Resources and influence will always drunkard’s-walk into the hands of the unscrupulous and manipulative, pretty much by definition.
They’re going to be drawn to it, they’ll fight dirtier for it, and they’ll use the power it gives them to prevent anyone else from taking it away.
Big Tech is a huge source of both, so it would be amazing if the people on top of the heap weren’t massive piles of shit.
Using an ethnic stereotype as a logo/mascot is a bit whiffy, no? Ramp it up a bit and take a look at the Robertson’s Jam ‘golliwog’ logo.
Maybe a different degree, but certainly the same smell. It’s just not a good look in this day and age.
I’ve often said “What do we want? Police to face accountability when they commit crimes! What do we actually get? We’re going to use the term ‘main’ instead of ‘master’ for programming things!”
The other thing is that the big stuff is shored up by all the small stuff.
The reason you can’t get police held accountable for crimes, ferinstance, is because there’s a hundred shitty racist / sexist / classist / etc attitudes locking down the idea that the police are both besieged by and protecting us from an underclass of people who deserve neither compassion, rights or justice. Look at the people leaping on the ‘he was no angel’ bandwagon, for god’s sake.
If you want to topple the big overt heinous idea, you need to wash away the soil its roots are sunk into and that’s banked up round its trunk making it look like an inherent part of the landscape.
A spoonful at a time, if need be. It all helps.
Until a couple of years ago, we had a brand of cheese called ‘Coon’, here in Australia.
The word isn’t used as a slur over here, and the brand was simply named after the founder about 150 years back.
But it was getting increasingly on the nose as cultural influences from the US and everywhere kept seeping in, and it reached a point where it pretty much needed an excuse or at least an explanation.
So they renamed it; now it’s ‘Cheer’.
And at the time, there was all kinds of pearl-clutching about the malicious / disingenuous / officious / vapidly-offended / white-knighting / attention-seeking / etc / etc ‘woke crowd’ stomping in and making them change everything when it was perfectly good and harmless and stuff.
Six months later, nobody gave a single shit any more. Nobody died as a result or was even mildly inconvenienced, no great cultural traditions were lost, and contrary to several predictionsm newly-empowered wokeocrats have not risen from the shadows to re-gender everyone or whatever. It’s that cheese with the blue white and green label, nobody reads it anyway.
My point is that small token changes cost virtually nothing, and even if they achieve little in and of themselves, the mere fact of people being willing to make them is of benefit. Small courtesies, you know? Returning your shopping cart. Smiling at passing dogs. It models kindness and consideration, and promotes the idea that those things have value.
Which is not to suggest that we must avoid giving offense at all consts; far from it. I’m one of those stereotypicallly abrasive genX types raised on ideals of free speech, punk rock, uncomfortable truths and loudly pointing out the elephant in the room no matter how many toes get stepped on. But when there isn’t some burning issue that needs to be addressed, niceties be damned… then yeah, small courtesies. Give people that extra bit of room even if they don’t strictly needed. It’s nice to be nice.
Look back a handful of decades at all those cultural relics that your grandparents considered harmless and invisible. Asking people to drop them may have attracted ridicule and suspicion at the time, but looking back at some of them… oh dear god, really?
Hell, I remember The Black And White Minstrel Show on TV, and if you don’t remember it yourself, it’s far worse than you’re imagining.
I like the world better without things like that, even the little seemingly-trivial ones, and even if it seems like empy virtue-signalling while you’re cleaning them up.
I do know about window managers, thanks.
And that’s part of the problem: they all have their own slightly different infrastructure that relies on slightly intricate and not-quite-standard plumbing.
Dialogs not opening, or those weird invisible 30-second timeouts opening an application becasue dbus isn’t happy because one of the xorg init scripts messed some XDG path or set the wrong GTK_* option, or XAUTHORITY is pointing somewhere weird.
Whichever user is logged in locally should be allowed to talk to the device they plugged in via usb? Well that’s just an unreasonable thing to expect to happen by default, let me spend 20 minutes cooking up a udev script to chown it on creation.
Users managing to set their default terminal to some random script they were working on (seriously, how?). Or they initialised their xfce4 profile with the blank-toolbar option and now can’t work out how to launch anything.
Notification popups? Sure, the toolbar will let you add one, but nothing communicates with it by default lol.
also jesus christ kde.
And I’m talking about the built-in functionality of the desktop environment wrt package management, not separate applications.
Sure, it’s nice to be able to apt-get upgrade and just get everything all at once - when everything is happy with everything else.
But when you get conflicting dependencies and you have to take time out to track down what libpyzongo0-util is used for or what is going to break later on if you just purge it because people use cutesy package names that are worse than Ruby libraries in terms of communicating what they’re actually for, and do we need this thing for the core platform or it it form some random crap that was installed ad-hoc and used precisely once, it gets old.
Like I say you need this amount of flexibility and complexity for development and deployment and network services and all the rest. Anyone using Windows for much more than file-print-office-browser-gaming has more masochism in them than I can comprehend.
But for that same very minimal set of core use-cases, you don’t need (or, I’d argue, want) flexibility or complexity, you want it to be simple and robust with JOWTDI. And for everything else, you ssh into your linux box and do it there. I was amazed to discover that Windows Terminal is actually really nice; combine that with an X server and maybe a VNC client, and you’ve got the best of both worlds.
And yes, Windows has all kinds of annoying shit of its own - but that mostly pops up when you want to do interesting things on it, not when you just want to look at cat videos on the internet.
I’m a sysadmin. We’re a Linux shop, I spend my life deep in the guts of Linux boxes, both server and desktop.
And for my daily-driver both at work and at home, I use windows.
The UI and overall UX are just better. The annoying bullshit I make a living knowing my way around, I don’t have to think about.
For actual development or backend services, of course you want a Linux box. Proper logging, proper tools, build shit, pipe it together, automate stuff and get down and technical when it breaks. Doing that on windows is absolutely hell.
But on windows, the volume control just works, I never have to delete lockfiles to get my browser to open, my desktop login doesn’t terminate if something in .profile returned nonzero, I can play every video game out there without having to fuck around, I can use native versions of real apps, I don’t have package-management dependency hell, all the pieces were designed to work with each other, and the baseline cognitive load needed to just use my computer is zero, which frees up my brain to focus on my actual work, or for playing games and fucking around on the internets.
:stares in genX:
That’s not assembly, that’s ikea.
Back in my day…
Let me guess, they laughed at trump?
That’s what coffee is for.
What do you think an algorithm is?
He says, on social media
Your mum.
I must once again post The Night Watch [PDF]
I don’t care that it’s outdated, everyone still needs to read https://eev.ee/blog/2012/04/09/php-a-fractal-of-bad-design/
I really like ruby :(
He committed the ultimate crime, though: stealing from rich people. And he even had the effrontery not to be rich himself while doing it.
That’s what they’re punishing here.
Hurt people hurt people, as they say - and that cuts both ways. Yes, you should be kind and supportive if you can, but you aren’t obliged to put yourself at risk in order to do so.
Malignant narcissists cause significant, ongoing harm to those they get their hooks into. They may have a terribly sad backstory and lead unpleasant lives, but that doesn’t help the victims any.
BPD abusers tend to be less evil-karen on the surface, but their need for ongong validation is just as intense, and they will harm people just as ruthlessly in order to maintain their supply.
I don’t think it’s unreasonable to point out some red flags to let people steer clear of that risk.
If you want twenty minutes of rage-filled ranting, ask me about vscode-server sometime.