banneryear1868

Code Sherpa

Most industry standard software that people use in their jobs is closed source. When you watch movies or listen to music or play video games you're supporting proprietary software. Same with finance and basically any office job. Niche IT jobs are the exception but I've been in enterprise IT for 20 years and this is just how it is in a capitalist economy. I'd prefer for public ownership of technology platforms but it's basically reduced to a consumption model within the current system. Like the platforms people consume media through isn't very significant, which the open source community puts a lot of ideological importance on. Most open source projects are also abandoned and become obsolete too quickly. I've basically been relying on the same set of proprietary Adobe software for part of my income since the 90s, can't name an open source alternative that does what I need it to do or has this longevity even though I'd prefer it.

Btw a way you can verify the security of a chat app is by reading case docs from law enforcement about what's required to obtain communications through said platform. With whatsapp the closest they can get to message content is by retreiving cache from the iPhone chatsearch database, and metadata from WhatsApp about who sent a message to whom and when but not the message contents. Retrieval of WhatApp messages through proprietary security forensics software is limited to how certain phone models and OSs locally cache messages basically. This applies to different platforms the same way though and isn't something special about WhatsApp or Meta. The unique thing to Meta is how quickly they respond to law enforcement requests about metadata collection.

Depends what you use it for, there's some great servers for a lot of things. I don't really care about platforms and basically use them all. Certain people really hate Discord but the alternatives don't have many interesting things on them, and the people who use them aren't a very diverse group. Checking all the right FOSS and feature boxes is nice but it's not what actually makes a platform good to use.

An LMM modeled after the average redditor sounds like the most condescending thing ever.

That was the only reason to use the site lol other paid options are way better. All userbenchmarks was good for was giving you a rough idea that your hardware was performing as it was expected to.

I assumed they'd be clear coated, expect that to be a big aftermarket service.

Which is both a huge investment in infrastructure and climate initiatives and also pretty poorly understood by most people.

This sentence represents the DNC's approach to politics so well and why they fail to connect with many voters. They approach politics inversely, coming up with policy and trying to invent/convince a politics around it, so they need a brand to sell their policy basically which Obama was so perfect at. You see this with the former Obama staffers Pod Save guys a lot. They constantly plead with their audience to realize why something like public healthcare isn't a realistic policy, or why some policy that connects with very few is actually the best thing for you. This is also just the general DNC-sympathetic approach in the media coverage, "here's why, despite you struggling with increased economic uncertainty and material stresses as a result of our decaying economic system, your life is actually better because of Biden and the DNC."

Inversely you have the GOP who shamelessly accept any and all public politics to the point of absurdity. Trump is like the inverse-Obama where instead of a political brand selling policy, he's parroting back the politics that people present him with as if it was a "yes, and" improv exercise. And they effectively take that public fear approach towards Trump from the Democrat-sympathetic media and flip it around, "your life didn't significantly change under Trump despite this insane reaction to him," which for many Trump supporters actually connects.

So average voters, they don't care about policy or some political argument, most American's aren't engaged in politics at the online level. They vote based on how much they personally connect with a politician or by circumstance. The DNC fails to approach politics this way and desperately wants to find more Obamas to perform the function they require for their approach to work, vs the GOP who offer up anything no matter how ridiculous or absurd and contradictory.

If not voting for Biden is a vote for Trump, by the same logic not voting for Trump is a vote for Biden

It's a route of exploitation. FOSS developers aren't often paid for their labor, and what they produce is often commodified by capital. Products of people's leisure are exploited basically, and they justify it through this moral framework, but no class dynamics are impacted and actually the opposite, they become reified even more.

If Linux or foss had the ability to impact political economy in some communist way we'd have seen it by now, so this is like a deus ex machina myth for tech hobbyists to elevate themselves, an evangelical tech religion. As a Marxist myself this stuff just makes me laugh, the irony of a creature like Bill Gates calling something communist and embracing it with pride.

If you want to put faith in technology and the internet changing the world for the better, just realize since the dawn of all this stuff wealth inequality and economic stresses have only increased until a full blown crisis in 2008 of the consenting economic model. Now as these stresses turn inward we see it culminating in what we might call neofascism.