Skip Navigation

merc

@ merc @sh.itjust.works

Posts
10
Comments
3686
Joined
3 yr. ago

  • It's a great day to delete your X account(s)

    Jump

  • This in turn would necessitate the abandonment of democracy and the embrace of a technocracy—government by an unelected, technically skilled, empirically-driven elite with the expertise necessary to determine values and make rational resource-allocation decisions

    Sounds a lot like one of Elon's beliefs, doesn't it?

    Strange how people who think this way never assume they'll be one of the people on the outside, letting others make the important decisions. Whenever there's an elite, they imagine they'll be part of that elite.

  • This is Jehan Pages, the top developer behind GIMP, a free open source photo editor. Adobe executives hate Jehan. Because of his hard work, Adobe lost millions of dollars

    Jump

  • Yes, that's the distinguishing feature of the GPL. The ironic thing is that the only thing that gives the GPL its power is the thing it's trying to fight. If IP laws didn't exist, the GPL would be unenforceable, but it would also be unnecessary.

  • This is Jehan Pages, the top developer behind GIMP, a free open source photo editor. Adobe executives hate Jehan. Because of his hard work, Adobe lost millions of dollars

    Jump

  • And has that made the people selling that software rich? No.

    My point is that to get rich making software you need a moat. You can still make a bit of money without it, but it will be a fraction of what you can make if you can use intellectual property laws to make sure you don't have to worry about competitors.

  • This is Jehan Pages, the top developer behind GIMP, a free open source photo editor. Adobe executives hate Jehan. Because of his hard work, Adobe lost millions of dollars

    Jump

  • Red Hat doesn't even exist anymore. They're nothing more than an IBM subsidiary. Canonical is hardly rich. It may be influential in the free software world, but in terms of market cap, they're half the size of "A2Z Cust2Mate Solutions Corp". Have you ever heard of A2Z Cust2Mate Solutions Corp? I hadn't until I started looking for software companies comparable to Canonical.

  • Nearly a third of Canadians believe U.S. may try to invade Canada: poll

    Jump

  • Yeah. Let's say this extremely unlikely thing does happen. There's some kind of false flag attack, like a person wearing a Canadian flag does a suicide bomber attack on the US congress or something. An event that riles up Americans enough that there's enough support for an invasion of Canada that Trump could get away with it.

    Now imagine the result of invading a country where almost none of the locals want you there, and all of the locals can pass for Americans. European countries might be too cowardly to actually send their armies against the US for doing that. But, they would almost certainly find a way to fund and train Canadian freedom fighters. The Canadian / American border is completely indefensible. It's simply too big to ever be properly guarded.

    So, you'd have Canadians slipping into the US easily, they'd be trained and armed by Europeans, Australians, Japanese, Koreans, and all the other former US allies. And, once in the states they'd have no problem finding support networks to help them attack American targets.

    Just because Trump would be insane to try this doesn't mean he wouldn't do it. With their massive propaganda networks in place, they might get a fair number of Americans to support it, at least at first. But, the most they could ever hope for is a Pyrrhic victory.

  • It's a great day to delete your X account(s)

    Jump

  • And its funding is pretty suspect.

    Even if you trust the current leadership team, there's no reason to believe they'll remain in charge.

  • It's a great day to delete your X account(s)

    Jump

  • In case someone thinks "Oh, he's just an alt-right troll, he doesn't actually believe in that stuff", meet Elon's grandfather:

    He became involved in Canadian politics, backing the technocracy movement, before moving to South Africa in 1950. Over the course of decades, Haldeman repeatedly expressed racist, antisemitic, and antidemocratic views.[1] In South Africa he was a supporter of apartheid and promoted a number of conspiracy theories.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joshua_N._Haldeman

  • This is Jehan Pages, the top developer behind GIMP, a free open source photo editor. Adobe executives hate Jehan. Because of his hard work, Adobe lost millions of dollars

    Jump

  • It will probably take something like universal basic income. Also, before copyright etc. a lot of art was created when a patron paid the artist for their work. In modern times, a single individual patron has been replaced by a bunch of them using Patreon. In addition, some people (not enough) are employed to work on open source software. It's similar to a patron kind of arrangement because someone is paying for the "artist" to work, even though the thing the artist produces can't be owned by the employer.

    I think if you combine all those various things the need for "intellectual property" goes away. But, the people who currently make money from IP are going to fight tooth and nail to keep it.

  • what are people still doing on twitter?

    Jump

  • It still seems like a lot of bands, brands, sports clubs, even governments haven't left, so people who want to see info from them still stick around. It's pretty ridiculous when your official fire department social media account is on the same site producing deepfakes of nude or nearly nude kids.

  • This is Jehan Pages, the top developer behind GIMP, a free open source photo editor. Adobe executives hate Jehan. Because of his hard work, Adobe lost millions of dollars

    Jump

  • Yeah. Software licensing is artificial scarcity, trying to make the new world of bits seem like the old world of objects so that people who knew how to make money with objects can still make money with bits.

  • What if the Internet Goes Down? - 15 Jan, 7PM CET

    Jump

  • I'll say what I just said on a similar thread: if the internet goes down tomorrow, mesh will mean very little compared to ham radio.

    For what purpose? Hanging out with friends? Watching porn? Getting vital information around?

    AFAIK, ham is really mostly geared towards synchronous voice communication, whereas most of the Internet is asynchronous communication in a variety of forms: text, voice, video, etc. In an emergency, synchronous voice is pretty important. But, for day-to-day life, asynchronous dominates most people's usage of things.

    So, if the Internet goes down tomorrow and you need to know why, what happened, etc. your best bet is probably not ham radio but normal TV and radio broadcasts, not rumours being spread by other random people using ham radio. If you live in a country where a complete overnight shut down of the internet, and complete stopping of all news broadcasts is possible, then ham might be useful for the first few days / hours to figure out what's going on. But, in the longer term, ham isn't really a replacement for the Internet. For that you'd want asynchronous sharing of various kinds of data, which is more a mesh network, not ham radio.

  • This is Jehan Pages, the top developer behind GIMP, a free open source photo editor. Adobe executives hate Jehan. Because of his hard work, Adobe lost millions of dollars

    Jump

  • What many people don't think about is that open source / free software is anti-billionaire software.

    Since all software is bits, and it's free and easy to copy bits, to make money from software, a company needs to build a "moat". A moat is something that protects your company from people choosing alternatives. Open source software is built without a moat, so that anybody and everybody can access it. And, if you build with the GPL anybody who builds something based on your software is forbidden from building a moat of their own.

    This means that it's really hard to get rich building free / open source software. But, it also means that in any area where there is free / open source software it's much harder for fully commercial, closed source, for profit companies to make big profits. Enshittify too much and people will just switch to the alternative, even if the alternative is significantly less stable, not as easy to use, is lacking features, etc. Piss people off too much and they might actually invest engineering money on improving the open source alternative.

    Adobe is a big company with their fingers in many different pies. Photoshop is only one of their products. Gimp alone can't do much to hold Adobe back, but it does limit what they can do with Photoshop and still expect to make money from it.

  • Epic Games CEO Tim Sweeney argues banning Twitter over its ability to AI-generate pornographic images of minors is just 'gatekeepers' attempting to 'censor all of their political opponents'

    Jump

  • It helps that Tim Sweeney seems to always be wrong about everything.

  • Just play the piano Billy

    Jump

  • My theory, it was supposed to all be a piano song, but Harmonica Man showed up and just started playing. Now, the song that was just supposed to be a piano song has the harmonica in it. It's so famous that Billy Joel can't do the song without the harmonica part now.

    For years, Billy Joel has been trying to get his revenge, interrupting a song about the harmonica man with his piano playing. But, he's never going to be able to do it. The harmonica can be just slipped into a pocket so Harmonica Man can easily slip into anywhere with his instrument, ready to add his playing to the song. Meanwhile, Billy Joel can't haul around a piano with him, and even when he does something like take a keyboard or a keytar it is still much more easily spotted than a harmonica.

  • ‘Cancel your tickets’: Calls grow to boycott US-hosted FIFA World Cup over Trump admin

    Jump

  • I think a better comparison would be the 1936 Olympics. And plenty of people were really happy to talk about how they were at the Olympics and watched a black American man beating the Nazis on their own turf.

  • ‘Cancel your tickets’: Calls grow to boycott US-hosted FIFA World Cup over Trump admin

    Jump

  • There's a recent article about trade:

    https://www.cbc.ca/news/business/canada-trade-oct-2025-9.7037913

    Exports to the US are still 2/3 of all Canadian trade. Canada's exports around the world did increase significantly in percentage terms (up 15.6%). But, because 2/3 of all Canadian exports are to the US, the fact they were down 4.1% is a major issue.

    As for booming tourism, I don't know where you're getting that statistic. International tourism overall is down 1.1% overall. Canadian residents are doing more tourism within Canada, but far fewer Americans are visiting, so overall things are down slightly.

    In the long run Canada may be less dependent on the US, which is a good thing. But, it's hardly a boon for the economy for the previously low-friction relationship to now be high-friction.

  • ‘Cancel your tickets’: Calls grow to boycott US-hosted FIFA World Cup over Trump admin

    Jump

  • Maybe, but actually going to a world cup match in person with thousands of other people supporting your country is probably a pretty special experience that not many people get to do in their lifetimes. Watching it on TV is never going to feel like that, especially watching at home on a pirate stream. It's probably what I'll do. And a big part of the reason is that I don't want FIFA to get any money from me. But, I know I'm missing out on a unique experience.

  • try it. just a little taste.

    Jump

  • Yeah, good description. Fighting Entropy is really the trick that makes ONI great. I just love how at the beginning heat isn't even on your radar as something to worry about. You might not even know that the heat overlay exists. But, by the mid-game if you don't start handling heat suddenly everything starts breaking.

    Also, the size is another big difference. Factorio has that endless map where you just keep expanding your conveyor belts. The further out you go, the more you have to worry about aliens, but after a while that isn't much of an issue. Meanwhile in ONI as you start making bigger and bigger colonies, it starts to feel cramped.

  • Self-hosting in 2026 isn't about privacy anymore - it's about building resistance infrastructure

    Jump

  • k

  • ‘Cancel your tickets’: Calls grow to boycott US-hosted FIFA World Cup over Trump admin

    Jump

  • There are probably boxing or MMA organizations that are more corrupt. But FIFA easily beats them in scale and the amount of money sloshing around.

    Incidentally, for all the shitty things that the US has done, and all the contempt Americans tend to show towards football / soccer, the one thing you have to admire is that they were the ones to try to actually take on FIFA corruption a while back. They didn't have much long-term impact, but no other country has done anything, so it was still impressive.