Rating things on a numerical scale is pointless and only meant to give the false impression of some objective standard, when really knowing what the person meant requires knowing what their tastes are anyway

If you’re gonna review something, just give me insight into your personal tastes, and then tell me whether you liked it or not

I agree with you on the pet peeves, but when it comes to binary prefices, I am always in favor of clarity in communication instead of leaving things up to context clues and interpretation (aka assuming everyone thinks the same way)

Logically what you’re saying makes perfect sense.

But there’s just something so strangely beautiful about the thought that on a certain planet in the middle of nowhere, there is a species of animal that buries their dead in groups all facing the same direction. No one is quite sure why they do this, not even them

An opinion piece I read once about accessibility in writing—touching on things like tone indicators and breaking up overly-dense sentences/paragraphs—made a point that stuck with me and has clear applications in so many areas:

Your audience only has so much cognitive energy to devote to what you’re saying. Every little hurdle you add funnels that much more energy away from understanding your message toward deciphering what you were trying to say.

That means unnecesary jargon, overlong sentences with complex structures, and pretentious diction are all hindering your ability to communicate. But so are grammatical mistakes and typos.

Sure a few heer and there are forgivable, but fi ur reeders hev 2 desifer sumthen liek dis jus bc day shud no wut u mean, they may lose interest or be too distracted by the medium to comprehend the message.

Corollary to all this: those cute little “quirks” you give your writing so people will recognize you by your style are ironically hindering their ability to recognize you by your ideas, which are infinitely more important than an aesthetic

I also just like not having to mash my spacebar 20 fucking times with each new line like I’m playing the world’s most repetitive strain injury-inducing quicktime event because I’m 5 levels deep and the style guide/linter requires 4 space indentation

You’re using “ignore” wrong, not the other way around.

If you want to be a linguistic pedant, then we should consider that both “ignorant” and “ignore” ultimately comes from proto-indo-european *ǵneh₃-, which meant “to know”, and a negation prefix. So really the words should mean “the act of not knowing” (ignore) and “the quality/state of not knowing” (ignorant). Not avoiding knowledge, just lacking it

My hot take is that beans are great, and the brits are right to put them on everything

A very compelling narrative, thank you for sharing! Based on my limited understanding of history and economics and sociology, it feels true. But I’m no expert :)

The one point that I don’t really understand is:

It is not possible to work, or be compelled to work outside of society. Until we have socialism nothing compels us to work outside of social classes. I wouldn’t be working if my bourgeois didn’t compel me to.

This doesn’t make sense to me. My functional definition is that work is just expending energy to transition something from one state into another. Moving a boulder up a hill is still work, regardless of motivations of the actor. How are you defining “work”?

Good question. I have my own opinions, but I’d be more interested in hearing what reasons you can come up with (and any counterarguments you have to them), so I’m gonna challenge you to do that while slogging through all my disorganized brain droppings.

My biggest issue with “let people be exploited if they want” is that it doesn’t exist in a vacuum. If the world was two people, one who seeks to exploit and the other who seeks to be exploited, then I don’t really care; in our world, it’s a bad basis for society to allow for injustice simply because people can be convinced to want it.

In such a world, the exploiters (whether individuals or organizations) would seek to control whatever systems of education, media, and ideology they could to convince as many people as possible that being exploited is good for them. This would allow for them to centralize power, and that power would enforce a class divide; anyone who didn’t exploit others would be relegated to being one of the exploited class, anyone who willingly exploited others but didn’t work to convert more into “wanting to be exploited” would never amass as much power as those that do.

Besides the perverse incentives, that division would create a power imbalance that attracts (into the positions of authority) individuals and groups who are both indoctrinated into the system, and more efficient at subjugating others. That means there is a filter naturally built into any such system that selects for people who view others more as statistics and resources than people with inherent value, and are skilled at both convincing them to want exploitation and exploiting them.

Being the real world, people will not be perfect, so any lack of skill in one domain will require compensation in the other. If someone cannot be convinced to be exploited willingly, the authority will need to find other ways of enforcing exploitation.

Lifeforms being how they are, not all of them will be brainwashable; that means oppression will be necessary, as dissent is a threat to the amount of power an authority has amassed and imposes “soft” limits on how much power can be amassed—that is, limitations that can be overcome with enough effort (as opposed to physical limitations like the total amount of living beings). And any threat to the power imbalance is a threat to the system itself, a threat to the society.

We have thus specified a system that selects for abusers and oppressors in positions of power, without once having to speculate that unjust and cruel people would begin in such positions.

Now one might claim I’m just using a slippery-slope fallacy, that we might be able to specify such a society that accounts for the aforementioned flaws, and implements some sort of system of checks-and-balances to keep from the balance shifting so egregiously. And to that, I want to point out how any such system constitutes an aforementioned “soft” limit on power, but does not remove the incentives at the core of the system.

Meanwhile, in a just society, anyone who wants to be exploited and anyone who wants to exploit are given the knowledge and resources necessary to overcome such primal desires. Maybe they are educated, or maybe given safely contained environments—e.g. VR, or LARP, or BDSM—to exercise their desires without negatively impacting others/society.

I would also challenge the assumption that there is some naturally-arising desire to be exploited. Put another way: assuming a perfectly just society, whence comes the desire to be exploited?

The problem I have with “voluntary” is that someone can still fall into the category of being exploited, either willingly or without their knowledge, and still happily and voluntarily participate in an unjust relationship

Not all of us ahem bourgeoisie ahem

I meant moreso that it compels us outside of the structure of a society, which also precludes any social classes. One cannot be bourgeois if one does not live amongst others whom they can subjugate.

of course, however what makes a societies differ is exactly what gets filled in to the “…”

Ha! I was trying to refer to the idiom without being verbose, not leaving those blanks as variables.

I guess my take is that what determines a society is more how “ability” and “need” are defines, that way the social structure is not oversimplified to a single one-sided relationship. E.g. a feudalist would claim the serfs need protection from thieves and bandits, and a lord has the ability to provide such protection; the lord, conversely, needs grain and the serfs have the ability to farm it

funnily enough, that is exactly what capitalism postulates.

Well yes and no. I guess it comes down to how you define participation in society. Capitalism only accepts production of commodities, whereas I meant it in a more broad sense. E.g. non-monetized hobbies are classified as entirely consumptive behaviors by capitalist societies, but if you look at the benefits conveyed by an open-source, volunteer project like lemmy you quickly see how much of a misclassification that is.

Even not in the extreme there are broad misclassifications under capitalism. You bring up the example of those of us on welfare; capitalists might agree with you that they are non-participants, whereas I don’t think it’s illogical to claim that services like raising children or advocating for change or community-building or maintaining a home or even just providing emotional support are ways that people contribute to and participate in society. I’d even go so far as to boldly claim that welfare is simply the way the bourgeois convey wages to such people, and then they have the gall to propagandize it as charity to make themselves look better, while simultaneously vilifying this subset of the working class

Or maybe microsoft should focus less on gamifying coding and turning it into an activity done for social credits, and make github more of a platform for… idk, version control and programming?

Consent is a bad metric because it ignores externalities—stuff like economic incentives, implicit threats of loss of basic needs, propaganda, trauma. Someone can be said to consent to exploitation, even if they only did so to continue surviving under oppressive economies/states. I “consent” to have the value of my labor extracted, pooled, and distributed to business owners in the same way I “consent” to the privacy policies (and the sale of my Personally Identifying Information) of the software the company I work for requires us to use (to remain employed)

That’s why I prefer focusing on exploitation. Someone doesn’t have to know they’re being exploited, agree that they’re being exploited, nor even want to not be exploited for it to still be unjust to exploit them and identify when it is happening. Veganism is a stance against animal exploitation.

Nature compells us to work for food anyway, that’s not exploitation and coercion, that’s just survival.

The construct of society is predicated on the idea of “from each… to each…” That saying often gets conflated with left-wing politics, but that’s just the point of animals (humans included) grouping together; after all, what’s the point of living in society if it doesn’t convey any benefits to the individual that they could not provide for themselves? That would be exploitative of the individual. But if they are benefitting, then it is only fair and just to also give back to the society one extracts benefits from, otherwise it is exploitative of the others.

Put another way: no one should be obligated to participate in society, but then society should likewise have no obligations to the non-participants.

Services as subscriptions: fine. They are ongoing agreements that require an unspecifiable amount of labor, it makes sense to pay as you go.

Subscription goods? Fuck that. If I am in posession of it and responsible for maintaining it in a specific state of operation and quality, I basically own it anyway.

Charging me monthly for a pocket-sized computer with the added stipulations that the seller gets to dictate what I’m allowed to do with it, probably installs spyware on it (on top of the OEM and OS spyware), and if I break it (or otherwise violate the terms of use) I have to buy it anyway and they still get to keep it? They’ve basically reinvented a mix of payphones and library PCs, but more invasive and more expensive

What about you? When did you choose stability over the rolling release?

This is such sloppy engagement baiting. If it was just a hot take shitting all over one of the larger linux communities, that would be one thing, but to follow it up with a “let me know in the comments” just makes it all feel disingenuous and like somebody is being sponsored by NordVPN or Incogni to post their ragebait

What do the apps have that the browser doesn’t?

I did do the 5 minute search, and found his write-up. I said I wouldn’t be surprised to find out it was fabricated, not that it was.

Nobody wants to point out that Alexey Grigorev changes to being named Gregory after 2 paragraphs?

Slop journalism at its sloppiest. I wouldn’t be surprised to find out that this story was entorely fabricated.