this post was submitted on 13 May 2024
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Big brain tech dude got yet another clueless take over at HackerNews etc? Here's the place to vent. Orange site, VC foolishness, all welcome.

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Have a sneer percolating in your system but not enough time/energy to make a whole post about it? Go forth and be mid!

Any awful.systems sub may be subsneered in this subthread, techtakes or no.

If your sneer seems higher quality than you thought, feel free to cut’n’paste it into its own post, there’s no quota for posting and the bar really isn’t that high

The post Xitter web has spawned soo many “esoteric” right wing freaks, but there’s no appropriate sneer-space for them. I’m talking redscare-ish, reality challenged “culture critics” who write about everything but understand nothing. I’m talking about reply-guys who make the same 6 tweets about the same 3 subjects. They’re inescapable at this point, yet I don’t see them mocked (as much as they should be)
Like, there was one dude a while back who insisted that women couldn’t be surgeons because they didn’t believe in the moon or in stars? I think each and every one of these guys is uniquely fucked up and if I can’t escape them, I would love to sneer at them.

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[–] self@awful.systems 19 points 6 months ago* (last edited 6 months ago) (5 children)

this one doesn’t deserve a freeasm thread, but the latest bad nix take just dropped, and a bunch of the folks I follow on mastodon just outed themselves by agreeing with a post that’s best summarized as:

I am an American living in the United States. I have in the recent past been a centrist Democrat. But my opinions have been trending rightward for some time now, and it’s not impossible that I will consider voting for Republican candidates locally in the future. I would call myself a libertarian these days, although not with a big “L”.

It’s unfortunate that I have to mention my politics here, but it will become relevant.

[…]

But there is no moral difference taking money from Anduril or from Microsoft. Microsoft has had multi-billion dollar Pentagon and other agency contracts for many years now, and the things they produce are used wherever the U.S. Government wants to use them, including as tools for war and border control.

[…]

From the interactions I had, and the ones I saw in Discourse and on Matrix, it also didn't seem there was an epidemic of bigots in the Nix community.

you’ve read all of this shit before. it’s another “centrist democrat” who thinks the republicans have really good points now that they’re open fascists. you can autocomplete the rest of the post from what I’ve quoted here. there’s a bunch of paragraphs defending Jon, whose bigotry and resulting pissbaby tantrum over a temporary ban from the Nix community is legendary. there’s a bunch of bad faith shit pretending that a dependency on Microsoft (via GitHub) is just as bad as a direct sponsorship and control over the project from a company whose only purpose is to enable the more efficient killing of people.

this post wouldn’t be notable except that a bunch of apparent fuckheads I accidentally followed on mastodon (probably cause they do nix shit) started salivating over this post like hungry dogs. seriously, check this shit out:

Beyond NixOS, I learned so much about trying to get involved in politics from this post.

In a man like you, these events cause reflection, worry, and certain feelings. But to a politician, it would all be just one more day at work.

I read it twice and I showed it to my wife.

and my wife was a bald eagle and she shed a single tear and that tear’s name was George Washington

[–] V0ldek@awful.systems 13 points 6 months ago

there’s a bunch of bad faith shit pretending that a dependency on Microsoft (via GitHub) is just as bad as (...)

Ofc it's not, but also hey mate, if you want to take up the cause of "let's move off GitHub cause Microsoft sucks" then more power to you! Microsoft does suck! Those problems are not mutually exclusive!

You can be both against bad business practices and human rights violations at the same time while recognising the latter is a much more pressing issue. Is this a hot take? Have those people never had two separate ideas in their head at the same time?

[–] dgerard@awful.systems 11 points 6 months ago (1 children)

lol this mcdonough guy's great

@nebucatnetzer none of that is relevant. the wedge issues mentioned in that letter are being used to gain power by cynical people who aren't interested in that.

yes it's a cynical power grab by the woke mob

and in conclusion I expect these people can greatly enjoy each other's company

[–] self@awful.systems 11 points 6 months ago (1 children)

the woke mob that is, at various points in his post, either a large group that’s taken over the Nix community, or a tiny and unimportant but loud group of marginalized folks, depending on what makes his point more efficiently at the time

[–] blakestacey@awful.systems 9 points 6 months ago

[taps the sign]

"Thus, by a continuous shifting of rhetorical focus, the enemies are at the same time too strong and too weak."

[–] Soyweiser@awful.systems 8 points 6 months ago* (last edited 6 months ago)

Libertarianism is the ideology of splitters (which is sort of ironic as that is what they accuse 'the woke' of being (which also gets combined with the oppression Olympics idea, ideas which are not only not compatible, but is a thing I have only see concern trolls use against things 'ow you are protesting against the Gaza genocide? But you never said anything about the Darfuris in Sudan, which is a much worse genocide, much curious, I am very intelligent') it is annoying)

E: note on a bit of language used which was a bit of a red flag to me.

I want people to know that the author of this blog post (another ex-contributor to the discussions) is not the only one who believes the process was corrupted[emph mine].

The language used here is quite interesting, corrupted vs coopted, or some other word, as corrupted has implications of a profane/divine sort of thinking (which fits nicely into my splitting link above. But it is probably just more like 'government corruption' than this divine/profane thing).

[–] blakestacey@awful.systems 7 points 6 months ago

And the name of that George Washington? Albert Einstein!

[–] dgerard@awful.systems 6 points 6 months ago (1 children)

this mcdonough dude's a trip

this blog post before this

referencing how much he loves this blog post from another guy just kicked out for sealioning

[–] self@awful.systems 7 points 6 months ago (1 children)

oh Shea’s Zulip posts are a fucking trip too. it’s yet another straight up tantrum from the same kind of folks who think you shouldn’t get banned if you tell every moderator to go fuck themselves, personally, during a phone call

[–] dgerard@awful.systems 8 points 6 months ago* (last edited 6 months ago) (3 children)

they absolutely are

loved this LWN subthread where another of these guys makes vague accusations, replies look at his actual posts and say yeah you should have been kicked out

and this one where yet another poster laments needless politicisation and the immediate responses are "oh it's you" and receipts

[–] self@awful.systems 11 points 6 months ago* (last edited 6 months ago) (2 children)

And actually just a bit further, there are not far right people in tech, because there are basically no right wingers in tech, so the one who is delusional is you

ahahaha you know this whole “I don’t see any problems in the Nix community other than these woke fuckers starting drama” shit would be so much more effective if the folks saying that could stop themselves from following it up with the most obviously fash shit I’ve ever seen

also it’s kind of amazing how fast that second poster got recognized and called out. a whole bunch of way too high profile fash and neoreactionary tech weirdos tried to make nix their hill to die on (and were probably encouraged by the lack of tech media coverage of what’s going on, allowing them room to control the conversation), but they’re pretty consistently getting told to shut the fuck up by people who’ve had the audacity to read their previous posts and know exactly who they’re dealing with.

this is the kind of response that makes me optimistic that we can achieve less toxic open source communities as a new norm, one day. Lix seems to be doing it right; Aux unfortunately seems to be absolute chaos, but its heart is in the right place.

e: and of course, the new Nix governance structures getting this kind of negative, effortful response from the worst parts of the community is making me optimistic it’s going to work, in a way that the announcement and Zulip frankly haven’t yet. an outspokenly antifascist nixpkgs combined with Lix would give the fash parts of the nix community effectively nowhere left to go, especially if Nix or Aux does the remainder of the work left to make Lix the evaluator NixOS’s tooling calls into.

[–] dgerard@awful.systems 9 points 6 months ago (2 children)

i wonder how long before the antiwoke fork

[–] self@awful.systems 8 points 6 months ago

finally, an operating system worthy of all your favorite urbit services

[–] froztbyte@awful.systems 8 points 6 months ago (1 children)

made me wonder if devuan is still a thing and holy shit it is

[–] gerikson@awful.systems 6 points 6 months ago (1 children)

What's the backstory with Devuan? I first heard of it from someone licking Andrew Lee's boots after the Freenode debacle, and that instantly branded it as really suspect. But it might just be Debian minus systemd?

[–] earthquake@lemm.ee 8 points 6 months ago* (last edited 6 months ago)

In 2015 Debian officially dropped the requirement that packages support sysvinit scripts and only required systemd support. Devuan is indeed intended to be a fork that only removes systemd and maintains support for other inits like sysvinit, openrc, runit, etc.

Last time I looked (and it has been a while) the anti-systemd origin story had attracted a few nutters, but I didn't see anything suspicious about the dev team itself...

EDIT: I see a couple connections to cryptocoin crap, but no smoking gun yet. Still digging.

EDIT2: wtf am I looking at: https://dyne.org/software/dynebolic/ strange vibes all over this.

EDIT3: Seems like the cryptocoiner, Set Hallström AKA Setto Sakrecoer, is the main dev/organizer of devuan? The structure of devuan and dyne.org does not seem to be set out, instead it's an informal "do-ocracy" with a whole mess of normal and weird projects in a loose constellation.

[–] V0ldek@awful.systems 8 points 6 months ago (1 children)

there are not far right people in tech, because there are basically no right wingers in tech

There are no rws in tech because there are no rws in tech, qed

[–] Soyweiser@awful.systems 7 points 6 months ago

Look by my definition you can only be a RW if you voted for the republicans in the past 5 elections, and there are not many of those, so he is right!

[–] Soyweiser@awful.systems 6 points 6 months ago

The guys should just have been banned for writing posts that take hours to read that the mods then have to read and respond to.

[–] gerikson@awful.systems 6 points 6 months ago

Yeah milesrout made a fool of themselves on lobste.rs and got banned.