• 14 Posts
  • 267 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 9th, 2023

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  • Everything Wordpress is heavily infested with that. However you don’t have to let it impact you – it kind of looks to me like they pressure commercial vendors to put their stuff under the GPL if they’re wanting to offer a free version, so there’s a robust ecosystem of actually-FOSS tooling for it. My experience has been that it’s always worked pretty well in practice; you just have to keep your nope-I’m-not-paying-for-your-paid-version goggles firmly affixed. (Also, side note, GPT does an excellent job of writing little functions.php snippets for you to enable particular custom functionality for your Wordpress install when you need it.)


  • Wordpress 1,000% (probably coupled with WooCommerce but there are probably some other options)

    I honestly don’t even know off the top of my head why you would use anything else (aside from some vague elitism connected to the large ecosystem of commercial crap which has tainted by association the open source core of it) – it combines FOSS + easy + powerful + popular. You will have to tiptoe around some amount of crapware in order to keep it pure OSS though.


  • What the HECK man?

    There’s an underlying problem IMO with all Fediverse software and instances, in that because it’s made available for free, people get entitled, moderators and admins are obligated to sort of do volunteer work on behalf of people who haven’t earned it in order for any of the thing to work, which naturally leads to a inexhaustible wellspring of negative energy because the whole thing isn’t right.

    I saw the posts of Ruud asking for people to basically interview for a part time admin position and do a job which for skills and time investment is worth from $50k/yr-$200k/yr (calibrating for the fact that it’s “only” 5-10 hours per week), and all I could think was whoa no no no this isn’t the way. Not saying there’s anything wrong with people volunteering their time to make available this great thing, but I think undervaluing them when they decide to do that is almost inevitable, which has follow-on effects that manifest in all kinds of ways and lead to things not being the way they should be. Occasional prickly or unfair behavior by mods or admins represent one example of that; comments like this one represent another.

    What on earth is hostile about the OP post in any way?


  • I have no real idea with Navalnvy, and only dim memories of news reports about Magnitsky which went into a little more detail, but I’ll tell you how I assume it operates: It’s basically mistreatment to the point that it’ll kill you, just slowly. Your cell’s cold all the time, in the arctic winter with no blankets. You get bad food and bad sleep and beatings and no medical care of any kind. Once your body starts to malfunction (Magnitsky started having kidney failure), they go on beating you severely enough to cause additional organ damage, but then just continue to put you in your cell day after day with no medicine. Basically, you’re going to die, but they’re drawing the process out enough that it’s indirectly, because of “medical issues” related to what they’re doing to you, instead of just from blunt force trauma or something. So it’s incredibly painful and long and drawn-out, a slow death of constant suffering from which you can’t escape or get any relief.







  • That’s how Linux happened. Microsoft got so good at eliminating competition, and so lazy about making a product that was more than barely-passable, that it created a unique combination of “we want something good” and “something good cannot be constructed” that drove a whole generation of techies to get familiar with Linux simply because there was no good alternative for certain types of serious computing. The selection pressure of “any competitor company will get destroyed” eventually produced a competitor that wasn’t a company.

    I think that’s what’s happening right now in social media. For a long time ActivityPub went nowhere, and then the big players all got so godawful that you couldn’t ignore the godawfulness, and now look what’s happening. It’s not because Mastodon and Lemmy are great “products” as such; mostly, people just want something that’s not shit. Then in the longer run the selection pressure will create something that’ll be a lot harder to kill or control.

    It would have been easier for Facebook and Twitter not to be shit, but apparently that’s too much to ask. I think the ultimate outcome will be way for the better this way.










  • It’s definitely factual. That’s why I linked to some examples of rape. The occupying forces are committing rape. Want me to try to find more examples? Or do the same for occupation, killing, torture, and systematic dehumanization?

    The fact that now that I’ve read up a little bit more, I think it’s genuinely pretty unfair to put that in there in the way that I did, and that context needs to be added, doesn’t change the fact that rape has occurred because of what Israel is doing in the Palestinian territories. It also doesn’t change the overall thesis of what my comment was in the slightest.

    The wider point, that us being allowed to have this conversation is a good thing and that forbidding this conversation would be a bad thing, was more my point. I won’t claim to be perfect or right all the time, and I’ll be pretty honest about it if I learn something or realize I got something wrong. But if you want to talk about what Israeli forces are doing in Palestine I’m happy to do that and back up anything I’m saying or have said.