Modern Dependency Problems (with apologies and thanks to XKCD)
Probably needs more arrows, tbh
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@Floppy respectfully, a correction: the load-bearing bit shouldn't be the fascist. The critical infrastructure would be generally maintained by progressives, and the projects at the top would be less than palatable people.
Or am I still too innocent at my advancing age.
@Floppy not ffmpeg 🥺 right?
@Floppy Still kind of new here -- but it seems to me the tin-foil hat guys, that did not wanted to be fascist have closed their X-accounts and came here. It is sure just a minute before someone calls Linus a tech-fascist because he calls AI just another tool...
@Floppy You could interchange fascist with whatever political movement you don't agree with. Are we to say that Stalin was a great guy after all? Communists were worse! Look at what they've done in Kommiefornia.
@Floppy is there a list? I can think of:
- Ruby on Rails
- Omarchy
- Xlibre
Any others?
@Floppy As a software engineer, I just now had to look up what this was in reference to, I assume neovim? I do not think a tiny handful of people running completely forgettable projects should be suggested to represent MANY ACTUALLY important projects...
I've never used neovim. I don't know anyone that has ever used neovim. That isn't critical infrastructure. It's one of the tiny blocks on the upper right corner supporting literally nothing.
@Floppy Superimpose this over the "project of a trans furry" one and you realize that nobody can win.
@Floppy Needs a bunch of spikes coming out the side and falling off that say, "Projects that might have done different but everyone made fun of."
@Floppy the code is crucial. The guh is not.
much of modern biomedical research depends on tools that were not patented by the people who discovered them
eg
Green Fluorescent Protein and 2 Hybrid
PCR is an odd exception
@Floppy Fascism attracts people, because of deceptive beauty, order, and masculinity.
If only demonized, we won’t take away its power to destroy.
I believe label Fascism was created first by outside press in response to Mussolini, not him nor his predecessors.
Fasces is the key to understand Mussolini.
He saw Roman militarism as the socialist unifier, which was influenced in part due to his exclusion from internationalist privileged circles & ironically British financiers.
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@Floppy I feel like this needlessly inflates how many fascists there actually are. every time someone is revealed to be a fascist, it’s a whole news story - because it’s relatively rare.
But because you hear about every fascist who happens to maintain or lead something, they seems a lot more than the thousands of people who aren’t fascist, who are just quietly maintaining something without fanfare or big red alerts.
@davidgerard@circumstances.run @_r@donotsta.re @Floppy@mastodon.me.uk [genuine] who are "they"? Maintainers who knew the one of the core maintainers was a facist? And that by their silence about it, it says something about them?
Please read our pronouns before interacting
@Floppy
Did the xz utils guy turn out to be fascist? Did I miss something? If not, then sorry, but that one random person in Nebraska still remains among all the assholes building upon his/her work to enslave all of us.
@Floppy yeah, review thier code closely - 🤢
@Floppy Maybe we shouldn't use projects that are led
@Floppy Maybe we shouldn't use stuff that was made by a guy /hj
@Floppy ok, so you have certain percentage of fascist-made-but-still-free-code, which you can fork.
But with corporate infrastructure, fsscists can take over everything and you have no longer right to fork.
As long as it is free and open source, it is just that you are perphaps using something made by someone who turned out to be asshole later, but it works and will work. With true fascists, you are inside concentration camp and has to subdue to whatever the camp fuhrer tells you to do.
However you may dislike this, fascism is a system: system of hierarchy, control and power. Something like "standalone fascist" is nonsense. Someone with stupid behaviour and ideas, if not organized, is just asshole, not "fascist".
Fascism is working, deadly social machinery - not individual psychiv disorder.
It does sometimes seem like this, doesn't it?
However: One of the several real world cases that have cropped up over the years with that picture has been ntpd, and in fairness I don't think that the world knew what David L. Mills's politics were at all, or knows now.
There are a lot of quiet people like that. We've no idea what Herbert Xu, maintainer of the shell (dash) that runs much in Debian and Ubuntu, believes politically, for example.
@davidgerard @JdeBP @Floppy All I can say is "Hang All Politicians."
@Floppy damn I fucking hope the readline guy doesn't turn out to be a fascist.
@Floppy
Isn't putting labels on contributors fascism in itself?
@vvilhelmus @Floppy I'm not saying it's *always* mastodon.social,
@davidgerard @vvilhelmus @Floppy Sometimes it's infosec.exchange!
@Floppy Decentralize everything.
The "turns out" is rather load bearing since anyone with basic social competencies has usually gone "whoah that guy is an asshole" decades before he does the roman salute, but get told "nooo it's just his special way of working you have to respect his skills" by nerds.
@Floppy I wish I could downvote this, but the frequency in which this has been happening lately is very sad. I mourn being able to (naively) believe that tech was more altruistic than this 😢
Even worse somehow is the hill that people are willing to die on. Sure, it's painful to our pride to admit mistakes, but are we all so bad at learning how to empathize and improve 😭
