do i think humanity will ever fully liberate itself? probably not, there will still be conflicts of power and privilege in any social or political system, on all sorts of levels
but it doesn't mean things can't be made better
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been thinking about this partly in response to the results of the LLM vote in debian
like, the general public (not as overwhelmingly as some headline writers like to claim, but still) dislikes generative AI and products made with it, and even people who regularly consult ChatGPT don't like LLMs being pushed everywhere
you would think that a vote in the debian developer community would give out similar results, but instead, the option that won was the one that (1) changed nothing in practice, (2) instead only served to remove the element of worry that LLM-using devs might have had before contributing to debian -- and so, to most in the overall user community, it was still seen as the "pro-LLM" option
and it won under a ranked choice voting system, which is generally considered better than most, because it removes the "spoiler effect" when a bunch of similar competing options make it possible for something to win, meaning that, at least in theory, more than 50% of debian devs were okay with that option
now, out of all possible improvements to today's democratic systems, i personally think that a very good improvement, and one that also doesn't create illiberal outcomes, is to make it so that every enterprise hiring a sufficiently large number of workers is obligated to give them the ability to vote on how the enterprise operates -- basically turn them all into worker cooperatives
and yet, the debian LLM vote, which is as close to a worker cooperative deciding its own policy as it can get, still produces outcomes that are at odds with the interests of its users
i can easily imagine that some future syndicalist society, where every enterprise or every type of labor is ruled by its own union -- even assuming that the union in question itself isn't corrupt -- will still result in some conflicts of power and privilege that will have to be resolved
the steel workers' union will still have some power over the unions of workers that do things out of steel, for instance, the farmers' union will be at odds with the union of food industry workers, and so on
@rnd Hard agree about democratizing large enterprises.
...and I suspect that the problem with the Debian vote is that most users didn't vote, possibly because they didn't know they could or because it was difficult to get set up with the voting system.
I only heard about the LLM vote after the fact, on fedi... and although I'm mainly an Ubuntu user, I do have Debian installed on at least one server.
@woozle as for democratization of enterprises, i find it to be one of the more radical socialist ideas that doesn't also infringe on the liberal ideas i find to be fundamental to a free society
@rnd That is an interesting point, about which I will have to ponder some more. (I don't disagree; I guess I'm now thinking I need to re-examine my "radical" socialist ideas in the light of "liberal" values... which may mean figuring out what the difference is...)
@woozle i assume that the vote is restricted to people who actually contribute to debian, rather than regular users, though, and the process of officially becoming one is rather complex (requiring someone to vouch for you via OpenPGP or an ID document, and demanding a name-shaped identifier (there seems to be no "real name" requirement, but they do explicitly demand first and last name, and probably would not accept a contributor named after a UNIX character device))
@rnd Yeah -- so, there's your problem right there.
@rnd I see it as being kind of like knowledge: we can't ever understand the universe completely, but we can always understand it better over time.
We can't ever have a perfect society, but we can keep making it better.
(...or like finding bugs in a large codebase... okay, okay, I'm stopping now...)
@woozle and much like with a codebase, sometimes it's not a question of which option is better, but more of a matter of opinion or a choice made a long time ago that people now have to live with or justify
like how people in the windows and linux world keep trying to bring in the "global menu" from macOS (where the desktop's top bar provides access to what would otherwise be a menu bar inside the window), even though it doesn't quite work, because in windows and linux GUIs, menus belong to windows, whereas on macOS, they belong to apps (which can have any number of windows, including zero), and, if i had to guess, the reason for that lied in the fact that the original mac os was a single-tasked system where the currently-active app was responsible for that menu, which included finder (which also has 0 windows at the very start) and then it sort of turned into a UI paradigm that still functions to this day, whereas windows was inherently multitasked straight from 1.0, and the idea that apps aren't supposed to influence things outside of their windows was very important
@rnd To me, it makes sense for things like that to be a user preference, assuming there's no technical/logical obstacle.
...though with many more recent applications doing menus and the window-top-bar in their own weird ways, that does become more difficult.... but as long as apps had the option of doing it the standard way, and the desktop supported putting the menu in either place... it could be a user-option, where the window-manager would update the screen-menu whenever the focus shifted to a new window (i.e. that would still maintain the separation of control -- the app wouldn't be doing anything to the screen; the screen manager would be asking the app how to draw its menu, and then placing it at the top instead of in the window).
I'd say this (having the option to do it either way) would objectively be an "improvement", even if I never used it because I prefer the in-window version.
...and I guess I'm thinking that a lot of those subjective things could be turned into improvements by making them a user-choice...
...which is, to a large extent, what Linux does by providing a selection of desktop environments (although switching between them after installing the OS is another matter... but I digress).
