Decentralization greatly decreases vendor lock-in, lessens the damage of a single actor and adds competition. These are serious long-term benefits for a service and its users.

There’s a reason why something like email is still around and being innovated on 40 years later, while its proprietary competitors are long since dead. And it’s not that the technology is very good.

Bluesky is just another ICQ/AIM/Slashdot/Digg, a little walled garden that will eventually be ran into the ground. Which is fine. The issue is that it’s trying to embrace and extinguish the fediverse by pretending to be decentralized.

The point is that bluesky has no interest in being actually decentralized, it’s just a gimmick

I had a similar task to

“Set up a web service, load balancer and infrastructure to scale it to handle a large amount of requests. Harden the security of it to the best of your ability. Document how it works, how to scale it, why you built it the way you did, what measures you took to harden it and why, and any future improvements you would suggest. All code and documentation should be production quality. This should take about four hours.”

Maybe you can write this code in four hours, but all this documentation and motivation as well? Fuck off.

They also asked for a made up report from a security audit (this was for a security engineer position) containing a dozen realistic vulnerabilities with descriptions, impact assessments, and remediation suggestions. Once again of production quality. This is at least six pages of highly technical, well researched, and carefully worded text. Four hours is tight for this task alone.

May I suggest you spend more effort understanding the situation, and less coming up with wild speculations?

I’m sorry but that is absolutely not “the whole point of open source”.

The point of open source is the ability to read, modify, keep and share the source code of the software you use.

It’s a good thing that no one is beholden to anyone then. Which is the entire point of free software.

2024 is the year of Red Star Linux on the desktop

You might be surprised to learn that Sweden also has sanctions against Russia, together with the rest of the EU, Norway, Switzerland, Japan, Australia, South Korea and a bunch of other countries. Because this is not about the US being an ass, it’s about Russia being an ass.

The massive negative outcry over this fairly uninteresting change certainly seems oddly overblown, almost as if there are parties trying to turn it into a big political issue to paint Russia as a victim. But idk, nerds freak out over stuff all the time completely on their own.

Giving them the benefit of the doubt, I think the Linux Foundation has a hard time being clear on the matter because it just isn’t clear. These are new laws and a global open source cooperation run by a non-profit is likely a corner case that the lawmakers did not think about at all when making them.

Yes, the sanctions against Russia, as mentioned by Linus. The change also said the maintainers “can come back in the future if sufficient documentation is provided”.

My guess is that the Linux Foundation must ensure that none of the people they work with are in any way associated with any organisation, person or activity on the sanctions list. And that they preemptively removed all maintainers that might risk violating the sanctions while they work with them to establish whether they might be covered by the sanctions or not.

Regardless of what you or they think of the sanctions, they are the law, and I don’t think anyone wants the Linux Foundation to have to spend their money on lawyers and fines because they had a maintainer who also worked on a research project funded by a sanctioned entity. (If that is how it works, IANAL)

I’d say the “exchanges” they had with Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, Finland etc. were quite unequal. Expanding your territory through force is the purest form of imperialism, no matter what color your flag is.

That declaration wasn’t worth the paper it was written on, as the USSR immediately turned around and tried to forcefully annex these newly independent states (and when it failed tried again some years later).

Yes Finland joined forces with the nazis after the winter war, but the USSR started the winter war attempting to conquer Finland. To blame them for joining forces with the enemy of their enemy after being invaded and losing territory is just wild.

So the argument is that the USSR was so scared of Poland joining the nazis that they made a deal with the nazis to invade it together and divide it between them? How does that make any sense?

The USSR didn’t withdraw their troops from the baltic states until the 90s, a good 45 years after the end of WWII.

The Molotov-Ribbentrop pact was a deal between the USSR and nazi Germany detailing who would get what parts of eastern Europe. The existence of other deals and treaties that you think are worse does not change that reality.

If the USSR had been the staunch defender of the slavic peoples from nazis aggression that you claim they were, they would have entered into a defensive pact with the eastern states, not invaded them.

Talk of freedom and brotherhood means nothing when cooperation is gained at the barrel of a gun.

So you are straight up denying the existence of the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact?

To be clear I don’t fault them for signing a NAP, I fault them for invading a bunch of eastern European countries with whom they had no quarrel because they wanted to do imperialism.

But I guess the fact that you dodged the question and immediately started spewing whataboutism proves that you’re not really interested in a discussion.

It’s an ironic title. Like saying “A benefit of loosing your legs is that you don’t need to buy shoes anymore. I mean I can’t get down the stairs to leave my apartment, but at least I never have to shop for shoes again!”.

The benefit is real, but it’s also clearly not in proportion to the drawbacks presented, so focusing on the benefit is a joke.

So you’re saying we should invade Poland?

You missed the part in between where they made a deal with the nazis and invaded eastern Europe

I honestly kind of like the title and the angle of being brutally honest about the fact that the author (like most who are well off) actually benefit a lot from world hunger. That’s an important point, not because we should support world hunger, but because if we are to tackle it we must be willing to lower our standard of living.

To quote the article in question (highlight is my own):

“[H]ow many of us would sell our services so cheaply if it were not for the threat of hunger? When we sell our services cheaply, we enrich others, those who own the factories, the machines and the lands, and ultimately own the people who work for them. For those who depend on the availability of cheap labour, hunger is the foundation of their wealth.”

Before you have an opinion on it, just read the article, it’s just one page. https://www2.hawaii.edu/~kent/BenefitsofWorldHunger.pdf

The UN really shot themselves in the foot by deleting it, because the title only looks bad if you don’t actually read the rest of the text, which they now made more difficult.

It does explain those things! I quote:

“While it is true that hunger is caused by low-paying jobs, we need to understand that hunger at the same time causes low-paying jobs to be created.”

The title is clearly thinly veiled satire and a pointed reminder that our current wealth is founded on the suffering of the poor.

Just read the article, it’s one page. https://www2.hawaii.edu/~kent/BenefitsofWorldHunger.pdf

But I’m sure George Kent, author of “Freedom from Want: The Human Right to Adequate Food” is actually a shill for wealthy scum.