A billion dollars is a hard sum of money to wrap your head around. There is basically no ethical way to make a billion dollars. If you have a billion dollars it’s because you’ve stiffed a lot of people a lot of the value they created and kept it for yourself.

Boston Market. It might try to convince you it’s upscale homemade, but it’s just kfc in another wrapper

Excellent point and kudos to you for knowing that widgets are juiced based.

Tariffs suck for the country implementing the tariff. But before I tell you why they suck, let me tell you the way they are supposed to help.

Here’s the way tariffs are supposed to work according to people that like tariffs (spoiler alert, this thing I’m about to describe is a fantasy and I’ll explain why).

Let’s say people in the US can make widgets for $10 and sell them for $12 and have a viable business. But mean old foreign country can make widgets for $5 and sell them for $7 and have a viable business. The foreign country sells the people of the US widgets for $7, which is great if you live in the US and want to buy a widget but sucks if you live in the US and want to make a widget.

Tariffs are supposed to protect local businesses by making foreign goods less competitive. Let’s say we pass a law putting a $10 tariff on foreign widgets. I used to import widgets from foreign country and pay the manufacturer $5 per widget and sell them to Americans for $7. Now when I import the widget from the foreign country I still pay the manufacturer $5 per widget but now I have to pay the US government a tariff of $10 per widget. Each imported widget now costs me $15 and so I have to sell them for $17 to make a profit. This now means that American made widgets are competitive again, the locally made $12 widget is a great deal compared to the $17 imported one. Great if you are a US widget maker and shitty if you are a US widget buyer.

Now you might notice the people in the US buying widgets, even in the best fantasy scenario, end up getting dicked over. The theory goes that widget making jobs are good though and if we do that enough then everyone will have to pay more for goods but we will have lots of jobs making stuff that pay ok.

Now here’s the part that really, really sucks. Let’s say you are a US widget maker and now you know that your foreign competition can’t make a widget for less than $17. You could sell your widgets for $12 and have a viable business or you could sell them for $16.99 and have a super profitable business. I’ll just gesture broadly at the sea of corporate greed we find ourselves floating in and let you decide which is more likely.

Tariffs induce even local manufacturers to raise prices because it hurts competition. It’s basically a massive transfer of wealth from local consumers to local producers by cutting out the foreign producers and the competitive pressure they exert on the market. This is why basically every economist said “do this and kill the economy”

So why do people want tariffs? Well the promise for your average voter is that the tariffs are going to bring back good solid blue collar jobs. You can go work in a factory and pump out widgets and get a nice middle class paycheck. It’s a nice sales pitch and a lot of people would really want that to be true. I suspect though that the manufacturers will automate most of this work and pocket the profits, again, gestures broadly at the late stage capitalism hellscape all around us.

Oh I completely agree. And I don’t want any working poor stolen valor (for lack of a better term). I just think we won’t be able to fix these problems if we keep letting the owner class get away with dividing us up.

The way we pay for labor is unfair and the fact that I get a bigger paycheck is about 5% things I can control (skills, training, etc) and 95% blind luck (if I was born in 1890 or 2190 my ability to write erlang wouldn’t be nearly as marketable. In the 1390s my annoying fastidiousness and desire to work purely in theory would have me a pauper)

It’s that old meme though of the worker with a cookie, the immigrant with a crumb, and the wealthy guy with an immense pile telling the worker to watch out for the immigrant. It’s the same playbook for the working class, just add a third guy with 2 cookies and the wealthy guy is telling you “he’s also not on your side because he has 2 whole cookies, don’t band together to take any of mine”

If the working class could achieve class consciousness and start demanding their fair share, we could actually fix some of our problems. So I hope my brothers and sisters and non-binary siblings in the working class can embrace me and each other in solidarity and fight for a better tomorrow.

Republicans love a good scam

Next up is the dismantling of the ACA. They will roll out these amazingly cheap alternatives. Health insurance for $10 a month!

So the poor and the stupid will sign up. They’ll go to the bar and saunter up to a “libtard” and tell them that trump fixed everything.

Then when they get sick and try to use MAGA super plan plus premium they won’t be able to find a doctor. The $10/month plan only covers an annual trip to a CVS minute clinic. They’ll go on Facebook and write up how the goddamn liberals tricked him. Other faithful republicans will pray for them and tell them that it must be a glitch because trump made things better.

The con will win because it’ll only hurt those without power.

I’m one of those highly paid Silicon Valley workers.

But I’m still working class because I trade my labor for the money I need to live. I trade my labor for the healthcare that keeps me and my wife alive.

I’m working class because I can’t afford not to work.

Don’t let the owners of this country divide us up any longer. They love it when we fight amongst each other to determine who is really “working class” because it means we in-fight instead of challenging them.

No war but class war.

I don’t think it’s weird to feel exhausted by the pace of innovation, especially when the innovation has nebulous value.

I felt this way with the wave of “smart house” stuff. I’m a software engineer, I spend all day programming and debugging stuff. I do NOT want to spend 1 fucking second of my precious finite life debugging a fucking light bulb. Not one. Oh I can say “Alexa, red alert” and all my lightbulbs turn red, fucking fuck you. I don’t want my refrigerator connected to the internet, I don’t want my toaster monitoring my speech patterns to serve me ads and customize my toasting experience.

To every shitbag manager out there tying to shove this garbage down our throats, fuck off and die. And you might think “you don’t like a smart (whatever) then don’t buy one.” Fuck you too, over time I fucking can’t. Try to buy a tv that isn’t a fucking smart tv, you just fucking can’t anymore. And slowly but surely everything you use turns into some shitty piece of fuck.

The good news is that AI is probably a bubble. We’ve fed the sum total of the internet into our LLMs and we’ve gotten pretty convincing liars that are sometimes right. We are running out of data and 99 out of 100 uses of AI don’t make sense.

I’ve been in the startup scene for my entire adult career and if you talk to people that try to jam AI into their products to make investors happy you’ll hear very similar things every time. It was incredibly expensive, no one used it, and no one liked it.

There are some use cases for AI, but not nearly as much as what’s getting thrown at the wall. AI has been through many winters where progress stalls, the hype dies out, and AI winter begins.

Final thought, you don’t have to do anything you don’t want to. People are enamored with using AI to make false memories (sorry, there comes a point where you’ve touched up a photo so much it isn’t reality anymore), destroying their ability to use their brains for critical thinking, art, writing, reading. You don’t have to. Those people might deeply regret not having a single real picture of their child. Maybe the clouds made the photo look bad, but now you can’t remember laughing as you ran through the rain.

Our lives do not need to be curated and polished into some technicolor madness. Do what you want and in 20 years people will ask you “how are you so interesting and fulfilled” as they shovel AI garbage into their maw. I see a future that is similar to what happened to social media (I know, I’m using social media right now, we are all hypocrites). People working everyday to present some faux reality to others, jealous of everyone else’s faux realty, unhappy and unable to go 5 god damn minutes without a dopamine hit.

The other day I had to wait for something, I sat and looked out the window at the beautiful trees rustling gently in the wind. I took in the glory of the world around me, I sat in peace and let my mind wander. These are skills too few enjoy these days because they let the future happen to them.

You are in charge of your life.

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I suppose you might get to kill people but that doesn’t mean that the law is going to be ok with that. Proportionality of force is a thing. Stand your ground states are doing their best to change that, but that’s a very mixed bag.

If you shoot and kill someone for blocking your waymo and being a creep, in most places you are going to have to convince a district attorney and a jury that you were justified in ending their life. Even if you do that and escape criminal liability, you’ll then have to convince more people not to hold you liable in civil court.

Sounds pretty cool to go “I got a shooty bang bang so if I feel threatened in any way I can come out blasting.” It is true in the moment, but if you place any value on your future liberty, money, and time you might want to consider the ramifications of killing another human being.

Finally, even if society decides you shouldn’t face any criminal or civil penalty for killing someone, you will have to face yourself. Sitting behind a keyboard it sounds badass to shoot someone that’s pissing you off. In the moment you will probably feel justified. Many a young man sent to war or employed as a police officer didn’t think that taking a life would change them, only to find the reality of taking a life is not what the action movies promised. Self doubt, self loathing, ptsd, depression, these are all common reactions to reckoning with the fact that you are the cause of another persons death.

It is hard to feel like a righteous badass as you watch a grieving widow mourn someone that may have even done something stupid or wrong, knowing that their child has no father now and their wife no partner. Are these people jerks and creeps, sure, is the punishment for being a jerk or creep death, rarely. It is a heavy burden to carry to end another.

Don’t want to be involved with politicians, stay out of politics.

Don’t want to be involved with the police, follow the laws. Absolutely do not get involved with sovereign citizen bullshit, it is based on nothing and has never worked in a court of law. I mention this because you seem like someone that might be attracted to that, and there’s nothing that’s going to get Johnny Law up in your shit faster than some bullshit “I’m just traveling in a private conveyance license plate I bought off Facebook marketplace.”

Don’t want to be involved with the underworld… again just follow the law. Mobsters and human traffickers aren’t heading into the suburbs to recruit new operatives.

Don’t want to be involved with the elite, kinda shit out of luck, they own everything and will squeeze you with all kinds of predatory capitalism. This means you get to pick between hundreds of brands all produced by 3 mega corporations, not that Elon musk rapes your kid in the basement. So basically the same advice, don’t go to billionaire cocktail parties (don’t worry they aren’t inviting you) and you’ll be fine.

You live in the statistically safest time for a human being to live if you are in the USA. If you consume a bunch of media you’ll get a different impression, but you literally could not pick a safer time to be alive if you are some upper middle class nobody.

tl;dr - No one gives one wet shit about you, my dude. You aren’t the main character, there isn’t a cabal of politicians and elites and cops and billionaires plotting your destruction. If you are feeling paranoid go seek out mental health support, and do it from a doctor, not Lemmy.

Hosting the image on discords CDN allows you not to give out your IP address to any person that comes across the link, prevents you from getting hammered with download requests if your upload becomes popular, and allows your content to be accessed when your own machine goes to sleep or has any kind of networking interruption.

Before discord people used to self host teamspeak or some other software. One of the big things you don’t have to think about is the person you just made a joke about or beat in an online game trying to DDOS your machine, because they don’t know where you are.

So did this guy just blast his own legs with shit to own the libs?

Very on brand for the conservative brain trust

I think it’s a shame that when we figured out skyscrapers we didn’t start doing that with the dead. Catacombs in the sky reaching to the heavens.

I’m gonna go pay my respects to grandma she’s in the towns bonescraper. Smash cut to a giant tower made of skeletons.

Aliens come down to that kind of society, they’d want to party with us because that’s metal as fuck

Not really perfectionism just grammar

I think the fact that using a neuter pronoun is so charged that we can’t even speak or write our language correctly is insane.

I’ve written thousands of technical documents, if you are referring to a generic operator / user / whatever the correct term to use is “they.” That’s how you say “the person that I’m referring to that I don’t know anything about”

There was a brief madness in the 90s when fucking morons used “he/she” for absolutely no reason.

Don’t worry, he seems hard at work making sure all that Tesla stock he got will also be worth less everyday.

In case you are wanting the history. IBM actually coined the term PC with their IBM Personal Computers

At the time most computing platforms were incompatible. Software written for a commodore computer wouldn’t work with an apple computer wouldn’t work with an IBM PC.

The IBM PC was popular enough though that people started building “pc compatible” machines. A very popular configuration for this was intel chips with Microsoft DOS. While these machines started out as “pc compatible” after a while the IBM PC wasn’t a big deal anymore so saying “we are compatible with a machine released in 1981” just slowly morphed into “it’s a PC” as shorthand for “intel chipset with Microsoft OS”

Now why didn’t apple get the pc moniker? At the time when the IBM PC launched apple was actively building and selling their own computers and weren’t interested in making them IBM PC clones so they never went out and marketed themselves as “pc compatible” because for the most part they were not.

Thanks for attending my Ted talk

I get the frustration and there’s a lot of free software that is so vital to our modern way of life that it’s crazy that it’s always one dude in Nebraska maintaining it for the last 60 years for free as a hobby.

That said, I think you should consider the great landscape of dependencies and who the competition is.

For example, I’ve open sourced a bunch of things in my life and I have a library used to make testing more ergonomic. I worked very hard on it and I like it. There are other libraries that solve this problem to, I’m biased, but I like mine the best. I like when I can help people write higher quality software with nicer tests.

My “competition” isn’t commercial offerings it’s other free offerings. Now in the grand scheme of things, it doesn’t really matter if anyone ever uses the thing I wrote, but since I wrote it and put it out into the world I get to decide how I want to interact with the wider community of people that use it or might think about using it.

If I take a hardline stance, everyone has to be committed, but the right quality bars, do things the right way, etc. I’m free to do that. The most likely outcomes are two fold. One, I’ll have a very high quality thing to my standard. Two, probably not a lot of people are going to be using it because I’ve made it too hard to participate and they will go off and use an inferior solution. Again, if it solves my problem no big deal. But I might be missing out on someone that, if they had been allowed to participate more easily, could have made my thing better, faster, more secure.

So that’s the bargain. Do you have strict controls and limit your exposure to the good and bad out there in the open source community. Do you have lax controls and expose yourself to all the good and bad. Most maintainers end up shooting for the middle, open enough that good contributors can come and flourish but strict enough to keep bad contributors out. It’s a spectacularly difficult problem though, so I’m always happy to hear how other people think about it.

This seems like a reasonable approach when all actors are being paid to contribute.

I think where discord actually ends up helping is for community projects where everyone is basically a volunteer. It works because it lowers the barrier to helping.

The official documentation of your favorite programming language or highly popular library or framework is probably pretty locked down with a semi high quality bar for contributions. This is a good thing, those docs are consumed by lots of people and the documentation has no context for what the person is trying to do so making sure they are clear, concise, and easy to understand creates a high quality bar.

A lot of projects end up with enthusiastic helpers who probably aren’t going to dedicate the time and energy it takes to become a core maintainer. You can either leave these people and their possible helpfulness on the table or you can harness it with a discord server.

People that might not be the right fit for writing an in-depth general purpose getting started guide are still pretty great at answering peoples questions when given context and the ability to discuss it back and forth. That’s what projects are actually taking advantage of, a large group of people that are willing to help others learn how to use the programming language / library / framework.

The people they help end up having a good time with the friendly helpful community and hang out and help others. If you do it right you get this virtuous cycle where people using the thing you made help each other be successful making the thing you made even more popular.

RTFM, is ok in a corporate environment when part of your paycheck is for RTFMing. But for the last 70 years people that know how stuff works have been shouting RTFM at people wanting to learn how stuff works. But some people just aren’t good at RTFM or plain don’t want to. Discord, and other chat platforms, end up facilitating their learning models.

I think this is the main disconnect for people.

What a lot of technical people want is a forum. They want to have every problem discussed one time and then if someone brings it up again they can link to it and not have to discuss it again. This exists, it’s called stackoverflow and if technical people want someone to close their question as “already answered” or “off topic” they can go there.

Most discord communities though aren’t attempting to build a permanent corpus of knowledge carefully curated and searchable. Instead it’s basically the polar opposite, someone can show up and ask the question that every beginner stubs their toe on and people answer it and chat with them and help them learn.

It is more work for the people giving out the help, but it is seems like it’s what new users want. A place they can ask a question and get an answer or get someone to ask them questions to improve their question.

A lot of technical people get blinded by their own knowledge. Indexable searchable information is great if you know what to search for, but new people seldom do and they don’t even know the right way to formulate the questions. Asking other human beings that know what they are doing is a good way to learn stuff. Discord facilitates that, people like that, and no amount of highly technical people kicking their feet and holding their breathe and shouting at the communities “you are doing it wrong, you need a highly curated forum where questions are never asked twice” is going to stop human nature.