the whole context here are the insane payouts for the execs

🤣

I’ve heard about this kind of shit, but never seen it myself.

yeah most companies don’t even bother with the courtesy email anymore

The way that normally works is that the US will isolate a country that can’t fight back and then commit war crimes there for decades because it’s a good profit vehicle for the military industry. They control the level of escalation, and they’re able to turn heat up when they want or to cool things down when they need to.

The difference with Iran is that it’s not isolated, and it’s able to fight back in a meaningful way. The US does not have escalatory dominance in this conflict. And that’s a whole new development for the burger reich.

not to mention that Iran is systematically destroying US radars across the region as we speak

completely agree

Indeed, a lot of the US capabilities and limitations are being revealed now. I’d also be shocked if China wasn’t quietly testing stuff like radars in Iran to see if they can detect US stealth jets for example.

You’d think the US would’ve already been learning these lessons in Ukraine, but evidently they were not. And this is the first time the US got itself into a war where it does not control escalation. I don’t see why Iran would settle for anything less than pushing the US out of the region entirely at this point.

The crazy part here is that NATO evidently hasn’t learned anything at all over past 4 years.

That could be an aspect too.

Exactly, and I get why companies do it. They generally prioritize bringing new customers on, so they tweak things because they think it’s more trendy or appealing. But for an open source project to do these things just makes no sense at all. I get the impression people running things at Mozilla are completely disconnected from what Firefox users actually want at this point.

I really hate the trend of people just randomly changing UI in apps for no apparent reason. It’s just a pervasive problem at this point.

the thermal paint idea is cute though

Thermal paint is very much a new development.

but pedantry is alive and well

Exactly, when you dig into all the complaints people have about this tech, they’re ultimately just symptoms of the underlying capitalist relations.

cause it’s a mechanical turk

The talk is reality check for anyone who thinks open source is still in its honeymoon phase. He basically argues that we have been living through a Gilded Age of open source from about 2000 to 2020 where everything looked like rapid growth and success on the surface while the foundation was actually rotting. Just like the original Gilded Age had its robber barons and railroad monopolies he points out that we have traded genuine freedom for the convenience of proprietary platforms like GitHub and Slack. He is pretty blunt about the fact that the industry has shifted from community driven passion projects to venture capital backed rug pulls where companies like Redis or HashiCorp just swap licenses the moment they need to squeeze more profit out of users.

He highlights how the XZ backdoor and the Log4Shell mess exposed that the entire internet is basically held together by three tired volunteers in a trench coat and how new regulations might actually make those people legally liable for bugs. He also goes off on how AI is being shoved into everything not because it helps developers but because VCs want to replace them, and he is clearly not a fan of how companies like Red Hat and Fedora are tying everything to AI tools now. It is a really sobering look at how we stopped caring about the principles of free software and just became pragmatic consumers who are okay with locked down ecosystems like macOS or Android as long as they are shiny.

He thinks we can still fix this but it requires us to stop being spectators and actually start mentoring the next generation on why these values mattered in the first place. He basically says that if we just treat open source as a way to get free labor for corporations it is going to end up as a dead hobby like ham radio. The main takeaway is that the era of easy growth is over and if we actually want a future where we control our own computers we have to stop picking the convenient path and start fighting for the principled one again.