Antitrust is not about preventing big companies making money. It’s about preventing specific practices by monopolies to restrict the free market and to abuse their users. Don’t get me wrong, there’s a ton I find morally objectionable with companies as big as Valve and people as rich as Gabe. We might agree on those issues. But this particular Google thing is about something else. And Valve is indeed different to most tech companies in that regard.

It would be great if Valve funded this to bring gameworks back as a planned feature. It would make the Steam Deck the only handheld to support gameworks, as the competition is all using Windows + AMD GPUs as far as I know.

What are you on about? Nothing you say has any relevance to what I said or to what Vaxry said. Go back and read my comments. I said this:

Vaxry is making it as clear as possible that he will make zero commitment to oppose toxicity in his community and people took his word for it. The idea that he was punished solely for a couple of comments that happened years ago and are definitely “fixed” is Vaxry’s own misleading interpretation.

And then I quoted Vaxry’s own posts showing exactly that. I didn’t claim that he is a nazi and I don’t have to prove to you that he is. No one cares. Welcoming nazis into his community and advocating that we should all be doing the same is the problem. Whether he is a nazi or a “dense idiot” is a question only you posed. By his stance alone he is creating exactly the type of unsafe and toxic community other people want nothing to do with. That’s all that needs to be said. Your statement that this was only a “Discord dumpster fire that was thankfully put out months ago” is plain false. My comment was a statement of fact. Nazi salutes and proof of malice are irrelevant to any of this.

Seriously, what even is this level of strawmaning?

You’re saying that he is secretly saying “hurr hurr I am a nazi and this is how I get away with it.”

You need to work on yourself if this is how you react to people online simply saying a fact that annoys you.

Also, don’t bother writing another long meaningless comment. I don’t care to convince you. It’s clearly impossible, anyway. My previous comments were to bring Vaxry’s actual quotes and political stance into this thread because I knew people would either lie or genuinely not know about it. And now this one was to point out the dishonest debate tactics that most pro-Vaxry comments use, where they try to “win” the argument by moving the goal posts, misrepresenting the facts (deliberately or not), and twisting other people’s arguments. Now that all of this is in the open (in this thread at least), there’s nothing to talk about.

There are only so many ways “I don’t care if Hitler is active in my community as long as he doesn’t talk about the gassing in my discord” can be interpreted and “I just want to code” is not one of them. For starters, the practical issues of moderation and whether he wants to do it are never relevant to his argument throughout the blog post. He’s saying that “we should not care about people’s political views on a community unrelated to politics, as long as they do not use it to spread their agenda”. The words “we”, “should”, and “care” are pretty clear. This is a moral statement.

There are many more quotes that make it clear he is not talking about moderating his own community. His point about Hitler is clearly used to demonstrate his thoughts on how communities in general should be run, and why FOSS communities are getting it wrong.

Inclusive communities, in the eyes of such advocates, are often the opposite of inclusive. They will try and find things that you do outside of your proffessional persona, or often infer, guess, meddle with, or lie about what you say and stand for. Then, once they have the “ammo”, they will ostracize you. Ban, kick, call for removal, censorship.

Unlike those people, I stand by my stance that even if you are something that the country I live in disagrees with, you still are free to use, contribute to, and be a part of the greater FOSS community.

It’s also sad to see that the inclusive communities for which such people “fight for”, are accepting this type of, ultimately hateful and bigoted, behavior…

Bonus points for explicitly listing LGBT issues as a topic one might disagree with.

It’s important to note that there are many people who disagree on topics like religion, economic systems, LGBT issues, geopolitics, and other

It’s all unambiguous. Vaxry is at no point talking about the practicalities of keeping Hitler out of his community. He is explaining why he thinks Hitler should be welcome into his community and the FOSS community in general, just as long as he doesn’t use these communities to further his goal of gassing people. If there was ever any confusion over whether Vaxry doesn’t care about the toxicity or just can’t deal with it, this blog post definitely clears it up. He doesn’t care. He’s welcoming evil and harmful people in his community and in all communities and he takes a stance against the people who have an issue with this.

Your interpretation doesn’t work unless you ignore all the words he uses, the logic of his arguments, and even the fucking title. Not to mention all the other times he’s talked about these issues. In so many blog posts about how his community is unfairly represented and how his ban was unwarranted, Vaxry has not once just simply stated in any terms that he is not okay with evil and harmful people in his community, or that he even acknowledges trans rights. The only thing I’ve seen him say on the incident of harassing a trans person by editing their profile to change their pronouns is that it was “unprofessional”. No mention of ethics or possible harm done.

And if the far-right is bad (“you’re either with us or against us; death to you!”), the far-left is bad too (“you’re either with us or against us; cancelled!”)

Ah yes, seeking people to harm because of their race and innate characteristics and banning people from your platform because of their morals and behavior. Equally bad things. I see the rights and wrongs of both sides now.

I’ve also read Vaxry’s response and it’s complete nonsense. It’s even apparent in your condensed version.

Uh, we don’t have a CoC

Exactly. This is more than “an incident” as you put it. It’s a long-lasting pattern of Vaxry refusing to commit to any standards of behavior. He explicitly calls “upholding any value” nothing but an inconvenience. His only reaction to his community ridiculing the concept of a CoC is to say “nice one”.

What’s funny is that the person who opened the issue said “Instead of attacking the post, could you provide some evidence against it? (e.g. say “Trans rights are human rights”)” and it was completely ignored. See, the CoC is not about the text itself. It’s about taking an open stance against bigotry. Vaxry can cry all day about how this one incident is misrepresented and how moderation has become more strict now, but nowhere in this discussion or the FDO emails or his own blog about the issue have I seen him take an actual moral stance on the issue.

we don’t belong to your organization

What does this have to do with anything? FDO, a space that aims to be LGBTQ+ friendly, banned a bigoted person from participating, as they should. It’s such a stupid childish argument to say “but I didn’t out myself as a bigot in a commit message I submitted to you, checkmate!”. No-one cares. You can’t leave your “fuck trans people, lol” sign at the door and walk in, mate. You’re still a toxic asshole and you’re still a threat to the LBGTQ+ people we want to participate in our community.

He also said that the misrepresentation got to such point that a another transgender coder made a contribution to Vaxry’s project, expecting that it would be rejected, and got surprised that her PR got merged.

This is just so funny to hear from Vaxry himself. After people have repeatedly tried to explain to him that not enforcing any code of conduct on a toxic community is going to make it an unsafe space for LGBTQ+ people, Vaxry is shocked to find that LGBTQ+ people are afraid of being discriminated against!

Oh, but no, you see it’s because of the “misrepresentation”! Vaxry’s had made it so clear through his words and actions that trans rights are human rights and that bigotry is unacceptable, so it can’t possibly be on him. Even as he’s posting pictures this conversation where he’s accused of being a transphobe, and a trans person is expecting to get rejected, does he point out how he’s not a transphobe and how he respects all human rights? Nope, he only says that he only cares about the code.

But that’s just me picking apart his comments in a few specific discussions. What if he has in fact taken a moral stance, but just not in these particular discussions where’s he’s felt attacked and pressured into making a statement?

He did post this in one of his blog posts:

With that, I believe that every human’s opinion is valuable and important, and most crucially, equal. There is no point in having some people’s opinions be more important than others. That is the essence of discrimination.

Hey, that’s not bad. There’s mention of equality here and he seems against discrimination! Now let’s read the rest of this Inclusive community activists are harming FOSS blog post and see what it’s really about! Oh no, the above statement was only to set the stage for accusing SJWs of not understanding that not everyone agrees with them and how they shouldn’t “cancel” us for “saying bad words”. So he does think to talk about equality and discrimination, just not in any of the above discussions. But he’ll do it here to defense people acting like assholes on the internet!

And then he says this:

if I run a discord server around cultivating tomatoes, I should not exclude people based on their political beliefs, unless they use my discord server to spread those views. which means even if they are literally adolf hitler, I shouldn’t care, as long as they don’t post about gassing people on my server

that is inclusivity

So there you have it. Vaxry will literally accept Hilter into his community, just casually interacting with Jewish people (presumably he doesn’t ban them from participating). It’s all fine, just as long as the gassing happens outside his own platform. Gosh, I wonder why people are feeling unwelcome in his community. Surely it is the misrepresentation of his views.

Here’s an archive link for the above article just in case: https://web.archive.org/web/20240511145845/https://blog.vaxry.net/articles/2023-inclusiveActivists

And now in the r/linux thread about these news people are defending Vaxry, misrepresenting what the ban was about, and hating FDO.

Indicatively, this blatantly wrong comment chain is upvoted:

Is this the project where some red Hat dev started dropping legal threats from their corporate account over offline activities by third parties in unrelated communities years past?

Sort of. You got some details wrong but essentially, yes.

But this is downvoted and has replies telling them they’re wrong:

Congratulations to the hyprland project, but I definitely will not be using or contributing to the project as long as it’s an exclusionary and intolerant space.

This was a Discord dumpster fire that was thankfully put out months ago.

Right, but the original mail from FDO basically said “we know about these examples of bad behavior, we want to notify you that they are definitely unacceptable and we expect to never see something like it again”. And Vaxry had a meltdown over that. Among other things, he doesn’t get why he should be held accountable for behaviors outside FDO. He has also rejected and commented negatively on the idea of any code of conduct at all for his project. Vaxry is making it as clear as possible that he will make zero commitment to oppose toxicity in his community and people took his word for it. The idea that he was punished solely for a couple of comments that happened years ago and are definitely “fixed” is Vaxry’s own misleading interpretation.

The point of encrypting something that gets decrypted midway by an organization is that there are worse actors than the organization out there. I’m not really scared of Steam abusing my credit card info, but I am afraid of random internet strangers.

Also remember that https doesn’t just protect your data, it also verifies that you’re actually on the website you think you are. The internet is basically unusable without this guarantee, especially on a network you share with others.

So no vetting at all presumably since you didn’t mention it? So how do you know that Dashlane is safer than a password scheme that might be guessed by someone after they’ve already compromised a couple of your passwords?

For someone to work it out, they would have to be targeting you specifically. I would imagine that is not as common as, eg, using a database of leaked passwords to automatically try as many username-password combinations as possible. I don’t think it’s a great pattern either, but it’s probably better than what most people would do to get easy-to-remember passwords. If you string it with other patterns that are easy for you to memorize you could get a password that is decently safe in total.

Don’t complicate it. Use a password manager. I know none of my passwords and that’s how it should be.

A password manager isn’t really any less complicated. You’ve just out-sourced the complexity to someone else. How have you actually vetted your password manager and what’s your backup plan for when they fuck up?

Go to protondb.com and search for the games you’re interested in. If your profile is public, I think you can import your entire library and browse through it instead of manually searching for each individual game. Ideally you want “platinum” compatibility but I’ve personally never had problems with “gold” games either.

Actually a lot of people don’t drive most of the time. If that’s news to you then you probably live in a shitty place that’s never going to be viable no matter what type of vehicle you use.

Right, air pollution is terrible. So let’s do the thing that minimizes it, which is not driving all the time.

EVs can be better than ICEs and still a terrible industry though. You phrase it as if it’s one or the other.

Regardless of abuse allegations, EVs are just not the big improvement we need to fight climate change and save the millions of people that will die because of it. We need fundamental changes like lives built around public transport, biking, and walking, not slightly better vehicles in an enormously wasteful model.

Imagine you were asked to start speaking a new language, eg Chinese. Your brain happens to work quite differently to the rest of us. You have immense capabilities for memorization and computation but not much else. You can’t really learn Chinese with this kind of mind, but you have an idea that plays right into your strengths. You will listen to millions of conversations by real Chinese speakers and mimic their patterns. You make notes like “when one person says A, the most common response by the other person is B”, or “most often after someone says X, they follow it up with Y”. So you go into conversations with Chinese speakers and just perform these patterns. It’s all just sounds to you. You don’t recognize words and you can’t even tell from context what’s happening. If you do that well enough you are technically speaking Chinese but you will never have any intent or understanding behind what you say. That’s basically LLMs.

Just because something is available to view online does not mean you can do anything you want with it. Most content is automatically protected by copyright. You can use it in ways that would otherwise by illegal only if you are explicitly granted permission to do so.

Specifically, Stack Overflow licenses any content you contribute under the CC-BY-SA 4.0 (older content is covered by other licenses that I omit for simplicity). If you read the license you will note two restrictions: attribution and “share-alike”. So if you take someone’s answer, including the code snippets, and include it in something you make, even if you change it to an extent, you have to attribute it to the original source and you have to share it with the same license. You could theoretically mirror the entire SO site’s content, as long as you used the same licenses for all of it.

So far AI companies have simply scraped everything and argued that they don’t have to respect the original license. They argue that it is “fair use” because AI is “transformative use”. If you look at the historical usage of “transformative use” in copyright cases, their case is kind of bullshit actually. But regardless of whether it will hold up in court (and whether it should hold up in court), the reality is that AI companies are going to use everybody’s content in ways that they have not been given permission to do so.

So for now it doesn’t matter whether our content is centralized or federated. It doesn’t matter whether SO has a deal with OpeanAI or not. SO content was almost certainly already used for ChatGPT. If you split it into 100s of small sites on the fediverse it would still be part of ChatGPT. As long as it’s easy to access, they will use it. Allegedly they also use torrents for input data so even if it’s not publicly viewable it’s not safe. If/when AI data sourcing is regulated and the “transformative use” argument fails in court and if the fines are big enough for the regulation to actually work, then sure the situation described in the OP will matter. But we’ll have to see if that ever happens. I’m not holding my breath, honestly.

This has nothing to do with centralization. AI companies are already scraping the web for everything useful. If you took the content from SO and split it into 1000 federated sites, it would still end up in a AI model. Decentralization would only help if we ever manage to hold the AI companies accountable for the en masse copyright violations they base their industry on.

I would highly advice against using Wine. It requires constant root access, just like virus scanners, making your system vulnerable.

This can’t be right. Was it maybe a particular workflow you used that required root access? I know I’ve used wine as part of Steam’s Proton as well as via Lutris and neither app has ever requested privilege escalation. I’ve also run wine manually from the terminal also without being root.

Both su and sudo originally meant “superuser” because that was their only use. They have retroactively been changed to “switch user” because this functionality was added later.

It’s not just Batman. This is a common trope in the superhero genre. Pop Culture Detective has a great video on the subject: https://youtu.be/LpitmEnaYeU