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Defletter

825 karma · joined May 14, 2021

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Defletter··on Ofcom concedes defeat in 4chan case
Except that his grievances are extremely surface level.

For example, he claims that legal experts, regardless of their political leanings, agree that the small-boats crisis cannot be solved without primary-legislative changes to the Human Rights Act. Does he mention how the HRA is obstructive? No. Does he mention even one change to the HRA that would help? No. Does he mention the scale of changes required? No.

What's funny is that I'd actually use his HRA example as an example of our constitutional safeguards working exactly as intended: it's for Parliament to decide what our human rights are and their extent, not the whims of ministers. That the Prime Minister and Parliament are refusing to make those changes because they find them to be politically untenable is actually how a democratic system ought to work.

In fact, I'd summarise his testimony as him being irritated at constitutional safeguards working as intended. For example, he claimed that the biggest enemy to British Special Forces is not Russia, China, or Iran but the Cabinet Office and Ministry of Defence lawyers. Oh no, our ministries are operating within the law! How terrible! He seems to advocate for ministers and ministries to instead adopt an 'ask for forgiveness, not permission' mindset with regards to the law, particularly given his testimony on how things were done during the chaos of the pandemic:

> That led to some very big decisions inside No. 10 where, essentially, I said on behalf of the PM, for example, "Call the airlines. Commandeer the planes. Fly the planes to China. Pick up all our PPE. Fly back here. We don't care if the officials all say it's unlawful. If we don't get all this PPE back, God knows how many doctors and nurses are going to die as a consequence. Do it, and, if there's a judicial review that says it's all illegal, whatever, the PM will deal with that down the line".

Defletter··on Ofcom concedes defeat in 4chan case
Dammit, my edit window ran out of time. Alas. While the 22nd April, 3rd June, and 10th June sessions are from that committee, they are unrelated to the inquiry of constitutional safeguards. Skip to the 15th July session. Here's a link to the inquiry: https://committees.parliament.uk/work/9861/the-uks-constitut...

Anyway, after watching the session with Cummings, I have to say I'm deeply unimpressed with his contribution. While I found his bluntness somewhat refreshing, he was clearly irritated at being (repeatedly) asked to suggest actual solutions instead of just using the session as a pulpit for his grievances.

Defletter··on Ofcom concedes defeat in 4chan case
Here's the link to Parliament's own on-demand video: https://parliamentlive.tv/event/index/c32e3478-65af-41b2-aa7...

I'm somewhat dubious of a Youtube channel called "Western Liberty" that was created the day of Cummings's testimony, which contains nothing but the session and short clips of it. Using the link above avoids any potential ad revenue going to that clearly political pointed channel.

For anyone that's interested, here are the links to the other sessions of this committee:

- 22nd April 2026: https://parliamentlive.tv/event/index/e79ae489-4db6-4159-88b...

- 3rd June 2026: https://parliamentlive.tv/event/index/f27d8b93-b09d-433a-8e6...

- 10th June 2026: https://parliamentlive.tv/event/index/097aadbd-b58d-4f76-90e...

- 15th July 2026: https://parliamentlive.tv/event/index/87f1e00f-82b5-432b-af6...

- 2nd September 2026: https://parliamentlive.tv/event/index/110f81a5-32c4-4577-bab...

- 16th September 2026: https://parliamentlive.tv/event/index/ecf7a237-54c9-40be-922...

Defletter··on Developing Taste
One would presume they are making a clear distinction between people who design for design's sake, and those whose design is a result of interviews, research, and testing.
Defletter··on Ousted Savannah police officer gave ICE agent husband access to Flock system
What I think everdrive is saying is that for it to be a smokescreen, there needs to be smoke: if it was only the government participating in the Purge to eliminate undesireables, it'd be extremely obvious and rallied against. But it's not, regular people are engaging with it in droves, which is what they believe to be the unrealistic part.
Defletter··on Thank You, Deno
TIL that &c means etc. I just spent more time than I'd like to admit googling for "&c" thinking it was some kind of FFI functionality or something xD
Defletter··on Suicide rates highest ever among middle-aged men
Yes, we are in agreement that empires bully their smaller neighbours. This is bad, right? You agree that this is bad... right?
Defletter··on European Alternatives
Yup. I cannot stress how much the conversation has changed from a decade ago: the mere prospect of a European army was feared enough to be one of the reasons why we left the EU, but now it's something being seriously considered thanks to Russia's deranged land grab and the US's worsening instability. There's even been some panic over how reliant we are on the US for our nuclear deterrent and what that could mean should relations break down. This became a particular concern when the US started openly threatening to annex Greenland.

The prospect of the US going rogue has forced us to wake up and realise that every dependence we have on the US is potential leverage. For example, the US has levied sanctions against ICC judges, meaning that they can no longer use their VISA/MASTERCARD cards. This means that the French Judge Guillou for example cannot go to a shop in France, pay for French goods in Euros with a card from his French bank, because a US company is intervening to prevent it. As such they can only pay for things in cash... and Europe is becoming increasingly cashless.

Defletter··on IRCv3
To be honest, I don't think most people's first interpretation of someone's claim to a "Discord-esque feel" when describing the UX of their open-source IRC client is that it's therefore riddled with dark patterns to sell an upgraded version of the service. I think it's probably more likely that they were referring to the general layout (eg: having circular server icons as a vertical list on the left hand side). I'm guessing that that's also why they mentioned Slack, since that has the same layout too.
Defletter··on 11 of 23 Core Open Source Projects Run on 1 or 2 People
While I don't doubt that regulatory bodies and/or ethics boards would have some cost effect, I don't think it'd be to the degree that you suppose. If anything, the long-term costs might be less. For example, say you take bad legal advice from someone online, which you follow, and now you've been found liable for some misconduct and have to pay a fine. Whereas, if you had paid for an actual solicitor and followed their advice, the initial cost would've been higher, but you wouldn't have had to pay the higher cost of the fine.

Similarly, it might have preempted things like the $99 Apple Developer Program: if your software-engineering licence is at jeopardy, you may be less likely to upload malware, or target micro-transactions to children, or make cars lie about their emissions, etc. How many lives have those ruined?

It might help with the AI-slop crisis too: Speedy Web Compiler might not have needed to adopt a policy of rejecting every external PR out of hand if they could have chosen a "licensed software-engineers only" policy instead.

Some other things to consider too like what effect this would have on anonymous/pseudonymous contributions, and whether the regulatory body/ethics board would accommodate that in some way. There's been some discussion about how governments flirting with age verification laws could do so without forcing everyone to dox themselves to every website they use, or allowing the government to track everything they do. Perhaps a similar system could be adopted for contributions. Etc.

Overall, I do agree that the upfront cost would likely be somewhat higher, but I think the overall cost to run a modern OS would be somewhat lower, resulting in a similar-enough cost overall. Though this is just my opinion based on vibes. I'd love to see any data about this.

Defletter··on Cloudflare acquires Deno
Curious to see whether, in five or so years, we'll see another talk by Ryan Dahl announcing a new JS runtime: doen!
Defletter··on Open Source as We Know It Is Dead
This is something that has been a problem for quite some time within the modded-Minecraft community that I'm a part of: it's highly generational, as in, upstreaming is exceptionally rare. Each server is a fork, or a fork of a fork, etc, resulting in lineages of servers like a family tree. It's very typical for multiple servers to encounter the same (or similar) problem(s) and create their own solutions, like convergent evolution.

There was an attempt to start upstreaming changes to a more centralised, ancestor repo, but this failed almost immediately. Why? Well, whoever owns that upstream will naturally want a say in, and thus will exert control over, what gets merged in. The best case scenario is that you create a whole bunch of work for yourself to conform your code whatever arbitrary requirements upstream demands, or; the worst case scenario is that you effectively cede control over what gets run on your server. But this begs the question: why doesn't upstream just pull from downstream? It's all open source, after all, and yet it almost never happens.

It's been a couple years since then and things have only gotten worse: servers are no longer accepting many (if any) community contributions anymore, instead relying on in-house developers. In a sense, these mods are no longer open source, but rather source available: the vast majority of updates come whenever the sole dev-admin has one of their code-binge days.

Anyway, I think something similar is happening here, with open source more generally, particularly with the advent of AI: any outside contribution is just creating work for you; it's probably going to have its idiosyncrasies from its author; features that you wont want to support or spend time tearing out or waiting for them to tear it out; etc. So if you want a feature, you might as well do it yourself, or get an LLM to do it since it'll probably generate something good enough, without complaint, and without much delay.

Defletter··on I switched to Brave
The "just asking questions" defence is most exemplified by this South Park clip: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eKsfJHZ9vXE. But the concept is not confined to questions: it describes how attackers hedge their disparaging statements. "You might be amoral, some of us give a fsck" is so obviously an example of this that it feels asinine discussing it at all: it feels like trying to convince someone that "and" is a conjunction. I even fed the exchange into ChatGPT and asked what it thought "the 'just asking questions' defence" meant and it understood it without issue. I can even paste the output if you want. And let me be clear, I understand the distinction between amoral and immoral: it's still a personal attack. And I'm assuming the HN mods agree because their comment is still flagged.
Defletter··on I switched to Brave
> I do always find it jarring and confusing when I come across gendered language in that context.

While I genuinely do not object to gender neutral language, I often find the opposite to be true: it's extremely obvious when gendered pronouns have been lazily replaced. For example, "If the Minister consults the Commission before they issue a direction, they must notify the Board before they take any further action." Who is "they" in this scenario? And is each "they" referring to the same entity? What this made-up example demonstrates is that, very often, switching to gender neutral language often requires you to rewrite and restructure the text, rather than merely find-and-replacing he/him/his with they/them/theirs. Though wrt to the specific Ladybird PR in question, it really was that simple.

Steel-manning the argument, I can understand a general aversion to updating language just for the sake of updating language: nothing is being added, clarified, or elaborated on. It's not like the section was rewritten to include a new feature and the rewrite used gender-neutral language. If anything, one could easily accuse the PR of being an attempt to pad a resume.

That being said, I do want to reiterate that Kling was being an absolute chud for rejecting the PR the way he did.

====

> I don't think that saying someone "might be amoral" is an ad hominem

Ah, the "just asking questions" defence. Wonderful.

====

> You may be thinking of the word immoral instead, which would certainly be an ad hominem attack.

Fun fact, saying someone is without morals is also an ad hominem attack.

====

> You went beyond "questioning their boycott" when you stated assumptions

No? Me stating an assumption based on demonstrated behaviour is part of questioning their boycott.

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> When OP and others explained how they evaluate projects

Okay, this is the second time you've referenced conversations that have not taken place within this thread, so let me remind you of the flow of the conversation with 1attice thus far:

> I'm excited for ladybird to reach alpha

> [flagged comment that said something approximating "I don't use browsers that don't respect human rights"]

> Fair enough. Which browser are you currently using?

> Iceweasel

> And you are certain that its maintainers comply with your requirements?

> Yes. [later edited to repeat the "yes" and state that I might be amoral]

> From what I can tell, Iceweasel is more or less a reskinned Firefox: there's some code changes to make it compatible with Debian's licensing guidelines, but it would be reasonable (in my opinion) to describe Iceweasel as 'Firefox for Debian'. And so are you also certain that the maintainers of Firefox comply with your requirements?

At no point during this exchange did they explain that they "researched the Iceweasel project before choosing it" or "explained how they evaluate projects" (both quoting you). In fact, prior to their comment editing, both of their answers to my questions were single-word responses. So once again I must insist that you actually show me these comments where they supposably said these things, because I cannot find these comments from 1attice anywhere in the comments or on their profile, so I'm starting to doubt their existence.

Defletter··on I switched to Brave
> Perhaps OP is more concerned with how humans interact with each other than Chromium/Firefox's hegemony.

Fair enough.

====

> Perhaps combating the hegemony is only worthwhile to OP if the incumbent treats its users with equal respect.

The issue arose from a pronoun PR, which I regard as disrespectful towards contributors. One can speculate whether that'll trickle down to the users, but I'd imagine most users being unaware of this drama going on behind the scenes. Then again it's a small project largely followed by people who care about the Chromium/Firefox thing so maybe not?

====

> OP described that they researched the Iceweasel project before choosing it.

Did they? Where?

====

> He's not interacting with the Mozilla community - he's interacting with Debian's Iceweasel community.

> whether it's dependencies support OP's views

Okay, let's say that I do the same thing: I fork Ladybird and give it a new name (Ladybug) and a new icon. Maybe I swap out the IO library for whatever reason. Does that free Ladybug from upstream's drama? Can 1attice now safely use Ladybug knowing that it respects human rights because Ladybird is a mere dependency?

====

> I'm not sure it was an attack on your character.

> then devolves into an attack

You're unsure whether their ad hominem was an attack on my character, but you are certain that me questioning their boycott was an attack? Huh?

Defletter··on I switched to Brave
Very true, though the suspicious mind seeking to evade Google's dominance will be naturally wary of then picking a browser that's kept afloat in-part by Google. I do correct my previous assertion though of a "Chromium/Firefox hegemony" since Firefox only seems to hold ~5% market share: https://gs.statcounter.com/browser-market-share/desktop/worl....
Defletter··on I switched to Brave
> Your takedown of Iceweasel completely misses the point.

This is not a takedown of Iceweasel: it was merely the example that they provided. It could've been anything.

> Some people don't allow imperfection to stop them from achieving their goals to the best of their ability.

One could use this exact argument to explain one's continued use of, shills for, or even contributions to Ladybird, because what does the maintainer being a bit chuddy have to do with combating Chromium/Firefox's hegemony?

And let me be clear, the goal with these comments is not to convince 1attice to use Ladybird against their objections: the goal was to invite them to reflect on their boycott and question whether it was a proportionate response. But instead I got the usual moralistic response where I'm accused of being amoral for not [presumably] not engaging in the same boycott. Alas.

Defletter··on I switched to Brave
From what I can tell, Iceweasel is more or less a reskinned Firefox: there's some code changes to make it compatible with Debian's licensing guidelines, but it would be reasonable (in my opinion) to describe Iceweasel as 'Firefox for Debian'. And so are you also certain that the maintainers of Firefox comply with your requirements?

EDIT: Seems like they edited their comment instead of replying (kinda weird?), answering "yes" to my question. Perhaps I am a pessimist but I am doubtful that every single maintainer involved in Iceweasel complies with their requirements. And presumably this applies to more than just the browser: what OS are they using? What apps do they use? What phone do they have? What bank do they use? What car do they own? Etc. When you take such a hard stance against something over a refused pronoun PR (which btw was definitely chuddy of him), you nonetheless invite scrutiny against yourself, particularly when you say things like "You might be amoral, some of us give a fsck."

What I'm assuming is that 1attice is boycotting public statements, not actual impact. It's why JK Rowling is so hated but not Orson Scott Card: the latter is likely giving just as money money to objectionable causes but he's not being loud about it [anymore], whereas JK Rowling is being loud... very loud. And so buying Harry Potter merch becomes a litmus test for morality, but not buying Ender's Game merch. Alas.

Defletter··on I switched to Brave
Seems like Kling is a wee bit of a chud. The claim about human rights likely stems from the "trans rights are human rights" mantra and is likely is reference to this (https://github.com/SerenityOS/serenity/pull/6814) where Kling accused a contributor of bringing "personal politics" to the project for changing one instance of "he" to "they" in a markdown file. Since then he has, for example, apparently gone on to complain about anti-white discrimination in the workplace (https://x.com/awesomekling/status/1874518295350837401).

For what it's worth, the perpetually-offended progressive has become an annoying stock character in our culture. At risk of falling for Poe's Law, the commentor on that PR who said "The denial of non-male users and/or developers is sufficient reason to not use SerenityOS" is a perfect example of this. Another more contemporary example would be the seething outrage over Last Ditch Bar's new mask-optional Saturdays.

Defletter··on I switched to Brave
And you are certain that its maintainers comply with your requirements?
Defletter··on I switched to Brave
Fair enough. Which browser are you currently using?
Defletter··on The Normalization of Inexplicable Failures
To be fair, I'm inclined to believe that most of this pressure to lean (if not rely) on LLMs is not coming from programmers, but rather from middle and upper management: banks are resisting this not because their programmers are holding some kind of line, but because management is not giving-in to the LLM siren call. So that tour of duty, while a good idea, would be more about teaching management skills than anything else.

The normalisation of inexplicable failures is, in my opinion, the consequence of programmers being unable to refuse their managers who have fallen for the LLM siren call, lest they lose their jobs.

Defletter··on Performance of WebAssembly Runtimes in 2026
That's probable, though if we want to give them the benefit of the doubt, it could be a non-optimised benchmark, ie, something that may be written during the average devoper might ordinarily write, rather than hyper-optimised code specifically for that benchmark.
Defletter··on Paint.net 5.2 alpha now runs on Linux
Nah, Twitter is still absolutely rotten with toxicity. The Great Xodus happened due to the rapid chuddification of Twitter under its new management: it was over politics, not toxicity. As such they brought the toxicity with them like a plague.

Bluesky has this nice feature where you can mute lists, so someone made a MAGA list (https://bsky.app/profile/skywatch.blue/lists/3l53cjwlt4o2s), and yet I was still seeing MAGA stuff on my feed because all the Twitter refugees were screenshotting Twitter nonsense and laundering it into my feed. Utterly ridiculous.

Defletter··on Paint.net 5.2 alpha now runs on Linux
Stealing that
Defletter··on Paint.net 5.2 alpha now runs on Linux
I originally had "self exiles" but thought the Xile pun was funnier :P
Defletter··on Paint.net 5.2 alpha now runs on Linux
Bluesky is pretty decent and has features that I like over X, but much of its user base are from the Great Xodus (pardon the pun): people who frame their switch to Bluesky as some kind of boycott of X, ie, a bunch of moralists. They didn't leave X because it's a hellscape of trashing and toxicity, no, they left because the politics changed. And so Bluesky is now saturated with people who are very opinionated, very loud about it, and very willing to engage in trashing.
Defletter··on The Amazon tax
> I simply said that I disagree with your stated motivations for your vote.

That's a semantic distinction without a difference.

> The way that you discuss your plan makes it sound as if you consider it morally incumbent upon others to follow suit. I do object to that.

That's more or less true: I do believe that people should BDS corporations that knowingly and willingly harm humanity (eg: aid and abet genocide); that it's not within our interests to let such things slide. And while I am biased, this doesn't feel like a particularly controversial take: it feels like I'm just spelling out basic civics. But.. this is also just like my opinion, man. You do you.

Defletter··on The Amazon tax
It doesn't surprise me that corporations [whose primary, if not sole concern is the profit motive] don't care about the morality of their customers. What I don't understand is why you're objecting to me voting with my wallet, something that's been a popular retort against progressive and humanitarian movements for at least the past two decades.
Defletter··on The Amazon tax
Continuing the red/blue pill metaphor from earlier, what you're describing is not dissimilar to Cypher's betrayal to be plugged back in.
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