drewdevault

>Even in Africa, the correlation is apparent. The countries bordering the Mediterranean all have low diversity and high development, compared to almost all other African countries.

Okay, let's examine this assumption, comparing your first map (diversity) with the map you reference in this comment (HDI). First, Africa:

Consider southern Africa. South Africa is the most ethnically diverse country in this region; it also has the highest HDI. The two more homogeneous countries north of it, Botswana and Zimbabwe, are not outliers in their neighborhood when it comes to the HDI score. Let's look to Western Africa: along the Ivory Coast we see a number of relatively high-diversity countries, but their diversity scores relative to each other are not well-correlated with their HDI scores. In the Arab World, Northern Africa through to the Middle East, we also see poor correlation between diversity and HDI: Algeria, Libya, and Egypt are relatively wealthy and homogeneous, but Saudi Arabia is wealthier than any of them and has higher diversity; Yemen is both one of the poorest countries and most homogeneous in the region.

In Middle Asia, compare China to Kazakhstan: both are high HDI (Kazakhstan scores higher), but China is more homogeneous and Kazakhstan is more diverse. In the Mediterranean, the correlation is somewhat stronger but still has numerous counterpoints; Bosnia and Herzegovina is the most diverse country in the region but it's HDI scores comparably to its neighbors to the south and east. And, again, moving slightly north, Switzerland is the highest scoring country on the HDI in Europe and is also among the most diverse.

Your methodology is very weak and your conclusions make no sense.

>Electronics and factory farm tomatoes are cheap, and near nobody lacks food or a phone.

The price of tomatoes has inflated at a rate of about 3.55% per year, up a total of 1,049% since 1953. In that same period, minimum wage rose from $0.75 to $7.25. In 1953, an hour's work would have bought you one tomato with a bit left over, today an hour's work leaves you short. Tomatoes have not become cheaper.

Source: https://www.in2013dollars.com/Tomatoes/price-inflation

I question your methodology, but let's take it at face value.

>In fact, if you look at the accompanying map[2], you will immediately notice a strong inverse correlation between diversity and living standard. Assuming the underlying analysis of diversity level is accurate, this map itself is a condemnation of the entire ideology surrounding diversity.

As a matter of fact, this correlation is much weaker than you portray it to be, and the number of outliers in this hypothesis call it deeply into question. Let's assume GDP (factoring in purchasing power parity) per capita as a proxy for standard of living. Consult this map and compare it to yours:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Map_of_countries_by_GDP_(...

You see many counter-examples to your thesis. Africa tends to have poor correlation between ethnic diversity and standard of living. Look also at East Asia: the more diverse Indonesia and Papua New Guinea are doing better economically than their homogeneous northern neighbor in the Philippines, in this region too is diversity poorly correlated with economic status. Also true of Europe -- just look around the map and you'll find counterexamples everywhere. Look at Switzerland -- it's at once one of the wealthiest and most diverse European countries according to your map.

Your example of Japan as an ethnostate is also an interesting case study. I agree that it resembles an ethnostate. However, it's also going through a demographic crisis which is in large part attributable to its status as an ethnostate: an increasingly wealthy and aging ethnically Japanese population is an impending disaster in the face of Japan's historical (and contemporary) strict policies on immigration and integration.

Speaking of demographic crisis, compare your map to this one:

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/b/b7/2017_wor...

I see some correlations there.

It's not, a cursory review of the literature would tell you otherwise.

If you want narratives: the introduction of agriculture to human society is a cooperative effort which generalizes labor such that some can provide for the food supply and others can pursue other forms of labor, e.g. intellectual labor. The strictly competitive approach would not favor the establishment of agriculture. Human progress is measured in cooperation; in fact our cooperative nature it is one of the distinguishing traits of humanity and is largely responsible for the establishment of complex society, which was the greatest evolutionary achievement of humanity over the rest of the animal world.

Would the device you wrote your comment on have been possible without a nigh-incomprehensible level of human cooperation?

If you wish to build a society without cooperation, you are welcome to start your potato farm on a free plot of land out west. The potatoes you grow, by the way, were a product engineered by millennia of cooperative bioengineering on the part of indigenous farmers, but feel free to disregard that in your daydreaming.

My reply remains the same with your clarification added, I have edited my comment accordingly. This is absurd.

> There is no expectation of [reciprocity] in a diverse society.

[citation needed]

> Evolution doesn't know morality, unwarrantedly nice guys finish last.

Incorrect. Citation:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cooperation_(evolution)

Artificially scarce commodities, as any basic inquiry into social economics would illustrate. Naturally no one wants to have kids when they can't afford a home and need two jobs just to feed themselves and pay off their student debt.

This is not unique to the United States. In my home country (the Netherlands), we have an issue with refugees being placed into dedicated camps, encouraging an approach of non-integration. Integrated refugees have better metrics of success, however, and the segregated approach exacerbates numerous problems with the Dutch approach to refugees.

This is an extremely reductionist take, to infer that all human progress is motivated by a better life for your children. Certainly some people are motivated by that, but human motivations are way, way more complex than this ridiculously simplified (and aggressively conservative) worldview suggests.

The assumption that society would "quickly crumble to dust" if children's opportunities were entirely independent of their parents' efforts and successes is quite possibly the most absurd take I have heard on this website in the 10 years I have been here.

> Strawman. Integration isn't the same thing as diversity, and doesn't automatically follow from it either. Different kinds of people living in the same locality doesn't mean they form an "integrated society". Almost every large city is a testament to that. The idea that city people are more empathetic and understanding than villagers because they live in a more diverse environment flies in the face of everyday experience.

You are calling for empiricism but mixing your arguments with anecdotes and "everyday experience". The empirical argument looks at questions like integrated communities as a form of diversity, and finds that it has socially beneficial consequences -- exactly what kind of diversity are you referring to which is distinguishable from integration? Do elaborate so that we can examine that in an empirical lens.

> Appeal to consequences, and thus irrelevant to whether my arguments are correct or not. Not that I accept the ridiculous assertion that my arguments are in any way comparable to the ones you are linking them to.

Let me draw the connection for you: do you agree or disagree that your initial line of reasoning would support the conclusion that ethnostates are morally neutral? When this reasoning is placed in a historical context, are you blind to the means by which ethnostates have historically arisen?

> The most revered/successful societies on earth are the complete opposite of diverse.

[citation needed]

Which societies? Revered by whom? Successful by what metric?

> That does not negate the opportunity we both have to live in a country, and time, when we can both pursue the life we (realistically) want.

This is a very narrow and simplistic view of opportunity, both in the present and historical contexts.

I assume that you (a man) and your friend, a sporty woman, live in a country and time (the US?) where she enjoys some of the wins of early feminist movements in the US, namely the right to vote, to have a bank account without her husband's permission, etc etc. Life is in perfect harmony and institutional bias has been solved, hooray!

It's possibly true that women in the US have it better now than they have at any other time in history. However, the opportunities of women are still not equal to that of men. Perhaps your friend has opportunities to pursue passions in women's sports, but what if she wanted to enter the corporate world and work her way up to management, C-level, etc? She will find it more difficult to pursue this opportunity than you would. Even in women's sports she will have a different (and subjectively worse) experience than a man would have in his sporting career: to this day women in sports earn less than men and are often treated not as athletes but as sexual objects that compete for the attention of male viewers -- for example, in 2021 the European Handball Federation imposed a fine on the Norwegian women's team because they wore shorts instead of bikinis during their match, like the men's uniform.

> Of course all children everywhere do not have the right to choose their own path. Indeed that's a -very- recent development, and is still not universal. External factors still collide all too often.

Children not having the right to choose their own path is not a recent development, it is a fact which has long been historically true and in the context of this history draws a throughline to reduced opportunities to this day. To give one oft-cited example, consider generational wealth disparities between white and black Americans. White families have had generations to accumulate relative wealth, comfort, and security, dating back to the founding of the United States, wealth in many cases built from slave labor, in other cases from discriminatory laws such as the Homestead Act and redlining. This wealth gives them access to opportunities, such as economic access to higher education, but also access to better (more expensive) neighborhoods with better schools and so on. Black families in the US have been historically unable to build generational wealth due specifically to this history of racism, and today a black child has significantly reduced opportunities for these reasons among others (institutional racism in other forms is still a big deal in the US). A black family has never been able to choose the same paths as a white family in the United States, now and throughout the history of the country.

> I am encouraged by the progress of the last 100 years. I hope that progress continues for the next 100.

We don't really live in a progressive moment, in the US but also generally. Women's rights, LGBTQ rights, and others, are regressing right now.

It has been shown many times that integration reduces bias, see studies on the contact hypothesis. Racism, homophobia, Islamophobia, and other examples of bias have been shown by many studies to be dramatically reduced in an integrated context. So long as many of these groups are subject to bias, discrimination, and worse, it is important to engender empathy and understanding among the majority class (white, heterosexual, etc), and move towards equity and justice as a society -- and integrated communities are one of the best ways to achieve this.

You can say, "I'm not 'shapeist', but I do live in a community with a strong majority 'square' population", which I'll readily believe -- but there's no substitute for actually talking and living and working with the "triangles" to achieve a deep level of understanding and empathy for their worldview, experiences, and needs.

Moreover, your arguments taken to the logical conclusion have been the basis of some of history's worst atrocities, and I would advise you to do more research before seeding this particular thought pool.

True that!

Yes, I have used a Prusa, but I have mostly used Cura with it. The bulk of my experience with Prusas started with finding one at the local hackerspace, firing up Cura and finding a profile for it, getting it to work and never questioning this procedure again. I used Prusaslicer once or twice, but nevertheless, I cut my teeth on Cura so I used the tool I knew. Not that the comment you're replying to alleges that most Prusa users are using Cura, for the record.

Yes, installing and using Cura is a nightmare for non-technical users, and indeed serious users will have to install a slicer eventually. But that's the point: this product design locks it into the enthusiast market, and most consumers don't want to deal with that overhead.

Clicking "print this" on a model catalogue, having it fire up a cloud slicer thing, and pressing "go" is a better user experience for a novice, plain and simple, and I'm sick of arguing with your enlightened enthusiast takes here.

Mainly I think that this temptation is circumvented with strong leadership and weak investors. That big VC money is a poison, but if you don't take it then you can focus on the product without so much of the risk.

Businesses are more complex than just one facet. Not everything the business offers has to be a direct revenue driver; it builds trust with the brand and improves the experience by putting everything you need with respect to your printer in the same spot.

Which of the following experiences delivers better value to the customer:

1. They buy a printer and can immediately slice and print stuff on the vendor's web app

2. They buy a printer and have to deal with the nightmare of installing and configuring Cura

The former is more meaningful still when you consider how it can integrate with other parts of the value-add, such as Creality's model database, which can take you from the model's detail page to the slicer in just a click or two -- no download, no import into Cura, no setting up Octoprint or whatever. For enthusiasts the value-add is not entirely necessary but for consumers it's massive.

And none of this precludes continuing to support local slicers or free software! In fact, if you value FOSS in your product line (as Prusa… well, used to) they will be using and contributing to the same slicer you run on your workstation as they run on their servers.

Author here. For the price tag of a Prusa Mk4 you can get a Bambu X1 Carbon 3D which is, metric for metric, a better printer -- larger volume, 16 color prints, faster printing, better resolution, pretty much all stats. Go for Creality and you can get the K1 Max at $300 less than the Mk4 (currently on sale, so more like $400 less) which is even better, again, in every spec and comes with an ecosystem that Creality has invested in to a much greater extent than Prusa.

Author here. I have used Prusas, as well as many other 3D printers. I know how they are distinguished from the rest. The thing is, there really isn't much of a difference between an Ender 3 and a Mk4 that a typical consumer (that is, not an enthusiast) would understand as justifying the bigger price tag. The Mk4 is a better printer, by a long shot, but not by the same factor as the price tag. The Mk4 price completely eliminates Prusa from the entry- to mid-level market which is a big lost opportunity when new enthusiasts are learning on other brands -- and by the time they want to upgrade to a Mk4 price-point, they have much, much better options than Prusa and brand loyalty to someone else. Prusa is not the right choice at any price point anymore and has little to no market relevance left, except maybe among a certain niche of enthusiasts.

It need not be predatory, nor need it be mandatory for users to take advantage of these features, nor need it be proprietary or non-free.

Sorry, I'm aware of that nuance but I worded myself poorly.

Certainly you can't get a similar product made at the rock-bottom price points that China will ship it for. But, you can get a lot cheaper than Prusa, and there are vulnerabilities in the Chinese market you can exploit.

And, to be honest, Chinese manufacturing is not the open slave market it used to be. They've cleaned up their act quite a lot, and the quality of life in Shenzhen isn't that bad. China isn't winning just because they have cheap labor, but also because they have made numerous innovations and smart investments in manufacturing. The poverty rate is only 6% higher in Shenzhen than in San Francisco.

>Our funding did not motivate the license change. I can say this with clean conscience. I understand that I have biases here but I also do not want Open Source to turn into something that is exclusively for plumbing.

Here's the thing: you are no longer working in open source. If that's right for your product and your company, then so be it, I wish you success. FSL is an interesting development in this space. But, you opted out. You did give up on open source. Okay, fair enough, but to square your conscience I think you need to acknowledge that.

If you want to chat a bit more about the problems of open source and commercialization, share your insights from Sentry, and hear some thoughts from someone who might have done differently, feel free to send me an email, sir@cmpwn.com. Would be interested in talking about it with you further.

I haven't 180'd anything. The throughline is the same: they have more than enough money and they had many opportunities to use it effectively, but the tied their ankles together with their infinite-growth business model.

Elastic's losses are a classic story of VC-funded promises of infinite, unsustainable growth. Success for Elastic is defined by the classic impossible measure of becoming a monopoloy so you can raise prices every year and cite growth indefinitely. They had everything they needed to reach a sustainable business model, and the problem was not in their licenses but rather that they set impossible goals for themselves.

Yes, it's a gamble. But having exactly one 3D printer model at a high price point and doing nothing else is also a gamble, and a much stupider one.

Western manufacturing is at odds with China for the reasons you stated, but free software eliminates this competitive advantage entirely and you need to plan for your output to be reused by your competitors as a fundamental part of your business model.

Yes, quite likely. This is not really a matter of FOSS or not, but it is something that Prusa absolutely needed to have foreseen and made a viable business plan to address. Chinese manufacturing was always a huge vulnerability in their business model and they definitely should have planned for that.

That could have taken many forms. They might have invested in a much stronger brand, aiming to make Prusa (needs a better name tbh) synonymous with 3D printing, and developing a product line which covers a wider range of needs, from entry-level highly-usable stuff up to hackable mid-tier things and possibly high-end workshop printers as well, all of which should have had a shared brand identity. China can't really compete on reputation, so that's where to focus. Moreover, they could have invested more in services surrounding the product, such as the aforementioned cloud printing services, perhaps a thingiverse-equivalent with a models marketplace and a small margin off of that, etc. Auto-detect when your filament is running low and have a subscription service to ship you a new one -- maybe the cloud printer notices when you don't have enough in stock for a model you want and suggests you order more.

Just making a new model every 2 or 3 years and hoping China wouldn't notice was a very stupid strategy, and the free or non-free nature of their firmware has nothing to do with that.

This is such a common failure mode in open source companies -- they think that the code is 90% of the battle for the market. It's not, it's more like 5% at best and because it's open source the rest of the market can make use of it. This can be very powerful if you're smart about it, but "write the code and the rest will work out" is not that.

Elastic's revenue was north of half a billion dollars when they changed their license. Amazon was most decidedly not killing them. It was motivated by greed, like it always is.

Sorry, Armin, but this is such nonsense.

Do you really think that Prusa going with non-free firmware is going to dissuade Bambu from undercutting them? The point isn't the firmware is free or non-free, hell, 3D printer firmware is rather easy to make. Prusa's was already GPL'd and there's no evidence that Bambu used it in their product, so making it non-free is pointless. The material issue is that Bambu is undercutting them on hardware costs. Now that Prusa is non-free, they have lost both the price, the hackability, and the moral advantage. It's an utterly braindead move. If Prusa were smart they would be looking for ways to reduce production costs to get down to similar price points, investing in usability improvements, and doubling down on the free software approach. Let's face it, Prusa got complacent and someone at their lunch.

You can monetize free software without breaking the social contract. I'm quite fine with your licensing approach with FSL, but it's not free software nor open source, and it does not align with the social contract, and that's all well and good so long as you can acknowledge that -- and live with the consequences, such as heavily disincentivizing third-party contributions. But you can make money with genuinely free software, social contract and everything, if you're smarter about it than barking up the VC tree and promising infinite growth and monopolization using a tool (open source) which is not suited for that purpose by design -- that was Sentry's mistake. Honestly, I'm glad that FSL is working out for you, but by no means does it justify some call to action to water down FOSS nor is it indicative of some fundamental problem with FOSS.

>From his past comments, the author doesn't have much respect for women in general

Exhibit A:

https://drewdevault.com/2023/09/29/The-forbidden-topics.html

Given the hyperfocus on the mention of trans issues in these comments (which I called out in my blog post specifically because they are the group who is currently most affected by this issue in free software), I think your comment is trying to say that I (the author) think trans women are women and therefore I don't respect "real" women.