tjader

I don't know what to say. Someone went to a person who is well known to have the position that nonfree software is unethical and to be an idealist to ask how to make nonfree software and somehow is surprised that the answer is that they shouldn't make nonfree software.

I would expect the same if I asked any particularly idealistic vegan how to eat meat with less impact. The idealistic vegan will just tell me to not eat any meat.

Also, in no way is any of what I said contingent on Stallman being an asshole, but it also surprises me that someone thinks finding Stallman to be an asshole at all surprising. He is a man of strong convictions that won't budge, and it's easy to find many anecdotes where people paint him as assholish.

> To conflate and compare and equivalate unethical behaviours like theft with true evils like slavery or murder is beyond unhelpful.

I'm not saying those behaviors are all equally bad. I'm saying they are all bad, with an unspecified amount of evilness. I wouldn't help anyone do any of them. I won't help someone steal, even if I think murder is more wrong than it, because stealing is already wrong.

For Stallman, nonfree software is also wrong. You can argue with that, but you can't expect him to help someone write nonfree software and still hold that view.

> You did exactly that.

You may want to reread my original post carefully.

> I truly hope that you are wrong and Stallman does not believe proprietary software to be an evil on par with slavery.

I can't claim to know the internal ranking of evil things in Stallman's mind, but nonfree software is very clearly beyond the line of unjustifiable evil for him.

"While we can distinguish various nonfree distribution schemes in terms of how far they fall short of being free, we consider them all equally unethical.", from https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.en.html

I wasn't comparing proprietary software to slavery. I was making the point that for Stallman proprietary software is as unethical as slavery is to most people. Maybe I picked the wrong thing to make the analogy, it could have worked just as well with theft, murder, or any other unethical behavior.

I wasn't making any point about whether Stallman is right or wrong on that, I was just pointing out that people are attacking the wrong part of his argument. If you disagree with him you should attack his base belief that proprietary software is unethical.

> Unless you have a low opinion of Stallman, why would you expect him to be so dismissive of the day-to-day concerns of someone who wants to support a family?

When have you ever seen Stallman be pragmatic instead of idealist about anything regarding proprietary software?

The point is not to compare proprietary software to slavery. The point is that Stallman does not find proprietary software bad for the user, he finds it morally wrong.

That means in this case it doesn't make sense to complain and argue about his answer to the developer, as his answer makes perfect sense given his premises. If you want to disagree with his advice, you have to disagree with his moral position on proprietary software and argue about that.

Expecting Stallman to help someone make money with proprietary software is like expecting a vegan advocate to help someone kill cows more humanely.

Note that I'm not expressing an agreement or disagreement with Stallman's worldview, only that his answer is exactly what follows from his worldview, and you should argue about that and not about the answer.

No. I made an analogy to another behavior that I hope everyone will agree is unethical. The point is that if you accept Stallman's position that closed source software is unethical his response is not unexpected.

Stallman and the FSF see closed source software as unethical.

Imagine if someone asked you for help and said "I don't see how to free my slaves while making a living, paying my rent, paying for my children's education". Would you tell them "You shouldn't have slaves, it's unethical" or would you try to help them find a way to run their business with fewer slaves, but still some?

Two years ago the S&P 500 fell 12% in one day. You'd need about $1,250,000 invested in it to lose $150,000 in that day. That doesn't sound like an unlikely balance for a 401K after 20 years to me.

I don't believe RL or other modern online games could survive with even a tenth of the player base if they didn't have decent matchmaking, and you can't have decent matchmaking if you depend on players finding each other outside the game and one of them running a server and sharing the IP address. It's way too much friction to expect most players to do that.

Ah, I understand what you mean now. I can't say that feels relevant at all at my level of play.

The Fennec's hitbox is the same as the Octane: https://twitter.com/RL_Support/status/1144311306415157248

As far as I know all custom cars have the same hitbox as one of the freely available cars.

I'm not sure, why do you ask specifically about the Fennec?

I have bought some items, but only by trading free drops for keys/credits.

Anectdata: I have over 2000 hours of Rocket League, never once spent any money on it after purchasing it and never one have I felt that my fun was impacted by the available microtransactions.

Nothing that can be purchased in the game affects gameplay, it's all just cosmetics.

I use matrix-appservice-irc, mautrix-{googlechat,telegram,whatsapp} and mx-puppet-discord.

I don't use Discord all that much and I just bridge a few specific rooms I'm interested in, but I think you can bridge entire servers at once as well.

Do you manage to get pictures, audio messages, videos and reactions to work well in both directions with that setup?

Also, I use this for personal messages as well as group chats. The people I interact with don't even know I am not using the native client.

I've been using Matrix + bridges to fill that gap. I use IRC, Telegram, Google Chat, Discord and WhatsApp all via bridges, so I only have to interact with a single interface and all my chats are in the same place.

Before that I used first Trillian, then Pidgin. Then seeking persistence across clients I started using bitlbee to access everything through IRC, but that really sucked for media-heavy things like Telegram. My current setup of my own Matrix homeserver + bridges has been working great and feels way more liberating than using 6 different apps.

> Or, for a more concrete example: I do actually refuse to hire people who are both a) presently addicted to nicotine and b) consume tobacco combustion smoke to service that addiction. My personal thesis is that not quitting smoking in 2022 (and further not switching to a vaporizer now that such is widely available) is correlated with a specific lack of important personality and cognitive traits that make someone maximally effective in life (and at work). Am I being awful, and why?

Aren't you precisely making the point that you would be discriminating on something relevant to the job being done?

They don't handle the trades themselves. You use them to find a person and trade directly with them.

Aren't localbitcoins.com and similar markets that?

There are such markets in the open, as trading gold and crypto is mostly legal, so where's the demand for a dark market for those?

To me that just makes what DST really does transparent. It makes everyone shift their schedules, whether they want to or not.

About the meeting example, I don't think GP meant purple who like DST should change their clocks, they should just change their schedules. If you want more sunlight after work, arrive earlier and leave earlier. After all, that is effectively what DST forces everyone to do.

I think a more apt comparison would be requiring farmers to make their farming techniques public, not giving away the food they farmed.

That will run on even days. That means that when a month with 31 or 29 days ends it won't run for two days in a row, as the day will go 30, 31, 1, 2.

I am also interested in this. I don't understand how it makes sense to talk about "class" in such a discrete way.

Is a FAANG engineer who earns $250k/year really an oppressed proletarian? Is the small bakery owner who struggles to make ends meet really a bourgeois because he owns a mean of production?

I would say it's unhealthy to think of it as only luck.

It's luck that you like something that is sought after in the job market. But actually spending years learning about it, and sometimes learning things you may not like so much because they are needed for the job, takes effort.

Isn't individually targeted comprehensible input a large part of a 1-on-1 class? I would expect a good teacher to speak a lot during those 2 hours, and to properly adjust his speech so that's always pushing the boundaries of what the student can understand.

He probably meant to say that Vanguard is owned by the funds themselves, not by some external private entity. That makes their incentives be more aligned with making the funds cheap and efficient.

Can't that same argument be used to lower the minimum wage when inflation is low?

If it's not economically viable, then there's no need to regulate against it, as no one would build it.

However we see many governments blocking nuclear and even shutting down current plants. Why is that?

It depends on how it's done. If it's just printing the $30 out of thin air and giving it away then probably yeah, but if it's from a better wealth distribution it should have better effects.