I grew up with Windows and I constantly had to fix shit just for my own casual use, the biggest barrier to moving to Linux is about learning a new OS from scratch, we already go through that learning curve with Windows normally so we forget how much time and effort it took us just to understand the system well.

That aside, I’d argue that for most productive work that doesn’t require proprietary software, you also don’t need to understand Linux that well to be productive. You just need to know how to log in, launch whatever you need, and then turn it off before going home. The biggest reason why we can’t just make people switch overnight is that they’re probably used to proprietary software that just won’t work well on Linux, like Adobe or Microsoft Office. If you train your personal to first switch to FOSS alternative, when you do make the switch to Linux the learning curve for what they need to do is small and they won’t be as intimidated. But now, if you’re talking about how their years of learning Word or Excel or Photoshop doesn’t translate 1:1 because of different UI and behavior, they’ll be very uncomfortable and less productive when they switch.

Things inevitably go wrong no matter what system or software in general you use, we’re just used at tolerating it when it’s something we know and use already, but there’s no reason why we should think Linux or FOSS software has to be strictly much more stable than its counterparts, as long as they’re good enough for the person or the use case, it’s already good enough to switch, with the caveat that you should never switch everything at once, but rather first switch your productive software, retrain to feel confident in it, and then switch to Linux. That way you’ll not even remember you’re running Linux after a few weeks, other than when you see the login screen or something.

That’s amazing, especially considering China has even more people than the entirety of Europe combined, may we soon follow over here

Personally I think everyone should be benefitting, and I don’t think that’s gonna happen if the big corpos lobby successfully to ban foss alternatives or if hardware stays perpetually expensive, but for coders as a whole it wouldn’t be the worst if we can simply run a foss model locally for a use case that makes sense, especially stuff like debugging. I do agree with most of your points, for what is worth. I just don’t agree with copyright law or IP law a whole lot even if it sometimes benefits regular workers, these laws were reshaped long ago to protect big owners of capital and we need to move away from them at some point.

Yeah it’s just very poorly written, I was trying to be too charitable in my previous comment but I think the article deserves a lot more criticism, like about the random change of tone (ex: professional to swearing for no reason to professional again), missing explanations, and taking several paragraphs to explain that sometimes people do shit they don’t like for money, like, we’re human, we know that lmao

I also gave up reading it, but from a few paragraphs below, when they said knowledge work they mean stuff like marketing, finances and other relatively high paying jobs that most people aren’t passionate about but choose to do for money. I think it’s a weakness of the article that it isn’t upfront about what it means, so you’re not wrong for looking it up, but yeah, they meant that.

The article itself seems to be on alienation and stress, but as I said I didn’t finish it, as it’s quite long and not engaging enough, at least to me.

Programmers?

Make no mistakes

Always probing how much we can take, too

The narrative of Galileo vs the Church is misrepresented to push a specific narrative, the whole thing is obviously very nuanced, but to keep it short he was in disagreement with the Church, but he was a Catholic himself who happened to live in a period where the Church was on edge due to the tension with Protestantism. The fight wasn’t on science vs religion, but on who had the religious authority, individuals or the Church.

Galileo is portrayed as a proto-skeptic later on because it was useful to present the European enlightenment as a rupture with the old world, nevermind that Europeans pushed racism as a science while claiming to be purely rational, you can see this kind of misrepresentation of many early scientists as well such as Newton, who’s obsession with esoterism is rarely discussed, and even when promoting a grand narrative of the West as the cradle of reason people like to ignore that as far as we know Pythagoras was a weird religious dude with a cult, you don’t need to be rational in all spheres to be rational in some, and if we want to highlight the diversity of western thought as a good thing (which I believe it is) we can also find examples of early skeptics way before the enlightenment. Cicero literally wrote a skeptic as one of his characters to express his ideas, and while he’s clearly trying to promote stoicism instead, the fact that he includes a skeptic shows that there were already skeptics in society even back in Rome. And again, in my opinion this is a good thing, we generally need more skepticism, not less, but let’s not reinforce narratives that are just false and used to whitewash the horrendous crimes of colonialism to this day.

I had read cats and was expecting some weird shitposting lol

there is literally no way to use logic to infer existence of god.

Agreed

people believe in religion because they were brainwashed to it

It’s way more complicated than that. First, most people normally absorb religion from our immediate environment. The biggest predictor for if you’ll grow up to be your parents’ religion is whether your parents displayed religious behavior, especially some that came at some kind of cost to them and you could perceive as a sacrifice (for example, if your religion says you shouldn’t drink, but your father drinks, you probably won’t find anything else convincing, but if you know your dad would otherwise drink, and that all his friends drink, seeing him drink water or soda when surrounded by drinkers is powerful).

Second, it’s true that people who are already religious tend to tell themselves that they believe out of logic, and some of them eventually try to be intellectually honest and wrestle with these questions, but belief is only the biggest aspect of religion in some branches of Christianity.

In most religions out there, you can be agnostic and still practice religion, and the belief based model is extremely inaccurate at understanding and explaining those other religions, because unlike mainstream Protestant Christianity, which takes the belief in Jesus and the Bible as the one thing that separates a Christian from a non Christian, in other communities it can be more important whether you participate in holidays (like festivals with animal sacrifices in pre-Christian Europe; you can find evidence of Romans who didn’t believe in their Gods back in the day, but unless they refused to engage in festivities people generally didn’t care). There are also religions where belief is important but practice is equally important, like most of Islam.

I had religious trauma growing up and it’s shit, and although I’m aware of people who had it way, way worse than me, to this day I still struggle with purity culture over a decade after formally leaving the church.

All of this is to say, brainwashing rarely works to make people stick around, people who stay due to coercion, often do because their religion functions as a high control group (such as Mormons and other branches of Christianity that isolate you from everyone who doesn’t belong to your exact same religion), not because they were taught wrong information. There are exceptions, like people who are terrified of hellfire, but again, that’s more often than not due to lots of abuse rather than just being told hell is real (even being told that as a child is fucked up, especially if you have OCD or intrusive thoughts in general).

So yeah, it’s complicated.

Right? People who are familiar with proprietary software assume them being used to navigating that mess means the UI there is better

b4 Xi Jiping conquers me.

Because China has been so aggressive? Wtf lol

I had a senior in my last Ruby job who told me to keep metaprogramming to the minimum and after learning more about design and architecture I’m so glad he taught me that mindset lol. Metaprogramming is very tempting when you have a lot of repeated code that could be drastically reduced, but the whole team needs to be able to understand and work on it too, and not everyone is familiar with these features, nor should they.

Angry upvote

VLC: I know that and I love you

How do you suggest they get paid? There’s a massive issue with most foss devs and maintainers being unpaid and burnt out while their work is used by corpos and more often than not they don’t receive a dime

than what an AI or cheap programmers from places like India or China could do.

People abroad making less money has more to do with the cost of living, different regulations and so on, not necessarily skill. I’m a mid developer with years of professional experience and my salary is shit for US standards, but it allows me to live okayish here, so that’s why we put up with it. Immigrants also often face a precarious position (such as a visa status being tied to their work, or prosecution by the authorities, or not being part of a union in an otherwise unionized industry, etc), so them getting paid badly is, again, not always related to skill. I’ve met Arab doctors who are cab drivers in Europe.

That doesn’t address the climate or jobs question though, both require organizing

Unfortunately both parties share the same donors who benefit from this, and getting momentum on a third party under a bipartisan system takes a lot of time and effort