No Billionares at FOSDEM
drewdevault.com
drewdevault.com
You dislike Jack because he sold Twitter and it made mastodon popular, and that's a bad thing? And because this also meant that people with cushy FAANG jobs who could easily find another job at the drop of a hat got displaced by Elon as a result? Is that really your argument Drew?
Maybe it's time for a "No Drews DeVault at FOSDEM" blog post.
Disappointing but you see it time and again :(
I am strongly opposed to this idea. We should not be burning books and should not be preventing talks from proceeding.
See Tim Urban's book What's Our Problem?: A Self-Help Book for Societies for why blocking speakers is a bad idea. Tim's argument essentially is that it's okay to decide you don't want to see a speaker, it's also okay to decide if you advice your friends to not see a speaker, but it's not okay to block a speaker from speaking to anyone.
That didn’t explain anything. You just said “it’s OK to do X but not OK to do Y” with no supporting argument.
FOSDEM is a not-for-profit org. They run on sponsorships and donations. Many sponsors are what we would consider to be part of Big Evil Tech. The last year I was at the FOSDEM beer event, Google sponsored many rounds of beer, in addition to helping pay for the conference. All the money that goes into FOSDEM is invested in subsequent editions.
FOSDEM org gets money from the sponsored talk, but no one is required to attend it. If you don't like Dorsey or his talk, you don't have to attend it. Or better yet, you can attend it and ask critical questions.
I'm sure you meant to help, but a factual inaccuracy crept into your comment. FOSDEM has never ever scheduled any talk or other content in exchange for money. There is an absolute consensus within the organising all-volunteer team to stay that course.
Our goal is to bring free and open source software developers together at a yearly conference. We manage income and expenses very carefully, eliminating any need to compromise our mission by selling talk space.
Tangential point but did he sell Twitter to Musk? I thought Twitter was a publicly owned company and its board (on which Jack wasn't present AFAIK) agreed to sell to Musk. Jack did rollover his holdings into the new private entity X Holdings Corp created for this purpose, instead of cashing-out. So instead of owning 2.4% or so of Twitter shares, he holds shares of X Holdings Corp, I think.
1. "the FOSS community shouldered the burden – both with our labor and our wallets – of a massive exodus onto our volunteer-operated servers" -- this implies that users actually using decentralized services is a burden, a bad thing. Or rather, that a) it would be much better if Twitter was better and people just continued using Twitter rather than FOSS platforms b) that Twitter has some kind of obligation to keep their platform good because not doing so will make people use FOSS services. If the operators don't want their service to be used, they don't have to offer it...
2. "No billionaires" as a motto, implying that having money in itself (and not a specific way of behaving) is wrong, unethical, and worthy of exclusion. That feels like an very common envy-based position, trying to tear people down because they are better off. He does have reasonable points for not wanting that specific billionaire, but the demand for exclusion is "no billionaires". Should e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brian_Acton not be allowed/given a platform at FOSDEM?
Having money in the abstract is not. But being a billionaire is.
As an analogy, this is similar to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chandrasekhar_limit.
To GP: It's less "no one should have any mass". It's more "Billionaires are like Black Holes, and therefore should be avoided" -- yes, it is a value judgement; no, it's not a blanket statement about money.
No, it's not because they are better off. It's because (a) to get control of that level of economic resources in this economy, you generally have to do something with many questionable aspects to it, despite its (potential) popularity and (b) you don't need to remain a billionaire or show signs of trying to increase your holdings. Mackenzie Bezos shows the way here - still deliriously rich but giving away money like a bank on fire and having plain her goal to ultimately donate essentially all of it.
The billionaires we don't want at FOSDEM are not just rich, they want to be richer and they are, from our perspective, demonstrably causing harm.
Yes, I happen to think that marginal tax rates above some threshold should probably be on the order of 95%, but I don't begrudge people making a lot of money by doing something good and/or for a lot of people.
I don’t understand what you’re suggesting here. FOSDEM is a free event, attendees don’t pay. I doubt speakers are paid much or at all, either, though I wouldn’t be surprised if the organisers covered their travel/hotel/meals.
Twitter was publicly traded at the time and Dorsey owned approximately 2-3%. The shareholders overwhelmingly voted in favor of the sale, effectively giving Dorsey no choice. He, in fact, didn't even sell, he instead rolled his shares over into the new company, which means he didn't take the payout implied and instead ate the decrease in value that has occurred since then.
I'm all for criticizing billionaires for the things they do wrong, but there are enough of those things that we don't need to invent fault where there is none! It's actually counterproductive to do so because it distracts from your legitimate points.
However their lifestyle and ideology is inherently dangerous to workers and life on earth as we know it. So yeah I don't really care what they have to say beyond knowing how the enemy views the average citizen (hint: it's not very positively).
All that to say, perhaps other people don't prioritize values like you do. The technical excellence that companies repeatedly achieved under Musk is incredible.
It's sad that people can see a good thing and think it cancels out all bad things.
It's sad that people can see a good thing and think it cancels out all bad things
I'd rather listen to Lars Blackmore (the engineer who is largely responsible for SpaceX powered descent). Or Gwynne Shotwell who actually oversees the business day-to-day. I'm really not interested in what the money guy has to say, especially since he is primarily interested in cultivating his public image-- how can you trust anything he says? The dude pays people to play a videogame for him 24/7 so he can pretend he is the best player in the world. That's not a metaphor -- he actually does that.
https://www.vulture.com/article/fake-gamer-was-elon-musk-che...
But you're not giving Musk enough credit. All engineers and other professionals told him that landing rockets is bullshit, and what is interesting here is that he went and made it happen anyways.
I'm not talking just about the engineering, everything is interesting here - the project management, the hiring, the investments, the business side... Musk has a lot of input and influence in all of these, he was the one who decided and paid for it.
Every company has some kind of mythology where someone says "you'll never make it in this town!". The reality is that uncrewed propulsive landing was technologically feasible since the soviets landed a rover on the moon. NASA propulsively landed a rover on Mars back in 2011.
Like I said, listening to billionaires is probably interesting if your goal is "acquire boatloads of money". But we already know how to do that. 1. Appear confident 2. Lie 3. Have no morals or ethics 4. Prioritize the pursuit of power above all else
Mars is completely off topic, as they didn't land the booster there. We had Space Shuttle before and it didn't say much about landing rocket boosters.
> All engineers and other professionals told him that landing rockets is bullshit
Where did you hear that?
Even if that's true, there's still every engineer and every other professional in the world you haven't spoken with. To take an example, I'm an engineer, I didn't say it. That disproves the claim.
That seems less impressive than saying 100%, doesn't it? But hey, this is hacker news, not a math exam, and 100% is pretty much < 0.00001%, lol.
Also the head of ULA said they'd need to do 10 rides of a booster before it makes financial sense to reuse. SpaceX claims it's one
What didn't happen? I didn't provide you a narrative, I gave 2 examples of uncrewed propulsive landing which literally happened.
> There is an incredible gap between the tech demo you're speaking about, and actually landing a heavy orbital rocket, and then doing it 100 times in a row without a hiccup.
I agree. Now please point to me which part of the self-landing booster Elon built.
He built the company that built the booster, which to me is at least as interesting as building the booster itself.
It's not just about money - Bezos has much more money available than SpaceX had in 2002-2015, and yet his rockets still don't land.
I do agree though that SpaceX has used their money much more efficiently and moved a lot faster in general than BO.
Didn't Apollo 11 land on the moon using a rocket, then take off from the moon again, back in the 1960s?
Not exactly a tech demo. And the Apollo missions had the additional challenges of being crewed, and targeting an atmosphere and gravity they couldn't reproduce on earth for test purposes.
The SpaceX stuff is neat though, compared to the defence industry clowns they're competing with.
To do what Apollo 11 did without discarding the boosters you also need orbital refueling and probably rapid turnaround (or a huge inventory of boosters), which SpaceX plans to develop next. Awesome stuff.
You know, this bit https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apollo_Lunar_Module that descended to the moon, landed, some guys walked out and grabbed some moon rocks, then they took off again and made it back to earth.
That's a rocket-propelled space vehicle gently landing tail first, and ready for immediately reuse.
Given that it clearly had been done, I doubt anyone who knew what they were talking about was telling Musk it couldn't be done.
You literally responded to a guy citing Lars Blackmore, who is the engineer that designed their landing algorithm--which was developed at NASA's JPL lab (before SpaceX existed).
Musk bet on landing rockets _because_ engineers told him that it was possible.
In fact it was one of the reasons red dragon was cancelled.
The group studying hypersonic retro propulsion of boosters at NASA was let go because that's what SpaceX did to land
https://arc.aiaa.org/doi/abs/10.2514/6.2005-6682
Lars and Beschet wrote their groundbreaking paper on lossless convexification of the powered descent problem at JPL before Lars went to SpaceX:
http://www.larsblackmore.com/CarsonAcikmeseBlackmoreACC11.pd...
And I don't see any rocket actually coming back with an orbital payload? Where's the demonstrator? Like that quiet supersonic thing Lockheed is demonstrating.
Even Lars didn't deliver at the first attempt. So it's not like it was something available off the shelf. Like some cryptography library you include in your code.
https://ntrs.nasa.gov/api/citations/19980237254/downloads/19...
Those were still winged boosters, but were not helicopter-caught and did RTLS.
Musk didn't invent the concept.
I know only one company landing orbital boosters.
Musk sucks, attack him for valid reasons like racism instead of some made up bullshit about cheating at video games.
People who like Musk aren't going to care that he is racist, they will argue about what actually constitutes as racism (erm pushes up glasses --actually have u read the bell curve???).
Having definitive proof of him paying others to play videogames for him is an example of how he just lies about everything. If he lies about videogames what else does he lie about?
Just playing on an account that I didn't level up myself is not lying. I know that some competitive amateur players think it's the end of the world but no, nobody cares.
He stated on Joe Rogan he was one of the best Diablo players in the world (top 20 or thereabouts). The only way to do that is to grind the game with long hours, because it gets exponentially more difficult to level up. I don't remember exactly how many hours of playtime he'd need to achieve the level he was at, but it was excessive. Something like 14+ hours a day.
Then he recently live streamed his Path of Exile 2 account. It was one of the highest leveled accounts in the world. Similar to Diablo, that's not possible without grinding the game for many hours. However, it was clear from the stream that Musk barely understood how to play the game. He was having trouble just finding things in the UI.
The point is: he paid someone (or multiple people) for a leveled up account. Then he publicly claimed to be one of the top players in the world.
It's both shocking and revealing that he's willing to put forth such a blatant lie, for something that matters so little (a video game).
Why do you talk about hours per day? Does it matter if you play less hours per day, but more days?
Because the only way to level up your character is to grind through a dungeon. You'll get experience for doing so. Every time you level up your character, it takes exponentially more experience to hit the next level.
I don't remember the exact number of hours per day that are required to hit the levels his characters are at, but it's in excess of 14+ hours/day.
Combine that with the evidence from his live streaming that he doesn't actually know how to play these games, and it's clear that he can't have achieved the character levels he has on his own.
This youtube video has a decent breakdown of the whole thing: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6N-WW0UDrVQ
To be clear, I don't think anyone really cares that he's paying for a leveled up account. What people care about is that he's taking credit for achieving the high level on his own, when that's obviously not true.
Q: Why would a person with $300 billion feel the need to lie about being good at a video game?
A: Likely because deception has become habitual/reflexive for them.
This one is considerably shorter, and I feel does a good and quick breakdown.
> Elon Musk stated that the SpaceX Falcon 9 development was "... continuing the great work of the DC-X project."
So...
So that gives me a sense that Musk is much closer to truth than most people out there. What am I missing?
You mean brilliant people were able to achieve this despite him? I don't see why this CEO should be the one taking credit for such achievements.
In fact, I believe we would probably be further into the “Space Age” if it weren't for the lost decade since he appeared on TV.
Like The Boring Company? Or Twitter? Or Hyperloop?
SpaceX has done it with two completely different systems.
Other companies have smart people and money too.
I'll tell a little story:
I worked at a company with like 1k employees. Good company as far as I knew, as much as such a company can be.
I work the night shift (tech support) and I'm young so I go to the company wide meeting in person because I'm curious and honestly don't have much to do. CEO talks, nothing of interest is said. I go back to my desk and get my things and I'm really tired and I'm in the elevator heading home.
CEO steps in. Smiles and introduces himself and says "What did you think?" I'm really tired, so I say something like "It was ok I guess, it's just not my kinda event. Stuff I really want to know I don't think can be said at an event like that..."
Other folks in the elevator (including my boss's boss who I didn't notice) look kinda horrified.
CEO looks at me and pauses for a minute: "Yeah I get it..."
And that was the truth of it ... there's nothing for those folks to say that they can say that I would want to know. I want the nitty gritty, not some pie in the sky stuff.
I understand it when it's someone important in the community, but I think the "invited keynote" is a monstrosity that makes no sense and was invented at the behest of sponsors.
If they did the Developers, Developers, Developers speech every time ... that would work for me. If only out of amazement.
Elon Musk did not found Tesla, and most definitely did not did it for environmental reasons.
"Tesla was incorporated in July 2003 by Martin Eberhard and Marc Tarpenning as Tesla Motors." [1]
"If, I don’t know, 50 to 100 years from now, we’re mostly sustainable. I think that’ll probably be okay. So it’s not like the house is on fire immediately. [...] "The risk is not as high as a lot of people say it is with respect to global warming." [2]
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tesla,_Inc.
[2] https://turboscribe.ai/transcript/share/4422534834081521519/...
>and most definitely did not did it for environmental reasons.
From that same link, he says one of the goals of Tesla is to make environmentalism cool:
> And so you get the solar power, mind that with batteries. So because obviously the sun doesn't shine at night and then you use that to charge the electric cars and you have a long-term sustainable solution.
> And, you know, that's what Tesla is trying to move things towards. And I think we've made a lot of progress in that regard. But when you look at our cars, like we don't believe that environmentalism, that caring about the environment should mean that you have to suffer.
> So we make sure that our cars are beautiful, that they drive well, that they're fast, they're, you know, sexy. I mean, they're cool.
Here he says the purpose for him working on electric cars is to transition people to sustainable transport: https://youtu.be/SNIaHc0Uggs?si=ELivf9xj2J3PS8Wi&t=304
But then more recently, he's said that farming doesn't contribute. https://x.com/elonmusk/status/1672793968587702272
He flies on his private jet all over the world, that alone contributing 100s of times more than the average household. https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2023/nov/20/elon-mus...
His social media platform is one of the largest spreaders of climate change misinformation.
He recently campaigned for and spent hundreds of millions to elect a guy who believes climate change is a hoax, which will likely delay any progress we could make by years. https://www.businessinsider.com/elon-musk-260-million-spendi...
His unelected, unofficial government department is targeting huge cuts to the EPA. https://www.eenews.net/articles/epa-in-elon-musks-crosshairs...
So maybe in the past he was concerned about climate change, but that appears to no longer be the case, or its further down on his list, below accumulating billions in wealth and amassing political power.
That feat of staying on top of self-inflating balloon is their only claim to fame. So they might have interesting things to say about how to backstab and exploit and avoid getting dethroned but that's all. Unfortunately that's what not they happily share.
Wait until you hear about China.
I see no reason to discriminate against wealth explicitly.
Rather if someone's actions make them worth leaving out, then yeah that's a reason:
>Dorsey is presumably being platformed in Janson because his blockchain bullshit company is a main sponsor of FOSDEM this year.
That's your problem, not the money. That problem is not solved by drawing the line at personal wealth.
They have enough influence in the world as it is, for the rest of us not voluntarily giving up some of our precious time to listen to what they have to say.
I don't buy it.
We're talking about a conference that apparently puts itself up for sale in a way ... that's the problem. The other stuff is a silly distraction. You're not solving anything with a personal wreath rule, conference is still for sale. Dude with slightly less wealth is going to just buy in...
Oh, no. But they have less power and less influence, and are more likely to fly commercial when they come talk to a conference, so have lower emissions. Also, I'm talking more in general: we should absolutely not listen to billionaires, even those few who, unlike Musk, haven't yet gone completely insane.
The conference is for sale ... whomever pays apparently makes that call.
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/how-wealth-reduce...
I'm part-way through the book “Character Limit: How Elon Musk Destroyed Twitter” by Kate Conger and Ryan Mac, and so far I can recommend it. It's not necessarily perfect writing (they do _not_ think highly of Jack, nor really any other tech-bros), but definitely informative.
[Disclaimer: I have been an employee at Square/Block for nine years now, so I technically work for Jack. Luckily, we have the kind of work culture where my openly bemoaning his blockchain obsession has not (yet) had any (obvious) negative consequences… although tbh I would be _extremely_ surprised if he even recognized my name or face.]
You know he ran the Stallman hit piece, right? You know it was also discovered he was into a certain type of Japanese "art" involving the exact same child-involved things he criticized Stallman for right? (There's a website detailing it, but gets flagged/removed from here)
You should not be a fan of Drew. He is a terrible human being. I had a friend house him during a conference and found the man insufferable. He's a hypocrite and lolcow and no one should take anything he say seriously.
I'm curious as to what flavor of insufferable he was to your friend.
As for being into sexually explicit drawings of minors… yuck.
It seems that Dorsey is into cryptocurrency.
https://www.wsj.com/articles/square-changes-name-to-block-da...
https://fortune.com/crypto/2023/02/21/bitcoiners-flocking-to...
https://finance.yahoo.com/news/jack-dorseys-bitcoin-vision-b...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j0eMHXx6zdg
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2022-04-13/twitter-f...
https://www.cnbctv18.com/technology/jack-dorsey-seeks-court-...
Some of the known ones kids don't share their parent's surnames.
I'd like to see them keep Claire Wilson out
> instead buy our respect by, say, donating 250 million dollars to NLNet
> or the Sovereign Tech Fund
and then, he would have our respect? Hmm. I was later reminded of this phrase when reading author also laments how
> Dorsey sold Twitter to Elon Musk, selling the platform out to the far right
as if a Billionaire + BlackRock + Vanguard can "sell out" in any way, as if they are somehow an elightened elite which is supposed to hold the fort, while Billionaire #2 (Musk) is the evil-far-right we must defend the other Capitalists from.
This part just isn’t true. Does the author think that Block is a blockchain company?
Completely understandable decision at the time. Who wouldn't want a piece of that action?
But we can't retcon the pivot out of existence just because the blockchain hype has cooled off.
I don't understand this sentiment at all. "We hate billionaires, but we need them to operate our servers because we don't want to"?
Extreme eyeroll on this post. Twitter's shareholders voted overwhelmingly to sell to Musk. 98.6% of them voted an affirmative yes, in which Dorsey was a very small minority. Dorsey could have voted no at ten times his stake in the company and still it would have been sold to Musk. Everyone was in agreement Musk was overpaying to an extreme degree.
> and its 11 million tons of annual CO2 emissions
Nobody is more in opposition to the current energy regime than Bitcoin miners. They are consistent lobbyists for deregulating private nuclear power, so that they can cleanly power their operations.
This reads like a petulant Communist's criticism of Dorsey. Much like many other of the author's diatribes.