FlownScepter

The kicker being that such problems are so rare as to be functionally nonexistent, and even in such cases, usually contacting the vendor can at least give you some options. A few anecdotes from my own experiences:

1) Windows\MacOS have never simply refused to use a network card, for no apparent reason.

2) MacOS has never destroyed it's own bootloader because it was Tuesday and it was bored: Windows did it once, but it was repaired automatically by the recovery partition.

3) Windows\MacOS have never refused to play audio after resuming from standby until rebooted.

> The point is: once your problem is complicated enough that your only resort is to edit the software, free software _at least_ gives you the chance to do that

But conversely, I don't have to edit software I paid for that's built on a reliable, if imperfect, OS. A reboot fixes almost anything wrong with Windows, and sure, I'd appreciate it if it could be like linux and stretch it's uptime into years, but also, a reboot takes less time than a run for coffee.

That a solution technically exists is less important than the accessibility of the solution.

It's so fucking accurate, and explains why the site's content trends towards a very corporate-friendly "safe quirky" that I personally find nauseating.

Personally, I wouldn't do either one. I'm fine with multi-stage interviews, even multiple drives to a given location, but there are limits. If a company wants me there for an all-day affair, I better have some compensation on the way, either the job itself or just for the time investment. I'm too damn busy to just flush a day down the toilet on a "maybe we'll hire you," not even going into the travel expenses, arranging time off from my current job, etc.

All my career I have watched as stories from fellow tech workers get more and more ridiculous, the lengths they're expected to go to for a freaking interview. It's gotten disgusting. If a company thinks you're a good fit for their position, they should be ready to court you as well. The only context these death march assembly line interviews make sense in, is if you are utterly meaningless to them, just another cog to be placed, and eventually, replaced. And I don't want to work for anyone like that anyway.

If a company sees no issue with asking for a TED talk just to consider you for a position, imagine what kind of work/life balance you can expect once hired. What kind of last minute assignments, what kind of weekend calls to wipe some higher up's rear end after they foot-mouthed with a client, and promised the moon, and now you've gotta go to Kroger and find 40 tons of cheese and carve it up so they don't need to look stupid.

I've said it before and I'll say it again: we as software devs/code monkeys/devops/admins have fucking worth. You should not EVER be willing to put yourself through this kind of meat grinder, not just to avoid demeaning yourself, but for demeaning everyone else who practices your craft alongside you. They're not worth so little as to need to do that, and neither are you.

You want me to write code for your company? Awesome, I'd love to do that. Pay me.

Because the only thing generated is fake money on a spreadsheet. There is no product, there is only consumption of resources to generate nothing.

For all of what's involved here, you could just pull the same amount of money out of thin air, deposit it in their IRA, and nothing changes, apart from way, WAY less energy consumption.

If bitcoin went away tomorrow, a bunch of financial companies would have a lot of problems, a few big holders would be out money, and that's it. For every other human, it's Thursday.

Conversely, if gasoline didn't exist tomorrow, society would collapse.

Not at all. Lots of businesses make money by turning materials and/or labor into products. Other businesses make money solving problems for people or other businesses. However, crypto (and most of the rest of the financial sector) burn shit tons of energy, materials, time, and human effort generating wealth; wealth expressed in either bitcoin that doesn't really exist, or money that also doesn't really exist. The only real product they consistently produce is said wealth, yes, and also huge amounts of human suffering when their given business goes sideways and tanks the economy. With that in mind, maybe we ought to add said carbon taxes. I'm extremely pro killing off businesses that do nothing but generate profit on a spreadsheet for some overpaid stuffed suit and contribute nothing to humanity, nothing to the economy, solve no problems, and in general just cause the economic equivalent of "wind drag."

Mind you, my definition of "contributing" here is purposely overbroad. Coca-cola, despite producing literal sugar water, is contributing, even if that contribution is literally just sugar water that slowly kills you. It made something you can hold in your hands that people want, even if it's horrible. Hell even tobacco companies fit this definition. In my mind, financial corps and bitcoin companies are below those: using the finite entropy of the universe and the limited resources of our world to do exactly nothing.

But yeah, fair point. It's pretty much the only 99% safe asset.

Gold is however undoubtedly a good comparison pick for Bitcoin; it's something with a few natural pros on it's side that's been hideously overvalued for largely irrational reasons. Like... this metal is advertised as the "right" basis to back currency but I also have some of it in nearly every gadget I own? Then how rare can it possibly be if a small amount comes in a $15 audio decoder for goodness sakes!?

Maybe we should all just acknowledge that money is made up and any security it provides depends on tons of interconnected systems made up of people largely unaccountable to the layman.

Edit: I think the mistake people make is trying to create stability on unstable ground.

The problem is every time this is brought up, it's met with talk of how reform is possible, reform is the answer, you can't disband the police because $(blatantly_ridiculous_reason).

The police in this country are unaccountable, in a literal sense. There is no mechanism to hold them accountable; what exists to do this is inefficient, inaccessible to most people who may need to use it, and also largely ineffective even in the rare cases it does work.

And none of this can surprise when you know the past of most police offices lies in slave patrols and union busting Pinkertons.

Policing in the United States is not broken, it's doing exactly what it was always intended to do: abusing poor people in the interest of the owning class. You can't reform that which is doing exactly what it was designed to do.

And if you hold officers accountable, then they won't overpolice minority neighborhoods, they won't beat people to death for sleeping in front of your buildings, they might hesitate to shoot someone in the back for stealing a $5 beer. I.e., they become less effective to the owning class. And that's why it doesn't happen.

Until this cultural gap is resolved, where we acknowledge not just what is happening but why it's happening and that it's happening was the intended, desired outcome, we can't move forward on it.

We have an admin who spends a good 40% of his workweek doing just our email servers. They are a massive PITA.

(Each * here representing some unknown third party getting access to your email address, phone number, blood type and sexual preferences.)

And my point isn't to denigrate those efforts as they are, merely to point out that the fact you're permitted to engage in those efforts is contingent on those efforts remaining ineffective. Those in power will never concede power to those without peacefully, this is a lesson history teaches us all the way back to the city state of Ur. If you ever were to engage in efforts that caused legitimate destabilization of the power structures above you, those efforts would be put down. Probably legally, possibly violently, but they will be put down.

The fact that some Governments are quicker to pull the metaphorical triggers, doesn't mean the others are therefore not armed.

> A company like Google might not have the power to say no to censorship in China, but they're a lot more likely to have considerable heft against a nation that can't credibly mount a replacement for something like Google.

This presumes the Government in question sees value in a thing it is trying to actively remove. Like I'm not trying to be rude, but do you think it's a major concern of Pakistan's leadership that their people have ready access to Stadia and Chrome? Or the search engine itself, for that matter?

I mean, that literally did almost happen once, right here in the US of A. And sure, points to you, no country has yet attempted it since then, but also, China has locked onto a much more productive and efficient model; controlling the flow of information itself, rather than the client devices at hand.

And yeah, that's circumvent-able by users of sufficient tech literacy and bravery, but also, that fact has not presented an issue yet for China's Communist Party in their efforts to keep a stranglehold on the culture of their country, apart from perhaps Hong Kong.

Is it company-less, though? Code is useless without the silicon that brings it to life, without the people that maintain that silicon, without the power grid that energizes it, and without the data links that connect it. Like I understand what you're saying, you're saying that the pure technology itself is the liberating part, and I agree with that about halfway. But code doesn't run on nothing. To run your code, you'll need a computer, either in your home or business. That computer is sold to you by a vendor, and it's connected to internet sold to you by a different vendor, and is powered by electricity sold to you by a different vendor. Ergo, your code is dependent upon the infrastructure to which you are in turn beholden to. And none of this changes if you use AWS or whatever, you're just adding more vendors and more middlemen, who in turn are buying the needed things from whomever else, etc. Ultimately, if whatever authority decides you must not proceed with what you're doing, that can be enforced in numerous ways, all of which mean that you will not proceed. Or at the very least, will make it much harder.

We saw this recently with the Parler fiasco.

> To cast into concrete terms, we're talking about Facebook (company example) vs DeCSS (code).

But DeCSS only works with DVD drives sold to you by manufacturers in PC's sold to you by manufacturers, running on electricity sold to you by a utility. The code, the information, that's free. But taking it and doing something useful with it, in this case decrypting DVD's, requires hardware, and if for whatever odd reason the U.S. State Department decided that nobody was ever going to use it in the States again, maybe they couldn't stop it entirely, sure, but they can make it infinitely more difficult to do so.

I mean, they're going to do that anyway. They will enter all markets they are able to, and profit as much as they can. That's the entire point of their existence: generate value for shareholders.

I'm not saying I disagree that this situation should be avoided, and in fact super agree with you saying that this moment in history is a consequence of earlier ones more than anything else. However, there's a reflexive action where people are like "$corporation needs to make more ethical decisions" and I cannot overemphasize how ridiculous this view is. Corporations are not even unethical, they're aethical. Their decision making is entirely focused on maximum profit generation.

Now occasionally they'll do something ethical, but oftentimes this is solely because the negative PR from doing something else, or doing nothing, would cause too much damage to the bottom line, however relying solely on this mechanism to illicit change in said corporations is optimistic at best. Instead, legislate what must happen. If you don't want corporations to use child labor to mine minerals, then make that practice incredibly illegal, and make sure the costs to do it anyway are sky high compared to the ones to not. And do it with law, not protest.

To comply with the law.

No, I don't like it either, but I also don't like the idea of corporations having the ability to flout the laws of sovereign nations because they disagree with them.

> The course of action they followed implicitly supports human rights violations

This is not a "course of action" anymore than not committing a crime is a public service. Enforcing human rights laws is not Apple or Google's job, full stop. They are corporations who's goal is to make money, and that's it. Enforcing human rights is what Governments are for.

Instead of asking "why aren't Apple and Google helping activists in Pakistan?" ask "why is Pakistan allowed to abuse it's citizenry in 2021?"

Yes, you do. Because within the borders of that republic, regardless of how banana it might be, it is the Government and it has power. I feel like this is the penultimate expression of privilege for Westerners, to find out that the madman running around in tanks and aviator sunglasses in that part of the world, you know, over there, actually does have direct and indisputable power over MILLIONS of people and in all likelihood, is probably killing tons of them. Like, we know that, but we don't understand what that means, not really. How could we? I find it hard to conceive of something further from my reality.

And ultimately, for all the legitimate strengths the Internet has to fulfill the dream of these folks, in terms of speaking truth to power, ultimately, Governments can turn it off if needed, as we've seen, if it becomes too much of a problem.

This attitude pervades tech-inclined folk's discussions of politics, as if the Internet is somehow above the laws and culture of the places where it operates, especially with regard to the global south. Just because you either don't comprehend or don't respect a given culture enough to learn about it, doesn't mean it no longer applies to you.

I of course disagree with what's happening here, but nothing Pakistan is doing here is illegal or surprising.