I’ve heard either “the aughts” or just “the two thousands” although that one isn’t as clear.

It doesn’t have to be a big baroque thing. When there’s a dotfile I configure regularly, I move it to a Git repo and use stow to put it “back” into place with a symlink. On new machines, it isn’t long before I try something that doesn’t work or see the default shell prompt and go “oh yeah, I want my dotfiles”, check out the repo, run a script that initializes a few things (some stuff is machine-specific so the script makes files for that stuff with helpful comments for me to remember the differences between login shells or whatever) and then I’m off to the races.

The far right loves a strong man, and by definition there can be only one of those, prefers when “the natural order” is followed, and thinks the ends always justify the means. That keeps them pretty cohesive with the establishment right, who are making buckets of money under the system as it is now and are okay with just about anything else as long as that doesn’t change. When they fight, it’s because the far right is trying to do something stupid enough that the establishment thinks it risks their money or power, or the establishment is holding the far right back from fully implementing their “natural order” worldview, but there’s a lot of overlap where both can be happy, because the establishment really has no morals at all and are happy to use the far right to gain power if all they have to do is throw them some red meat every once in a while.

The left’s a very different story. On the far left, people are very principled, to the point where compromise or partial wins feel hollow because the only real win would be the entire principle being adopted en masse. It makes it harder to work together, because even groups with the same goals can get frustrated by the way the other one is doing it, or because the other group is going to keep going while the other wants to stop sooner. And the establishment left has a fair amount in common with the establishment right, they find the right’s goals uncouth and mean, but they do still fundamentally believe in capitalism and don’t want to upend the system. That leaves a lot less common ground and a lot more infighting overall.

I got the .net and .org of my last name, and offered $50 to the owner of the .com as he wasn’t doing anything with it. Kind of a lowball, admittedly, but I would’ve gone up to a hundred or two. Instead, he told me it was worth thousands, which, lol, but then he didn’t renew it, which I only found out because a random third person reached out to me as the owner of the .net offering me the .com. Turns out they hadn’t actually bought it yet, though, so instead I scooped it up and now I’ve got the trifecta!

I’d believe that people are living happy, fulfilling lives there, sure, people usually find a way to do that regardless of their situation. But I’m pretty sure it’s not just propaganda that the same damn family has been in charge for the better part of a century, and that alone is enough for me to conclude that it is a fundamentally broken system that, even if it somehow isn’t as repressive and evil as it’s portrayed, will get there eventually.

This is a good point, we should ask some average North Koreans directly, that way we get a better balance of viewpoints. Maybe we can catch some on a vacation abroad or something.

Yes, but most human em dashes are from writing going through relatively professional processes, not, say, writing a comment online. Of course, there are many — like myself — who know how to type them quickly, and choose to use them, but LLMs are definitely a lot more eager to use them than the average person.

Maybe I’m missing something, but I’m not sure what the worst case scenario is… like, is some company going to get rich off of their proprietary cp and sudo implementation that they forked off of an open one?

That is indeed the right way to do it, unfortunately Plex doesn’t handle it well. It’ll show all the episodes separately, but each one plays the entire file (fair, it doesn’t know for sure where the breaks are, but could be done better), and watching the whole thing marks only the one you selected as watched, so you have to mark all the other “episodes” as watched manually (this is annoying, if it knows you watched the whole file, it should know that you’ve watched all the episodes it covers).

Usually if an episode is a 2 parter in one file, I’ll just name it for part 1 since you’d watch them together anyway, but for cartoons the two parts are usually entirely unrelated, so it really only works properly if the file’s split. It’d be better if the interface at least showed that a range of episodes are combined so you could, say, start it and know that the episode you want needs to be scrubbed through to find it, and also if it marked them all as played when you watch the whole thing.

The problem is that the sports industry has been propped up for decades with cable, where every subscriber paid fees for sports whether they cared about it or not. If they charged a reasonable price to just the people who care, it’d be a devastating loss. And cable was structured the way it was because that’s what made the most money, and though cable’s slowly being replaced by streaming, don’t be shocked when the streaming landscape starts to take on a similar shape. There’s already lots of bundling going on, remember when streaming meant that you could save a ton of money by just paying for what you wanted? They’re going to do whatever they can to keep the revenue from falling.

Ah, I didn’t see that edit, apologies, had the page loaded for a while before replying.

Isn’t that the same leverage that the earliest labor unions used because it was all they had? It seems to fit very well, actually. There’s a smaller but more powerful group in charge of them, workers get little to no direct say in company policy or who they are managed by and have to hope they’re listened to when asked how things are going. There certainly isn’t a second C-suite waiting in the wings to be put into power if the first one disappoints, the current powers-that-be would be insane to allow something as chaotic as that. If the CEO’s got a good track record of listening, the pay’s pretty good and satisfaction is high, and they’re kept in line with picket lines when it’s necessary, is this company an extension of the working class like China’s government is?

I’m comparing and contrasting quite a bit with my new job, which fits much more closely with what my idea of something worker-controlled would be. It’s fully employee owned, so profits go either back into the business or into our pockets as bonuses. There’s as little hierarchy as possible, the closest thing to a manager isn’t ever going to “put” you on a project, you’re free to find one that you like and wants you to join. Company decisions involve everyone equally, and there’s freedom to loudly speak your mind about policies and procedures if you disagree with them. That’s closer to the country I’d want to live in, not the one where my influence is akin to answering corporate surveys and getting to choose which of 3 approved managers I want to work under, or go on strike if I’m really not happy.

Right, that’s a good example of it going the way you describe, and I’m curious what would’ve happened if the government hadn’t folded. If the people really are making the decisions, they would get their way eventually, what does that look like?

But this doesn’t answer my question, the only mechanism for people’s input seems to be elections and polling, and it conspicuously omits the fact that elections only allow party-approved candidates. Maybe the powers-that-be have a great track record of listening and respecting the will of the people, and are beloved by all as a result, but that doesn’t actually put the people in control, it just means the ones actually in control are being nice. When the government and the people have a fundamental disagreement about the path forward, what piece am I missing that makes the government the one to back down?

I’m trying to get to how it’s democratic and worker-controlled in your eyes because it’s hard to see for me, as people don’t seem to get to choose much in the system as designed. What’s the mechanism for average people to change a government policy that they disagree with? If the party does start to lose touch with what the workers need or start working against their interests, how do the workers course-correct it?

Yeah, those don’t count, if they’re required to align with the party then they’re just subcommittees or something, not actual political parties.

I promise I’m keeping my mind open, but all of these answers seem indistinguishable from authoritarian rule, which was kinda my original point. The same organization has to rule in perpetuity because foreign influence would subvert the interests of the country if there were other options, quite lucky that they locked in the right one. Practically all one billion people are aligned on this and agree that this system is working for them, but no, they will not be allowing that to be tested at the ballot box or in a media environment where people can speak their mind, it might all fall apart despite how unified they are. It’s a party controlled by the workers and acting for their interests, with total control of the levers of power, they just felt like keeping some ultra-rich and ultra-powerful folks around for a laugh, not because they’re the ones who actually have the power.

Honestly, shit’s so bad in the west that I’m kinda open to the idea that maybe a totalitarian government that recognizes it needs to keep workers decently happy to allow them to rule is, in fact, better than what we’ve got going on now, but it’s really hard to go as far as saying that it’s an active, ongoing, consensual choice by the workers to never give themselves a choice.

Oh, c’mon.

The PRC is officially organized under what the CCP terms a “system of multi-party cooperation and political consultation under the leadership of the CCP,” in which the minor parties must accept the leadership of the CCP.

I’m in awe of your ability to read minds, because that was not at all the vibe I got when I was actually in that conversation.

But it’s also a ban on other socialist parties, not just capitalist ones, and it plays directly into the talking point that socialism is an authoritarian system that is imposed on people, not chosen on its merits. If the CCP really has enjoyed resounding, unwavering support from the proletariat for 75 years straight, why appear so weak by never allowing any competition whatsoever?

Okay, but we are talking about a country where you aren’t allowed to form a political party that opposes the CCP, right? How can we tell the difference between “hell yeah, my country is making my life great” and “there is exactly one answer to this survey question that will not get me in trouble”? I always try to keep in mind that I am not immune to propaganda, but I’ve personally known Chinese people who have very explicitly declined to offer any criticism of the Chinese government or go against the party line, even in private conversation, because they didn’t want trouble.

My characterization would be that there’s a spectrum here:

• 100% yes code: compilers, IDEs, scripting environments, databases, you wanna get something done, you are going to be specifying it in something that at the very least looks like traditional source code.
• Completely on the other side of the spectrum, traditional consumer-oriented software: word processor, web browser, accounting/bookkeeping (not spreadsheets though, we’ll get to those), photo/video/audio editor, maps, music player, etc.

That first side of the spectrum is pretty easy to pin down. It has little to no metaphor or abstraction, and the pointy tip of this side is no metaphor at all, just writing machine code and piping it directly into the CPU. A higher level language will let you gloss over some details like registers, memory management, multithreading, maybe pretend you’re manipulating little objects or mathematical functions instead of bits on a wire, but overall you are directing the computer to do computer things using computer language, and forced to think like a computer and learn what computers can and cannot do. This is, of course, the most powerful way to use a computer but is also completely inaccessible to almost everybody.

The second, I’d link together as all being software with a metaphor that is not particularly related to computing itself, but to something more real world. People edited music by physically splicing tapes together, an audio editor does an idealized version of that. Typewriters existed, and a word processor basically simulates that experience. Winamp wasn’t much more than a boom box and a sleeve of CDs. There is usually a deliberate physicality and real-world grounding to the user’s mental model of the software, even if it is doing things that would be impossible if the metaphor were literal. You don’t need to use code, but you also don’t get anything code-like out of it.

No-code is in between. It’s intended for a similar audience as the latter category, who want a clear, easy-to-understand mental model that doesn’t require a computer science degree, but it tries to enable that audience to perform code-like tasks. Spreadsheets are the original example of this; although they originate as a metaphor for paper balance sheets, the functions available in formulas fundamentally alter the metaphor to basically “imagine if you had a sheet of paper that could do literal magic” and at that point you’re basically just describing a computer with a screen. Everything in a spreadsheet is very tactile, it’s easy to see where your data is, but when you need to, you can dip into a light programming environment that regular people can still make work. In general, this is the differentiator for “no code” apps: enabling non-coders to dip their toes into modifying program behavior, scripting tasks, and building software. They’re limited to what the tool provides, but the tool is trying to give them the power that actual coding would provide.

I’d never thought of WordPress as low-code, but I think that fits. Websites go beyond paper or magazines, and WordPress allows people to do things that would otherwise require code and databases and web servers and so on.