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Don't you realize that those with money are the ones who have the means to build a culture? How do you propose we compete with Jeffrey Epsteins who have a shit-ton of money to spend on pushing whatever narrative they want to? Just look around and see the "culture" we're in.

There are many Mastodon servers run by ordinary people simply because they want to. And before the shit-show the internet has become, there were many forums and IRC channels, absolutely free, and with 0 ads.

Very low traction on these. Let me know when there’s something that people actually use in tens or hundreds of millions and random people are just providing the infrastructure out of pocket and spending all their time on this without expectation.

Forums used to be visited by millions of users.

Hosting millions of users is very cheap (less than 200$ per month).


Maybe low traction is a good thing. We don’t need social media to be an all consuming addictive mega platform.

I could have agreed if the high traction ones that do all the bad things didn’t exist.

We've come full circle to banning advertising. It seems like we have good reason to believe that people will create the infrastructure for the communities that they _want_ to exist and fund them. So just banning advertising will probably be fine. Worst case scenario, we gradually loosen the ban. The advertising hellscape will grow back immediately, nothing of value will be lost.

Moving the goalposts much? Of course there aren't any free services serving millions currently, how could they, when Facebook/X spends millions to make sure everyone stays on their platform? Which non tech savvy would want to move to a platform without all their friends? That's the gotcha with social networks, once you grow big enough, it is really hard for people to move off of it.

Still, funny how you ignored IRCs/forums that I mentioned. Those were used by MANY people, and could scale infinitely. You are literally arguing against something that has already happened.


> Still, funny how you ignored IRCs/forums that I mentioned. Those were used by MANY people, and could scale infinitely.

At its peak (late 1990s to early 2000s), IRC was estimated to have about 3–4 million concurrent users worldwide at any given moment, with tens of millions of total users over time.

Pales in comparison with the scale that’s needed today, given the number of people, variety of media, and bandwidth required.


Storage/compute/etc were orders of magnitude more expensive at the time, so the fact that it was 3-4 million is uh, pretty impressive? You could host a Matrix server for your 1,000 closest friends for basically no money.

No I am not moving the goalposts, the alternative shouldn’t just exist it should actually do the job and by doing the job, I don’t mean that if people made the effort to use it, it can do the job. I mean people should be using it. Also, no people are not stupid and its not their fault for not using it.

Why?


Without agreeing (or disagreeing) with their larger point, dynamic types become more of liability as a project gets larger

Like "schemaless" database applications, there's always types/schema somewhere: the choice is if they'll be explicitly defined at the place of construction, or implicitly spread out across all the places data happens to flow in your application. And the more places there are, the more spread out they'll be.

Static typing is also really nice for game dev since proper unit tests are harder (but not impossible) compared to your average CRUD app.


The other side of the argument is that dynamic typing is great for prototyping and can allow for more compact code.

The discussion is exhausting because many people don't understand the difference between weak typing and dynamic typing. You basically never want weak typing but dynamic typing has legit uses. Yes JS is both weakly and dynamically typed and that sucks but Common Lisp shows you can have very strong typing and dynamic types.

Lots of very complex software has been writing in dynamically typed languages. The whole Erlang/Elixir world is dynamically typed though Elixir is getting gradual typing.

There is a good reason gradual typing is getting popular, you get the best of both world. You can prototype quickly and then add types and make everything more solid later.

(Which also why you want to always use a statically typed language in the corporate world because there is never a "later" and the bigger the team the more important it is to have the lang enforcing discipline. But not every programming is corporate.)

People that are dogmatic about static typing show their immaturity. The older I get the more I realize that there is no right or wrong way to program, everything it tradeoffs and "it depends".


Exactly which part of my comment seems dogmatic?

You literally start your comment by reaffirming my point (prototyping, like when you tend to have a smaller code base?)

Feels like you replied to a comment you imagined based on past interactions, not anything I actually wrote.


> Exactly which part of my comment seems dogmatic

I never said that any part of your comment is dogmatic. This is not private conversation where I am talking to you directly.

I wrote

> People that are dogmatic about static typing show their immaturity

Referring to the people like eatsyourtacos who started this discussion.


> dynamic types become more of liability as a project gets larger

Why?


> there's always types/schema somewhere: the choice is if they'll be explicitly defined at the place of construction, or implicitly spread out across all the places data happens to flow in your application.

> And the more places there are, the more spread out they'll be.


You can still have schema validation at the borders of the application(data in/out) without static typing.

I think there are many other factors that come into play when it comes to maintaniblity of large projects. I'd easily choose to maintain a large Elixir or Common Lisp codebase over a Java one, assuming they were all using the Best Practices™ of their respective languages.

There is research out there, and there is absolutely zero evidence that static typing catches more bugs than dynamic types. My experience is that immutability, functional programming, simplicity and testing pays a MUCH bigger role in maintainability than static typing.

Dynamic typing has trade-offs, and so does static typing, HUGE trade-offs by the way. But for some reason, no one seems to mention them... ever.


Silly me for falling for the bait after two one-word replies in a row.

If I need to specify this is about data flow inside your application when we're talking about typing, I don't want think we're having the same conversation.

Hopefully someone else will want to mud wrestle on this.


Add the East India Company's rule in India to the list, 40 million deaths on a conservative estimation.


Check Logseq for an open source alternative to Obsidian: https://github.com/logseq/logseq


Maybe ill have to give it another try, but each time I've tried it, it wasn't particularly intuitive. I couldn't figure out how to turn off the bullet points on all notes. I'm sure there's a setting somewhere but that's such an odd default that I never investigated further.


Logseq raised a lot of VC money and has started turning the screws. They switched from Markdown files to and database, and their sync is paid and closed source.


Hm, it looks nice too, but that's another "freemium open source" app with a pro version that will eventually be enshittified, I would bet.


It has no Pro version, and I believe their plan is to monetize it through an optional Sync service, which is fair, since it actually costs money to keep it running.


> TLDR: Logseq is free but Logseq Pro (coming soon) is not. https://docs.logseq.com/#/page/faq

My original point was that I don't want this kind of software that has an incentive to nag you into an upsell.


> 1 Samuel said to Saul, “I am the one the Lord sent to anoint you king over his people Israel; so listen now to the message from the Lord. 2 This is what the Lord Almighty says: ‘I will punish the Amalekites for what they did to Israel when they waylaid them as they came up from Egypt. 3 Now go, attack the Amalekites and totally destroy all that belongs to them. Do not spare them; put to death men and women, children and infants, cattle and sheep, camels and donkeys.’”


Since you said in another comment that the ten commandments would be a good starting point for moral absolutes, and that lying is sinful, I'm assuming you take your morals from God. I'd like to add that slavery seemed to be okay on Leviticus 25:44-46. Is the bible atrocious too, according to your own view?


Slavery in the time of Leviticus was not always the chattel slavery most people think of from the 18th century. For fellow Israelites, it was typically a form of indentured servitude, often willingly entered into to pay off a debt.

Just because something was reported to have happened in the Bible, doesn't always mean it condones it. I see you left off many of the newer passages about slavery that would refute your suggestion that the Bible condones it.


> Slavery in the time of Leviticus was not always the chattel slavery most people think of from the 18th century. For fellow Israelites, it was typically a form of indentured servitude, often willingly entered into to pay off a debt.

If you were an indentured slave and gave birth to children, those children were not indentured slaves, they were chattel slaves. Exodus 21:4:

> If his master gives him a wife and she bears him sons or daughters, the woman and her children shall belong to her master, and only the man shall go free.

The children remained the master's permanent property, and they could not participate in Jubilee. Also, three verses later:

> When a man sells his daughter as a slave...

The daughter had no say in this. By "fellow Israelites," you actually mean adult male Israelites in clean legal standing. If you were a woman, or accused of a crime, or the subject of Israelite war conquests, you're out of luck. Let me know if you would like to debate this in greater academic depth.

It's also debatable then as now whether anyone ever "willingly" became a slave to pay off their debts. Debtors' prisons don't have a great ethical record, historically speaking.


At least nowadays we have the upper moral hand because the debtors prison has become so large and comprehensive you think you’re not in it.


Cherry picking the bible isn't going to get you any closer to understanding. There are a lot of reasons God ordained society in a certain way. Keep reading and you'll discover that is a much more complex situation than you let on. Also don't let your modern ideals get in the way of understanding an ancient culture and a loving God.


So it was a different kind of slavery. Still, God seemed okay with the idea that humans could be bought and sold, and said the fellow humans would then become your property. I can't see how that isn't the bible allowing slavery. And if the newer passages disallows it, does that mean God's moral changed over time?


You mean well in ignoring their argument, but please don't let people get away with whitewashing history! It was not a "different kind of slavery." See my comment. The chattel slavery incurred by the Israelites on foreign peoples was significant. Pointing out that standards of slavery toward other (male, noncriminal) Israelites were different than toward foreigners is the same rhetoric as pointing out that from 1600-1800, Britain may have engaged in chattel slavery across the African continent, but at least they only threw their fellow British citizens in debtors' prisons.


Good point. That wasn't my intention. I meant to steelman his argument, to show that even under those conditions, his argument makes absolute no sense.


You are still selecting one verse to interpret an entire culture. Misleading at best. And saying this is "white washing history" is silly. Continue reading the Bible and you'll see that it is the Christian Worldview that eventually ended slavery.


God has changed since Genesis.

Why haven’t we all?


Have you ever read any treatment of a subject, or any somewhat comprehensive text, or anything that at least tries to be, and not found anything you disagreed with, anything that was at least questionable.

Are you proposing we cancel the entire scientific endeavour because its practitioners are often wrong and not infrequently, and increasingly so, intentionally deceptive.

Should we burn libraries because they contain books you don’t like.


What I agree or disagree with the bible is irrelevant. He is claiming moral is objective, unchanging and comes from God. God allowed slavery at some point, as that bible passage shows. So his options are to admit that either slavery is moral, or morality is not objective/unchanging. That's the point I was trying to make.


Why would it be a good starting point? And why only some of them? What is the process behind objectively finding out which ones are good and which ones are bad?


It's a good starting point because the commandments were given by God. And without God, there is no objective moral standard. Everything, including your opinion on my point of view, is subjective and relative. Whatever one would want to call "good" or "evil" would just be a matter of opinion.


Thats all very nice, but first prove god.

If you are done solving that question, next prove that the book you favor is from god. There's a lot of competition for this claim as you know.


Looks like someone just discovered philosophy... I wish the world were as simple as you seem to think it is.


Let's not forget there are actual people behind open source projects. I think it is extremely rude to say those people should SERVE the users of their open source projects for free. The project "serve" the needs of the maintainers. If you as a user don't like something, that is entirely YOUR problem. Feel free to fork it and fix the bugs you think are worthy fixing.


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