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Cake day: October 4th, 2023

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  • The “tolerance paradox” is a handy tool with which to justify violence by those on both sides. If I’m just fighting intolerance, then my actions are justified. It’s a common rally cry used by authoritarians to stamp out diversity and democracy. To really hammer the point home, the Nazis were the first to employ it. By blaming their issues on the “intolerance” of foreign states, they justified a global war. It is obviously the inspiration for Popper’s 1945 work, The Open Society and Its Enemies. Russia is currently using this fallacy to justify the war in Ukraine, claiming that the West is “intolerant” of Russia, and they need to defend themselves against this intolerance.

    Here is a full quote from Popper on the subject if anyone is interested.

    I do not imply, for instance, that we should always suppress the utterance of intolerant philosophies; as long as we can counter them by rational argument and keep them in check by public opinion, suppression would certainly be most unwise.

    But we should claim the right to suppress them if necessary even by force; for it may easily turn out that they are not prepared to meet us on the level of rational argument, but begin by denouncing all argument they may forbid their followers to listen to rational argument, because it is deceptive, and teach them to answer arguments by the use of their fists or pistols.

    Popper’s argument is laid bare here. Tolerate up to the point of violence. That is, if one physically attacks us, we no longer have the burden of tolerance. Popper is commonly misquoted and intentionally misused to justify violence, suppresion, and censorship against disagreement, and that is clearly not his argument.










  • The operative word there is “entirely.” We have philosophy going back thousands of years playing with the subjective nature of reality. There is some truth to this. However most of human history has been an exercise in “might makes right,” and truth was whatever the person with the biggest club said it was. Then the Enlightenment happened and it was suddenly considered virtuous to observe, document, and publish objective reality. See the early days of the conflicts with the Church to understand how uncomfortable it can make those who enjoy subjective reality suddenly being confronted with the concept of objective reality.

    It’s only relatively recently (post Enlightenment) that large portions of society decided it was a good idea to disregard objective reality in journalism, science, and politics, in favour of subjective or “lived” realities. We can in part thank postmodernism for escaping academic containment, but I think that’s only part of the slide. Whatever the cause, I think it behooves all of us to attempt to steer into objectivism as frequently and clearly as possible. Depending on the metric, Western society has arguably never been this polarised. If we can’t agree on the definition of words, we aren’t even speaking the same language anymore. Our North Star needs to be shared language so at the very least we can have valid arguments with each other. That is how we progress.


  • I’ll preface this by saying I am/was a Reddit user since its first year operating in 2005/2006.

    The notion that reality is entirely subjective is relatively new and I believe has led to a myriad of consequences across society from social media to journalism to politics. Even if we will never arrive at a future in which we can all acknowledge what a spade is, we should absolutely continue to strive for that. Common understanding is the bedrock of liberal societies. We need it for science and democracy to function.

    The “Redditquette” the user above explained was the notion that disagreement isn’t invalid. By this I am referring to the philosophical distinction between valid and invalid arguments. For example:

    1. Every dog is a reptile.
    2. Every reptile is cold-blooded.
    3. Therefore, every dog is cold-blooded.

    This argument is silly and easily disproved, but valid. Flat Earthers often make valid but easily disproved arguments, and there is much to gain in the world by people having valid discussions with one another. Especially from a curious and open position.

    On the other hand, invalid arguments are those in whose conclusion is not proven by its premises. That is, even if all the premises are true, the conclusion could still be false. For example:

    1. Being friendly is the easiest way to make friends quickly.
    2. Alana has a lot of friends.
    3. Therefore, Alana must be very friendly.

    The argument tells us that being friendly is one way to make friends, but is that the only way? And does having a lot of friends necessarily mean that you are very friendly? Although Alana might be very friendly, the author hasn’t proven that she is. There is nothing to gain by engaging with this, other than to potentially educate someone about valid and invalid arguments. However this rarely works out well over the internet. This is an opinion masquerading as reason or fact. Trolling uses some variation of this.

    Reddiquette was intended to encourage healthy discussion without immediately devolving into insults and death threats. It actually worked really fucking well, for many years. In the early days, the administrators would enforce Rediquette, as crazy as that sounds. They would give out warnings for people downvoting earnest comments and submissions. Some of the better moderated subreddits still maintain a shadow of this, but they don’t have the tools to see who is up/downvoting what.

    Unfortunately there is some game theory in this. If the rules are “downvote what you don’t like,” then both sides of any debate must use this rule, or their comments will be permanently hidden, and their ideas will never propagate. The evidence is that this rule is quite devastating for online discourse, and I miss old Reddit.


  • JasSmith@sh.itjust.workstoSelfhosted@lemmy.worldSomething like Sonarr but for Youtube?
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    2 months ago

    I agree. I am forced to use dockers with Unraid and I really don’t like them. For me, the benefits are very limited compared to the extra hassle. I think they have become so popular on Linux because they sidestep so many issues related to distro fragmentation. This is yet another example of how the “freedom” of Linux prevents long term innovation and general OS improvements. Especially in terms of UX.



  • Anyone complaining that installing software in Linux is always complicated hasn’t installed software on Linux.

    I didn’t complain it’s always complicated. I used a specific example of when it is complicated. Such examples happen to all Linux users from time to time, and I think we should be working to ensure users never ever, for any reason, ever need to bust out the CLI to install basic software. Maybe when SteamOS becomes more widespread devs will fall in line with whatever Valve has chosen as their preferred install method. Fingers crossed it’s flatpaks! Normies don’t want many methods to install software. They want one simple, reliable method, which works the same way every single time. And if we’re being honest, even power users would be happy with that. Just ask my fellow macOS devs :)



  • After a long career in software development I’ve learned one important thing: everyone is motivated by incentives. Developers don’t package their software on Linux as frequently because they’re not forced to, and because it’s a huge pain in the ass compared to macOS and Windows. I don’t blame the developers for this. I blame the OS. Torvalds was right: this won’t be fixed until Valve forces everyone to use the same libraries. Then it’s super easy for the Radarr devs to provide a single executable across all compatible distros.

    I guess in an ideal world all the developers would voluntarily package their software well, but that’s just not reality and it will never be.



  • nix-shell -p radarr

    I don’t think this works on most distros. Even if it does, isn’t this only installing Radarr to a temporary shell? Either way, CLI should never be required to install software. Not if the intent is consumer software. You do appear to make the argument that it’s not consumer software, which is fair. It’s just different from a lot of other claims about it being consumer software. So you can forgive people for thinking it’s meant for regular people. We should definitely make that clearer.



  • The way I see it the biggest fragmentation is just users expecting things to work like windows, ie navigating to a website, downloading the software and running it.

    Usually Linux users just search their package repo. If you want more bleeding edge software, youre expected to understand Debian/Ubuntu repos probably aren’t the place to go.

    Like it or not, most users expect to be able to go to a website, download software, and click it to install. It is objectively more intuitive than using a command line, or having users go somewhere else to install software. I don’t see the sense in fighting against user preferences. Embrace it. Offer it. Give the users what they want. That’s how we grow Linux. There is no reason that “bleeding edge” software needs to be complicated to install and use.