Yup this is the real world take IME. Code should be self documenting, really the only exception ever is “why” because code explains how, as you said.

Now there are sometimes less-than-ideal environments. Like at my last job we were doing Scala development, and that language is expressive enough to allow you to truly have self-documenting code. Python cannot match this, and so you need comments at times (in earlier versions of Python type annotations were specially formatted literal comments, now they’re glorified comments because they look like real annotations but actually do nothing).

20 year olds are not generally getting night terrors from watching disturbing content on tiktok. They’re not losing sleep, or coming away with genuine psychological scarring. We don’t need government regulations to control media content for the sake of literal adults. And children in theory should already have their content moderated by the correct degree by parents, not the government.

It’s just content I find dumb

If you watch anything on YouTube that you don’t think is dumb, there is stuff on TikTok you also wouldn’t find dumb. I don’t use TikTok either, but I think you genuinely underestimate how much content there is, and overestimate how uniform that content is.

Considering the country that runs it (…)

ByteDance already stores U.S user data within the U.S, allows third party firms to scrutinize its data privacy policies far more than any other U.S media group, and has come back with a clean bill from groups like Citizen Lab (a Canadian research lab). No U.S userdata goes to the Chinese government.

Government officials know this, they’re just putting on a show. Leaked phone calls have made this clear, the actual issue is the lack of policing around the kinds of content served. ByteDance is not aligned with U.S foreign policy interests like Meta/Google are. They are more than happy to showcase the horrors of the apartheid, genocidal state of Israel, and that’s having a real impact on the literal more than half of Americans that use TikTok.

It’s clearly against the YouTube T.O.S

Videos against YouTube’s T.O.S of the October 7th attacks have been on the platform since October of last year. They’re much more strict about removing videos showcasing the much larger-in-scale violent acts done by Israel than anything done by Hamas. TikTok isn’t. This isn’t a coincidence, and the U.S needs TikTok to fall in line here.

If they don’t young people will continue to hold extreme views, like bombing tens of thousands of children in an open air prison that has been violating the GCIV since 2007 is somehow problematic. They need the American public to have the understanding that Palestinians are simply human animals; they’re savages that need to be put down. Not unlike native americans.

Towards the end of the culling, when enough of the population has died to no longer pose a threat, they’ll give them small territories like the U.S did with native americans and feign sympathy. Imperialism hasn’t changed.

When we say younger, we might just be talking about different age groups. I imagine 16-30, and in that age range you’re not likely to come away with severe psychological scarring, but you will be deeply upset and that’s a good thing (we shouldn’t ignore genocide, we should be upset by it). Being upset leads to change.

If you’re talking about like 10 year olds watching it, sure I can agree. They can’t really do anything about it. They can’t go out and protest, or advocate for change, or vote, etc. Plus they’re much more likely to have genuine scarring. Issues sleeping, night terrors, trouble concentrating, etc.

As for “that content is dumb”, I assume you’re talking about tiktok in general. And again, for some people it’s definitely not dumb. People get served different things. Tiktok isn’t a platform trying to do good in the world, like any other social media platform it’s trying to drive engagement. However, it’s one of the few social media platforms outside of the U.S media interest groups, and that’s why the U.S is either banning them or forcing them to sell.

The end goal is to censor all of that raw footage of genocide, because it changes views. When you can hide behind rhetoric and not show how horrific the mass bombings are, you get a lot more leeway. That’s good for Israel, and why AIPAC and other Israel lobbies are the main forces behind this push in the U.S. In the end, the ban is bad for humanity (will allow the genocide to escalate without public backlash), but will be good for Israel and U.S elites.

Yes, genocides are emotional. Watching children being blown up is something that should upset you. That’s actually happening in the real world.

Emotion isn’t the only thing that should inform your decisions, but pretending like you shouldn’t be upset at watching kids being blown up, or begging for their parents, or whatever else have you is just foolish.

Yeah fuck people who are against animal abuse and actually live out their principles.

Like you could at least say “preachy vegans”. This is still problematic, because it ignores that everyone is preachy about issues they understand are immoral (we’re all preachy anti-racists, anti-rapists, etc.)

But just saying “vegan” is wild.

I don’t use tiktok, but some people have unusually based tiktok feeds. They can get direct footage from the genocide happening in Gaza, for example. I never get that recommended on YouTube, despite my very obvious socialist leanings, watching pro-Palestine content, etc.

This is the actual reason tiktok is being banned (if they don’t sell) after the election. One of the largest lobbying groups in America, AIPAC, in probably the most well-funded policy categories (pro-Israel policies) backs most of Congress. They’ve determined tiktok has far too much influence on American youth, and has made the Israel/Palestine divide a young/old divide more-so than a left/right divide.

There’s already a strong correlation between political leaning and age, which is problematic for the future of the fascist movement in America, but this issue falls outside the norm. You’ll find a lot of young conservatives calling for an end to the needless killing of civilians. They won’t call it a genocide because admitting Israel is a genocidal apartheid state is too far for them, but they can at least admit killing tens of thousands of children is not the right path here.

That kind of extremism (e.g not greenlighting any amount of culling of “human animals” Israel feels it needs to do) is unacceptable to the pro-Israel lobby, and they’re not used to getting this kind of pushback from the American public.

As someone who has primarily used spaces, I still use the tab key. I sincerely hope most space users understand that your editor can expand your tab key into spaces, and people aren’t genuinely going around spamming their spacebar 2->16 times for various indentation levels.

Battle.net games have been some of the most reliable non-steam games you’ll find. You’ll have trouble in the Riot Games space (League on Linux, Windows 7, and 8 are all dead in the next month due to Vanguard), and some Epic Games (Fortnite), but if you’re a Battle.net/Steam gamer Linux is ready for you.

Linux is a far more reliable operating system at the kernel level, which is why the vast majority of the Internet runs on Linux, and is very stable compared to anyone’s personal computer (no matter O.S). It’s also lighter weight at its core, which is a big plus for servers.

The thing about Linux desktops that tend to be finicky is interop with some proprietary software (e.g nvidia drivers) or desktop environments (gnome can freeze/crash if you like running bleeding edge before bugs are ironed out). Windows has issues too however, free software often literally doesn’t run on Windows (requiring WSL, the same way games on Linux require wine), and the desktop environment is essentially indistinguishable from the base operating system. When you get a desktop environment crash on Windows, your system will BSOD and restart with no recourse, in Linux I can ssh into my still functioning computer and kill my DE, or drop to the TTL and do the same thing.

The end might not seem like a big deal for some people (who cares if you have to restart by a button press or kill your DE and login, they’ll take a similar amount of time), but for someone like me where reliability is a big concern (as in, uptime for the half a dozen services/containers I run for people), this is great. People watching media off of jellyfin don’t have to stop because of a DE bug, but on Windows a BSOD would stop their media (and within the last week we’ve had several BSODs on Windows PCs due to bugs relating things like adaptive sync or sometimes just unknown reasons).

For what it’s worth I also game exclusively on Linux, vk3d, dxvk, and proton are godsends. Somethings don’t work, developers who won’t flip the switch for EAC (e.g Fortnite), but for me the games I play always worked. This will actually change soon, Vanguard is coming to League and that only works on Windows, but also probably not my last install of Windows (I tried W11 when it came out because I’m just curious about new tech), but I had to do a TPMBypassCheck despite having ftpm enabled in the BIOS, and afaict, at least from people I know with similar builds to me, if this happened then firmware TPM probably isn’t being picked up by W11, and that means I need to buy a TPM module or drop to W10 to play League. Plus, vanguard is an intense rootkit with full 24/7 access to your O.S so I probably don’t want that installed anyway, even if it happened to work on Linux. Just going to stick to SoD for now in my free time lol

I’ve seen a couple of posts in here about sound. It’s wild that I’ve been through dozens of distros since the start of high school (12 years ago), installed them on at least 10 machines over that time, and can’t remember one issue with sound that took more than 15 seconds to fix (e.g discord choosing the wrong sound device because I have 6 things plugged in that can technically output sound, which also happens to my friends who use Windows).

Maybe I’m just lucky. The only issues I recall having in the last decade are essentially graphics related. Either game compatibility (though proton/wine is much better than it was in 2015) or desktop environments being finicky (freezing on sleep for example), but the latter afaict was entirely due to proprietary nvidia drivers. There are proper, high-performance open source drivers in the works, so nvidia might be on par with amd in 2-3 years on Linux (which is to say literally no issues for the vast majority of people, probably far more stable than Windows).

In the same time I’ve had lots of people come to me with problems that we’ve specifically troubleshooted and found Windows to be the issue even when it seemed like hardware problems. Like monitor flickering/black screening, and plugging in a different monitor the issue goes away. On the surface it seems like a hardware problem, but both monitors worked flawlessly on Linux for literally months. Full reinstalling Windows did not fix the issue. Upgrading from Windows 10 -> 11 did not fix the issue.

Same thing with another friend’s external SSD. For some reason it wasn’t being detected on his Windows 7 install. We installed Linux and the drive was picked up. Maybe Windows 10 would’ve also picked up the drive in this circumstance, but a lot of people hated the idea of Windows 10 at the time (this was just after Windows 10 was released, when Windows 7 still had a similar market share).

There’s likely a huge percentage of problems people attribute to hardware that are actually Windows being a shitty O.S, but nobody actually checks if Windows is the problem.

In humans there’s a psychological phenomenon called “crowding out”, essentially it’s hard for our brains to attach multiple, powerful incentives to one activity. Generally the “lesser” ones get crowded out by the more important one.

I’m still young (26), and still feel the same way about programming, I deeply enjoy it. However, I know programmers who were passionate like me when they were younger, and that passion has been slowly drained as they continue to code professionally, and I’ve seen it come back when they move into non-programming roles (be it industry change or moving to management).

Generally you won’t find yourself wanting to program 40 hours a week, 48-50 weeks a year, for 50 years without a substantial break, and yet that’s what capitalism expects of workers. Yet you’ll continue to work because there’s a more important incentive than passion, money.

You need money to survive (food, shelter, etc.) and your brain understands those are more important than fulfilling a passion, that’s why you’ll go to work even if you’re drained mentally. You’ll continue to do that forever so long as you don’t have the financial freedom to do otherwise (which is the goal of capitalists, this is why we have COL-based incomes, so as not to overpay people who live in cheaper areas as it’d allow them the freedom to leave).

I support creatives with direct donations. When you buy Netflix, you’re supporting extraordinarily wealthy capitalists.

If you actually care about supporting creatives, end all your subscriptions, pirate all your media, and give 100% of your previous subscription costs directly to the creatives you want to support.

Yeah choosing to abstain from eating certain animals for moral reasons (dogs/cats/cows/horses) and not others (pigs/chickens/fish) is definitely weird. Though the majority of people in western society fall into this category, you just moved one more animal across the boundary due to normalization. If you were brought up with pigs, chickens, and fish you’d probably abstain from those too.

The real question to ask though is despite normalization, what’s actually the right thing to do? Is it actually okay that some people eat dogs, cats, and cows? Or is it wrong to do this?

People should put more effort into reconciling this dissonance, because slaughter and oppression is not a matter we should leave up to the normalization of society to decide. Society has countless times normalized immoral things.

I didn’t compare capitalism to slavery. I said the word slavery. The first paragraph wasn’t demonstrating a comparison, it was demonstrating a principle (principles are universalized, comparisons aren’t). The idea that every system has positives, but those systems can still be horrifically bad.

I don’t know if it’s emotion that’s clouding your reading comprehension, I hope it is, because then you can calm down and have a reasonable conversation. If it’s not, then this conversation isn’t worth having because you won’t understand half of what I’m saying. Literally 50% of your last message was you misrepresenting what I was saying.

A capitalist society cannot enact socialist policies. It can enact “social” policies. These policies are inspired by socialism, and often advocated for by socialists, but the policies themselves are not socialist policies. Capitalism is an economic system where the means of production are privately owned, and socialism is an economic system where the means of production are socially owned. If private (not personal) property exists, it’s not socialism. It’s not necessarily capitalism (you could have other systems with private property), but in our world it always is.

Welfare capitalism, where these social policies exist, is a well established ideology that has been around for about 80 years in any serious form, and yeah welfare can be used to address some of the negative tendencies of capitalism, but it doesn’t fix them. It’s applying a band-aid fix, not addressing the problem. In the real world what this means is there’s a class of people always working to remove those regulations and welfare because their class interests are opposed to ours.

Class distinctions cannot be solved with a regulation, they have to be solved with a societal restructuring. Our legal system does not support the idea of abolishing private property and by extension classes.

If by “have merit” you mean “has some positive aspects”, sure. Every system has merit. Slavery had merit (slave owners got cheap cotton). The Holocaust had merit (antisemites felt better). The issue is weighing the merit against the negatives. You can’t just say two systems have positive aspects and call it a day.

Are you a fan of democracy or authoritarianism? Capitalism is a system where productive forces are driven undemocratically, in the name of profit instead of by worker democracy. The commodification of everything exists in a world of private property:

• our bodies (labor power)
• our thoughts (intellectual property)
• the specific ordering of bits on a hard drive you own (digital media, DRM)
• the means of production (which exist as a result of collective knowledge, infrastructure, and labor)

These things being commodified and privatized are ridiculous in any democratic, non-capitalist system.

However, these ridiculous conditions are absolutely necessary in a capitalist society. Without them the system falls apart. And as society continues to progress, the situation gets more and more ridiculous.

What about when AI “takes away” jobs for 50% of Americans (as in capitalists fire humans in favor of AI)? That’ll collapse our society. Less work would be a good thing in any reasonable system, but not in capitalism. Less work is an existential threat to our society.

If we ever have an AI that is as capable as humans are intellectually, the only work left for us will be manual labor. If that happens, and robots get to the point of matching our physical abilities, we won’t be employable anymore. The two classes will no longer be owners and workers, they’ll be owners and non-owners. At that point we better have dismantled capitalism, because if we don’t then we’ll just be starving in the street, along with the millions who die every year from starvation under the boot of global capitalism.