It's interesting looking at their sponsors page. Four out of the top five have had scandals relating to far-right leadership, platforming, or sponsorships, and the fifth is possibly a CIA cutout.
I have to admit, the is is so all-inclusive it's daunting.
But look on the bright side!
If you ever have difficulty with choosing between a thousand very similar computers, phones, chips, OSes and programs, look for the intersection between "not fashware" and "not bot slop".
DDV is a weird little guy with his own history he's covered up, as well as duplicitous behaviour like lying about being the author of the so-called "Stallman Report" - I wouldn't trust him as a primary source on anything. I'm sure we can find a better community member to maintain this kind of list.
You should probably link receipts if you see fit to post a comment like this. I don't mean to diminish the validity of your concerns, at all. If I knew what you were talking about, we would likely agree!
But this kind of vague-shaming someone is really rough, and doesn't give us anything to latch onto about this list or what would make someone suited to maintain such a list.
Also, Drew linked receipts in much of his commentary.
I've read most of the report and it's got a lot more than "last time". Speaking as someone who has done a lot of my own research on Stallman's bullshit, the depth of this report is astonishing.
I removed your comment and banned the domain for that reply site about DDV because the site was long on innuendo and short on evidence in a way that strongly reminds me of some particular trolls who like to make up really heinous accusations about individuals. I don't think I've done that before or since, it really was that one source was screamingly bad to me.
It's not a problem that you're making this criticism, and a good citation is appreciated. FWIW, DeVault has also confirmed his involvement.
I've never appreciated DDV's style and usually don't read him much because I find it quite tiring and not enjoyable.
The "weird little guys" list however is quite terse and sourced.
And how bad DVV may be has no impact on how bad, or good, people on the list are. It only affects the trust you may put in his list. There are several terrible people in the list and DVV's opinion has no impact, one way or another, about how bad they are.
The list is mostly fine and I appreciate it's existence - I just don't think Drew of all people is the guy we should be lionising or rallying behind in a culture war, no matter he reformed he claims to be.
Yeah, these kinds of ideological trials are tapping into the forces that formed the engine behind some of the categorically darkest episodes in 20th century history.
Even if fascism is something you strongly feel should be fought, understand that this isn't it. We've been down this route before, many times, and it has never lead us anywhere good, it's not even worked out well for the most loyal participants.
The mass graves and Gulags were full to the brim with people who were deeply concerned with fighting fascism, they were full of loyal chekists, and also full of various bystanders who thought assisting in the hunt for hidden fascists would spare them from the NKVD troikas. In the end not even Yezhov was spared.
Idk maybe this will put me on Drew's fascist list. I don't care. I read about the infant-smashing tree they had in Cambodia a while back, and if there's any chance speaking up avoids such things happening again it's worth whatever inconvenience comes from being on the list. If anything is clear from history is that these things spiral out of control over time, and the only time to stop them is early.
Bummer, I like your search engine and it feels like it's making the world a better place.
But it sounds like you're saying though that the best way to avoid mass graves is for some courageous people to stand up for ...avoiding taking moral stands? No matter what people who want or have power power say or do?
This looks like a weird form of bothsideism I notice a lot in the past months. And I wonder if I'm missing something, because it looks to be so obviously untrue or at least heavily reductionist.
The people calling out bad behavior are not the people being divisive, unless the badness is purely a matter of perspective without any real consequences. The actions of the people being called out here do have consequences.
Yeah...too many weird guys. Jeff Geerling was a surprise. Humans without uteri having very-strong opinions about what people with uteri should do with their uterus will always be ironic to me. And I can see Primeagen now when I think about it. He said things like "...california being filled with our enemies...", "LGTBQRST" in the few podcast/streams I have watched.
Basically, he seems to be an American Christian? Honestly, those of us in the rest of the world are more or less forced to deal with very weird American religions and weirdly religious people. From Pat Gelsinger right on down.
A huge amount of tech came out of Utah: Novell, WordPerfect, Caldera (before they went mad, true Linux pioneers), and more. Some of it was great tech, and basically all created by extremely weird religious cultists.
Once I learned that wearing one of my several atheist T-shirts, or my several atheist laptop stickers -- which I think are funny -- could get me lynched on the street in much of the States, my urge to even visit the place for very long faded.
or my several atheist laptop stickers -- which I think are funny -- could get me lynched on the street in much of the States, my urge to even visit the place for very long faded.
I grew up in the deep South surrounded by a lot of religious conservatism. You are not going to get lynched for having an atheist T-shirt or sticker. Always remember that the picture you see of the world on the Internet is highly distorted because the signals that get amplified are the intesting ones, not the representative ones. Representative reality is boring so disappears on the web. Most people are fine.
Roman Catholicism being a weird American religion is news to me! Maybe the papal chair rests in Rome, Georgia :)
I don't think you would get attacked for having an atheist laptop sticker or shirt in any of the states. I'm not sure where you learned that, but I don't think it's true.
People can practice the same religion in very different ways, and US-Americans certainly seem more intense in their religious approach than Italians or any European. Part of that view is internet-distorted, but that's true of other countries too.
Also, parent didn't specify roman catholicism. Christianity has many branches, with some of the more unusual ones rooted in the USA.
He is loudly and stridently Roman Catholic. He's also US American, and Roman Catholics are Christian, so you're not wrong. But conservative American Roman Catholics do generally read a bit differently than conservative Americans of more homegrown sects, and often strongly dislike each other. So I'd say "Basically, he seems to be an American Christian" isn't really communicative, even if it's strictly accurate.
Americans of both stripes do frequently (very strongly) agree on what people without a uterus should get to dictate about what people with a uterus get to do, though.
Some of my best work has happened by repairing to a very offline space for a while, and then only coming back online very consciously, over a low bandwidth connection. My old PC might hail from a little before 1987, but that's certainly not a load-bearing distinction. Going offline and building a thing is fun.
asserting Linux on ARM is the only morally acceptable computer is pretty bold
I don't see where it's asserted (and AMD isn't on their list), but anyway coming to terms with the facts is the first step before deciding what to do with them.
As @jmiven said, I don't see that assertion on the list. But I do agree that it's a hell of a list. I still think it's worth knowing where you're handing your money when you participate in this "industry" even if you don't feel there's a reasonable way for you to opt out. Apple, Dell and Framework are all there, and Lenovo has other issues. My life situation means that I should use a laptop, generally. This listing (plus Lenovo) doesn't leave me room to feel good about buying a new one, but I'm still glad to know what I'm buying.
Yeah, that's a very good candidate in terms of my values. I don't believe that it gets me particularly close to where my 2018 Lenovo ThinkPad did in terms of performance, though :-(. And I'm sure it doesn't stand up well to a 2021 M1 macbook pro on that front.
If you and I could sit down across a table with the beverages of our choice (mmm espresso) and have a lively discussion about this, I think we'd be in near complete agreement that it's ethically better to buy used. I am not sure I'd quite get to "the only ethical choice" though.
Yeah, I went back and forth with how I wanted to say that and overall I think "only" was too strong. Generally though, I think we need to prioritize buying used (especially with things like laptops) for so many reasons. Until every fully functional device is being utilized or properly recycled (and not just thrown away or in a drawer), is it really okay to go out and buy a new one? If the concern is sustainability, isn't reuse the most sustainable choice after simply doing without? Unfortunately, some categories like smartphones make it difficult to do this while remaining secure on the Internet; this is why proprietary software is a scourge on the earth.
I still buy some things new, of course, though in a lot of cases it's because there's some sale that puts a new one at a near-used price or because I genuinely can't find a used item that does what I need.
A specific case is one from last year: I was able to buy a brand new EV that did everything I wanted ("need" is a funny word) for less than any comparable used EV, and buying a used combustion-powered vehicle would have been far worse environmentally and economically long-term. There was also a potential social benefit in signalling how important electrification is to me. In a situation like that, where there is an enormous shift in the way things are done, I concede that buying new can be more ethical than buying used.
My suspicion was correct; we pretty much agree. If I wanted to get to "only" I'd say that the only ethical choice is to evaluate used options before buying new.
Proprietary software and glued-in batteries are both a scourge, IMO. I'd say that almost every piece of computing equipment that I've sent for recycling rather than just reusing it in a different capacity, over the past 15 years, was due to a battery I couldn't either work around or replace. And the rest were proprietary software that I wasn't willing to work around because of those batteries...
It's worth looking at previous times Ladybird was posted here as well, there's a lot of discussion that tends to elaborate on what a lot of these links are already saying to help paint a picture. I honestly find it terrifying how this type of thing is creeping in, even if it is just in the form of showing support for a project.
its worthy of recognition, the amount of mental gymnastics some people go through in order to draw parallels between this project or its maintainers and fascist ideologies
There are countless people whom ideologies and beliefs I am unaware of.
A few people make these known however, sometimes in very clear and sometimes eruptive ways. Andreas Kling is one of these people and that's not a recent thing with him. Something like saying you're not being aligned with diversity politics at Apple years ago is a pretty soft sentence from a language point of view.
But feeling the need to mention it when discussing about leaving Apple or something like that means that he's actually obsessed about it, and it perspires everywhere. Non-obsessed people would simply say the atmosphere at $company didn't suit it and they chose to leave, nothing more.
Really, everybody's aware of the opinions and beliefs of these people because they've stated them out loud, sometimes while discussing about the software projects.
Not sure what you mean by 'pure' rust. Normally pure $LANG means not using FFI to another language. As the OP mentioned the JS engine Servo uses is written in C++. The bindings are part of the Servo project and an ongoing effort fwir.
We can argue about what "itself" meant here, but that seems a bit pedantic. I know the bindings to Spidermonkey are not trivial (Servo devs have been working on them lately), but Spidermonkey is still a separate project, not part of Servo proper.
Excluding tests (which are a large chunk of html and js), the servo repo is 500k lines of Rust, 50k of python tooling, some html/js for ui, some Kotlin for Android, and zero C++. So yes, it's not "pure Rust", but it's as close as a project of this size could be.
if opening a pr is the only way you can imagine contributing to an open source project, then you are right. if you want you can pretty much do it the same way anyone can to most of the bsds - through project maintainers.
The Ladybird maintainers have gone on record before, essentially saying that suggesting code changes to maintainers in any shape or form is considered in violation of the "no community code contributions" rule.
sanxiyn | 22 hours ago
Look at StyleBench: Firefox's style engine written in Rust is still undefeated after all these years.
pbronez | 17 hours ago
Nice to see Ladybird continues to make steady progress. Looking forward to trying the alpha.
ayba | 22 hours ago
Fashware; Didn't Read
gcupc | 15 hours ago
It's interesting looking at their sponsors page. Four out of the top five have had scandals relating to far-right leadership, platforming, or sponsorships, and the fifth is possibly a CIA cutout.
abhinav | 19 hours ago
This Andreas guy is so weird, he didn't even want to change
hein the browser documentation sentences tothey.d33 | 20 hours ago
Can you elaborate please?
lproven | 19 hours ago
"AwesomeKling" is #2 on Drew DeVault's list: Weird little guys of FOSS
He also links to a handy list: Fashware
I have to admit, the is is so all-inclusive it's daunting.
But look on the bright side!
If you ever have difficulty with choosing between a thousand very similar computers, phones, chips, OSes and programs, look for the intersection between "not fashware" and "not bot slop".
Suddenly you will find it easy to choose!
WilhelmVonWeiner | 18 hours ago
DDV is a weird little guy with his own history he's covered up, as well as duplicitous behaviour like lying about being the author of the so-called "Stallman Report" - I wouldn't trust him as a primary source on anything. I'm sure we can find a better community member to maintain this kind of list.
hoistbypetard | 15 hours ago
You should probably link receipts if you see fit to post a comment like this. I don't mean to diminish the validity of your concerns, at all. If I knew what you were talking about, we would likely agree!
But this kind of vague-shaming someone is really rough, and doesn't give us anything to latch onto about this list or what would make someone suited to maintain such a list.
Also, Drew linked receipts in much of his commentary.
WilhelmVonWeiner | 15 hours ago
Last time I linked receipts my comment was moderated for the receipts not being good enough for the mods, but here's receipts for DDV lying about not writing the so-called "Stallman Report".
pushcx | 15 hours ago
I got asked in chat to reply here, so I'm dropping in to connect back my reasoning + better explain a decision.
I left up the Stallman report for this reasoning; which I referenced recently and expanded on a little here.
I removed your comment and banned the domain for that reply site about DDV because the site was long on innuendo and short on evidence in a way that strongly reminds me of some particular trolls who like to make up really heinous accusations about individuals. I don't think I've done that before or since, it really was that one source was screamingly bad to me.
It's not a problem that you're making this criticism, and a good citation is appreciated. FWIW, DeVault has also confirmed his involvement.
adrien | 12 hours ago
I've never appreciated DDV's style and usually don't read him much because I find it quite tiring and not enjoyable.
The "weird little guys" list however is quite terse and sourced.
And how bad DVV may be has no impact on how bad, or good, people on the list are. It only affects the trust you may put in his list. There are several terrible people in the list and DVV's opinion has no impact, one way or another, about how bad they are.
WilhelmVonWeiner | 10 hours ago
The list is mostly fine and I appreciate it's existence - I just don't think Drew of all people is the guy we should be lionising or rallying behind in a culture war, no matter he reformed he claims to be.
wofo | 17 hours ago
Wow... I didn't know about DDV's list. I'm not a fan of pointing fingers like that.
lproven | 16 hours ago
It's pretty new.
What do you suggest as an alternative, then?
wofo | 13 hours ago
Maybe I'm naive, but my impression is that we don't need an alternative.
marginalia | 12 hours ago
Yeah, these kinds of ideological trials are tapping into the forces that formed the engine behind some of the categorically darkest episodes in 20th century history.
Even if fascism is something you strongly feel should be fought, understand that this isn't it. We've been down this route before, many times, and it has never lead us anywhere good, it's not even worked out well for the most loyal participants.
The mass graves and Gulags were full to the brim with people who were deeply concerned with fighting fascism, they were full of loyal chekists, and also full of various bystanders who thought assisting in the hunt for hidden fascists would spare them from the NKVD troikas. In the end not even Yezhov was spared.
Idk maybe this will put me on Drew's fascist list. I don't care. I read about the infant-smashing tree they had in Cambodia a while back, and if there's any chance speaking up avoids such things happening again it's worth whatever inconvenience comes from being on the list. If anything is clear from history is that these things spiral out of control over time, and the only time to stop them is early.
ropeladder | 8 hours ago
Bummer, I like your search engine and it feels like it's making the world a better place.
But it sounds like you're saying though that the best way to avoid mass graves is for some courageous people to stand up for ...avoiding taking moral stands? No matter what people who want or have power power say or do?
kolja | an hour ago
I have the same questions for the same reason.
This looks like a weird form of bothsideism I notice a lot in the past months. And I wonder if I'm missing something, because it looks to be so obviously untrue or at least heavily reductionist.
The people calling out bad behavior are not the people being divisive, unless the badness is purely a matter of perspective without any real consequences. The actions of the people being called out here do have consequences.
abhinav | 18 hours ago
Yeah...too many weird guys. Jeff Geerling was a surprise. Humans without uteri having very-strong opinions about what people with uteri should do with their uterus will always be ironic to me. And I can see Primeagen now when I think about it. He said things like "...california being filled with our enemies...", "LGTBQRST" in the few podcast/streams I have watched.
lproven | 16 hours ago
That was not enough to go on, so I Googled.
Basically, he seems to be an American Christian? Honestly, those of us in the rest of the world are more or less forced to deal with very weird American religions and weirdly religious people. From Pat Gelsinger right on down.
A huge amount of tech came out of Utah: Novell, WordPerfect, Caldera (before they went mad, true Linux pioneers), and more. Some of it was great tech, and basically all created by extremely weird religious cultists.
Once I learned that wearing one of my several atheist T-shirts, or my several atheist laptop stickers -- which I think are funny -- could get me lynched on the street in much of the States, my urge to even visit the place for very long faded.
munificent | 16 hours ago
I grew up in the deep South surrounded by a lot of religious conservatism. You are not going to get lynched for having an atheist T-shirt or sticker. Always remember that the picture you see of the world on the Internet is highly distorted because the signals that get amplified are the intesting ones, not the representative ones. Representative reality is boring so disappears on the web. Most people are fine.
Sanity | 13 minutes ago
I talked with a guy who was afraid to visit Scandinavia because he had heard that we have wolves, bears and poisonous snakes in our forests.
kaig | 12 hours ago
Roman Catholicism being a weird American religion is news to me! Maybe the papal chair rests in Rome, Georgia :)
I don't think you would get attacked for having an atheist laptop sticker or shirt in any of the states. I'm not sure where you learned that, but I don't think it's true.
moltonel | an hour ago
People can practice the same religion in very different ways, and US-Americans certainly seem more intense in their religious approach than Italians or any European. Part of that view is internet-distorted, but that's true of other countries too.
Also, parent didn't specify roman catholicism. Christianity has many branches, with some of the more unusual ones rooted in the USA.
hoistbypetard | 11 hours ago
He is loudly and stridently Roman Catholic. He's also US American, and Roman Catholics are Christian, so you're not wrong. But conservative American Roman Catholics do generally read a bit differently than conservative Americans of more homegrown sects, and often strongly dislike each other. So I'd say "Basically, he seems to be an American Christian" isn't really communicative, even if it's strictly accurate.
Americans of both stripes do frequently (very strongly) agree on what people without a uterus should get to dictate about what people with a uterus get to do, though.
zem | 12 hours ago
I would use a much stronger word than "ironic" there!
hoistbypetard | 18 hours ago
And it'll be a cabin in the woods with no radios and no telecommunications wires.
lproven | 18 hours ago
"You say that like it's a bad thing."
Honestly, give me a maxed-out Acorn Archimedes or something, a pile of books and media, and only a dial-up modem, and I might be really quite happy.
hoistbypetard | 5 hours ago
I didn't mean to imply it'd be a bad thing ;-)
Some of my best work has happened by repairing to a very offline space for a while, and then only coming back online very consciously, over a low bandwidth connection. My old PC might hail from a little before 1987, but that's certainly not a load-bearing distinction. Going offline and building a thing is fun.
jamesgecko | 20 hours ago
Probably referencing the Normalized Fascism in Open Source post from last week.
hoistbypetard | 19 hours ago
Here's a description and a list: https://git.sr.ht/~rabbits/fashware
pbronez | 17 hours ago
Apple, Microsoft, and Intel? I get it, but asserting Linux on ARM is the only morally acceptable computer is pretty bold.
jmiven | 17 hours ago
I don't see where it's asserted (and AMD isn't on their list), but anyway coming to terms with the facts is the first step before deciding what to do with them.
hoistbypetard | 16 hours ago
As @jmiven said, I don't see that assertion on the list. But I do agree that it's a hell of a list. I still think it's worth knowing where you're handing your money when you participate in this "industry" even if you don't feel there's a reasonable way for you to opt out. Apple, Dell and Framework are all there, and Lenovo has other issues. My life situation means that I should use a laptop, generally. This listing (plus Lenovo) doesn't leave me room to feel good about buying a new one, but I'm still glad to know what I'm buying.
pbronez | 12 hours ago
Maybe an MNT Reform?
hoistbypetard | 12 hours ago
Yeah, that's a very good candidate in terms of my values. I don't believe that it gets me particularly close to where my 2018 Lenovo ThinkPad did in terms of performance, though :-(. And I'm sure it doesn't stand up well to a 2021 M1 macbook pro on that front.
gnafuthegreat | 11 hours ago
I maintain that the only ethical choice is to buy used.
hoistbypetard | 10 hours ago
If you and I could sit down across a table with the beverages of our choice (mmm espresso) and have a lively discussion about this, I think we'd be in near complete agreement that it's ethically better to buy used. I am not sure I'd quite get to "the only ethical choice" though.
gnafuthegreat | 7 hours ago
Yeah, I went back and forth with how I wanted to say that and overall I think "only" was too strong. Generally though, I think we need to prioritize buying used (especially with things like laptops) for so many reasons. Until every fully functional device is being utilized or properly recycled (and not just thrown away or in a drawer), is it really okay to go out and buy a new one? If the concern is sustainability, isn't reuse the most sustainable choice after simply doing without? Unfortunately, some categories like smartphones make it difficult to do this while remaining secure on the Internet; this is why proprietary software is a scourge on the earth.
I still buy some things new, of course, though in a lot of cases it's because there's some sale that puts a new one at a near-used price or because I genuinely can't find a used item that does what I need.
A specific case is one from last year: I was able to buy a brand new EV that did everything I wanted ("need" is a funny word) for less than any comparable used EV, and buying a used combustion-powered vehicle would have been far worse environmentally and economically long-term. There was also a potential social benefit in signalling how important electrification is to me. In a situation like that, where there is an enormous shift in the way things are done, I concede that buying new can be more ethical than buying used.
EDIT: I do like a good espresso.
hoistbypetard | 6 hours ago
My suspicion was correct; we pretty much agree. If I wanted to get to "only" I'd say that the only ethical choice is to evaluate used options before buying new.
Proprietary software and glued-in batteries are both a scourge, IMO. I'd say that almost every piece of computing equipment that I've sent for recycling rather than just reusing it in a different capacity, over the past 15 years, was due to a battery I couldn't either work around or replace. And the rest were proprietary software that I wasn't willing to work around because of those batteries...
bityard | 10 hours ago
Hmm, it seems that "guilt by association" is how the list works. If that is the case, it is missing:
kreeft | 16 hours ago
It's worth looking at previous times Ladybird was posted here as well, there's a lot of discussion that tends to elaborate on what a lot of these links are already saying to help paint a picture. I honestly find it terrifying how this type of thing is creeping in, even if it is just in the form of showing support for a project.
[OP] spikewall | 18 hours ago
its worthy of recognition, the amount of mental gymnastics some people go through in order to draw parallels between this project or its maintainers and fascist ideologies
adrien | 11 hours ago
There are countless people whom ideologies and beliefs I am unaware of.
A few people make these known however, sometimes in very clear and sometimes eruptive ways. Andreas Kling is one of these people and that's not a recent thing with him. Something like saying you're not being aligned with diversity politics at Apple years ago is a pretty soft sentence from a language point of view. But feeling the need to mention it when discussing about leaving Apple or something like that means that he's actually obsessed about it, and it perspires everywhere. Non-obsessed people would simply say the atmosphere at $company didn't suit it and they chose to leave, nothing more.
Really, everybody's aware of the opinions and beliefs of these people because they've stated them out loud, sometimes while discussing about the software projects.
[OP] spikewall | 3 hours ago
thank you for illustrating my point.
Corbin | 18 hours ago
Previously, on Awful, Ladybird made the list of "fashtech, vol. 1":
the-lazy-guy | 11 hours ago
This statement has multiple factual errors. Expect nothing less from people loving calling others fascists.
xnacly | 20 hours ago
I am still disappointed I can not contribute to ladybird anymore since its closed to contributions
moltonel | 14 hours ago
Sounds like an opportunity to switch your contributions to Servo 😉
xnacly | 11 hours ago
They are using spidermonkey and I have no clue about or desire to work with c++; otherwise, yes, good suggestion
moltonel | 11 hours ago
You don't have to touch any Spidermonkey or C++ code, Servo itself is pure Rust.
PuercoPop | 11 hours ago
Not sure what you mean by 'pure' rust. Normally pure $LANG means not using FFI to another language. As the OP mentioned the JS engine Servo uses is written in C++. The bindings are part of the Servo project and an ongoing effort fwir.
moltonel | an hour ago
We can argue about what "itself" meant here, but that seems a bit pedantic. I know the bindings to Spidermonkey are not trivial (Servo devs have been working on them lately), but Spidermonkey is still a separate project, not part of Servo proper.
Excluding tests (which are a large chunk of html and js), the servo repo is 500k lines of Rust, 50k of python tooling, some html/js for ui, some Kotlin for Android, and zero C++. So yes, it's not "pure Rust", but it's as close as a project of this size could be.
gnafuthegreat | 10 hours ago
Even so, surely you could contribute to Servo without touching SpiderMonkey or C++.
[OP] spikewall | 19 hours ago
if opening a pr is the only way you can imagine contributing to an open source project, then you are right. if you want you can pretty much do it the same way anyone can to most of the bsds - through project maintainers.
timschumi | 8 hours ago
The Ladybird maintainers have gone on record before, essentially saying that suggesting code changes to maintainers in any shape or form is considered in violation of the "no community code contributions" rule.
ag | 5 hours ago
Incredible progress! Keep going strong, can't wait to try the alpha! Still waiting for the awesome YouTube video for August!