i don’t know much about stallman; but little i do know makes me inclined to agree with this. lol

i didn’t know that he was behind it; the licensing details are confusing to me as all legalese is.

I would work in a supermarket

that’s what i’m doing in spirit. lol

it’s only in spirit because i lucked out and found someone with a need for my skills but at a SIGNIFICANT pay cut and it’s a non-profit organization that actually helps humanity so i feel that it’s slightly better than a supermarket for me.

it’s one of the several other examples that i pulled out the thin air and probably not the most appropriate in helping me make my point.

they won’t even talk to me w/o one; how do you not?

i think the bigger question is why we rely on honor systems when history proves that corporations don’t have any.

And then of course, there should be ways to make money in Free / Libre to convince those who care only about how big their pockets are. Donations do not cut it. They are good, but they feel pathetic in comparison to what a proprietary alternative makes. There should be a way to make money without restricting freedom.

they make that money because our system restricts that freedom and it’s intentional.

ever since i became a software developer, my work has been 100% based off of extending the capabilities of open source projects beyond their base capabilities that’s available to the public. (ie turning it from a hobby project into enterprise worthy product). my task masters make billions of dollars off of the efforts of those volunteers who will never see a dime or even be aware of the details needed to get their fair share that they rightly deserve. the legal “protections” put in place to help open source projects like gnu or copy-left licenses is so easily curtailed that my management and senior engineers literally laugh at it sometimes when deciding which scraps are useless enough not to make money for the company and then report it back to comply with the copy-left. those things that they report back are MINUSCULE compared to what they actually have and they milk it to look like they’re actually compliant.

the people who are aware of this fact are, like me, are trapped into legally binding non-disclosure agreements resulting in thousands of us who are aware that we’re profiting off the blood, sweat, and tears of people like you and our system assures us that our livelihoods & freedom will be permanently altered in some of the worst ways possible if we made you aware of exactly how we profited. this is one of those evils that i felt i could no longer keep doing, which is one the core reason why i want to stop doing this.

like you, i don’t think that they’re bad people. it’s simply that your environment determines your actions and these people are so placed that they’re disconnected from the impacts of what their actions are having on humanity because of those ridiculously high salaries; this encourages their worst, material impulses and makes them believe that anyone doing what i’m doing is simply a malcontent or a shitty developer. it’s a open secret in my industry that a lot of people do what i’m doing and the most privileged among us will sometimes derisively use groupthink “common sense” stereotypes to attack the person doing it; it’s so bad that most who do it have learned to say that they want a “change” or to “give back” to help them keep the door open should they decide to ever return.

HRIS sellers are also adding them as value added bonus to help companies weed out “undesirable” people.

It’s hard to imagine that someone has deeper pockets than the richest man in the world

i do something like this on firefox and the container tabs feature.

i create a set of container tabs for websites that do tracking with cookies and only visit that website using its dedicated container so that it looks like i ONLY use my browser to go to ONLY go to that one website from the trackers perspective.

i also started using privacy badger and ghostery to give the tracker junk information to make all the data harvesting useless; but i don’t know if it works yet.

… libertarians locally so I am interestingly enough working with ML’s.

for a moment there i couldn’t tell if ml stood for marxist/leninist like it in for lemmy.ml or if it mean machine learning. lol

and absolutely stay away FAR away from conversations about politics. my experience has taught me that highly placed/status-ed software engineers tend to be conservative (probably because of the money) and are perpetually on the hunt for dissident views to “protect” their “people” from “threats” and they will use their position to put you on a leash if they think you don’t fit in.

i’m reminded of it each time i see the duct tape covering the camera of my work laptop. lol

i had the same thought since i sometimes wonder “why bother” when i know that things like prism gave them everything they wanted 15 years ago.

why am i more disquieted by the fact that trump has a good quality in ending the war than the prospect of it escalating into nuclear war?

i’ll be starting a new union job in a couple of months and the pension plan is the biggest reason why i was willing to take a 56% paycut to do it and reading the article makes me fear that it too will pass away with my new union since they’ve given so much ground in the last 10 years.

i think it’s crazy high salaries; it insulates them from the problems that the rest of us have have to deal with in our lives.

i first noticed it around the tail end of the earlier “IT half” of my career when my payrate started to push up against six figures; now at over 20 years as a software engineering that’s solidly past that boundary (like most well connected software engineers are); the opinions/outlooks/expectations of my colleagues have become so toxic to me that i’ve decided to go back to IT permanently.

also: the work seemed to get more and more evil as i progressed in the software engineering half of my career. i’m convinced my current gig is a net detriment to humanity and society like all my software engineering gigs were and i’ll be taking a 56% pay cut to avoid the that profit-seeking-evil in a non-profit organization that teaches people who can’t afford to dedicate their lives to a college degree like a 19 year old from the suburbs can do.

a big part of me is sad that i will never become rich like my current colleagues; but i think that my psychological well being matters more and it’s a union job so there are other perks that help compensate for it.

i hope that they do sell off chrome just to keep firefox around a little bit longer.

… Politicians either don’t understand or don’t want to understand that once an encryption is broken, it is equivalent to there being no encryption in the first place. And their ignorance… And I truly want to believe that that’s their ignorance. It causes such disproportional oppression, that I am stupefied that not enough people scream about it.

Still there is a possibility that it is not ignorance. There is a possibility that it is just a political stunt. A sort of red herring, to mislead you into not asking the questions of proportionality. And that they are actually just trying to take control over us all.

the politicians are merely mouth pieces and useful idiots to enable such draconian measures and the author is right in believing that it’s not all merely ignorance.

my own experience as as software engineer tells me that the most gifted engineers are gung-ho about these measures because it appeals to their intellectual curiosity and the affects upon humanity for such intellectual pursuits doesn’t enter into the equation at all; even the ones who are sympathetic to leftists causes don’t care so long as their mortgages are paid and they can afford to put their children into the best schools.

expect no help from the tech bros and tech lefty’s alike.

it also happened a lot before operation wetback.

not yet and that’s why the black market and the dark web exist.

it’s impossible for the police’s human eyes to detect that your glasses or your makeup is capable of reflecting the light that face recognition needs to identify you; at least for now.