"Luddites were not opposed to the use of machines per se (many were skilled operators in the textile industry); they attacked manufacturers who were trying to circumvent standard labour practices of the time".

How is that meaningfully different than what I wrote?

Otherwise it would be like claiming that an industrial union is opposed to people working in factories by pointing to a strike action and concluding they members just want to stand around outside the factory instead of work.

Recall that my comment is in response to "it is economically infeasible for me to be a luddite".

If that means something like "infeasible for me to oppose bad labor practices" then collective action is the typical response to bad labor practices.

If that means something like "infeasible for me to destroy the employer's use of AI" then I think that's mistaking what Luddites did as being the Luddite goal.

The job value of an SWE is to maximize that profit. It doesn't matter if the product is better to use, faster, with more features users like - that's an early 20th century model of value production.

What matters is how much money the company can extract from its customers, and how little it can pay its employees. Use dark patterns, increase lock-in, and switch to a rental system with recurrent payments. Minimize employee benefits, require broad non-compete agreements, have long vesting periods and lay people off before its reached, or simply fire them and order the others to pick up the slack using AI.

If you want to write software meant to please the user, do that for fun in your spare time -- though remember that your employer still owns your IP, so it's not like you can create a market competitor.

Alas, the above was meant in sarcasm but is all too true.

The Luddites were not opposed to machines. They were opposed to bad labor practices, with machine-breaking as way of applying pressure on employers.

We got close to nuclear war several times (thank you Stanislav Petrov!). This AI concern seems small potatoes to anyone who had nightmares from Threads, The Day After, or (a generation earlier) On the Beach.

Plus, any effort to really address climate warning will necessarily prohibit large fossil fuel consumption, so lets just fix global warming, through the same international collaboration we did to prevent global warming and to repair at least some of the ozone hole damage caused by CFCs.

I found this line particularly poignant: "Torn between their values and their pragmatism, the desire to improve themselves and the fear of being left behind, they’re arguing with each other about AI even more than the faculty are."

That text points to the discussion topic, dated 19 Aug 2026, when the policy was not yet decided and in flux.

The final policy is "original content written with or which facilitates the use of LLMs (large language models) or other generative AI technologies", with interpretation at https://sourcehut.org/blog/2026-08-27-tos-changes-and-llms/ posted 27 Aug 2026.

>Drew DeVault: This policy is worded carefully to allow some room for reasonable interpretation. For instance, the choice to target “original” content in the policy is intended to allow you to host mirrors of major codebases that may have more lenient LLM policies, such as the Linux kernel. An individual who contributes to a project like Linux can host their personal tree and stage patches on SourceHut, and a Linux kernel subsystem which has an internal policy on LLM use which aligns with SourceHut is welcome to host their tree, mailing lists, and so on, on our platform, without worrying about the impact of AI-assisted code in the rest of Linux. However, SourceHut would not be suitable as the upstream platform for the broader Linux project as a consequence of their liberal LLM policy.

I've used Sourceforge, Google Code, GitHub, BitBucket, and others.

Over time these added annoying ads, mandated 2FA, shut down, and dropped support for Mercurial support, as examples.

The lesson learned it that organizational interests always override your interests. Every single one is a potential trap with a grace period - and I got trapped by each and every one.

> Now imagine you were one of the people who put a crypto project on Codeberg in 2020, or used AI assistance for your SourceHut-hosted project in 2025, built years of community around it, and then saw the headline on HN. Your work didn't get banned for what it was. It got banned for what the platform silently decided to become, several years after you signed up for something else entirely.

For a specific example, I migrated to Sourcehut because BitBucket decided to drop Mercurial support, so my way of doing development "got banned", including code repos I made available for scientific research.

But I didn't cry out "censorship!" This is the way life is, if you depend on external services. If you want something different, set up a contract with them.

> What got pitched was an alternative, and thousands of people built repositories, communities, and reputations on top of that pitch in good faith.

We can see what got pitched at from https://drewdevault.com/blog/sr.ht-general-availability/

"The 500 foot view is that sr.ht is a 100% free and open source software forge, with a hosted version of the services running at sr.ht for your convenience. Unlike GitHub, which is almost entirely closed source, and Gitlab, which is mostly open source but with a proprietary premium offering, all of sr.ht is completely open source, with a copyleft license. You’re welcome to install it on your own hardware, and detailed instructions are available for those who want to do so. You can also send patches upstream, which are then integrated into the hosted version."

The primary pitch was a forge you could use sr.ht on your own hardware, with the option of running on sr.ht services. The first helps avoid the trap of using the second.

> Now I beg that GitHub fixes its issues so people stop migrating away. Because

That's what happens when you depend on a non-free forge - you have no choice but to beg them to change.

> one of the most fundamental gifts GitHub gave to the world: Not having opinions about software.

GitHub has opinions. Its AUP says you may not use GitHub to develop "software for generating unauthorized product licensing keys, or software for bypassing checks for product licensing keys, including extension of a free license beyond its trial period".

> Malware [on GitHub]? Also welcome!

Then that should have been a clue. Malware development has never been allowed on hosted sr.ht. https://web.archive.org/web/20190819052848/https://man.sr.ht... .

> Now imagine this scenario: Bob hates GitHub. Bob has a legit Crypto project on Codeberg.

Now imagine this scenario. Alice, Carol, Dave, Erin, and Frank hate cryptocurrency schemes and believe it can never be a legitimate use of their dues. All have legit projects on Codeberg, but after the organization decides to support crypto projects they decide to self-host Forgejo on their own respective hardware.

How is this better for the environment?

> Or they imply that their ban meaningfully affects projects' progress and visibility, which is literally censorship

By the definition every forge does censorship because every forge has policies which meaningfully affect projects' progress and visibility.

Also, https://xkcd.com/1357/ .

Yes, the last 50 years of post-Borkianism has resulted in an entire judicial system having a very narrow and essentially useless definition of anti-trust, far different from its original goals. That's part of the broader neo-liberal movement which started around the time of Carter, gained strength with Reagan, continued with Clinton's "triangulation" and NAFTA, and is still with us.

Yes, the League of Women Voters warned us about what you term the "two private clubs" back in 1988 when they decided to stop hosting the United States presidential debates saying that following the demands of the two parties would "perpetrate a fraud on the American voter".

Yet you seem to think I'm somehow shocked that same aged corporate Democrats who supported Obama, and who now fight tooth and nail against the democratic socialist arm of their party, are somehow in actually in favor of effective antitrust enforcement?

Your rant makes it seem like you're just easily triggered by the least bit of correction.

> I want to see a third Trump term.

Ahh, you're one of those anti-Constitution people. I remember as a kid people calling out "four more years" in support of a 3rd Reagan term, as their hero worship made them forget the lesson of FDR and the Twenty-second Amendment.

Just like those people who forget the lesson of Guiteau about a consequence of whims and bribes as a way to run a government.

What about Trump's threats after Google was hit with a 2.95 billion Euro fine from the European Commission's antitrust investigation?

From last year: "EU Trade Commissioner Maroš Šefčovič on Monday made an 11th-hour intervention to stop the European Commission from issuing a penalty against American tech giant Google for its search advertising practices, amid continued trade threats from U.S. President Donald Trump." https://www.politico.eu/article/eu-google-antitrust-decision...

Or from https://www.cnbc.com/2026/04/10/google-meta-big-tech-6-billi... "In February, Trump signed a memorandum stating the U.S. would consider tariffs to “combat digital service taxes (DSTs), fines, practices, and policies that foreign governments levy on American companies.”"

That memorandum is at https://www.whitehouse.gov/fact-sheets/2025/02/fact-sheet-pr...

How does reading up on the history change how the stated reason for this pause has nothing to do with the meritocracy issues, fraudulent H1B visas, etc. that you complained about?

Do you think those labor issues will be improved after the training is finished, and if so, why?

How does your earlier comment explain why visas based on family preference are also apparently on pause as well?

Of course if we look at the history of US immigration we can easily see how for over 150 years it was explicitly set up to support a white supremacist race-based culture, which broke down with the civil rights movement and the incoherency of "whiteness" as a legal or scientific definition (are Arabs white? Are Asian Indians white? Are Chinese immigrants in Mississippi "white"? - https://archive.org/details/mississippichine0000loew/page/n7...).

With the current reactionary administration's antipathy towards nearly all immigration, except seemingly white South Africans and Nordics, it's far easier to interpret this action as deliberately gumming up the works and causing distress, rather than some systemic beneficial labor reform like what you want.

I assume that's what you mean by reading up on how we got here?

I guess I will remain unenlightened.

If not, then using words like "rigged" and "meritocratic" as a complaint about the current system can only mean that you want no border controls.

If so, how? Every system I can think of can be rigged, and exclude people who have merit, resulting in a system which favors the rich and powerful.

It's not simply a pause on immigration by people applying for a category which requires special expertise.

The system is set up so the casino wins. You cannot, with a straight face, argue the odds are in your favor, but there are rules about how the casino works, both formal and informal.

When a casino only investigates cases where someone wins $1 million on the slots, to see if there's a fault in the system, while never investigating all the times that people lose, that's technically within the legal system, but the spirit of gambling is not being upheld, and people get upset. Just ask Katerina Bookman.

The immigration system, with the thumb firmly in favor of the interests of capital, is still based on the expectation of good faith by those running the system, as doing otherwise results in orders of magnitude more rules, or an alternate set of unspoken rules based more on vibes.

"Pausing" is a bad faith breaking of the spirit of the system.

I think SWIFT transactions are under US control.

No use of Apple, Google, Amazon, AirBnB, Uber, or other US-based services.

Eg, "Canadian judge Kimberly Prost is unable to use credit cards or access everyday services in what she calls an attack on the independence of the judiciary " - https://www.irishtimes.com/world/us/2025/12/12/its-surreal-u...

The blog is titled "Merchants of Insecurity". The word "hole" does not exist anywhere on the page, the HTML, or the HTTP headers.

Yesterday's submission used the correct title: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49433378

If a vegetarian, who became a vegetarian because of the high environmental impact of meat production, berates you for defending data center water use, would that convince you to change your mind?

What about a vegan, who also stopped flying and doesn't drive, and is organizing a protest to shut down the local golf course?

You are, I presume, arguing that companies should not have personhood.

I think any definition is going to have caveats. When does a fetus gain volition? Does someone in an irreversible permanent vegetative state lose personhood? Do apes or cetaceans have volition and thus personhood?

The Wikipedia page also points out that "volition" comes from a certain Western philosophical viewpoint, but other philosophies have a different idea of what personhood means.

In any case, "personhood" doesn't mean that all persons have equal legal rights. A 10 year old has personhood but, for example, cannot vote.

Personhood can be applied to "natural persons", like people, and "judicial persons", like companies.

Personhood can also be applied to, for example, rivers.

Ethyl lead, that is.