Yeah sure, it's on the open Internet, but then again, the capitalists could also actually adhere to the licensing terms of the free software they're hoovering up and all that. These are the same people who want to enforce all kinds of EULAs against the commons, employing measures such as DRM to protect their "intellectual property", so why is it suddenly okay to not comply with IP when it's them doing the infringement?

And that's just with software, but this also affects other creative endeavours. Also the individual HN user's 132 TB Plex server doesn't suck up ludicrous amounts of resources from the commons.

And there's of course also Sinclair's law, so even people who should know better might be either willingly ignorant or just not care if it means that they can maintain their quality of life, moral bankruptcy be damned. Similar arguments can be raised for example with the anthropogenic climate catastrophe or other abhorrent phenomena where there's a big chasm in the knowledge between laymen vs experts.

It is exceedingly difficult to convince someone that something is a problem unless said problem is staring the person in the face.

Besides, I'm sure many people would look at your Scheme snippet and argue that it's not really about indentation as much as alignment of the subforms, because in a Lisp those two things are basically equivalent, and that the distinction between indentation and alignment is mostly a thing for the curly-brace or otherwise ALGOL-esque languages like Pascal or in this case Python. And in those cases the use of "tabs for indentation, spaces for alignment" is fairly popular although I don't frankly know if many editors actually support that.

I do however think that this whole discussion of spaces Vs tabs is pretty asinine and mostly just stems from people just wanting to align code text visually across lines. It's the same way people insist on monospaced fonts even though one could easily make the argument that proportional fonts are easier to read. Oh well, even I'm not _that_ deprived.

Sure, it'd make all the lawyer types nervous for obvious reasons, but that's why you'd also need to be comfortable with the evil deed. But you're correct that the evil plagiarism machine makes it way easier.

And once you get there, you're no longer a trade union. Or a trading block, which is probably the better word since a trade union already means something else.

And in return one gets a saner programming language than the Nix language.

It's one thing for an LLM to get things wrong. This case is not that though. And if big tech can't make sure that their models don't libel companies and individuals then good riddance. Whatever diminutive economic advantage one can get from "competitive LLMs" probably isn't worth it anyway, especially with all of the other disadvantages of these "competitive LLMs" compounding on our societies and the planet, as the resource usage of the data centres necessary to run and train them exacerbate the ongoing climate crisis.

As for not wanting to force companies to release only "safe-for-children products", I do actually agree. However I consider it to be a matter of degree, and in this case for example, I think that if nothing else, Google should say the very least make the disclaimer a bit more prominent and maybe tweak the model so that it's not quite as confident in its claims in the AI Overview.

Do you really want to go there? That everything in the world would have a literal "caveat emptor" attached to it?

Now, land value taxes obviously have their place in the gamut of different taxes to levy, so I don't wish to badmouth them too much. But as a consumption tax, VAT also does have its place. Sure, they are absolutely regressive, but this also helps them to act more like Pigovian taxes, since they can be used to make certain categories of goods and services more expensive. And so if one can afford to pay the value of the negative externalities, why not. And hopefully it can then steer people towards better choices.

Would such legislation be perfect for dealing with these kinds of things? Of course not, but it would be better.

Does it actually matter? And if so, why?

> You can try to distract and do as much mental gymnastics as you want but everyone rational can clearly see that one thing is doing politics for software (free drivers, open source, no DRM, …) and the other is about virtue signaling about subjects that are completely unrelated.

Okay, but you would still have to answer a really important question. Why does it matter?

Let's say that it's virtue signalling, for the sake of the argument (although people tend to not know what virtue signalling actually is, and just claim any public acknowledgement of one's values as such, which is incorrect).

So, why does one being virtue signalling and the other not being such actually matter? Does it actually change the messaging in any meaningful way? Does it make it less legitimate or whatever?

> Btw, feel free to label me however you want (others did already), which shows that they have no arguments and resort to pidgeonholeing and name calling.

I wasn't going to, but thank you for the invitation!

You can disagree with the politics in question, but to say that FLOSS has no room for politics is itself a political position, leading you to a paradox!

Introducing a non-binary mascot for KDE is no more or less political than for example Richard Stallman demanding that printer drivers should be free, back in the 1980s. And same way the use and preference of the term "open source" over "free software" -- or vice versa -- is also very political because it depends on if one wants to go with the described values or not necessarily want to stand behind them.

The Free software community involves people, and with people come shared values and politics. That's kinda what "community" implies. And if we really want to go into it, given the circumstances of the invention of things like computers, the Internet, etc. it'd be very erroneous to asset that software in general has ever been value-free or non-political. Computing artillery trajectories is political just the same way as promotion of LGBTQ+ people, even if people get more upset about the latter rather than the more kinetic kinds of politics implied by howitzers et al.

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