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The tools I love are made by awful people

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Re: The tools I love are made by awful people

#161

Post by thefz »

mrguyorama wrote: post #148
thefz wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The new Macbooks have amazing hardware Hm. You can't really repair or upgrade them, so you don't own the hardware at all. That's far from amazing.

People who insist Apple makes good hardware are falling for marketing. Apple historically has had constant engineering poor choices and bad designs and outright flaws that they just never acknowledge, and for some reason people take that as "good". Back in the day, Apple laptops used to cook and kill themselves with poor GPU heat management. Several versions of macbooks shortened a display cable such that it would de…

> Several versions of macbooks shortened a display cable such that it would degrade over time because it simply wasn't up to task, and eventually your screen would be borked and have absolutely ungoogleable issues (this happened to me)

Had this happen to a 17 inch PPC, red line in the middle of the display then completely dead. Had to be hooked to an ext monitor. Never knew i it was a cable or inverter thing.

Re: The tools I love are made by awful people

#162

Post by Karrot_Kream »

s1artibartfast wrote: post #102
tdb7893 wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your purchasing decisions are one of the more significant ways you impact the world and it makes sense people want to be cognizant of how they are effecting other people. Though I recognize depending on people's mental health it can be stressful to think about and if you can't then it's okay, one of my friends in particular was worrying about what she was buying to the point where it was a significant source of stres…

It makes sense if consumerism is your only connection to human society. It is a form of trained helplessness to fixate perpetually on consumption. If someone wants to do good in the world, go out and do it. help someone for real. I think it is lack of real connection that leads people to navel gaze about the third order consequences of their clothes or software. I think this substack [1] summed it up perfectly: >I wa…

IMO you're pretty right on this front. A lot of the folks I see most concerned about consumption are the folks who have the hardest time engaging offline. I suspect a lot of these folks feel anxiety in interacting with a physical community and find consumption to be one of their main connections to the world around them.

Re: The tools I love are made by awful people

#163

Post by mrguyorama »

thefz wrote: post #161
mrguyorama wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People who insist Apple makes good hardware are falling for marketing. Apple historically has had constant engineering poor choices and bad designs and outright flaws that they just never acknowledge, and for some reason people take that as "good". Back in the day, Apple laptops used to cook and kill themselves with poor GPU heat management. Several versions of macbooks shortened a display cable such that it would de…

> Several versions of macbooks shortened a display cable such that it would degrade over time because it simply wasn't up to task, and eventually your screen would be borked and have absolutely ungoogleable issues (this happened to me) Had this happen to a 17 inch PPC, red line in the middle of the display then completely dead. Had to be hooked to an ext monitor. Never knew i it was a cable or inverter thing.

I was referring to an issue with 2015 era macbooks, so you experienced something different.

Re: The tools I love are made by awful people

#164

Post by ModernMech »

imgabe wrote: post #146
ranger_danger wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Buying or not buying a Tesla is very unlikely to influence Elon at all. But it can certainly influence other people's perception of you... I think what we all have to decide though is how much that matters to us, should we decide to buy one anyway. > Do you also need to individually vet every one of their opinions before you enrich them by buying a Tesla? I think most people's negative image of a company/project te…

> But it can certainly influence other people's perception of you... I think what we all have to decide though is how much that matters to us, should we decide to buy one anyway. Yes, this is a concern, and it's a direct result of the phenomenon I'm talking about. There are violent, stupid people who will attack you because they think that buying a product means you endorse every political opinion every person who ma…

I agree with you, up until the point that CEO is a verified Nazi. If you see a man give multiple Nazi salutes behind the presidential seal, and your response to that is to hand over your money to him, are you a good or even neutral person? Not in my eyes, sorry. We have to have some standards in this society. Look around, fascism is flourishing. What you are doing now is what you would have been doing as a German in the 1930s.

Re: The tools I love are made by awful people

#165

Post by ModernMech »

_DeadFred_ wrote: post #156
ryandrake wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This individualistic attitude is how we got to our current situation, and why we are perpetually stuck here. Everyone in any position of corporate power is a psychopath, because the system will replace them if they are not. Every purchase you make has the downstream effect of encouraging whoever you bought it from to continue doing what they are doing. And, what everyone is doing is "throwing everything possible (mor…

Becoming only consumers is how we got here. We are no longer citizens, no longer members of religion, no longer anything but consumers. Hiker/biker/crafter/music maker...so much around the scene is consumption. So all we see is consumption. To the point that making the tiniest movement in consumption is the only impact we can possibly imagine. Every good company sells out in the end. You aren't making a difference, y…

There are these child-sized shopping carts at the grocery near me with a flag on them that says "customer in training", and it's one of the sickest most obscene thing I can think of. Because it's true, we train our children to be good consumers better than we train them to be good citizens. And it shows.

Re: The tools I love are made by awful people

#166

Post by ModernMech »

imgabe wrote: post #72
merouan wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hmm, this doesn't track with history. Boycotts, and more generally collective economic action (strikes, etc), are an incredibly powerful form of protest. People have shaped the world through refusing to buy from oppressive forces - case in point, the boycotts of South Africa during apartheid successfully pressured South Africa out of apartheid. We got our collective rights as workers (40 hour work days, etc) through…

Boycotts are a different thing. A successful boycott targets a specific company about a specific issue that that company has the ability to change. When the company changes the thing, the boycott ends. The bus boycotts in the US Civil Rights movement are a good example. "Hey bus company, we're going to stop riding your buses until you end your racist seating policies". It's clear what they wanted to happen, and it wa…

The specific boycott is against Tesla, and the specific issue is Elon Musk's wealth. The objective is to bankrupt him by bankrupting Tesla until Musk is gone. The only acceptable future Tesla has is a future without any financial ties to Musk.

> There is zero chance of anything happening in the world because of this.

So far we've accomplished a 71% drop in profits, and we aren't letting up. This has caused him to turn tail from DOGE and to cry on his earnings call about it. We are having an impact, and it is impacting Musk's and Tesla's behavior.

Re: The tools I love are made by awful people

#167

Post by geoka9 »

mrguyorama wrote: post #148
thefz wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The new Macbooks have amazing hardware Hm. You can't really repair or upgrade them, so you don't own the hardware at all. That's far from amazing.

People who insist Apple makes good hardware are falling for marketing. Apple historically has had constant engineering poor choices and bad designs and outright flaws that they just never acknowledge, and for some reason people take that as "good". Back in the day, Apple laptops used to cook and kill themselves with poor GPU heat management. Several versions of macbooks shortened a display cable such that it would de…

I can't comment on the internals (and I actually don't like Apple and their software), but comparing my TP X1 Yoga (basically Lenovo's top of the line) with my partner's new Macbook, the build of the latter is noticeably more tight, with barely noticeable seams where the metal panels come together. The Thinkpad's build is pretty good too and I'm fine with it, but I just can't help noticing the build quality of the Macbook.

Re: The tools I love are made by awful people

#168

Post by adastra22 »

akho wrote: post #138
adastra22 wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, make it so they get more money by being better citizens. That’s the only way it will ever work. I fail to see the sarcasm here.

In perfectly competitive markets noone makes a profit. As a result, capital is only allocated to imperfect markets, defined through various inefficiences: barriers to entry (monopolistic practices), information asymmetries (cheating), … If you regulate away bad practices, capital will flow elsewhere. The level of equity investment in IT (and the valuations) is largely due to bad practices; fixing that will take away…

> In perfectly competitive markets noone makes a profit

Bit of an aside, but this is not true btw. Even in situations which most closely approximate what you describe, there is a positive, nonzero floor to profit taking. This is typically explained as the opportunity cost of allocating money, which is not just the known alternative investments you are giving up, but the unknown-unknown risks. Among certain schools of political economics, it is also taught that this is a built-in action bias towards holders of money. Essentially, the rich get richer (quantified).

Re: The tools I love are made by awful people

#169

Post by tim333 »

>...made by awful people..mac...

I think awful people is a bit unfair to the folks at Apple. They are probably much like other people, maybe a bit nicer judging by my years of using macs.

Large corporations will never be perfect but not much is. At least they are not Comcast or HP.

Re: The tools I love are made by awful people

#170

Post by fragmede »

bustling-noose wrote: post #76
suprfsat wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

With the funds raised everyone can be assigned a Linux expert to sit next to them.

With the kind of funds raised by AI companies there should be 10 different ones sitting next to me competing with each other.

I have enough competing voices inside my head, I don't need the ones outside of it to have their own competition as well.
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