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One Guy Ruined Hacktoberfest 2020

joel.net

411–420 of 511 posts

Re: One Guy Ruined Hacktoberfest 2020

#411

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why do people equate capitalism with "Fuck everyone, get money"? Sure, the people who have the majority of the world's wealth may be unsavory, ruthless folks, but let's not toss the baby out with the bathwater. Capitalism is the alternative to state-controlled commerce. If you believe in (here we go with the cringe term) liberty, then you cannot on-premise agree with an economic system that isn't capitalism. (Whether…

Because people equate capitalism with America, and "fuck everyone, get money" is literally required by law there. In 1919 Henry Ford was sued by minority share holders because he wanted to increase wages. "The Michigan Supreme Court held that Henry Ford could not lower consumer prices and raise employee salaries." Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dodge_v._Ford_Motor_Co . If you want to claim that America reached…

I will absolutely agree that America's economic system is nothing close to resembling capitalism.

I view capitalism the same way I view communism -- both are bleeding-heart idealism that never works out in practice.

But hey, at least on an individual/personal level you can pick that hill to die on, however futile it may be.

Re: One Guy Ruined Hacktoberfest 2020

#412

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe this will be interesting: https://youtu.be/8KQcm0Mi5To I found it interesting at least :)

huh well i came into that very dubious, but that was actually quite interesting and i listened to every word. i will hand it to religion that they have had a fairly consistent answer to the post-modernism / relativism / post-truth-iness and its attendant ugliness in present times-- the same answer as before any of those things even existed, in fact. xD

I agree! Glad you enjoyed, have a great day

Re: One Guy Ruined Hacktoberfest 2020

#413
post #306

As an Indian, I think here some points I think western world needs to know about India. * "Gaming the system" to get your desired outcome is widely accepted in Indian society. Especially if it doesn't involve breaking any laws (not ethics). Even in many cases Gaming the system by breaking the law is considered OK as long as one doesn't get caught doing it. (In fact this might be the only way to come up in politics in…

"Gaming the system" is also a cultural thing in Greece. In fact, it's so expected that you are perceived to be either out of the loop or a fool for not going the extra mile. I broke friendships with people who claimed that "it's all subjective at the end of the day" whenever I was raising ethical/moral concerns. Imagine not being able to provide a reasonable argument to justify your actions, beyond of "because I'm al…

I'm Greek too (γειάα) but live in the UK. It's a cultural thing here, too. Just imagine everyone around you constantly trying to pinch every last penny off your purse, in any way they can think of.

Or, look at the way the Brexit campaign convinced half of the UK citizens to vote for Brexit with unsubstantiated claims like "350 million to the NHS" or "Millions of migrants from Turkey coming over" etc.

In general, I think both OP and you are making the same mistake: assuming that because we're citizens of once or currently very poor countries, we're doing something different than the more affluent countries, or are somehow backwards, more corrupt, etc.

Far as I can tell, rich countries are rich because they're better at this game of taking as much as they can from everyone they can anyway they can, than we are.

Just think of who is associated with "move fast and break stuff". Is it an Indian startup? A Greek startup?

Re: One Guy Ruined Hacktoberfest 2020

#414

As an Indian, I think here some points I think western world needs to know about India. * "Gaming the system" to get your desired outcome is widely accepted in Indian society. Especially if it doesn't involve breaking any laws (not ethics). Even in many cases Gaming the system by breaking the law is considered OK as long as one doesn't get caught doing it. (In fact this might be the only way to come up in politics in…

This has less to do with India, and more about what happens when there’s no prior culture of open source, to balance against the willingness to “hustle”. The fact that a lot of these PRs might originate in India is only relevant insofar as there are a lot of people willing to hustle, and don’t have much open source experience. Chances are that they are oblivious to what happens on the other side of the table, and open source projects are abstract entities (which might as well be run by Github, or some other bureaucracy!) A useful reminder that the celebrated “hustle” is susceptible to the unintended consequences of Goodhart’s law.

If this was Sean Parker with Napster or Zuck with early Facebook, we’d be celebrating it.

(For all those who advocate for growth hacking techniques, or annoying ads, this is exactly how scummy most such techniques / dark patterns feel to users. I don’t think that is geographically localized in any way.)

Re: One Guy Ruined Hacktoberfest 2020

#415

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wouldn't say it's an Indian only phenomenon, plenty of that everywhere

Sure, but you always have to ask, to what degree? If it is more prevalent than in other societies then you can definitely call it a phenomenon.

It's pretty well correlated to wealth inequality. The more wealthy cheaters there are, the more the masses are pro-cheating for themselves.

Re: One Guy Ruined Hacktoberfest 2020

#416

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why do people equate capitalism with "Fuck everyone, get money"? Sure, the people who have the majority of the world's wealth may be unsavory, ruthless folks, but let's not toss the baby out with the bathwater. Capitalism is the alternative to state-controlled commerce. If you believe in (here we go with the cringe term) liberty, then you cannot on-premise agree with an economic system that isn't capitalism. (Whether…

Because people equate capitalism with America, and "fuck everyone, get money" is literally required by law there. In 1919 Henry Ford was sued by minority share holders because he wanted to increase wages. "The Michigan Supreme Court held that Henry Ford could not lower consumer prices and raise employee salaries." Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dodge_v._Ford_Motor_Co . If you want to claim that America reached…

That's a poor reading of that Wikipedia page, it says pretty much the opposite of what you have written.

Anyway, there is an old quotation attributed to Horace (about 65 BC):

Be but great, With praise or infamy—leave that to Fate; Get Place and Wealth, if possible with grace; If not, by any means get Wealth and Place;

That's an English translation from Alexander Pope, somewhere in the 1700s. Maybe he made it up.

Either way, you can't blame America.

Re: One Guy Ruined Hacktoberfest 2020

#417
post #284

Earlier quoted context omitted.

On the other hand, I was told by boost project that my one line fix for a typo was "waste of maintainer time", so it seems to vary on per-project basis :)

Yeah, some maintainers are friendlier then others, and some seem to care more about their precious time then about encouraging people to make (legitimate) contributions unfortunately...

Transaction costs exist.

Re: One Guy Ruined Hacktoberfest 2020

#418
post #381

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'll see your destruction and I'll raise you externalization . Yes, this behaviour is rampant throughout Western society, it's pretty much embraced by capitalism. It's still "who cares about $x, as long as I can get my $y". It doesn't really change the argument much if $x is open source and $y is a free t-shirt, or $x is the habitat of these creatures and $y is gallons of oil. Don't really see how postmodernism fits…

Why do people equate capitalism with "Fuck everyone, get money"? Sure, the people who have the majority of the world's wealth may be unsavory, ruthless folks, but let's not toss the baby out with the bathwater. Capitalism is the alternative to state-controlled commerce. If you believe in (here we go with the cringe term) liberty, then you cannot on-premise agree with an economic system that isn't capitalism. (Whether…

Well, you can't very well spark a fire that burns down a whole city and then turn around and say you can't blame the sparks because they're not really dangerous, it's only a conflagration that's really dangerous. Capitalism is the system that enables the kind of people you call twisted and unethical to do their twisted and unethical things and "amass hugely disproportional wealth". And also the system that everyone else accepts because they hope that, one day, they'll have the "hugely disproportional wealth" and be able to do twisted unethical things, themselves. Or, am I wrong? Did Adam Smith say that capital should be equally distributed, or something similar?

Re: One Guy Ruined Hacktoberfest 2020

#419

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The exactly same goes for Brazil. Am I seeing a pattern here, i.e. countries that are supposed to be great but really aren't?

That could describe any country. Certainly Greece, India and Brazil wouldn't make it to the top of my list of countries I'd expect to see described that way.

Yes i think Nigeria should come first in terms of those behaviors

Re: One Guy Ruined Hacktoberfest 2020

#420
post #216

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can understand Hindi well enough to skim the video, which I just did. The impression I got was that this person was an enthusiastic YouTuber with somewhat good intentions: “get free swag”, “learn how to open a pull request which you’ll need to know how to do”, “if your pull request is garbage it’ll get rejected and you won’t get credit”. The issue was that he picked some random repository and made a useless change…

As far as I can tell his video only did damage: it taught people to spam open source projects, created a lot of bad blood, probably made open source maintainers more suspicious of new contributors, and gave a large number of potential contributors a bad experience. It could have been so much better if he'd actually put in the effort to create a real, meaningful pull request. Show how to clone the project, run it, fix…

Even worse, since he's speaking Hindi, his campaign rallied Indians into a massive cloud of bad behavior and made thousands of GitHub community members a little more prejudices against Indians in the future. Even if he meant well and didn't profit at all, he hurt the people he tried to help
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