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Open source ‘protestware’ harms Open Source

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Re: Open source ‘protestware’ harms Open Source

#431

Post by AQuantized »

shadowgovt wrote: post #421
baryphonic wrote: post #262

To be honest, I'm annoyed by the benign protestware messages when they start to get in the way of using the software, particularly on mobile. I was looking at the isomorphic git documentation the other day, and noticed that their "#BlackLivesMatter #DefundThePolice" banner scrolls under the rest of the content, leaving this annoying gap that takes up screen real estate, especially in landscape mode on a phone.[0] Wha…

What's the point of the thin black bar we put at the top of HN periodically? It sounds like the underlying issue is insufficient testing of the UI layout with the new content, not the fact that there is new content.

There's a difference between providing information ("Someone significant to many members of this community has died recently") and providing a (arguably very superficial) signal of support for a cause dear to some of the developers.

Re: Open source ‘protestware’ harms Open Source

#432

Post by cimi_ »

relativeadv wrote: post #430
baryphonic wrote: post #262

To be honest, I'm annoyed by the benign protestware messages when they start to get in the way of using the software, particularly on mobile. I was looking at the isomorphic git documentation the other day, and noticed that their "#BlackLivesMatter #DefundThePolice" banner scrolls under the rest of the content, leaving this annoying gap that takes up screen real estate, especially in landscape mode on a phone.[0] Wha…

I agree. I really do feel for these refugees and victims of social injustice. But when it mildly irritates me by having to scroll an extra inch or two to get to what i want to see i feel like their efforts are being misdirected. It makes more sense for these issues to simply solve themselves without inconveniencing me.

Do you genuinely think these banners help with anything?

Re: Open source ‘protestware’ harms Open Source

#433

Post by [deleted] »

leaflets2 wrote: post #418
blueflow wrote: post #411

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> is more of a dog whistle ingratiating yourself with a certain crowd Genius move. Any concept that can be used to criticize you is implicitly outing me as part of your out-group. Now you can judge me not on my own merits, but on the merits of people you associate me with. And my posts can well-formulated and thought-out, you disregard them for factors i cannot possibly control. This is the partisan thinking that i d…

Seems you're doing the same thing, when you claim that others who try to do sth about something are just virtue signaling.

[deleted]

Re: Open source ‘protestware’ harms Open Source

#434

Post by robocat »

aulin wrote: post #228
jraph wrote: post #10

npm install is such a scary command these days (or yarn install, same thing). I never liked it because of the shitload of dependencies it usually pulls but now I would hesitate running it outside a well isolated container. This event added to the strong distrust I came to have on NPM these last months. The NPM ecosystem seems incredibly immature and unreliable and any Javascript project depending on NPM is now a pote…

> In theory the same things could happen for PIP, Maven, Gradle, their Rust and Go counterpart and any such package manager. Any data on this? in theory, but why is it always node.js/npm? I work on completely different things... is it a different community culture? is it the thousands of tiny low quality packages people include to do the most basic things?

A perfect example is webpack. Indirectly depends on many thousands of different packages, is run during development, and has 225k packages that depend upon it. https://github.com/webpack/webpack/network/dependencies i.e. even if you are careful about dependencies, your build tools are not.

I also checked esbuild which is written in go, but it still has a dependency on babel and webpack (via scripts/package.json fuse.js at least). https://github.com/evanw/esbuild/network/dependencies

Re: Open source ‘protestware’ harms Open Source

#435

Post by def_true_false »

whimsicalism wrote: post #274
pkulak wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If a company does business in Russia right now, they are giving money to the Russian government which will be used to kill Ukrainians. Let's not conflate wartime trade policy with Twitter wokeness marketing.

I know this will get labeled as whataboutism, so to pre-empt that I am suggesting sanctions and Hague charges for all perpetrators, but what is uniquely bad about killing Ukrainians over Syrians, Libyans, or Iraqis?

From the point of view of American isolationists, there is no difference. There is a difference for Europeans, in that Ukraine being engulfed by a full scale war will result in around 40M refugees in the EU, almost 10% of EU population. That's an order of magnitude bigger than the previous migration wave. It's also an order of magnitude faster. Over 10M people have been displaced already.

Some numbers: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2022_Ukrainian_refugee_crisis , note the dates.

Re: Open source ‘protestware’ harms Open Source

#436

Post by kennywinker »

blueflow wrote: post #416
kennywinker wrote: post #402

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I don’t want stupid personal expressions, I want meaningful or beautiful or somehow useful. I guess I feel that improving our world, ending war, making our society more just and fair, these are meaningful, useful, and beautiful things to do. They might be some of the most meaningful things actually. > It was counterproductive and distracting and wasted valuable time that we could use to do something better. This is…

None of the signalling achieves anything. Its annoying, the signalling people really stand out. Seeing them doing the "Notice me, I'm standing for the right thing, im a good person!"-move makes me cringe. I wish they would stop.

> None of the signalling achieves anything

This is just false. Some signaling achieves nothing, but there's plenty of signaling that has caused individuals to change their behavior, politicians to pass laws, and corporations to change their products. The thing is it's basically impossible to tell which is the useful signaling and which is shouting into the void, even as the person signaling the signals. Which drop filled the bucket?

You seem to find it annoying because you think it's being done just to SEEM good, rather than to BE good... but when it comes to issues we don't have direct control of, there's not much difference. I can ACT on my belief that texting and driving is a terrible thing to do all I want, but it doesn't stop anyone else from doing it. The only small piece of influence I have over others is to signal that I believe it's wrong whenever it's appropriate. That and lobby for tougher fines (by signaling to politicians) and technological solutions (again, by signaling to corporations).

None of this is to say you can't criticize specific gestures as being empty - but to say signaling is always empty is just false.

Re: Open source ‘protestware’ harms Open Source

#437

Post by cosmiccatnap »

x3c wrote: post #309
julienfr112 wrote: post #279

You are right, but economic sanctions harms also the countries that are making these sanctions. Shell leaving Russia harms also Shell. Banning Russian airlines harms aviation as a whole. And it's not a reason not to do them. I think also that's it's better to focus on propaganda, like displaying a ascii-art of the old woman threatening a Russian soldier or whatever. But at the end, maintainers have the right to do an…

Withdrawing a service is very different from delivering a malignant service. McDonalds is withdrawing from Russia instead of serving contaminated Burgers.

No post body was provided.

Re: Open source ‘protestware’ harms Open Source

#438

Post by relativeadv »

cimi_ wrote: post #432
relativeadv wrote: post #430

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree. I really do feel for these refugees and victims of social injustice. But when it mildly irritates me by having to scroll an extra inch or two to get to what i want to see i feel like their efforts are being misdirected. It makes more sense for these issues to simply solve themselves without inconveniencing me.

Do you genuinely think these banners help with anything?

You and I are here discussing it, right now.

Re: Open source ‘protestware’ harms Open Source

#439

Post by [deleted] »

kennywinker wrote: post #436
blueflow wrote: post #416

Earlier quoted context omitted.

None of the signalling achieves anything. Its annoying, the signalling people really stand out. Seeing them doing the "Notice me, I'm standing for the right thing, im a good person!"-move makes me cringe. I wish they would stop.

> None of the signalling achieves anything This is just false. Some signaling achieves nothing, but there's plenty of signaling that has caused individuals to change their behavior, politicians to pass laws, and corporations to change their products. The thing is it's basically impossible to tell which is the useful signaling and which is shouting into the void, even as the person signaling the signals. Which drop fi…

[deleted]

Re: Open source ‘protestware’ harms Open Source

#440

Post by Karrot_Kream »

shadowgovt wrote: post #424
gadders wrote: post #385

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm highlighting the emptiness of the moral grandstanding.

We appear to have burned 393... Wait, 394... User comments on the subject. So if it's empty, so is commenting on HN, I'd extrapolate. Otherwise, it's gotten the attention of the sort of people who comment on HN, and that's something.

I think HN folks are commenting because:

1. These political threads always bring out the most ideologically strident folk

2. Developer time/experience is impacted by these changes.

While I personally think these banners are fine and good to raise awareness, I do agree that there's a moral grandstanding element as well. I'm often puzzled why it's so controversial a belief to have. I don't see why folks are so annoyed at these banners though because I've been annoyed for years and years at crappy ASCII/figlet drawings that libraries/apps output that are garbled in my terminal's width/encoding and yet people still add those.

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