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Joined 6 months ago
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Cake day: April 27th, 2024

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  • My opinion is that Jesse Lyu is lying about making any significant changes. (Because otherwise the demo wouldn’t have worked)

    I don’t want bad things for him personally, but I want bad things to happen to people who lie in public.

    The code is open source with licensing requirements, so I’m therefore hoping someone Jesse has already made a statement to can write him with these requests:

    • For GPL2 licensed components such as Linux: Give me your changes in source form.
    • For Apache-licensed components such as Android: What files did you change?

    I can imagine him responding in three ways:

    • “Sure, here is another lie” – and then he’s locked into an answer which will probably make him look clueless as hell
    • “We don’t think we have to do that” – and now the Open Source Reply Guy Brigade instantly hates him.
    • <no reply> – and now, given that a conversation has actually occurred, he looks evasive.

  • Every rationalist I’ve met has been nice and smart and deserved better. These are nerds and not in a bad way, but in a way that gets them bullied and shamed and gaslit. And in practice I can come to agreement with them on lots of issues.

    On this issue I can never pin them down – responding with what I think are reasonable questions gets me shut down with what I believe is thought-stopping behavior. They rarely state the actual reasons and the actual reasons are always slippier when they have to verbalize them to people who don’t agree.

    No doubt if you’re a cynical manipulator, “having your followers lie about what you believe” works for you. But a lot of these are going to be nice normal guys who are tired of being laughed at and, worryingly, tired of being made to think.

    In this respect they have a lot in common with, say, high school kids who became communists in part to piss off their parents. I’m not saying that to mock those kids, because I was one of them – and I think there’s a huge part of this that they’re not wrong about and they’re entitled to demand to be taken seriously, and precious few people do take nerds seriously. And for that matter, there’s philosophically sophisticated people doing the same work as them.

    I don’t know how we get them into spaces where something is actually done – if not for humanity or whatever, for people very close to them who actually need it – and where the seduction of ego and money isn’t like, so readily and constantly available.