but pedantry is alive and well

Iran is not the only player here.

💯

even a broken clock is right twice a day

Exactly, when you dig into all the complaints people have about this tech, they’re ultimately just symptoms of the underlying capitalist relations.

cause it’s a mechanical turk

The hubris of the burger reich is truly astounding. They really think they can just waltz in and destroy a whole civilization that’s thousands of years old.

Seems like they’ve been preparing for this for a long while.

basically yeah

I suspect that a major war in West Asia isn’t going to help things here

relevant reading https://redsails.org/witbd-rs-abridged

but you don’t understand, it was supposed to be quick, in and out, 20 minute adventure, the US was supposed to be able to control escalation and decide what kind of war this is going to be

The talk is reality check for anyone who thinks open source is still in its honeymoon phase. He basically argues that we have been living through a Gilded Age of open source from about 2000 to 2020 where everything looked like rapid growth and success on the surface while the foundation was actually rotting. Just like the original Gilded Age had its robber barons and railroad monopolies he points out that we have traded genuine freedom for the convenience of proprietary platforms like GitHub and Slack. He is pretty blunt about the fact that the industry has shifted from community driven passion projects to venture capital backed rug pulls where companies like Redis or HashiCorp just swap licenses the moment they need to squeeze more profit out of users.

He highlights how the XZ backdoor and the Log4Shell mess exposed that the entire internet is basically held together by three tired volunteers in a trench coat and how new regulations might actually make those people legally liable for bugs. He also goes off on how AI is being shoved into everything not because it helps developers but because VCs want to replace them, and he is clearly not a fan of how companies like Red Hat and Fedora are tying everything to AI tools now. It is a really sobering look at how we stopped caring about the principles of free software and just became pragmatic consumers who are okay with locked down ecosystems like macOS or Android as long as they are shiny.

He thinks we can still fix this but it requires us to stop being spectators and actually start mentoring the next generation on why these values mattered in the first place. He basically says that if we just treat open source as a way to get free labor for corporations it is going to end up as a dead hobby like ham radio. The main takeaway is that the era of easy growth is over and if we actually want a future where we control our own computers we have to stop picking the convenient path and start fighting for the principled one again.

seems like liberal media is still having trouble calling it what it is

That might destroy Iran, but it will be the end of the US in the region and the end of Israel. While everybody is focused on the missile war, there’s a broader context being ignored here which is that the US is seen as an occupier, and Israel is hated. The regimes aligned with the US are deeply unpopular with their populace. The war is seen as a war between zionists and Iran. Any regime that end up fighting against Iran finds itself on the side of the US and Israel, and after what people watched in Gaza for over a year now, I don’t think that’s going to play well. Not to mention martyrdom of Khamenei which will help rally people to the cause. Imagine the reaction across the region if zionists used nuclear weapons here.

ah cool, added to the post

ha

He basically spelled this out in Munich, and Europeans gave him a standing ovation https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4mWRy7A1cJI

I’m pretty sure both China and Russia are already feeding info to Iran, hence why the strikes have been so effective. There’s no reason for them not to do that. And completely agree that replicating what Ukraine does to counter Russian drones, which still hammer Ukraine massively, is not something the US can do quickly.

Pretty much yeah, China is obviously not looking for a direct confrontation with the US here. The same way, the US is not looking for a direct confrontation with Russia in Ukraine incidentally. I don’t see anybody claiming that the US isn’t helping Ukraine because they haven’t put boots on the ground.