You’re so right, turning Syria into something like Libya with open slave markets is far better for the people living there.

It’s premature to say that the rapid collapse of Syria actually benefits the west. The status quo was that Russia and Iran had to devote significant resources to prop Syria up. Now they were able to pull out their assets while the west is stuck trying to manage the situation.

Incidentally, there is a RAND paper that warns against this exact scenario. It basically argues that putting Syria under stress is beneficial to the US, but there is a risk of over commitment.

• The United States should oppose any and all policies that seek to partition or divide Syria. A collapsed, divided, or fractured Syrian state would likely contribute to further instability and radicalization in Syria and the region.
• Syria’s relatively strong national identity and experience of centralized authority reinforce the prospects for a unified state.
• Lessons from recent conflicts, including U.S. interventions in Iraq and Afghanistan, suggest that postconflict security, governance, and reconstruction in Syria will require viable, centralized state institutions.

Russia and Iran aren’t stupid, and they likely saw that the west was going to flare up the conflict in Syria again. One option was to pour resources into Syria to fight off the jihadists. This would be long and protracted quagmire just as it was last time around. The other options was simply to withdraw and let them take it. These groups all hate each other, and they’re not a cohesive fighting force. They’re already starting to fight each other just days after taking over, and it’s only going to get worse.

The west wants to have a compliant regime in Syria and that requires using coercive methods that will inevitably breed resentment from these groups. This is basically what happened in both Iraq and Afghanistan where the insurgents ultimately turned on their masters.

On top of all that, Israel is now invading Syria in a big way, and they’re unlikely to withdraw. It’s only a matter of time till they start getting attacked, and this will force the west to keep pouring resources to prop them up. In effect, this flips the script on Syria. Instead of Russia and Iran being on the hook propping it up while the west can keep destabilizing it relatively cheaply. It is now the west that’s stuck with a very volatile situation.

Like I said your mileage may vary, also even a good business like Steam can turn bad over time. That’s the fundamental problem with privately owned businesses. A lot of utterly deplorable companies today started out with the best intentions.

The dictatorship in Ukraine has bigger problems than Telegram if you ask me.

Did your regime propagandists tell you that?

It’s much better to fund projects using a nonprofit foundation. There are plenty of examples of this. The problem with corporate muscle behind it s that development priorities end up being driven by the corporations doing the funding. In some cases, like the Linux kernel, there can be enough alignment so that it’s not problematic. However, Chrome is an excellent example of how corporate backed open source goes horribly wrong.

It’s not just a problem of stuff getting acquired. Companies exist to make money, and they have to chase new customers. No matter how good the software was originally, sooner or later you’re going to stop being the target demographic. This happens all the time, every single proprietary product I’ve used eventually changed in a way I did not want it to change. At that point I either have to adapt or find a new product. On top of that, companies go out of business all the time. At that point you lose support for your product, or if it’s an online service the product itself disappears.

With open source the situation is much better. As long as there’s a community of users who want it to work a particular way, then it’s always possible to fork it and keep it working the way you want. A perfect example of this was when GNOME started moving in a direction a lot of people didn’t like, and now we have Cinnamon and Mate desktops.

For sure, long term sustainability is a big aspect of making open source great.

lol yeah it’s powered by hamsters it seems

Exactly, the system works as designed.

I get why it exists, but yeah it’s more trouble than it’s worth in most cases.

I really like the idea of using a relation db to track change history. It removes so much weirdness and quirkiness that git has. You just have regular SQL queries you can use to go through history and ask questions about the state of the repo. I also like that it’s immutable so you don’t have to worry about things like rebasing and other ways you can fuck up history in git. The problems solved by mucking with history largely go away when you can query the db with a rich syntax.

Oh I haven’t seen the EFF one, thanks for linking. We absolutely do have to fight for public forums to be open and publicly owned.

as a treat

No, I don’t think there’s anything fishy about picking the past two decades. Meanwhile, there’s nothing odd about the fact that Russia and China who were very weak in the 90s didn’t want to anger the US and become victims themselves. I personally lived through post USSR years in Russia, and it was already hell.

You mean when there was a famine caused by the US sanctions which are a modern form of siege warfare? DPRK lost its main trading partner when USSR dissolved, and the US choked their ability to trade with other countries. Wow what an amazing gotcha you got there.

I’m guessing it’s the models but not sure

Big tech companies like Google made deals with agencies like the NSA to harvest user data. On top of that, these companies will sell data to everyone else who’ll pay for it with effectively no oversight.

gpt4all has been my go to as well, this one’s neat cause it can do multimodal stuff

It is a reactionary take, but still has interesting statistics even if the interpretation is wrong.