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by fgfarben 55 days ago
in your world, literally who isn't a dickhead? yourself, presumably? you must make a living somehow.
1 comments

nah, I'm you're run-of-the mill dickhead, I'm afraid. righteous and principled but ignorant and overbearing. classic asshole, by nature. doing my best to be better every day, though. hoping the same for everyone else.

as far as who isn't, the first names that come to mind are Fred Rogers - he seems like kind of the summit of what a soul can aspire to be. Randall Munroe seems like a pretty awesome guy. Haven't looked too much into him, though. most names that come to mind are personal acquaintances that wouldn't mean much to you, but I find that it's not very difficult to find non-dickheads in my day to day life. probably around 30% of the people I encounter in passing are a-okay in my book! but it is true that the number of dickheads I encounter skyrocket when I start approaching cultures that glorify personal gain over community success and health. abstract or practical; the business community is rife with awful people and los angelos is terrible for entirely different reasons.

anyway, yeah. I make a living. dealing with wonderful people who have a shred of humility and who - when they get called out - just sheepishly say "oh! wow, that is awful. I'm so sorry for saying/doing that." and everybody moves on with their business. I hope you work with wonderful people as well!

so, to be clear, you're not pissed at Tangled because they're building an open-source, freely available tool that helps people develop in public without demanding anything in return, but you are pissed at them because they took VC money and are using atproto, the latter of which in some way legitimizes crypto / billionaire techbros?

if so, you value ideology over pragmatism to the extent of "cutting off your nose to spite your face"

no, you seem to have me confused with someone else? I'm pissed because the CEO of a social media company said 'fuck the users' and then, when called out about it not only refused to apologize for that sentiment, but doubled down on being shitty because the users weren't paying her for it. that is, very simply, bad behavior. and I see no reason to reward it. since the tangled co-founder jumped in there with a +1, I see no reason to reward them.

the point is that whomever you are going to be doing business with (giving your data to) is eventually going to let their true colors show. happened with jack and twitter, happened with mark and facebook. if bsky is any good now - which is not a claim I'm making - it will eventually get worse because the ideology behind what they do is a toxic one that prioritizes growth and self-aggrandizement, or at the very least deprioritizes the value that individual users have to the success of an organization.

so I choose not to do business with people who are telegraphing, loudly, that one day they'll choose themselves over me, at my expense if I'll let them. and remind myself of that and let others know about it. I think I do it relatively fairly - by providing a balanced take on the practical features vs the abstract moralizing. simple as.

ETA: as far as spiting my own face, I...uh.. I still use git? I just use it elsewhere. not sure where I'm losing the practical battle here. there is no feature tangled provides that I miss out on by hosting my git elsewhere. and there are honestly a few features that I gain from doing so. so... if anyone's being impractical here, it's not me.