I don't understand why people make such a big deal out of these voters. Maybe I'm just consuming the wrong media, but it feels like third-party voters get 50x the blame nonvoters get for ruining elections with probably something like a thousandth of the population. I basically never see this discussion call out both third-party voters and nonvoters equally.

I keep seeing third-party voters maligned for thinking a candidate has hope to win a national election, I see so many arguments to address why third-party candidates can't win. In spite of that, I have never come across any community anywhere where people collectively believe these candidates actually have a chance. People who consume crazy media can believe crazy things, that's why MAGA is a thing, but there's a whole Fox News etc media machine feeding those people. Is there a forum somewhere with more than ten people where there's a consensus that a third-party candidate might actually win? None of the third party voters I have known or met irl believed this, and I would be shocked if they're all weird exceptions.

Like, please, where are these people congregating to spread the ludicrous idea that a third-party candidate can win a national election? Looking on the recent green party posts on their subreddits, the only thing I see even close is a thread with a headline about "candidates are electable if people vote for them", where the furthest they go in the comments is a few people talking about how big a deal it would be for the party if they got 5% nationally, and a couple other people replying to say the greens won't even get 1% this year but the election is still very important because of some nonsense about incremental gains.

It feels like we've imagined a brainwashing machine that does not exist in reality, rather than admit to the existence of protest votes. Condemning protest votes means condemning protest nonvotes equally, and we'll never have sufficient information about protest nonvoters to reasonably make a claim about how they would have voted. That would severely muddy any attempts to assign blame for election results.

If you're trying to convince these voters to act differently, the way to do that would be to address the arguments they're actually making, like the incremental gains nonsense. If you're addressing arguments they haven't been making at all, then it's worth asking whether you're trying to convince someone other than them.

I agree with the sentiment that it's very easy to underestimate the harm done by the loss of a major site or scene group, but I'm not sure I really agree with much else you've written here. In particular:

And it’s due in part how most of the pirates just take and take, but never give back. On r/piracy and sometimes on here, people are making posts wondering where they can get free stuff and how they can get free stuff. They don’t care about the technicalities, they don’t care about the cause of piracy, they don’t care at all. It’s always “give me free shit, thanks, bye”.

The people making those posts have minimal exposure to piracy. This is getting your feet wet. For me, contributing my share is saying that I think these users deserve access. Yeah, they wouldn't have a place on a private tracker, that's not a problem because they're not on a private tracker, and if they join one they won't stay for long if they neglect seeding.

I'm sure a lot of these people will continue their lives without seeding or contributing. I won't say I endorse that, but I'm cool with it, and even if I wasn't I still don't think an argument can made that the harms of any hypothetical injustice here outweigh the benefits from a single dedicated pirate that began their journey this way.

I care about uploader counts, about seeder counts, about the wellbeing of the people who maintain the infrastructure. I'm invested. I don't care about download counts. Looking at an unseeded download as a loss in seeder count makes exactly the same amount of sense to me as looking at a download as a lost sale. I think it's morally right to support pirates who will not end up contributing, and beyond that I think treating them with kindness a net plus for the cause, because less than 100% of them will just say “give me free shit, thanks, bye”.

If the DoJ replaced google.com with a similar scare screen, a message about the AI feature appearing before search results, and photos of CEO yachts, that might actually give me hope for the future.

Maybe include a screenshot of the AI Overview so there's no ambiguity about what feature was problematic. Something like this:

Tangent - I remember reading a blog post when oink got seized saying that if the guy behind it was trying to make a profit rather than to create a library he would be respected like another Steve Jobs rather than being imprisoned. I still 100% believe that.

RIP oink's pink palace, I was a member for only two or three years but it opened up the world to me. Got invited from a guy at my undergrad I never met in person or knew his name, there was a local filesharing network on campus with a few hundred students on it and we had similar music tastes so would im occasionally. Hope you are doing well wherever you are now, meowfaceman.

It's at least reassuring to know that the DoJ values the privacy of these horrible criminals enough to warrant blurring their faces. Hard to believe those assholes were spending the money on beautiful rainbows. A rainbow isn't a tangible possession someone can just keep to themselves! The idea that some guy can just own this abstract thing is deeply offensive to me and I will not be giving any more of my hard-earned money to library genesis.

It's still Office Space.

Man I've never really thought about how much having the wrong successor could fuck up the whole ecosystem.

I'm looking through this thread and the concept behind the picture is 100x more fascinating to me than the actual question. Is the number your maximum capability?

I'd estimate I go through the majority (90℅?) of each day at like a 4 bordering on 5, but at times I'll move up to 2. It's a pretty seamless transition, I don't really have an explanation for why it only happens every so often. It's not like it's exclusively reserved for moments where it's more useful.

I don't read five star reviews ever anymore. If I want to find a believable endorsement of a product, I'll look for a four-star review that contains a criticism that isn't that bothersome to me personally, but legitimate enough that I can imagine a customer who would be deterred by it.

We moved a year ago, and I found my favorite pizza guy, Tony, by maybe the most convincing online review I've ever read. The most recent review on google maps was a one-star that was basically like "I met Tony and he casually used foul language etc etc there is no need for profanity etc pizza was some of the best I've ever had though"

My favorite thing about this post is that question 2 is asked based on the assumption that you've answered question 1 correctly by picking "cat".

I think what the number 44 specifically would look like was probably way outside the radar of whoever designed that font. Yeah, it looks similar, but even noticing that I still really wouldn't have assumed that someone wearing intends it as a nazi symbol. Is there really a need to announce a ban and solidify that it will be one? Just change the damn font going forward. Are they going to ban 88 too?

Here's Roto-Borola, who has somehow fallen asleep while sitting up like a person.

I saw a snake-oil kickstarter for one of these about ten years ago.

I used to use the Trisquel forums, Trisquel being a fully-free operating system and at the time the only one that could be installed by a total novice. There was a guy there, Chris, who was heavily involved with the company ThinkPenguin. Chris seemed genuinely passionate about free software and actually seemed pretty genuine when plugging his products, he'd point out the specific points where his products failed to be fully free and sometimes give examples of competitors who could do better and some justification for why he didn't feel it was realistic for ThinkPenguin to match that. I had some respect for him and some of the stuff he wrote on that forum really helped me understand the movement better.

Anyway, like ten years ago someone made a post about a kickstarter for a new company called Purism, which was fundraising to build a fully free high-end laptop I think by the end of that calendar year. A couple hours later the CEO of Purism (his name was Todd) found his way to that thread and explained to us how exciting this was and he intends to use Trisquel as the operating system and we should totally support this financially, blah blah blah. He's giving lengthy replies to every single comment made in that thread. At some point Chris writes an extremely extensive response about why every detail Todd has promised does not seem realistic, including recognizing from the kickstarter photos exactly which computer Todd intended to use as a base and why he felt that choice made no sense. I didn't really understand any of the details here to be honest, but yeah. Todd gives a one-sentence reply to Chris' post where he addresses zero of Chris' points and instead simply tells us that Chris is slandering his project because Chris is afraid of seeing a competitor succeed and doesn't actually care about free software.

At that point I didn't really need to understand the finer points to figure out which one of the two was more reliable. It was so blatantly transparent that Purism became a running joke in the forums.

Todd obviously ended up backtracking on virtually everything, using a brilliant scheme of weakening the promises in the kickstarter description over and over and over and dodging questions about that. He made a bunch of petitions to the FSF to certify his stuff on the grounds that their certification requirements (all those details initially promised for his laptops) were unrealistic to achieve. No shit. He also created an online (change.org? not sure about that) petition to Intel, which was sure-fire going to work, I'm pretty confident Intel did remove their management engine because I definitely would have heard more about that if Intel inexplicably decided to ignore that change.org petition.

Oh yeah, and on top of that, because Trisquel was the only FSF-endorsed distribution that was realistic for general-purpose use, he also ended up blowing a bunch of the funding to make his own distro (called "PureOS") because if he stuck with using Trisquel his customers could easily end up on a forum where his products weren't taken seriously.

Anyway, his initial kickstarter got like $600,000. He did release a laptop which was functional but not really different from things other companies like Los Alamos and ThinkPenguin had been doing for a while. A few years later he promised a fully libre phone and I think got even more for that than the laptop kickstarter. Last I heard only a very tiny fraction of the orders had actually been filled, and people were upset about that because it was already a few years late and also the company was desperately trying to remove all evidence that full refunds on request had been promised for the first couple years of preorders. Also the phones remained like six times as expensive as the (at the time) new pinephones and only functional for people who were extremely generous with how they define the word "functional".

I'll admit I did find some entertainment in this, but overall this shit was really depressing because not only could the funding Purism got have gone to other projects, but, more significantly, everyone who got scammed will be much more hesitant about supporting libre projects in general.

edit: Just checked /r/purism, the sidebar reads "PLEASE! Read at least 10 posts here before considering whether to place a Librem order! :) System76 is also a great alternative for Linux laptops." Sounds like a community of happy customers.