Sven Slootweg (soft-deprecated) @joepie91@pixie.town

@pixelcode@social.tchncs.de @davidak@chaos.social @codeberg@mastodon.technology The UDHR is not *remotely* universally accepted as an ethical standard, and the reason copyleft licenses don't pose *as much* of a problem is because they don't outright *prevent* use in certain contexts, they just introduce additional requirements.

I also have no idea why you think that "every license on the planet containing a copyleft clause" is somehow a requirement for anything I've said.

Also, stretching during that time and generally making myself comfortable is an important part of making that work

So here's an interesting thing I've found: I sometimes wake up super relaxed (especially on hot days), but most days I wake up in a subtle 'instant anxiety' state, immediately worrying about all the stuff I have to do.

Turns out that if I just *stay in bed* for an hour or so, pondering over random thoughts and stuff I might want to do that day until I feel genuine motivation appearing, my brain works *significantly* better for the rest of the day! Both in terms of motivation/focus and in terms of (lack of) anxiety.

It kinda feels like frontloading the "winding down after a busy day" thing, but somehow that works super well!

@pixelcode@social.tchncs.de @davidak@chaos.social @MagicLike@mstdn.social @codeberg@mastodon.technology The bigger problem with "ethical licenses" (or anything that restricts usage context) is that it fundamentally kills the concept of a public commons; because everybody has slightly different definitions of 'ethical', you would see a proliferation of licenses that all disallow *subtly* different things, eventually leading to a patchwork of prohibitions.

Which essentially means that with every level in the dependency tree, you further approximate the point of "literally nobody can use the resulting software because everybody is disallowed from using it by *some* component of it".

This is obviously not sustainable. And that's not even going into how the license is entirely the wrong place to be enforcing ethical standards...

Don't mind me, am just completely refactoring a critical library 30 minutes before bed

Ah and there's the 03:00 second wind...

@Scmbradley Realistically I will probably end up *being* the person who writes about this stuff, once my brain gets around to, like, cooperating

@rune I have been using a 'temporary' keyboard for several years now 🙃

@Scmbradley Not really, unfortunately. This is an almost entirely unexplored field as far as I know. I wrote http://cryto.net/~joepie91/manifesto.html a while ago (but that's very high-level), Pieter Hintjens' "Social Architecture" AFAIK *sort of* relates to this, but honestly I've found the most useful information here to be anarchist insights about how to organize and structure things in an egalitarian manner in general, but that's nothing specific to software development.

Most of what I've learned on this topic has been through a decade+ of trial-and-error and many *many* discussions and experiments and whatnot. And I couldn't have done that if I'd taken the usual "write software for money as a job" path either :/ Presumably there's other people working on this with a similarly broad scope, but I haven't really been able to find them.

@sorunome I don't keep an active list of them, unfortunately, and most of them are subtle enough that it's difficult to understand the problem without a lot of explanation and/or investigation/reasoning-from-first-principles :/ It's somewhat uncommon to run into an obvious-ish case, hence the toot above

@dysfun@treehouse.systems Maybe not the best term, but basically a way to implement/design mutations such that it fits into a composable API which may be composed out of different pieces maintained by different authors for different purposes (ie. not just a pile of hyperspecific top-level mutation methods)

@rune I reluctantly switched to Thunderbird recently, and while most of it is horrible, I've been really surprised by whatever its local self-learning spam filtering thing is, which just... works? With almost no classification errors? After like <100 spam/ham judgments? No idea if that can be used standalone though

What the hell, an extremely panicked neighbourhood cat somehow sneaked into my house through the roof window, how did it even get up there

(This toot prompted by me investigating whether anyone else has figured out yet how to do modular mutations in a graph API, and predictably discovering that nobody cares because that's not seen as useful in a corporate setting - guess I'll be solving the problem myself again...)

So here's a good example of how conventional 'best practices' in software development implicitly optimize for corporate usage rather than community projects: https://www.apollographql.com/blog/graphql/basics/designing-graphql-mutations/

"Don’t be afraid of super specific mutations that correspond exactly to an update that your UI can make. Specific mutations that correspond to semantic user actions are more powerful than general mutations. This is because specific mutations are easier for a UI developer to write, they can be optimized by a backend developer, and only providing a specific subset of mutations makes it much harder for an attacker to exploit your API."

This makes sense - *if* you're developing corporate software, where you control the entire stack! But if you're building a community project, then this design approach actively makes it harder for third parties to adapt and experiment with your thing, and ultimately centralizes control over how the software works, which is the opposite of what you want.

By itself, this is of course a relatively small thing - but implicit "corporate optimizations" like this are *everywhere* in software development, both in how tools are designed and in what people believe to be 'best practices', and they add up - and that puts grassroots projects at a serious disadvantage.