The point is that someone posted this guy’s project to the AUR with a badly written PKGBUILD and it was failing to build. This led to him getting tons of support requests which he could not help with since he doesn’t control that AUR build.

He also couldn’t get it removed from AUR without giving the admins his personal information. Completely understandable given the history of console companies going after emulator developers. The guy has been doxxed and seems close to being run right out of the open source community by a bunch of zealots.

For troubleshooting issues with his code. Not with broken packages created by others that he has no power to fix.

He changed the license in the first place because someone took unpublished code from him and contributed it to another project. He had permission from his other contributors when he did that but people still went on GPL crusades against him.

Now it’s the issue of people re-packaging his releases for other package managers such as AUR (which is against the license) and doing so incorrectly which leads to support requests from the users of broken packages.

There’s a whole community of people who have turned hostile to this guy over his decisions but it comes off as a sense of entitlement on their part. This is after all an emulation community which is full of people who simply use these tools to run pirated old games. They don’t understand the hard work that goes into a sophisticated emulator. They just want more, better, faster! Gimme gimme gimme is all they know!

But then you can’t offer support to users of your upstream code.

This is an issue of open source etiquette and there’s no technical solution that can solve it. There have been numerous passionate developers who have been run right out of open source by well-meaning users who simply don’t know the protocol around contacting a developer for support.

He got mad because people kept bugging him to fix problems created by other people which he has no control over. His “tantrums” are his way of re-asserting control over his life.

Open source dev burnout from support requests is a real and widespread phenomenon. When a software developer releases the fruits of their hard work they are doing the wider community a service. When large numbers of people begin to contact the developer for support the effect can be overwhelming even though every individual request may be legitimate and non-malicious.

In the case of packaging errors created by a third party not in contact with (let alone under the control of) the developer, these support requests for dealing with unsolvable and irrelevant (in the developer’s eyes) problems can be absolutely maddening.

I am quite sure the developer would have had no issues with people doing what they did as long as they accepted the responsibility to fix their own issues without contacting him. The fact that they did not do so (and therefore caused him grief) is negligent even if it isn’t malicious.

One of the most entitled takes I’ve ever read.

The guy built software and opened sourced it. People started packaging it for their favourite distribution repositories and then users started coming to him for support on problems he didn’t create!

It’s like if you were a farmer selling eggs and some kids bought your eggs and started throwing them at people’s houses and then instead of the cops arresting the kids they come arrest you for selling eggs. It’s bullshit!

Pretty much every single website uses HTTPS these days which means all traffic is encrypted anyway. Instead of a VPN you could use an encrypted proxy that connects over HTTPS. I doubt the UK is just going to completely cut itself off from the rest of the world’s internet (because all it takes is one path out).

Because the argument is that guns cause violent crime (specifically mass shootings) and the example of Finland shows that not to be the case. Then if guns don’t cause violent crime what is it?

The most likely explanation to me is that there is a confounder: an unknown which causes both the acquisition of (one or more) guns and the commission of crimes. A hidden criminality element which Finland seems to lack.

The alternative explanation is that the U.S. is a broken society (in one or more ways) and that this leads people to feel the desire to lash out in extremely violent ways. The availability of guns in the US offers them an easy option for inflicting mass casualties but the recent example of Michigan shows that even without a gun there is still the opportunity for mayhem.

Well yeah that’s sort of the point. The presence of guns alone does not predict gun violence. You need violent people for it to happen.

I got it from Wikipedia. Households and people are different statistics. People includes children who are unlikely to own a gun.

I also prefer households as a statistic over guns per capita because it avoids the issue of gun collectors who may have hundreds of guns in one household…

Finland has almost as many households (as a %) with guns as the U.S. (38% for Finland vs 42% for the U.S.) yet the U.S. has about 19x the per capita gun homicide rate of Finland.

They’re just trying to cash out at this point. Much of the early investment, such as from Microsoft, was not in the form of cash but credits to use Microsoft’s computing resources. Can’t retire on Azure credits!

Using technology as a surrogate for community.

It’s just nostalgia applied to the internet. Some people call it Eternal September. Everyone prefers what the internet was when they first discovered it and hate what it’s become since then. I remember the internet from 1996 most fondly. Many prefer it from the 80s or earlier 90s. This is no different from other media: music, TV, movies.

Of course this is separate from the real issue which is the consolidation and silo-ification of the modern web.

I don’t have a doorbell of any kind (the button isn’t even hooked up to anything). My neighbours are jerks but they won’t steal packages or anything like that.

We’re living in a low trust society that used to be a high trust society a few decades ago. I believe all of the problems you see in politics ultimately stem from this. Factionalism is tearing western society apart.

It’s a cognitive dissonance thing for collectors. They want the preserved, playable copy but they don’t ever want to break the seal because that lowers the value.

I bet there are a bunch of collectors out there in possession of empty game boxes (with placebo weights) that have been expertly resealed and then submitted to grading companies for a seal of approval.

Yes, it is a choice. However one of the biggest problems is that so many of the good choices are gone. I’m talking about the positive social institutions and community organizations people used to belong to. The third spaces.

Communities have fragmented. Neighbours hate each other. Both of my neighbours hate our family. One is a childless, alcoholic husband and wife who also hate each other (they used to be nice years ago) who also hate us and give us creepy looks all the time. The other is green lawn-obsessed neighbour who hates us for the pine trees we have growing on our property and refuse to cut down (at our own expense) to suit their tastes.

We’re a society of severely mentally ill, isolated, confused, and angry people. Our villages and communities are all gone. We’re all a bunch of islands unto ourselves.

The manosphere is one symptom of a much larger problem. Look at it in isolation and you’ll miss the big picture. Authoritarianism is on the rise globally. Loneliness is reaching epidemic proportions. Society’s traditional institutions are a distant memory. All we have remaining are loose groups of people shouting at each other as the spectre of war lurks in the background.

Most of the games I buy today are less than $10 anyway. What I want from games has really changed, and a lot of the time I’m just playing free Roguelikes rather than commercial games.

We didn’t buy most games when I was a kid, we rented them. There were countless games we paid $5 to rent for a week and that was plenty of time to finish the whole game and return it.

I only had one rich friend who had like a hundred games he owned. He let me borrow some of them but most of them I had already rented and finished myself. There were only a few games I ended up owning myself, such as Tecmo Super Bowl and the Legend of Zelda.

Some games could also be bought used for a lot less than full price (at stores such as The Games Exchange). They also bought games back from you when you were done with them!

If I could time travel to live back then as an adult I would rent everything and only buy a game if I foresaw wanting to play it long after a week was up.