Do you guys ever feel tired of 'sounding the alarm'?
I feel like I've been doing that for years on a wide range of topics, but every time it's like you're talking to cult members.
How do you break through to people? People say things like "you're overthinking it", "that's never going to happen", "I don't care because I like using VSCode and not alternatives".
Is it individualism? That they only consider their own narrow short-term interests, and have become blind to collective problems?
What's the problem for people who just use VSCode, exactly? The software still does what people want for free, which is what 99% of VS Code users use the software for anyway. People who care about open source-ness have their own extensions to replace their proprietary C++ tooling, or they can use an open source alternative like Eclipse.
I remember when basic features that come for free in VS Code cost thousands of dollars per developer, back when "update" meant "buy the new version (again)". I swear, people forgot how good they have it.
The change that made the Microsoft addon incompatible with VS Code forks happened four years ago.
For people who see VS Code as just a decent gratis text editor, there's no problem.
For people who care, to some degree, about using an open source tool, for whom the marketing that VS Code is open source played a role in their choice of using it, it should matter. And it matters that other projects (think Platform IO and more) choose VS Code as a platform to build on top of, and they get away with it because "it's open source".
Then people should stop caring about open source, care about free software instead, and do not forget that it is free-as-in-freedom, so they should still pay for their tools.
Otherwise keep hoping that your corporate or VC funded SaaS "disruptor" master will continue to be nice to you
I feel like comments lately have become full of false statements.
VSCode is MIT licensed.
But the extensions aren't, which locks you into the Microsoft distribution of VSCode.
And that's how they turned an open source product into a monopoly-enhancing tool.
I agree, lots of false statements here. "Code - OSS" is open source, and released under the MIT license. Visual Studio Code is built by combining "Code - OSS" with proprietary code, and is released under the following non-open-source license: https://code.visualstudio.com/license
From their github repo:
Visual Studio Code is a distribution of the
Code - OSS repository with Microsoft-specific
customizations released under a traditional
Microsoft product license.
"Visual Studio Code" is to "Code - OSS" what Google Chrome is to Chromium. Microsoft has just been successful at tricking people into thinking that Visual Studio Code is itself open source through misleading marketing on their website and things like naming the github repository for "microsoft/vscode".
Bruh, you can write your own extension, or use an extension created by another individual or company which is open source. They’re simply enforcing the policy that their extension can only be used with their VScode.
I'm at that tired stage right now as well. The way I read the title: "Company did company thing". Absolutely no surprise. The question is always a when, and similarly, I don't expect this current thing to last forever either: maybe they rethink their decision.
Also, very often, the feelings don't correspond to the reality or the aftermath of the decision-making at all. For example, X seems to be hugely upsetting, but life generally moves on, and people are not that touched actually, as much as they protest to the opposite. This happens pro and contra issues as well; for example, people might hate Windows' latest X bullshit, but they won't change their OS in the end, or, pro example, people might feel like that stand by local production, but they won't actually buy local, because it costs more.
What we are very blind to are problems that don't have immediate negative feedback. Comfort and security are huge motivators, especially when people have to let go of them. PR and propaganda (same thing really) uses this, among others, very effectively.
It's tradeoffs all the way down. VSCode remains one of the best intro editors, because it's free, has next to zero learning curve, and a robust extension ecosystem. I mean, what even is the argument here? That it's not completely open in every possible way? Do we feel so strongly about the heaps of paid IDEs that are completely closed source?
> Do we feel so strongly about the heaps of paid IDEs that are completely closed source?
Me, personally? No, because they're honest about it. I use BBEdit and Nova frequently on my Mac. Those are as closed source as it gets. They never pretend otherwise, though. You pay your money and you know what you're getting. VSCode tries really hard to appear to be open source, as long as you're willing to ignore the million places where they aren't. (Python devs: are you using PyLance? I'm talking to you.)
And ironically, those closed editors seem to play more nicely with the ecosystem as a whole. Neither BBEdit nor Nova have ever tried to talk me into installing closed plugins, and the same plugins that work with them work great in Emacs and Zed.
If I go to one bar that charged $5 per beer, and another that gives free beer but makes you rent single-use mugs for $5, even though the end price is identical, the rental bar's going to annoy me horrendously. Just admit what it is and let people judge on their own merits.
Tech bubble remains tech bubble, when common, non-tech people are much more screwed, yet nothing is being done except saying "lol, just install Linux".
I just use the OSS vs code builds at home. (Work uses vscode).
Ever since I got remote mode working, I haven’t noticed any missing functionality I care about. (I also haven’t tried installing extensions for the pile of commercial services work uses, and that I wouldn’t pay for anyway.)
Edit: Since cursor now has near infinite VC money, perhaps they should fund a few open source devs to work on those forks. Why should they get a free ride?
I think the problem with "sounding the alarm" is that it's not a tsunami that will immediately wipe out everything, it's more of a slow flood. The business strategy is boiling the frog.
I think ultimately we're mostly just not as clever as we think we are, which I think unfortunately we must accept.
Where this has become increasingly problematic is rampant materialism and corporatism.
If the only real motivator in town, especially for the powerful, is material gain then there is nothing to constrain wanton greed. This becomes even more pronounced with corporations because their overtly stated purpose is not but greed, so even if the individual actors have some transcend moral compass they will be in conflict to their programmed imperative to "do their job".
Currently many of the powerful are materialistic and materialism can bring worldly power. Other political paradigms may come to the fore but as it takes a form and gravity it will likely come into some dialectic conflict with the prevailing materialistic status quo. That may be a peaceful resolution, but I'd not be certain of that.
Meh. If it does eventually go away, it wouldn't be the first time I've switched editors. Which turns out to not actually be all that hard to do.
> Is it individualism? That they only consider their own narrow short-term interests, and have become blind to collective problems?
What collective problem, that someone might have to unexpectedly burn a weekend writing a new editor? That {emacs|vim} isn't popular enough? That people might have to go install openjdk in order to start using eclipse?
Indeed! "No one saw it coming" is the most ridiculous thing I've been hearing for the last couple of months regarding global politics. They've literally been predicting and warning against the rise of these (political) issues for 20 years.
And in the same sense regarding VSCode, and the VC fueled takeover of the open source ecosystem; the old guard warned against it, that's why they promoted GPL as critically necessary.
It's important to remember that the communist states were in a cold war with the US, and were being sabotaged from within, so they had to aggressively monitor for internal threats.
We don't know what the world would look like if the US hadn't destroyed communism, and hadn't actively supported tyrannical leaders.
But in an ironic twist, the US will now be destroyed by the same dark forces they created.
We do know what happened to socialist projects that weren’t authoritarian. They got crushed by the US and other capitalist states.[1]
That all socialist projects that were successful for some time were authoritarian is, well, those were the ones who could survive in that world (in this current world). I think there’s a word for that. :)
[1] Capitalist nations violently interfering in other nations is not called authoritarian.
That's not true. I've seen it firsthand. They built infrastructure that was free for public use.
It is significantly better than privatized tourism, because private tourism is frequently taken over by organized crime who destroy the nature to build hotels. Public service tourism usually doesn't care about profit, but rather about reducing public spending, so it is generally more efficient, has a smaller foot print, is shared, educative, and respectful.
I'm not an expert so I can't give you references, but ask your neighborly LLM:
> The USSR promoted the idea of "democratic tourism" — affordable and accessible to everyone. Unlike Western commercial tourism, Soviet tourism aimed to educate and unite people. The Tourist Union (Туристско-спортивный союз) and other state organizations built networks of tourist bases, campgrounds, hiking routes, and equipment rental centers.
Yeah, until an alien species shows up that has more powerful weapons and decides your meat is delicious, and considers you a herdable animal. They might install you in a coup so you can play videogames all day and drink beer as your only source of nutrients, to give your meat that kobebeef marble.
> Whatever happened to liberty
The Americans decided that it wasn't worthwhile anymore.
> and the pursuit of happiness
It became profitable to keep you from being happy.
Hard disagree. Accessibility matters, and some of us are photosensitive to large amounts of bright white. Design your CSS to not completely break with a forced dark theme and this won't be a problem.
Not to mention that I can:
- Create a bucket and store 1MB in it without any overhead
- Create 50 buckets with strong perimeters around them such that someone deleting the entire account doesn’t bring down the other 49
- Create a bucket and fill it with terabytes of data within seconds and don’t need to wait for hardware to be racked and stacked
- Create a bucket, fill it with 2TB of data, and delete it tomorrow
Cloud is more than bare metal, but plenty of folks discount the cost benefits of elasticity.
I suspect the problem is that we're engineers in domains that have very different needs.
For example, I agree that elasticity is great. But at the same time, to me, it sounds like bad engineering. Why do you need to store terabytes of data and then delete it - couldn't it be processed continuously, streamed, compressed, process changes only, and so on. A lot of engineering today is incredibly wasteful. Maybe your data source doesn't care, and just provides you with terabyte csv files, and you have no choice, but for engineers that care about efficiency, it reeks.
It might make a lot of sense in a highly corporate context where everything is hard, nobody cares, and the cost of inefficiency is just passed on to the customer (i.e. often government and tax payers). But the real problem here is that customers aren't demanding more efficiency.
Alone the fact of audit gives you a lot of reasons to keep data. Even if it gets downsampled one way or the other.
And plenty of use cases have natural growth. I do not throw away my pictures for example.
Data also grows dependent of users. More users, more 'live' data.
We have such a huge advantage with digital, we need to stop thinking its wasteful. Everything we do digital (pictures, finance data, etc.) is so much more energy and space efficient than what we had 20 years ago, we should just not delete data because we feel its wasteful.
This is the most reasonable explanation. Wikipedia is openly opposed by the current US administration, and 'denial of service' is key to their strategy (i.e. tariffs, removal of rights/due process, breaking net neutrality, etc.).
In the worst case, Wikipedia will have to require user login, which achieves the partial goal of making information inaccessible to the general public.
In the worst case Wikipedia will have to relocate to Europe and
block the entire ASN of US network estates. But if the United States
is determined to commit digital and economic suicide, I don't see how
reasonable people can stop that.
It would be trivial to use botnets inside of the EU, so I doubt that blocking ASNs would make any difference. And as I said, it achieves the goal of disrupting access to information, so that would be nevertheless be a win for them. Your proposition does not solve for Wikipedia's agenda of providing free access to information.
> digital and economic suicide
My view is that it's an economic coup which started decades ago (Bush-Halliburton, bank bailouts in 2008, etc.). It's only inflation and economic uncertainty is only for the poor. For the people that do algorithmic stock trading, it's an arbitrage opportunity that occurs in the scale of microseconds.
By the time that the people will be properly motivated to revolt against the government, it will be too late.
Wouldn't using this software constitute a crime if using it to "appear as literally anyone"?
IIRC, the have been news stories in the EU about people receiving prison sentences for creating deepfakes, although maybe it was related to adult material. But impersonation and defamation is likely covered similarly. I'd assume that all it takes is for single viewer to believe it, to legally qualify as an act of impersonation.
I feel like I've been doing that for years on a wide range of topics, but every time it's like you're talking to cult members.
How do you break through to people? People say things like "you're overthinking it", "that's never going to happen", "I don't care because I like using VSCode and not alternatives".
Is it individualism? That they only consider their own narrow short-term interests, and have become blind to collective problems?
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