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@mgorny@social.treehouse.systems
2026-04-26 18:14:50

A long time ago, when I was still going to school, I often thought about some class or other: "What's the point of this? I'm just wasting time on stuff I won't ever need. And my grades are going down because of it." So I supported all these bright ideas like having schools work the curriculum out with the industry.
Nowadays, I know better. The purpose of school is not to produce ready-made employees. It's to give people a wider perspective. Perhaps they won't use most of what they learn there, perhaps they'll have bad memories of some classes, but that doesn't really matter. What does matter is that you learn how to learn, how to reason, how to think.
I hate what's been happening to schools lately. They are becoming conveyor belts: we throw children on them, throw specific knowledge at them and see what sticks, we do exams and classify them. We expect to get a thoughtless laborer at the end, someone ready to take a specific job immediately.
A human whose only purpose in life is mindless labor and mindless consumption. Metaphorically, someone who's just going to spend their time off by drinking beer in the front of the TV and breeding more babies. Babies who will eventually become more cogs in the machine, fueling the infinite growth, trying to prevent this mindless system from falling apart.
#AntiCapitalism

@mgorny@social.treehouse.systems
2026-03-26 10:28:42

So I'm walking out of the forest, found a way to cross the small river and I'm trying to get to the main road. The road straight ahead is going through a farmstead (surrounded by fence), with "private property, keep out", etm. So I'm turning to the side road. That one is going next to another farmstead (outside the fence), yet "private property", etm.
Seriously, what's wrong with these people?! Did the capitalism mess up their brains so much?! What am I supposed to do, walk straight through their fields?!
#AntiCapitalism

@mgorny@social.treehouse.systems
2026-03-10 10:54:24

"The Rise of the Voluntariat" by Geoff Shullenberger (found via D. Graeber's "Bullshit Jobs").
"""
The voluntariat performs skilled work that might still command a wage without compensation, allegedly for the sake of the public good, regardless of the fact that it also contributes directly and unambiguously to the profitability of a corporation. Like the proletariat, then, the voluntariat permits the extraction of surplus value through its labor.
But unlike the proletariat’s labor, the voluntariat’s has become untethered from wages. The voluntariat’s labor is every bit as alienable as the proletariat’s — Coursera’s Translator Contract leaves no doubt about that — but it must be experienced by the voluntariat as a spontaneous, non-alienated gift.
And the voluntariat is not, like the proletariat, the instrument of its own dispossession. Rather, its contribution of uncompensated work accelerates deskilling and undermines the livelihood of those who do not have the luxury of working for free — in this case, professional translators who cannot afford to give away their labor.
"""
#AntiCapitalism

@mgorny@social.treehouse.systems
2026-04-23 10:21:17
Content warning: Gentoo, FLOSS, LLMs, depressing

#Gentoo is still one of the bright outposts in #FLOSS where human work is valued and #LLM contributions are banned. However, sometimes I feel that this matters very little.
After all, Gentoo is a distribution. While it has its own value, it cannot exist without all the software it is shipping. It makes no sense in isolation.
And let's be honest, I don't think you can avoid slop today. We are trying our best to sieve out the worst: the copywashing chardet, the vibecoded NIH Perl crypto packages… but it's just that.
As someone who bumps Python packages, let me tell you this: LLMs are omnipresent. I notice Claude in commit logs, I notice the blasphemy of agent instructions all over the place… and there's probably much more than I don't notice. With many core components giving in, you can't avoid it without literally freezing on old, vulnerable versions, or spending hours looking for alternatives or creating them.
FLOSS is dead. People don't care. They don't have conscience. All they care about is the sick idea of "productivity", i.e. generating more slop.
The few of us who do care can do very little. We will continue doing our best until they kill us (as they're literally slowly killing the whole humankind). But that's it. Maybe it will pass once the bubble pops, maybe it won't. Either way, the damage is beyond repair. We will never be able to trust one another like we did. We will never again be a community building a better world.
It's just like everything nowadays. It's hard to find a good washing machine (one that will actually be repairable), good shoes (that won't fall apart shortly after the warranty expires), good food. You need lots of money, and even then you have to sieve through all the scammers who just sell the same shit with higher profit margin. #OpenSource is just another branch of business where people are trying to "sell" you shit, and don't care anymore if it explodes in your face. They don't even care if they're actually making a profit.
#AI #NoAI #NoLLM #enshittification #AntiCapitalism