That may very well be true, but as you're describing it, I think of all my fellow engineers, all of them very talented, who moved up into management, arguing exactly the same point of thinking at higher abstraction levels. And after one or two years go by, they will come to me with requests or opinions that are literally the dumbest shit I've ever heard. Like arguing that we (holding most of our data on MariaDB and Postgres) should move everything into Kubernetes custom resources because "the Kubernetes resource model is the best database ever". That's a real thing that I've had an engineering lead say to me. When I asked how you're gonna do an efficient table join on Kubernetes resources, I just got a blank stare.
Will you though? I like the adage: "We used to write software like hardware will get twice as fast every 2 years. Now we should write software like hardware will get twice as expensive every 2 years."
Yes, because GTK2 is so difficult to upgrade to new versions, whereas Qt4 to Qt5 usually only involved replacing a few identifiers (cannot speak to Qt6 since I don't do Qt anymore). That's why distros need to drag GTK2 along even though we are already at GTK4.
I work on the IUP fork, where I have and support the Qt driver, which works with both Qt5 and Qt6, and I only need a couple of checks to make it work on both. I often check if I broke the Qt5 build; nope, all good there, hard to break. For GTK3 and GTK4, those must be separate drivers; there's no way you can handle that with a couple of checks. Everything is different. That was possible to some extent and works with GTK2/GTK3 (single driver), but there are so many checks and workarounds there. Qt is so nice to work with.
Yeah let's start on a specific version that they overhauled the API since computers are getting new hardware features, god forbid a different DPI. And use that as a leverage point against a library that kept their API quite stable for the last 20 years!
Especially when comparing Qt against a library who couldn't keep its shit together for 5 years and is infamous for breaking all sorts of API and removing features.
> since computers are getting new hardware features
It's not possible to move forwards fast anywhere.
> and removing features
Yeah, this is indeed very unfortunate. They claim the GTK core team is about 2 devs, so tiny that we're lucky the development goes further at all. Hard to understand considering Red Hat became part of IBM.
Try living without a Google or Apple account in a country where most bank accounts or other services (incl. in some cases government services) require a smartphone app only delivered through the monopolists' app stores and (in the case of Android, where installing degoogled Android images is technically possible) requiring Google Play Integrity to pass.
> Understand human nature, incentives, and complex systems like markets and how they produce incentives.
We do. "Class war" is just the succinct phrasing for "people who earn money through capital returns have vastly different incentives than people who earn money from their labor, and they also have the means to turn those interests into political leverage".
Except that when you comparison shop, you are helping construct those incentives.
When you sell your labor you want it to cost as much as possible. When you buy the results of others labor you want them to be as cheap as possible.
The system is circles, cycles, loops, two sided trades. It’s not one group of people unilaterally plotting things. When someone does try to do that they usually fail unless their plot happens to align with the current in the river.
If you get rid of the investment and capital class you will get a new investment and capital class, probably made up of the leaders of the revolution that overthrew the old one. That’s where our current one came from after all. They are the intellectual and social descendants of the mercantile capitalists who overthrew the feudal order.
It’s pretty common for the new boss to end up becoming the old boss because they are also monkeys with the same limbic system.
Real change would require changing the system not the people in it, but I see no ideas on how to do this from the typical pop Marxist at least. Maybe there are deeper thinkers out there. Usually it’s “proletarian revolution, magic happens here, utopia.” Instead you get a new capital class whose power is rooted in position in the party, like the CCP, and it behaves just like our capital class.
I also suspect really deep change would require genetic modification that alters the structure of the human central nervous system, since a lot of this stuff is just ape behavior writ large.
My deeper point is: there’s a lot of discontent out there for legitimate reasons, but I don’t think LARPing communism will help any more than LARPing fascism has. We need new ideas, not 19th century ones that failed. Right now it just feels like the only ideas we have is to LARP the 1930s.
Some thinkers believe you have to encourage the people in the system and change the system to make it harder to do the wrong thing. Some reading on the topic includes:
> If you get rid of the investment and capital class you will get a new investment and capital class, probably made up of the leaders of the revolution that overthrew the old one.
How true is this? Certainly trust busters like Teddy had a lot of political power. Though I wouldn't call them a new capital class.
> Except that when you comparison shop, you are helping construct those incentives.
You're advocating for political consumerism? I suppose it has some use alongside boycotts and the "buy made-in-the-USA" movements of old. Sadly today the label is so watered down I doubt one can reasonably know whether any given purchase has any significant manufacturing or resources from within the USA. Ultimately we have to pull all the levers to enact change. Because the top 1% certainly isn't holding back.
No, not really, though that's been tried and hasn't been that successful. Hasn't worked when either the left or right have tried it.
What I'm doing is arguing against the us-vs-them conspiracist framing and pointing out that you are a participant in the system that contributes to creating the incentives that make the whole thing behave the way it does.
The CEO wants to save money, and therefore wants to lay people off because labor is a top cost, in part because you comparison shop on price. When you do that you send a price signal that says "do everything cheaper!"
(I don't really respond to these kind of threads, but I'll respond to you because I respect you and am a Zerotier customer and have been for years. Thanks for your work!)
> My deeper point is: there’s a lot of discontent out there for legitimate reasons, but I don’t think LARPing communism will help any more than LARPing fascism has. We need new ideas, not 19th century ones that failed. Right now it just feels like the only ideas we have is to LARP the 1930s.
I think that's genuinely why the pop left and the pop right are LARPing the 1930s. The deep thinkers of the world on both sides know that there are very hard problems but nobody has thought of solutions. I think the mid-to-late 1800s felt a lot like this too, which is the crucible through which many of today's political and economic systems came from.
It doesn't require deep thinking to understand that the idea of a guaranteed 0% return on cash is inherently a physically impossible lie and that this lie will have consequences on all of society since money is a mandatory monopoly and there is no competition between non thermodynamics aware and thermodynamics aware money systems.
The real blockade is that it would require everyone to admit that they are just as bad as Elon Musk, at least when it comes to the desire to accumulate infinite wealth. Everyone thinks they are in the right and that if they had control over all of society, their moral framework would improve the world, no matter what that moral framework actually is.
(Thanks for knowing about ZeroTier! BTW my opinions are 100% my own, not those of my employer yada yada.)
I have a rule: if we are still talking about a problem, it's a hard problem.
It's true in engineering but also in other fields like politics and economics. If it's still a problem it means the problem is hard -- meaning harder than what's already solved.
"But what about cases where people resist the solution for selfish or ideological reasons?"
Yes those are real, but I think that pushes the problem back to "why are they doing that?" If you dig, you generally find that there's some deeper perverse incentive or feedback mechanism at work. Or there's fear, or something deep in human psychology that needs to be understood and mitigated. Those are all tough problems.
Very few people -- maybe a few extreme narcissist and psychopaths -- wake up and genuinely try to be nasty and evil. It's very few people even at the top. If most executives and politicians were that bad, the world would be a lot worse than it is... like I'm not even sure we'd have a civilization at all. We'd have something that looked like Mad Max.
But people at the top absolutely do fall for conspiracism and ideological cults that claim there's easy solutions. People at the top are just people after all. When they fall for this bullshit they can end up doing a lot of damage.
The funny thing is that while conspiracism is popular everywhere now, it's also quite popular at the top. Go look at certain billionaires' accounts over on X. It's clear that these people are 100% conspiracy pilled and think they're the underdogs in some struggle against The Conspiracy(tm). That's not good at all.
They gravitate to conspiracism and gimcrack populist bullshit for the same reason ordinary people do: hard problems are discouraging and facing them induces despair. Despair sucks. It's easier to buy into some kind of bullshit that promises an easy answer.
>Real change would require changing the system not the people in it, but I see no ideas on how to do this from the typical pop Marxist at least. Maybe there are deeper thinkers out there. Usually it’s “proletarian revolution, magic happens here, utopia.” Instead you get a new capital class whose power is rooted in position in the party, like the CCP, and it behaves just like our capital class.
The typical pop Marxist denounces any form of observable incremental improvement as "reformism" which will supposedly pacify the workers and thereby delay the necessary revolution. From a Marxist perspective, things are going wrong when capitalism works better than what their book says and things are getting worse, when capitalism becomes less bad.
Needless to say, once the revolution does happen, they won't go back on their word and think "Okay now that the old system is gone, maybe we should look at the old (reformist) ideas and run a thousand small scientific experiments to see what actually works."
Because they are ideological purists rather than systemic engineers, they reject the very concept of trial and error. They genuinely believe they already know what's correct and what's wrong. They demand the utopia promised in the text immediately and with a 100% guarantee of success while simultaneously denying any way of actually getting there.
The modern term for this is accelerationism: allow things to get worse or even make them get worse to force the Big Change that we "really need."
Usually that big change makes things worse, unfortunately, because magic does not happen. The underlying faith behind accelerationism is that if everything breaks the good change is what will happen and not something else, but that's not backed up by history or honestly logic. Why would things get better after a crash and not worse? Why wouldn't worse forces (criminals, totalitarians) use the crash as an opportunity to take power?
It's found across the political spectrum and is IMO incredibly toxic. The accelerationist is wishing for other people to suffer so their preferred ideology can triumph after the great calamity, which is incredibly self-centered and callous. If you really think about it, it's pretty evil to hope for suffering in the name of realizing some mental image you have of how the world ought to work.
So why not just get rid of "earn money through capital returns" by removing the zero lower bound on cash so capital returns can finally be negative????
Of course that would go against the class war idea, then you can't blame others anymore. You'd have to accept how this objective improvement to your life as a labor income dependent person would also crush your own dreams of earning capital returns yourself.
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