We: Italians, Spanish, Greeks, Arabs, Turks, Vietnamese, South Asians, Japanese.

Barbarians: everybody else, especially the French

You clearly haven’t met a Southern European. We divide the world in civilized ass washers and uncivilized smelly barbarians

I use Notion+Notion Calendar for this and I delegate to it a lot of stuff: bureaucracy, booking the barber, changing the bedsheets, all my work, birthdays, etc etc. How can people trust their brain with more than two or three items is unfathomable to me. I mean, when I was younger I could keep in mind a dozens upcoming appointments and go through them every few hours to make sure I wouldn’t miss anything, but as soon as your routine is disturbed by work stuff, it’s impossible.

Months? You clearly haven’t tried Pyanodons.

Jokes aside, yeah, it would be a killer.

mastercard sends your transaction data live to banks. They sell your data to third parties for marketing, profiling and the likes. Credit score is the least of your problems.

I know because I developed a system, in a major European bank, enriching their transaction data with mastercard data for live, predatory marketing.

I’m not American and I don’t even vote. Get off the internet and touch grass pls.

Quitting the for-profit sector for political and moral reasons. Not easy and it’s still a struggle, but I keep going.

If you’re wondering, no Appflowy cannot be used to replace Notion. It’s in their claim but you would have a pretty bad time doing it. Anytype might one day get there, Appflowy is another thing.

Bonfire, with its direct support for OpenScience features, would be a better alternative

Join Tech Workers Coalition then. https://techworkerscoalition.org/

Union organizing should be done across departments. Anyway software developers are doing a lot of organizing and unionizing, exactly because they have more secure positions. AWU, Kickstarter, NYT, Grindr, and many others are almost entirely office workers, many of which are software developers. Software developers are tech workers: drawing lines doesn’t help anybody and historically has always been to the detriment of the workers movement. Software developers start organizing when they stop being software developers and become tech workers.

Also FYI: I’ve been a software developer for a decade and I mostly organize software developers that, if anything, are overrepresented in “tech workers” spaces, to the point where we have to put rules like “don’t talk about git, it scares the workers” to prevent the spaces to become cliquey.

What do you mean? The USA has a lot of momentum and a lot of tech companies are unionizing, many more than anywhere else. It’s on mainstream newspapers every other day

I’m a union organizer in tech. I’m Italian, but I live in Germany and I do interact a lot with American organizers.

In Germany, most organizing is effectively cleansed of political identity and needs to be conducted in a very sanitized environment to be appealing to workers. It’s also very very focused on the legal aspects.

Americans are way more technical about the whole of it: more methodologies, more processes, more tools, it’s a game of numbers.

Italians…, well, let’s say the unions there deserve the hate. Not because they are particularly corrupted or conservative (which they are), but because they have no fucking clue what they are doing. They are much slower than their foreign counterparts, they have no resources, they have very little coordination and no interest in getting better. Like many things in Italy, they are slowly sinking in the quicksand. The organizers on the ground they are often under prepared and they have no concept of methodology: they know their legal stuff, but they believe that building momentum in the workplace is just a matter of identifying the right arguments and deliver the right speech at the worker assemblies. Basically they rely on luck, workers motivation and 50 years old processes. They also have no operational coordination on a regional or national level. People from the same union working on the same category don’t know or talk to each other unless they work in the same physical office.

None. I’m used to Notion and unfortunately there’s no OSS even getting close to that. I would like to move away, but even if I considered to lose my current base or move everything manually, there’s nothing feature-rich enough to meet my use cases.

It’s hard to say because I started when I was 4. I know the first one I have memory of, though: The Settlers. I was probably 5 by that point. I also have a very clear memory of my father, who would die two years later, coming back home from work, to whom I said: “I finished the first level of The Settlers before you”, to which he replied: “No shit (or something like that), you don’t have to go to work”. There, I understood work wasn’t a great thing.

I also have other memories of The Settlers and other games when my father was still alive, so it was necessarily before I was 7. These include: The Chaos Engine, Arkanoid, Cannon Fodder, Lemmings, Monkey Island 1 (it was 13 floppy disks). All of this was before I could really read and they were in English anyway (except Monkey Island), which I didn’t speak. I played on an Amiga 500.

Mitochondrium

I have a few:

• back in University I overhear some classmates I was not very familiar with talking about a girl playing Street Fighter IV competitively. They say the nickname. She was a girl I was flirting online with. I never played that game, she was from a completely other part of the country, she had no connection with my uni or the discipline of the uni. I asked her for confirmation and she said she knew the two guys, so it was actually her.

• recently: I’m talking to a girl I met after being in contact on Facebook for 10 years. She’s living in Paris, I’m living in Germany but we are both from Italy. Talking about an ex of mine, I ask her if she knows X because X and my ex have been together for a while. There was a slight chance she would have some kind of connection to him, but she says no, never heard of him. Then I start describing the guy, because he’s the most toxic guy on the planet and there are a few very clear identifying informations. She says: “Ah, yes, I know the guy, I matched with him on a dating app when I was on vacation two years ago, he was nuts”.

• one time I was hanging out with my friend G. I’m talking about my political activity as a general mutual update on how we are doing, and I mention among other things how I was trying to reach out to a few very specific publications which cover labor stuff in Italy. G is a painter, not really active in politics except very local community stuff. They say: “wait, you said xxx media? The editor-in-chief is my sister. Mind=blown”. To add to this, I have known G for like 10 years and I never really registered they had a sister.

They just allocate according to different logic than the mainstream american FOSS ideology. For instance, hackerbros, and you seem to say the same, will tell you that resources should be centralized into the biggest project in its own category to add more and more features to it. Regardless of cooptation from the private sector, this is generally a bad idea. It leads to a monoculture and monoculture leads to critical bugs impacting enormous amount of users. Also it’s predicated on the idea that there should be only a single way to fullfill a specific use-case, and that it’s the same throughout the world, erasing cultural, economic, social, biological and political differences. Optimization requires standardization, standardization requires erasure and suppression of minoritarian voices and it’s therefore oppressive. Maximizing it is not a good idea, both for technical, political and ethical reasons.

Seeding new projects that better fit local contexts, or simply produce diverse alternatives raises diversity and in turns raises resilience of the software ecosystem as a whole.

There has been for years: NLNet. It just got suspended by right-wingers. A lot of European projects were relying on it.

Clarify?

The vast majority of people do not care at all for technological autonomy, either because they don’t know about the implications or because they know and don’t care because it has very intangible effects over their life. Therefore they don’t make decisions taking into account technological autonomy or privacy.

People can learn entire, sometimes multiple languages, but learning some FOSS tools that are much more limited in scope is too difficult I guess. People who learn new languages during adulthood while working are a small minority. I speak as an immigrant who after 7 years barely speak the local language, like pretty much all my peers who didn’t take a whole year off to study. People with a job, social life, healthy relationships have very little time to focus on learning and very little incentive to do so.

FOSS is dead? (and we killed it?)

FOSS, on a political level, as a movement, it is dead. What we observe is the corpse, being a resource for value extraction processes by corporate and military organizations. The space of conflict over technology today is somewhere else: tech unionization, the post-FOSS movement, tech cooperativism, direct sabotage, public regulation. FOSS has been subsumed by the system.

https://www.boringcactus.com/2020/08/13/post-open-source.html