I imagine both Libre and Free are open-sourced and easily modifiable? I haven’t looked into it, but if it’s anything like Rhino there should be a standard way of writing custom plugins that should close the gap on some of those - at least the object naming would be easy.

I’ll look into them though, thanks! BIM software is such a pain in the ass to work with and one of the most expensive design software I know of, I think open sourced projects would be amazing for BIM if they took off like FreeCAD did

I work as an architectural designer but I’ve never really been allowed to use anything other than Revit for BIM workflows. Our consultants basically only use Revit or Autodesk products, so our hands are kind of tied for projects where we need to collaborate.

My boss uses Vectorworks for our small projects that don’t need BIM, I might suggest we switch to Libre or FreeCAD so that we all have access without needed another VW license. Do you enjoy using LibreCAD?

Person A: Expresses a liberal perspective “Watch as this person calls me a Lib” Person B: “… yes, that is common liberal perspective” Person A: “Called it”

The more we electrify our cars, the less feasible this is.

Decoding and sending messages to mechanical systems over the CANBUS is one thing (still difficult, but possible), but taking control over system software is another. In the us, consumers are supposed to have the right to repair their personal vehicles, but a lot of that law was established back when you could do work on a vehicle without having access to digitally protected copyright. We might have a right to repair, but that’s starting to clash against their copyrights over their IP and software controls.

And that’s not even getting into their eagerness to utilize subscription models - would a court side with a consumer if they decided they wanted to circumvent DRM controls over subscription-controlled car features (a car that they own outright)? It’s unclear to me that right to repair or consumer protections have been written in a way to accommodate those conflicts… Especially when cars are subject to far higher safety regulations than computers - a manufacturer could argue that they need to prevent consumers from tampering with their software systems for their own safety.

If you still own a ‘dumb’ car without one of these systems, it’s really not a bad idea to hold onto them for as long as possible. You can always upgrade them if you want to - some people have even replaced ICE transmissions with electric ones. But once you own one of these cars with software-controlled systems, it’s far harder to strip them out. Especially once they start requiring cellular connection to operate or function (or require connections to privately-owned satellite constellations…)

maybe it’s because i’ve been watching too much of the office lately but I expected you to end this comment with:

But those reasons aren’t nefarious

Downloaders can be prosecuted.

They wouldn’t go after the users, just the domains and the host servers. Similar to shutting down TPB or other tracker site, they’d go after the site host. True enough, there wouldn’t necessarily be risk to users of those sites, but if they escalated things enough (like if an authoritarian got elected and was so motivated…) they could start taking more severe punitive action. Who knows, they could amend the regulation to go after the users if they wanted - it’s a dangerous precedent either way. Especially when the intent is to ‘protect children’, there’s no limit to how far they might take it in the future.

Blocked servers are inaccessible to adults, too, which raises freedom of information issues.

I’m not familiar with Australian law but I don’t think this really applies. Most countries with internet censorship laws don’t have any guaranteed right to uncensored information. At least in the US, they don’t have ‘censorship’ per se, but they do sometimes ‘block’ an offending site by seizing domains/servers/equipment, and they can force search engines de-list them if the offense is severe enough. If the server is beyond their reach, they can prosecute or sanction the person hosting the site to pressure them into compliance. I can imagine a social media site who refuses to age verify and that hosts pornographic content (cough cough lemmy cough cough) be pursued like a CSAM site.

Large scale piracy is illegal pretty much everywhere, meaning that the industry can go after the operators and get the servers offline. Not so here.

That doesn’t mean they can’t throw their weight around and bully self-hosters/small-time hobbyists and scare them into compliance. Any western country enacting a law like this could pressure their western trade partners to comply with enforcement efforts. And anyway it isn’t necessarily about the practicality of enforcing the law, so much as giving prosecutors a long leash to make a lot of noise and scare small-time hobbyists out of hosting non compliant sites. Most people can’t afford the headache, even if it isn’t enforceable where they live.

It gets banned/blocked, or sued for noncompliance for allowing Australian users without age verification. They’ll play whack a mole for decades, just like they have been for P2P file sharing.

Like a lot of post-911 legislation, it’s anti-privacy surveillance disguised as a way to ‘protect the children’. It’s absolute shit and we should absolutely be taking measures to anonymize our open source social media platforms further.

There’s no editorial process, anyone can post anything (within the TOS).

A lot of people use it for personal vlogs and such. It might be easier to ask how it’s meaningfully different from something like tiktok that makes it not social media.

Yes, famously anti-capitalist Liberalism…

This article is excellent, even if many here will be offended by the headline and refuse to read further.

This part struck me:

In the United States and elsewhere (think of French President Emmanuel Macron’s disastrous electoral machinations), the liberal centrism or ​“progressive neoliberalism” that casts itself as the bulwark against fascism is proving to be anything but. Not only has it contributed to the social miseries upon which reactionary politics feeds — mass incarceration, predatory finance, imperialist war and the rollback of social welfare have all been bipartisan projects in the past half-century — but it stands revealed as a failed brand, kept alive primarily by the investments of party elites and donors, but also by what historian Adam Tooze calls its profound narcissism. This delusional conviction that it is a historical force for progress, sanity and the good makes elite liberal politicians slip easily into paternalism and condescension—something many voters find more offensive than direct insults.

Edit, Jesus what a banger. The last paragraph is perfect, too

An anti-fascist politics does not require constantly decrying the fascism of your opponent (which may prove numbing or alienating) but it certainly has to cleave to a different logic than that which ​“depends on the moment” or on electoral calculus alone. It needs to discover ways to not just make emancipatory ideas popular — fortunately, many of them already are — but to weave them into a project rooted in everyday needs. To this end, liberal centrism is not just useless, it is an obstacle. It demands endless moral and political sacrifices from leftists and progressives, while not even serving as a decent vehicle for the kind of reformist compromises we might expect from representative politics. When existential issues are on the agenda, from genocide to the mounting climate catastrophe and the manifold crises it will bring, betting on liberalism is a fool’s errand.

Lmao, the CIA fomenting violent revolution in their own country in order to install a pro-western dictator/monarch would be very on-brand, I will grant you that

No lol, we do not agree.

There are numerous examples of revolutionary change bringing better, more equitable systems of governance.

The only pattern I see is that the ones where the US is involved end up turning to shit.

Literally two comments ago you were saying this:

Most of the time when you destroy the system you get a much worse system.

Was the Shah good or bad? Is it important that what came before the Shah was a popular democratic system that the US destroyed? Is that destruction justified if it becomes a great vacationing spot for Americans?

You’re all over the place bud.

Hmmm

They absolutely were compelled by his opposition to international conflict and intervention - which was a huge part of Clinton’s legacy as SoS.

People forget that nationwide elections are ordinarily determined by infrequent voters to begin with.

It wasn’t high-propensity voters voting for trump, third party, or abstaining, it was ordinary non-political americans who didn’t see a point in voting for a status-quo center-right candidate.

People have been screaming at democrats since at least 2008 that they need more progressive, more radical policies, and they’ve repeatedly avoided addressing those concerns. Trump ran in 2016 as a moderate. He came out on the left of fucking hillary clinton on the war in Iraq and interventionism. She lost to trump because he maneuvered to the left of her, and democrats still have not fucking learned.

Democrats need to let go of their moderate progenitors and re-build their base from the bottom left. They’re leaving millions of voters on the table because they keep hamstringing themselves on a bygone era of popular neoliberalism, and there’s nobody left to blame now but the party itself.

I do consider that “game theory” voting (a) results in a definite single rational course of action for this election for anyone who favors democracy or left-leaning policies. But I also, it (b) is not be the endgame and just a mitigation until we prioritize ranked choice voting and other structural reform.

This is fine if there was any indication that the underlying problem of fascism in the US is going to be addressed by the incoming administration, or if you believe it is addressed by voting against it. The problem is that many of us don’t believe either to be the case, especially when the current campaign strategy has been to grant concessions to those nationalist solutions while turning away from socialist ones.

When neither of the most likely outcomes address the continued growth of fascism inside the US, the ‘game theory’ of electoral politics suddenly seems like a naieve indulgence more than any kind of solution, even a temporary one.

I think the miscommunication is that you’re looking for a game-theory explanation for the best way to vote given a desired outcome, and TDD (forgive the shorthand) is doing a higher-level analysis on large-scale electoral trends and demographics that explain a shortcoming in the democratic campaign strategy. Even working within the 2-party electoral system, democrats have been leaving a lot of voters on the table, and the only outreach they’ve been doing for those voters (who are getting more and more frustrated) has been to scare them/shame them into falling in line and swallowing their scruples.

The reason why it’s dumb to paint Greens or other third-parties as ‘spoilers’ is because of this implicit assumption that those votes will trickle-down into one of the two major parties if they weren’t there. TDD is pointing out that Greens (and RFK before he stepped out, and PSL, ect) are filling political voids that the democrats and republicans have left open by not addressing the concerns of those voters. Assuming those voters would simply make a different choice ignores the fact that there was something about whatever third-party candidate that was motivating them that isn’t present in the 2-party candidate. That voter is about as likely to decide not to vote at all as they are to decide to give up their scruples and vote for the party that they were actively avoiding in the first place, especially when that candidate has refused to give those voters/those interests representation.

All of this analysis is on top of a foundational understanding/materialist lens that suggests that the US is heading toward economic/capitalistic collapse independent of whatever electoral showmanship is happening every 4 years. This game-theory bullshit is completely indifferent to the environment that is actively pushing voters away from the center and into more and more extreme populism.

Yup. This is what frustrates me here and especially the last year: everyone pretends as if Trump is the singular threat that - once defeated- we may move on to other more important things.

But Trump is a manifestation of a national disillusionment with electoral politics and a broader economic failure. We keep dismissing the progressive populism of the left, while the fascistic populism on the right grows to a fever pitch.

If tonight trump keels over from a stress induced aneurism, by tomorrow lunch an opportunistic upstart will take his place because conservatives are frothing at the mouth for retribution. If Republicans return to classical wasp conservatism now, they’ll lose the next decade of elections because half their voting base simply isn’t interested in stale fiscal policy anymore.

The longer democrats ignore the conditions creating that current of populism beyond the orbit of Big Orange, the shorter lived any victories they might squeeze out now will be. We’ll see what happens Tuesday, but i think the odds are leaning away for Harris. We might have to confront that failure sooner than we think.