They wanted direct access to the repositories for other purposes than serving the customer. Such as training data for copilot, and who knows what else.
You frame as if agency exists, then exploitive coercion doesn't exist.
We can respect the agency of folks to smoke or drink, while also criminalizing lying to entire populations about the known health effects of your products.
We can respect people as having agency, while also acknowledging that psy-ops like those run by Cambridge Analytica, or even normal psy-ops like mass market advertising, can influence groups of people through deceptive or manipulative ways in aggregate and cause massive harms.
We can respect personal agency while also acknowledging some folks have addiction problems, addictions problems be intentionally manufactured by products and platforms. There is a balance between allowing a poker game, and allowing the MGM Grand to plant a limo driver in a recovering addict's driveway.
We can respect agency while acknowledging those with large reach because of wealth can cause mass harm through media, influence and coercion if unregulated.
We can grant authorities to police and politicians without Qualified Immunity from consequences of their actions.
1. If someone knows all the information, but still chooses to make the wrong decision.
2. Someone is being told wrong or incomplete information, leading them to make the wrong decision
3. Someone is being forced by external means into making an wrong decision.
Two and three are already illegal, under fraud and coersion.
Im solely talking about 1. Because if you don't believe people have full agency in that regard, you have to prove to what extent can you determine what is deception. You can't just willy nilly say that something feels immoral, and therefore should be banned.
You appear to be making the assertion that any economic exchange taken by two adults with full information is morally acceptable. Is that correct?
If so, would you accept the following as moral actions?
Financial adviser charging substantially above-market fees to recent widows, who lack experience in finance (All information is available, but not understood)
Selling heroin outside of a drug rehab clinic (All information available & understood, but under compromising circumstances)
>Financial adviser charging substantially above-market fees to recent widows, who lack experience in finance
As long as the financial advisers statement is along the lines of "this is the service I provide, these are my rates", with no lies about saying how his rates are the best or lying about what he can actually do, absolutely no problem.
That doesn't mean that he is of a moral upstanding character, but he certainly shouldn't be banned from setting his own price.
>Selling heroin outside of a drug rehab clinic (All information available & understood, but under compromising circumstances)
This one is tricky, because unlike online sports gambling, this ties into other things.
My answer would still be yes with the following caveats
* The heroin seller is FDA certified and not making the drug at home where he can accidentally mess it up and kill someone that is not expecting to die.
* We have a system of dealing with people effectively who turn to drugs. Id be 100% for state/government funded drug camps where anyone can either voluntarily enter, or get put there if their drug use causes them to be a public nuisance. They can stay there, get shelter and food and basic first aid for free, and get all the drugs they want, with 2 caveats: no advanced medical care (if you OD, or have a heart attack, you die), and the only way to leave is to go through a trial reintegration program where you get support for getting off drugs, get put to work, and do this for a year before being let out.
It means that you assume that the person is capable of rationally analyzing a situation, and making the best choice for themselves. And if that choice is financial ruin, than that is what they want, and if doesn't affect anyone else, they should be able to make that choice.
It is possible to believe that people have full agency and allow them to make wrong decisions, but in the case of wrong decisions about harmful addictive things where such people tend to later themselves wish they had not gone down that path also believe that we should not allow others to help them make that wrong decision.
This is not my experience. My costs are higher, but the costs offset and then some by tax advantages.
Sharing here, to give a picture of what a real single person LLC looks like, compared to a vanity hobby LLC as described by OP.
I'm a contractor with a registered LLC S-Corp in the US. Almost all of my income is 1099 from one source. I was converted from W-2 to contract when my employer was acquired, my job role did not change. You might call me a misclassified full time employee. I could report this of course, and then I would burn my professional contacts and lose my job. So I don't.
I hire myself, pay myself a fair market rate as a salary, and run a payroll just for me. And I provide myself a few benefits from the LLC, like health insurance.
I'm required to keep up with a pile of quarterly and yearly fillings between the state, county, city and IRS. This is a non trivial amount of time and effort. I have to maintain separate business books and bank accounts in coordination with my accountant. I don't actually get to access the money I earned until it exits the business entity through a controlled process. I have to file business taxes separate from personal taxes. I still have to pay quarterly estimates on my personal taxes too.
My family health insurance is roughly $12k this year. If I purchase that insurance directly, I use post-tax income to do so. I'd pay ~$4k in taxes to take home the ~$12k income used to buy health insurance. But when the LLC buys the health insurance and provides it as a employee benefit, the ~$12k is not taxed.
The salary I pay myself is taxed at ~37%. The same as if I just filed as self employed. But the business income I earn over that salary is taxed at ~20%. This is the biggest advantage. The gap between a "fair market value" for my role, and my actual contract rate. In that gap, the LLC structure saves me 20% on taxes by labeling that portion of income as "shareholder profit disbursement".
Rough yearly costs:
$150 registered agent service
$150 state registration filing
$2500 tax prep and account services throughout year
$1500 payroll services, including payroll tax filings
Where I come from, if they went back and looked at the years you were only earning what would normally be employment income from the single employer, they would classify it a "personal services corporation" and move any income in the company you declared as corporate income into your personal hands, tax you at personal rates and make you pay interest on that difference for the time you had it misclassified.
Your jurisdiction might not do that, but I'd be damn careful and if you are liable that way, they might let you off the hook on the interest if you went back and declared it correctly before they do.
"Conservatism consists of exactly one proposition, to wit: There must be in-groups whom the law protects but does not bind, alongside out-groups whom the law binds but does not protect."
~ Frank Wilhoit
Good. That's a gain, not a loss. We're better off without social media psyop manipulations and subscription services bolted onto our code repositories. We're better off without a giant evilcorp getting wholesale access to a large majority of the world's source code.
Personally I never engaged in the community aspect of GitHub.
In my eyes it would be a ginormous gain to our colective mental health to not have the expectation to contribute to open source projects for free, or to have "green squares" every day on a public GitHub profile.
Especially now with LLMs. My hand coded github activity is through the roof the last two years just because of a job change, but I assume everyone's activity is up in the last 2 years for other reasons and if it meant anything in the past it definitely doesn't now
I just use GitHub for the basics: repo hosting, reviews and actions - what are the "social media psyop manipulations"? I've never really paid much attention to the other features.
All the metrics based around how many commits you have made, how many stars your repo has, etc. Why is that info gamified? Its a dopamine addiction channel.
You outlined what it (and all git hosting other services) are for: repository hosting, optionally issue tracker, mandatorily pull requests (for syncing with master or other branches), Actions for automated steps on merge to a tracked branch.
But now the users who only use core functions (re: repo hosting, reviews and actions) suffer when the service is down due to overreach with feature implementation.
It's good you can isolate yourself from it. But there's plenty of cases.
Open source maintainers being harassed or being demanded work through Github's issues. Or being feed AI slop to review endlessly. Or recruiters filtering resumes via Github activity graphs or repository stars.
And obviously the side shady market of all of the above (e.g. buying/selling popularity).
Like the parent comment, I can't wait for social media to be completely obliterated from code repositories.
> Open source maintainers being harassed or being demanded work through Github's issues
This isn't "psyops". Sure, it's a bad side of social interactions, but when you interact with other people, there's always some of this - in person as well as online.
The lead-off argument here seems more like "interacting with society can be bad".
I have no argument that selling popularity is bad and filtering by stars is stupid, but I don't blame Github for any of that.
You could equally well assign the success of certain coders to YouTube because they came to attention by showing off their work in livestreams. Which I do not. They found a way to advertise their own success, but it's theirs.
> The lead-off argument here seems more like "interacting with society can be bad".
The argument is that there's no need for that much social interaction to produce quality code, quite the contrary, the more social interaction, the more focus is lost.
I know it's an unpopular opinion, but there's a reason why the Linux Kernel communication is still done through acerbic email threads.
None of this is specific to GitHub. The exact same problems will sometimes happen any time users and developers communicate, which is a basic requirement of developing useful software. I doubt GitHub issues are worse than mailing lists or any other mechanism.
They almost have to be - which users will be able to get to your issues page and which will be able to find a mailing list? You'll have a much more selective audience in the latter
Demanding work isn't really an issue. Anyone can do that, and also reject the work. Dishonest actors on the other hand would take money for someone else's work.
Which law suits would those be? It seems to me that the reality is that GMO seeds are really useful and all the lawsuits Ive seen are farmers wanting to use them without paying royalties.
No. They should be available for legit use cases and not available for data scrapers who will use it to facilitate algorithmic housing and employment discrimination. Especially not available for scammers who make mugshot extortion websites.
Few who paid their debt to society and moved on are excited about random strangers wanting to do their own petty little performative mock show trials to sit in smug judgement over them. Please stop.
Almost as if there's a limit to how many demands strangers can reasonably place on a person before we as a society agree that the person should put up boundaries (like, say, putting on headphones and outright ignoring the demands) and even go out of our way to encourage strangers to respect those boundaries.
I'm not calling you out, IncandescentGas, you're right and you're doing a good thing. I'm just saying its ironic that you jump to the defense of somebody who has made it clear that they don't believe others deserve the same courtesy you are providing them.
No defence needed in my case. I made a mistake and paid my price. I feel bad for people who are so bored and miserable in their own lives that they feel the need to elevate themselves by trying to diminish me.
It's too bad that they don't live more fulfilling lives that don't require them to feel the need to attempt to insult people.
They wanted direct access to the repositories for other purposes than serving the customer. Such as training data for copilot, and who knows what else.
Pricing low helped ensure access to that data.