> (Literally my views were influenced by Feyerabend, an academic and leftist anarchist)

Sigh this is the most annoying thing on the internet. It's like every online debate a leftist post-structuralist has to say "nuh uh actually everything is relative because it's all about structure and there's no objective truth man." It's a lazy critique. You can aim post-structuralist critique at literally anything. You're right, science is an artifact of the society it's in, and actually society is based on the Wim Hof breathing technique so really science is in service of Wim Hof Breathing. You can't argue with me because everything is relative and based on structures and Wim Hof breathing is the root of all social structure.

If you're going to trot out a post-structuralist critique, build an alternate theory, don't just pick an argument apart. I'm hardly the first person to note this continental Leftist weakness. Zizek has written about this extensively. I don't need to believe in Soviet conspiracy theories to think your argument is weak.

> Moreso the internet evolved into something we don't like.

> If you can come to terms with that, maybe a rebirth of FOSS that targets our base instincts can arise.

> The cyberpunk dystopia we were warned of is already here and the masses invited it with open arms.

Mature conversations need to accept reality to move forward. I disagree with the implication in your comment that we are in uniquely lost times. I think FOSS was under much, much more threat in the Microsoft and proprietary software times than it is now. Remember when encryption was locked by the NSA? I just think the community on this site has locked itself into a local minimum of getting frustrated and sad over the state of things they don't like. Once any upvote-based site gets locked into one of these local minima it becomes really hard to escape as the incentive structure of voting continues to reward tapping into the same emotions.

You've really hit the nail on the head on how I feel. Especially with this line:

> This place used to make stories, not just Digg them.

I've started to dread most conversations about FOSS on this site because they just turn into the same tired old high-energy, low-quality conversation repeated over and over again. There's little incentive for anyone of influence or expertise to contribute because, well, all of these conversations end up the same way.

I guess I disagree on your view of the moderation of this site. While it's true that pg used to do a lot of guidance and tastemaking on HN, the scale of the site was small enough where he could. At this point the site is massive and only growing and this new userbase expects a Digg or Reddit like norm, not one that drives tastemaking. I think the site would require a fundamental rehaul to offer an individual or a group the tastemaking that pg could do when the site was a fraction of the size.

I also think, for better or for worse, that HN has "accepted" not being the tastemaker anymore and becoming another tech news aggregator. It's because the eyeballs of folks new to these issues doesn't really fall onto this site anymore. For a while that had been Twitter but now that Twitter is under Musk, it's lost that distinction and now tech discussions don't seem to have a good home.

Something something Brendan Eich

ActivityPub? Just because people use it as a Twitter clone doesn't mean you can't run mailing list style content on top of it. It would be nice to not use Mastodon-isms if you're trying to go about doing something like that. However it's easy with Mastodon-isms too. Have a bot listen to mentions, use any sort of moderation/accept queue to accept questions, then Reblog the ones you accept.

ATProto would fit most of the bill too here but AP is self-hostable and contained in a way that ATP isn't. AP is also standardized and has gone through standards bodies.

There's a lot of money pouring into stablecoins for "internet native payments". I'm cautiously optimistic about a net powered by flows of money and not ads, so incentives can align around user preferences. But to work I think a first use case will need to come out that really displaces existing usecases or builds a wholly new experience. An integrated LLM-assistant experience, if the thesis is to be belived.

I think the key difference is that online communities are "cheap"; they're easy to create and easy to destroy. Offline communities are difficult to form and as such more "sticky". A great example is ideological differences. Lefty political groups (no doubt Righty ones have this too but I'm not as familiar with them) constantly reorganize based on perceived ideological bounds. Leftist groups splinter from liberal groups, labor-forward leftist groups split from identity politic leftist groups, and on and on.

A PTA doesn't do that. The folks in the PTA all have the same shared interest in the school their kids attend. They can't just splinter off into another PTA over a perceived difference. This forces the folks on the PTA to work together and makes the organization sticky in a way an online group might not be.

If the activation energy to form and join a community needed it's also really easy to just churn from the community. Moreover when splitting is this easy it prompts the creation of hyper-specific communities which lead to things like radicalization and dehumanization of the other (look at the acrimony between leftist identity-politic progressives and center-left liberals on the internet right now for example.)

Sure but why start this discussion from first principles when you can read a text that covers the same ground in 10 pages?

> num1 and num2 are not default initialized

num1 and num2 are declared on the stack and not the heap. The lifetimes of the variables are scoped to the function and so they are initialized. Their actual values are implementation-specific ("undefined behavior") but there is no uninitialized memory.

> And a + b can invoke signed integer overflow UB. A program with more than zero UB cannot be considered memory safe.

No, memory safety is not undefined behavior. In fact Rust also silently allows signed integer overflow.

Remember, the reason memory safety is important is because it allows for untrusted code execution. Importantly here, even if you ignore scanf errors and integer overflow, this program accesses no memory that is not stack local. Now if one of these variables was cast into a pointer and used to index into a non-bounds-checked array then yes that would be memory unsafety. But the bigger code smell there is to cast an index into a pointer without doing any bounds checking.

That's sort of what storing indexes separately from references in a lot of Rust structures is doing inadvertently. It's validating accesses into a structure.

I'm actually not advocating for a reduction in the size of government bodies and I'm a bit frustrated about it. I'm not advocating anything about the size of government bodies (though naturally I have my feelings.) I'm confused why people seem to be intuiting this. I'm in fact doubly frustrated because I feel that people seem to be injecting modern political points into something that I feel predates many of our modern problems.

My point is: the social problems of disenfranchisement that come from large organizations are a property of their size. They may differ in that they're volunteer based, profit oriented, non-profit in a capitalist system, democratically organized, or several hundred or thousand more distinctions. But I'm going to feel just as disconnected from my national government as I will from the workings of Google as a small shareholder as I will from the NBA as someone that plays pick-up on a basketball court. The experience of going to a minor league baseball game is much more personal than going to a major MLB game.

To me the important issue is: the US specifically and the Anglophone West more broadly is seeing a decrease in its small institutions. This decrease predates the modern internet and social media landscape (see Bowling Alone.) I have many, many questions around this. Why is this happening? What is its effect on society? How can we reverse this? Is this something we can reverse?

It's an important issue to me because this trajectory is very different outside of the Anglophone West. Japan for example is not seeing the same decline in its small organizations as the US is, despite population reduction. If anything Japanese life is dominated much more by huge conglomerates than US life.

To add to this, I think a lot of people are reading this post to be some sort of reflection of economic organization when I (and others I suspect) think it's a post on social organization. There's always overlap but, as you say, it's a very dense field.

I do think there's a dearth of scholarship in the decline of social organizing in the US. There's studies that show the decline but other than Bowling Alone every subsequent book I've read or skimmed on the topic uses this decline to rail off against their boogeyman of choice, more set dressing than problem to consider.

I think when we think about our social fabric and the empowerment that individuals feel, that this is more of a theoretical rather than practical argument. All of the disenfranchisement, the feeling that your individual participation doesn't matter, the inability to steer the goals of the organization around your individual opinions, these are all just as present in a large state.

Sure a democratic government derives its legitimacy from the people's will but not from your will, and that is the role of the small community organization.