Sidetracked

A 2007 panic, the BlackBerry Storm, and why Android won't tell you why your WiFi failed

2026-07-25T00:00:00.000Z

So, I was facing an issue.

I had installed Android 6 on a Samsung Galaxy Tab 2; however, connecting to WiFi simply yielded... nothing.

It would try for about 10 seconds and then wouldn't even give me an error. It'd simply say "Saved." I've dealt with this for years on older devices, mostly accepting it without question, but this time I decided to actually question it.

I've since narrowed down the issue to the fact that my router was using PMF, and versions below Android 9 don't support it at all. But it took a decent amount of time to get there.

It didn't throw an error, at least not a meaningful one, and I only realised that I could use logcat much later.

All this is to say, I think it's quite interesting how so many of Android's problems can be attributed to the simple fact that it was foundationally Linux hacked onto a phone.

Linux utilities are meant to log an error to the journal and die while the rest of the system keeps running. It is generally bad practise for them to alert the user directly. I can't imagine translating that to a neat message box, one possibly on another thread, being easy.

And this is exactly the problem with Android's core networking system. It drops a line into logcat and just keeps going.

To turn that into a helpful user experience, the Android framework (written in Java/Kotlin) has to constantly poll or listen to these low-level native states.

Furthermore, why doesn't Google modify wpa_supplicant to throw a neat little error? It's possible, but just highly impractical.

In reality, trying to force an open-source C daemon to talk directly to a high-level Java/Kotlin framework is an architectural nightmare. Google did actually try doing things like this in the early days, and it turned into a massive engineering bottleneck for a few core reasons.

Large parts of this come down to the fact it's C. For a C utility to tell Kotlin anything, it needs to go through the Java Native Interface.

C, of course, doesn't know what a Kotlin "error" or "exception" is. Rather, it uses raw memory addresses, integer status codes, and string buffers.

Google would have to write hundreds, maybe thousands of JNI bindings for every single edge-case error condition in the low-level code. And, lest we forget, JNI calls are slow, prone to memory leaks, and notoriously hard to debug.

Oh, and that would require a fork, an architectural headache in its own right. Either way, wpa_supplicant is an independent project; it has no direct affiliation with Android.

Creating a fork would mean maintaining a special Android version of wpa_supplicant, to which they would have to manually merge every critical, urgent fix.

Don't even get me started on doing this dozens of times for every external project Android uses.

And at a certain point, you need to ask the chip what happened. Many, with their proprietary drivers, will return something close to WLAN_REASON_UNSPECIFIED. And "we don't know" doesn't look great on an error.

Locking everything in the attic

The root of the issue is that it requires ADB. You can't easily view logcat's logs from an Android device; you'll usually need a PC, or maybe you can hack something together using Shizuku.

This is the most mind-boggling part of it. If everything dumps info into logcat, why not just let someone look there?

The reason it's hidden comes down to a few things. Namely, historically, any app with the READ_LOGS permission could read the system log. This was a massive security risk because malicious apps could sniff the logs to see what other apps were doing, leak personal data, or track user activity.

Plus, logcat lists 12 new errors every time you touch the screen (I'm barely exaggerating), so it's hard to find what you're actually looking for.

Google locked this down pretty tightly. Now, apps cannot read system-level logs without root or ADB access. Even if they built a native Quick Settings tile to show logs, they would have to build a highly privileged and secure UI wrapper to expose that data without opening security vulnerabilities for the rest of the OS. Not the easiest thing in the world.

But let's be honest here, it's not exactly hard on a project of Android's scale.

And Grandma exists, sure, but it's also not exactly hard to add it as a quick settings tile that can be enabled in developer options. Android already does this.

Because you can't see that your device lacks PMF support, you never realise you need to disable it. It'd be messy, but better than nothing.

Instead, it leaves you to think "Android is buggy or broken."

I genuinely think Android is ideologically harmed by Google and fundamentally tries to hide what it was built for in fear of driving away consumers who only want an ideal frictionless appliance.

The user won't blame the march of time; they'll blame Android. And I can't help but feel like Google would rather that than admit Android is a Linux-based operating system. And Linux is just... like this.

Linux in a trenchcoat

Google has spent over a decade trying to scrub the "Linux-ness" out of Android’s public image.

In the early days, Android largely embraced its tinkering roots. It was almost encouraged to use a launcher and mess around.

Today, Google wants Android to be viewed identically to iOS, a seamless, locked-down consumer appliance.

That's not an insult to Apple, and it's not a compliment to Google's recreation.

To acknowledge that a Wi-Fi connection failed because of a low-level native daemon handshake error is to admit that Android is not a cohesive, bespoke piece of silicon magic.

It is to admit that Android is a massive, complex stack of open-source Linux utilities, legacy C code, and driver blobs shoved inside a Java virtual machine.

Linux, and the software ecosystem around it, are incredibly powerful, but it is like this. It expects configuration mismatches. It expects the administrator to look at a log, tweak a config file, and move on.

That's what the Linux networking stack is and will be for the foreseeable future. But no, Android must be some perfect, top-down piece of software. Because iOS is.

Mayday, mayday, mayday!

When Steve Jobs walked onto the stage in January 2007 to announce the iPhone, the Android team was actively working on the Sooner. It was a BlackBerry clone with a non-touch screen, physical QWERTY keyboard, d-pad navigation, and a 2G radio; it didn't even have Wi-Fi working yet.

Android was still aiming to accommodate all screen sizes, but the Sooner was meant to be released, well, sooner than the theoretical touchscreen device that was somewhat planned but also not really.

Andy Rubin famously watched that keynote from a taxi and realised their entire roadmap was instantly obsolete. They pivoted immediately to the "Dream" (the HTC G1), tacking touchscreen capabilities onto an operating system that was architected to be a keyboard-and-button messaging platform.

See, when Apple built iOS, they designed a monolithic, top-down operating system. Every single component, from display compositor to network daemon, was built from scratch to pass information cleanly up the chain to a highly controlled user interface.

In 2006, official design specs treated touchscreens as entirely optional, and physical buttons were assumed, though the architecture didn't disallow touch capabilities per se.

When Google bought Android, a startup that had briefly started in 2003 trying to build a digital camera OS, in 2005, they weren't trying to build a touch-first flagship.

Google didn't have the luxury of time that Apple had; they had only 18 months to pivot a button-oriented project into a touch-first smartphone OS.

We don't know a tonne about Android's pre-2008 development, but given that the Sooner was meant to come first, we can assume the sudden shift to a touch OS in just 18 months wasn't exactly handled with complete sobriety.

If Google had handled the launch with complete sobriety, they might have taken the time to write a proprietary, highly integrated networking stack natively unified with the UI, the way Apple did and the way they honestly should've. But they were in a literal race to stop Apple from locking down the entire mobile market forever.

Google was building Android to beat BlackBerry until Apple forced everyone to pivot. Congrats, Google; Apple doesn't have a monopoly! And the cost is permanent tech debt.

The underlying Linux system is pulling one way, and Google's product managers are pulling another. The result: "Saved."

Hardware sci-fi with usability crimes

The Sooner really could've killed BlackBerry, just not in the same way the iPhone did; it was designed to compete directly in BlackBerry's territory.

It did more than any BlackBerry could; it was in many ways better. BlackBerry occupied a distinct market from smartphones, one that still exists today, and the Sooner happened to also be in that market.

BlackBerry's death was accelerated by the iPhone, sure, but it wasn't directly caused by it. The iPhone faced major backlash at launch from "serious businessmen" who hated the lack of an actual keyboard.

The problem was largely that BlackBerry misinterpreted the iPhone. Instead of sticking to their guns, improving the platform, and keeping BlackBerry as a product alongside the iPhone, they panicked. They both didn't do enough and did too much.

When the iPhone launched in 2007, BlackBerry executives initially dismissed it as a battery-draining toy with a poor digital keyboard, choosing to double down on their physical keyboards, enterprise security, and corporate email rather than immediately changing their design path.

But that was both arrogant, as it completely dismissed the iPhone, not as a threat to adapt to but as something to ignore.

The next problem is that they didn't stick to it. They launched successful physical-keyboard devices like the Bold 9000 in 2008, but in November 2008, they released the BlackBerry Storm.

Which might've been fine, but it had a clickable screen.

You're probably as confused as I was, but the screen clicked. The entire glass display physically moved downward. Didn't catch on; you can imagine why.

Many users found the physical clicking cumbersome, stiff, and slow, and that is a moving part. If you drop it one too many times, the entire gimmick breaks. You can also imagine it being rather tiring.

The BlackBerry Storm could've worked, absolutely. The BlackBerry Storm could have worked if they had released an SDK with the new screen dimensions in advance and required all new apps to support it, made sure it was easy for existing apps to support it, and, in worst-case scenarios, just ran it in the classic form factor and added some emulated buttons.

An instant, sprawling app library and iPhone competitor. But the weird lack of dedication to touch (clickable screen, seriously?) and lack of trust in the whole "iPhone clone" thing doomed BlackBerry and made the attempts to course correct resounding failures.

Five. Hundred. Patches.

So where does Android fit into this? Well, in 2006, Android wasn't competing with Apple; it was competing with RIM. Android very well could've swooped in and stolen BlackBerry's customers while they were fumbling. But I guess you can't do that when you're making the same mistakes.

I honestly think that Google made choices when the iPhone was released that they wish they could take back. Maybe rip out the networking stack and replace it with their own, or stop dumping everything to logcat.

But when you're spiralling, and you need to get something out immediately, you don't think about portability. You make choices you cannot change.

So what has Google been doing about it? Decoupling core components and rewriting daemons in Rust and C++. This effort has seen modest success, but progress is slow.

It will take years to detangle this mess, and I highly doubt it will ever truly be as good as it could've been from the start. Every quick fix from fifteen years ago has become today's foundational architecture.

Detangling that web takes massive engineering resources, and as long as the OS's philosophy favours hiding errors over surfacing them, there's very little incentive for leadership to prioritise fixing the diagnostic pipeline.

Modern Android has actually been replacing wpa_supplicant with nl80211 / wificond / WifiNl80211Manager in recent versions to modularize the Wi-Fi stack. The fact Google is still untangling this 15+ years later shows how deep it actually runs.

Sweet nothings

There's an interesting fallacy I see often, and it's regarding simplicity.

The classic stereotype of "Grandma thinking her computer got hacked" when a popup appears comes down to a lack of phrasing and clarity.

If you pop up an error saying "Unhandled exception" with a string of arbitrary characters, what do you want people to think? That they're getting a prize?

If you phrase it correctly, you can say something like:

"This app has encountered an internal issue. [OS] and other apps will not be affected. If you want to troubleshoot it, here's more info: Unhandled exception (0x12345678)"

Or perhaps in an optimal scenario:

"Sorry, your device doesn't support (hardware feature), which is necessary for (action)."

I doubt anyone will be distressed by that.

Compare it to just something like:

"This app has encountered an error."

Grandma won't be worried, but she won't have anything to do either. Making complex systems clear makes them manageable; hiding failure states does not. And there's a difference between using layman's terms and "dumbing it down."

Simplicity is not the same as secrecy. By treating every user like they can't handle basic diagnostics, we erode general technical literacy.

We turn computing devices from tools you can understand and configure into black-box appliances you can only restart and pray over.

The final question is, Google won. Android hasn't faded into obscurity. Was it worth it? From a corporate perspective, yes, it was a home run.

Android powers roughly 70% of the world's smartphones. If they hadn't panicked, rushed, and hacked low-level Linux daemons to a Java framework in 18 months, Apple might have locked down the global smartphone market, or Microsoft/BlackBerry might have stumbled into a dominant position.

But it created a permanent tax on debuggability and software quality. We have market competition, but at the cost of jeopardising Android, in a way I fear will catch up to them within the next decade.

A large reason why Android exists today is that they were early. Nobody has disrupted Google or Apple because of their untouchable app ecosystems. It's a large reason why other Linux phones are somewhat doomed. If they didn't manage to scoop up that market share at the beginning, Android would've been a distant memory.

A necessary evil.

Defending your right to exist as you are

2026-06-12T00:00:00.000Z

I was thinking last night about Linux apologists.

You've probably met one, those people who try to defend Linux at every turn and insist it's the best at everything. People who love to remain adamant that desktop Linux will overtake Windows. It won't.

The desktop Linux toolkit we have today was fundamentally built by enthusiasts for enthusiasts. Windows, as an example, was built for the consumer and the business man, from 1 to NT to 11.

From around ME and onwards, they moved nearly everything to GUIs. An average user will never have to use the command line.

The standard toolkit used for functioning desktop Linux environments (GNU/BusyBox, X11/Wayland, Pulse/Pipewire, GTK/Qt) still expect that you either have knowledge of the system you're running, that you are willing to edit config files and use the CLI for anything and potentially everything.

Distros like Debian or OpenSUSE have historically done a good job at hiding this and building a GUI wrapper for everything and anything - which is great. But those expectations don't go away. Typically, they show when something goes wrong. Keeping it under a GUI lock and key doesn't remove the issue.

"Linux"

So far I have tried to avoid calling it "Linux". Linux very well might be better than Windows, I'm certainly not in a position to say, I'm no expert in C programming, and the source for Windows' kernel is not public.

Blanket statements like "Linux is better than Windows" is comparing a single, massive, cohesive integrated commercial operating system (Windows), to a singular monolithic kernel (Linux).

Because that's what Linux is. A kernel. A kernel has 4 responsibilities: memory management, process management, device management, and system calls. Notably, none of those are "showing a GUI" or "printing a document".

No, because what most people refer to as "Linux" is a combination of software that is not Linux. They're referring to Debian or Ubuntu, or everything else that was built around Linux. It's like referring to the dirt as your house.

Often, it's projecting all the work done by completely separate projects (GNU, freedesktop.org, GNOME, KDE, systemd, Debian, Canonical, etc) onto that one word.

You can say "Linux" is better because there is no Linux.

In reality, most are referring to distros. Specifically ones like Debian. That's another problem, most times "Linux" is a shorthand for Debian. Debian is not Linux.

Yes, there is Linux, but Debian is not Linux. Debian has added thousands of packages around Linux in order to make it usable as a desktop OS. Ditto with Ubuntu (except it's based off Debian), OpenSUSE, Red Hat, and Fedora.

But you cannot call those Linux. Because "Linux" represents everything and nothing all at once, it can never be proven wrong. Nobody boots into raw Linux, interacts with the memory manager, and says, "wow, what a great computing experience".

The word "Linux" is simply doing too much work.

The crowd that yells the loudest about "Linux" being ready for the masses is almost always using a heavily curated, heavily modified corporate-backed distro. I mean, look at the site of the Linux foundation, it proudly displays Google, Meta, Microsoft, and Oracle.

It's coasting on the massive amount of money and development hours companies like Canonical have put into Ubuntu to patch over the chaotic and fragmented reality of the Linux ecosystem, if you can even call it that. You want the indie street-cred of using "Linux", but you also want the sanitised, hand-held experience of a commercial OS?

Calling it "Linux" erases the actual labour of the people building the user-facing software. The people writing the desktop environments, the display servers, and the packaging systems are the ones actually attempting to make a functional OS.

It's a lazy way to win an argument and allows praise of a hypothetical ideal.

Printers

Printer drivers are a common pain point on Linux. It's simply not usable for a casual. HP is widely and consistently recognised as the most popular printer manufacturer, which makes the Linux situation around it even more damning.

Let me take you back to the 2000s. Horrifying, I know. Linux printing often relied on primitive spooling systems and reverse-engineered Ghostscript drivers. Hardware companies ignored Linux because its desktop market share was minuscule.

In 2001, HP launched the HP Linux Printing Project and released HP-IJS (Inkjet Server). It was an open-source driver interfacing directly with Ghostscript, and it improved print quality and reliability for Inkjet printers.

In 2005, HP consolidated their efforts into a single, comprehensive suite, known as HPLIP. It went beyond printing and integrated with SANE (Scanner Access Now Easy) and faxing. It was basically the whole thing.

In 2006, as HP started rolling out the LaserJet printers at a lower cost, the open-source dream crumbled. They started requiring a binary blob plugin for certain models.

Around 2017-2019, they stopped caring. By 2019, AirPrint and Mopria had fully conquered mobile. They started building these universal standards into hardware and they basically didn't have a reason to keep actively developing HPLIP.

HPLIP's graphical tools were written back in the era of Python 2. Eventually it got completely deprecated, and HP scrambled to port it over to Python 3. This left a mountain of legacy code, deprecated library dependencies, ancient PyQt bindings, and brittle paths.

Remember the binary blobs from earlier? For HP's cheaper LaserJet models, HPLIP requires a binary blob to upload firmware to the printer every single time it powers on.

HP updates the version string every few months, but the plugin version must match the HPLIP version exactly. If you update HPLIP, your printer stops working until you re-run hp-plugin and redownload the blob from HP servers. Which means they can take it away at any time.

I know this problem first hand, I use an HP Smart Tank 530. It's from around October 2019. It should support driverless printing, but in reality, HP cocked it up. Printers released around that time were built on the cusp of the transition.

These include the HP LaserJet Pro M15w and MFP M28w, both are wildly popular. They have mobile printing and AirPrint, sure. But their implementations are buggy, unfinished, or non-standard.

Most Linux distros try to connect to printers using mDNS/Bonjour for discovery, and then attempt to communicate via IPP (Internet Printing Protocol). Not that shockingly, HP fibbed. Most of their printers do not properly implement either and they require a tonne of proprietary software on the client.

I have to use HPLIP and suffer through it. Most do. This is made worse by Debian's packaging system not handling these types of things too well.

Most won't even know to install HPLIP, they'll just go to the settings app, see it doesn't work, and give up.

Often the answer to this is just to buy a Brother printer. But, what about offices? What if you don't have the money? What if you have a niche usecase you need from your printer? What if you just don't want to?

Telling someone who might be struggling financially, or an office that deployed fifty HP machines to "just spend more money" because the operating system can't handle a basic hardware handshake is completely out of touch with reality.

The printer is bad. HP makes terrible, locked-down software, but at the end of the day, the user just wants to print a boarding pass.

A casual user does not care about the philosophical battle between the Linux community and big bad HP. They care that the document doesn't come out the tray. Just to do that, you are thrown into the nightmare of HPLIP. A casual user is going to look at a localhost for hardware config and think the computer is broken.

Most Linux environments fundamentally expect the user to adapt to it, and not the other way around.

Stockholm syndrome

Linux enthusiasts love to claim Proton and DXVK are so good now, and you can just run any game you want and there's no need for Windows, and there's no need for Windows, who needs Windows amirite?

In a perfect world, maybe.

Yes, Proton can run like 70% of the games I want to play. But am I supposed to ignore the 30%? Am I supposed to have nothing and be happy? I'm like the optimal user here, I don't play that many new games. I mostly play games from around 2000-2010.

If you pay for Xbox Game Pass Ultimate, you literally cannot play those native PC games on Linux. Telling a user to give up a massive, affordable library of games just to avoid Windows is terrible advice.

This is all hanging on Steam, a company with many questionable practises that people love to defend, and it requires you to use the Steam app to launch everything?

If Valve decides tomorrow that the Steam Deck experiment is over and they want to pivot their funding elsewhere, Proton development slows to a crawl or stops completely. Proton is entirely corporate-dependent. It's an open-source project on Valve's life support. You are trading one corporate overlord for another.

A fair chunk of modern PC games use Xbox and the Microsoft Store. Do you know what doesn't work under Proton? Xbox and the Microsoft Store.

Some say "I'll never play a game with DRM or anticheat". Good luck.

You are shifting your behaviour and restricting yourself because of the limitations of an operating system, and the "just use an alternative" or "just don't play those games" argument is pure coping. Expecting someone to completely change their hobbies, drop their favourite games, and abandon software they need just to conform to an operating system is ridiculous.

A computer is a tool that allows you to do what you want. When you start changing your behaviour and hobbies, giving up games your friends are playing, abandoning niche software, and rewriting your preferences, the tool is now ruling you.

Eisegesis

I need to address something that's been bugging me. The "FOSS community".

I was watching a video about gOS. gOS (short for good OS) was an Ubuntu-based Linux distro created in the late 2000s, that was very Google centred. Notably, it had no association with Google.

I saw a comment saying something along the lines of "this wouldn't fly in the FOSS community nowadays". And it made me realise something about FOSS.

FOSS as a term means 2 things:

It's free
It's open source

Enthusiasts assign meaning to FOSS that simply isn't there. It doesn't mean the author shares your opinion about Google or Microsoft, it means they published the code.

There is a massive, revisionist history trend where people treat "open source" as a shorthand for a specific anti-corporate, anti-"Big-Tech" ideology.

The developer doesn't have to take a blood oath against Microsoft to use the Apache licence. It's wanting FOSS to mean "an underground rebellion of developers fighting the system" and ignoring the fact most devs release FOSS because it makes collaboration easier, builds a better portfolio, and is often funded by the very corporations they dislike.

A licence isn't a political party.

If a developer wants to write open-source software that hooks directly into Google Drive, has proprietary telemetry, and sells user info to the highest bidder, that is completely in their right under the terms of "open source". People might not like it, and they are free to fork it, but claiming it "isn't real FOSS" is just pure gatekeeping.

I fundamentally hate the concept of the FOSS community. Again, it just means they published the code. How are you building an identity, an ideology, and a community around that concept? It's genuinely not that deep. It’s a way to collaborate on code without getting sued, and a way to let other people fix bugs.

It’s a mutated version of the early hacker ethic from the 70s and 80s (like Richard Stallman and the Free Software Foundation). Back then, "free software" was explicitly political and philosophical, it was about user freedom and ethics.

This kind of forced meaning of FOSS, like on gOS, lets people feel like they are making a moral or ethical choice and it turns computer usage into some kind of righteous defiance.

Nowadays, you see people like Richard Stallman trying to cram that 1980s anti-corporate ideology back into modern open-source software, even though the modern ecosystem runs on corporate money.

This is all in the name of freedom, it must be.

The consumer as the enemy

I've talked a lot about "casual" users so far.

I'd define a "casual" as someone who just wants to use their computer. Someone who doesn't care if the software is libre or proprietary. Someone who wants to be able to work and to play, and to do everything without having to fork over significant time and effort, and without resistance from their OS.

Casual users are often subtly portrayed as having a lack of knowledge or effort. I believe casual users are who software should be built for.

Software, especially not an OS that will allegedly replace Windows, shouldn't require active investment just to use it.

They are the final and most important test for any piece of software, because a casual user will never indulge. They want to get their work done or play a certain game. They do not want to spend 2 hours configuring Hyprland. They want the computer to work.

The ultimate defence mechanism of an apologist is redefining the "ideal user". Not admitting software should seamlessly fit into human life, and that it shouldn't require exorbitant amounts of thought or time, and instead treating a user’s lack of technical indulgence as a moral or intellectual failing.

The answer is never that desktop Linux is fragmented and poorly standardised, it's that the casual didn't spend enough time on their dotfiles. It's that the casual user expected sensible defaults and a system that would do what it was asked, and not ask the user for something significant in return.

If a casual user struggles with an IPP printer handshake, the knee-jerk reaction isn't "wow, our software failed", it's "RTFM" or "you just don't understand how permissions work".

An everyday consumer or a casual user is not "lazy". They are the ultimate, unbiased judge for the actual, real-world utility of a software. Because they will not indulge, and they will not ignore the issues and the expectation that they will.

A war by proxy

Customization often comes up in Linux circles. A lot of Linux environments are indeed very customizable.

You can tweak every font and colour to suit your exact taste, every animation and sound, and every position and binding to perfectly reflect yourself and what you want.

But you have to recognise that this turns the operating system into the hobby itself, not a tool to get work done.

If you love taking the bicycle apart, greasing the bearings, and replacing the handlebars every weekend, that is a wonderful hobby. But you cannot get mad at a commuter who just wants to pedal to work without the chain falling off, and you certainly can't claim your disassembled bicycle is "ready for the masses".

When you spend 40 hours customising a desktop to your taste, you have invested significant personal labour. If anyone comes and says, "hey, this workflow is kind of clunky", it feels like a critique of those 40 hours and not the software it was built on.

It reframes it as a criticism of themselves and their hard work, and the illusion of choice becomes a prison of time. It becomes a surrogate of their values.

It causes a reaction on the same level as attacking someone's family or personal morals, because it largely is someone pouring themselves and their time into their desktop.

There is a distinct psychological phenomenon that occurs when a person invests enough time, friction, and identity into a specific ecosystem: the tool and the self begin to blur. It becomes a threat to the individual.

It's why debates over something as trivial as a file manager can often become heated, the software is a front.

The real battle is a war over personal validation.

You have to give up Office and Adobe and you need to feel like it's worth it, you must, otherwise why would you do it? Why would you make those sacrifices? You're fighting with the hardware you bought and you're sacrificing your hobbies just to run a certain OS, surely you must believe it is morally superior or objectively better?

The erasure of self

Admitting Windows or macOS handles daily tasks better, once you believe in the supremacy of Linux and you've spent your time switching and you've made your sacrifices, it feels more like admitting defeat.

You must evangelise Linux to validate your own past sacrifices.

When software requires this much sacrifice, this much tinkering, and this much gatekeeping to maintain, it stops being a utility and transforms into a core pillar of someone's identity.

It stops being a flawed kernel wrapper or a broken printer driver and starts being a mirror. To admit that an ecosystem is flawed, fragmented, frustrating, or hostile to outsiders is to admit that a part of yourself and your identity is flawed.

The user is always blamed, they must be at fault. It must be that the missing software or features are unnecessary, that they configured their desktop wrong, that they simply aren't trying hard enough.

It is no longer defending a tool, it is defending your right to exist as you are. If you've spent years mastering a hostile system, admitting a casual user's apathy is justified simply must be false.

If a tool fails the person who just wants to get things done, the tool has failed entirely, and defending it requires a level of personal, irrational investment. It must be that this is worth it.

People build their identity and themselves and their beliefs around Linux and FOSS and they become unwilling to criticise it, instead ignoring any issues, or blaming the user who encounters them, because to criticise would be to criticise what built them and has now become them.

They cannot criticise it, because to criticise the tool would be to criticise themselves. And the tool ceases to serve the person, because the person has become a servant to the tool.

2000 Metres to Andriivka, the Sisyphean gaze, and the weaponization of attention

2026-04-05T00:00:00.000Z

I watched 2000 Metres to Andriivka recently. It's an incredible film using footage from Ukrainian soldiers' helmet cams, specifically during the liberation of Andriivka.

It made me realise something: geopolitical documentaries of this type are inherently repulsive. Nobody wants to know that Ukraine is losing terribly and that soldiers are losing their lives, and certainly nobody wants to see that emphasised for upwards of 2 hours.

An incredibly tragic film like this is fighting an uphill battle between informing the viewer and not driving them away. It has to strike a balance between the natural want/duty to be informed, while not crossing into "this is just gore from the Ukrainian frontlines".

You can talk about Ukrainian casualties as a statistic (which distances you) or show actual soldiers in actual conditions (which doesn't). The film chooses the latter because abstraction makes it easier to look away. A number is manageable, a person is not.

These documentaries fulfil their purpose, at least when it comes to the duty to be informed. They provide education on the realities of the war, serving as tools to form opinions, despite the aversion.

It cannot be good, in any stretch of the word, to watch this type of content, the sheer amount of tragedies is horrifying. In fact, it makes the viewer less sensitive to it. If you felt the full weight of each death, you'd be catatonic by the time credits roll.

This protective mechanism that keeps you from being overwhelmed also makes it easier to rationalise inaction or to treat distant suffering as less urgent than nearby concerns. It's not a clean problem with a clean solution.

Viewing this content cannot be categorised as entertainment. It lacks the element of enjoyment, existing instead as a mandatory engagement, a perceived requirement to remain aware of the situation.

Knowledge is power, right? You feel a duty to be informed, because if you're not, you can't fight the terrible things happening. The alternative, ignorance, feels like a betrayal of the people actually living through this.

The especially dreadful part is that "knowledge is power" usually applies to situations where you can do something with that knowledge; but I'm not going to start fighting on the Ukrainian frontlines!

It's powerless knowledge. However, it does make the public more agitated and it does spawn indirect action. The most prominent example is protests.

Witnessing soldiers dying tragically on the frontlines over and over again, it's objectively bad for your cortisol levels, sleep, and general sense of safety in the world. However, the sheer amount of content coming out from Ukraine is unprecedented, and the alternative is turning a blind eye, effectively abandoning Ukraine.

If this sounds like an exaggeration, it isn't. See, foreign aid for Ukraine is a very fragile thing. Most governments aren't altruist, they support Ukraine because it makes citizens happy.

A decent amount of people are incredibly engaged with this war, and would be outraged if their government dropped aid. And those people, they are the main reason Ukraine gets the aid it does.

If everyone has their eyes on a government, it's harder for them to do something harmful. Once that gaze drops, it's free game.

For example, in late 2025, several major Western powers (including a pivot in US policy) began "reviewing" aid (essentially testing the waters to see if they could stop), leading to temporary suspensions that cost lives on the front.

It's effectively Sisyphus and his rock. Except, he stops pushing, he dies. Here: you stop looking, they die.

It's something genuinely trapped, not metaphorically, actually trapped. The structure doesn't permit a good solution; it only permits choosing which bad option you can live with.

The thing that makes this different from abstract ethical dilemmas is that it's happening now, and the people it affects are real. That's what prevents you from just opting out with a clear conscience. You can't think "well, this isn't my problem" and feel right about it, because the alternative to your attention has real consequences for real people.

There is no resolution to offer here. The structure of the problem doesn't permit one. It's a genuinely difficult position where every choice carries a real cost, and the costs don't balance out neatly.

You aren't directly acting, you're hoping that your awareness will convince someone else to pull a lever, and that person is only pulling it because public pressure exists. It's a chain of indirect incentives, and every link in it is fragile.

Governments don't aid Ukraine because they inherently care. They aid it because voters care (which requires public awareness), it's strategically useful (which can change), and it's politically convenient (which is temporary).

Remove any of those and the chain breaks. And you're aware of exactly how easily it breaks. You know that if public attention drops, if a more pressing domestic issue emerges, if the geopolitical calculation shifts, the aid can stop. You're not pushing the rock yourself, you're trying to keep enough people aware that the rock gets pushed.

And the party you're relying on, the government, the public, the international community, they don't have your commitment. They have competing interests. Your psychological cost, your sleep disruption, your elevated cortisol, none of that factors into whether they continue. You bear the cost of awareness; they have the power to act or not act.

It's not just that you feel powerless (which would be bad enough). It's that you're dependent on the continued attention and goodwill of actors who don't share your stakes in the outcome. You're trying to maintain pressure on a system that can outlast your capacity to maintain it.

Which means you're left bearing the psychological cost of awareness without the satisfaction of direct action. You know things are terrible, you're carrying that knowledge, and your only available response is indirect, voting differently, donating to aid organisations, maybe mentioning it in conversation. These aren't nothing, but they also feel inadequate relative to the scale of what you've learned.

There's something particularly dreadful about that because it creates a kind of obligation that can never feel complete. Unlike someone actually fighting, where actions have immediate, visible consequences, the informed viewer is perpetually in a state of "is this enough?" The knowledge creates responsibility, but the responsibility has no clear fulfilment.

Traditionally, if you knew a fire was burning, it was so you could grab a bucket. Now, we have high-definition, 4K views of fires on the other side of the planet, and our buckets are just social media posts or a ballot box.

Political leaders only send billions in aid if they feel pressured to. That agitation is fueled by a public that understands the stakes. If the public was ignorant, the political cost of helping would be too high.

It's weaponizing your attention. How long? How long can you keep indirectly fighting this war? How long can you go knowing that your attention is keeping Ukraine alive? How long can you survive that burden?

That's the actual question underneath all of this, and it's not rhetorical, it's the one that will eventually break the chain.

You can't sustain that indefinitely. Attention as a resource is finite. Moral obligation as fuel for psychological endurance has a limit. At some point, the cumulative cost of knowing you're carrying someone else's survival on your shoulders, knowing that your sleep, your peace of mind, your mental health is being traded for foreign aid decisions, it becomes unsustainable.

And goverments know this. Or rather, they don't know and don't care, which amounts to the same thing. The structure of international aid doesn't account for the psychological cost to the people maintaining public attention. It just assumes attention will be there. Until it isn't.

So you're on a timer. Not consciously, but mechanically. Eventually either you burn out and stop consuming the content (which weakens the pressure), you continue and the psychological damage accumulates, something else captures public attention and the chain breaks anyway, or the war ends (in some form, not necessarily favourably).

And you'll be aware of all of this the entire time. You can't pretend the burden isn't real. You can't trick yourself into thinking your attention is consequence-free. You're trapped between knowing that you need to look and knowing that looking is harming you, and neither option resolves. Your conscience is being used as a tool, and the tool will eventually break because tools wear out.

And there's the argument of "well, surely one person (me) doesnt matter that much?", which I guess is true on a very surface level, but everyone is thinking that.

Everyone is undergoing this and having to fuel the funding for Ukraine, even if indirectly. And there isn't strength in numbers, because people aren't numbers. Everyone supporting Ukraine has their own life, and this isn't a situation where burden becomes lighter when shared. It just means the damage is distributed rather than concentrated.

Everyone carrying this knows they're carrying it. The Ukrainian aid worker knows. The person donating. The viewer of the documentary. The activist. The voter deciding on policy. Everyone's aware that they're part of a chain that could break, and everyone's experiencing the psychological cost of that awareness differently.

And that fragmentation is itself destabilising. You can't look around and see a unified movement that will sustain itself, you see individuals, all separately deciding whether this burden is worth bearing, all hitting their own breaking points at different times. There's no distributed strength because there's no actual coordination, just parallel individual struggles with the same impossible question.

The weight doesn't dissipate because others carry it. It might even intensify it, because you're aware that everyone else is also burning out, also hitting limits, also wondering how long they can sustain this. You're not part of a movement with clear purpose and defined roles. You're part of a diffuse mass of people all trying to individually maintain something that requires collective will.

And collective will, by definition, requires that the collective doesn't all simultaneously decide the cost is too high. Not because one more person watching creates proportional impact, but because it's designed to break when a certain percentage of people simultaneously opt out. That's different from diffusion of responsibility. That's a structural vulnerability.

The act of looking changes the outcome, not always positively, but the act of looking also changes the observer, and not always for the better.

Looking at 2000 Metres to Andriivka isn't passive observation. The act of watching changes the material outcome, it contributes (however marginally and indirectly) to aid, policy, and attention. But it simultaneously changes you. It damages your psychology, it burdens your conscience, it makes you aware of a responsibility you can't fully discharge.

And you can't separate those effects. You can't watch and remain unchanged while the outcome stays changed. The same act that keeps the chain alive is the one that wears you down.

That's why it's difficult to watch. It's not difficult because it's technically graphic or emotionally manipulative. It's difficult because watching it obligates you. The act of looking creates a debt that you carry forward, and you know you're carrying it.

It's assuming sustaining the system (keeping aid flowing, keeping attention on Ukraine) is the problem. It's not. The problem is that the system requires psychological damage to function. Being complicit in keeping aid flowing to Ukraine isn't the moral failure. the moral failure is the structures that make that the only available option.

It's not about being morally complicit by participating in it. It's about being stuck in it. Not to mention, this will always happen. Our minds become desensitised to things eventually, and this war is no different.

Once things go on long enough, they become natural, we accept it, and we stop fighting.

And the worst part is that this trap doesn't have an escape because it's not a logical puzzle, it's a structural feature of how attention, suffering, and responsibility intersect in a world with asymmetric power and knowledge. There's no clever argument that dissolves it.

There is no clean solution, but it's not that simple, and it never is. Within the current system, sure, there is nothing in the current structure.

But structures can shift. The unsustainability of attention-as-fuel for aid policy is actually visible to policy makers. The fact that they don't account for it isn't because it's invisible, it's because accounting for it would require them to either build more resilient systems for aid that don't depend on viral public attention, or admit that their foreign policy is hostage to the psychological endurance of distant observers. Neither is appealing to them.

This isn't claiming that caring about Ukraine and being on the battlefield are equivalent, this isn't just "government bad", and this isn't about 2000 Metres to Andriivka. It never was.

Witnessing does something to your values, your judgement, your sense of what matters, that isn't purely corrosive. It allows you to make better decisions, vote better, protest, and help Ukraine push the line. But, it's still harmful. Not purely, but partly.

There is still value in knowing, but you're stuck with the weight of knowing what you know.

Sonic Colours, the death of sincerity, and the cowardice of being too cool for your own premise

2026-02-22T00:00:00.000Z

I have spent the last week trapped in Dr. Eggman’s Incredible Interstellar Amusement Park, and I have returned with notes.

Let me set the scene: It's the year of Sonic Free Riders! You log on to Sonic Stadium, cyberbully some people who think Sonaze is a good ship, express your distaste for the Unleashed werehog stages, and hey, wait a minute! There's a new Sonic game releasing for Wii! And critics... love it? Hold on, did Sega actually make a Sonic game critics don't hate? Even IGN seems to like it, the guys infamous for hating Sonic!

Yes, in fact they did make a game critics didn't hate. Remember, it's 2010, and critics are just fed up with Sonic right now. Sonic's 'too many friends' had become a phrase critics were using with genuine contempt, and nearly every game review site hated the serious stories of Shadow the Hedgehog and Sonic '06.

In hindsight, most critics were practically begging SEGA to just have a return to form, and go back to the simpler stories of the 90s. And Sonic Colours delivered. It did so by listening to critics and the fans who had already left, while ignoring everyone who stayed.

It also provided a masterclass in what happens when you let irony overtake genuine love for a franchise, and what happens when you listen to critics, while listening only to the fans who had already defected.

It turned Sonic into a sociopath, and Miles into nothing.

Before I start...

I need to introduce something very important. We have learned from writer Warren Graff that they had 'very little say' and that every story point was handed down by SEGA.

At first glance, you very well might blame Pontac and Graff, I know I did, but this tweet changes the flavour of the failure from cluelessness to cowardice. It means the people who own the legacy of the ARK and the tragedy of the Ancients were so embarrassed by their own history that they ordered their writers to mock it.

It wasn't two outsiders making fun of Sonic, it was Sonic’s own parents telling him to stop being so "cringe" in front of the critics.

The existence of a 'Sonic Game Bible' used to mandate this tone is the ultimate irony. Usually, a series bible protects the soul of a franchise. Here, it was used as a hit list. Every character trait that made the Adventure era resonate was apparently highlighted in red ink and ordered to be purged by the very people who wrote the book.

An ice-pick lobotomy and a two-tailed fox

Miles has been lobotomized here, reduced from a modest, genius mechanic into a walking Wikipedia page. In Sonic Adventure, Miles earned his genius. He built the Tornado 2 and learned to be independent, ultimately saving Station Square from Eggman. He was a "mighty little man" growing into his own hero. In Adventure, the stakes felt personal because the characters had internal lives.

In Colours, the stakes are purely external data points on Miles' iPad. He’s been reduced to a Doctor House archetype, minus the actual personality. In House MD, House always knows the specific time it takes for a snake bite to kill a human, here, Miles is just a smug, overconfident, supercilious fountain of exposition regarding Wisps. He no longer exists as a character growing independently, now he exists only to hold the "Translation Device", the ultimate "tell, don't show" narrative sin.

Tails didn't just lose his personality because of a lazy script, he was dismantled by design. If SEGA signed off on every "supercilious" line from the fox, it means the creators of the character no longer believed in his capacity for a hero’s journey. They traded his heart for a translation mechanic.

You can't just say the writers didn't get Tails, sure they admitted that they didn't know much about Sonic, but the harder truth is SEGA understood Tails perfectly, and they decided he was better off as a sentient search engine.

A company’s shield and the loss of agency

In one of the first cutscenes of the game, when Miles asks Sonic if they're going to "wreck" Eggman's plan, he replies:

"That's pretty much how we spend our time."

It's not particularly funny when you're guilty of the things you're mocking. Right off the bat, this line does two things wrong. It strips Sonic of his agency, turning a heroic act into "just another Tuesday," as if this is a low-stakes 90s sitcom.

There is nothing inherently wrong with self-deprecating humour or a tongue-in-cheek callout. The game tries to be one big joke about the Sonic franchise, and that is actually a decent premise.

For meta-humour to work, the writers have to actually love the thing they are poking fun at (like The LEGO Batman Movie), whereas here it feels like they are mocking it from the outside, because SEGA is forcing their hand. It fails because it doesn't just poke fun at the tropes, it acts like it's too good for them, and SEGA it as a shield to say 'we know this is stupid', therefore avoiding judgement.

A yellow iPad and the screams of the enslaved

Miles mentions that Yacker (one of the main Wisps) was saying "save us" over and over again. "Save us" is not something you say in the same tone as "my coffee was bitter this morning." I presume it was more like screaming.

From this, we can deduce that the Wisps have thoughts, feelings, and communication skills similar to a human. Yes, there is a translator involved, but there isn't exactly a translator for dogs. These are sentient beings. Meanwhile, Eggman is using them for battery acid. Their life force (Hyper-go-on energy) is being extracted from them in tubes to power Eggman's mind-control thingamajig.

By giving Miles a translator, SEGA/Sonic Team removed the need for animation and empathy. It strips Yacker of all personality; he could have been the next Chip, but instead, he feels like a collectible that occasionally squeaks. He is a plot device trying to mimic Chip without understanding what made Chip work.

In Sonic Unleashed, Sonic and Chip bonded through shared experiences, eating chocolate and exploring. Chip had agency, fears, and a growth arc.

He was initially terrified of Sonic, but they became true friends, making his departure meaningful. In Colours, the "bond" is technical. Sonic and Miles stand there while Sonic talks condescendingly to Yacker and a black box tells them the plot.

The "save us" plea becomes a data point for Miles to relay, not a call to action that strikes a chord in Sonic's soul.

Here, it is a literal alien slavery operation where sentient beings are being drained of their life force to power a brainwashing beam. You’d think the writing would respect that weight. But nope, it’s just one big joke.

The game’s most famous quips are "Baldy McNosehair" and "No copyright law in the universe is going to stop me!" These might be "funny" in total isolation, but within the media itself, the Wisp situation is treated as a minor inconvenience for Sonic to make a remark about.

A supercilious hero and copyright law

I'd like to define a word I'll be using a lot: supercilious. Oxford Dictionary defines it as: "behaving or looking as though one thinks one is superior to others."

Earlier I called Miles supercilious in this game, and he is, but so is the entire game. It looks down on itself and the franchise it came from.

The characters essentially tear the world and immersion to bits, but the game doesn't actually dare to do anything to change the formula. If SEGA found the concept of a blue cartoon hedgehog fighting a 300 IQ evil genius so unbelievably embarrassing that they instructed their writers to poke fun at it at every opportunity, maybe do something to change it? There's a difference between a "fun adventure with high spirits" and "nothing matters, isn't this franchise embarrassing?"

The "no copyright law" line especially shatters the immersion because it ignores the actual suffering of the Wisps in favour of a quip that doesn't even make sense in the context of their world. Sonic is a cartoon hedgehog who values being free over anything else (there is a whole song literally named "Free" in Sonic Free Riders). Why would he know, or even care, what copyright law is?

This isn't just a bad joke, it’s corporate intrusion. Sonic isn't a legal scholar, he’s a force of nature. Take SA2, he didn't make legal quips, he just ran through the G.U.N. blockade because they were in his way. It's a joke that exists purely for the player, not for Sonic as a character. It's SEGA speaking directly through Sonic to make a reference, completely shattering any sense that this is a coherent world with its own internal logic.

And what's even worse is that the "no copyright law"" line isn't just a bad joke from Pontac and Graff, it’s SEGA using their icon to wink at the audience about their own intellectual property. It’s the ultimate sign that the "force of nature" had been successfully tamed into a brand ambassador.

Sonic shouldn't know what copyright law is. He’s not breaking the fourth wall in a clever way, SEGA was just using him as a mouthpiece. It turns Sonic from a character into a mascot suit. It doesn't belong in the mouth of a teenager who lives in a shack on a beach and fights gods. It shatters the verisimilitude of the world.

This tonal shift even affects how we perceive the voice. While almost anyone can 'be' Sonic if they capture that spirit, the Colours era lacks a certain maturity. It’s why a voice like Jaleel White’s worked for the zany 90s cartoons but would struggle with something like Sonic Adventure 2, a game with an extremely serious story - and for a story to have stakes, there has to be a grounded core. Without sincerity, the voice and the character lose their weight. He’s no longer a teenager who lives in a shack and fights gods, he’s a comedian doing a bit he’s already bored with.

I previously thought this was just something from two guys who didn't care. But with the new knowledge of that tweet, and that every word was vetted against a 'Sonic Game Bible' makes it worse. This wasn't a mistake, it was an execution. SEGA didn't just hire writers who were 'too cool' for the premise, they instructed them to be.

It's still authorial intrusion, it's still a comedian doing a bit, and it's still not breaking the 4th wall in any clever way. But they couldn't have done anything to change that, and SEGA wanted it that way.

A tragedy on the ARK and unprompted witticisms

The thing about Sonic Adventure 2's story, I didn't even realise how insane it is until now. That is because it treats itself in a humble and sincere manner. It's just happening, and you're a witness to it. I call Colours' writing supercilious because that's exactly what it is. It is not humble, and it is certainly not sincere. It is looking down at the franchise and saying "Isn't this so dumb, guys?"

Every "quip" that breaks the fourth wall is a reminder that the people in charge of the character don't seem to like the character. If Sonic doesn't care about the stakes, the player has no reason to care either. You cannot have a "hero" who thinks heroism is a chore.

To be a Sonic fan in the mid-2000s required a certain level of sincerity. You had to care about Shadow’s past, or Blaze’s duty, the tragedy of the Ancients, and the history of the Babylonians. Colours tells you that you were a fool for doing so. It frames the player's investment as the punchline to a ten-year-long joke.

You can’t make a good story if you don't consider the foundation to be good. "Supercilious" is the perfect word because it's not just self-deprecation, it's condescension. The game looks down at its own premise, its history, and the masterpieces that previous writers created. Above all, it’s making fun of you for caring. In Colours, the "joke" is that you, the player, are still here. It’s a "meta" commentary that nobody asked for, delivered with a smugness that implies SEGA is doing the franchise a favour by "fixing" it.

Colours is the result of mistaking smugness for cleverness, and a company gutting their own character because it wasn't "cool" enough: A game that thinks the worst thing a player could possibly do is actually care.

The Library of Alexandria has one key-holder (and they’re having a bad day)

2026-01-13T00:00:00.000Z

Well. I can't access The Cutting Room Floor anymore. Whenever I try, I get a 403 Forbidden status code.

According to Xkeeper, running TCRF is a one-person operation.

If you've been living under a rock, TCRF is THE resource for cut content in video games. And I do mean THE resource, it's pretty much the only one. TCRF is essentially the Library of Alexandria for video game archaeology.

If said one person decides that your IP range, region, or vibe is unwelcome, that history effectively ceases to exist for you. It's the Library of Alexandria, and one person holds a box of matches.

In the web's infancy, information was pretty scattered. Now there is The Resource™. If that one person running The Resource™ has a bad day or a personal grievance, well, they can tell you to go pound sand and there will be exactly nothing you can do about it.

FOSS and Wikis are built on the dream of decentralisation, yet they almost always coalesce around a single gatekeeper.

DeaDBeef, node-ipc, the literal Linux kernel, Python (pre-2018), Wikipedia (when it first started out), Wikidata, curl, SQLite, all these are examples of this exact thing happening.

On the surface, it seems open, but for all of them, there was ONE person — dictator, rather — who could do anything they wanted.

How dangerous is it that our collective knowledge of "what was left behind" in games relies on the server configurations of a single individual?

If they get hit by a bus or just get bored, does that data vanish? Most of TCRF is not archived elsewhere!

The early web was chaotic and decentralised (well, even that's debatable with the whole thing of buying a domain and potentially just having it taken away, but that's a whole other problem), it was scattered and there was no Library of Alexandria to burn, at least not like TCRF.

Nowadays, that has largely been traded for the convenience of a single wiki. If Xkeeper decides to go home and take his ball with them, the history of 1,000+ games becomes a 404.

Wikis like TCRF give off the impression of a public utility or a digital commons. Users, like me, contribute free labour under the assumption it's building something for everybody. But TCRF is an example of the truth, it's being a guest in someone else's house, and at any time they can kick you out and never let you back in.

It's donating your labour to a private server that can be gated at any moment.

Most people visiting TCRF are trying to study history. And one server config has decided a certain few don't exist. It's the gatekeeper saying "I don't care if you're a scholar, you look like a bot to my Nginx config!"

When you contribute to a wiki, you're not just writing history. You're increasing the value and gravity of that domain. By making TCRF one of the only meaningful resources, contributors inadvertently help build the walls that can later be used to lock them out.

In the physical world, if a library bans you, there is usually a human process, a conversation, a reason, a way to appeal. In the digital world — and TCRF (Xkeeper openly admits to blocking entire IP ranges, and in a rather enthusiastic manner) — your existence is reduced to an IP range.

If your ISP happens to share a range with a botnet or a country the admin dislikes, you are collateral damage in a silent war you didn't know was happening. History shouldn't be gated by a .conf file.

Users till the land (write articles, upload assets) for free, but they don't own the soil. The admin owns the domain, the database, and the hosting.

In the physical world, if a landlord kicks you off the land, the land still exists. In the digital world, if the admin bans your IP or nukes the DB, the "land" effectively vanishes for you. You’ve worked to build a wall that is now being used to keep you out.

An admin doesn't have to look you in the eye to ban you; they just have to add a CIDR block to a blacklist. It turns history into a privilege granted by your ISP's geographical location rather than a right of human curiosity.

We congregate around one "Authority" (TCRF, Wikipedia, Arch Wiki) because it’s efficient. But efficiency is the enemy of resilience.

The "older" internet contained a thousand libraries. If one burned, you went to the next. The "modern" internet is one massive library with a single entrance, and the guard at the door is tired, cranky, and overwhelmed by botnets.

Why do we contribute to these things? We think we are preserving history. If you want to write about a Majora's Mask beta leak, you write about it on TCRF. Why? Because that's where people will see it, and it will be useful.

When a single person runs a massive repository, they aren't just the librarian; they are the sole key-holder. If Xkeeper disappears, the domain registration eventually expires. Once the domain expires, the "Library" doesn't just close; it gets bulldozed and replaced with one weird trick insurance companies don't want you to know!

If TCRF blocks a certain country’s IP range to stop a DDoS, they have effectively declared that an entire nation’s scholars are collateral damage for the sake of one person’s server uptime. I bet TCRF's owner is really good at playing Monopoly.

Xkeeper seems to have a sense of pride in being a one-man show. This is often framed as "heroic" in tech circles, but I see it as systemic negligence.

If a physical museum with world-class artefacts had only one employee who also owned the building and the locks, we wouldn't call it a "dedicated project", we’d call it a hoarding situation.

It's incredibly lazy to use block an CIDR block in a situation like this, too. It's the nuclear option of sysadmin. It invites situations where people receive punishment for the heinous crime of sharing a CIDR block with a script kiddie.

The barrier to entry isn't just the code; it's the gravity. TCRF has decades of backlinks. If I start "The Better Cutting Room Floor" today, it will be buried on page 10 of Google results. We are trapped in a monopoly not of quality, but of momentum.

We are essentially donating our intellectual labour to a private asset. When you write a TCRF article, you aren't just contributing to "knowledge"; you are increasing the SEO value and Adsense potential (or just the personal prestige) of one person's domain. You are building a castle you aren't allowed to live in.

Because of TCRF's high domain authority, other sites or blogs covering the same content are buried. By being one of the only meaningful resources, TCRF hasn't just gathered information, it has displaced it. It has created a vacuum where no other library can grow, making its own potential failure a total extinction event for the data.

In engineering, a SPOF (Single Point Of Faliure) is a bug. In culture, we call it "dedication." I'd argue that if Xkeeper truly cared about the preservation of history over the control of it, they would have a succession plan or a decentralised mirror system. The fact that it remains a "one-person operation" is a choice to prioritise ego/control over the safety of the data. And we, for some reason, allow, and accept that.

It’s not just that the server might die, it’s that the intent of the owner is a single point of failure. If their "vibe" changes, the history changes.

If you want the prestige of being the Library of Alexandria, you lose the right to treat it like your personal Minecraft server.

I tried literally every server on Proton VPN, and as an extra middle finger from Xkeeper, all of them also returned 403 Forbidden.

But anyway, I still can't access TCRF, so pardon me while I burst into flames.

January 14, 2026 update:

Well, I'm tired of not being able to access TCRF. Time to contact a staff member!

"We'll need to know your IP address. You can use any of countless online services for this (just google "what is my IP"). Send your IP address to a staff member in DMs. My DMs are open for this, but you can pick any staff member you prefer." So, I get punished for being an introvert?

Anyway, our "lovely" converation went like this:

Me:

"Hello, I’m currently receiving a 403 Forbidden error when trying to access TCRF. This error is consistent across browsers and pages."

"To my knowledge, I have no badly behaving extensions (as I only use Ublock Origin), and I do not use VPNs nor proxies."

"I was directed here to provide my IP for unblocking. It is as follows: 196.39.70.254"

"Thank you for your time and patience on this matter. Good day."

Them:

"...that IP computes to this https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dimension_Data, that's a cloud computing provider, so there's a VPN somewhere in there"

Me:

"i feared this would happen. let me explain: i understand the confusion, but I can clarify: i am a residential Webafrica customer on a Fibre-to-the-Home line."

"while the IP resolves to Dimension Data/NTT Group, that is because Webafrica acquired Mweb from Dimension Data and continues to utilise NTT’s infrastructure for its national backbone and IP transit. in the South African market, Dimension Data/NTT acts as the primary wholesaler for many consumer ISPs. IP address blocks are registered with regional registries and often list the original or upstream AS/organisation, not the retail ISP."

"if you check the PTR records for this IP, the hostname is 96-39-70-254.ftth.web.africa. the .ftth.web.africa suffix confirms this is a consumer fibre line (Fibre-to-the-Home) provided by Webafrica, not a cloud instance or a VPN exit node." "also, Webafrica acquired Mweb from Dimension Data/NTT, a Tier 1 IP provider, but it is now a distinct retail ISP serving consumers in South Africa. im happy to provide any more info you need"

Them:

"alright, I'm gonna trust you, I'll forward the IP and check back as soon as I know more"

I can't lie, I expected basic research before making claims that I'm a data centre. Yeah, I'm getting rather tilted by this.

YOURE SUPPOSED TO BE THE KNOWLEDGEABLE ONE HERE. It's backwards that I have to correct them,

Their first felt weirdly snarky, like they caught me red handed or something. Like I was trying to pull a fast one. You didn't catch anything.

Oh my, thank you so much for doing me the grand favour of researching before you make claims. And the 3 ellipses really adds to the snarkiness. Oh my, you caught me, I'm running a data centre and I want to scrape TCRF on exactly one IP.

The admin has seen a name they associate with "Cloud/VPN" and has immediately moved to the "I've caught you" phase of the conversation. They are using a surface-level lookup to dismiss my reality.

In the South African ISP market, WebAfrica (my ISP) relies heavily on the infrastructure of NTT/Dimension Data. When an admin sees "Dimension Data," they think AWS or DigitalOcean, but in South Africa, that is simply the backbone of consumer Fibre-to-the-Home (FTTH).

Because I live in a region where the ISP infrastructure is consolidated under a name that looks like a cloud provider to a Western admin, I am being treated as a security threat. It’s a form of digital redlining. The "Library of Alexandria" is closed to me because my country's internet architecture doesn't fit the admin's narrow definition of what a "real person" looks like.

The sheer arrogance of "I'm gonna trust you" is breathtaking. It frames their own lack of technical due diligence as an act of personal charity toward me.

To a Western admin, "Dimension Data = Enterprise/Cloud." They didn't bother to check the PTR record or the FTTH suffix because they already had a "hit." It’s a confirmation bias that turns into digital discrimination.

The interaction had that distinct flavour of "guilty until proven innocent," where the burden of proof falls entirely on me, the person trying to access publicly contributed knowledge, to demonstrate I'm not a threat.

The three ellipses before accusing me of using a VPN is doing a lot of work there. It's the textual equivalent of a raised eyebrow, implying I'm being deceptive. When I'm the one who voluntarily provided my IP and explained my situation transparently.

And then: "I'm gonna trust you" as if they're doing me a favour by... checking whether my technically detailed explanation is accurate? That's not trust, that's just doing the absolute minimum due diligence before blocking someone.

I'm also just so pissed at the fact that they treated me like an idiot.

"this IP computes to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dimension_Data"

What does that even mean? Did you use a reverse DNS lookup? Did you find the ASN and use that? Did you even do anything at all?

In networking, things don't "compute" to an organisation; they resolve (via DNS) or they are allocated (via ARIN/AFRINIC).

Reverse DNS (PTR): This is what actually matters for "who is this." As I found, my PTR resolved to web.africa. That is a human-readable confirmation of my ISP.
ASN (Autonomous System Number): This is the "big picture" routing. Dimension Data/NTT owns the the ASN, but WebAfrica owns the "customers."

By ignoring the PTR record and just looking at the ASN, the admin chose the bluntest, laziest tool available and then used it to "well, actually" me.

It is a special kind of hell to have to explain the basic mechanics of DNS and ISP transit to the person who has the power to silence you. We are living in an era where the people running the 'Libraries' have forgotten how the plumbing works, yet they still feel entitled to judge who deserves a drink.

So, let's recap:

I provide my IP address
They do a surface-level WHOIS lookup
They see "Dimension Data" and jump to conclusions
They accuse me of using a VPN
I have to write a technical explainer about South African ISP infrastructure
They graciously "trust" me
Then I got unblocked

So anyway, now I wanted to read the TCRF page on the SpongeBob movie game, so I opened all the pages in new tabs as I always do, but now I'm paranoid that I'll look like a bot. Thanks TCRF.

And I know what you're thinking, "well you can't expect a western admin to know the inner workings of South African telecom"

Then why do they pretend like they do?

Desktop Linux isn't ready (and I'm tired of pretending it is)

2025-12-20T00:00:00.000Z

Today I realised something. Desktop Linux isn't ready.

The day started off normal, I accidentally corrupted my root partition, so I installed Kubuntu as a quick fix.

I quickly realised, wow, Kubuntu lacks polish, and decided to install a new distro. But then I had to choose a distro. In my life, I've, tried many:

Ubuntu
Debian
Fedora
Fedora KDE
Zorin OS
Peppermint OS
Pop!_OS
elementaryOS
Hannah Montana Linux
Slackware
Arch
Gentoo
Bodhi
Vanilla OS
Salix
MX Linux
Pardus
Deepin
PureOS
NixOS
Clear Linux
Mageia
Gentoo
Endless OS
antiX
Tiny Core
Damn Small Linux
Trisquel
elementary OS
openSUSE
PCLinuxOS And that list is not exhaustive. There are so many I've forgotten about.

And today, nothing appealed to me. I loved Pop!_OS and COSMIC, but it's not feature complete, and there are other issues with that.

None of them are really a fit for me. I treat computers as a hobby, not an appliance, and while I enjoyed my time on Arch a LOT, and its probably worth revisiting, right now I'm in a spot where I'm reconsidering going back to Windows.

Right now, I'm in a very narrow middle ground. I don't want boring, locked-down, "just works" distros, heavy defaults, Snap, or distro-specific nonsense.

I also don't want constant maintenance, breakage, feeling like my system can collapse if I blink wrong.

I can run Arch, I had it going for 50 days and the thing that broke it? Me forgetting to check the news and installing a bad GRUB update, which then spiralled into 3 days of unsuccessful troubleshooting.

In some ways Ubuntu is definitely my favourite distro, It's rock solid because of GNOME, and it usually gets out of the way. I still hate apt though.

And it's the only distro, in my experience, where sleep and wake isn't russian roulette.

It's also a DE problem.

I'm a KDE fanboy, what can i say? I love Konqi and the Kommunity, and KDE Plasma itself. It's the kool desktop enviroment. Always bet on KDE.

But it also has all these weird little quirks, that GNOME does not, for example Plasma is adamant on not showing if you have unread notifications on the lock screen.

GNOME is rock solid and polished, but boring and more like a prison than anything. You need Dash to Dock and various other extensions, and it works well if you do, but it's just boring. And again, I treat computers both as a tool and a hobby.

True, that may be an oxymoron, but it also makes finding a distro even harder.

Another issue, on any distro other than Ubuntu, sleep/wake Russian roulette.

Sometimes it will wake perfectly, other times it will reboot entirely. And I like to just close my laptop's lid and pick up again instantly the next day and accumulate stupid large amounts of uptime. I want my laptop to be a laptop.

Pop!_OS (GNOME) has halted development because COSMIC reached epoch 1. Yeah I don't even need to say anything about that. COSMIC is incomplete. And so Pop!_OS isn't an option anymore for a tasteful Ubuntu fork.

And that made me realise, no distro offers what I want. I want to not be restricted and treated like an idiot, to have choice and control over my own system.

Desktop Linux is not ready for the casual user.

OK, maybe it is. I'm not normal, I treat computers as a hobby.

But do you really expect the average user to know how to install Arch just to get an OS that doesn't treat them like a goldfish? To know how to stop snapd from hijacking apt? To know why nothing seems to fit them well because most mainstream distros are all shit in their own ways? And how to fix that? Oh and also, even if you do notice snap hijacking, it ignores SIGINT while installing!

I love COSMIC and I hope it gets more feature complete, because I did test epoch 1 and the moment epoch 2 releases, I'm switching. But it's very much by Linux geeks, for Linux geeks. And so for a casual person who just wants to use their PC, yeah its not really very intuitive. And that's the best distro I've found.

Desktop Linux is conditionally ready for casual users, and those conditions are narrower than the community likes to admit.

For a truly casual user, these things must be true by default:

Install without reading a wiki
Updates never break boot
Sleep/wake never fails
Video, audio, Bluetooth work immediately
The desktop does not argue with expectations
The user never needs to know what a package manager is

Linux only meets this bar sometimes, and usually by accident. Ubuntu gets close, not because Linux is ready, but because Canonical papers over Linux’s cracks with engineering debt. And even that falls apart the moment someone steps even slightly off the golden path.

The part about knowing how to stop snap from hijacking apt, this is more serious than people realise: A casual user should never even encounter this question.

The fact that:

Ubuntu silently redirects installs (while ignoring Ctrl+C)
The community response is "just remove snapd"
Removing snapd breaks core assumptions

...is proof that desktop Linux is still designed by people who know too much.

The problems from knowing too much

A system that’s ready for casual users doesn’t require:

knowing which packaging system is "real"
knowing which one the distro secretly prefers
knowing how to undo it

Most mainstream distros and Linux THINGS are awful in their own ways.

Linux desktop development is fragmented along values, not users:

GNOME: "Users don’t need choices."
KDE: "Users should control everything."
Fedora: "Upstream purity matters more than UX."
Debian: "Stability over comfort."
Arch: "You’re responsible."
Ubuntu: "We’ll decide for you."
System76: "We’ll build the future, trust us."

None of these start from: "What does a normal person expect from a computer?"

They start from a flawed ideology that's being sold as something else.

Casual users don’t care about ideology, they care that closing the lid doesn’t reboot their laptop.

So, is desktop Linux "ready"?

For appliance users: Yes, if:

they buy hardware Linux likes
they never customise
they never ask "why"
they stay on the golden path

For even mildly curious users: No, because:

curiosity immediately exposes sharp edges
stepping off the path means self-support
polish and control rarely coexist

And dare I say it, Windows is the best AMD64 desktop operating system for casual users.

Windows isn’t elegant, respectful, or fun.

But it has one killer feature Linux still lacks: You can be curious without being punished.

You can:

install random things
ignore updates
close the lid for a week
come back and keep working

Desktop Linux is still built by people who like computers for people who like computers.

Linux geeks are terrible judges of casual usability.

Sometimes I just want to use my PC. This sentence matters more than all the distro talk combined.

That feeling is one of the reasons Windows still dominates, despite it's flaws.

It optimises for:

continuity
predictability
not needing to think

Linux desktops, historically, optimise for:

correctness
freedom
ideology
modularity

Those are great values, but they’re not usage-first.

You shouldn’t need to:

evaluate philosophies
understand trade-offs
anticipate breakage

...just to open your laptop and get on with your day.

Year of the Linux desktop

I hope and pray that this is not the year of the Linux desktop, and that it will not be anytime soon.

Because if this were "the year of Linux desktop" it would mean:

locking things down prematurely
freezing bad UX decisions
declaring victory too early

Linux desktop isn’t failing because it’s bad, it’s failing because it’s unfinished. And unfinished systems shouldn’t be mass-adopted.

Here’s the most accurate description I can give:

Desktop Linux is excellent for specialists
Awful for enthusiasts
Mediocre for casual users
Incredible for servers
Surprisingly bad at being "boring"

And boring is what most people want. Most people don’t want excitement from their OS, they want absence of friction.

I have a Windows friend who wants to switch to Linux once they buy a new laptop, and we've been bickering about it for months and it's been great fun. But now I've realised I might just have to tell them that Linux isn't the correct choice.

And yet SOME people still tout it as such. My friend is a very small minority. They aren't expecting Linux to be like windows, they've been open to the differences, the way software is installed and ran, how problems are troubleshooted, etc.

But despite all this, Linux just isn't ready, and I say that as a Linux geek with Qt in their heart who has been on and off Linux since age 9.

No matter how open-minded someone is, a laptop OS must guarantee:

Lid close, lid open, instant resume
Media works without thought
Updates don’t nuke core functionality
The system degrades gracefully
You never need to understand why something broke

Linux cannot guarantee this, especially on laptops. Not because users are dumb, and not because hardware vendors hate Linux (at least, not always). But because the desktop stack is fragmented and under-owned.

Desktop Linux’s biggest problem isn’t drivers, or DEs, or packaging. It's that the people who know it best are the least honest about its limits.

If I'm saying these things and actively being affected by them as a Linux geek, that's an indicator of how bad it is. Yes, I love computers. Yes, I love Linux, my heart is literally just a hollow space with Konqi in it. But sometimes I just want to use my PC, not spend hours debating which distro I want to waste my time on.

And yet every year, people say it's the year of Linux, I sure hope not. Desktop Linux is not there yet, not by a long shot. No matter how much we want to believe otherwise. Even while writing this, I decided to go back to Ubuntu.

I'm not just annoyed, I'm fatigued. I can't do this anymore! I'm sick of it! I just want to use a computer sometimes! A computer that respects my intelligence and allows me to make choices.

And this matters because Linux is my Thing™. It's been part of who I am since I was 9. It's why I advocate for FOSS. It's why I have Qt in my heart and Konqi stickers. I'll talk your ear off about any subject even loosely pertaining to Linux.

So when I'm the one saying I'm tired, that should tell you something.

If the people who love it most can't sustain using it, what does that say?

The fatigue isn't from complexity. I can run Arch and Gentoo. I can fix apt pins and snapd being a cancer.

But why should I have to, constantly, forever?

A prison of my own making.

DeaDBeeF, discrimination, and why 'just fork it' doesn't work

2025-11-30T00:00:00.000Z

A little birdie recently told me about the fact that DeaDBeeF maintainers were acting aggressively towards Russian speakers and actively silencing discussion about it.

I don't speak Russian, but this had me relatively pissed. I'll make it very clear here, I do not support Russia's actions in the war and I stand with Ukraine.

To make your software harder to use for anyone who speaks Russian, even people who aren't from Russia, because you don't like what the Russian government is doing? What kind of logic is that? Do you think every single Russian supports the destruction of Ukraine? That an entire population is homogeneous?

Needless to say, I was very angry about this.

So angry I decided to do something. I forked DeaDBeeF.

The chaos of modifying DeaDBeeF

The commit removing the Russian language only affected 5 files, so it should be relatively easy to restore, right? I wouldn't blame you for thinking that. I started a fork, and got to work.

First problem: I'm on Ubuntu (my Arch install broke) and the latest version doesn't have libdispatch in the repos. I had to clone and build it from source - 30 minutes of waiting, errors, fixes, repeat. I'm still not clear why a music player needs a Swift component, but the build failed without it.

Then came the real fun: missing dependencies that ./configure somehow didn't catch. intltool, jansson, Clang instead of GCC, and oh yeah - just minor things like THE ENTIRE GUI TOOLKIT (gtk3) and AUDIO SYSTEM (alsa). Each missing piece meant another rebuild cycle. Even after it compiled, I had to manually copy plugin files from the build directory to .local/lib/deadbeef. That can't possibly be right, but it runs, so... win?

Finally, the language switching. I tried everything - environment variables, system language settings, nothing worked. Turns out DeaDBeeF is a little quirky. Instead of the standard ru_RU.UTF-8, you need to set LANG to just ru. Because of course you do.

Let's reflect

So, they are stomping out Russian speakers. They labelled the commit which kicked this off as "Remove unsupported language localization". Unsupported? If you're going to discriminate against the speakers of a certain language, at least be honest. I just noticed that when it exits it prints "💛💙". In any other situation, yeah. Cool. But here. Supporting Ukraine is one thing, that's completely reasonable and justified. I support Ukraine too! But here's what they are actually doing: they are combining that with actively discriminating against Russian speakers and contributors. That's not solidarity with Ukraine, that's just using the war as an excuse for ethnic discrimination while performing moral superiority.

"Look how much I care about Ukraine! I put emojis in my software and punished random Russian translators who had nothing to do with the invasion!"

You can support Ukraine AND not discriminate against Russians. Notice the distinct lack of an oxymoron. But apparently the DeaDBeeF maintainers missed that memo.

The absurdity of thinking that punishing random Russian translators and users accomplishes anything is infuriating.

Putin doesn't care. The Kremlin doesn't care. Russian military leadership doesn't care that some music player removed their language.

The only people affected are:

Russian civilians who just wanted to use software
Contributors who donated their time for free
People who might oppose the war but happen to speak Russian

It's performative cruelty dressed up as activism. And that Ukraine flag on exit makes it so much worse. It's not solidarity, it's using a real tragedy as cover for discrimination while patting yourself on the back for being "one of the good ones."

Actual support for Ukraine would be donations, awareness, political pressure. Not removing translations and printing flag emojis while calling a language with 250+ million speakers "unsupported."

And actually, I don't blame "the DeaDBeeF maintainers". I blame one maintainer. Oleksiy Yakovenko. They published most of the DeaDBeef commits, including the one removing Russian. You may think it's a little harsh to blame one person. But I don't care, this is my blog and I'll do what I want. They approved the commit, they decided to remove Russian, they are at fault. One maintainer, who is controlling most near everything.

And that launches me into the two main points of this piece.

Open source does not solve the problem of authority

FOSS ideology generally sells itself on two things:

Freedom
Control by the user

Very simple.

This whole situation disproves that.

Maintainer dictatorship.

I know what you're going to say, "just fork it!" I'll get more in depth into why this doesn't work later, but for now: forking doesn't really solve anything.

"Anyone can fork" ignores the fact that:

Network effects always favour the main repo
Discoverability is terrible for forks
Resources (contributors, testing, bug reports) centre around the canonical version
The social infrastructure around FOSS (issue tracking, CI/CD, documentation, community knowledge) doesn't easily transfer to forks.

So yeah, technically I'm "free" to fork. But practically, the original maintainer still controls what most people will use. BeefREE might be more ethical, but it'll have a fraction of the visibility and contributions. Authority still exists, it's just informal instead of legally enforced.

"Just fork it"

I forked DeaDBeeF. So what am I complaining about?

DeaDBeef is a 20 year old codebase spread mainly across C, C++, and Objective C. Colloquially known as hell.

A 20 year old C codebase, with arcane build systems, files scattered across the system that I didn't know existed (seriously, replacing the po files tripped me up for a while), broken locale implementation that took hours to debug and made me quit and delete the repo at first because I thought it was dead-end, and this goes beyond DeaDBeef. If there is the wrong licence, I can't even fork in the first place.

How the hell do you expect anyone to fork this?

I'd like to consider myself a competent developer. At least, that's what I tell myself to sleep at night. It isn't working. But I frequently develop in Rust and C#, I understand most C and Linux build systems, and sure. I'm not a good developer. Far from it.

But when I'm trying to sleep, I also tell myself that I'm above average - if your pool is random people from off the street. It took me nearly 5 hours to get the Russian translation restored and working, and to get DeaDBeef to build.

How do you expect the random everyday user to be able to "just fork it".

If someone with my skillset (if you can even call it that) finds it this hard, what about regular users who just want their language supported? They're just... fucked. "Just fork it" becomes "just accept discrimination or become a C systems programmer."

So here we are. No matter what certain people will have you believe, FOSS is not the answer to everything.

I spent over 5 hours on this as a non-Russian speaker fighting C build hell. It made me realise something, FOSS ideology promises many things. Mainly liberation from the evil shackles of big tech. Which big tech? Stop asking questions! And these very same thing happen in open source. It is not solved, in fact, it's distilled. In big scary "big tech", it's an entire company. Here it's that one maintainer, and they have control. There are other maintainers, sure, but they have not done anything. I chalk that up to the fact that one maintainer is the owner and creator of DeaDBeef.

This isn't just a music player. It's how FOSS communities handle geopolitics, discrimination, and maintainer power.

The worst example of this is node-ipc:

node-ipc

After the invasion, its maintainer introduced a dependency (peacenotwar) that would wipe files on computers located in Russia or Belarus, as a form of protest.

For some maintainers or communities, removing translations or blocking contributions can be a form of protest or rejection, of a regime, government, or war, and often is, rather than a purely technical decision. This ends up punishing innocent users (or contributors) and conflating nationality with political stance.

The core principle of FOSS is that source code (and by extension collaboration) should be open to anyone, regardless of nationality, language, or belief. When maintainers remove translations or ban contributors based on identity or politics, it fundamentally challenges that universality and inclusivity.

I'll also in passing link this article by The Register which details Russian developers being barred from contributing to FOSS tools.

The node-ipc case is genuinely shocking and supports the argument perfectly. That's not symbolic protest, it's actual sabotage targeting civilians based on geography. It's the kind of thing that makes "just trust the maintainer" look dangerously naive.

In DeaDBeeF's case, not all Russian-speaking users support or are complicit with the invasion. Many oppose it, or are entirely neutral.

I'd love to engage with their reasoning, but there isn't any beyond 'unsupported language localization.' When people tried to discuss it, but alas, that one maintainer shuts it down. No explanation, no dialogue, just silence and closure. Not emotional closure, the issue is closed.

Removing translations or excluding users punishes individuals who had nothing to do with it, effectively conflating language with politics.

It undermines the principle that software should be open and inclusive, irrespective of user background.

I'll also acknowledge that there are some counterarguments and complications. Maintainer burnout from Russian-speaking trolls, is an example. And what about symbolic gestures mattering to Ukrainian contributors?

I understand why maintainers might feel torn about Russian contributions during wartime, but just removing the language is crossing a line.

Putin doesn't notice a music player removing Russian. Russian civilians opposing the war still lose access to software in their language. I beg of you, think a little more critically about FOSS authority structures.

Shower thoughts on communism (even though capitalism sucks too)

2025-11-01T00:00:00.000Z

I was in the shower recently thinking about communism.

The question isn't whether communism is appealing as a concept. Many of its goals around equality and meeting human needs are admirable. The question is whether it can actually function at the scale of a nation, particularly one as large and diverse as the United States. The answer, when examining practical constraints rather than ideological preferences, appears to be no.

Karl Marx stated that once the current government was overthrown, a sort of socialist system would take place as a stepping stone. In Karl Marx’s ultimate vision of a fully realised, post-capitalist communist society, the state "withers away" and society becomes entirely decentralised.

Communism might work in small communities where people know each other, share values, and can coordinate effectively. But scaling to millions or hundreds of millions of people introduces fundamental organisational challenges.

Systems requiring high trust and shared values function better when people actually know each other. At the scale of millions, you need entirely different organisational structures.

In political economy, "communism" is technically defined as a stateless, classless, moneyless society. Nobody has ever achieved true communism. Not even the USSR or Maoist China, they claimed to be socialist states ruled by a Communist Party, attempting to transition toward communism.

The crucial question becomes: why did these revolutionary transitions inevitably become authoritarian? Is it inherent to attempting communism? The historical record suggests that the bottleneck is the state itself. In trying to manage everything centrally to prepare for a stateless future, the state bureaucracy either becomes too powerful, too corrupt, and too vital to ever actually "wither away".

Centralised systems struggle with the information problem. Decision-makers are far removed from local conditions and lack the distributed information that even imperfect market signals provide. Though it's worth noting that large capitalist systems face their own coordination failures. The 2008 financial crisis was a massive information and coordination breakdown in a supposedly efficient market system. Scale introduces complexity for any economic model, not just communist ones.

Small, relatively homogeneous populations can build consensus on what "fair" looks like more easily. Consider the Nordic countries, though calling them simply "capitalist" oversimplifies things. They have significant state ownership, unions with real power over corporate decisions, and different property relations than pure market capitalism. They're more accurately described as hybrid systems, demonstrating that the spectrum between capitalism and socialism isn't binary. But even these systems, operating at 5-10 million people, face challenges. Scaling to the United States with 335 million people spread across vastly different regions with different priorities makes the complexity explode exponentially.

Centralised planning assumes a world of relative abundance where the main issue is distribution. But what happens during actual scarcity, real famine, economic collapse, crisis? Someone, somewhere, has to make impossible choices about who gets what.

Imagine: a starving single mother with three kids (including a newborn) and a single father with two kids. You have limited food. Who do you prioritise? The larger family? Do you factor in that the newborn has no self-awareness or memories yet? There's no objectively correct answer, only tragic trade-offs.

Centralised systems are particularly dangerous for handling these decisions, not because distributed systems avoid the moral horror, but because of where the responsibility concentrates:

In a centralised system, someone (or some committee) has to literally decide: "these people get food, those people don't." They're actively choosing who lives and who dies. That's the trolley problem made real and you're forced to pull a lever. Decision-makers are removed from local realities, power concentration makes the system vulnerable to both corruption and ideological rigidity, and with no objective moral standard to constrain them, this concentrated authority becomes extraordinarily dangerous. Historical examples, like Stalin's policies during the Holodomor or Mao's Great Leap Forward, show how catastrophically wrong this can go.

In a market system during famine, people starve because they can't afford food, but no single person made that specific choice about who dies. It's an emergent outcome of millions of distributed decisions. The moral horror is diffused across the system rather than concentrated in specific decision-makers. This doesn't make the deaths less real or the suffering less terrible. People still die, children still starve, and it's arguably worse because the diffusion of responsibility means no one feels accountable. It obscures the fact that these are still choices, policy choices, economic choices, and it lets people off the hook morally ("the market decided, not me").

But the mechanism of suffering matters, not just the amount. One type of bad (concentrated moral authority with life-and-death power) creates different failure modes than another type of bad (diffused negligence where everyone can claim it wasn't their choice). Capitalist famines have killed millions too, like Bengal 1943, or the Irish potato famine where food exports continued while people starved. The question isn't which system avoids moral catastrophe, but which failure mode is less likely to produce the worst outcomes given human fallibility and the absence of objective moral foundations.

Even most communist theory doesn't eliminate money entirely in the near term. Historically, communist states used currency and wages, just with state control. But this creates murky questions: who controls how money is made and distributed? How are taxes collected and allocated? How do people acquire personal belongings beyond basic necessities?

The answer typically becomes: centralised state bureaucracy. This introduces massive inefficiency and corruption opportunities. Any system must be robust to bad actors. Calling this "human nature" is philosophically contested. What we call human nature is partly shaped by the systems we live in, and people do behave differently in different economic contexts. But the practical point stands: assuming universal honesty and virtue is a fantasy. Free will exists, and humans will game whatever system you create.

As a side note, I can't go without mentioning Goodhart's Law:

"When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure"

In the USSR, certain factories given quotas based on the weight of chandeliers made them so heavy they pulled ceilings down.

Communist systems rely heavily on good faith: how do they verify you're not lying about your assets for benefit? Who ensures the distributors aren't corrupt? What prevents those with power from abusing it? History shows these aren't hypothetical concerns. Systems need mechanisms that work even when people are selfish, dishonest, or corrupt.

Centralised systems can innovate. The Soviet space programme, nuclear weapons development, and current Chinese technological advancement prove this definitively. The internet itself emerged partly from DARPA, government funding driving fundamental research. China's current system (state capitalism with heavy central planning) is producing substantial innovation in AI, green energy, and infrastructure.

The relationship between economic systems and innovation is complex. Market competition drives a particular kind of rapid consumer innovation. Computers, smartphones, and the variety of products we take for granted emerged largely from capitalist systems with their complex payment and delivery mechanisms. But centralised systems excel at coordinated, long-term projects with unclear immediate returns: space programmes, fundamental research, massive infrastructure. The Soviet Union went from agrarian society to space power in four decades.

The question isn't "which system innovates?" but "what kind of innovation, under what circumstances, and at what cost?" Markets incentivize incremental consumer innovation but underprovide public goods and long-term research. Centralised planning can achieve massive coordinated projects but often misses decentralised needs and evolving preferences. Both models have demonstrated innovation capacity; both have characteristic blind spots.

Markets do aggregate information through price signals, but they also produce systematic failures that aren't just policy mistakes to be fixed: externalities (pollution, climate change), public goods problems (infrastructure, basic research), information asymmetries (healthcare, financial products), boom-bust cycles, monopolistic behaviour. These aren't edge cases, they're fundamental features of how markets work.

Wealth inequality isn't just about lack of redistribution; it's baked into how capital accumulation functions. Healthcare can't work as a pure market because you can't shop around while having a heart attack, and insurance companies profit by denying care. Housing markets lock people out not through individual moral failures but through structural dynamics of property as investment.

Many complaints about "capitalism" are really about lack of regulation, weak labour protections, or specific political choice, problems that could theoretically be addressed through reforms. But some problems are more fundamental to treating human needs (housing, healthcare, education) as commodities subject to profit-seeking.

Every large-scale attempt to engineer this transition ended in some combination of economic failure, famine (cannibalism in some extreme cases), and authoritarian repression. The Soviet Union, Maoist China, the Khmer Rouge; these aren't abstract failures of Marx's ultimate stateless ideal, but catastrophic failures of the vanguard state machinery meant to achieve it.

But if we're evaluating systems by their worst implementations, capitalism also has famines (Bengal, Ireland), authoritarian implementations (Pinochet's Chile), and catastrophic failures. The question becomes whether the bad outcomes were inherent to the system or contingent on other factors, and that's genuinely hard to determine.

I will admit, a crucial question I don't fully answer: why did revolutionary communist transitions become authoritarian? Is it inherent to attempting communism, or inherent to revolutionary change in general? Is it about the economic system, or about seizing state power through violence? And that is a very important distinction.

It's also worth noting that my critique mostly addresses centrally planned economies (the USSR model). But there are other traditions, like anarcho-communism, council communism, market socialism, and cooperative economics, that don't rely on central planning. The critique of central planning may not apply equally to all variants of communist thought.

Even so, the historical reality creates a massive political obstacle. This isn't just irrational propaganda backed by abstract fears, it's backed by actual documented events. Even if you argue "that wasn't real communism" or "authoritarianism was the problem, not the economic system," you're asking people to trust that this time will be different. That's an incredibly hard sell.

This is different from fighting prejudices like racism or homophobia. Those are hatreds of people for existing. Resistance to communism is resistance to a system with a track record. The perception problem has a foundation in reality, not just bias.

For the United States specifically, you'd face: decades of Cold War cultural conditioning, a national identity built around individualism and entrepreneurship, many citizens who fled communist regimes and have personal reasons for opposition, and powerful economic interests with every incentive to resist.

Implementing communism in any way other than by force is simply impossible. And force would introduce catastrophic problems of its own. Even if 51% of people voted for communism tomorrow, how would you actually transform an economy that size without massive disruption? Who loses their assets and how? How do you prevent capital flight? What happens during the chaotic transition period? How do you maintain basic services while restructuring everything?

Revolutionary upheaval at the scale of a nation-state is extraordinarily risky. You're not just changing policy; you're trying to coordinate massive transformation across a continent-sized population.

Much of what people hate about capitalism is actually about specific policy failures that exist in some capitalist countries but not others: healthcare access problems in the US (other capitalist countries provide universal healthcare effectively), corruption in government contracts (happens under any economic system), extreme wealth inequality (could be addressed through taxation and redistribution without abolishing markets).

These could potentially be addressed through reforms rather than revolution. But that requires honestly distinguishing between problems inherent to markets and problems that are policy choices.

There is no economic system that can fix everything. Anyone who says otherwise is lying.

Capitalism sucks at: wealth inequality, leaving people behind, treating healthcare as a commodity, boom-bust cycles, environmental destruction for profit, systematic power imbalances between capital and labour.

Communism (as implemented) sucks at: innovation incentives in consumer goods, efficiency, personal freedom, resisting authoritarian drift, handling scarcity, preventing power abuse.

Social democracies suck at: being expensive, requiring high trust and cohesion, sometimes stifling growth, and still not eliminating capitalism's problems, just mitigating them.

The question isn't "which system is perfect?" It's "which problems can we actually handle, and which ones hurt the most people the worst?" That varies by context, culture, size, and resources.

When I say "there is no objective right and wrong," I'm not arguing for nihilistic relativism where all choices are equally valid. Decisions still have to be made. Resources must be allocated. During scarcity, someone eats and someone doesn't.

What I mean is: there's no cosmic answer key for complex moral and political questions, no objective foundation we can point to that definitively proves "this is the right way to organise an economy" or "this person deserves food more than that person."

This matters enormously for WHERE moral authority gets concentrated:

In centralised systems, a committee must explicitly decide moral questions ("who gets food?"), articulate criteria and apply them to millions of people, and construct and enforce what counts as "right" across an entire nation. With no objective standard to check them, this concentrated power becomes extremely dangerous. Stalin and Mao weren't just bad people, they had concentrated power to enforce their moral vision without effective constraints or feedback mechanisms.

In distributed systems, moral judgments emerge from millions of individual decisions within constraints. No single entity declares "this is the right allocation." The outcomes still reflect values (property rights, market rules) and can be horrible, but there's no single point of moral authority that can impose their vision by force. Power is diffused, which limits how catastrophically wrong any single moral judgement can go.

Given moral uncertainty plus human fallibility plus power corruption, distributed decision-making is less likely to produce catastrophic outcomes than centralised decision-making, even if both produce significant suffering.

This isn't "everything is relative so nothing matters." It's "because there's no objective foundation, concentrating moral decision-making power is especially dangerous."

We can still make evidence-based judgments about what reduces suffering. We can still say some systems work better than others in specific contexts. We can distinguish between better and worse outcomes based on measurable impacts. But we should maintain humility about our certainty and be extremely cautious about giving anyone the power to enforce their moral vision on millions of people.

Communism at the scale of a modern nation-state faces insurmountable practical problems: scale (though this affects all large systems), human behaviour (though what counts as "nature" versus learned is contested), implementation challenges, historical stigma, and the fundamental challenge of making tragic choices under scarcity without concentrating dangerous amounts of moral authority.

Yes, true communism is an idealised, decentralised goal. But that requires absolute centralization, and that is where every example breaks down.

This doesn't mean capitalism is perfect or that we shouldn't pursue reforms. Strong social safety nets, universal healthcare, worker protections, progressive taxation, these are all possible within market economies, as demonstrated by various countries. Some problems attributed to capitalism are really policy choices that could be amended without completely changing the economic and political ideology of a nation.

The goal should be reducing suffering and building systems that suck less, not chasing ideological purity. That requires accepting trade-offs, staying humble about our certainty, and being honest about what actually works rather than what we wish would work.

It's not right. It's not good. But in a way, nothing is. We're all just making decisions in a universe that doesn't come with an answer key, trying to choose options that lead to less suffering rather than more. And maybe that's the best we can do.