Holla Forums tech collective

Ive been reading the cybernetics thread and it has a bit of an influence on my wanting to organize something like this. We need to organize together so we can talk about and develop ideas to enact change. Image boards are fine for chit chat and what not, but they are not the ultimate tool to accomplish this goal.

I'm interested. Just a mediocre programmer working through some IT certs. Sounds like just the thing to learn more and get me motivated.

Tons of cool stuff going on in open hardware right now. Things are looking up. I hope we can someday burn Intel to the ground.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sortition#Ancient_Athens
How about Athenian sortition? People who feel themselves capable of moderation put themselves up for being chosen by random chance. This also works with anonymity, although it would require them to submit a single IP to be used the entire time (problem for VPN and Tor users?).
sure.

Completely agreed.

Just looked this up, clicked on the Wikipedia page, and read the intro because I haven't heard of it beforehand. Screw cooperatives, this is probably what will bring us communism. Actually, what if we used the site proposed above to act as an organizational tool for open hardware people to cooperate on leftist projects and act as a collective representative to make money and finance more open source projects?

People organize themselves into projects with their own closed space and elect a revocable delegate to do negotiations with Porky. We need money to really grow. Just stay the hell away from finance Porkies, they'll sink the whole thing.

Athenian sortition would work.
An easier solution would be to make it username-based, like an old-school forum, though that could turn off some people here I imagine.
It could be one without an e-mail requirement for registration to mitigate that. Though that leave the gates open for trolls and other security concerns.

It would be easy to attack it by creating tons of accounts, and hoping one of them gets mod.

tbh at this point might as well just make another board called /leftyinstallgentoo/ or something specifically for tech related discussion.

No, we really do need a separate platform for this. OP is right, we're not getting anything done without it, and this could be world-changing.

How about making a quality requirement of some sort? Have a Q&A section where external users ask questions regarding their own local praxis and someone responds, the questioner stars all responses which satisfactorily answer the question. Mods delete threads which are asked with the sole intent of giving a spam account a star and can kick out anyone who gets through this if all mods apart from the infiltrator agree to kick them out. All discussions and files deleted are archived (only deleted after a few weeks in the trash) for easy access to restore them, so as to repair damage done.

This is immune to that, but could potentially limit the number of candidates if legitimate candidates can't answer a relevant question. Another way to get the 1 star required? Maybe mods can tag good responses in other discussions or the makers of good code?

This seems like a workable system.

Forums are okay so long as there is no karma or post counts.

Also have some sort of minimum requirement to be included in the sortition, say, currently being active in participation

Yes that's pretty much what I was saying.
I miss those kinds of forums tbh.

RISC-V is promising

Tying identities to a key, and only allow identites with verifiable 'contribution' to the community to be included in the admin pool is a possiblity. Could still be abused, but it would take a very determined attacker.

My email is [email protected]/* */
Pass me an email and lets at least get an initial working group together

I recommend setting up some sort of IRC channel or something to get a working group rolling.

I was thinking about IRC too. Network preferences?

Indeed, we can run this like a revolution; labour (i.e. posts and posting quality) can be involved too.

There's loads of 'alternative systems' projects out there which could use some development; I've never come across one which isn't FLOSS. All we need is some materials in addition to some 3D printers, at-least-robust designs and sources of energy.

Solar panels are relatively inefficient but a few biomass burners will do (opensourceecology.org/wiki/Gasifier_Burner); materials from scrapheaps and landfill sites are plentiful; GitHub hosts many open-source hardware projects for free and alternative networks can be built and run for this cause. 3D printers can either be bought or made, though the functions of the former
kind are often limited. We will need some committed people given that a lot of the work will be heavily-manual.

I think Rizon would be good and iirc they delete logs don't they?

The logging part is pretty superfluous even if they do it. It would be relatively public and anyone in the chan can log. But I do think Rizon has good no censorship policy

Alright I'm up for that. Should we post the channel here or distribute it through e-mail?

I mostly use Scheme but I am not married to any language. If somebody has an idea for a project I'd be happy to try to help, but I might have to learn about how git et al work first.

Turns out rizon, nor many other of the major networks allow tor connections. Looks like freenode offers a hidden service to connect through, but I will have to make some certs to auth with that I don't have time for right now. With that I'm off for a bit. Will check the thread later and look for emails.

Not to come across as a stuck-up liberal who won't get his hands dirty, but it looks more like something which we could offer support on to comrades over the Internet as opposed to doing ourselves. We need to be spreading these ideas and help manage them, not necessarily be part of them 24/7.

Email sent!
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ethereum.org/
So, I was thinking about something. How about this: individuals can form projects with negotiating delegates as proposed in , but if they want to sell what they make on the market (either with normal money or Ethereum cryptocurrency, which is a mutualist alternative to Bitcoin and doesn't deflate), they have to pay back a portion of the proceeds into a general fund which new projects can draw from with minimal strings attached. This both A) encourages the projects to be oriented towards free communist distribution within the network and B) prevents the same capitalization from happening but without any payment back into the system. As for the Ethereum-normal money system, I'm not sure if there's an exchange rate posted anywhere like there is for Bitcoin and dollars, so we might have to devise an alternative.

Fuck yes, this is exactly what I've been shilling for all over this board. The tendency being developed in the cybernetics thread and others has a good chance of turning into be the only useful organisation the Left has developed in decades. It's ridiculously rare to see leftists proposing action that isn't either naiive utopianism or millenarianism.

I've got lots of relevant experience and an astonishing amount of free time that I would be overjoyed to put into getting this off the ground. Send me an email: [email protected]/* */

Sure, something like suckless or cat-v with a leftist touch would be great. What licenses would be publish our code under? GPL? Public Domain? Whatever the idea, send me an email. I'm already operating regist.ra.rs, so maybe that can help somehow?

How about everyone should stay as anonymous as possible? It doesn't have to be officially affiliated with Holla Forums anyways. Other than that we could insist on using traditional software like Mailing lists and IRC to not attract those people.

Thereby just attracting more Holla Forumsyps to make fun of our "safe spaces". Great idea

Depends, really. Most of it would likely be under GPL, but we might consider a CC-NC or Peer Production License if we want to keep porky out. However, as I've said in the cybernetics thread, I think we would want porky to integrate as much of this stuff as he can - in fact, the widespread integration of these systems into the capitalist economy to my mind will be exactly the building of the new system in the womb of the old that aided systemic change in past epochs.

On the subject of platforms, I agree with maintaining as much anonymity as is feasible. Anonymous posting lets you throw ideas out without having to (or being able to) worry about your reputation - I think that encourages freer and more creative discussion. I don't mind the imageboard format, as long as we're able to save old threads, maybe automatic archiving?

In the end I think this thing encompasses a variety of tasks that each demand their own platform. Stuff like mailing lists could be used for collaboratively producing articles for publication in established Left media, IRC for quicker-moving or exclusive discussions, regular participation on Holla Forums (or further? Is there some other non-cancerous recruiting pool?) to bring in new people to help out, a repository for code projects, and a website for distributing open hardware designs, news, articles, discussions, etc.

Okay, please elucidate this to someone who doesn't know much about these ech communities.

Is the goal to be exclusively to leftists or something? Or open to anyone but only work on leftist projects? Maybe try to move the Overton window of the techie community to the left?

I'm a programmer and I'd be willing to contribute. But you should keep in mind that any of the people with a lot of experience and skills will likely have jobs and other commitments. Any of the people who have more time and fewer commitments will have less experience and skills. Don't get too ambitious about making a super awesome hacker collective that does absolutely everything and has no nubs.

github.com/redecentralize is in my opinion a good example of an organization effectively promoting and working on tech with a particular political bent. Copying their structure would be a good start.

I'm not terribly good with support regarding technology or even in general; this would be the perfect use of the abilities which I do have in this area. More research would be neat with regards to what's out there to help with building a commune of sorts.

Tox?

wouldn't ricochet be better for organizing?

ricochet.im/

redecentralize looks like a cool org, never heard of them before

Tox seems like it would be pretty good for this purpose

Licensing isn't much of a concern at this point. Just trying to put in the ground work to organize a group is the main priority. Defiantly publish under some sort of copyleft license.

Trying to move the tech community more left is something that defiantly should be done. Many are already into anarchistic beliefs.

anyone that is interested should email me at [email protected]/* */

What is the benefit of ricochet over tox? It has tor built in, but it is trivial to run tox over tor. Tox seems more developed and has a wider ecosystem built upon the protocol. Whereas ricochet is a single application

Ricochet is considered more mature, plus its gone through a independent security audit. Tox on the other hand has largely been developed by summer interns and shit in google summer of code and other things as their first project, no security audit + theres been a bunch of drama with their management, some of the devs split after the project managers stole a bunch of donations to pay for their tuition or some shit.

Geez, protonmail is complicated. When I replied to the group message, was it visible to all the people within it?

looks like ricochet doesn't have group chat implemented as of yet, which would be the main use case we are looking for

i got it

I haven't seen any replies to toasyfroth's message. Did you send it to anlum?

tox has groupchat

>[email protected]/* */
E-mail sent m8

I have some coding experience but the only thing I have any desire to work on is vidya and even that's minimal

Oh hey, that's like me, but for pixel animation. Wanna not build a game together?

Maybe a few of us could make a leftist game.

Make it appeal to the mainstream to subvert them into ideologiez

My idea was cat girls related so probably not mainstream. Would be fun to work on anything leftist related though.

So much for the tolerant left.

This isn't a half bad idea. We could make a strategy/economic simulation game that doubles as a proof-of-concept simulation for in-kind economic calculation in the Cockshott style.

Better to make a game that it inherently leftist than to try forcing it to be leftist through the injection of shitty memes. Kind of like society, really.

i like the idea of testing economic models by gamifying it. Reminds me of the economy in EVE. They have dedicated economists working for them that study the in game player centric economy.

Ancapistan is surprisingly fun in game form. Wish there were more games like EVE.

Just had another idea about open-source hardware: What if we made the wikileaks/pirate bay of hardware specs? Like people reverse engineer proprietary designs or steal them from their employers and upload them to the hardware bay anonymously, and anyone can download them, distribute them to places like open source ecology, etc. Basically make all forms of intellectual property completely unenforceable de facto.

Yeah! Actually the communist version of EVE would be awesome, and thinking about how it's supposed to actually run would be an interesting question in and of itself. Nobody has really been able (or tried) to answer how communism is supposed to actually operate from an economic point of view, trying to simulate virtual full communism might yield some interesting political insights.

It is because you are the rich person floating around in space with infinite life. In lore there are tons of regular people working on the planets and in the stations actually doing stuff

Not sure many people would be willing to leak hardware, but it sounds like a cool idea.

Yeah, I know. Still fun though.

Leaking proprietary hw would also be very risky. The companies who hold the IP have lots of resources and lots of reasons to stop it

Kind of what I was thinking. Personally I'd probably be more motivated to discretely sell to Chinese companies.

Don't do this. If you're going to do it anyways, DON'T DO IT HERE. We want a project that isn't shut down ASAP by the FBI. Keep it legal.

I'd rather keep things focused on the real world if at all possible, but this could be a thing and help popularize the ideas. We might even one day take back the gamer community from the alt-right. If we have them, we have 4chan and the means of meme production.

I was just thinking of fun software projects. Not sure what exactly this is supposed to be, but I thought it would just be a group of leftists working on leftist projects. Game sounds like it would be a good propaganda vehicle if done right.

It's not that I'm opposed to it, but it makes me think, maybe we need a grouping of projects into core projects (what everyone agrees needs to be done) and side projects. Do we?

I don't care. I will try to help with whatever people want to do. Can just work on my own games.

Not true, action front is still going sorta fine, we only had to ban one guy because some drama surrounding his position on pedophilia.

You banned him for being a pedo? That's fucked assuming he didn't actually go near kids.

Alright well in any case that sort of thing will hopefully be much less of an issue with /leftytech/ since as far as I can tell we're more about the base and less about the superstructure. The way I see it all this wankery about what kind of social mores/formations the new society will have is none of our goddamn business and won't be up to us to decide anyway. Frankly I don't know why Marxists go on and on about ideological shit that they have no ability to affect.

Better to focus on the things we can build: organising tools and economic theory for a communist economy. Speaking of tools, I just saw this in another thread:
spliddit.org/apps/tasks
which splits up labour/goods according to some sort of ranked preference voting + algorithms. Maybe we could make an open source version? The site talks about the research it's based on pretty openly.

How progressive of you.

I'd be willing to pour some of my free hours into a cool programming project but I would like someone with more experience and skill to lead/design the framework I can fill in.

I did not ban him, I argued against that really. It was fuvky, but shit's now sorta fine.
Thing is, one of the other members reacted heavily on it for some reason (I suspect he was raped as a kid I guess)
The pedo advocate didn't really stop being pedo. He kept trying to hold his ground, this caused a pretty violent discussion between the two.
The guy that reacted heavily was threatening to leave if the other guy didn't. I think he was just very emotional at the time, later he realized it was a dickish move.
Maybe some people also voted for it because they felt it'd be bad PR.
Maybe some people were virtue signalling.
Maybe some people hoped he would return under a different name and shut up about pedophilia, to at least get the illusion of the "justice" he was demanding.
He wasn't even a pedophile, just one of the people asking to themselves what rape means if the child consents. I guess it makes sense to be shocked though, when he was talking about baby necrophilia.

Moral of the story: try to avoid drama, even if it means you need to shut up about some political idea. Both parties were causing a stir here.

Well you guys sound like a charming lot

Remember that this is the exception to the rule. Normally, we normally discuss normal stuff. And direct action.

matrix.org/ is pretty cool tech. Decentralized, open source, user friendly, does everything discord does and more. Try it out:
riot.im/app/#/room/#lefty:matrix.org

i emailed op but he didnt respond

We've got the rudiments of a mailing list started up, try mine: [email protected]/* */

I responded, unless you emailed someone else. also im busy doing other stuff a lot of the time, and may not get back to you right away.

Shoot me an email.
[email protected]/* */

Why not create a program and network that makes it so groups of people can work on the same coding in real time with eachother? Make it sort of run in a democratic fashion that it detects what the common lines of code the collective goes for so each individual only has to do a small amount of work if there is enough programmers. Is that an okay idea or is that not even possible?

I don't really see the purpose of this, when writing code you are going line by line making sure it works. You don't want other people changing the code you are working on. There would be breakages and bugs.
Plus there are already distributed VCS (eg git) out there which make collaborating on the same code base pretty easy.

I am actually studying the equivalent of comp. engineering, but hate they idea of working as a programmers. What do?

study something else. if you don't like it now, you will probably be hating yourself in a few more years

Sorry I wasn't totally clear. It's difficult to word my thoughts. Each person could work on their own line of code but once they finish that section it passes through everyone else who then choose to delete it, edit it, or approve it and the most common action determines what is done with it. I guess it's probably too complicated and would just be buggy though plus may waste time writing code that wont be used. I just thought it would be a lot more organically fluid of a way of programming in situations it's not run by just a team of developers but instead a large fully open community with no central authority.

as a comp engineer u are more like an electrical engineer than a programmer. Comp eng is about designing digital circuits/computers not programmming for the most part, although there is likely to be some programming. Focus on the hardware side or change ur major to EE if u can if u hate the programming but like the other parts of it'

There already is, see google docs or 'gooby' for collaborative text/code editing.

also, this

You lefty tech guys should nuke Silicon Valley and build something better in its place.

Well silicon valley is bullshit its a bunch of people getting paid absurd amounts of money to build useless products with dubious social utility. I mean, think about fucking "juicero"… Yeah, basically hipsters pissing away some investors money on a unicorn rails project

I'm not much of a coder but I can build the hardware up fairly well. And I'm handy in troubleshooting. Can I join your club?

Oh I'd love to nuke SV.

I wish it was limited to just tech bros making stupid shit with venture capital money. You got scumbags like Zuckerburg, Thiel, and Musk who want to shape the world in their image.

But those are exactly "tech bros making stupid shit with venture capital money"!

I think the previous poster means to separate the people making stuff like juicero from the randroid literal vampire who has the ear of the president

Fuck, the actual real world features an aristocratic gay vampire seducing the president. When did we start living in an Anne Rice novel?

...

is that you

its supposed to be a hipster tech bro

I'm in.
[email protected]/* */

Sysadmin.

Zuckerberg, Thiel and Musk are kind of what happens when these "tech bros etc etc" actually gain some kind of relevancy.

I can code in R if that's useful to anyone. Basically just statistical models and shit.

I'm actually surprised there isn't much device support for Replicant OS and Lineage OS to replace Android on phones and tablets. You would think people would want more privacy from Google.

Normies don't give a fuck about privacy.

What do I do guys?

Im Cis Admin Scum. Not sure what you would need me for, but im pretty nifty at unix/linux shit and sql databases. Im mostly responsible for sperging out at the other staff for security retardation if you need something with that.

whoops forgot email
>[email protected]/* */

Get a 2 year community college degree in computer science / information technology / networkings + get certifications like A+, Network+, Linux+, etc. Finish in 2 years, get a job, and study politics/economics on your own while making $35k - $60k a year.

payscale.com/research/US/Degree=Associate's_Degree,_Computer_Science_(CS)/Salary

I've read SICP!

I'm a programmer myself, so one thing I would potentially be interested in doing is developing software to help leftist movement mobilise and actually start being effective on the web again. We can create services people can sign up for and flood comment sections where it would be most effective to get our message across.

Right wing are already doing this so we need to start catching up. Problem is, they are likely getting lots of funding and help from big data analytics companies like that thing Robert Mercer owns, but we can still be effective by using free software methodologies as is the case in most conventional software development. The main problem though is figuring out how to avoid having these things be subverted by right-wing groups if they can be used against us. If anyone has any ideas, please let me know.

Don't do this, the tech market is oversaturated and shitty work.

This. Tech companies are laying off in droves. A lot of low level stuff is being automated now. If you can become the fabled superstar engineer and want to bust your balls go for it. Otherwise look for a different field.

GameGirl66:

Gamerdude80:

lol, like theres a better career than tech out there, you could say the same thing except worse about every other industry like law for example. telling this kid to go make 40k as a helpdesk is alot better than slaving away at mcdonalds for minimum wage, you get to work in aircon, light to no manual labor, etc.

Theres still a shortage of stem/tech employees

especially with trump cutting the h1bs

I just finished a BS in IT and it is pretty much useless without certifications. But I really want to get a job then get my certifications. Tech is overrated unless you get the certs in school and can afford an unpaid internship.

Send me an email comr8ds

[email protected]/* */

like i said,

Yeah, that's stuff I've been working on since I dropped out. Hoping I can get a decent job with just certs and no degree.

keep trying bro, good luck and i hope you get a job soon :)

This seems pretty cool tbh, im working on a crypto project at the moment, would be cool to have a community for it.

Bump this thread.

If you can teach me all the stuff, I am willing to help.

Start reading man. Just pick up comp sci, learn a programming language and start looking into comp sci books. For road maps you can look at college curriculums and just try to follow them. You can even find syllabuses for those courses and pirate the recommended books if you want. Or you can just look up recommendations on google.

Shouldnt you do the opposite? Create programs that stop the aut-rights from doing that and then distribute it all over.

Are we dead set on using tox? It always fucks up my internet connection and I generally prefer hanging out on irc.

I'm interested in helping.
Bumping/Voicing support.

It can work if you know where to look.
Lots of small ISPs in rural towns are shriveling up due to a lack of competent/trainable staff. If you don't HAVE to live in a city, lots of these places would be desperate for some help.

I managed to land a Unix sysadmin position in my home town for about $45k/year (after about two years there, I started closer to $30k) with almost no (professional) experience. Pretty easy, just managing mail, dns, web hosting, occasionally I need to help a colo customer out, and a few other things.
I've automated most of the annoying shit away.

We've just gotten a big infusion of cash from the local power coop to deploy fiber to the home, and high-speed fixed wireless, so it'll be pretty good for me for at least a while.

I'm also in a pretty good position to influence many of the tech decisions that we make

In my spare time I'm working on a hypervisor cluster based on Proxmox and Ceph that I get to keep in the datacenter at work.

YES! FUCK YES!

Absolutely, anarchism / libertarian socialism is the clear winner in this space

Tox could develop into something great, right now they're still amid a rough patch
Ricochet unfortunately still lacks group chat functionality
Matrix I've looked into for a while and it looks like the thing to use in the meanwhile, while P2P projects are maturing. Matrix is a decentralized chat program that aims for end-to-end encryption by default (now it's opt-in, but it will be by default in the Riot app in only two releases, the 1.0 release, which probably is out in a month or two), inter-connectability of many walled gardens, like Discord, IRC, Facebook and many more.

I say go with Matrix. You'll have to exchange keys at this point in time tho. I think you make a "secure room" and then invite people to that room. Was a couple of months since I last used it.