I’m not criticizing the choice of C++. I just don’t want to look at the code because I don’t personally like the language.

Languages: C++

Yeah, hard pass on looking at that code base.

Really? Are you saying this in reference to the essay of his that starts with:

‘Left-wing’ Twitter can often be a miserable, dispiriting zone. Earlier this year, there were some high-profile twitterstorms, in which particular left-identifying figures were ‘called out’ and condemned. What these figures had said was sometimes objectionable; but nevertheless, the way in which they were personally vilified and hounded left a horrible residue: the stench of bad conscience and witch-hunting moralism.

Because if you are, then I guess you didn’t read the article, huh?

I respect the sentiment, but I recently read “Exiting the Vampire Castle” by Mark Fisher and he makes some good points for why callout culture is, shall we say, “less than productive” in some situations.

Edith Finch is more of an interactive short-story collection thematically and narrative centralized around a single family and their almost comical level of intergenerational neglect.

forgiving your younger self and understanding that books can be good in different ways

You can imply whatever you want about me, if it makes you feel better about losing an argument, but I read a lot of stuff that I don’t think is particularly good. That’s the present tense of read, by the way. As you get older, one thing you’ll realize is that you can acknowledge that something being entertaining and something meeting some set criteria of artistic merit are different things. I like a lot of things that I don’t think are executed with a great degree of skill or which have a great degree of literary merit. I acknowledge those things as enjoyable (which I’ve already done for Harry Potter), but I also acknowledge them as flawed in specific ways.

You’re nearly there yourself in your original comment. No one is comparing Harry Potter to Gravity’s Rainbow or Wuthering Heights here.

No, but you can compare it to other, superior works of fiction for that targeted age range. Many of the works of Ursula K. Leguin and Terry Pratchett that were intended for people in the similar age range as Harry Potter put Rowling’s work to shame.

I’m surprised you didn’t link to Wikipedia…but that’s not really the argument here.

I would say I’m surprised you’re complaining about things I haven’t done and arguments I haven’t made, but as I’ve been on the internet for more than five minutes and have engaged in arguments with people like you more than I would ever realistically care to, I can’t say that I am. But that’s not really the argument here, either.

And if you had been more reasonable - not called them “shit” perhaps - it would have been a different story. And I see you skirt the issue, but the reason people go on and on about the failings of Harry Potter these days is very obvious, and it has little to do with literary value.

I think they are shit, though. From the perspective of the entire thing, if you want a more nuanced analysis, the first novel is a masterpiece of world building. The second and third do good jobs of expanding the internal mythology of Harry Potter and his relationship to Voldemort. But that’s all they do. The last four novels become overburderend with meandering, often pointless content and are just hilariously overindulgent.

I think the core issue I have with the novels is that the main characters of the series experience comparatively little in the way of real character development and growth over the course of the series. They are essentially the same people at the end of the seventh novel as they are at the beginning of the first. Hermione is a little bit less insufferable, Ron is a little bit less of a walking inferiority complex. And Harry is a little…angrier? It’s hard to say. They have such little character development because the novels aren’t really focused on the complexities of growing up or the way in which your understanding of the world radically shifts from childhood to adulthood. These things, if they exist in the novels at all, are even less than tertiary to the core focus. The novels themselves are more concerned with action and worldbuilding, which…I get it. It’s accessible. It’s engaging for children. Things like difficult feelings and interpersonal drama are stereotypically boring for kids. Having a lot of stuff going on, a lot of fantasy and mythology and all the other bullshit Harry Potter is known for is part of its core appeal. But it’s also shallow. You don’t like the fact that I think those qualities makes the series “shit,” but I do. If you have a problem with that, then you have a problem with my criteria. And if you have a problem with my criteria, then I guess…too bad? There’s not really any point in trying to have any more of a discussion after that, because in order to talk about “good” and “bad” art you have to have some semblance of a shared definition, and the simple reality is that we probably don’t. You have your criteria for what you think makes a work of fiction good, and Harry Potter meets it enough for you to think it’s good, and I have my criteria and it simply doesn’t.

“accessible” is a weird thing to criticize in a work geared towards children, btw

It’s not a criticism. It’s an, at worst, neutral observation. It’s not like a children’s novel written from the perspective of a child in a concentration camp during the Holocaust and it’s not a children’s novel about a person growing up transgender. These things are comparatively less accessible because they require a degree of abstraction and empathy of which your average child, who likely doesn’t have similar experiences, is almost certainly psychologically incapable. That’s not a knock against kids. It’s just the psychological nature of being a child. Accessibility makes sense and is important for works looking to act as mainstream entertainment. And that’s what Harry Potter succeeds at being: entertaining. There’s nothing wrong with entertainment, but entertaining and artistically rich are different things.

And I guess the reason you read the whole thing is…that it was so awful? Be honest with yourself.

I guess the reason I read it is because I was a child and enjoyed detective fiction, which is all Harry Potter effectively is: detective stories with wizards. I read a lot of stuff as a kid that wasn’t very good in retrospect. I also read a shitload of Hardy Boys, and most Hardy Boys novels are fucking awful. Something being entertaining to you when you’re a kid that you can acknowledge was shit when you’re an adult is a normal part of growing up. I’m sure you’ll get there yourself, someday. Or maybe your ability to parse literature will suffer from arrested development. Who can say?

It is, however, a book written for children and teenagers. And for what it is, the plots and themes ask more of, and give more back to, young readers than so much of the other drivel that is readily available to them.

The argument that something should be considered good because there exists other things which can be considered significantly worse is not a very good framework for arguing for the quality of a work of fiction. This is classic “damning by faint praise.”

I know this, since I read to my own children and teenagers every day, and buy them books to read for themselves

The foundational premise of this argument is that you know something to be true because you perceive it to be so. This is like me saying that I know I’m a good cook because I cook every day and enjoy the food that I make for myself. It ignores the obvious possibility that your personal standards for what you are doing are simply garbage.

If we’re being honest, the real issue is that Rowling is now le diable du jour, which means everything she ever did is now material for our daily two minutes of hate. The books have to be completely without merit as well because it’s just not possible to hold even mildly conflicting views simultaneously.

If we’re being honest, her books are simple, accessible, designed for mass appeal, relatively thematically shallow, and were at the time of their initial publication outrageously overhyped because she did what J. J. Abrams does with every single t.v. show he’s ever made and allude to an elaborate set of mysteries that actively drove fan engagement via wild speculation about the future of the series between novels. To add to this, the average American reads so little that for many of them, the novels were the only major series of fiction they’d ever voluntarily read, so there was a period of time on the internet where every piece of fantasy fiction in any medium got immediately compared to Harry Potter. This is admittedly not Harry Potter’s or Rowling’s fault, but it was fucking annoying and served to drive negative sentiment for the series.

If anything, it’s an overly generous reading of a work whose themes and characterization come across as remarkably shallow when examined by anyone with even a hint of genuine critical literacy. I guess the main takeaway is “read another book.”

Context obviously matters. It’s essentially what I said in my comment. But if you’re in a public forum like Lemmy or Reddit and you have a thread about, say, a popular t.v. show, and someone expresses a negative sentiment towards it, while you genuinely enjoyed it and thought it was good, then if you try to silence that person’s perspective, which they have as much right to share as you do, then you are effectively saying that the only perspective that is valid is one that agrees with yours. There’s a reason that circlejerk subreddits like r/gamingcirclejerk and r/moviescirclejerk were so popular. It’s because monolithic sentiment is the bane of places like reddit and lemmy.

This basically puts the onus for another’s enjoyment on everyone except for the individual enjoying the thing, though. Which I’m not saying is categorically wrong in all cases. If you have a child/niece/nephew/etc. who really enjoys, say, Harry Potter, and you go “well, J.K. Rowling is a transphobic neoliberal and Harry Potter is a story about only fighting against fascism and bigotry when it actively threatens dominant, existing modes of power.” In that case, you are actively robbing enjoyment of something from someone who should be engaging with things uncritically. If you say it to an adult, who should have already developed that degree of literacy, and they complain about having their fun ruined, then they’re basically asking to be infantilized.

I always hate whenever someone criticizes a work of art and then there’s some smoothbrain response to the criticism that essentially says “just let people enjoy things.” This happens a lot with contemporary film and television. How about you let people engage with something and critically think about it, even if the things they have to say are mostly negative. If you like something, great. Another person not liking something doesn’t mean you suddenly aren’t allowed to like it, either.

It’s “y’all” - as in a contraction of “you all.”

As the internet gets scarier

How the fuck is the internet getting scarier? This isn’t the random gore and porn filled, go to a forum and immediately get targeted by a sex-predator, internet that I grew up with. The internet is a corporate walled garden of mega services that feed disinformation and bullshit to people, but your odds of getting genuinely victimized as a child are so much lower than they used to be.

I mean, both are bad. I definitely don’t advocate for body shaming.

pavement princesses

Insult seems vaguely misogynistic.

If there’s one thing I learned working in IT it’s that devs actively half-ass their error messages, routinely misspell critical words you’re gonna grep for in logs, and never even consider having someone in Product read over customer-facing error messages like this. All they see is a Jira ticket that says “include the following verbiage in the VPN rejection message” that was typed up by a mostly plastered PM one afternoon after they downed 3 margaritas at “lunch” at the taqueria next to their office. And then they just copy and paste that shit into whatever bullshit HTML template took the least effort to find.

“State capitalism with Chinese characteristics”

I also wouldn’t be surprised if even the automated processes that edit your comment to be gibberish even accomplishes that. Text is, in the software world, remarkably cheap to store, even at volume. It also compresses easily, is remarkably easy to tie to version control mechanisms, and with reddit’s comment system can easily be structured as a part of an existing dialogue tree. They know people are pissed at them and are looking to nuke their comment history, so I wouldn’t be surprised if they already have multiple cold storage backups of reddit’s entire site comment history over the course of months or years. Right now, that data is the most valuable thing they have, their reputation as the “front page of the internet” be damned.

It’s about momentum.

Once again, the popularity of something is not what defines its status as a utility.

If I stop using Whatsapp, I now have to convince everyone I’m in contact with to also use the alternative when msging me before I can actually stop using WhatsApp.

Yes, that would be devastating, wouldn’t it? “Hey, I’m not on WhatsApp anymore. If you want to reach me, please send me a text message or an email.” Wow. So difficult. \s

I am confident the EU could do it. A complete transfer of ownership isn’t necessary for other countries to use exported services as public utilities. Public-private partnerships exist.

Could do it and “has a reason to do it” are very different things. There is no motivation there because WhatsApp and other, similar services, are ubiquitously available. It would be a largely pointless endeavor. Also, the EU has the same style of media freedom laws as the United States. If they ran a service, they wouldn’t be able to censor the content on it. Like, legally speaking it couldn’t. Hope you like a state-run platform for European Nazis…because that’s what you’d get.

“American freedom of speech = Nazis get to speak” was your stance before. Now it’s “Anything but American freedom of speech = government censorship”. What am I even supposed to say here?

You implied America’s first amendment was a “government problem.” I described what would happen if the United States got rid of it. I don’t know if you need to say anything, but you might want to brush up on your reading comprehension skills.

First off, I think you are being very rude. I didn’t call you names or make assumptions, so please treat this with more respect than a Twitter thread.

I’ll think about it… …Okay, I thought about it. No.

Olvid, a French alternative to WhatsApp, was made in 2019. It took a law passing last month banning all ministers from using non in-house messaging services to stop people from using WhatsApp. I wouldn’t consider that “trivially easy”.

Except in your own example, a viable alternative was immediately available. Users didn’t switch because they didn’t have other options or were physically limited from using anything else. They just preferred to use WhatsApp. Switching to an alternative was trivially easy. People just didn’t want to because of personal preference. It would be trivially easy for me to stop drinking coffee every morning and only drink water - there’s nobody pointing a gun at my head to make me drink coffee - but I like coffee and would be annoyed by giving it up and probably have a hard time quitting. The same is probably true for many people. Should access to coffee be considered a utility? Probably not.

I already said this is a “government problem”. I said this in reference to the US government, because this isn’t really an issue for most countries :/

You mentioned WhatsApp. Several times. WhatsApp is owned by Meta, an American company. If you want it to be a public utility and its owned by an American company, which country is going to be the one to make that happen? Also, calling “completely eradicating the first amendment in order to make it so that the American government can forcibly seize and censor people on its new state run social media websites” a “government problem” is an atomic bomb level of understatement.

First off, I think you are being very rude. I didn’t call you names or make assumptions, so please treat this with more respect than a Twitter thread.