rk: it’s hyphen-minus actuallyJun 23

I’ve noticed that there is often an alignment between extreme minimalism in software and edgelordy falling into the libertarian trap that goes full Nazi, maybe accidentally.

Xlibre, sure (blatantly), but I remember for a while the 9front home page had a photo of Auschwitz “as a joke.” The docs at cat-v.org (which is associated with 9front/suckless) has a “libertarian” manifesto filled with straw men

It’s frustrating because I like minimalism in software and I hate Nazis

Show threadrk: it’s hyphen-minus actuallyJun 23
I contributed to suckless many years ago (the swallow patch for dwm), and my port of sam is linked on cat-v.org, but I never quite realized how far right the culture of those projects were; once I did I was quite frustrated.
Show threadPulkoMandy

@rk the kind of minimalism which goes "who needs configuration files? Just recompile the thing, everyone knows how to do that" does not set a good framework for undertanding how diverse computer users can be. The next steps are "localization files and cjk fonts are a waste of disk space" followed by "accessibility is bloat"

you can, however, design things that are minimalist, but modular and extensible to allow more use cases. It's not easy and it takes time.

Jun 23 at 3:57pmWeb