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Comment by oompydoompy74

4 hours ago

Neat! Not sure why the comments on this post are immediately asking if it’s useful. Not everything has to be immediately useful to exist. Kill the capitalist in your head.

> Kill the capitalist in your head.

Who referenced capitalism? And do anarchists, socialists, communists, et al., never question the usefulness of a thing either?

  • The difference is those groups promote culture for culture's sake. Capitalism does not. Culture is only promoted if there is profit to be made off promoting it. As such what culture exists is severely inorganic and dependent on market forces rather than being some proxy of the actual ideaspace of the community.

    • well, to be pedantic, stalinist tendencies of socialism (and leninist inspired movements as a whole), tend to prioritise culture as a way to communicate the ideals of the party.

      Capitalism, in its most pure form, puts profit before anything else in any form of work

      3 replies →

  • I mean it's not hard to understand where the author is coming from. It seems like these days even a hobby project has to meet some kind of 'is there a market for it' threshold of justifying its existence.

    So your parent may've taken the 'is it useful' comments to mean 'if not, why even exist' but I got the sense they're more from people who are considering an install, even if just in a VM.

If it's not useful, then why create it?

  • What a depressing thing to read on _hacker_ news of all places

    You might want to read this https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hacker_culture

    • Are you telling me hacker news isn't just for advertising vibe coded slop services as a get rich quick scheme? Impossible, why did claude put it in my marketing.md then? (/s in case it isn't obvious)

    • HN isn't reddit, for better and for worse. This is the "Orange Site" that gave us Sam Altman, defends monopolies and shits out thousands of net-negative SaaS startups that leech off Open Source software. Manufacture of depression is one of YC's byproducts that everyone loves to ignore while berating Flock and 9 Mothers like they spontaneously popped into existence.

      Your peers on this website are not principled, fun-loving Freenode/Libera geeks. HN is the Linkdin of underground social networking.

  • We could say the same for most of the comments on this site, including yours and mine.

  • There are so many projects that come up here that have the tag line of "This is such a stupid idea that I just had to do it!".

    We can do things just for the fun of it. Woz made the Apple computer basically as a toy, nothing more. And that's cool.