So I just read Bill Gates’ 1976 Open Letter To Hobbyists, in which he whines about not making more money from his software. You know, instead of being proud of making software that people wanted to use. And then the bastard went on and made proprietary licences for software the industry standard, holding back innovation and freedom for decades. What a douche canoe.
He have no life
He’s still the same sociopath as always, except now with a savior complex. Giving away all his money, is he? His foundation has been around 25 years and he still has $100b+ net worth. A single individual shouldn’t have that much power, and the fact that he still voluntarily wields it while virtue signaling affirms every negative opinion of him. Even if he were the benevolent billionaire his PR campaign would have us believe he is, such a net worth should be reserved for governments where it’s spread across multiple agencies that have checks and balances and are accountable to voters. I don’t trust any individual with that much power, though I’d trust any random person off the street over anyone ruthless enough to become a billionaire.
Idk who these ppl are even donating to, never benefits my life, wherever they go its not benefiting the ppl they took the money from, some third world country if that
I remember reading somewhere that his foundation was all a massive tax avoidance scheme. It was quite a compelling argument when broken down. I wish I could find it again.
Simply follow the big money. He’s got more net worth now than when he said he would start donating.
Did you also read that he taught himself code by reading out print outs in the trash? He wanted to close that ability to learn. Shut that open stuff down and make licenses, while he himself learned from others.
Didn’t he come from a stupidly rich family and had access to a computer (at a time when it was like having access to a helicopter) whenever he wanted to learn and fiddle around? Isn’t that where he got the print outs?
No. He’s a nepo baby.
Yup. His dad i believe was a renowned lawyer.
With connections to the Rockefeller family. Also his mom was the one who convinced IBM to give Bill the contract for MS-DOS (which he bought from some other guy).
yup. It was originally QDOS (Quick and Dirty Operating System). I believe he ripped the guy off when he bought it? Not sure
How many 0’s are in his bank account?
Yeah, he ripped that guy off.
If I’m remembering correctly, his mom was on the board of IBM.
I really don’t get how opinions on intellectual property and its “theft” turn 180 whenever AI is mentioned.
ai is the rich stealing from us, piracy is usually us taking it from the rich.
AI is theft in the same way that all private property theft. It isnt the piracy of media, it’s the alienation of labor from its product, and withholding it for profit.
All private property is theft? Lmao go back to your cave tankie
quotes a concept about property from 1850s
Lmao sorry for not being able to take this seriously
yes.
Sees an anarchist
“Tankie”
???
tbf that’s also the tankie view about it.
Even libertarians, who are on the exact opposite side economically, agree IP is garbage made and manipulated to enrich the few.
Clearly one of those horrible anarchotankapalists.
Anarchists believe that “all property is theft”? Lol
There is some disagreement between people who, for example, favor Proudhon versus those who favor Kropotkin over the ownership of personal tools that are involved in individual trade-craft. As with any ideology there are varying schools of thought but the common ideological baseline is that anything that requires capital investment should be collectively controlled and operated for the common good. A person’s personal possessions including their home and tools required for self sufficiency are not considered “property” or a “means of production” by almost anyone.
A good real world example is the FOSS community, most of us would be quite vexed to say the least if someone started changing stuff on our personal computers but we also actively share our code, experience, and knowledge with the world for free. Same goes for the open hardware folks, permacomputing community, and the open research community.
Yet none of that can be interpreted as “all property is theft” unless you redefine what “property” itself means which is a terrible strategy for advertising Anarchy.
private property, distinct from personal property.
Is it? This dichotomy seems incredibly artificial and unsustainable.
Some people on the Left regretfully tried to redefine Private Property and split off some private property into “personal property” but since that’s not how the language works it’s caused endless miscommunication. By private property is theft he means Private Mean’s of Production with the caveat that people essentially own their owns but homes can’t be bought/sold/inherited.
Private property is not theft, it is exploitation. Marx already refuted this anarchist childish way of thinking
The exploitation of private property is derived from the exclusion of labor from its product - maybe you have a different understanding of what ‘theft’ means, but it’s the principled exclusion of what labor produces from the labor producing it that is the basis of marx’s claim of ‘exploitation’
And piracy is actual enjoyment of art made by hardworking devs who unfortunately work for multi billion dollar companies T-T
That’s true in the same way that Trump’s tariffs are paid by other countries. Which is to say: Not at all.
Bill Gates was no billionaire at the time. His background was probably shared by almost all computer hobbyists at the time.
Hardly. Bill Gates came from a wealthy family, attended a private school, and through it had thousands of hours of computer programming time several years before even the Altair 8800 came out. He had a personal connection to IBM through his mother, which is how Microsoft got the DOS deal. His circumstances were unique, and his success the result of a hefty dose of luck.
What kind of person owned a computer as a hobby in 1976?
a rich person
I don’t mind it if the models are open for anyone to use in any way they see fit. If you trained it off public works and made it available to everyone, I am ok with that.
I’m on the side of abolishing intellectual property, with the caveats that commercializing someone else’s work or taking credit for someone else’s work should be illegal.
If there wasn’t a profit mode we’d get much less “slop art” and more challenging art made with passion. The slop would also be far less off-putting.
the caveats that commercializing someone else’s work or taking credit for someone else’s work should be illegal.
So, not actually abolishing IP, then.
Commercializing means sell for profit. If a non-profit were to create a cracked version of Windows 7 with security updates and sell that for $200 an install that’d not count as commercialization. The idea here is that if Netflix took someone else’s work and made a bajillion dollars off it they’d need to ask for permission and credit the original author.
I don’t know if something still counts as intellectual property if it can be infringed upon except by for-profit entities.
the common denominator is money
One day chat got won’t work without a paid subscription…
Intellectual property as a concept is a cancer to humanity, and we’d be in a much better world without it.
This is why they want Wikipedia and internet archive, etc, killed off. They have it for their training data but they won’t have a profitable model via paid subscriptions without a monopoly on information.
Yes but we’re in the bait and switch phase of it. They’re pushing the AI responses at the top of search to cut down the through clicking to Wikipedia. They’re trying to capture behavior by being the lowest effort route to an answer. They’re gambling that people will forget these other sites and then stop donating. Then it’s to the courts until they’re too broke to keep the servers online.
The information will still be free, but maybe obfuscated enough that most people accept [erratic] information as a service.
“They” is the copyright industry. The same people, who are suing AI companies for money, want the Internet Archive gone for more money.
I share the fear that the copyrightists reach a happy compromise with the bigger AI companies and monopolize knowledge. But for now, AI companies are fighting for Fair Use. The Internet Archive is already benefitting from those precedents.
And for any of the people saying “he changed”.
One of his most recent “philanthropic” ventures was to partner with Nestle (good start) to “modernize and increase yields” of the dairy industries in impoverished countries.
The two organizations then sold modern (likely non-servicable) equipment and entrenched them in corporate supply chain systems geared towards export and making it much harder to trade locally (not sure how that part worked, but was in what I read).
For a grand total of… 1% increased dairy yields.
Then 3-4 years later they pulled out, leaving heavily indebted farmers without the corporate supply chains and delivery systems they were forced to switch to, and making it very difficult to switch back to the old ways of working, so they can’t sell nearly as much locally.
Who do you think will buy up those farms when the farmers go bankrupt and have to sell ar rock bottom prices.
He is doing what the robber barons did, they are trying to clear their name before they die.
His work on malaria in Africa focused on bed nets to the explicit exclusion of larvacide control of mosquitoes. Millions of preventable cases over the last 30 years.
Then there’s the circumcision to fight aids.
Guy’s a fuckwit.
Most people are.
Sounds like you need to keep better company
It’s a continuum, of course, like everything. Most people sit somewhere in the middle, with a few people defining the extremes.
No, most people are not horrible.
I doubt you actually believe this, at least if we are understanding the words as written.
Just based on the website we are talking on, I am going to assume we have a few shared moral similarities, at least at a glance.
We think murder, rape, discrimination based on inalienable traits, domestic abuse, religious fanaticism, theft outside of exceptions are wrong.
If we start going down even that quickly thought up list, and just look at surveys from groups throughout the world, we start chunking massive percentages of people off of our “good” list very quickly.
These are nowhere near exact numbers because the point isn’t about any specific one of these, but about disqualifying behaviours and points of view.
Most people don’t murder, but many support it. Let’s just say we are only thinking about people who will murder at some point in their lives, and guesstimate that at 1% off the list.
99% good
Most people don’t rape… or do they? How many third world or religiously fanatic nations treat rape as standard, within marriages, on people of lower status, etc.
Even in western nations, the numbers of people who are sexually assaulted by people they know are more like 1 in [single digit number], and then further surveys always reveal that there is probably significant under-reporting going on, with many people unable to believe they were raped, told to be silent, and who ultimately rationalize away the event.
Now you go to countries with religious fanaticism, and many if not most condone rape in some fashion, especially spousal rape.
I would estimate, that the amount of people who rape, extremely roughly guesstimating, is around 1/10th the population, if not higher.
Some will overlap with the murderers of course, but this is just a thought experiment, and I already think this guess is on the low side, so lets move on.
89% good
Discrimination is where we start chunking hard. Even if you try to be charitable here, surveys show that even within western countries many are ok with and regularly discriminate against people for their inalienable traits. You go to poorer countries or countries with less stable situations and this gets even worse.
Lets just guesstimate that of the non overlaps, this takes 3/10 off the list, giving quite a bit of leeway to people with less blatant instances.
59% good
I could keep going but I hope you see the point I am making here and why I think that if just about anyone here sat down and truly pieced together what the average person was like, with whatever their personal list of disqualifiers from being a good person were, they would quickly come to the conclusion, that most people are not good, and could easily come to the conclusion that many were horrible, depending on what horrible meant in that context. Horrible doesn’t have to be saved for only hitler just because its not used for someone who steals a candy bar.
It depends on your definition of horrible. Mine is quite broad.
Speaking for yourself it would seem
People are shaped by the conditions which they are subjected to. Currently, those conditions promote endless greed and exploitation as a way and means of life, and give out huge advantages to anyone willing and able to perpetrate them at scale.
“Well, Steve [Jobs]… I think it’s more like we both had this rich neighbour named Xerox and I broke into his house to steal the TV set and found out that you had already stolen it.”
He’s also a thief of course, as that’s the only way to become a billionaire.
Yup. He stole a bunch of ideas and code, then got upset that people were stealing his ideas and code. Do as I say, not as I do.
Wait… You’re telling me that people born into extreme privilege and wealth turn out to be self-aggrandizing, egotistical, sociopaths who drastically over-estimate their own importance and contribution to society?
My world view is shook!
The Hated One has a few videos about Gates and the shit he has done. Windows is only the tip.
I don’t know The Hated One; I’m assuming they are a content creator. What kind of stuff do they usually do?
Sorry about that. He is a content creator who posts on Youtube and bitchute who focuses on privacy, security, protesting, civil rights, the environment, and consumer rights. Usually how silicon valley is making all these problems worse with their greed.
Thanks for sharing those channels!
Wonderful; thanks for sharing. I’ll check him out this weekend.
You are very welcome.
AstraZenica COVID vaccine was going to be opensource but he used with weight as a donor to pressure the university to sell it to a firm he had ownership instead
I read about that, yeah. All hail Mammon; money above all. Sometimes I think wealth changes something in a person’s brain, like psychologically or neurologically. It’s as if they get so detached from reality that they lose all empathy and sense of community. I’ve heard the term ‘affluenza’ used as a joke, but the more I think about it, the more it makes sense as a legitimate thing.
It takes a certain kind of personality to even become a billionaire. You don’t become a billionaire by being kind and ethical
Its any position of power in my experience. People get power, justifying in their mind that they and people like them should be in power. Even games about being in charge run into that problem. Maintaining power becomes a major part of the game at some part.
That’s a good point, as illustrated by things like the Stanford Prison Experiment.
That experiment was massively flawed to the point of uselessness.
That’s exactly what a rich and powerful squirrel would say.
Also the issue of you need to be a deranged psychopath to get wealthy in the first place.
There’s plenty of wealthy people who aren’t psychopaths, but they are all broken in some way. Usually it’s because capitalism has completely alienated them from our natural communal instincts and taught them that the individual is god. Many are capable of empathy, they just choose to do the selfish thing because they’ve been told their entire lives that “taking care of number one” is a virtue.
Of course, the impacts of their behavior are the same as if they were psychopaths, so this isn’t me excusing them. But it’s important to know what capitalism does to people and how it requires us to ignore our natural instincts, because the wealthy (the ones capable of empathy, anyways) are the same as the rest of us, only luckier.
as someone who recently escaped the labor trap (that is what capitalists call it…wages are suppressed for a reason…), the shift from needing to work and not is…profound.
no wonder so many rich cunts are batshit psychopaths, nobody born into $ can ever truly know this feeling of relief (and the resulting stress, just from your brain leaving “survival mode”…hierarchy of needs stuff, then realizing just how fucked everything is, how powerless you still are even as new-rich to change anything…)
I think there’s research to that effect.
Well, it would make sense. Rich people have always creeped me out, just instinctively.
I’m sure the threshold varies, but I would back research that attempts to pinpoint or at least narrow down what amount of wealth starts to change your brain chemistry for the worse.
I saw something recently that suggested their brain scans look similar to serial killers.
No, I don’t think that’s accurate. Oxford Unkversity was going to waive their rights to the vaccine, and Gates pressured them to instead partner with Astra-Zeneca. But to my knowledge Gates never profited from that deal. Now, was there still some shady backroom dealing going on? Very possibly.
who cares if he didnt profit? “I convinced this man to make money off of the sick and he did it and profited off of a global contamination, but at least I also didnt get a kickback right? He was just gonna give it away the fuckin idiot!”
such a swell dude. totally not a shitbag human
I care when someone claims that they did. It’s important to gets the facts straight imo. They commenter you’re replying to didn’t imply Gates was a good guy or something.
Listen m8 all I do is try to do is stop the spread of misinformation. If X thing is just as bad as Y… just say he did X thing. No need to embellish the story.
He, through his foundation, own a significant portion of AstraZenica.
Where do you see that? That isn’t anywhere in your link. The only reference to AZ is that they partnered with one of the companies that Gates invested in.
His foundation owns stocks in Immunocore who owns AZ
No they don’t dude. AZ doesn’t have a parent company. Immunocore has about 1 billion dollars in assets, AZ has about 100 billion. Stop making stuff up.
My bad partner “Immunocore’s specialty, however, has been working in oncology. Its therapies induced industry giants including AstraZeneca (NYSE:AZN), Eli Lilly (NYSE:LLY), GSK (NYSE:GSK) and Genentech to partner with the biotech over the years.”
His wife left him when she found out he’s in the Epstein files. Because Bill Gates rapes children.
Honestly, I wouldn’t put it past him.
That is exactly how it looks. The timing is correct. I can imagine the argument, although, they might not have loved each other enough to even argue about it by that point.
If I was a billionaire looking to make waves, I’d release a memoir upon my death bed, admitting to the kid rapey cabal. Nothing to lose. Hi Bill.
And he is one of the “better” billionaires. He has donated over $100 Billion to help people around the world, which makes him look like a great guy on paper.
I think it’s not so much him as a person, but his business decisions in the context of capitalism. That’s the real evil, not any one person.
Just to be clear, I’m not defending him or his actions.
Brave of you to hold a nuanced opinion! So many people have a very binary view of others, and Lemmy’s the same, as the downvoting shows.
And yes, totally, he was a typical morally corrupt businessman and one of the first tech bros in a time before most of Lemmy was even born. But he’s also done a lot of good in the second half of his life. People are dismissive of that but they bloody well shouldn’t be.
Who else has contributed $2bn specifically to fight malaria? Nobody. There’s quite a few now who could have helped but nobody else has. The Gates Foundation has also contributed that much again towards fighting Tuberculosis and AIDs. These are big numbers and they’ve had a real effect. Those of us who live comfortable lives are fortunate where these diseases aren’t everyday killers of friends and family and we cannot fully appreciate the benefit this work has done.
Does this offset his earlier negative behaviour? I honestly think it might do.
I wish there was a better way than the “be a horrible piece of shit for the first half of your life until you get your bag, then do nice stuff to rehab your image” path a lot of of them seem to take, but at least we get something out of some of them that way I suppose.
He never stopped doing bad things, he just started rehabing his image
So many people have a very binary view of others, and Lemmy’s the same, as the downvoting shows.
What a ridiculous argument you’ve made here. The voting system is literally binary. No one can vote 7/10 on messaging, 4/10 on points.
Does this offset his earlier negative behaviour? I honestly think it might do.
This is exactly why hes done it. You don’t know what hes actually responsible for. You don’t see the pharmaceutical investments hes made, farmland he owns, or his bad takes (like recently suggesting that we should abandon the climate because he’s dipping his toes into the AI space).
You see some flashy figures and figure, well that must be a good guy!
Some “nuance” that is.
This is exactly why hes done it.
Why would he give a shit what people think about him? Others rich people don’t because when you’ve got enough money you can insulate yourself entirely from what the world thinks.
You don’t know what hes actually responsible for
Nor do the people judging him so harshly.
You don’t see the pharmaceutical investments hes made
The fuck? Why would he donate money and save countless lives just to benefit from it via some claimed business link?
What a ridiculous argument you’ve made here.
Why would he give a shit what people think about him? Others rich people don’t because when you’ve got enough money you can insulate yourself entirely from what the world thinks.
This is the most ridiculous line of reasoning.
Firstly, many rich people care. Many care about their “legacy”. They want their names on big donations, and on school campuses.
Secondly, many rich people spend inordinate amounts on PR advisement firms, demonstrating that there are significant dollar values put into caring about this. We’re talking about PR for the person, not even for a business.
Nor do the people judging him so harshly.
They judge from what is known. You judge from giving him the benefit of the doubt between the cracks.
The fuck? Why would he donate money and save countless lives just to benefit from it via some claimed business link?
This is such a bizarre misrepresentation of what my comment is clearly saying.
I am clearly pointing out that he is still doing evil and you are being blinded by some fancy curated numbers.
I don’t even know how you got to that conclusion.
He is moving money in his own foundation
I think it’s not so much him as a person
Gates is in the Epstein files.
Honestly it makes me so fucking depressed when I hear people saying something as fundamentally disconnected from reality, something so needless and unthinking, something so flavorless and insipid as even ironically implying Gates is one of the “better” ones, that “as a person” he may be fine and that no one is “defending him.”
I wasn’t being ironic. Better is a relative term, and I do believe that gates is a significantly better person that musk or zuckerberg, or many other evil asshat billionaires. But that doesn’t make him a good person. I’m not defending him, he has greatly contributed to the rampant capitalism that is destroying our climate and society.
Things are seldom black and white in this world, pure good and pure evil do not exsist. Is it easier for you to see things in absolutes?
Things are seldom black and white in this world, pure good and pure evil do not exsist. Is it easier for you to see things in absolutes?
Jesus, you’re really doubling down on the unthinking and insipid takes.
I’ll triple down if you like. Absolutism is stupid and a hollow comfort. It’s easy to vilify people, and difficult to hold cognitive dissonance about how any one person can be both good and evil.
Gates is a Epstein customer, an IP thief and a con artist. I 100% agree with the OPs original comment about him. But he also helped eradicate polio from the face of the planet.
It would be nice and simple if we could point to him in his volcano lair of villany, touriring small animals for fun, and say “there, that’s pure evil, that’s him, the devil incarnate”, but the real world isn’t a movie or a video game. It is just not that simple.
If that sort of opinion is a sign of “unthinking” to you, then I suppose I’m wasting my time here.
Why even make the comparison though
You are right, it’s a worthless endeavor.
Yeah. He has shaped the world in very negative ways through his decisions. He could donate his entire fortune today and live out the rest of his life in a monastery, but I would still hate him.
That doesn’t even scratch the anti consumerist behaviour behind what he did to Linux that piece of shit.
He’s one of the worst billionaires, it’s just that since the 2010s he’s been trying hard to soften that image.
Cool, you’re taking life lessons from a 21 year old…
I think he genuinely believed it was the best thing for society. He, like so many, was (and likely still is) convinced that everyone thinks like he does. So he believes the only thing that drives people is money.
Now if that were the case, the only way to advance society and facilitate growth in software would be to offer smart people a lot of money.
In that flawed logic, he really thought it was for the best.
Fair point. It’s not an excuse, but it does explain a lot. Nobody is the villain in their own story, after all.
He’s a total ideologue.
