Gonna be real honest here, I would have taken that in a heartbeat. It’s an open source project, I could disappear with my money and the project could be continued from a different fork without ads. The only thing you’re really sacrificing is your reputation and with enough money I don’t care.
Who needs a reputation when you have money ! I’d do the same , hopefully he is atleast not broke.
and with enough money I don’t care.
Most people are like you.
Which is precisely why humanity will be just another of many dead end evolutionary cul-de-sacs in Earth’s natural history.
I’ve come to peace with that, but this is a nice microcosm of the core reason. We can do better, we know better, but at the end of the day, almost all of us will just take the animalistic dopamine rush of winning.
Live together or die alone. We choose the second one like breathing.
If most humans were like Kempf (we’re not), we’d actually have a chance.
I don’t think this hypothetical is about winning so much as never having to worry about your needs being met again. The calculus changes completely for a lot of people (not optimistic enough to say most) if that’s not part of the equation.
Right, but at cost to others, and attempting to minimize the cost to others trying to rationalize it. That’s the point. Call it winning, call it succeeding, call it whatever you like, its me over us. The idea of accepting your benefit at the loss of numerous others tears people en masse down. Maybe another branch would become as popular, maybe not, but such choices are presented frequently in our civilization, and the choice is usually to take the win at other’s expense.
Regardless, we are what we are and on a long enough time scale what we are will destroy us. That’s not as sad to me as all the other creatures we’ll take with us, but even we won’t be able to sterilize all terran life, so the Earth will recover from us. Life will go on after we successfully fuck ourselves trying to fuck one another. I find solace in that.
That is a very western, independent cultural paradigm you have there. Western culture and values are not shared by everyone in the west let alone all humanity.
Only a few of us have strong narcissistic and anti-social personality traits, but they are vocal and usually end up in positions of power.
I would argue the vast majority of humanity throughout history is more selfless and willing to sacrifice and work towards a goal than you give us credit for. Look at the big picture and think about how much innovation has come from a place not driven by profit potential but for THE potential to go further.
When I look at the world and to the East, I see just as many people in suits lording over people slaving for very little. I see Asian factory owners and managers getting bonuses for inflicting draconian conditions on their factory workers to the point of suicides. I see eastern governments sending their citizens to brainwashing camps to make governing them a little easier. I see the rare society that does find homeostasis with its environment being decimated by societies of people with a selfish interest in the land they sit on time and time again. Taiwan isn’t at war with anyone, but China wants their shit because they want their shit. No cowboys or rugged individuals required.
Okay but why would we all take the money? Because we want to be rich? Or because we need to be rich in order to live a comfortable life?
Because everyone thinks they need to live lavishly.
Everyone thinks they need a mansion or twelve cars to be happy.
If everyone would be content with simply living a modest life we could exist harmoniously with the environment.
But nope gotta have that big house with all that empty land for aesthetics so fuck everyone else ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Because it makes us feel safe, and it makes us feel like we’ll be happy.
I have a Master’s in Psychology, and I will always remember the disheartening feeling when I learned the most prevalent and accepted theory of what defines human happiness. Know what it is?
Comparison to others.
Very literally, the person in the tribe with the biggest mud hut is probably happier than you in your Chevrolet when your neighbor pulls up in a Cadillac.
Yes, we really are that small as a rule.
This is what happens when you let an arbitrary system of resource management based on strife and competition govern your society top-down.
Making everyone compete for resources against one another in an abstract version of Hunger Games is not going to lead to good results.
If you decree a global law that says that everyone is to compete against one another in a zero sum game for resources, in perpetuity, and that law remains in full effect for generations upon generations, people will go insane. The algorithm programs us as well as we program it- “amass, forever” is not a great command to issue just in general with no other conditions or parameters, especially without a goal state. You don’t just “program”, you create a program that is to achieve some result.
If the only game in the world was soccer, and everyone in the world had to play, at all times, at the risk of dying if they don’t, they will start conceptualizing their whole reality around soccer, and soccer will at some point supersede reality- it will become reality.
I like to ask people- “in a thousand years, if humanity is still around, do you think we will still be living under a capitalist system?”. By far the most common response is more or less yes, and furrowed eyebrows. I find that most people are incapable of entertaining even the thought of an alternative. Not because they’re stupid or ignorant, but because the thought would never occur to them, like if one were asking a fish to imagine a replacement for water, it’s just beyond the scope of imagination bordering on the purely metaphysical.
Almost the best of both worlds right?
Creator gets a huge payout, well deserved. Users install VLC, see ads, exit, search web for “VLC ads”, see the fork, re-install having wasted 2-3 minutes total. Eventually “VLC Origin” is the only one anybody talks about.
Those who can stomach ads don’t bother finding the ad-free version, and still use great software. Even the advertisers win.
(This assumes no abusive telemetry / spyware.)
