Lizzy Fleckenstein

Abitur: I graduated from KGA in April 2022, with a grade of 1.2.

University: Since October 2022, I am studying computer science at TU Darmstadt.

I'm a revolutionary Marxist, mostly aligning with Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht. I believe in universal basic income, worker's self management (via councils) and direct democracy.

My stance on (centrally) planned economies is that they can be beneficial in some circumstances (especially when they are digital). Services like Amazon demonstrate the effectiveness of a huge entity planning centrally, but because of the profit motive they are happen to be very harmful regarding the environment and worker's rights (exploitation, pollution). I also recognize the effectiveness of the free market however.

The www was originally created for sharing interconnected information (Markdown is, in many ways, what HTML originally aimed to be).

It has developed into a general-purpose application platform, today the web is probably the primary way to deploy end user applications. While such a technology is in itself useful and beneficial, it is built on frameworks created for manually writing documentation (HTML and CSS), which makes it, in many ways, fundamentally flawed.

Additionally, the strong focus on network interaction and applications that store data on a server rather than on the client machine creates privacy concerns. Lastly, the web has also been perverted from it's original purpose. Because fancy web technologies exist, everyone and their grandma thinks they have to use them. This has lead the accessibility of information to suffer; instead of providing you with information in a simple and readable manner, many sites throw fancy graphics and interactive/reactive elements at you.

Abusing web technologies like this hurts everyone:

• Users have to spend more time looking for the information they need and are easier distracted
• Scrapers and search engines have a harder time understanding the content. This also applies to client side tools/plugins (e.g. reader view)
• Sites take up a lot more more bandwith when downloading, and also take up more cpu/mem if they are interactive
• Web developers have to spend more time on building and maintaining the sites
• Because so much content on the web uses advanced features, you need a very feature rich browser even to access small subsets of the web. This creates a browser oligopoly, where only a few modern web browsers exist, and many of them rely on the same engine (Chromium). And because the web is so important, it subsequently creates/reinforces an operating system oligopoly, because modern browsers are huge and hard to port,
• Requiring JavaScript (or even CSS) to view a page is bad for privacy, because these technologies can be used for tracking/deanonymisation. Excluding users who choose to disable support for these technologies in their browser hurts privacy, even if your page does not use the technologies to track users.

Please, if you make a website that hosts information, keep your frontend simple and at least free of JavaScript and complex frameworks. Yes, I know you're a great programmer and want to show off your web development skills. But making a good website is a lot more about what you chose to leave out than what you chose to add. Show some restraint.

Rust is, in many ways, simply better. Cry about it.

Of course, there is valid criticism of Rust, and there are cases in which it doesn't make sense to use Rust. Yet, most applications will strongly benefit from what Rust as to offer.

Intellectual property is the single most harmful thing humanity has ever created.

Applying the restrictions of physical objects to intellectual goods like ideas, media and software which are infinitely reproducable and sharable is a stupid, made up, concept that obviously primarily hinders the progress of humanity.

Since files can easily be copied, intellectual properly is largely ineffective at protecting people who want to sell their work. Piracy is easy, and tracking down pirates costs more than it's worth (depending on their opsec). Many people who pirate also wouldn't even be finanically able to purchase the product they are pirating, and estimates of losses are almost always inflated by disregarding this simple fact. DRM mostly worsens the quality of the product and worsens the paying user's experience, while being insecure by design (it can always be bypassed, it's just a matter of effort).

In practice, any small or medium sized entity producing intellectual goods professionally already can't rely on restricting the produced good, and has to enter different business models. E.g. selling support for software, offering cloud services/hosting, relying on trust/donations, doing art comissions etc. Copyright and intellectual property often even harm creators (every few years there is a new copyright strike drama on youtube).

Intellectual property exists to protect the interests of big companies who have the resources to take each other to court, and who want their "infinite money glitch" to go on forever (Being able to copy and sell software infinitely after it has been written).

IP is not a tool of justice or equality.

I agree with the FSF on the issue of intellectual property, I use their GPLv3 License for my projects, and I use many pieces of GNU software. This does not mean that I full endorse (or reject) the FSF and Stallman however.

Stallman has been associated with questionable takes in the past, and I find the FSF's behavior regarding naming issues (GNU/Linux vs. Linux, Free Software vs. Open Source) especially childish. If it gets the point across, there is no need to bitch about it. Use whatever terminology you want to.

The FSF also sees itself as an ethical authority regarding stuff like licenses or git hosters and is - again - very stubborn about it, in a way that doesn't really benefit them or the free software movement in any practical sense. I really don't care a lot about whether the FSF approved the license of a program I use. It seems largely like a hybris to me.

I'm also not too exclusionary about using free software, if proprietary software is useful to me, I will use it (Google search, Social Media, Discord and Games are notable examples). I'd much rather use free software alternatives, but if there are no alternatives or existing alternatives are significantly worse I'd rather use software that (in some cases hypothetically) restricts my freedom. Apply some pragmatism. It must be noted however that it's crucial to not coerce people into using proprietary software. Being able to choose to, or choose not to consensually give up parts of your freedom should be part of freedom itself.

GitHub is proprietary and sucks in several ways, feature-wise. However, it's not primarily just a storage for your code, it's a social media platform. It's used to discover and collaborate on software. It's used by employers to discover people. I use GitHub for the same reason I use twitter and reddit. It's not so much about the features of the platform, it's about the (amount of) people that use it.

Using a more free alternative to GitHub is cool, self-hosting a git service is very cool, but I still see large advantages to using GitHub.

As an advocate of digital decentralization and federation, I fully understand the appeal of decentralized currencies. Ideally, currencies would not be dependent on central entities. In practice however, there are several major issues:

1. Many popular cryptocurrencies (like Bitcoin), contrary to popular belief, are not private/anonymous at all. Monero is the most well known exception to this (secure, private, and untraceable).
2. Cryptocurrencies suck for the reason all currencies without inherent, non-speculative value (which are all currencies that are at all practial) suck. Investing in crypto (just like investing into stocks, property or anything else) is nothing but gambling.
3. Even tho there is no central authority that can "infinitely print money" (which btw is an oversimplification of how governments interact with central banks), cryptocurrencies are a lot more unstable than fait currencies because significantly less people use them and even less people actually understand how they work.
4. Many blockchains are very centralized, with some entities controlling large parts of the network's hash rate. As an individual miner, you are stongly disadvantaged since dedicated ASICs are exponentially better at mining crypto than CPUs and GPUs usually built into PCs. Monero attempts to combat this by utilizing an ASIC proof algorithm which prevents devices that specialize on mining Monero, but even the Monero blockchain has been shown to be highly centralized. Entities who have a lot of fiat (like governments, banks and large corporations) are able to heavily exercise control over blockchains by acquiring the devices used to increase hash rate. Because the "real world" economy is so unjust and imbalanced, crypto is going to be as well. It's inseparable.
5. Proof of Work mining (which most currencies including Bitcoin and Monero use) is disastrous for the environment. To mine crypto, extreme amounts of energy and resources used to manufacture hardware are wasted.
6. Proof of Stake mining (which e.g. Ethereum uses) just benefits those who already posses, which heavily reinforces points 2. and 4.

TL;DR I recommend against using crypto unless you have a good reason. For the most part, crypto is useful for illegal and half-legal transactions, e.g. excersizing free financial control as a minor (working and getting paid etc.), buying drugs or medicine (As a trans person I have contemplated DIY HRT in the past). If you need to use crypto, use Monero.