Website redesigns. Just more whitespace all over the place, less information on the screen, and more trouble trying to get anything done.

Github is especially bad about this. I’m so tired of only being able to fit about 50 lines of code on the screen at a time, or issues with a similar lack of information density. I can understand this paradigm for websites that you only use once every year or so, but for something that most people use regularly every day, it’s such a backwards anti-productivity trend. I hate it… hope it dies someday.

This has always been the whole point behind the Trojan Horse that is systemd. Now that Poettering/Red Hat control the entire userspace across virtually all distros, he/they can use it as a vehicle to force all of them to adopt whatever bullshit he thinks of next.

This is what the Linux ecosystem gave away when they tossed their simple init system to adopt the admittedly convenient solution that is systemd. But in reality, the best solution was always to drop init, and instead replace it with an alternative that was still simple to replace if the need should arise. But now that everyone is stuck on systemd, they’re all at the mercy of Poettering’s Next Stupid Idea.

Convenience comes at a price. systemd is the Google Chrome of Linux userspace. Get out while you can.

Indeed, Reddit was a great example of this. All of the stupid things they tried to pull off in the past few years (selling user data, turning off the API, insulting their users, VPN blocking, to name a few) would have not worked when they were a growing website. Now that they have so many low quality users, they can do that successfully because they know that said users are too dumb to realize how they’re being abused. Even larger websites like Twitter and Facebook operate this way.

The takeaway here is: don’t focus on having many users, focus on having good users. All relationships are a two-way street, and if you’re on the side of the street with too many people, you don’t have any personal leverage on your own. It’s in your best interests to get out of that relationship.

In some countries, there are already.

In others, it will be up to courts to decide whether this is illegally firing staff. That said, good luck getting equal legal representation to these trillion-dollar companies.

So yes, basically, it’s legal.

But part of the appeal of Linux is the fact that you can repurpose existing computers running other OSes to run Linux instead. This is a great way to lower the barrier to entry for Linux, because it’s easy to test it on a Live USB or a dual boot. It’s much harder to do this on phones because they have locked bootloaders.

Another problem is that phones are not productivity devices - they’re consumption devices. Maybe this is just my personal bias, but I don’t think people will be as passionate about liberating their phones because they’re inherently less useful than computers. Convenient, yes, but useful? Not as much.

That said, I would love to be proven wrong. I would definitely consider a Linux phone if they become more popular/useful, but I can’t really justify spending hundreds of euros/dollars on something for which I don’t see any particular use.

Great to see, but are there punitive damages too, or even charges for interest? Because if not, then they’ll just keep trying to pull stunts like this off again and again.

(My guess is that there isn’t because it involes a deal with Ireland, but I would love to be proven wrong.)

The biggest theft in history, even.

Why is nobody talking about this?? Oh yeah, because it’s okay when our planetary overlords do it. Let’s imprison some more homeless people for stealing bread instead!

That looks like a really nice policy. But my question then becomes, what happens if the company sells out someday? What if they get bought out by a larger company, or a private equity firm? Did they take funding, and if so, how much leverage do the funders have to influence them to make money and cut out programs like this?

It’s great to see companies trying to break that trend and I highly commend them for it! But we have already seen this pattern a million times before and it always ends due to something similar to this.

I agree, I don’t think they have any limit. Look at how invasive platforms like Facebook are, and yet they’re still massively popular. Mobile operating systems are several times worse than Windows is for privacy and data harvesting, and people clearly don’t care at all. They’ll even happily consent to ever more levels of it - there’s no evidence to suggest that they’ll ever stop.

One of the biggest “mistakes” Microsoft made was not realizing how lucrative data collection could be. Back in the quaint old days of early PC computing, spyware was actually considered a bad thing. When Google came along, that philosophy was flipped on its head. Over the past 15 years, Microsoft has seeing what these spyware vendors are doing and salivating because they know that they are still the kings of computing - they still have total control the PC market and there’s a good chance that it’s not really going anywhere because most people hate change - even though Linux is starting to make inroads in quite a few places.

It would not be surprising if, in a few years, a Windows OS looks like a Google search page, or a cable television channel.

Not necessarily! I always run ln -s '/usr/bin/$EDITOR' $(which $EDITOR) after a fresh install, so I have a valid executable on the path called $EDITOR.

Of course, then I have to make sure to add export EDITOR=\$EDITOR to my .bashrc. (Obviously.)

And this is why I’m perfectly happy with Lemmy being the size that it is. There certainly are trade-offs - I wish niche communities were bigger - but is it worth bringing in all the other crap that comes in, like all the shit you see on Twitter? No, in my opinion.

It was always obvious to me that as long as I was using closed source software that any day could come when the vendor would screw me over. In fact, it could have been running it with bundles and bundles of spyware already and I had no way of knowing it. So I pledged to start using open source software only, to make sure that wouldn’t happen. First, I migrated all my desktop applications to open source alternatives. Then I finally made the switch.

I don’t have any suggestions, but this is incredibly impressive. I haven’t heard of jmp.chat before, but it sounds like you can create multiple identities using different phone numbers - is that correct?

If so, that sounds amazing. I really hate how the modern world is trying to force people into a singular identity online, and the way that they’re using phone numbers to do it. This sounds like it could be a pretty decent method to avoid that.

Well, this was quite a ride. I’ve spent far too long thinking about this than I’d like to admit, so I’m just going to cut it off here and see how it goes. My apologies in advance if it’s a bit incoherent, but I to be succinct, yes, I stand by RMS because I think he’s a special character and worthy of further consideration than most other people. If you’d like to understand why, well then read on…

You mean when he had an epiphany and changed his mind 2 days after his job became under fire?

I think you’re being a bit uncharitable. He was fired by the FSF, then hired again a couple months later. There was plenty of time for reflection between that period. And I think it’s safe to say that the many people that support his ideals had discussions with him, and hopefully educated him on why many of the things he said was wrong, and why many of the things he thought were misguided, and how they could have caused harm.

Gee, I dunno. Maybe because it was a clear last-ditch effort to save his job, rather than because he genuinely went from his decades-held (and publicly-championed) view that sex with children is ok to sex with children is rape, by sheer coincidence, 2 days after people started requesting he step down over Epstein comments?

RMS has always had terrible social skills and a terrible inability to understand other people’s emotions. He has always thought other people are like him, and think and act and feel the same way he does to everything in the world. He hasn’t (or hadn’t) yet realized that not everyone is like that.

But perhaps after talking with others and learning about it, he decided to change his mind and his ways. So yes, I think it’s entirely plausible that’s what happened, similar to how Linus Torvalds did when he realized he needed to calm down his tone on the LKML.

I’m not telling you what to believe and people are free to believe whatever makes them happy. But personally, I think my proposal is far more realistic. RMS has always been a man of principle, so if you think he would just forget all of his principles for a few moments to get a job, then I don’t know what to tell you.

It was about as convincing a statement from Stallman as when Zuckerberg says he cares about privacy.

I don’t think these are comparable. Zuckerberg has a very well-vested conflict of interest when it comes to safe-guarding privacy. I don’t think RMS’s beliefs on paedophilia influence or affect his opinions on Free Software in any way whatsoever, regardless of whether he works for the FSF or not.

Do you genuinely believe him when he says he changed his mind? It’s an awfully convenient timing, even you would have to admit.

Sure, I could admit that - I could imagine nobody would want to have to explain to him why paedophilia is wrong, but maybe when people realized how important he was to the Free Software movement, they realized how urgent and crucial it was to make him understand these things. I can easily see why it didn’t happen earlier than that.

So yes, people do change their ways. I myself have evolved a great deal over my lifetime and have no reason to believe that others can’t as well. Has RMS gone back to championing his old pro-paedophilia talking points now that he’s back working for the FSF? How should one interpret that?

And can I also ask - are you only looking favourably at him because you like him?

I’ve met Richard once and he was a very kind and interesting person. But that said, I wouldn’t want to be around him any more than that, and a few other people I’ve met have said the same. Interpret that how you will. You are attacking me of showing bias and favoritism, but I think you’re just projecting your negative bias against him and getting angry because you want to pretend that the other side of the story doesn’t exist, or that there are less nefarious ones than what you’d like to believe. Maybe it sounds like I’m defending him - to an extent, I am - but I think it’s more important to make it clear that the situation in this particular instance could be a lot more nuanced because RMS clearly is a very different kind of person from you and me.

If Andrew Tate…

I have no clue who that is and I honestly don’t care.

But what really makes a difference to me, and why I would put RMS is a separate category, is honesty and integrity. I happen to think RMS might be one of the most honest people on the planet. Have you seen his commitment to Free Software? Have you seen how much software he’s written and how much of his life he’s dedicated to his cause? Have you read the hoops he goes through like the kinds of computers he uses, in order to live by his principles?

Can you honestly tell me that it’s all just a farce that he would give up for one measly job???

So yes, I think your accusations are way off base; I would side with you 99% of the time if we were talking about someone else, but given RMS’s demeanor and the kind of person he is, I think it’s pretty easy to see that he falls in the .001% of the population where you have to give him an honest second chance.

I don’t think the fact that he is a very… special person can be denied. I think it’s pretty clear that RMS is a very different kind of person, and I don’t in any way excuse his behaviors. But he thinks that what he says about Free Software shouldn’t be discounted because of how he feels about other things, and he’s right. That’s just an ad-hominem fallacy. Maybe that logic doesn’t appeal to the masses, but to people who understand why Free Software is important, we should still be able to make that distinction.

It seems to me that you’re likely sweeping Stallman being pro-childrape under the rug, because he happens to have cool ideals when it comes to software.

To an extent, yes, unfortunately. And it’s not because I agree with any of those stupid things he used to believe. It’s more because I don’t want to talk about RMS. What’s really more important is Free Software.

What really gets me angry is that we can’t have conversations about the importance of Free Software anymore without people talking about child rape. Yes, it’s unfortunate, and I think if RMS knew that his comments would have had such a negative effect on the Free Software movement, he probably wouldn’t have said them. And it is painfully obvious that he did not know this of course - he’s the kind of person who doesn’t yet realize that not everybody in the world is like him, and does not realize that people will attack how you feel about one thing because you may have reprehensible view about other things.

So I really wish we could keep discussions about Free Software about that, because otherwise, we are enabling the Googles and Facebooks and Twitters of the world to distract our attentions while they steal our creations and liberties to make us digital peons. I think we do a great disservice by having this conversation every time RMS comes up.

How is it that you’re so well-versed in all of Stallman’s negative quotes (from over a decade ago), yet conveniently omitted the fact that he later retracted those statements?

On September 16, 2019, Stallman announced his resignation from both MIT and FSF, “due to pressure on MIT and me over a series of misunderstandings and mischaracterizations”.[124] In a post on his website, Stallman asserted that his posts to the email lists were not to defend Epstein, stating "Nothing could be further from the truth. I’ve called him a ‘serial rapist’, and said he deserved to be imprisoned. But many people now believe I defended him—and other inaccurate claims—and feel a real hurt because of what they believe I said.

The FSF board on April 12 made a statement re-affirming its decision to bring back Richard Stallman.[133] Following this, Stallman issued a statement explaining his poor social skills and apologizing.[134]

I think each of these needs to be handled in separate ways. For example, search could continue to be a conglomeration that includes maps, mail and possibly cloud. Android can just be split very easily into a separate company and same for Youtube, since that would basically be another Netflix or whatever.

Ads, in my opinion, is the most important one though. That absolutely has to be shattered into thousands of tiny pieces, all of which need to be forced to compete with each other, for the benefit of all internet companies anywhere. It would be a massive boon to companies everywhere and would provide an opportunity for lots of innovation in the advertising space, ie. trying ads that are less intrusive or ones that are cheaper because they don’t rely on tracking information.

And another thing I think people need to understand about search is that building the search engine is not the hard part - the hard part is figuring out how to pay for it. Search is really expensive - crawling websites, indexing, fighting spam abuse. That’s what really makes Google successful - the fact that they coupled it with advertising so that they could cover all the expenses that come with managing a search engine. That’s much more important than the quality of the results, in my opinion.

And as for Chrome: well, personally I think that monopoly has been the most damaging to the internet as a whole. I would love to see it managed as part of a non-profit consortium. There should not be any profit motive whatsoever in building a web browser. If you want a profit motive, build a website - the browser should just be the tool to get to your profit model, not the profit model itself. And therefore it should be developed by multiple interest groups, not just one advertising company.

Anyway, I know this is all an impossible fantasy. Nothing in the world is done because it’s right or wrong, it’s done because it serves whoever holds the most power. But if there were a just world, this is what I think it would look like.

You could also blame the idiots who had a chance to unionize but never did.

If you go back 5-10 years, everyone would say, “why do we need to unionize? Working in IT is great, we don’t need to unionize!” And now see where we are today to realize how stupid of a mindset that was. I guess they don’t buy insurance for the same reason.

I thought you had to be smart to work at Google, but seeing people take dumb positions like that made me realize that while they might have been brilliant engineers, they were definitely not very smart people.

(I’m not holding Google blameless here by the way - fuck them hard! But Google employees had the chance and wasted it, and this is what they left behind.)

All negative basic human instincts are like this though, but it’s greed that we allow to grow unfettered. Anger is considered socially acceptable until you go berserk and start killing people and breaking things. Lust/sex is fine, until you start humping everyone and everything you see in the street. Greed has no upper bound like these though. And it’s high time that we started imposing some sort of control to stop this growth.

we cant have nice things because humans are just so fucking greedy and incapable of controlling that greed.

That’s not completely true though! One thing that a lot of people forget about Google is that they didn’t have to become a publicly traded for-profit company. A lot of people around 2002-2004-ish saw Google’s meteoric rise and wondered what path they were going to take. Some speculated/hoped that they would go the Wikipedia route and become a service that existed for the public good instead of a for-profit venture.

We all know what happened after. The pursuit of profit inevitably leads all companies to becoming sociopathic and evil. They didn’t have to be this way. And this is true for lots of tech startups. I wish we had seen more of them become wikipedias instead of googles.

It’s also worth pointing out that the original founders did want to make a company that was good and not evil. They tried to succeed by creating legitimately good products, and not screwing over their users. They did make mistakes along the way, but their intentions were at least good. The major problems started (as they usually do), when the second CEO took charge of the company, and it was evident that he had not clue whatsoever how to create a product. All Sundar Pichai knows how to do is suck as much blood as he can out of a stone. But Google’s founders are not blameless here: they were the ones that set the corporate structure up this way, and they were the ones that got bored and decided to fuck off. And they cheated on their taxes the way all corporations do, so no matter how good their intentions were, they were still pretty awful people.

Because the USA haven’t had the balls to hold corporations responsible for their actions in decades. They can save them from failure, but have no willpower to correct any of their malevolent behaviors.

I really hope this generation is the one that finally changes that trend.