Thoughts on Post-Open Source?
mo_ztt ✅ @ mo_ztt @lemmy.world Posts 40Comments 673Joined 2 yr. ago
mo_ztt ✅ @ mo_ztt @lemmy.world
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I wasn't too psyched about reading this article, but I was surprised at how sensible it is -- among a bunch of pretty good points he makes, this is one of them:
Another straw burdening the Open Source camel, Perens writes, "is that Open Source has completely failed to serve the common person. For the most part, if they use us at all they do so through a proprietary software company's systems, like Apple iOS or Google Android, both of which use Open Source for infrastructure but the apps are mostly proprietary. The common person doesn't know about Open Source, they don't know about the freedoms we promote which are increasingly in their interest. Indeed, Open Source is used today to surveil and even oppress them."
From the end user's point of view, there is absolutely no open-source-ness to your Android phone. (BSD which iOS is based on was always designed to make this a possibility, but the GPL was not.) They're using all this software which was supposed to be authored under this theory of GPL, but except for the thinnest thinnest veneer of theoretical source availability, it's proprietary software at this point.
RMS actually talked about this. He laid out this vision of this bright future where you'd always have access to the source code for all the software on your computer and the rights to take a look at it or build on it or modify it, and some reporter said, well yes but what about all these other urgent problems that are ruining the world with private industry trying to make money at all costs and destroy it all. And RMS said, more or less: Yes. It bothers me a lot. But I don't really know about that, and I know software, and I felt like in this one specific area I could write a bunch of software and solve this one problem in this one area where I felt like I could make a difference. If other people could get to to work on these other more urgent problems that'd be great, because they also bother me a lot.
(yeah, i ended up finding how to mount things manually, and then added it to my fstab as a workaround, but wtf)
I think you're expecting Ubuntu to behave exactly like Windows. There are tasks which any Linux machine is going to be better-equipped for than Windows, and it'd be silly to say that Windows "is a terrible development experience" because it doesn't run valgrind or strace or whatever. Contrawise, there are things which will definitely be easier or more intuitive to set up on Windows as opposed to any Linux distro you find, but that doesn't mean it's a bad desktop; just that it has a different set of strengths and weaknesses. For me, adding to fstab would be more of a normal thing to do than to use the Ubuntu GUI by quite a lot.
It kind of sounds like you're not interested in a lot of the benefits of having a Linux installation, just interested in something that works exactly like Windows and is good at exactly the same things. In which case, and I'm not trying to sound sarcastic, Windows might be more what you're interested in.
(Or, actually, a Mac may be more specifically what you're looking for -- similar "it just works" ness like Windows but works better for most things, outside a handful of specific tasks Windows still does better)
(Also - if Ubuntu really is refusing to talk to an SMB v2 machine I'd be very surprised by that. Which tool were you using? The built in Ubuntu desktop SMB browser I assume? What did you do to verify that it was the lack of XMB v1 that was the problem (e.g. enabling SMB1 temporarily and seeing if the tool started working)? As you noted, SMB v1 is terrible and if it's forcing the use of it, that's a for-real problem.)
Noticed that even though i enabled that setting on Kodi, it’s not switching to the refreshrate of the video i’m playing.
I have literally never in my life had my monitor's refresh rate switch to match the framerate of the video I'm watching. What refresh rate was it, and what's the framerate that you wanted it to match? I'm trying to wrap my head around what it is that you're watching that just letting the screen refresh at 60Hz or whatever speed it was going at won't cut it.
The HDR is a fair point. That's a legit example of something where I could easily see Windows working better than Linux, which is why I wouldn't try to use one as a drop-in replacement for the other. This exact type of thing -- some niche feature which genuinely is pretty useful but requires a bunch of different softwares to play nice with each other when Windows just sort of works out-of-the-box -- is something where Linux tends to lag behind.
Downloaded the .deb file (since ubuntu is a debian variant it seems), double clicked the file and … “no app installed for this file”…
This just isn't the way to do it -- installing Debian .debs on Ubuntu definitely won't work reliably, and downloading and installing random .debs from the internet is rarely the way to do it even if the distros do match (flavor and exact version). Does Rancher fit your needs? Looking over this it looks like that's the first thing I would try if I wanted "something like Dockstation that works well on Ubuntu."
I think overall -- just realize that Linux was created for very different reasons than "I want exactly the same thing as Windows, just to do all the work to create Windows over again and give it away for free." It was created for people who wanted a very specific type of development-friendly and Unix-friendly environment, and since the majority of it is still being made by those people for those people, it's gonna be constructed according to those parameters.
Want to know what "also in a tricky spot" means?
As Republicans struggle, Democrats say the problem is taking positions that are deeply unpopular with the American public.
That same night Andy Beshear, the Democratic Kentucky governor, won re-election after his campaign ran a powerful ad featuring a woman who was raped by her stepfather as a child. In the video, she criticized Daniel Cameron, Beshear’s Republican opponent, for supporting Kentucky’s near-total abortion ban, which does not include exceptions in cases involving rape or incest.
And in beet-red Ohio, 56.6% of voters chose to enshrine abortion rights in the state constitution.
“In every election since the overturning of Roe, voters have sent a resounding message: they want more freedom, not less – and come 2024, Republicans will once again face the repercussions of their unrelenting crusade to strip away our rights,” Sarafina Chitika, a spokesperson for the Democratic National Committee, said in a statement.
"In a tricky spot" means, they've been winning on the issue, but The Guardian thinks that maybe that might not continue, for reasons that are not fully articulated.
TL;DR she said "erection"
“It did not occur to me then — and remains surprising to me now — that Mr. Schwartz would drop the cases into his submission wholesale without even confirming that they existed,” Cohen said. “Accordingly, when I saw the citations and descriptions I had sent Mr. Schwartz quoted at length in the draft filing, I assumed that Mr. Schwartz had reviewed and verified that information and deemed it appropriate to submit to the court.”
Bro:
Even if this is true, don't throw your goddamned lawyer under the bus. Just say we're very sorry, we fucked up, I was the one that researched it initially, we won't do it again. Finger-pointing about it to the judge does 0% good and a whole lot of bad.
I like Cohen because he manned up and admitted he was wrong but this was a little reminder to me that POS is still in his DNA.
int cube(int num) {
char rv[num][num][num];
return sizeof(rv);
}
"Doctor, it hurts when I do this."
Can I have a TL;DR?
I skipped around trying to get to the point; as best I can tell, it is that people are subject to manipulation by what they consume, and business and government are doing that to us. Yes?
Yeah. To me it seems transparently obvious that at least some of the applications of AI will continue to change the world - maybe in a big way - after the bust that will inevitably happen to the AI-adjacent business side after the current boom. I agree with Doctorow on everything he’s saying about the business side, but that’s not the only side and it’s a little weird that he’s focusing exclusively on that aspect. But what the hell, he’s smart and I hadn’t seen this particular business-side perspective before.
Andy Weir's stuff, The Martian and Project Hail Mary
They tried to prosecute him. In MAGA world, that demands an escalation in kind to attack ("defend") against the prosecution; the truth or falsehood of the accusation doesn't matter. They also think Biden stole the election, although as before, they don't really care in an objective sense whether that's actually factually true. They believe it wholeheartedly and that's all they care about.
There's also a fiction that "they" are trying to put kitty litter in your classrooms and tell your kids to pretend to be cats and pee in the litterbox, or allow transgender people into women's bathrooms because someone "became transgender" for that exact purpose, or other weird and outlandish things, but I don't think those are really getting traction as much as they'd like them to. I think it's mainly a standard sociopath pattern of "I did an illegal thing" -> "You're reacting as if it's illegal" -> "My god how could you make that wild accusation and be an enemy to me" -> "I attack you".
And, the overwhelmingly dominant reaction the German civilians had in the destruction that was the aftermath of the war, was self-pity and resentment towards their enemies ("how could the allies be so cruel to us, we didn't do anything"). In fairness, their conditions were very hard (starvation, disease, prostitution, desperation) but there was effectively no recognition at all of any responsibility on the German side for what was "happening to them". Germany 1945 goes into a lot of the harrowing details and the German people's reaction to them.
TL;DR get ready for the Trump rank-and-file to never acknowledge responsibility for anything, no matter how badly it plays out.
What in the deliberate propaganda
“I have a distinct memory of when Carter was in office and we had to wait in line for gas," Schoettle told NPR, in reference to the gas shortages that impacted the U.S. under Democratic President Jimmy Carter. "I feel the liberals just have always done this sort of thing and they love to word things as socially responsible and things like that, but they're fiscally very irresponsible."
To me it’s more telling that they have to go back 50 years, to a time most of today’s people weren’t yet born. But sure.
Source with data links and a lot more metrics
Also remember a couple years back when we had an R guy and like half a million people died? Yeah those gas lines two generations ago were pretty rough.
(Edit: "Fascists don't care" part is 100% accurate. That's more than anything what defines fascists, the in-group and the winning being more important than any particular set of laws or norms. "The only way to stop them" is what I think is inaccurate.)
I don't think this is accurate. Trump's a fascist, and he came to power already in the first place, and we survived (so far).
How Democracies Die goes into this in quite a bit of detail with historical examples. Basically my takeaway from it is that the key factors are:
- Active resistance from within the conservative establishment that got hijacked by the fascists (Mitt Romney and Liz Cheney and etc)
- The non-fascists taking extraordinary care to preserve democratic norms with their own conduct, not just escalating in kind which leads to a no-holds-barred shit show which the fascists are usually equipped to win.
Point #2 is why I say this is a bad idea.
Yeah. They won't at all understand that it's legit to keep him off the ballot. They already think the election was stolen in plain sight; they'll just assume this is the next undemocratic authoritarian trick.
Of course putting him in prison will also radicalize his base and give him something to play victim about, but oh well. It's more effective by a lot, and more clearly within democratic norms we're trying to preserve by a lot.
I'm not saying there's any ambiguity about their legal right to kick him off the ballot. I'm saying it's a very bad idea for them to do so.
Pop quiz by way of example: Does Biden have the legal right to expand the Supreme Court to 100 justices?
Well then, why doesn't he? It'd sure make issues like abortion rights way easier.
Yeah. You can't run a democratic country with 40% of the country thinking the system is rigged against them and wanting to just burn the whole thing down. Kicking Trump off the ballot (in any state, battleground or not) just turns that burner up by that much more.
That's not to say it's as simple as "keep him on the ballot, let him win, end of democracy, o well we tried." I think a much more concerted government effort to combat the propaganda systems (Fox News, all its new runty media children, AM talk radio, and all the new totally-fact-free internet political propaganda) that got us to this place in the first place would be good. I think a more modernized approach to communicating with the electorate by the government would be good. I think younger people in politics instead of just the same old geriatric crew would be great. I think fixing some of the very real neglect that both parties have given to the working class since about 1980 would be good. Basically, fixing the underlying issues that led to people loving Trump in the first place. For as much of a big bag of human shit as he is, there's a reason he was able to come in and scoop up so many votes. Leaving the conditions in place but removing him from the ballot to inflame the fascism is like the worst of all possible worlds.
Unpopular opinion time: Newsom is right. Kicking Trump off the ballot, just like expanding the Supreme Court or having a state’s electors vote differently from the popular vote in that state, is perfectly legal. But, just like those things, it’s an escalation outside democratic norms which invites retaliation in kind which is a dangerous thing to do when fascism is already on the rise.
Trump shouldn’t be off the ballot. He should be in prison along with the other architects of the coup. There are mechanisms within existing democratic norms which are well equal to the task of responding to what he did. Eroding the guard rails a little further because what we’re having trouble getting it done inside the guard rails is dangerous as hell.
I welcome your condemnation
Did you read the article? This is 100% the opposite of his point. He wants to, among other things, publicly fund development of open source, at the expense of private companies which are currently profiting from it in arguably-abusive fashion.