𝕽𝖚𝖆𝖎𝖉𝖍𝖗𝖎𝖌𝖍 @ sxan @midwest.social

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That sounds horribly transactional. Like you're asking people to apply for a job as your friend.

That may just be me, but I wouldn't react well if someone approached conversation like a job interview.

It's also fair to point out that your browser may not know your external IP; if you're behind a NAT, like a home LAN, your computer probably thinks its IP is the LAN IP, an address shared by millions of computers the world over. If you're using a VPN, your external IP (which JavaScript could get) is the IP of the exit node - an IP shared with possibly dozens of other people. Of you're not using a VPN, well... that's on you. That's privacy 101.

They don't mention enshittification - I think Doctorow popularized the term later - but this is a perfect example of a process that contributes to the phenomenon.

I had never thought about it in these terms, but they repeatedly mentioned curation, and it's so clearly a fundamental topic in today's online world.

This was an incredible video, thanks for sharing. It gave me a new perspective to consider.

That's the thing with ethics: they aren't generally written anywhere. That's where being a decent human being comes in.

Without the Holocaust, there'd have been no international horror over the atrocities of concentration camps, gas chambers, human experimentation, genocide. Anti-Jewish sentiment was rampant around the world.

Progressives made a lot of progress off the back of WWII, and the anti-fascist sentiment in the US that survived until the greatest generation died and their grandchildren took over. It's entirely possible that, without WWII, the fascism we see in the US today would have happened much earlier, and we'd have run our own concentration camps.

Ironically, the people who probably would have benefited most from preventing "Hitler" would be the modern Palestinians, because without Hitler, Israel would not exist today, and it wouldn't be carrying out a genocide.

Huh. My cousin is a professor, and my best friend is a high school teacher. They're both responsible for developing their curriculum. That's only an n=2, but it's 100% that if they (the people I know) hate their curriculum, it's their own damned fault.

Someone will probably step up. It sound like the big blocker is governance - there are people willing to contribute, but whomever has control is not doing a good job of administering the project. At least, that's what I read between the lines.

Someone will probably fork it, get popular, then suddenly the original maintainers will find motivation, try to scramble to regain directional control, and be discarded because everyone lost faith in them.

Or, we're really about due for a new generation. Snap's a hot pile of steaming shit, Nix is simply awful for package managers to work with, Flatpak is directionless, Guix is like every other big GNU failed attempt to be an also-ran, and a lot of lessons have been learned from all of these. I expect someone will come out with something cleaner, leaner, and without all of the baggage; maybe with some backwards compatability with Snap, Flatpak, and AppImage packages.

Maybe not, but the situation is ripe for something like that. Just don't let it be based on god damned Lisp. I respect the hell out of Lisp and Lisp machines, but I absolutely hate having to work with it.

What? Teachers hating their subject?

Yeah... for the authors. That's fine. You downloading my FOSS, packaging it and selling it is slimy carpet-baggery.

This is exactly why nobody has announced they've cured aging. The scientists are all afraid of being kidnapped.

A thing that keeps me from believing in any conspiracy theory about aging having been cured and only being reserved for the powerful is because of people like Elon, Bezos, Trump, and O'Connell. They're each powerful in their own way, and none of them are aging gracefully. O'Connell looks like the fucking Pale Man.

Seriously. Nobody's seen these two in the same room at the same time. Coincidence? I think not.

"You get a scientist, and you get a scientist... everyone gets a scientist!"

With my luck, I'd get a mycologist or something.

I remember that!

They look way less detailed and fabulous than I remember; that's imagination for you. I just remember them being nearly as tall as I was, and it was glorious.

Yes! I completely agree. The distinction is, to me, utterly important: they aren't selling the software, they're selling the service. Hell, if they want to sell the option to get your bugs fixed on demand, great! That's enormously different than taking millions of developer hours spent creating OSS, sticking a label and name on it, and then reselling it as if you made any real contribution to the OSS community.

Yes, and I have the same opinion about Redhat.

No issue with their actual paid service levels; it costs them to run those, and they're providing value. Most corporations won't use software unless they have a telephone number to call when it breaks, and service level guarantees. That's worth paying for; it's a service. But the fact that they're charging for software that includes some that I wrote, and which RHEL got for free, and for which I receive no kickbacks, is inexcusable.

Pop-up ads are loathsome. It's nagware. We need to bring back that term, because that's exactly what we used to call this shit, and that's exactly what it is.

I've never bought a distro. I've paid someone for the CD and shipping, way back before ISOs and internet speeds at home made downloading it practical. But never have I "bought" for Linux. Every CD I got I could legally copy and give away; or charge for the service.

With few exceptions, what you were paying for the media, the effort of burning and shipping, and shipping. Even with companies like Redhat, what you paid for with Enterprise was service and support, not the software.

I seem to be having this argument frequently lately. Taking someone else's work, that they gave you for free, putting your own logo on it and then selling it to people is one of the most unethical things that isn't illegal that I can think of. Selling support services is entirely fair. Selling compute, bandwidth, and space, entirely ethical. But profiting off other's generosity? How do you justify that? Even if you're not a socialist or communist, taking a painting someone gave away and then turning around and selling it is disgusting and amoral. You've added no value; you're purely profiting on someone else's work.

Ironically, it's been in the news lately because of a talk given at LAS. Here's a breakdown of the video, for people like myself who hate watching talking heads.

Basically, development on Flatpak core has mostly stalled. And there's a lot of work yet to be done; efforts to rebase it on OSI, for instance.

Nobody's claiming it's dead; it's popular and widely used by a lot of people - it's just that nobody is actively maintaining the Flatpak project anymore.

So... you're saying that a positive learning environment is better than a terrible one? The AI part is ancillary to the scenarios you set up, isn't it?

"AI is better than having the student learn in a terrible learning environment."

"A homeless alcoholic is a better language teacher than having a student learn in a classroom whilst being beaten about the head with a stick."

You're saying AI is better than a bad teacher. Maybe a bad AI is worse than a bad teacher, and maybe a good teacher is better than the best AI. I just don't know how setting up such a comparison is constructive.

Yeah, especially for text files. Hard no.

Databases have their uses, but the trade off between obfuscating the data and making it harder for users to access has to be far more compelling. LogSeq is a really good example that you can do relatively complex note organization with cross references and tree structure without resorting to a database. Using a DB for something like this is user-hostile, smells of vendor lock-in, and seems lazy.

Home Assistant has so many moving parts, so I don't complain. I do wish containers would become first class citizens like the OS, because some stuff is just harder in containers. The only thing I can think of as to the "why" is because of how the OS project installs software, but that's an easily addressed problem so it must be something else.

Still, it's nice to know the container method is moving forward; I'm so done with installing specific OSes just to use some given piece of software.