gnomewascool

AFACT, the strongest argument in favour of the removal of RMS is by Thomas Bushnell[0]. The best counter-argument to that, which I could find, is by Thomas Lord[1][2]. I haven't found any replies to the latter.

(There's also the meta-issue that rule-by-lying-journalists-and-misinformed-mob is terrifying and despicable, but it doesn't affect the object-level question of whether RMS significantly contributed and/or contributes towards making MIT and the free-software world unwelcoming to women.)

[0] https://medium.com/@thomas.bushnell/a-reflection-on-the-depa...

[1] https://twitter.com/thomas_lord/status/1174433645110513664

[2] https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1174433645110513664.html

> - Ubuntu failed (I hear a community is still continuing with the SW, but not sure whether it runs on any phone HW)

Yes, it's a community effort and yes it does run on actual hardware.[0][1] A Nexus 5 is probably most stable. All the devices that were originally launched by companies in cooperation with Canonical, are also still supported. In addition, AFAIR Ubuntu touch should run on any android devices that Halium[2] supports (the purpose of Halium is for projects like KDE Mobile, Ubuntu Touch, PureOS (?) etc. to share the code needed for "normal" (GNU) Linux to run on Android devices).

[0] https://ubports.com/devices/promoted-devices

[1] (javascript needed) https://devices.ubuntu-touch.io/

[2] https://halium.org/

(Further devolving into off-topic:) What I don't understand is why they moved from BSD+Patents to MIT, and not to pure BSD, by just removing the Patents file, which would be the obvious step?

> This is the same kind of logic that taxes private company stock gains on vesting even if the stock isn't sellable, if the "official" value at vest exceeds the grant value.

I'm not a financial specialist, but googling[0] suggests that you can, say, use restricted stock as collateral for loans, at least under some circumstances, so the situation is slightly more subtle than having (currently) worthless pieces of paper that you have to pay tax on; not that I'm saying that the IRS is necessarily right.

[0] https://easystockloans.com/can-borrow-restricted-stock/

To anybody put off by the clickbaity title, as I initially was — the article is actually informative and well-written.

For the lazy, the doi is 10.1038/s41586-019-1335-8 if you want to add it to your bibliographies. Obviously, don't use the doi for any illegal purposes, such as getting around the paywall.

Porting XFCE applications (Thunar etc.) to GTK3 indeed gives automatic (or near-automatic) Wayland support. This means that XFCE applications will run natively (without XWayland) in Wayland compositors (such as sway, GNOME or KDE).

However, xfwm (the window manager) will also need to be ported to Wayland — i.e. become a Wayland compositor — which will probably be a more complicated undertaking, as "xfwm-wayland will need to fulfil the role of both X and the window manager. (Yes, using libraries like wlroots or libmir, will make this not completely impossible, but it will still be non-trivial.) Plausibly, XFCE might join forces and use the same Wayland compositor as, say, LXQt or Mate.

> I don't think mozilla is as privacy oriented as HN would make you think.

> * They pushed ad/extension for a TV show to everyone

I assume you're talking about the "mr robot" thing here as well. One can accuse it of being many things, but it wasn't a privacy violation, as no data was sent (or planned to be sent) to anybody, either to Mozilla or any third-party. (It was silly, an abuse of studies, a source of worry for those who monitor their list of add-ons for suspicious items, and a strategic error.)

Mir is actually still alive and being developed at Canonical.

Ubuntu phone (the software stack of Mir and Unity8, running on Ubuntu, on phones, as opposed to a phone backed by Canonical) is still alive, usable and arguably the most mature of the FOSS "GNU/Linux on a phone" projects.

Great!

You can donate to OpenSSH[0], whose "funding is generally done via the same donation framework" as the rest of OpenBSD, to which you can donate either directly[1] or via the OpenBSD Foundation[2]. If you're serious about donating obviously please check that these links are legitimate and I'm not a scammer. (I'm not affiliated with OpenBSD in any way.)

[0] https://www.openssh.com/donations.html

[1] https://www.openbsd.org/donations.html

[2] https://www.openbsdfoundation.org/donations.html

No. If you're found violating the GPL, then you have some time (which I don't remember off the top of my head) to provide the source; if you don't do that you'll be treated as having infringed any generic copyright — being liable for damages, having to cease distribution etc.

A large portion of programming books are still under neither a FOSS nor a CC license, and hence fully protected by copyright. (I've encountered some where the main text of the book is not under a FOSS license, while the code is, but that's also not universal.) In such cases, you're not allowed to just re-use large code segments from the book (commercially or in an open source piece of code). Hence the case of a book under GPL isn't any "worse" than that, except that you do have the option of using the code in a GPL-licensed codebase.

(Small snippets are obviously not covered by copyright.)

You obviously won't die from not watching Game of Thrones.

However, depending on your circle of friends and acquaintances, you might be excluded from social interactions. This can range from not getting occasional references, to not being able to participate in many conversations (during "peak" Game of Thrones a couple of years ago, they were a major and frequent topic in many circles) and hence being side-lined, to even being semi-ostracised ("Why should they hang out with this loser who doesn't even watch Game of Thrones?"). Obviously you could claim that you should get other/better friends, but that's not really realistic, especially if you're already on the border of social isolation.

This will have negative effects on your well-being and even your health (loneliness is a major health risk, on par with obesity and smoking).[0]

[0] https://www.webmd.com/balance/news/20180504/loneliness-rival...

Not quite — if you run Firefox nightly you can develop and use "webextension experiments", which have the same power as the old pre-webextension Firefox addons. If you wish, you can also apply to have your experiment be turned into an official webextension API for Firefox.

This is considerably more cumbersome than previously, but still far better than having to fork the whole browser. (On the topic of forks, if running a bleeding edge browser — nightly — is not for you, you can use Waterfox, which is approximately Firefox ESR + the ability to run full-powered extensions.)

What's even weirder is that a significant proportion of Mozilla's developers use Macs as their main platform (if I recall correctly the most popular platforms are Linux, then Macs and Windows a very distant third).

Further off-topic (from the main thread), but your blog Atom feed[0] seems to be slightly broken, due to an un-escaped, literal ampersand on line 687 (Tufte style sidenotes & marginnotes in Pollen). Presumably, it's a hakyll bug, as it should do the escaping for you. (Don't have time to dig further.)

[0] https://www.jonashietala.se/feed.xml

Off-topic:

Your book looks lovely, very much in the style of practicaltypography.com. Perhaps I'll follow along, despite being, as you put it, a "cryptocurrency skeptic".

I'm not sure if fixing this would look better than leaving it as it is (I'm not a typographer), but the "jumping" of the main body during the transitions to (and from) the rare pages that don't have side-notes, feels slightly jarring.

Yes, but by default uMatrix might be overly strict for many people. For instance, by default it blocks all third-party javascript.

If you use uMatrix, you can easily block the localhost and local network "sniffing" with the following rule[0]:

  * 127       * block    ### block access to IPv4 localhost 127.x.x.x
  * localhost * block
  * [::1]     * block    ### block access to IPv6 localhost
  * 192.168   * block    ### block access to LAN 192.168.x.x

In principle, you can use this without any other blocking, i.e. with the rule:

  * * * allow

and hence without disabling javascript on any sites.

[0] https://github.com/ghacksuserjs/ghacks-user.js/wiki/4.2.3-uM...

Edit: as pointed out by DarkWiiPlayer below, if you want to be able to access the localhost websites from the same browser, you need:

  localhost localhost * allow

and similarly for the LAN. In full:

  127       127       * allow
  localhost localhost * allow
  [::1]     [::1]     * allow
  192.168   192.168   * allow

> This is not helpful, because only an extremely small proportion of Web users run NoScript, and nor should they have to.

Most (non-technical) Web users also don't run their own web servers, so they aren't affected. Among technical users, the proportion with NoScript is probably not as small.

If you believe that "intellectual property" is a "thing" (as many people do) then you may consider China's behaviour in this area (obtaining trade secrets illicitly, or forcing companies to reveal them as a condition for doing business in China, or breaking copyright law) to be theft and more than enough grounds for sanctions.

Even if you don't believe in "intellectual property", then you may still believe that a selective (not universal) and one-sided breaking of the relevant international and national IP laws, in favour of one country, is harmful.

In addition to that, there have been allegations (I'm not sure how true they are), that supposedly private Chinese companies have been supported by the Chinese government in ways that break WTO rules.

Why, in principle, would it not be possible for us to design an AGI, that would have care for our (all sentient beings') welfare or care for the investors' profit as (one of) its core goal(s)?

To make a biological comparison, the vast majority of humans have a deep, intrinsic need to procreate and have children. It doesn't really follow from some rational analysis — it's just there, presumably "imbued" into us by evolution, as humans who didn't have this need had fewer (or no) children. Similarly, why could we not design an AGI that has a need (or a suitably chosed reward function) to fulfil some chosen goal?

Whether doing that would be moral (IMO it could, depending on the details) and whether we wouldn't mess up the design, subtly or otherwise (conditional on AGI actually being developed, I'm frankly pretty terrified), are two different questions.

Git signatures are designed for cryptographic security, and they (currently) rely on the SHA-1 hashes.

When you're signing a commit (or a tag) you're just signing the commit (or tag) message which includes the SHA-1 hash of the relevant "root" tree object (or commit object). The tree object, in turn is (in effect) a list of SHA-1 hashes of the files directly in the directory, along with their file sizes and permissions, plus the hashes of the tree objects corresponding to any subdirectories.

Consequently, if you replaced a file with another having the same SHA-1 hash (and the same file size — a considerable complication), all the hashes would remain the same and the signature would still be valid.

Obviously, once git transitions to SHA-256, the problem will disappear.

I haven't used it, but there's idyll[0], which was used, among other things, to make an excellent interactive article about the JPEG format[1].

[0] https://idyll-lang.org/

[1] https://parametric.press/issue-01/unraveling-the-jpeg/

Interesting. Presumably that means that all of the ipfs.io domain is blocked(?).

You could try it on some other IPFS gateways. For instance:

https://ipfs.jes.xxx/ipfs/QmXoypizjW3WknFiJnKLwHCnL72vedxjQk...

or

https://cloudflare-ipfs.com/ipfs/QmXoypizjW3WknFiJnKLwHCnL72...

There's a list of gateways[0][1] (hopefully github isn't blocked...) in case these two are also blocked. You could also try just using IPFS directly[2], rather than using an HTTP-to-IPFS gateway, though that's rather more involved and potentially might make you stand out more / seem more suspicious.

In brief, in case you hadn't read about it, the idea behind IPFS is that it's a decentralised, torrent-like content storage system, where content and nodes are "addressed" via their hash (e.g. QmXoyp... above), similarly to git. In order to allow people without the IPFS daemon to access the "IPFS web" there are gateways, like the ones mentioned above.

[0] https://ipfs.github.io/public-gateway-checker/

[1] I hope that I'm not just helping Chinese censors by providing a list of domains to block...

[2] https://github.com/ipfs/ipfs

There's an IPFS mirror of English Wikipedia[0], as well as several others[1], though not the Chinese one[2]. It's currently not a particularly up-to-date mirror, though (from late 2016).

[0] https://ipfs.io/ipfs/QmXoypizjW3WknFiJnKLwHCnL72vedxjQkDDP1m...

[1] https://github.com/ipfs/distributed-wikipedia-mirror/blob/ma...

[2] https://github.com/ipfs/distributed-wikipedia-mirror/issues/...

> Free Software enthusiasts can't advocate against copyright

You're right that we can't advocate for just eliminating copyright, without shooting ourselves in the foot. However, eliminating copyright, combined with, say, an obligation of software companies to disclose the source code of their "products" to their customers, or, less intrusively, with making the type of NDAs you describe illegal, would work.

Since the link to the paper, at the end of the article, is subtly broken (at least for me), here are the links to the abstract and directly to the PDF:

https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2003531

https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/Delivery.cfm/SSRN_ID3092895_cod...

Doi:

https://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.2003531

I think that most people are worried about Google using a controversial[0], draft web "standard" (Signed HTTP Exchanges), that introduces a major change in how the web works, in mass production, without trying to first resolve the problems raised with the proposal.

[0] For instance, Mozilla considers the current specification to be harmful[1].

[1] https://mozilla.github.io/standards-positions/