jrm4

Are you serious? Y'all are so confused about what this is.

The entire point of services like Bluesky and Twitter is broadcasting your activity out to the internet for anyone to see (which of, course, is technically little-or-no different from "grab")

Sure -- but it also makes it harder to verify. That's my issue with Bluesky, perhaps I'm thinking like a lawyer. ATProto's most touted feature is also its biggest danger. A post on 2 servers thats hashed/verified (and perhaps admissible in court) might be more dangerous than many more rando Mastodon servers.

Well, the problem is, now the word "owns" isn't really helpful either?

Because you have "possesses" (which can be anyone) vs. "controls?"

Twitter - single point of big company external control

Mastodon - One or multiple unverifiable fallible likely grassroots, points of external control

Bluesky - Once out, merely the illusion of control, because your data is out there, verifiable?.

So ATProto is about to die, in other words.

It was already wayyy too complex. And this? Yeah, they (you? sorry) really need to just give it up.

Actually, yes, it does.

Or more precisely, it might. We now have a better idea of how people actually behave and it's not in accordance with "the internet is forever," and I have no interest in blaming them for 'human nature' in that way.

And it's all still dangerous. Again, I know the internet is forever, but someone else posting about ME might not.

This isn't an individual thing. It's "ecological."

And I have no interest in making Big Brother THAT MUCH EASIER to build.

I mostly don't like this take because it presumes a precise definition of privacy that we all agree on. And it's not even remotely close to that, which is why I think the Bluesky model is perhaps insidious.

Exactly. And I'm willing to be that Bluesky folk might be somewhat similar because they haven't figured it out yet.

Except that the design of Bluesky severely increases the possibility of your data getting out of your control. And I can hear the immediate responses of "oh if you didn't want it public, don't post it," but as should be frightfully obvious -- not everyone thinks like that.

"Don't use it if you don't like it" is not a sufficient response here, because the gathering and verifying of personal data is NOT PURELY AN INDIVIDUAL PROBLEM. You might post about me. Etc.

Proverbial Big Brother ALSO likes "strong identity and content verification."

I 100% agree, I always thought that even Private Messages were a bad idea.

But no, we're way past "if you don't want it public don't post it." and then wiping our hands and being done. We need to think in a policy kind of way on this.

And again, things are already dangerous -- but ATProto makes them more dangerous. It's something like a chain-of-custody thing. I think the world is collectively safer where the gathering of data like this is less reliable and less verifiable.

ATProto's model makes the building of the proverbial evil Big Brother panopticon thing a LOT easier.

Doomed from the start. It took me a while to figure this out, but ATProto is generally a bad idea; maybe even worse than Twitter.

Which is to say, it provides a more robust model for your (true) information and data to be exploited by others than even the Twitter model.

The Mastodon-slash-email model that relies on individual servers is better because decentralization is safer -- Those models bear more genuine "ability to delete" and more "plausible deniability."

This is a very interesting take -- I wonder how it would deal with web browsers? I'm curious because I actually did try to add firefox to my Steam Deck as a "game" and it couldn't deal with multiple windows?

I have no idea what you're getting at here; I already use firefox from the couch?

So important across the board.

Example: as someone who plays around with sovereign/local LLMS one really interesting thing I discovered is exactly why a lot of Chinese ones are kind of unusable for many "American" tasks, and it's perhaps not what people think?

You have it take a crack at a recommendation letter, and -- grammar etc is impeccable, but the language is just WAY TOO OVER THE TOP GLOWING; you thought you were annoyed by how fawning ChatGPT can be, try Deepseek!

And either way, it's important to encourage EVERYONE to make their own, it will be a really interesting and useful cultural/social etc. window.

At the risk of whatever, I feel like there might be a "market" for something like the "OpenBox" version of this - or perhaps what I'm saying is even using something like Openbox to get the minimalist version of this thing.

Seems to me a 10-foot interface almost by definition doesn't need the complexity of a KDE; you need to launch apps from "big rectangles on the screen" instead of like a Start Menu(and probably configure those to be 10 foot friendly) -- and MAYBE a few widgets and that's it.

I've always wondered why that doesn't seem to exist, and now probably with vibe coding may just work on it myself.

I mean, genuine question, is Linux Mint or MX Linux endangered by this?

Unless I'm missing something, I have zero concern for companies who sell out by complying.

The code was "free as in freedom" when you decided to build your company on it; and while you're not legally obligated to defend that freedom, and I, and hopefully other consumers, find that you are morally obligated to.

Right, but in turn it is absolutely reasonable and good for consumers to threaten a company with (legal) harm or extinction on a moral battlefield.

Wrong. Stop nerding so hard. It's related in terms of how it functions as human beings use it.

Haven't seen anyone else mention the following - but it more or less fulfills the same connotative role as the passive voice, no? Takes focus off the agency of -- well, the speaker, but actually anyone?

Perfect illustration of why it's really easy to see the parallels between the immaturity of not wanting to change the UI and the immaturity of not wanting to change the name. "Glimpse" was a fantastic idea and resistance to it is pure childishness.

I installed this one day to try it out and can't remember why I stopped, but apparently now I must hunt it down and destroy every trace of it from my machine, so thanks for the update.

? Seems to support GTK, Qt and ncurses?

Again, this must be framed ecologically, not individually. We've moved past the point where "individual choices" matter a whole lot, a lot of this is not much of an individual choice at all.

So, it's good to remember the leanings of people like the author, but it's perhaps more important to remember the extent to which this is a collective issue.

I never trusted 23 and me. But my Dad did, so now I potentially have a problem. Reminded of another anecdote about a guy who did everything to not use is social security number for ID for ANYTHING. Then someone pointed out -- it doesn't matter, they have everyone elses, so yours is the missing one.

Policy and skin-in-the-game for the COLLECTORS of the info is the thing to focus on.

MORE OF THIS.

This exactly the sort of silliness we need to counter..well everything.

Audacity makes me think that UI isn't the real problem.

Exactly. As I think about it, I believe we have a pretty good thought experiment. What if "Audacity" (a program that's doing pretty good that IMHO actually also has a pretty crappy UI) was called, like "flatulence" or "Impotence?" I doubt it would be sitting on the 100 million ish downloads it has today.

It's not "intent to offend" per se, it's "attempt to be edgy."

This was my gut from the beginning. If they can't do "fully observable" or "deterministic" (for what is probably a loose definition of that word) -- then, what's the point?

Gonna have to say this a bunch around here, but yours is yet ANOTHER comment shooting the messenger. You (theoretically) are championing an idea of freedom in language or something like that.

Look, people, this is PR. The author wondered out loud "why isn't he more recognized" and a reasonable answer is that "People like me, in America, who love free software and try to get people using it, run into trouble that could have been avoided if the name was changed."

You want your lesson out there on freedom of language, fine, that's what you all got. Just be honest about what you may have missed -- which I genuinely believe could have been a world in which Adobe was nowhere near as annoyingly powerful as it is (or at least had been).

Yes, every time I post this point, I get this sort of "but I'm not offended" response.

I'm not either, personally. But I live in America, a pretty strong force, for better or lately probably worse. And GIMP is very good software, but the name makes it hard to recommend or take seriously. Not even in terms of "I'm offended" but in terms of "if you thought this software was good why would you name it something like that?"

GIMP perhaps could have competed with Adobe stuff, but we will never know because this name doesn't make it out the door for a number of related reasons. Don't shoot me on this fact, I'm just the messenger.

Let me be clear, this has nothing to do with pushing "linguistic sensitivity" for its own sake. Nothing.

Look, the author himself wondered out loud why he wasn't more deservedly popular. I put forth a reason why. PR is real. I understand if you really want to keep the name at the possible cost of popularity; but I don't think it's worth it. I wonder if he understood the possible tradeoff.