messo

> If SourceHut eventually grows in revenue — at least 5-10× its present revenue — I intend to sponsor this as a public benefit project, with no plans for generating revenue.

I like this attitude. Makes me happy to be a paying member of SourceHut.

You have to enable it explicitly. There are also several third party tools for offline syncing, and there is always the option to SSH into the device and do whatever you want.

Do give KDE a try. I recently helped a friend migrate from Windows 10 to KDE. I have personally been using i3, XFCE and GNOME back and forth during the last decade, and the one time I tried KDE a few years back, it did not boot to desktop so I just switched back to GNOME.

After helping my friend setting up KDE I discovered the level of polish and customizability that KDE now offers. That same day I installed KDE on my own machine and soon after removed every GNOME component from my system. I have been using it the last few weeks and really feel at home!

I think this is for the "read later"-functionality only. Also, it's a hackable device with SSH access as an official feature.

This is really fascinating. I dug around a bit to see if I could find a digital copy of the article you mentioned. The Norwegian National Library have an impressive archive of scanned books and newspapers going back hundreds of years, but apparently no danish newspapers. Instead I found a reference to a book from 1996 by an author from New Zealand which seems to describe the same topic in great detail.

This is basically the very early, pre-internett version of what Snowden revealed. The book is made available for free by the author: http://www.nickyhager.info/Secret_Power.pdf

This old website also contains a lot of interesting information on Echelon: https://www.bibliotecapleyades.net/ciencia/echelon04.htm

The summary is quite something: «In the greatest surveillance effort ever established, the US National Security Agency (NSA) has created a global spy system, codename ECHELON, which captures and analyzes virtually every phone call, fax, email and telex message sent anywhere in the world.»

There was also made a documentary based on the book (?):https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F-S0JH5YYZw

I have recently been watching a documentary series by a Norwegian musician that grew up in the rustbelt in America in the 70'ies [0], but moved with his famliy to Norway in his youth. He has been going back, visiting family, friends and random people and interviewed them, and it is frankly heartbreaking to witness the struggle the the 'average joe' has to endure.

I'm living well below the poverty line here in Norway, but it is nothing compared to being poor in America. I do not need to worry about health care or expensive insurance. Me and my partner own an old but nice house with a big garden in a semi-rural community (15min from the nearest city), and can afford all the basic necessities by being frugal. In America, we would have lived in constant fear of becoming ill, seeing a doctor or going to the hospital. The idea that you have no real safety net to help you in tough times is terrifying. I can only begin to imagine the stress that goes with it.

I have great sympathy for regular people who are struggling, that voted for Trump. They have long been ignored, neglected and forgotten, and I am sure many voted for him either in desperation or to defy the system they rightly feel have left them behind. People in Norway couldn't imagine how the American people could vote for such an obvious clown and a demagogue, but we have not seen the extent of the suffering and hardship before recently. We see the Hollywood version of your culture for the most part, and are shocked when we find out that American women actually have to pay the hospital when giving birth ("wtf, it isn't covered by paying taxes?").

I really hope that it gets better, but am afraid it has to get worse first.

[0]: https://tv.nrk.no/serie/uxa-thomas-seltzers-amerika (Norwegian language, but many segments are in English)

This explains a lot. Anger and desperation is the only logical outcome when almost half the nation is living in (or at the edge) of poverty.

It's only partly open sourced, the premium features are closed (open-core in other words). Also, Open Project is a fork of Redmine. I evaluated both a while ago, and Open Project differs in two ways: fancier design and a broader scope. While redmine is geared towards software development, Open Project has generalized the interface, language and some features to be better suited for any business out of the box. Redmine, on the other hand, has a lot of plugins that is not compatible with open project and can be customized to suit your needs.

I have often heard from non-arch users that they perceive arch as too unstable to be used as a daily driver, but as a long time arch user (~8yrs) I have never experienced any disruptive events.

I can imagine problems arising when using certain hardware and drivers, but then you would like experience problems on other distributions from time to time as well.

How did I not know about this? Thanks for sharing!

You should take a look at the ReMarkable tablet :)

Maybe, if your writing pseudo-code to grasp the logic?

Since the remarkable tablets features native SSH access, there is an active and growing community that makes really great software for these tablets. There is already quite a few local-first solutions which makes it possible to avoid the cloud: https://github.com/reHackable/awesome-reMarkable#gui-clients

The community around the ReMarkable tablet has made a couple of solutions that makes it possible to use it as a second screen [0], and you could also replace the stock OS with Parabola-rM [1], a linux distro optimized for the ReMarkable. It's not cheap, but not terribly expensive either.

I'll get mine in a month or two and plan to try out how it works as a second screen for programing and writing.

[0]: https://github.com/reHackable/awesome-reMarkable#screen-shar...

[1]: http://www.davisr.me/projects/parabola-rm/

Speaking of unfortunate naming: 'bash' is pronounced exactly like the Norwegian word 'bæsj', which also means shit/poop. This has been the cause of some hilarious situations where non-technical people have overheard a nerdy conversation

To your second point: I find that I can be passionate about almost any problem that needs solving, but only if I manage to sufficiently immerse myself in that challenge. This is where the struggle is at for me, to keep my focus on a task long enough to reach that zone. Some days it is easy, other days it is impossible. Other days I manage to force myself into it, but it takes time.

This is a great point. At the same time I observe a night and day difference in how some people close to me behaved before and after they had access to Facebook and Youtube. Pre-social media I could have a long and rather nuanced discussion on controversial topics, and we both left the conversation with slightly altered opinions and some new perspectives. Today, all nuance is gone and the conversation is scattered all over the place, spiced up with whatever conspiracy theory they "discovered" on Youtube lately.

Maybe one of the effects of algorithms has been to push people to extremes to such a degree that social filtering is discarded? People I know seem to be almost apologetic in their approach, as if their life depend on convincing people about their views and to not care about the social consequences of constantly "preaching". This form of polarization is not healthy – basic respect for other people is lessened and listening to counter arguments is considered a weakness.

This is just an anecdote from my life. From what I read and hear from others, this experience is not unique.

Yeah, I'm not that far from 40 myself and having grown up in a charismatic church in the 90ies, I sure remember the scare around heavy metal (or any rock for that matter) and that most things in fact was satanic. Fun times.

This docudrama explains hard-to-understand concepts by telling emotional stories that most people can relate to, which frankly should be done more often for technical stuff affecting society in not so obvious ways. Again, this film is not for developers and engineers who mostly prefer dry facts. It's for everyone else.

This twitter user seems to be currently working on Instagram and much of the thread seems to be an awkward search for a way to justify her industry's existence and finding ways to blame former colleges for their ignorance. Some of the points made are interesting, but at the same time quite biased.

Yeah, I was quite surprised by this historically incorrect analogy when I saw the film, but this does not invalidate many of the other good points that was made. Every argument should be evaluated on its own merit.

This film was not made for you. Techies like us have been up to speed on these topics for years, but most people have not.

Many people might have a creeping feeling that something is wrong in the world of social media, but almost none understands the actual mechanics of an algorithm and what it can do when applied on a global scale. This film is made for them, and judging by the reactions to the movie from non-tech people around me, it has had a profound effect and made them reflect deeply about their use of social media.

Your experience exemplifies one of the problems with social media: the radically different information diet served to different users.

All of the platforms you mentioned can be profoundly political and filled with extreme content, depending on which rabbit whole you have been exposed to and captivated by.

EDIT: I forgot to attempt to answer your actual question, sorry. It's not that the platforms intentionally tries to radicalize you. The algorithms are programed to keep your attention for as long as possible, to keep you engaged and scrolling through your feed. The more time you spend on their platform, there more ads they can show you and the more money they make.

The radicalization is largely (I believe) an unintended consequence caused by the fact that recommending and showing you content that engages you emotionally makes you spend more time with them. This can also be exploited by people, groups or even nations who want to propagate a certain message or worldview.

I started that tread because I was genuinely interested in peoples opinions on the film, especially the ones connected to that industry. Looking back at the answers I got, there was remarkably few comments from the latter.

People and groups with strongly held beliefs are not the most affected by algorithms, as you are pointing out. Worst case scenario is that their echo chamber becomes less impenetrable or that they become even more extreme.

Algorithms does most damage to people not currently holding any strong beliefs about any given topic, but do have some wage leanings one way or another. These people can be swung and their views amplified and radicalized without much effort or financial input, as the film The Great Hack makes a good case for.

Google, Youtube, Facebook and Twitter (who all offers fine-grained ad targeting) can be weaponized to push "normal" people towards the extreme, and pit groups against each other and affect democratic processes in a big way. This was Cambridge Analytica's business model, and it worked really well.

I have recently been building simple sites (HTML+CSS) for small-ish businesses with Hugo, with great success. I am currently building a base theme that will contain all the basic scaffolding, much like how Wordpress have the concept of child themes. I plan on open sourcing this base theme, but it is far from stable and under active development atm, but I have used it for several projects already and it enables me to put up a basic site within a day. The sites are super-lightweight and loads instantly, and contains all the features the client needs.

What is still missing to some degree is an admin panel for the clients to easily publish their own content, although there are some alternatives (Forestry, Netlify etc). So far my clients are happy to leave the actual content management to me, as their sites are only occasionally updated.

EDIT: Also, NUM looks really interesting!

> […] the animations while pretty get pretty jarring once u start switching windows too often.

Agree. I have used i3 for several years, but tried GNOME again recently to experience with Pop_OS's tiling feature. It was OK-ish, but a bit slow when resizing windows when rearranging / opening / closing windows, even with animations disabled.

I have read about Material Shell before, but did not try it. Gave it a try today, and I am pleasantly surprised so far. The animations get old very quickly, so I do what I always do in GNOME – disable all animations in Tweak Tools. This made the experience as close to i3 as GNOME has ever been for me. I will keep using the Material Shell for a while and stress-test it a bit.

> I think algorithms have less power than people think they do, even the computer scientists.

Algorithms are powerful because they can cause tiny, incremental and often completely unnoticeable changes of opinions and perception. These changes adds up when they affect large enough populations. I agree that people who gather in groups and share information makes up the bulk of this equation – algorithms do not operate in a vacuum.

I do think that the negative effects caused by algorithms are largely unintended consequences. Profit is the motive, not malice.

> People are leaving these algorithm ran places in droves especially now because they already believe that the government is working with these companies to track their movements and radical plans.

A tiny fraction of the technically literate people escape the big platforms, the rest stays on even though they are somewhat conscious of the negative effects and ruthless business practices.

> That all came from 4chan/8chan/etc. There are no algorithms there, no AI, and anyone could basically code something on that level of complexity in a day.

Many people joining extreme communities have been nudged by algorithms, especially Youtube's. What happens from there is usually just plain old group think and tribalism, feeling the comfort of finding a community to belong to. The point is that those nudges from suggested videos gently pushes you down a rabbit hole you otherwise would not be exploring in such a rapid and captivating manner.

Like they say in the film; algorithms are not evil on their own, they just tend to enable and amplify some of the worst tendencies in people who know how to exploit this tool for their own gain, political or otherwise.

> Information should not be free. It should have limits.

I disagree. What I do think is that the many "information outlets" should be held responsible for their editorialization. Newspapers, TV and social media platforms do all editorialize, only social media has left this task to the algorithms – which is rather careless and naive. These companies have indeed moved fast and are now braking things.

The movie does not argue for policing content, but directs criticism towards massive data gathering, analysis and micro-persuasion trough algorithms.

It is a bit silly, but at the same time an effective way to illustrate some very technical concepts to non-techies. Judging from the response I got from my partner, it did the trick.

Netflix is also guilty of using algorithms to recommend content, but to be fair, they do not gather nearly as much data on your behavior and life in general as i.e. Google and Facebook/Insta/WhatsApp. They also have different incentives as all of their users are actually paying for their product, and are not shown ads to the same extent (only product placements in movies as far as I know).