twentydollars

You can't use Oculus products now without a Facebook account?

The frustration is fair and understandable, but his characterization of Rust is wrong IMO.

Side note, has anyone read a Java textbook? They are notable for not being able to go more than a page without extolling Java's virtues in a way that is repetitive and annoying.

(My experience with Rust textbooks was not like that. They tend to explain the drawbacks of Rust's "radical wager" with the stipulation that for the authors, the payoff is worth it.)

hmmm, this is your desktop or a server?

It was a pun on "What's cracking?"

It was a joke, like "What's cracking?"

> I recognize they have a right to do it, but I have a right to make noise about it and criticize them.

Nobody suggested otherwise, and your statement that "you're not interested in free speech unless you're willing to defend speech you find repugnant" is clearly a sidestep. You can support free speech without supporting the nonexistent (and unrelated) right to post lies on Youtube.

Don't be ridiculous. There are thousands of competing communications providers. If you want to share content that harms society or harms the platforms themselves then you might just have to do it outside of Facebook or Twitter.

> A domain and VPS are simply not a viable substitute for access to mainstream social networks; to claim otherwise is disingenuous.

Nobody is claiming this. That's the whole idea of the "Freedom of reach" thing...

Why should you be entitled to post lies on Youtube?

There are dozens of competing platforms that will let you post these things, you actually don't even have to start your own...

It's not a non sequitur. Freedom of speech is not the same thing as a (nonexistent) right to post whatever you want on a private platform regardless of the consequences for others or for the platform itself.

I never said it's not censorship. You can post links on a number of competing services (or start your own), therefore statements like

“A group of unknown people at a technology corporation should be the ultimate authority on what I’m allowed to say, read, or share with my friends.”

are the real non sequiturs.

So newspapers should be compelled to print every letter they receive?

They're private platforms. You can send those links via many other routes which would be legally protected speech.

They're not banning all allegations of fraud. They're blocking a specific set of claims that have been shown to be false, for instance that Donald Trump won the 2020 US election.

> IMHO you're not interested in free speech unless you're willing to defend speech you find repugnant.

Defending speech I find repugnant is not the same thing as defending a nonexistent right to post lies on Youtube.

Host the lies on your own website. Create flyers and pass them out. Talk to people in public settings. Write to the newspaper (they might not post your lies, but you're free to try to get them). Hold conferences. Do whatever you want. As long as the lies don't violate a few well-established exceptions: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freedom_of_speech_in_the_Unite...

But the right to have your lies hosted for free (and given a valuable, far-reaching audience) on a private platform, no matter the consequences to others or to the platform itself? It doesn't exist.

> “A group of unknown people at a technology corporation should be the ultimate authority on what I’m allowed to say, read, or share with my friends.”

Literally nobody is suggesting this.

It's about freedom of Reach, not freedom of speech.

No, you're misinformed. The (Federal) Supreme Court rejected the Pennsylvania case unanimously.

Ah, my bad. The REFERENCE implementation, written in Python, which was supposed to be supplanted by a faster, better implementation years ago, now has 10x less bugs.

> Sorry, you're complaining that we... did the thing you want us to do? But it took longer than you wanted? My heart bleeds.

Wasn't complaining. I don't use Matrix.

> Meanwhile, portable identities are also in active development (as part of P2P),

Portable identities should be how it works by default. Nobody should be asked to sign up with a server and share their email address and metadata with it.

> Also isn't E2EE new to Matrix?

It was turned on by default in May of 2020. It was available before then.

> I don't have any fear of Moxie turning and pushing backdoor keys into everyone's app.

He could, though, and you have to trust him not to. I see that as a problem.

It's not decentralized because it's federated, client-server chat software. This is more decentralized than Discord or what-have-you, but it requires reliance on multiple centralized internet services and authorities, as I outlined.

I'm well aware that FOSS projects tend to be underfunded. Matrix is an outlier with some large grants fueling the project and opaque organizational structure.

> What you seem to want is a peer-to-peer solution, which at this point in time is not something Matrix has built or claims to have built.

Peer-to-peer is not absolutely necessary (it can be both). There's nothing wrong with routing message through a network, but e2ee is absolutely necessary, and it took until May this year for Matrix to enable that feature by default. Most importantly, in Matrix, your identity is associated with and controlled by a homeserver. It's under someone else's control. That's not good... Your identity should be under your control. We've known how to do this with asymmetric encryption for at least a couple of decades.

> Why is it not possible for GNUnet to / why doesn't GNUnet offer a high-level API that could be consumed by every-day apps and that stays stable across releases?

This isn't possible because GNUnet does not work, and AFAICT has never been in a working state. They won't find the time to build an API when they can't find the time to actually produce working software.

I have been watching the project for a decade at least and I can conclusively say that GNUnet is a waste of time for everyone involved.

As an aside, remember when the state-of-the-art GUI looked like this: https://fossies.org/linux/gnunet/doc/handbook/images/gnunet-...

A lot of Linux-y people, including myself, reject Matrix. It's not the solution it claims to be.

I could write a list of criticisms of Matrix's software products, organization, and track record, but the main problem is that we want an ip-native comms tool that's /actually/ decentralized.

Matrix is Open Source, federated, self-hosted Slack (plus voice calls). That's great, but that leaves you needing to trust a homeserver admin or host your own homeserver. Putting aside that there STILL isn't a finished homeserver implementation, you'll have to rely on a third party no matter what. Either it's hacker Joe (the admin of your homeserver), or the server hosting company that hosts your homeserver, or the DNS registrar who legally has to have your real identity...

It may be theoretically possible to host a homeserver without a domain name, but you'd still need to register your real name with an ISP to get a static IP.

Freedom from this kind of control should be baked into the software. Plenty of teams have tried it (retroshare, Scuttlebutt, etc.) but unfortunately none of them are quite there yet.

You said "they all spy", implying generic Linux.

You have been called out for multiple falsehoods in your comments here and you've still failed to provide any evidence.

Linux operating systems don't spy on their users. This is false. Stop repeating misinformation.

The Ubuntu Amazon fiasco is, if anything, evidence of extreme resistance to this kind of thing. The Linux community rejected Canonical's opt-out ad partnership with Amazon collectively and almost unanimously. The program was relatively benign, but it went against ideals of both users and developers, and there have been no repeats.

This is a lie.

So... No, this has never happened on Ubuntu.

Could you elaborate in plain English? Your comment makes no sense to me.

I guess I was asking pmoriarty. It's not my ideal. Just trying to understand their reasoning.

So the ideal would be to have the execution engine written in elisp (or the elisp replacement)?

There's no such thing as "lisp all the way down" unless you're running a lisp machine. Common Lisp, e.g. SBCL, is written in C. So I'd say Emacs already is almost "Lisp all the way down" in any meaningful interpretation. Elisp is written in C, yes. And there are a few functions written in C for performance. What abstract benefit is worth completely replacing this with some other language that will inevitably be written in C anyway?

In the meantime, people are actually improving elisp, giving us things like the new async options and performance improvements. People like to hate on elisp because of some ugly syntax and some missing stuff that most mainstream programming languages have, but it's uniquely crafted for Emacs stuff and fills that role better than any other language.

GNU Emacs is the only active Emacs. Resurrecting one of those old forks like xemacs isn't really an option. Also replacing Elisp with CL isn't a good idea. There's very little actual reward on that investment.

See https://emacsconf.org/2019/talks/26/ (you can skim through the slides to save time)

People have different ideas but I'd like to emphasize the good work being done on GNU Emacs right now. Also lots of new efforts such as Remacs. But there's no reason to try to rewrite emacs in Common Lisp or GNU Guile or whatever.