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Shamar boosted

All my friends are blocking FLoC. Which is cool.

But the advertiser sites won't. The big content companies won't.

Organizations like the BSD projects and the EFF don't advertise.

We are utterly irrelevant.

Still worth shrieking into the indifferent world, mind you.

Shamar boosted

#mastoadmin

hi, the bsd.network instance has blocked FLoC on all pages and media that our web servers serve.

We previously, currently, and in the future, will NEVER had ads, and we do not support any efforts to track our users.

Google is an important part of the advertising cabal, and is quite evil thank you very much.

(here is the snippet we use in nginx:
add_header Permissions-Policy "interest-cohort=()";
)

eff.org/deeplinks/2021/03/goog

#sysadmin #privacy

Very interesting perspective, @shusha.

I think that looking at the Manifest as a feminist document is a slightly projective of your own culture, but your criticism is very clever and I think that @ondiz and @mcp_ might like it a lot.

In fact, I think that missed the point of Free Software (🤦‍♂️ 🤷‍♂️ ), but not because of his condition (and btw it's well known he is autistic since he was a kid) but because of the influence of his mother-culture: he grown up in the USA in the middle of Cold War.

So he slightly misinterpreted the nascent movement (and his misunderstanding got spread in a powerful global feedback loop).

He founded Free Software on the value of instead of the value of , which is in fact more fundamental: the reason while freedom alone is not enough, and you need (protection from enclosures) and (honest sharing of one's perspective).

Hackers are ALL about acquiring more knowledge.
A sort of modern ... but more hungry.
As such we NEED to share what we learn or create, so that other can build on top of it, and teach us what they learn in exchange.
And OBVIOUSLY, you need freedom to explore and hack (even because, it's since Icarus that people of power are scared by hackers tesio.it/2020/09/03/not_all_ha )

Hackers are weird but they are not born weird: we become weird (one way or another) because we are too curious and we slowly move outside the mainstream.

But the reason we do so, is not because we are evil, just because we want to learn more, more deeply, we struggle for (some kind of) knowledge, we care about aspects most people do not give a shit and so on.

Thus, by design, we are interested in EVERY perspective we do not have access to, the farthest from the mainstream, the better.

That's why an autistic like Stallman might feel at home.
And why no hacker would attack other people for what they think or say (as long as they do not lie), just for what they do.
More likely, we are going to engage in endless debates, trying to understand the others' perspective and trying to explain the other our own, different, perspective on the matter (something that to non-hackers looks like people trying to outsmart each other, while we are just trying to understand in a very direct and effective communication protocol).

But you are very correct on this: "it is all about protecting a social practice (of programming). But the solution it takes, in form of the GPL, is acting on the level of the product of that social practice, not the social practice itself"

I think I could not explain it better than this.

In fact, one of the limit of (and any other I know) is that it only protects the software artefact, NOT the hacking community.

Even with a strong copyleft, there are way to NOT give back to the community the knowledge they ought to obtain (think of the cloud and software as a service).

Also, the Free Software movement never cared about EXTENDING the hacking community (in part, due to the elitism and focus on product and meritocracy that spread thanks to O'Reilly, that poisoned what was not elitist at all)

Indeed another criticism I have over Stallman is that he didn't focus on teaching people how to program and kept Free Software simple enough to be readable for everybody.

So this is something that, IMO, we should fix in Free Software.

And for sure, this is NOT the direction that corporations want the Free Software to take.

Shamar boosted

And this leads us to the second struggle, which is the struggle for a less toxic community.

I have read the statement from RMS fsf.org/news/rms-addresses-the and wondered if this is the first time he openly speaks about his condition.

I have been myself part of a local DIY community with a leading figure in the spectrum for long enough to see the toxic fallout on the community. Autism is not an autist's fault, but it is highly problematic for a community if not openly acknowledged: tone-deafness gets normalized, becomes common culture, and of course this happens at the expense of those that have been taking shit for centuries, basically everybody not white cis male.

So, what becomes apparent for me, is that the social dimension of FS practice has been dramatically undervalued on a systemic level for a long time.

And it is basically this neglect, which is now blowing up in a bizare power war.

Shamar boosted

first: I think that the power war is about corporate interests, which has never been shy in using any means - now they use a conflict in the community (struggle 2) to divide it, in order to consolidate power.

It is the dilemma of FLOSS, that its achievements are being used to amass immense profit and power by the platform industry. In commons theory, this is called "enclosure" and means the exploitation of "free" resources. free means "owned by no one" (and economic theory knows only two types of ownership: state and private) - even if in fact, these resources are maintained by informal communities. this is the case in land-grabbing from indigenous communities around the world, and I think in a way also in FLOSS.

It also points to another aspect in FLOSS: I was inspired by feminist activists to read the FSM as a feminist manifesto - because it addresses exploitation and offers a way to change it. And indeed, if you look at it that way, it is all about protecting a social practice (of programming). But the solution it takes, in form of the GPL, is acting on the level of the product of that social practice, not the social practice itself. This mindset of valuing the product over the social practice is also alive in the principle of meritocracy.

@tanakian@ծմակուտ.հայ

Out of curiosity, in your opinion and experience, what are the advantages of Oberon-2 over Oberon-07?

(I don't think it's a matter of worth: that page explicitly states that "It does not document variants, e.g. Component Pascal, Oberon-2, unless those are treated as extensions", that in fact looks reasonable to reduce confusion, given the site name...)

Shamar boosted

@https://qoto.org/users/Shamar i am the author of vishap. i think the page mantainer doesn't think voc is worth puting there, or may be because it's not o-07 compiler. i hope voc can be used, it shows itself very good in tests.

look here: https://github.com/vgratian/CosineBenchmark

Shamar boosted

RT @GianfredaStella@twitter.com

Perché nessuno (o quasi) parla della liberalizzazione dei brevetti visto che è l'unica cosa che potrebbe realmente sbloccare la questione #vaccini? #COVID19

🐦🔗: twitter.com/GianfredaStella/st

Shamar boosted
Shamar boosted

@tanakian@ծմակուտ.հայ

No, I didn't new Vishaps's compiler. Pretty interesting!

Maybe they should add it to oberon07.com/compilers.xhtml

My favourite one is miasap.se/obnc/

Shamar boosted

I always think that if you're making a new theory and it's *more* complex than the old theories it's trying to replace, you probably did something very wrong.

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Shamar boosted
The comments on this answer are very interesting and explain some physical advantages of the unix pipes-and-filters strategy with many small programs.

Sure, it's great for composability and unanticipated code reuse, but it also helped with use of physical RAM!

unix.stackexchange.com/a/45088…
Shamar boosted

HTML is powerful. You often don’t need JavaScript #SymfonyTurbo
---
RT @everestpipkin
how did i not know about the html <details> tag?? oh my god??? brb gotta rewrite my website to remove the last remaining javascript
twitter.com/everestpipkin/stat

Shamar boosted

I really should get back into drawing. I enjoy it far more than programming, but it doesn't pay the bills. I actually learned to draw long before I got into computer science or anything related to technology. I did this drawing of Richard Stallman 2 years ago.

Trouble is, I only get the inspiration to do art once every blue moon. It's really hard to get motivated. My time is otherwise consumed writing code and wielding a soldering iron.

Shamar boosted

Il populismo non è lotta popolare, è aizzare masse sfruttate verso guerre e sfascismi per arricchire duci che regnano sulle macerie.

Shamar boosted

I wonder whether one could abstract the MVC model into something like "data and control streams" and get from there to something like the Unix pipe model but for arbitrary networks of runtime-composable components.

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