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InitialsDiceBearhttps://github.com/dicebear/dicebearhttps://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/„Initials” (https://github.com/dicebear/dicebear) by „DiceBear”, licensed under „CC0 1.0” (https://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/)R
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2012
Joined
2 yr. ago

  • I won't. I see what designers do that looks nice if you only look at it like at a nice pic. Software engineers at least intend to use what they make.

  • If writing code and the J4F book qualify as "literature", then certainly. Also some of the mailing list posts by Linus - mwahaha.

  • I think some org could take the initiative and offer a standard protocol for "that" to communicate to this service.

    Then you could wear something FOSS and clearly not spying, but send some information (if you so wish). Maybe no location, but vitals. Maybe no vitals, but location (suppose you want RFK to see a big "FUCK THE GOAULD" on the map).

    Cause when you put enough money into a project, it might actually happen.

    This is also the mistake everyone made about platforms and social networks.

    I'll repeat again my idea that similarly to Usenet, there should be standard protocols and universal services for a global public system replacing those (Facebook, Reddit, Twitter, Google, whatever). You need a service to store data to be always available - have a standard for that service. You need a service to do some computation - have a standard for submitting a task and storing the result (until retrieved or maybe to the previous kind of service). You need a service to search for objects (common task, yes?) - have a standard for that. You need a service for notifications real-time - have a standard for that too, NOSTR does that now. You need some way to financially incentivize people to provide these services - have a "resource market" service, something like MMORPG item markets (where players script their trade with simple constraints, very easily), to buy&sell space&computation, with payments provided with something like GNU Taler, or BTC Lightning if nothing better. Need common identification - well, there's OpenID, but one can also have cryptographic identities and identity caching services. Need to actually aggregate hundreds of those services for every task - if search service is not enough (suppose we want to also make search and other services somehow partitioned, or something like that, to accommodate for amounts of data), then have an aggregation service (similar to torrent trackers) or maybe just use DNS for that. Structured machine-processable results of those services allow you to never depend on one platform and have everything they offer. With the specific "kind" being provided by the client application.

    Humanity in our time has all the technologies it needs and none of the will.

  • And the phonetic transcription of that is how we still call that in Russian.

    Well, with "Chinese" in Russian it didn't stick. I'm somewhat sad, I think certain political conditions also make the Russian language poorer and weaker with time. In 00s I, despite being autistic, could somewhat "feel the wave" of the people around me. Now it just ... feels as if someone tracks and tries to slowly kill all the good things, as if just being in control is not enough for those people.

  • And that's good, you shouldn't have broadband because then a fucking website will require downloading a gig of data or something.

  • That's too easy.

  • Well, in Russia in early 00s (my childhood) they'd say that about things looking like Chinese toys of cheap plastic. As in "Chinese means cheap, but low-quality and probably a toy". Such things were indeed mostly produced in China, so. It's rather that back then you'd sometimes have better things, now everything is like this.

  • When I actually started doing hobby projects, I remembered that feeling with Windows 9x where you learn to avoid "wrong" actions which have a potential of hanging your PC. You don't even think about it. Just get used that you don't move the cursor after clicking there, you don't click here again after a first double click, and other such.

    While things like editing config files were ... more normal for the average person even, you'd have a paper manual generally. For everything, kitchen appliances and anything technical you could buy too. You wouldn't expect everything to just work without reading it. Freezes and crashes were worse.

    Windows won because most people didn't know of anything else.

  • There were plenty of alternative graphic shells for DOS, too.

    For me it's interesting to imagine what if a multi-user memory protected yadda-yadda serious system replaced DOS, but preserved the modularity and interoperability of components, so that people would still use different graphic shells, different memory compressors\swappers and so on, and then the PC world would be much more interesting today.

    That's what, only in the sense of desktop shells, Unix-likes have raising them above Windows, or at least have until X11 dies. I think that XLibre person, despite their mental instability and wish to seek conflicts, was right to fork it and it's a good call and that XLibre project will live on. Because yes, RedHat had a policy for X11 stagnating and being deprecated, and they imposed it on the Xorg project itself. I think we'll see that, oh wonder, X11's modular architecture (in the sense of extensions too) will prove better project-wise than Wayland's. Even with legacy, technical debt, obsolete paradigm, all those things people like to mention. This happened too late to kill Wayland, but not too late to save X.

    Which is BTW why this meeting involving Dave Cutler is cool again. See, NT is in its architecture more modular than Linux.

    I doubt they are going to do any project, but in case they are - would be cool if it were a third OS in the VMS and NT row. Supporting Linux ABI and drivers, but maybe even allowing to use Windows NT device drivers. How cool would that be.

    OK, that's what's called "пикейный жилет" in Russian, utterly useless talk of the kitchen\taxi kind.

  • Frankly I have to mention one thing - while BG was in MS, the Windows world was kinda fine. He left before even Windows 7. He left after Vista, and Vista wasn't very good, but what's important - MS didn't only do evil.

    I mean, yeah, not "fine" fine, but when you are saying "and then stagnated for 20 years", Bill wasn't in MS for most of those 20 years.

    I agree that platform dynamics suck, but I also very well remember from my childhood that I wanted platforms. Everyone wanted platforms. Everyone wanted platforms like ICQ, not too opinionated and de-facto interoperable, or like Geocities, but people wanted platforms.

    It was just plainly unavoidable. Everyone wanted webpages to be dynamic applications and everyone wanted platforms.

    Yes, both are traps of evolution.

    Say, dynamic pages I wanted would be more like embedded content in its own square, as it was with Flash. Just instead of Netscape plugin API and one proprietary environment it could involve a virtual machine for running cross-platform bytecode, or even just PostScript. Java applets were that idea, sort of (no sandboxing), as always Sun solved the hard problem perfectly, but forgot to invent a way for adoption. Maybe it could be allowed access to cut buffers and even the rest of the page. But that would be requested. This would prevent the web turning into something only Chrome can support.

    Say, platforms I wanted would be more like standardized unified resources pooled. Storage resources and computing resources and notification servers and indexation servers for search, possibly partitioned to accommodate the sheer amount of data. Maybe similar to Usenet and NOSTR. With user application being the endpoint to mix those into a "social network" or some other platform. Universal application-agnostic servers, specific user applications.

    But this is all in hindsight.

  • Thinking freely and imagining freely in our world is considered harmful.

    The guy you're answering is literally blaming Stallman for opinions in the domain of philosophy expressed in words.

    There are so many fucking worse things happening very close to them every day by people far less intelligent than Stallman, yet that's fine. But if the guy who created the FOSS movement says something gross, then they and everything they stand for should apparently be shunned.

    It's an excuse.

  • This was a symbolic convergence, a ritual unification of cathedral and bazaar into a suburban steakhouse of existential despair.

    Linux people have forgotten, but "the bazaar" is not Windows. It's old Unices and BSDs. Say, Solaris and FreeBSD.

    Somewhere in the void, the ghost of Richard Stallman is chain-smoking over a broken Emacs install, muttering, “I warned you bastards.”

    That forgives your sins.

    The only thing missing from that picture was a scroll of NDAs and a PowerPoint titled “How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Surveillance Capitalism.”

    I felt that line.

    Weep for the dream. Or laugh maniacally, if you still know how.

    I (proverbially) weep because there were 4 people at that dinner, and you didn't even mention the guy who made VMS.

  • Dunno, I actually like how this reads. It doesn't explain on which specific points and to which ends he argued, and MS monopoly is a bad thing. But if I were defending a position, I'd do the same. If not to stall and disorganize, then to avoid being caught on unfortunate words.

    He's very legally literate, I'd expect, so such things are where it'd do us good to learn from him.

    Like for Troy you'd do well to learn from Greeks who actually won, not from Troyans who lost. No matter where your sympathies lie.

  • No, I can't rent a Ukrainian VDS, it might even get me to jail.

  • Normal. I used Opera. QuickTime player for Windows was nice. Used it under W2K for most of media things in the interwebs.

  • As a FreeBSD zealot, I really don't see anything far from norm with Linux zealots. They are a bit conflict-seeking and ignorant, but that's ok.

  • An apple has more intelligence.

  • It can be a very good thing if they try to actually become a normal company and not hype-serf.

  • So, your MO is fooling customers since Jobs. You learn that fooling customers doesn't ever get punished. Then your shareholders become fooled well enough over time. Then your management is so involved in fooling customers and shareholders that they don't know anything else. Then there's bound to happen a moment.