Notices by Irenes (many) (irenes@mastodon.social)

@glyph @mcc @b0rk the thing to keep in mind is that shells store it as a string on the userspace side of things, in addition to the kernel structures. the shell won't rewrite parameters to external commands, but cd is a shell builtin (necessarily so). that's likely part of the magic in why this works

@glyph @mcc @b0rk and then there's the subtle differences between the semantics of syscalls and the semantics of the libc wrappers around them...

anyway yeah there's definitely some explanation for this that wouldn't be too hard to find by reading all the sources. we're not sure we want to, it feels cooler as magic

@xgranade @trochee *sigh* it's the ideological component

save your eclipse glasses! you can use them tomorrow, too

@todb stack overflow in contrast goes really hard in building out game mechanics that kind-of seek to substitute the intrinsic motivation of helping other people with the artificial desire to acquire a large number - or, darker yet, with the potential to acquire power over others. while it would be possible to quibble with the details of these mechanisms, we think the mistake is more fundamental, it's the disconnect in motivations behind them.

@todb second, the incentive structure of wikipedia is much more closely aligned with people's intrinsic motivation. humans ENJOY organizing information and finding the best ways to say things, it's what our brains evolved to do. maybe not everyone is in touch with that feeling, but there's enough who are. there are layers of mechanism for review, quality control, dispute resolution etc. but their shape is driven by what the end goal needs.

@todb much of the recent abuse of the CVE system lately does appear to have had profit as a motive, so there is reason to think it can be improved. we do enthusiastically support the comparison you're doing, too, we just want to make note of its limitations.

@todb keeping out people who have a profit motive is one thing: profit is a short-term goal and all you have to do is make it cheaper to attack someone else. keeping out hate groups that perceive themselves to be fighting a war over the desired shape of the world, or nation-states that are fighting "hot" wars, is quite another thing.

@todb we do hope that you will keep in mind that, though it is broadly true that wikimedia, like, still exists and isn't drowning in spam, there is a lot of ideologically-motivated abuse that does get a high degree of success because it's done in long-term, patient ways

@todb in our view it's two-fold: first, the structure of wikipedia doesn't work well as a tool for people to promote their personal fame, outside the community of wikipedia editors. for example, contributors' names don't appear directly on the encyclopedia entries, you have to click to the change history to see them.

@todb anyway, to answer the original question... we can't claim to have a complete analysis, but we think it's instructive to look at why wikimedia gets higher-quality output than stack overflow, despite them both being crowdsourced and having the nominal goal of helping the public be more informed.

we should put something on our website

(something besides a single sentence that gives you feelings of various kinds depending on who you are)

dunno what though. we don't feel able to keep a blog fed.

please do not harass or bother people who do use the "hate group" terminology. everyone needs to make these choices for themselves about what language to use and how to engage with these topics, don't go around policing other people's. thanks <3

"hate group" means something specific that, personally, we don't want to water down. so we won't call Autism Speaks a hate group. however, their mission statement lays bare their intent to harm the autistic community. they do not speak for us.

as an autistic adult we would greatly prefer that your donations instead go to the Autistic Self Advocacy Network. https://autisticadvocacy.org/

hey does anyone remember who that retrocomputing youtuber was whose channel got spurious policy violations apparently related to a mass-reporting campaign after coming out as trans, a couple weeks ago?

we were wondering how that turned out and tried to find the video about it in our watch history, but it's gone, which doesn't sound good...

it was one of the more research-focused ones? where they'd dig up primary sources and stuff? we actually had no idea they were trans until that happened

@krans @glyph @eb but you're right, of course, it's a valid point. we just don't think trying to coin a new term would be useful, if anything it would be a distraction from the cultural work that matters

@Shamar @rms @krans @glyph @eb that's a good analysis. we do agree that, like, any complete statement of values should have more than one thing on it, or at least more elaboration of what they mean in-context.

we'll take a look at the license. we do think the work to be done is more social than legal, we suspect copyright law as a tool for change has gone about as far as it can.

@glyph @eb please note that we are ALSO no fans of the "subsume free software into capitalism" solution that corporate and statist rhetoric has been pushing for a couple years now

@krans @glyph @eb sure. well, so the reason we personally call the thing we do "free software" is precisely to highlight the point that our own goal in publishing stuff without charge is very much to work towards a world without that problem, by creating something that exists as far outside it as we can manage (not all the way - obviously we have the free time to do that because of our other privileges)

@krans @glyph @eb we're very proactive-death-of-the-author about this. the FSF has failed to provide ideological leadership due to RMS's top-down style, but many of the ideals are good ones and it's the job of the current generation to renew the movement if we want our children to be able to enjoy its fruits the way we did