Notices by Louis (louis@emacs.ch), page 2

@freemo I just hope that, whoever will be elected this year, will bring America into a better state than it is now and unify people.

I don't live in the US, but I traveled there a lot for business and pleasure for many years. Route 66 and all that. But that was many years ago and I really want to go back there and show my kids all these great people, diversity and landscape that the US has to offer. I hope that will be possible at sometime in the future.

@freemo Easy, Putin learned. He knows now that whoever candidate he endorses will have a disadvantage at the election. And obviously he's trying to help the American to figure out how stupid all of that is.

@freemo You know that this is just tactics from Russia to make Biden look even worse than he is?

@freemo@mastodon.acm.org @louis77 @wild1145 @SrRochardBunson @BobMastodon @oliphant @freemo@qoto.org Emacs.ch being on the <Recommended “Bare Minimum” List>, really? For a single moderation dispute with babka.social in June 2023 where we defended the rights of an Arab Jew to speak out AND resolved the issue with babka.social in consent.

Now we are considered to be on the level of pedophile, and racist instances. We run a clean and well moderated instance since Nov 2022, and mastodon.art decided that we should be in this list because they "don't like us"?

Really guys, if it weren't for the endless hours of work we put into this instance, it is our users I care about and they don't deserve to be treated like this.

@fosskers Thanks for sharing, and having a very good README! 🚀

@inthehands @donaldball Where did they change to “search quality at any cost, nothing else matters.” ?

@inthehands @donaldball Any what is it they are selling? Please enlighten me as a paying Kagi customer.

@offset___cyan He positions himself as a victim of the toxicity in the foss community, even though he willingly chooses to engage with it. Without realizing it, he ends up contributing to the same toxicity he opposes, spending significant portions of his life venting about it.

I was once a fan of SoureHut and a paying member, but only for a short time. When I followed Drew's stubborness re: supporting Org-file rendering on sr.ht, I figured that this is not a place to grow in.

Sadly you can only watch while things get worse and worse. His recent blog post about RMS was nauseating. I just don't understand what his goals and values are. Clearly, improving SourceHut is not the one.

@cmeier @amszmidt @galdor With this line of argument Emacs shouldn't even run on macOS or Windows. Nor should it be allowed to write proprietary software (or books) with it.

I always thought that Free Software is all about freedom. According to GNU, it's rule 0: "The freedom to run the program as you wish, for any purpose". What happens here is pure paternalism. Clearly an overstepping of boundaries by the responsible people in the Emacs Dev Team.

#Emacs #GNU

@dragestil @cmeier @amszmidt @galdor Same line of argument, still against freedom rule 0. What you say is that when it is in the interest of GNU/Emacs (publicity) it is ok to let it run in a user-harming environment, but when it is about user interests, it is not ok.

That logic really escapes my understanding of free software. There is literally no other GNU component that blocks the user from installing non-free extensions by design.

Amazon AWS will charge ~$3.6 for every IPv4 address, attached or unattached, starting Feb 1st, 2024.

https://aws.amazon.com/de/blogs/aws/new-aws-public-ipv4-address-charge-public-ip-insights/

Many PaaS companies based on AWS (which are most of them) will have to increase their prices big time.

I'm so glad I migrated all AWS projects to a sane IaaS years ago. Hopefully that will teach the industry a lesson or maybe just think the unthinkable: is there an Internet outside AWS?

#amazonaws #aws #hosting #selfhosted

@a13cui There is a middle ground, and in my opinion that is the #V language. It has a version of Go-like syntax that is as easy to comprehend but has all the "missing" features you would miss in Go.

https://vlang.io/

I'm not in favour of the V lang, nor do I recommend if for any serious use, but for other reasons.

@sqrtminusone @galdor

@a13cui Actually a few months ago, when the Go telemetry shitshow happend, Nim was my choice #1 as a replacement. However, the library ecosystem is dire for serious web backend and database development. That was the reason I abondoned it.

That was, of course, before I decided to shred my head with Common Lisp 🙂

@sqrtminusone What I mean specifically is that you look at your 100 lines of mostly imperative Go code and think, how can I make that better and more expressive?

Just to realize that in Go there is rarely such an opportunity, compared to many other languages, that allow you to learn more advanced functional concepts and abstraction patterns over time.

It took the Go devs 14 years to release a generic min/max function and slice/maps utility functions like Contains. I probably wrote thousands of rudimentary, ugly for loops because those did not exist.

@galdor

@galdor The ternary operator is "too brilliant" to understand for mediocre programmers, which is for whom Go was made for:

"They’re not capable of understanding a brilliant language but we want to use them to build good software." (Rob Pike)

While Go is a great tool to build good software fast, it doesn't offer opportunities to grow as a programmer.

@carptun Greetings and a warm welcome to the Emacs.ch! We're thrilled to have you on board. Happy coding! 🚀

@vindarel Wow, thank you! I didn't know about this. 😲

I'm probably the last person on earth who has discovered that there is a searchable and nicely rendered version of the Common Lisp HyperSpec, called Nova Spec:

https://novaspec.org

A pleasant surprise.

#CommonLisp

@ramin_hal9001 You make some strong arguments here. It's great to see you laying out your reasoning in detail and with passion. ❤️ That's the spirit.

What I have learned, however, is that Meta will only federate with select larger instances from the beginning. There will be contracts which also provide for financial compensation for the instance owners. Meta positions itself as a "savior", because especially the big instances have a very strong financial pressure. Users take it for granted that someone else is paying for everything.

In these contracts, Meta also specifies the rules regarding the moderation. Instances will have the option of allowing ads from Meta or not (with the benefit of additional compensation).

Smaller instances will have the possibility to register for a federation with Meta in a second step, but there will be no financial compensation and Meta decides if they will grant access based on their reputation.

In summary, there will be instances with the "plus Facebook" feature and those that do not belong to the illustrious circle. No #FediPact will be able to change that (btw. these are the same people that will silence and defederate from you if you don't play by "their" rules).

At the turn of the year there was a proposal from @freemo, where he proposed the creation of a "United Federation of Instances" (https://ufoi.org - ssl cert is expired). However, people associated the idea with one person and made fun of it because of his "reputation". If we had such a foundation today we would be in a much stronger position against Meta. It is the human condition not to be able to think outside our own bias.

Whatever Meta will do, the Fediverse will not go down because of Meta's decisions but because of the actions of its admins and users. When I follow the daily arguments on #MastoAdmin or (#)Fediblock, I quickly realize where the journey is headed. Silcening and public shaming instead of mutual respect and cooperaton is the motto.

@amszmidt @deadbeef @shelenn @dekkzz76 I was referring to the JS code used in the Mastodon UI, which is blocked by LibreJS per default because it has licensing issues (see screenshot).

JavaScript itself is free but often abused by sending unlicensed or proprietary code to the user's browser.