Notices by Dr. Quadragon ❌ (drq@mastodon.ml), page 2

@dside Yeah. That fucking Perl one-liner.

Also, yes, those VT-100 conventions clashing with desktop conventions are also disorienting as hell if you don't know what's going on.

As for command naming... Well, keyboard shortcuts can also be counterintuinive, the advantage however is that you need to learn them once. But yeah, Pacman sucks for this.

@dside Yes, I agree about forcing people to learn discouraging the adoption of, but all of this is actually beside the point, and we digressed.

Most of the guides ain't really about learning, they're about getting shit done. You need something done, find a guide, you follow instructions, and never look at it again.

@dside Uh... You seem to be under impression that I'm assigning some vauation to either CLI or GUI themselves, like "this good, this bad", or smth. This is not the case.

What I'm saying, is, if I'm ever to write some guides or something in that vein, given the choice, I'd probably prefer to throw together some commands to making screenshots and describing mouseclicks. Because I'm lazy, and it'll work. So that's what happens more often. And this affects the perception of the platform as a whole.

I'm also not saying that it's good or bad. Just that it happens.

I think, part of the reason why The Dreaded Terminal is still so prevailant in the perception of Linux is that it's just SO MUCH easier to write manuals for.

I mean, it's way more efficient to say: "run `apt install firefox` to install firefox" than "to install firefox, open the software center [screenshot], search for firefox [screenshot]", select firefox in the application list [screenshot], click install [screenshot]".

The results are the same. Why waste more time drawing a comic book when you can tell a person to just type one line in a box?

Today, 23 years ago, was the day freedom died.

The terrorists hoped that these attacks would send the entire civilization into the death spiral.

And they were right.

Almost all of the surveilance/security theater/thought police/war on terror bullshit we're dealing with today everywhere in the world, can be traced back to that very morning.

The whole "anti-terrorist" shebang scored way greater body count than the attacks themselves.

It's like we're in a bad timeline. I was alive to see it happen, and the world has never truly recovered from it ever since. Instead, it just collapses ever deeper into self-perpetuating self-consumption. This sucks.

@pixelfed Do you migrate with content, or without?

@a1ba By the way, I remember I wanted to send something to you to take apart. Can't quite put a finger on it though.

I'll get beck to you once I recall.

@th3rdsergeevich

@a1ba glow or no glow, it's still a nice decompiler.

Wish it was not on Java though... Bleh.

@th3rdsergeevich

Fintech is ultimately "taking advantage of people who are bad with money"-tech.

@yogthos Just to play Devil's advocate:

What are the alternatives?

XMPP might be, but they haven't been able to get their shit together for a decade and a half regarding... well, everything. Jabber is in shambles, especially regarding E2EE:

https://soatok.blog/2024/08/04/against-xmppomemo/

Matrix just has awful protocol design that crumbles under its own weight. Don't believe me? Try visiting #matrix:matrix.org.

So... We're kinda screwed, aren't we.

@krom What is your homeserver?

@yogthos

My key-value storage has that big dict energy

This needs to be an emoji.

@evan @docpop

What I fear the most is that, by washing out copyleft licensing in favour of permissive licensing, the movement basically gets atomized. We revert to that naïve individualism which is yes - highly seductive, but it's what's eventually going to be our collective undoing. Because we don't have that end-user protection anymore. We don't have a competitive edge over the non-freedom, we basically brought everything on the silver platter to people who don't subscribe to any definition of freedom in software at all, and couldn't care less about free usage, study, distribution or modification of software, it's just not in their interest.

An incredibly grim picture. I hope I am overrreacting.

Why have I brought this up at all?

Well,

https://github.com/uutils/coreutils

It's a nice project, I quite like it. But the license choice kinda irks me.

The author states that its goal is not to fight the GNU project. While that might not be the intention, in my opinion, this is actually one third of the way to the EEE scenario.

MIT license means it's easy for corporations who choose to make proprietary software to adopt it for their projects. So the "Embrace" step is basically done, voluntarily.

The next step is to Extend it, to make it on par or better than GNU Coreutils. Which has not been achieved yet, but this is the goal.

If this has the potential to be better than GNU coreutils (and it does, being written in a more modern language, and by that virtue having more potential for modernization), then why use GNU coreutils at all? That will be the Extinguish part.

We already have GCC basically obsoleted by LLVM (which, again, is great - but it's also permissive, it was made by corpos); GlibC still holds, but I doubt it's for too long, as Musl is coming along nicely, and the Linux kernel we pretty much lost to tivoization. What remains of the GNU project, then?

I mean, I'm in no position to tell the author what to do, he can do whatever the hell he wants to, but it's still sad to see that sweet free software protection for the base OS to slowly erode and fade to irrelevance like this.

Again: it doesn't make a difference to me, the user, if, say, the new Windows effectively becomes a *nix system and adopts those while staying just as proprietary. (it still would be better than what they have right now, by a mile, but merely technically)

And what I always liked about the Free Software movement, is that it turns the power dynamic of the copyright law on its head, therefore making an actual, tangible, political difference. Which is what I'm after.

There's an argument that permissive licenses offer more freedom.

And to that, I say - yes. If you subscribe to the naïve, individualistic definition of freedom, where everything is permitted, without restrictions.

And in the ideal world, maybe that's where the story ends. But we don't live in that world. No man is an island, and if you allow anyone to do anything unrestricted, that means you permit somebody to take someone's freedom away using force. And eventually you end up with a very unfree world.

How do you combat this? Well, with solidarity, of course. There needs to be a concerted effort to protect freedom from those who tend towards smashing it to pieces. That means, some boundaries must be set up. People who respect freedom must stand together and declare that freedom and non-freedom don't mix.

You know how the corpo kind tends to say that GPL "viral" and compares Free Software movement to Borg? Well, that shows what they fear the most. Copyleft represents this solidarity.

A nice compact explanation for permissive vs. copyleft licensing I found:

Both models provide freedom and protection at the expense of the developer;
Permissive model provides more freedom and protection for your *immediate downstream user* at the expense of the end user;
Copyleft model provides more freedom and protection for your *end user* at the expense of the intermediate users.

It's pretty context-dependent which way you wanna go, but personally, in a toss-up, I'm gonna side with the end user. Because that's what actually matters in the end: the ability to actually use the software freely.

At the end of the day, if I have to use a proprietary, locked-down system that spies on me, doesn't let me modify it, or even look at its insides, and generally treats me, the user, like crap, it doesn't make a nick of difference to me that it has a BSD kernel inside, or MIT-licensed coreutils, right?

Can't get over the fact that Black Mesa is probably the bestest video game remake ever created, and it's actually done by a bunch of nerds in their spare time who just love Half-Life series that much.

Looking forward to Blue Shift and Opposing Force parts to come out.