Notices by linear cannon (linear@nya.social), page 8

i received a DM earlier. i am not going to call out the person who DM'd me, but i am going to publicly share my response, because it is important. the context is @drewdevault@fosstodon.org's blog post earlier today about RMS. the person DMing me suggests for the "proper" place for this discussion was in the FSF channels and with RMS himself.

my response is this, verbatim:


"no. if we cannot discuss issues like this in places not directly controlled by the people at the root of the issue - e.g. in this instance, RMS and people sympathetic to him - then the reality is that we cannot discuss them at all.

we cannot restrict the discussion of difficult topics to forums controlled by people who might rather not have those topics talked about. there is a power imbalance, whether or not that power is used.

is free speech still free speech if, whether by rule or by cultural norm, you are only to criticize a king from within his castle, surrounded by his guards, with only the audience of himself and those who have chosen to be in that environment? even if the guards take no action against you, and allow you to freely speak your mind, there is no question in that situation that you do not hold the power, and you are at the mercy of those who do.

and, ever so frequently, they do exercise the power to silence or eject you, and if we do as you suggest, you are left with no acceptable avenue in which to exercise your right to speak.

you must be able to criticize the king in your home, or in the tavern, or on the streets, or wherever you choose, in places where his guards have no power. you must be able to do this with other people who would not have chosen to subject themselves to the king's court. you must be able to loudly proclaim his faults, so that those who would never have had reason to find themselves in his castle may hear, and understand.

the king will not dethrone himself because someone entered his court and made a good point. he will dethrone himself because crowds of people outside his court are making their opinions known, and he knows that if he does not, the castle he worked so hard to build will fall with him inside."

@mariusor@metalhead.club @drewdevault@fosstodon.org @mfru@mastodon.social well, why the hell not? it's not like people have listened to the unprivileged non-white non-dudes when theyve said exactly the same thing for decades

people like stallman being figureheads, and people like you deflecting discussions like this away from people like him, are a substantial part of why i am uncomfortable participating in communities around free software

believe me when i say, drew's article is serving to amplify marginalized voices.

you, a privileged white dude, are serving to suppress that discussion, and by extension, those voices. that is not the way to move the issue forward.

@chjara@akko.wtf agreed, it's pretty neat

but only really ended up in the dreamcast and a handful of Windows CE devices

@chjara@akko.wtf if i were running on a real cpu instead of dosbox i might expect that

but also, 486-class cpus have very limited branch prediction (basically none) and it shouldn't have enough of an effect here to matter

@chjara@akko.wtf the overhead of branch prediction would be maybe 3 or 4 cycles, compared to hundreds or thousands for the execution of the function

i am a bit confused, because an optimization i am pursuing in 486quake is making things slower in dosbox

there is a special case under which a different version of a drawing function can be used. i have a toggle that lets me switch, at runtime, whether it calls the normal version or the special-case version of the function when the special case is detected

the only difference between the regular version and the special-case version is that the special-case version *doesn't* have to do some math that the regular version does. and so that math is removed

and yet for some reason the special-case version takes longer

them: "there is no USA release of Puzzle Bobble and Puzzle Bobble 2, under that name, for PC. it cannot hurt you."

the USA release of Puzzle Bobble and Puzzle Bobble 2, under that name, for PC:

i love how running firefox on an aging dual-core system with a spinning-rust hard drive guarantees that my load average will never be below 2.0 and usually hovers around 5.

i love how it does not take advantage of my gpu for rendering, at all, because my gpu is "too old", even though it could do 99% of the rendering tasks just fine

@lanodan@queer.hacktivis.me this thing's only 6 GB, but i imagine if they did this with modern drive tech, 1TB would be well within the realm of possibility (those newer HAMR drives have excellent data density)

@lanodan@queer.hacktivis.me and yeah, sure, there are other, smaller, higher capacity storage media abound these days, but i just want to reiterate, this is a hard drive, with a spinning platter and voice-coil read head and the works

(photo from Wikipedia user Teravolt, aka Adam Munich; CC BY 3.0)

@lanodan@queer.hacktivis.me here's a 3.5" floppy and an SD card adapter for scale

a really tiny hard drive, for a really tiny NetWare server

even if you know how small a CompactFlash card is, it's still hard to get across in a photo just exactly how tiny these things are

"carceral justice is when you tow the criminals outside the environment"

@lanodan@queer.hacktivis.me eh, maybe

that policy caused some interesting side effects when higher ups have gotten overconfident in their english skills, though. like accidentally creating a requirement that all remote workers be able to run microsoft visio, rather than a requirement that they all be capable of videoconferencing. which is a bit of an issue when most remote workers run linux

i should adjust my life to put more french language in it so i can get better at it. maybe i should follow more french-speaking folk here

i used to get a bit of practice at work, given that it's a french company and many of my coworkers are french, but then they started doing a "english-only in the workplace" thing

new cpu 👀

was chilling out last night in the living room with some computers

nothing like a little casual network administration to unwind on a nice tuesday evening

i have finally managed to get a netware server actually running

i have also now learned that i probably couldve gotten it working on the 486 router sbc i originally wanted to use, if i'd bothered to RTFM ahead of time (but tbf its easier to RTFM if you have a working netware server with the online docs installed)

might still install it on there, but im having trouble finding the correct driver for the onboard network devices. if anyone knows where i can find a complete MacPHYTER II driver disk image (or just the files 'c83815.lan' and 'c83815.ldi') please do tell

i can get around this by installing a pci network card but thats kind of silly

i muted this thread months ago so i hope y'all don't expect me to see anything you're replying to it with

@cadey@pony.social ok :D