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Richard Stallman reveals he has cancer in the GNU 40 Hacker Meeting talk [video]

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Re: Richard Stallman reveals he has cancer in the GNU 40 Hacker Meeting talk [video]

#681

Post by mongol »

squarefoot wrote: post #351
mongol wrote: post #288

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You are surprising me. Where do you live? Many Europeans have lived under communism for decades, and repulse it as nothing else.

Sentiment about communism changes a lot. We, as western Europeans, haven't been brainwashed with decades of anti-communist propaganda, at least not to the level reached in the US, neither we lived under a communist regime, so we didn't develop extreme views until recent years. A couple decades ago one could find here a good number of right militants among immigrants from the former communist countries. As much as I'm…

On one hand, you have "propaganda" (your words). On the other hand, you have those that lived under it. If the views of those align, there may be more truth to the anti-communist sentiment than plain "propaganda".

Re: Richard Stallman reveals he has cancer in the GNU 40 Hacker Meeting talk [video]

#682

Post by calderknight »

cauch wrote: post #634
calderknight wrote: post #531

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you state which parts of the popular conception of cancellation are fantasy? What is it that people have in mind? that thing which practically never happens in real life. Norman Finkelstein is as left-wing as it gets. He views wokism as a right-wing ideology (correctly).

The popular conception of cancellation is that cancellation is an unfair imposition of an ideology on people who don't deserve to be judged, and that it is destroying their life. But on this discussion you've provided a list, and some people have highlighted that there is legitimate ground for their "cancellation" and that their lives are not destroyed. Therefore it does not correspond to this idea that we have a kin…

Finkelstein was cancelled by the right. Most prominently by Alan Deshowitz, lawyer for Donald Trump, Jeffrey Epstein, etc.

As a result, he was denied tenure and was never able to get a job as a professor, other than occasionally working as an adjunct. Really, I'm not sure how much more severe it could be without being something other than cancellation.

He was cancelled long before his work on wokism - that topic was only brought up because someone misread one of my previous comments.

Another example of someone on the left-wing being cancelled by those on the right is Paul Robeson, who was perhaps the most famous American alive at one point, but lost everything due to his left-wing beliefs.

I do think you're confused about the popular conception of cancellation. Stallman lost his position at the FSF and MIT. His speaking engagements were cancelled. Article after article came out about how terrible he supposedly was. Almost all of it was unfair, almost all the claims against him were inaccurate. If these things don't constitute cancellation, nothing does.

Re: Richard Stallman reveals he has cancer in the GNU 40 Hacker Meeting talk [video]

#683

Post by mongol »

touisteur wrote: post #360
mongol wrote: post #288

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You are surprising me. Where do you live? Many Europeans have lived under communism for decades, and repulse it as nothing else.

The Communist Party had 2-digits percentage of votes in France until the 90s. We had coalition governments with communist (and green) ministers last time in 2002 I think? And one of the main newspapers, when people still read them, was l'Humanité, clearly further left than the mainstream left (parti socialiste, then). Hate of communism was just never as rabid 'round here. In 1993 we had one of the mainstream pop song…

It is true that some did not oppose communism, but they were fortunately always a minority. They had a very naive and romantic view, which is easier when you don't get to suffer the oppression personally.

Re: Richard Stallman reveals he has cancer in the GNU 40 Hacker Meeting talk [video]

#684

Post by sho_hn »

Gigachad wrote: post #475
leidenfrost wrote: post #390

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's a lot more understandable if you consider the state of computing he experienced while growing up: Programs were way simpler, and shipping the source code in paper was the de facto way of distribution. It's not like he was a wacko around his peers. He just created what seemed a logical step from that. I'm just sad that there's no young people to pass the torch for when the time comes and the founding fathers are…

It’s commonly said that his inspiration was from wanting to improve a printer driver but couldn’t because it was proprietary. I feel like back in the day there would have been so many easy wins for modifications. Like how people used to root Android to add screenshot capability. These days modern software is so extremely sophisticated and refined that I can’t think of anything I could improve for say iOS. Still love…

> These days modern software is so extremely sophisticated and refined that I can’t think of anything I could improve for say iOS.

> Still love foss, but the idea of “it’s open source, you can improve it yourself any time” has worn off for me.

If you look at major MacOS or iOS releases, you will often see new features being advertised that were copied from FOSS systems that experimented with them and proved them out often many years beforehand.

That is to say: iOS might have the edge on QA, but if you want to have impact and shape the future of how people use computers, contributing in the community is still a good way to do this. And in fact, commercial development tends to rely on this talent pool for survival, as companies do a comparatively poor job in educating new talent. It's where you get people with "job experience" in doing certain things.

Re: Richard Stallman reveals he has cancer in the GNU 40 Hacker Meeting talk [video]

#685

Post by nobody9999 »

nottorp wrote: post #448
jraph wrote: post #181

Here he is, 70, under chemo, giving a speech. He keeps being a force of nature. May he recover well, or at least have long enjoyable years ahead. He has/had arguable/unacceptable behavior, but I believe we strongly owe him. He has built incredible software, defined important stuff and kicked our asses in the right direction.

Hmm I'm curious. He's been basically running non profits all his life. In the US. How can he afford the treatment? Is the FSF big enough to be able to get medical insurance for their employees?

>Hmm I'm curious. He's been basically running non profits all his life. In the US. How can he afford the treatment? Is the FSF big enough to be able to get medical insurance for their employees?

Since he's 70, he's eligible for Medicare[0]. And likely has access to other insurance through his professional affiliation(s) as well.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Medicare_(United_States)

Re: Richard Stallman reveals he has cancer in the GNU 40 Hacker Meeting talk [video]

#686

Post by hedora »

linuxftw wrote: post #680
hedora wrote: post #671

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm a bit worried about the health of the GPL ecosystem. GPL 3 is basically an anti-TiVo and (now) anti-Apple license, but it leaves giant loopholes for Google and other service providers. The whole point of the GPL was to empower users, and it's pretty clearly failing at that. SaaS providers provide access to GPL software, but users can't decide which version to run, or move their data, or even use an old version of…

The solution is simple: don't pay for SaaS products. And that's if you consider it a problem. When email was created, you didn't care what the remote mail server's software was, as long as it conformed to the protocol, you're good.

That's not a solution, and it's certainly not simple.

For one thing, it would mean that I'd have to pull my kids out of school, pull my money out of the bank and cancel all of my utilities.

Heck, I'd need the equivalent of a degree in tax accounting just to avoid being jailed by the IRS, since I wouldn't be able to use tax software. (Not that this would matter, since I have to use *aaS stuff to pay my mortgage and insurance and collect my paychecks, so my taxes would be simpler next year.)

Even if I somehow managed to connect to the Internet without indirectly paying for a SaaS, I wouldn't be able to browse it in practice without agreeing to ToS contracts from companies I haven't even heard of.

Don't agree with the cloudflare, google and aws ToS agreements? Try blocking all their servers (since continuing to use the services implies agreeing to continuously-updated ToS terms). If you succeed, you'll find that the internet doesn't work at all. You can't even use email normally, since it's unclear what addresses get routed through which service providers, and what terms you have to agree with to "use" their SMTP services.

Re: Richard Stallman reveals he has cancer in the GNU 40 Hacker Meeting talk [video]

#687

Post by Merad »

dEnigma wrote: post #346
newscracker wrote: post #270

I hope he’s able to manage it well (since the prognosis is good) and is around for a lot longer. We need absolutists like him who go to extremes and are known widely. For a few moments, leave aside his personality and what people have said about his behavior or hygiene. If he hadn’t been there, our world would’ve been a lot different and a lot poorer. A visionary is what he was and is. While the Free part of FOSS is…

I feel similarly. While I absolutely can't and won't operate under the severe restrictions that an ideologically pure stance on software freedom ala Stallman would impose, I'm glad that there are some people, like Stallman himself, who take it to those extremes, tirelessly advocate for improvement and thus move the needle towards a better middle ground for everyone.

Well, RMS tirelessly advocates for his beliefs, but sometimes his beliefs are regressive and outdated. In particular I remember a debate perhaps 8-10 years ago when the gcc team wanted to expose more info from the compiler back end to enable better support for editor integrations and similar tools, because gcc simply couldn't compete with LLVM in that department. IIRC RMS stepped in with a unilateral decision blocking the effort, saying that it wasn't a big deal anyway because editor integration wasn't an important feature. RMS, a guy who (AFAIK) hasn't done any serious coding in 30 years.

Re: Richard Stallman reveals he has cancer in the GNU 40 Hacker Meeting talk [video]

#688

Post by tgma »

nvy wrote: post #128
gitanovic wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think that FSF in a very romantic sense, is fighting a lost battle. The vast majority of people don't care much about their freedom and easily trade it away for convenience, that's just that.

>The vast majority of people don't care much about their freedom and easily trade it away for convenience, that's just that. Perhaps if the FSF wasn't so abysmal at advocacy, more people would care about software freedom. It's very easy to throw one's hands up and say "nobody cares!" but I think the FSF, and many Free Software enthusiasts, are not ready for the required level of introspection to really examine their…

FSF is not abysmal at advocacy. There was a fork in the road; the easy path was to jump in with the Open Source movement and abandon the core principles. Had RMS done that, he would have been the darling of Corporate Open Source by now, invited to Davos and speaking at TED every year, and not been cancelled by some rando college student who had never heard of or known him really. But then it would not have mattered one bit. There are hundreds of foundations doing that stuff, providing a lot of good things, but strictly speaking undermining Free Software.

It actually is painfully obvious now that what Stallman/FSF did was correct for their mission, in the sense that they knew what they actually wanted, and that Open Source definitely was not it. Thus they alienated their closest would-be allies. FSF narrative was hijacked as Corporate Open Source is a much easier sell comparatively, especially when the primary business models of "tech" companies has become less about selling software over time. When people suggest FSF is bad at advocacy, what they really imagine usually is they could have been nicer and said some of the things that everyone else in Corporate Open Source world say. If they had done it, by now they would have had no originality, added a big banner in support of Ukraine to the top of their home page, had a big DEI statement, and five random flags like every other corporate non-profit.

https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/open-source-misses-the-point....

Re: Richard Stallman reveals he has cancer in the GNU 40 Hacker Meeting talk [video]

#689

Post by linuxftw »

hedora wrote: post #686
linuxftw wrote: post #680

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The solution is simple: don't pay for SaaS products. And that's if you consider it a problem. When email was created, you didn't care what the remote mail server's software was, as long as it conformed to the protocol, you're good.

That's not a solution, and it's certainly not simple. For one thing, it would mean that I'd have to pull my kids out of school, pull my money out of the bank and cancel all of my utilities. Heck, I'd need the equivalent of a degree in tax accounting just to avoid being jailed by the IRS, since I wouldn't be able to use tax software. (Not that this would matter, since I have to use *aaS stuff to pay my mortgage and in…

You definitely should not send your kids to public school; that's crazy.

Anyway, as for the rest, you can pay mortgage by check in the US. No software required.

You can also file your taxes by paper.

As far as connecting to the internet, Stallman somehow manages it, I'm sure you can sort it out.

Re: Richard Stallman reveals he has cancer in the GNU 40 Hacker Meeting talk [video]

#690

Post by dheera »

jve wrote: post #175
dheera wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have a couple Samsung Galaxy A8 (2022) tablets set up as control panels around my apartment for Home Assistant. They cost a little more than $100 on eBay in very good condition. I don't think LineageOS supports this particular model, though, but I didn't bother since all it does is display a webpage. One of the things I like about Samsung tablets is that they have a "Battery saver" feature where you can restrict it…

Which mount are you using?

I'm using this mount

https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B01MS6I0HQ/

This short USB power cable

https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B092KF36T6/

This wall switch to tap USB power out of a wall switch box so there would be no visible dangling wires. This will only work if your apartment has neutral wires in the switch boxes. Older apartments often don't have them

https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B072Y2B2P5/

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