Karl Austin @[email protected]

I'm seeing several posts of FOSS supporters who go like "all of the software I use must be FOSS, and if I don't have a valid FOSS alternative for something then I'm part of a discriminated minority whose needs are ignored".

I've been a FOSS enthusiast myself for more than 20 years, but such arguments really miss the point.

First, I don't consider myself part of a "discriminated minority" just because I want to use only FOSS software and the industry doesn't go in that direction. I'd leave the "discriminated minority" label for people who really need it. I'm someone who has made a conscious voluntary decision, and who's well-aware that being 100% coherent with it is impossible - it'd require me to inspect every single file distributed by each single technology product I use, and it'd require me to reinvent seven decades of tools to make sure that the C compiler I use to build the software and all the toolchain around it doesn't have its roots in closed-source software built at the Bell labs.

Second, I shouldn't have the expectation that somebody must spend their (mostly unpaid) time to build something FOSS that I can use for free, and complain that I'm being discriminated if nobody does. Nor that an admin/provider of services only uses 100% FOSS products. That's a first-world expectation for a first-world problem. We are actually entitled to expect the government to adopt this approach in public services, because public money should only go in public code, but not from private individuals. If I have a problem with a piece of proprietary software, I just roll up my sleeves, reverse engineer it or code an alternative. If a hardcore vegan has a problem with most of the food available at malls and restaurants, then they should grow their own food instead of expecting the whole world to accommodate all of their needs.

Third, we shouldn't expect proprietary software to disappear. That's a utopia that even Stallman has given up to. In some industries this is just not doable. We should instead accommodate for pragmatism. 10% of the people using 90% FOSS software have a much greater impact than a 0.1% using 100% FOSS.

Fourth, like in all things that expect to raise awareness on a topic, playing the victimism card and advocating for purism is very unlikely to bring many new friends. Ascetism and purism are the greatest enemies of adoption.

Tennessee speeding right along, as expected -

“The Tennessee House of Representatives today voted to allow government discrimination against interracial and same sex marriages. Republican assurances that cases like Loving v. Virginia and Lawrence v. Texas were safe after the Dobbs decision were just shot to Hell.”

Reminder for anyone who hasn’t followed me for a while, what the Republicans are trying to do is establish a White Supremacist ChristoFascist state.

https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2023/4/12/2163618/-Tennessee-House-Votes-To-Allow-State-Discrimination-Against-Interracial-And-Same-Sex-Marriages

Seeing some stuff about Bluesky and folks, if you hook up w *another* platform built and owned by Jack fuckin Dorsey, all i have to say is LMFAO

‘Youtube-dl Hosting Ban Paves the Way to Privatized Censorship’ - https://torrentfreak.com/youtube-dl-hosting-ban-paves-the-way-to-privatized-censorship-230411/ indeed, terrible, stupid decision by german court... #copyright

Tiny Serious Security Tip:

Sometimes, when you encrypt all the things with long passwords, and forget to save your password somewhere, and do not to login for a while, it is easy to lock yourself out your own stuff!

Be careful with this!

- a cautionary tale offered to you by my own personal experience this week 🙃

@rysiek So much "anti-abuse" stuff doubles as a barrier to entry.

So, so, much. The e-mail ecosystem has been completely hijacked by this to the point that admins just think it's normal.

Every time the big guys "raise the bar" on anything related to security, they kill off a few independents. Shrugged off as collateral damage for the greater good.

The dynamic is obvious enough, and has been understood long enough, that I don't think they can feign innocence anymore.

It's professional incompetence to represent clients on tech issues if you don't understand the tech at hand. It's even worse to make policy decisions or craft new laws regulating tech without understanding the technical (and social!) dimensions of what you're trying to regulate.

"They paved paradise
And put up a parking lot
They took all the trees
Put 'em in a tree museum
And they charged the people
A dollar and a half just to see 'em"

I love how Barnes & Noble specifically promoted some of these "banned" books. Every library and bookstore should do this.

#fascism #books #ChildrensBooks #BookBanning #FightFascism

By the end of April, the bird site will be a substantially different user experience. Legacy check marks gone; only Blue in “For You”; no non-blue in polls.

This will have the effect of warping the entire ecosystem towards fascist shills, demagogues, and opportunists.

Now would be a good time to invest in alternative infrastructure, including making sure Mastodon instances are fast and robust. We are going to need them.

I really wish we never started the #docker, #flatpak, #snap and #appimage idea.

It sucks to see some things are only publishes in such formats.

I mean I can understand if you dont want to package it for 10 distros, but please dont actively prevent people from doing that.

Not everybody can or wants to use such technologies.

"The report to be released on Monday says 38% of children strip-searched were black. Black children make up 5.9% of the population, meaning they were six times over-represented.

The youngest child strip-searched was eight, and about a quarter were 10-15, the report will say."

Black children much more likely to be strip-searched in England and Wales than white peers

https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2023/mar/26/race-disparity-police-strip-searches-of-children-england-and-wales

The hard bit of software engineering has always been "deeply understanding a problem well enough to implement a useful solution to it".

The scary bit of people trying to AI away the programming part is that most rely on writing the software to understand the problem domain -- remove that part and you truly do have YOLO driven development with badly thought out questions "generating" bad and kinda broken software.

So @internetarchive scanning books for their digital library is copyright infringement:
http://blog.archive.org/2023/03/25/the-fight-continues/

But OpenAI slurping all of that to train a model that then can generate text and put actual authors out of business (already happening with copywriters), is not.

Figures, there are no $billions of VC / corporate money behind Internet Archive, why would anyone want to support a public service, right? 🤦‍♀️

IA ≠ AI, know the difference!

#InternetArchive

Jeremy Hunt "13 years ago, we inherited an economy which had crashed"

13 years ago the Tories inherited a AAA+ national credit rating. In the last 13 years, it’s been downgraded 7 times and is now AA.

National debt was £1.03 trillion in 2010, it’s £2.49 trillion today.

The UK was the 5th largest economy in the world. Now it is 7th and falling.

The living standard was better than France, Italy or Germany. Now it is on par with Slovakia.

If anybody has “crashed” the economy it’s the Tories.

NHS hospitals told to share patient data with US ‘spy-tech’ firm

And they haven't even won the contract yet (although there's little doubt they're a shoo in)

https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/palantir-peter-thiel-nhs-england-foundry-faster-data-flows/

#palantir #nhs #thiel #privacy

Maybe, just maybe, you shouldn't have fired everyone who understood your code...

@mavetju @simonlbn check out this blog post: https://blog.alexellis.io/docker-is-deleting-open-source-images/