Life is Tetris @tetrislife@social.cleverlibre.org

#TIL about Inner Source, which is basically Open Source minus the Software Freedoms. Coined by (surprise, surprise) that great friend of Free Software, Tim O'Reilly, Inner Source is the parasitic use of Open Source development practices by proprietary software companies, with no respect for the software freedoms of the people using the resulting software. *shudder*

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inner_source

#SoftwareFreedom #InnerSource #TimOReilly #ProprietarySoftware

@wim_v12e I went back and read Marc’s toot in context and I see he’s being sarcastic and making fun of tech pessimists (I sometimes call them “doomers”).

I don’t think tech pessimists are wrong. I think people are right to fear whatever new horror the wealthy and powerful concoct to remain ascendant.

Marc is right that science and engineering breakthroughs have enormously benefited our quality of life. But he didn’t explicitly reference the fact that those breakthroughs only reached the masses through a very active political program.

My hero Ignaz Semmelweis was persecuted for insisting doctors wash their hands before delivering babies. Louis Pasteur’s work was funded by the wine industry.

Tech has been necessary but totally insufficient, when it comes to our quality of life. And given that tech has also been necessary in many harms (climate change, nuclear war, Myanmar genocide), it’s obvious that political and social systems were just as much a part of bringing sanitation and pasteurization to us.

(Another way to contextualize this is. The US Food and Drug Administration traces its history to a 1906 law forbidding adulterated and misbranded food, a law that took years to pass.)

New tech will just as soon as nuke us as provide us with clean water. Taxation and governance decide which of those it’ll do.

(Sorry for being long winded and using your prompt to think aloud.)

@brewsterkahle

Wouldn’t be a problem if publicly funded research wasn’t kept behind paywalls.

Yo-ho, yo-ho…..
🏴‍☠️

"One particularly intriguing idea is that of artist and software developer Darius Kazemi, who suggests every public library – there are 2.7 million worldwide – could host its own federated social media server. As well as providing local accountability and access, and boosting increasingly defunded neighbourhood assets, these servers would benefit from librarians’ expertise in curating information."

#NickDowson

https://newint.org/features/2023/02/20/what-if%E2%80%A6-social-media-were-not-profit

Intriguing idea @darius

@marcorobotics @mrt181 @vaurora We now have a better understanding of how grand masters play chess, and it’s through pattern matching and recognition and not logic. Computers are really, really good at pattern matching.

@vaurora this, but it's also amusing to note that we (collectively) spent a lot of effort to ban smartphones from SAT and other test venues so people wouldn't ace the exams by being able to look up a bunch of stuff on the Internet, and now people are freaking out that a program whose main information source is "bunch of stuff on the Internet" is acing the exams.

Amazing how many brilliant scientists will look at an LLM "passing" a standardized test and think, "wow, this computer is very smart" and not "standardized tests are very bad at measuring intelligence"

I’m organising a Group Buy to import the Nitrokey Pro 2.

If you want to get your hands on a Nitrokey to use it for storing your keys to securing your communication (and more), do check out the announcement here:

https://ask.libre.support/t/-/97

You can place an order at:

https://libretech.shop/product/nitrokey-pro-2/

Please share this with others who might want to use a Nitrokey. The goal (as of now) is to build a group of at least 50 people by 16th April, 2023.

@nitrokey

Honestly, Rust just... isn't the language I want to use. I've tried many times to like it, but I think it's time I just admit I don't care for what Rust tries to be. It always feels like it's in this uncanny valley of high-level and low-level for me. High-level features like functional programming and flexible types will be swiftly punished by Rust's low-level constraints.

I don't mean to blame people but I really believe that if you're on a decent distribution and on well-supported hardware, if your Linux install regularly breaks it is entirely and wholly your fault. I have had three (3) total issues with my system that weren't caused by myself in the past four years, and one of which is actually arguably still my fault (https://tilde.zone/@nytpu/105782619220741231).

@nytpu this should not be an argument for PHP, it should be an argument for bringing back traditional CGI or some kind of modern equivalent