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Joined 4 years ago
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Cake day: February 15th, 2021

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  • Aren’t all motivations emotional?

    I mean… what would be the “logical” reason to use FOSS? I feel you can’t just use pure logic as a form of motivation, ever. Something that only uses logic and not emotions cannot take any action like a computer algorithm made of pure logic with no hard-coded instincts that simply operates mathematically, in reality there’s no logical reason to act in one direction or another… morals/goals are always emotionally grounded.

    I feel the problem has more to do with social reasons, and pragmatic reasons.

    What determines a behavior being “extreme” often has more to do with what is the average behavior of the people you surround yourself with. It’s a relative term.

    In a world where everyone used free software and saw that as the norm, with things being designed around software being free, someone going the extra mile just to use proprietary software would be seen as “extreme” too.

    Also, I’m not convinced that the numeric balance of who killed the most from the other side in a war is what should determine who is in the wrong.



  • Ferk@lemmy.mltoPrivacy@lemmy.mlI made a gpg Hat
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    9 days ago
    • Pretty Good Privacy (PGP): The first implementation of a set of methods used for signing, encrypting, and decrypting texts, emails and files that ultimately became a standard called “OpenPGP” (RFC 4880), the program itself was commercial/proprietary. Sometimes “PGP” is also used to call the standard itself for short.

    • GNU Privacy Guard (GPG): A popular Free and Open Source program from the GNU project that uses/implements the OpenPGP standards


  • If you are happy with the default, then just use the default.

    Some of us use the terminal more than any other app, so I like my terminal to be super lightweight and snappy in all situations so it opens instantaneously (I doubt this one is like that though, if it has big dependencies like GTK / Qt), preferably if it does so without sacrificing in features (true color, things like sixel for graphics, allowing to set fallback fonts, maybe font ligatures, being able to set the app-id so my compositor can treat special terminal windows differently, etc).


  • I wonder if freeing up those resources also implies that much of the adware Microsoft often includes in Windows might be removed too.

    if it’s not: I’m skeptical that the gain in resources would be enough.

    if it is: I’m skeptical that this OS won’t be locked down as much as possible to prevent it to be used for anything useful beyond this specific gaming usecase and/or specific to pre-authorized devices.

    I think Microsoft benefits too much from the adware they add to Windows to allow this new version of the OS to potentially be used as an alternative.








  • Does the DCO really offer a real guarantee? it looks like it just adds a Signed-off-by John line at the end of the commit, with no actual signature checking that enforces any particular version of a particular document is being acknowledged. IANAL but it doesn’t look like something proven to work in court to give legal protection.

    Sure, it’s easier to simply add a sign-off-by line than actually accepting a legal agreement, so it reduces the barrier of entry, but if this were really enough to establish the conditions to shift liability then I don’t see why companies wouldn’t start using their own DCOs and extending them, essentially just being a more convenient CLA (which is a license agreement, not a copyright transfer, even if some might add terms that allow relicensing… which anyway is already possible given the project is already MIT licensed).




  • Can you tell me the political affiliation of the creator of grep? I use that tool a lot.

    I think it’s impossible to know for sure what the political thinking of the people involved in everything that happens to have contributed to something in your life is. Some people are not even easy to discern… some people are interpreted out of context, some people are just caught in drama.

    I’d rather take advantage of their work, be thankful for it but without any sort of para-social intent, just thankful for the mathematical algorthms.


  • It’s more abstract than that, because this started with “recommending hyperland”, not with “I support the creator of hyprland”.

    I assure you most users don’t know (or care) about the creator of the software they use.

    I don’t know about you, but me, myself, don’t really know the creators of every piece of libre/open source software I use.

    I’ve even contributed to software some changes I wanted, without even knowing or caring who the creators or contributors of the other components were.

    So, with that in mind, it’s not hard to imagine how this could raise a few eyebrows in people who do not agree with the approach.


  • If, by supporting this theoretical Nazi science genius, I enable him to better perform Nazism, then I have been morally complicit in his Nazism

    If you think anything that could benefit him is enabling that, then there’s all sort of things that are complicit. Even the public social services and the State might be complicit, even people who pay taxes might be complicit… international influence/opinion, the whole world, society would be complicit.

    I’m a believer of honesty and direct punishment for direct precise problems. The more abstract the punishment, the most likely it is you’d end up with the innocent paying for the sins of the guilty.

    I think people should be aware of the exact reasons why something is bad, as opposed to punishing a general abstraction without actually addressing the root of the problem. I’ve seen how this often results in people religiously believing something is good/bad based on sheep thinking, and this leads to situations that actually create more Nazis than what they destroy. An unjust punishment is just a badly patched up wound that will not really heal and instead extend to other parts. Have you considered this in your calculation of moral consequences?


  • How about we just tell the truth as is?

    But that’s exactly what I mean when I say recommend good software and recommend good thoughts.

    Why do you assume I wanna “hide” problematic information? Did I say that? What I’m saying is don’t hide the fact that good things are good. The good car will be a good car, and the manufacturer being problematic will be a problematic manufacturer.

    Recommending the good car does not imply that you support the manufacturer, and denouncing the manufacturer does not imply that their cars are bad and not something we should recommend.

    What’s the manufacturer of the device you are using right now?

    If a notorious criminal created a cure for cancer, I’ll sing praises to his amazing work, asking everyone to use it. But that dos not mean I approve of their crimes. It would be perfectly consistent with my praise of his work to, at the same time, ask for him to to be judged and sentenced accordingly for the crimes he committed…

    The world is not black and white. People are not angels just because they have one good thought, nor do they become monsters that poison everything they touch if they have one wrong thought.


  • Ferk@lemmy.mltoLinux@lemmy.mlLibreOffice is pretty damn good
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    1 month ago

    Define lack of design. You mean theming? because Linux has way more customizable theming options than the proprietary alternatives, to fit all kinds of subjective tastes.

    You mean usability? it’s the one system that you can rice up to do absolutely whatever you want to do to fit your workflow, you can configure any key to automate literally anything a desktop can do.

    The catch is that you actually do have to get your hands dirty if you want to mold the system to your liking… as opposed to being your own tastes the ones molding to adapt to whichever the designer of the OS decided should be the new tacky fashion or workflow.


  • So the bad thing is the off chance that he would benefit?

    Because that’s a very different thing. Then this should not be about judging morals related to the thing they made, but executing punishment for a completely separate thing they did.

    Then it’s not a disagreement of morals, it’s a disagreement on the approach you are taking to execute that punishment.

    I’d be very wary of using any of his breakthroughs

    Ah, but will you still use them? will you promote his breakthroughs if they help people? what if his scientific work leads to the cure for cancer?

    Punish the nazi political work, promote the scientific work.



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