why i never

Server-side rendering is a thing.

Well, they’re also private, for-profit companies that legally own and sell the lines. So, there’s another political angle where people might vote against the regulations under theory that government shouldn’t dictate how you run your business or use your property, esp if it cost you money. Under theory of benefiting owners and shareholders, these companies are legal entities specifically created to generate as much profit from those lines as possible. If you don’t like it, build and sell your own lines. That’s what they’d say.

They don’t realize how hard it is to deploy an ISP on a shoe-string budget to areas where existing players already paid off the expensive part of the investment, can undercut you into bankruptcy, and (per people claiming to be ISP founders on Hacker News) will even cut competitors’ lines “accidentally” so their own customers leave them. In the last case, it’s hard to file and win a lawsuit if you just lost all your revenue and opponent has over a billion in the bank. They all just quit.

But without net neutrality, the ISPs still have an incentive to provide equal service, because otherwise they’ll lose customers (for obvious reasons).

I think this is too optimistic. I live in Chicago, the third biggest city in the country and arguably the tech hub of the midwest. In my building I get to choose between AT&T and Comcast. I’m considered lucky: most of my friends in the city get one option, period. If their ISP starts doing anything shady they don’t have an option to switch, because there’s nobody they can switch to.

Net neutrality is being pushed by the media because it “fights discrimination”, and they blame the “fascist, nazi right” for it’s repeal

Nobody says this. It’s being pushed because it prevents large corporations from locking out smaller players. The Internet is a great economic equalizer: I can start a business and put a website up and I’m just as visible and accessible as Microsoft.

We don’t want Microsoft to be able to pay AT&T to slow traffic to my website but not theirs. It breaks the free market by allowing collusion that can’t be easily overcome. It’s like the telephone network; I can’t go run wires to everyone’s house, but I want my customers to be able to call me. I don’t want my competitors to pay AT&T to make it harder to call me than to call them.

But without net neutrality, the ISPs still have an incentive to provide equal service, because otherwise they’ll lose customers (for obvious reasons).

That assumes people have a choice. They very often don’t. Internet service has a massively high barrier to entry, similar to a public utility. Most markets in the United States have at most two providers (both major corporations opposed to net neutrality). Very, very rarely is there a third.

More importantly, there are only five tier-1 networks in the United States. Five. It doesn’t matter how many local ISPs there are; without Net Neutrality, five corporations effectively control what can and can’t be transmitted. If those five decide something should be slowed down or forbidden, there is nothing I can do. Changing to a different provider won’t do a thing.

(And of those five, all of them donate significantly more to one major political party than the other, and the former Associate General Counsel of one of them is currently chairman of the FCC…)

I can’t speak to why open-source advocates are also pushing for net neutrality, because (in my opinion) the government shouldn’t be involved in how much internet costs.

Net neutrality says nothing about how much it costs. It just says you can’t charge different amounts based on content. It would be like television stations charging more money to Republican candidates to run ads than to Democratic candidates. They’re free to charge whatever they want; they’re not free to charge different people different amounts based on the content of the message.

Democracy requires communication. It does no good to say “freedom!” if the major corporations can effectively silence whoever they want. “At least it’s not the government” is not a good defense of stifling public debate.

And there’s a difference between a newspaper and a television/radio station/internet service. I can buy a printing press and make a newspaper and refuse to carry whatever I want. There are no practical limits to the number of printing presses in the country.

There is a limited electromagnetic spectrum. Not just anyone can broadcast a TV signal. There is a limit to how many cables can be run on utility polls or buried underground. Therefore, discourse carried over those media are required to operate more in the public trust than others. As they become more essential to a healthy democracy, that only becomes more important. It’s silly to say “you still have freedom of speech” if you’re blocked from television, radio, the Internet, and so on. Those are the public forums of our day. That a corporation is doing the blocking doesn’t make it any better than if the government were to do it.

Side note, the reason you don’t see the protests against the “gatekeepers” is that most of the mainstream media isn’t accurately covering the reaction of the people to the censorship.

There’s a big difference between Twitter not wanting to carry Alex Jones and net neutrality. Jones is still free to go start up a website that carries his message; with Net Neutrality not only could he be blocked from Twitter, but the network itself could make his website inaccessible.

There is no alternative with Net Neutrality. You can’t build your own Internet. Without mandating equal treatment of traffic, we hand the Internet over solely to the big players. Preventing monopolistic and oligarchic control of public discourse is a valid use of government power. It’s not censorship, it’s the exact opposite.

Even though I’m favoring net neutrality, I appreciate you braving the conservative position on this here on Lobsters. I did listen to a lot of them. What I found is most had reasonable arguments but had no idea about what ISP’s did, are doing, are themselves paying Tier 1’s, etc. Their media sources’ bias (all have bias) favoring ISP’s for some reason didn’t tell them any of it. So, even if they’d have agreed with us (maybe, maybe not), they’d have never reached those conclusions since they were missing crucial information to reflect on when choosing to regulate or not regulate.

An example is one telling me companies like Netflix should pay more to Comcast per GB or whatever since they used more. The guy didn’t know Comcast refuses to do that when paying Tier 1’s negotiating transit agreements instead that worked entirely different. He didn’t know AT&T refused to give telephones or data lines to rural areas even if they were willing to pay what others did. He didn’t know they could roll out gigabit today for same prices but intentionally kept his service slow to increase profit knowing he couldn’t switch for speed. He wasn’t aware of most of the abuses they were doing. He still stayed with his position since that guy in particular went heavily with his favorite, media folks. However, he didn’t like any of that stuff which his outlets never even told him about. Even if he disagrees, I think he should disagree based on an informed decision if possible since there’s plenty smart conservatives out there who might even favor net neutrality if no better alternative. I gave him a chance to do that.

So, I’m going to give you this comment by @lorddimwit quickly showing how they ignored the demand to maximize profit, this comment by @dotmacro showing some abuses they do with their market control, and this article that gives nice history of what free market did with each communications medium with the damage that resulted. Also note that the Internet itself was an open, free-if-you-have-a-wire system that competed with the proprietary, charge-per-use, lock-them-in-forever-if-possible systems the private sector was offering. It smashed them so hard you might have even never heard of them or forgotten a lot about them depending on your age. It also democratized more goods than about anything other than maybe transportation. Probably should stick with the principles that made that happen to keep innovation rolling. Net neutrality was one of them that was practiced informally at first then put into law as the private sector got too much power and was abusing it. We should keep doing what worked instead of the practices ISP’s want that didn’t work but will increase their profits at our expense for nothing in return. That is what they want: give us less or as little improvement in every way over time while charging us more. It’s what they’re already doing.

But without net neutrality, the ISPs still have an incentive to provide equal service, because otherwise they’ll lose customers (for obvious reasons).

What obvious reasons? Because customers will switch providers if they don’t treat all traffic equally? That would require (a) users are able to tell if a provider prioritizes certain traffic, and (b) that there is a viable alternative to switch to. I have no confidence in either.

But without net neutrality, the ISPs still have an incentive to provide equal service, because otherwise they’ll lose customers (for obvious reasons).

Most customers have exceedingly limited options in their area, and they’re not going to switch houses because of their ISP. Especially in apartment complexes, you see cases where, say, Comcast has the lockdown on an entire population and there really isn’t a reasonable alternative.

In a truly free market, maybe I’d agree with you, but the regulatory environment and natural monopolistic characteristics of telecomm just don’t support the case.

But without net neutrality, the ISPs still have an incentive to provide equal service, because otherwise they’ll lose customers (for obvious reasons).

Awkward political jabs aside, most of your statements imply that you believe customers are free to choose who they get their internet from, which is just plain incorrect. Whatever arguments you want to make against net neutrality, there is one indisputable fact that you cannot just ignore or paper over:

ISPs do not operate in a free market.

In the vast majority of the US, cable and telephone companies are granted local monopolies in the areas they operate. That is why they must be regulated. As the Mozilla blog said, they have both the incentive and means to abuse their customers and they’ve already been caught doing it on multiple occasions.

All of that is gibberish. Net Neutrality is being pushed because it creates a more competitive marketplace. None of it has anything to do with professional liar Alex Jones.

But without net neutrality, the ISPs still have an incentive to provide equal service, because otherwise they’ll lose customers (for obvious reasons).

That’ s not how markets work. And it’s not how the technology or permit process for ISPs work. There is very little competition among ISPs in the US market.

Hey, here’s a great example from HN of the crap they pull without net neutrality. They advertised “unlimited,” throttled it secretly, admitted it, and forced them to pay extra to get actual unlimited.

@lorddimwit add this to your collection. Throttling and fake unlimited been going on long time but they couldve got people killed doing it to first responders. Id have not seen that coming just for PR reasons or avoiding local, govt regulation if nothing else.

I can’t speak to why open-source advocates are also pushing for net neutrality, because (in my opinion) the government shouldn’t be involved in how much internet costs.

It’s not about how much internet costs, it’s about protecting freedom of access to information, and blocking things like zero-rated traffic that encourage monopolies and discourage competition. If I pay for a certain amount of traffic, ISPs shouldn’t be allowed to turn to Google and say “want me to prioritize YouTube traffic over Netflix traffic? Pay me!”

Net neutrality is being pushed by the media because it “fights discrimination”, and they blame the “fascist, nazi right” for it’s repeal (and they’re correct, except for the “fascist, nazi” bit).

Where on earth did you hear that? I sure hope you’re not making it up—you’ll find this site doesn’t take too kindly to that.

Didn’t ls predate the Unix Philosophy? There’s a lot of crufthistory in unix. dd is another example.

None of that invalidates the philosophy that arose through an extended design exploration and process.

nobody said it’s set in stone; it’s a set of principles to be applied based on practicality. like any design principle, it can be applied beyond usefulness. some remarks:

• i don’t see where ls violates composability. the -l format was specifically designed to be easy to grep.
• the sorting options are an example of practicality. they don’t require a lot of code, and would be much more clumsy to implement as a script (specifically when you don’t output the fields you’re sorting on)
• about formatting, i assume you’re referring to columniation, which to my knowledge was not in any version of ls released by Bell Labs. checking whether stdout is a terminal is indeed an ugly violation.

[3] I’d particularly appreciate a link to NeoVim criticism for being anti-Unix. Were they similarly criticizing Vim?

Yes, when VIM incorporated a terminal. Which is explicitly against its design goals. From the VIM 7.4 :help design-not

VIM IS... NOT                                           *design-not*

- Vim is not a shell or an Operating System.  You will not be able to run a
  shell inside Vim or use it to control a debugger.  This should work the
  other way around: Use Vim as a component from a shell or in an IDE.
  A satirical way to say this: "Unlike Emacs, Vim does not attempt to include
  everything but the kitchen sink, but some people say that you can clean one
  with it.  ;-)"

Neo-VIM appears to acknowledge their departure from VIM’s initial design as their :help design-not has been trimmed and only reads:

NVIM IS... NOT                                          design-not

Nvim is not an operating system; instead it should be composed with other
tools or hosted as a component. Marvim once said: "Unlike Emacs, Nvim does not
include the kitchen sink... but it's good for plumbing."

Now as a primarily Emacs user I see nothing wrong with not following the UNIX philosophy, but at it is clear that NeoVIM has pushed away from that direction. And because that direction was an against their initial design it is reasonable for users that liked the initial design to criticism NeoVIM because moving further away from the UNIX philosophy.

Not that VIM hadn’t already become something more than ‘just edit text’, take quickfix for example. A better example of how an editor can solve the same problem by adhering to the Unix Philosophy of composition through text processing would be Acme. Check out Acme’s alternative to quickfix https://youtu.be/dP1xVpMPn8M?t=551

akkartik, which part of my comment did you identify with? :) FWIW, I’m fond of you personally.

I’d particularly appreciate a link to NeoVim criticism for being anti-Unix

Every single Hacker News thread about Neovim.

Were they similarly criticizing Vim?

Not until I reply as such–and the response is hem-and-haw.

claiming everyone that disagrees with you is a ‘slashdot markov chain’ or similar idiotic crap

My claim is about the thoughtless shoveling of groundless rumors. Also I don’t think my quip was idiotic.

there are lots of alternatives to sysvinit that aren’t systemd

That’s fine, I never disparaged alternatives. I said: systemd is good and I’m annoyed that the grumblers said it wasn’t.

That’s nice, but the implication of the anti-systemd chorus was that sys v init was good enough. Not all of these other “reasonable objections” that people are breathless to mention.

The timbre reminded me of people who say autotools is preferrable to cmake. People making a lot of noise about irrelevant details and ignoring the net gain.

But you writing this sounds like someone hearing that systemd is bad, therefore never looking at it, yet copying it.

No, I’m reacting to the idea that the systemd controversy took up any space in my mind at all. It’s good software. It doesn’t matter if X or Y is technically better, the popular narrative was that systemd is a negative thing, a net-loss.

are you saying that neovim conforms to the unix philosophy, and therefore people who say it doesn’t must not know what they’re talking about?

When the implication is that Vim better aligns with the unix philosophy, yes, anyone who avers that doesn’t know what they’re talking about. “Unix philosophy” was never a goal of Vim (”:help design-not” was strongly worded to that effect until last year, but it was never true anyways) and shows a deep lack of familiarity with Vim’s features.

Some people likewise speak of a mythical “Vim way” which again means basically nothing. But that’s a different topic.

Yes.

https://gitea.io/en-us/

The only issue that I have with it is sharing my organization details. Although you could do it manually, I’m always a bit annoyed about this.

Some battles won, too many lost.

What were some of the wins?

You’re on week three of your new job at a big city ad and design firm. Getting that first paycheck was nice, but the credit card bill from the moving expenses is coming up, that first month of big city rent wiped out your savings, and you don’t really have a local personal network to find new jobs. The customer wants a fourth “tag” for analytics tracking. Do you:

1. Put it in
2. Engage in a debate about engineering ethics with your boss and his boss (who drives a white Range Rover and always seems to have the sniffles after lunch) culminating with someone screaming and you storming out, never to return?

Web devs know that auto play videos and newsletter pop ups are annoying but annoying people is profitable

No, you block on a domain basis so that security hole is not even needed to get around it. Its not going to save you from the government, just bloated websites and advertising.

How did they choose their email provider? Not be carefully weighing the technical options, surely. They chose whatever their friends or parents used, because with working federation it doesn’t matter.

In contrast to mastodon instances - which are very alike - email providers have differentiated on the interface and guarantees they provide and market that. People react to that.

How did they choose their email provider?

I think federated apps like Mastodon are fundamentally different than email providers. Most email providers are sustainable businesses, they earn money with adds or paid plans or whatever and have their own emails servers and clients with specific features. Self-hosted email servers are a minority. Please tell if I wrong, but I don’t think one can easily earn money with a Mastodon instance.

However I agree that both are federated.

You’re certainly not wrong, though I would argue that email, particularly as it was 20+ years ago when it went “mainstream”, is much simpler (for instance, it doesn’t require any long-term persistence or complicated access control) and therefore easier to federate successfully (in a way that humans can handle) than social networking.

In the case of Mastodon, which instance you pick does matter. Users can make posts that are only visible to others in the same instance. If you pick the “wrong” home instance, you’ll have to make another account in another instance to see the instance-private posts there. If you’re a new Mastodon user, you might not know that one instance is good for artists and another good for musicians, etc. In any case, this is as easily solvable problem by adding descriptions and user-provided reviews to each instance.

Facebook and Twitter also present single valuable targets and are thus more likely to be targeted. A hundred mastodon instances may be individually less secure due to the operators having fewer resources or less experience, but compromising a single server won’t get you as much.

I said replace ad revenue, not implement ad revenue. Things like https://en.liberapay.com/ seem interesting, you are right there.

Yeah, If I was going to host a video for reasons other than profit, I would consider just setting an instance up.

I assume the thing everyone is kind of getting at is Flutter, which is the preferred IDE for Fuchsia and it’s not Java-encumbered.

Have you ever tried to manually configure wireless on linux? It’s a nightmare. Always has been.

No. The Linux’s I use come with an out-of-the-box experience that makes wireless as easy as clicking a box, clicking a name, typing in the password, it works, and it reconnects when nearby. They have been like that since I bought an Ubuntu-specific Dell a long time ago. They knew it was a critical feature that needed to work easily with no effort with some doing that upon installation so parts of the install could be downloaded over WiFi. Then, they did whatever they had to do in their constraints (time/talent/available code) to get it done.

And then I was able to use it with only breaks being wireless driver issues that had answers on Q&A sites. Although that was annoying, I didn’t have to think about something critical I shouldn’t have to think about. Great product development in action for an audience that has other things to do than screw around with half-built wireless services. That’s a complement about what I used rather than a jab at OpenBSD’s which I didn’t use. I’m merely saying quite a few of us appreciate stuff that saves us time once or many times. If common and critical, adoption can go up if it’s a solved problem with minimal intervention out of the box.

That said, props to your project member who solved the problem with a minimally-complex solution in terms of code and dependencies. I’m sure that was hard work. I also appreciate you illustrating that for us with your comparisons. The difference is almost comical in the work people put in with very different talents, goals and constraints. And m4 isn’t gone yet. (sighs)

This is really great. I wish all other projects can do that, preferring elegancy to throwing code on the wall, but sometimes life really takes its toll and we cave and just make Frankenstein to get shit done.

I really appreciate all the works by OpenBSD folks. Do you have any idea how other *BSD’s deal with the wireless?

It’s almost like if you prioritize the stuff that truly matters, and be willing to accept a little bit of UX inconvenience, you might happen upon a formula that produces reliable software? Who would have thought?

I think this is just a matter of what you think matters. There’s no sadness here. The ability to trade off security for features and vice versa is good. It lets us accept the level of risk we like.

On the other hand, it’s really sad, for instance, that OpenBSD has had so many public security flaws compared to my kernel ;P

I’m getting a bit tired of every complaint and remark being reduced to entitlement. Yes, I know that there is a lot of unjustified entitlement in the world, and it is rampant in the open source world, but I don’t feel entitled to anything in free or open source software space. As someone trying to write software in my spare time, I understand how hard it is to find spare time for any non-trivial task when it’s not your job.

Though I am not a heavy user, I think OpenBSD is an impressive piece of software, with a lot of thought and effort put into the design and robustness of the implementation.

I just think it’s somewhat disheartening that something this common (switching wireless networks) was not possible without manual action (rewriting a configuration file, or swapping configuration files, and restarting the network interface) every time you needed to switch or moved from home to the office.

Whether you feel like this is me lamenting the fact that there are so few contributors to important open source projects, me lamenting the fact that it is so hard to make time to work on said project, or me being an entitled prick asking for features on software I don’t pay for (in money or in time/effort) is entirely your business.

First, both free speech and hacker culture say that person can gripe about what they want. They’re sharing ideas online that someone might agree with or act on. We have a diverse audience, too.

Second, the project itself has developers that write cocky stuff about their system, mock the other systems, talk that one time about how they expect more people to be paying them with donations, more recently talk about doing things like a hypervisor for adoption, and so on. Any group doing any of that deserves no exception to criticism or mockery by users or potential users. It’s why I slammed them hard in critiques, only toning it down for the nice ones I met. People liking critiques of other projects or wanting adoption/donations should definitely see others’ critiques of their projects, esp if its adoption/donation blockers. I mean, Mac’s had a seemless experience called Rendevous or something in 2002. If I’m reading the thread right, that was 16 years before OpenBSD something similar they wanted to make official. That OpenBSD members are always bragging when they’re ahead of other OS’s on something is why I’m mentioning it. Equal treatment isn’t always nice.

“But, I do care that people aren’t berating developers with: “That’s great, but ____” comments. Let’s support each other, instead of feigning gratitude. It wasn’t clear if that’s what you were doing, hence, my request for clarification.”

I did want to point out that we’ve had a lots of OpenBSD-related submissions and comments with snarky remarks about what other developers or projects were doing. I at least don’t recall you trying to shut them down with counterpoints assessing their civility or positivity toward other projects (say NetBSD or Linux). Seems a little inconsistent. My memory is broken, though. So, are you going to be countering every negative remark OpenBSD developers or supporters make about projects with different goals telling them to be positive and supportive only? A general rule of yours? Or are you giving them a pass for some reason but applying the rule to critics of OpenBSD choices?

i think he’s sad that there haven’t been enough volunteers to make it happen sooner