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I’ve got a Nintendo Switch and Breath Of the Wild coming in the mail tomorrow. I’ll also be spending time with my family.
Not many other plans outside of that.
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I got a very good deal on an almost-maxed-out T430 and I’m going to install OpenBSD on it.
Plus I’m going to configure new services trying to avoid Google and Cloud services as much as possible, as an experiment.
I don’t think I’ll make it my daily driver, but I want it to be a “war machine” even though there is no war :)
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I write about UNIX, mechanical keyboards and geeky internet things: https://cfenollosa.com
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First of all, congrats on launching!
Could you share a bit more of its story? I’m interested whether this service has any basic use case, or you just built it for the fun (which is perfectly fine!)
One of the messages says:
Messages are grouped in channels like they are on Slack and voted like they are on Reddit. It’s using mentions like on the first version of Twitter. The only thing in common with sublevel.net is the tech stack and the fact is they are both created by me. There’s filtering of bad messages and blocking of multiple consecutive messages. Private messaging will come later.
So it’s like Twitter, but messages can be voted, and hashtags define channels?
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I like posts like these!
I know I’ll say something which is not super popular by a hacker’s standards (GUI apps, closed source etc) but this is what works for me :-)
My requisites are:
- Has to work excellently offline since I need to work on the train
- Must sync to the cloud so that I can access all info from my phone. However, phone input is not 100% necessary, as I usually carry my laptop, but I need to be able to quickly access notes and tasks on the phone.
- As few apps as possible
- Everything must be searchable
This is my workflow; I use a Macbook Air and an iPhone 4S which limits me somehow. I used a 5S and an Apple Watch but my Watch killed my phone. I honestly miss the Watch.
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A notebook when I’m working and it’s rude to open up my laptop to take notes, e.g. when I’m meeting a client. In any case, I move all notes to Google Docs afterwards. My notebook is just a “draft”
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Google docs for work. Everything goes here. When I need better formatting or compatibility I use MS Office and Keynote. Google Drive for Mac syncs my files.
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Calendar.app for meetings and events that must absolutely be done at that specific time (not tasks!)
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Things for GTD. All my tasks are there. The latest version is fantastic, an amazing piece of art, I can’t recommend it enough!
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Tasks.app because I’m using an old iPhone which cannot run Things for iOS, so I brain-dump tasks there and import them automatically to Things when I’m on my laptop.
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Notes.app for everything else, especially personal stuff – I use it like many people use Evernote
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Stickies.app for ultra quick notes that stay floating on top of anything else, or to write down the status of projects – this is useful because I have a virtual desktop for every “project” and sometimes I leave them opened for weeks before I come back to them. They do not sync, but they only apply to applications in my laptop, so I don’t need to access them from my phone.
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Mail.app for email. My inbox is not a task list anymore thanks to Things (read comment below)
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My least-optimized workflow regards messaging – I need to use all of iMessages, Whatsapp, Signal, Skype and Telegram. Such is life :(
Other tips:
- I’ve tried jrnl and org mode, but they don’t work on my phone, so I can’t use them
- I use the same app for personal and work stuff (e.g. Things). I like when I can selectively disable notifications for specific accounts (e.g. Mail) but it’s not a requirement, I have enough willpower to ignore work notifications when I’m disconnecting
- I used a heavily hacked version of IMAP inboxes for to-do’s. I wrote a script that created labels for days (e.g. 2018-05-23) and moved emails back and forth (like Boomerang) to surface them to my inbox for specific deadlines. I don’t use that anymore because Things has a shortcut to import mails into tasks and assign them a deadline. Furthermore, using mail as tasks is a bad habit. But I think my solution was clever enough :)
- I have gVim on my dock and whenever I need to quickly edit any file I just drag it there. Formerly I used TextEdit.app for this, but gVim is better for most use cases.
- I use Preview.app extensively to quickly edit images and PDFs. For heavy work, I use Pixelmator and Affinity Designer
- I watch Youtube through Miro+VLC, by downloading videos through RSS with a script I made. This lets me watch anything offline or on weak networks.
Well, that was longer than expected. Feel free to ask me anything!
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Can the admins merge this story with that one?
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Massive kudos to this guy for not putting up with this SJW madness. I wish him all the best!
We at suckless are heavily opposed to code of conducts and discriminatory organizations of any shape or form.
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It’s very simple. Any non-technological matters during software development move the software away from its ideal form. Thus, to make your software suck less, you only take the best developers no matter what race, gender, heritage, etc. these persons have.
We do not believe in equal status (i.e. e.g. forcibly obtaining a 50/50 gender ratio), as this immediately leads to discrimination. We do however strongly believe in equal rights, naturally. You also naturally cannot have both.
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Any non-technological matters during software development move the software away from its ideal form.
Suckless makes a window manager: a part of a computer that human beings, with all their rich and varying abilities and perspectives, interact with constantly. Your choices of defaults and customization options have direct impact on those humans.
For example, color schemes determine whether color-blind people are able to quickly scan active vs inactive options and understand information hierarchy. Font sizes and contrast ratios can make the interface readable, difficult, or completely unusable for visually impaired people. The sizes of click targets, double-click timeouts, and drag thresholds impact usability for those with motor difficulties. Default choices of interface, configuration, and documentation language embed the project in a particular English-speaking context, and the extent to which your team supports internationalization can limit, or expand, your user base.
With limited time and resources, you will have to make tradeoffs in your code, documentation, and community about which people your software is supportive and hostile towards. These are inherently political decisions which cannot be avoided. This is not to say that your particular choices are wrong. It’s just you are already engaged in “non-technical”, political work, because you, like everyone else here, are making a tool for human beings. The choice to minimize the thought you put into those decisions does not erase the decisions themselves.
At the community development level, your intentional and forced choices around language, schedule, pronouns, and even technical terminology can make contributors from varying backgrounds feel welcome or unwelcome, or render the community inaccessible entirely. These too are political choices. Your post above is one of them.
There is, unfortunately, no such thing as a truly neutral stance on inclusion. Consider: you wish to take only the best developers, and yet your post has already discouraged good engineers from working on your project. Doubtless it has encouraged other engineers (who may be quite skilled!) with a similar political view to your own; those who believe, for instance, that current minority representation in tech is justified, representing the best engineers available, and that efforts to change those ratios are inherently discriminatory and unjust.
Policies have impact. Consider yours.
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I don’t know if that was your goal, but this is one of the best arguments for positive discrimination I’ve read. Thanks for posting it, and also thanks for noting that all decisions have some inherent politics whether we like it or not.
Unfortunately there is simply no solution: positive discrimination is opposed to meritocracy. Forced ratios are definitely an unethical tool, as they are a form of discrimination. However, this unethical tool brings us to a greater good, which is a final product that incorporates diversity on its design and accommodates more users, which is a desirable goal on itself, for the reasons you explained.
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color schemes determine whether color-blind people are able to quickly scan active vs inactive options and understand information hierarchy. Font sizes and contrast ratios can make the interface readable, difficult, or completely unusable for visually impaired people. The sizes of click targets, double-click timeouts, and drag thresholds
Let me see if I understand what you’re saying. Are you claiming that when color schemes, font sizes and drag thresholds are chosen that that is a political decision? I think that many people would find that quite a remarkable claim.
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It’s impossible to not be political. You can be “the status quo is great and I don’t want to discuss it”, but that’s political. The open source “movement” started off political - with a strong point of view on how software economics should be changed. In particular, if you say a CoC that bans people from being abusive is unacceptable, you are making a political statement and a moral statement.
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It’s impossible to not be political
Could I ask you to clarify in what sense you are using the word “political”?
Merriam-Webster (for example) suggests several different meanings that capture ranges of activity of quite different sizes. For example, I’m sure it’s possible to act in a way which does not impinge upon “the art or science of government” but perhaps every (public) action impinges upon “the total complex of relations between people living in society”.
In what sense did you use that term?
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Let’s start off with a note about honesty. FRIGN begins by telling us “We do not believe in equal status (i.e. e.g. forcibly obtaining a 50/50 gender ratio)” as if someone was proposing the use of force to produce a 50/50 gender ratio - and we all know that wasn’t proposed by anyone. There’s no way to discuss this properly if people are going to raise false issues like that. What comment’s like FRIGN’s indicate is an unwillingness to have an open and honest conversation. The same bogus rhetoric is at the heart of Damore’s memo: he claims to be in favor of equal rights and just against mythical demand for 50/50 gender equality so that he can oppose obviously ineffective affirmative action programs at Google where 80% of technical staff are male (Damore’s misappropriation of science is similarly based on an objection to a position that nobody ever argued.).
The next point is that some people are objecting that a CoC and a minority outreach program are “political”. That’s true, but it involves the use of the more general meaning of “political” which the Collins dictionary provides as “the complex or aggregate of relationships of people in society, esp those relationships involving authority or power”. If we are using that definition, of course a CoC and a minority outreach program are political, but opposition to a CoC and a minority outreach program fits the definition as well. If you have an opinion one way or another, your opinion is political. You can’t sensibly use this wide definition of political to label the effort to adopt a CoC and to recruit more minorities and then turn around and claim your opposition to those is somehow not political. So that’s what I mean by “it is impossible to not be political”. The question is a political question and those who try to claim the high ground of being objective, disinterested, non-political for their side of the question are not being straightforward (perhaps it’s just that they are not being straightforward with themselves).
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I agree that a CoC, a minority outreach program, and opposition to a CoC all impinge upon “the complex or aggregate of relationships of people in society, esp those relationships involving authority or power”.
Would you also agree that there is a popular ideological political movement in favour of CoCs (some combination of the feminist, civil rights and social justice movements)? Perhaps there is also a popular ideological movement against CoCs (some combination of MRAs and the alt right). Are you also claiming that if one claims a “neutral” stance on CoCs one is de facto supporting one of these ideologies?
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I’m making a very concrete assertion, which I sense does not fit into your schema. My assertion is that there is no neutrality on workplace equality and inclusion for anyone involved in the workplace. Anyone who, for example, participates in an open source development effort has a position on whether efforts should be made to make it more inclusive even if that position is “this is not important enough for me to express an opinion.”
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Thank you for clarifying. When you originally said “It’s impossible to not be political” I got the wrong impression.
Do you also hold the same point of view when it comes to roughly comparable statements in other spheres? For example ‘Anyone who eats has a position on vegetarianism even if that position is “this is not important enough for me to express an opinion.”’?
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You’ve been quoted by LWN: https://lwn.net/Articles/753709/
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How are the best developers identified?
I think this is a totally reasonable question, and one I’d like to see the answer too–if for no other reason than it might help those of us on other projects find more objective metrics to help track progress with.
Do you all at suckless use something like:
- defect rate
- lines of code/feature shipped
- execution time
- space in memory, space in storage
Like, what metrics do you use?
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You know, suckless is not a big company and the metrics that can be applied are more of a heuristic. A good developer is somebody who e.g. supplies a patch with a bug report, provides feedback to commits, makes contributions to the projects, thinks his commits through and doesn’t break stuff too often and does not personally identify with their code (i.e. is not butthurt when it’s not merged).
What needs to be stressed here is that the metric “lines of code” is completely off. There are horrible programmers who spit out lots of code and excellent ones who over time drop more lines than they add. Especially the latter group is very present among us and thus the LOC-metric will only give false results. Same with execution time, you find that when not enough time is spent on a problem you end up solving it wrong, in the worst case having to start all over.
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By being very diverse and doing fackelmärsche of course. https://suckless.org/conferences/2017/
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@FRIGN What’s the purpose of this “torchlight hike” in the context of producing code that sucks less? Don’t you see that the activities you choose to have during your conferences are a cultural stance, and because of that, can be perceived as exclusive by programmers that don’t recognize themselves in these activities?
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I get your point, but must honestly say that your argument sadly aligns with the ever-excluding and self-segregating destructful nature of cultural marxism. By eating food together at the conferences, do we exclude anorexics that might otherwise be willing to attend such a conference? I don’t drink any alcohol and never have. Still, it was not a problem when we went to a local Braukeller and some people drank alcohol and others like myself didn’t.
The fundamental point I think is that one can never fully and analytically claim that a certain process is completely unaffected by something else. If we dive down into these details we would then move on and say that the different choice of clothings, hairstyle, means of travel and means of accomodation all affect the coding process at suckless. This can be taken further and further with no limit, as we all know about the butterfly effect. At some point it is just not measurable any more.
If you ask me, this is a gross overstretching of what I said. There are quite a lot of people who do not attend the conferences but still work together with us on projects during that time. What really matters is that we e.g. do not ignore patches from these people or give them less relevance than those of others. To pick the example up: The torchlight hike did not affect any coding decision in a direct way, but it really bonded the team further together and was a very nice memory of this conference that I and the others are very fond of from what I’ve heard. On top of that, during the hike we were able to philosophize about some new projects of which some have become a reality. The net-gain of this event thus was positive.
In classical philosophy, there are two main trains of thought when it comes to evaluating actions: Deontology and Teleology. Deontology measures the action itself and its ethical value, completely ignoring the higher goal in the process. Teleology is the opposite, evaluating actions only by their means to reach a goal, completely ignoring the value of the action itself. The best approach obviously should be inbetween. However, there is a much more important lesson that can be taken from here: When evaluating a decision, one needs to realize what they are measuring and what is unimportant for a decision. What I meant is that to reach the goal of software perfection, the gender and other factors of the submitters do not matter. So even though we here at suckless have a goal, we are not teleologists, as we just ignore the factors that do not matter for coding.
It is an ethical question which norms you apply to a decision.
If we look at organizations like Outreachy, one might be mistaken to think that they are deontologists, striving to improve processes. However, after closer inspection it becomes clear that this is not the case and they are actually working towards a certain goal, increasing the number of trans and minority people in such communities. No matter how you think about this goal, it makes one thing clear: When you are working towards such a goal and also do not ignore irrelevant factors in your norms (and they in fact do by not ignoring e.g. race and gender), you quickly end up discriminating against people.
I hope this clears this up a bit, but as a short sentence, what can be taken from here is: When discussing ethical matters, it’s always important to make clear which norms are applied.
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fackelmärsche
I’m not going to wade into anything else on this, but I’d like to just take a second and let you know that, while you may not mean it in this way the phrase “cultural marxism” is very, very often used as a stand in for “jews”. Some links for the record:
https://www.splcenter.org/fighting-hate/intelligence-report/2003/cultural-marxism-catching
https://newrepublic.com/article/144317/trumps-racism-myth-cultural-marxism https://www.smh.com.au/world/cultural-marxism--the-ultimate-postfactual-dog-whistle-20171102-gzd7lq.html
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It’s not my fault that some idiots don’t understand this term or it’s critical analysis. Cultural marxism, as the term implies, is the classical theory of marxism applied to culture. It has nothing to do with jews directly, it’s just an idea. If you know any better term to describe it, please let me know.
Anyway, in the philosophical realms it’s known as ‘Critical Theory’, which originated in the Frankfurt School. However, nobody knows this term.
Unless a better term is found, I disregard your argument and won’t accept your attempt to limit language of perfectly acceptable words to describe an idea. At the end of the day, terminology must be found that adequately describes what a certain idea is, and I see no reason why this should be wrong.
Regarding the torch hike: Yes, marching with torches was abused by the NSDAP as a means of political rallying. However, at least in Germany, it is a much older and deeper-reaching tradition that dates back hundreds of years.
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You have amply demonstrated that you don’t know anything about the topic. You could start with the decent Wikipedia article. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frankfurt_School
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wow, uh, kind of a weird red flag that pointing this out is getting seriously downvoted. I picked these links pretty quickly, and anybody who comes behind and reads this and wonders how serious this is, do yourself a favor and image search and see how many memes have the star of david, greedy merchant, world strangling octopus or any of a number of openly anti-semitic imagery. Its not hidden, its not coy. If you’re tossing “cultural marxism” around you’re either willfully ignoring this or blatantly playing along. Its not a thing in the world. There are no leftists (at all) who call themselves “cultural marxists”, and in fact there is a sizeable faction of marxists who are openly disdainful of any marxism that eschews political struggle. The new republic article linked above goes into this, Perry Andersons “Considerations on Western Marxism”, a well known, well regarded text across a number of marxist subsects, is explicitly based on this. Anyway, enjoy contributing to a climate of increasing hostility toward jews. good stuff.
edit: have some fun with this https://www.google.com/search?q=cultural+marxism&client=firefox-b&source=lnms&tbm=isch&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwjz2tWrhvnaAhUJ7YMKHVgcCccQ_AUIDCgD&biw=1247&bih=510#imgrc=_
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The term ‘Cultural Marxism’ describes very well what it is, and not all leftists are cultural marxists. The classical theory of marxism, roughly spoken, is to think of society as being split in two camps, the Proletariat and the Bourgeoisie, eternally involved in a struggle, where the former is discriminated against and oppresed by the latter.
Cultural Marxism applies these ideas to society. In the Frankfurt School it was called ‘Critical Theory’, calling people out to question everything that was deemed a cultural norm. What is essentially lead to was to find oppressors and oppressed, and we reached the point where e.g. the patriarchy oppressed against women, white people against minorities, christians against muslims and other religions and so forth. You get the idea. Before you go again rallying about how I target jews or something please take a note that up to this point in this comment, I have just described what cultural marxism is and have not evaluated or criticized it in any way, because this here is the wrong platform for that.
What you should keep in mind is that the nature of cultural marxism is to never be in a stable position. There will always be the hunt for the next oppressor and oppressed, which in the long run will destroy this entire movement from the inside. It was a friendly advice from my side to you not to endulge in this separatory logic, but of course I understand your reasoning to the fullest.
Just as a side note: I did not see you getting ‘seriously’ downvoted. What do you mean?
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It’s uncommon to find such a well-put explanation; thanks for that.
There will always be the hunt for the next oppressor and oppressed, which in the long run will destroy this entire movement from the inside.
If the movement runs out of good targets (and falls apart because they can’t agree on new ones), wouldn’t that imply that it will self-destruct only after it succeeds in its goals? That doesn’t sound like a bad thing.
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I’m glad you liked my explanation. :)
That is a very interesting idea, thanks for bringing this thought up! It’s a matter dependent on many different factors, I suppose. It might fall apart due to not being able to agree on new targets or when everybody has become a target, but it is a very theoretical question which one of these outcomes applies here.
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Did you actually read any of the links I posted? Specifically the New Republic and SPLC links? I don’t know how else to say this and you pretty much side stepped what I said the first time so I’ll try to reiterate it: There is no such thing as “Cultural Marxism”. At all. Its not a descriptive category that any marxist actually self applies or applies to other marxists. I’m fully aware of the Frankfurt School, Adorno, Horkheimer, etc. I’ve read some of them and many, many of their contemporaries from Germany, people like Karl Mannheim. I read marxist publications everyday, from here in the states and from Europe. I’m a member of an explicitly marxist political party here in the states. I can’t emphasize this enough, “cultural marxism” isn’t real and is roughly on par with “FEMA camps”, “HARRP rays” and shape shifting lizard jews, meaning; its a far far right wing paranoid fantasy used to wall off people from other people and an actual understanding of the material conditions of their world. I also didn’t say, specifically in fact pointing out that I wasn’t saying this, that you were “targeting jews”. That being said, if you use a phrase that has its origins in anti-semitic polemics, is used explicitly and over-whelmingly by anti-semites, than that is on you. (Did you take a look at the linked image search? Does that sort of thing not give you pause?) To say that you “just described what cultural marxism is” is also inaccurate, you absolutely used it in a descriptive way
I get your point, but must honestly say that your argument sadly aligns with the ever-excluding and self->segregating destructful nature of cultural marxism.
White supremacist organizing is experiencing an enormous upsurge, not only here in the states but in Europe as well. From Le Pen to AfD to SVO in Austria and on and on. These people are not interested in polite conversation and they’re not using “cultural marxism” as a category to illuminate political opponents, its meant to denigrate and isolate, ironically given thats exactly what Neo Nazis and white supremacists here in the states accuse left wingers and “SJWs” of doing.
I appreciate that you’re discussing this peacefully but I’m going to bow out of this thread unless you’re interested enough to take some time and read the links
FWIW these also dismantle the trope and point out pretty much exactly what I’m saying around anti-semitism: https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/78mnny/unwrapping-the-conspiracy-theory-that-drives-the-alt-right https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/feb/22/chris-uhlmann-should-mind-his-language-on-cultural-marxism
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I took some more time to read it up and from what I could see, I found that indeed cultural marxism has become more of a political slogan rather than a normal theoretical term in the USA.
Here in Germany the term “Kulturmarxismus” is much less politically charged from what I can see and thus I was surprised to get this response after I just had “translated” this term into English. It might be a lesson to first get some background on how this might be perceived internationally, however, it is a gigantic task for every term that might come around to you.
So to reiterate my question, what term could be better used instead? :)
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interesting that it has a different grounding/connotation in Germany, but then again I’m not surprised since thats where its supposed to have originated from. I’ll reread your other posts and come up with a response thats fair. Thanks for taking the time to read those links.
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Generally people who use “cultural marxism” as a pejorative are sloganeering. The idea of an “eternal struggle” is completely foreign to any kind of marxism which is based on a theory that classes come out of the historical process and disappear due the historical process. Marxism claims that the proletariat and bourgeosie are temporary divisions that arise from a certain type of economic organization. Whatever one thinks of that idea, your characterization of Marxism is like describing baseball as a game involving pucks and ice. Your summary of “cultural marxism” is even worse. Maybe take a class or read a decent book.
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Removing differing viewpoints? It is precisely this kind of behavior that maddens people who complain about SJW, who (the SJW) seem unable to take any discussion beyond calling their opponent’s position “evil”, “alt-right”, “neo-nazi”, or, if they are exceptionally well-spoken, “mad”.
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Voting isn’t a replacement of moderation. It helps highlight and reward good comments and it can punish bad comments, but it’s not sufficient for running a community. I’m trying to head off places where people give up on argument and just try to hurt or tar the people they disagree with because it doesn’t lead to a good community. Lobsters is a very good place for discussing computing and I haven’t seen that in communities this size with hands-off moderation (but I’d love counter-examples to learn from!) From a quick query, we’ve had comments from 727 unique users in the last 30 days and there’s around 15k unique IPs in the logs per weekday, so people are constantly interacting with the others who don’t know their background, don’t share history, can’t recognize in-jokes, simply don’t have reason to trust when messages are ambiguous, let alone provocative. Friendly teasing like “ah yeah, you would think that” or “lol php sucks” that’s rewarding bonding in a small, familiar group hurts in a big one because even if the recipient gets the joke and laughs along or brushes it off as harmless, it’s read by thousands of people who don’t or can’t.
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Lobsters is a very good place for discussing computing and I haven’t seen that in communities this size with hands-off moderation
I support your position on sub-topic but even my Trial you linked to shows a bit otherwise on just this point. This site has more flexible, hands-off moderation than many I’ve seen with this much political dispute. Even in that link, we saw an amount of honest, civility, and compromise I don’t usually see. There’s been quite a bit better results in this thread than usual elsewhere. There seems to be enough community closeness despite our size that people are recognizing each others positions a bit. Instead of comments, you can actually see it by what’s not said more since it’s prior ground we’ve covered. The others are learning as discussion furthers. Then, there’s the stuff we don’t want which seems to be basically what those individuals are intending in a way that has nothing to do with site’s size.
So, I support you getting rid of just pure abuse, trolling, sockpuppeting, etc. I don’t think we’ve hit the full weaknesses and limited vision of large sites yet despite our increase in comments and views. We’re still doing a lot better than average. We’re still doing it with minimal intervention on things like politics relative to what I’ve seen elsewhere. I think we can keep at current moderation strategy for now because of that. For now.
Just wanted to say that in the middle of all this.
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Voting isn’t a replacement of moderation. It helps highlight and reward good comments and it can punish bad comments, but it’s not sufficient for running a community.
I’m not sure if I see why it’s not a good replacement. To me, I see voting as distributed moderation and the “real” moderation is automatically hiding (not removing) comments when they fall below a threshold.
I’m trying to head off places where people give up on argument and just try to hurt or tar the people they disagree with because it doesn’t lead to a good community.
I think this method relies on an accurate crystal ball where you can foresee people’s actions and to an extent, the reactions of the people reading the comments.
I’d have to question what you mean by “a good community”, it seems like it’s just a place where everyone agrees with what you agree with and those that disagree aren’t heard because it risks offending those that do agree.
I think the best discussions on here are because we have many people with wide and varied opinions and backgrounds. The good comes from understanding what someone else is saying, not excluding them from the discussion. The only places I see that warranted is where someone has said something purposely and undeniably vile.
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The automatic hiding of low-scoring comments is also a “sole discretion” thing; jcs added it and I tweaked it a few months ago. The codebase enforces a lot of one moderator’s ideas of what’s good for a community in a hands-off way and the desire to do that motivated its creation.
I strongly agree that a community where everyone agrees with the moderator would be bad one, even if I am that moderator. It’s tremendously rewarding to understand why other people see things differently, if for no other reason than the selfish reason that one can’t correct learn or correct mistakes if one never sees things one doesn’t already agree with.
I think the crystal ball for foreseeing problems is experience, from many years of reading and participating in communities as they thrive or fail. I think it’s possible to recognize and intervene earlier than the really vile stuff because I’ve seen it work and I’ve seen its absence fail. I keep asking for examples of excellent large communities without active moderators because I haven’t seen those, and after a couple decades and a few hundred communities I see the anthropic principle at work: they don’t exist because they self-destruct, sink into constant vileness, or add moderation. At best they have maintain with signal-to-noise ratios far below that of Lobsters where the thoughtful commentary is crowded out by trolling, running jokes, ignorance, and plan low-quality comments because it doesn’t seem worth anyone’s while to care when posting.
But moderation is not a panacea in and of itself. Without good experience, judgment, and temper a bad moderator swiftly destroys a community, and this is a very common way communities fail. If it helps any, the author of the comment I removed agrees that it wasn’t done to suppress their opinion.
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The benefit I see from moderation being part of the codebase is that it’s public, predictable and repeatable (it terms of reliability). When you take moderation decisions into your own discretion many of these virtues are lost.
As for experience, I think that’s tricky because it can easily lead you to making the same mistake twice. It’s also made of your personal experiences and you’re using that to curate the discussion of other people, I would caution that it’s another method of controlling dialog (perhaps subconsciously) to what you find acceptable, not necessarily what’s best for everyone.
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The benefit I see from moderation being part of the codebase is that it’s public, predictable and repeatable (it terms of reliability). When you take moderation decisions into your own discretion many of these virtues are lost.
Most of them go into the Moderation Log. I’ve been watching it since the jcs days since it’s what folks are supposed to do in a transparent, accountable system. Gotta put effort in. I haven’t seen much of anything that bothered me. The bans and deletes I’ve been able to follow @pushcx doing were trolling, alleged sockpuppeting, and vicious flamewaring. Some I couldn’t see where I’d rather the resource go off the front page rather getting deleted so someone looking at logs could see it for whatever it was. Nonetheless, his actions in the thread about me, the general admining, and what I’ve seen in moderation have been mostly good. A few really good like highlighting the best examples of good character on the site. I think he’s the only one I’ve seen do that on a forum in a while.
You have little to worry about with him in my opinion at the moment. Do keep an eye on the comments and log if you’re concerned. Scrape them into version storage if concerned about deletions. What goes on here is pretty public. Relax or worry as much as you want. I’m more relaxed than worried. :)
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Yeah, I agree on the pitfalls of experience. As SeanTAllen noted in a separate branch of this thread a minute ago, there’s “but you didn’t say” and other wiggle room; I think that’s where automatic moderation falls down and human judgment is required. Voting has its own downsides like fads, groupthink, using them to disagree (which is all over this thread), in-jokes, a drifting definition of topicality, all the parallels to the behaviors of political rhetoric, etc. Lobsters has never been voting only and I don’t see a compelling reason to change that. jcs’s involvement in the site was steadily declining so I’m certainly more actively moderating, but I don’t see that as a change in character. I guess what it comes down to is that I agree with you about what successful communities do and don’t look like, but I haven’t seen one that works on the model you’ve outlined and I don’t see that kind of fundamental change as a risk worth taking.
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Not exactly, I was sarcastically non-replying because I assumed he was intentionally misunderstanding me. I assumed this because I didn’t see any ambiguity in my answer. On later inspection I noticed the ambiguity so I gave an actual reply:
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To be fair, suckless is not well-organised enough to be a group that can have a single opinion to be spoken for.
That said, FRIGN is a prominent contributor and I from what I’ve seen most contributors are heavily on the side of “the code will speak for itself”.
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Trying to finish a long running project: my e-ink computer.
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Yes, I document everything along the way. I do not like to publish about ongoing projects as I tend not to finish them when I do that :).
Both the code and the CAD designs will be open sourced once the project will be finished.
I also plan to write a proper blog post about it. I still need to figure out the proper way to do partial refresh with this screen and it should be more or less done (the wooden case still needs some adjustments).
[Edit] Typos.
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Same, I would definitely be interested in following the project progress.
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It seems to be this one, same marks on the bottom corners and the shield looks the same:
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Is that a raspi it’s hooked up to? Where did you buy the screen?
There is another guy doing e-ink stuff on the internet recently. You should go search for him. He is researching how to get decent refresh rates too.
Instead of creating a laptop-like enclosure, you should make a monitor-like enclosure. It will look way better and more reusable.
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So, one of the thigns that annoys me about this world is how we don’t have e-ink displays for lots of purposes that nowadays get done with a run of the mill tablet. You don’t need a tablet for things like a board that shows a restaurant menu, or tracking buses in the area. So why can’t I find reasonably sized E-ink displays for such purpses?
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Entirely agree with you.
I guess it can be explained by the fact that LCD screens have a better brightness, they are better to catch human eye attention.
The eink technology is bistable on the other hand, making it highly energy efficient for such applications - when no frequent updates are needed.
Energy is cheap nowadays, we don’t really care about energy consumption anymore. But I guess this might change past the peak oil.
I guess these techs will start developing as soon as energy becomes scarce and expensive.
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The Cambridge Analytics scandal has prompted me to delete Facebook and be much more aware of my privacy. I know that deleting Facebook is now a “cool” thing to do now, but it’s been a difficult decision. I still had many friends there that I have no other means of contacting. Ads have gotten much scarier recently, perfectly retargeted among services, so I was getting mentally ready for this. But stealing data for political purposes is where I draw the line.
I’ve also replaced google with DuckDuckGo, and am planning on changing my email provider too. But I don’t know if it’s going to be futile. I still shop on amazon and use many other irreplaceable services like google maps.
Again, I’m not a privacy freak. I try to find a middle ground between convenience and privacy, so these changes are hard for me
Any recommendations for a balanced solution?
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Whereas I’m about to have to get back on Facebook after being off quite a long time. I’ve simply missed too many opportunities among local friends and family info since they just refuse to get off it. Once it has them in certain numbers, they find it most convenient to post on it. That’s on top of the psychological manipulations Facebook uses to keep them there. I’ll still use alternatives, stay signed out, block JS, etc for everything I can. I will have to use it for some things for best effect.
The most interesting thing about leaving, though, was their schemes get more obvious. They tried to get me back in with fake notifications that had nothing to do with me. They’d look like those that pop up when someone responds to you but you’re not in the thread at all. They started with an attractive, Hispanic woman I’ve never seen from across the country that some friend knew. Gradually expanded to more attractive women on my Facebook but who I haven’t talked to in years or rarely like (not in my feed much). The next wave involved more friends and family I do talk to a lot. Eventually, the notifications were a mix of the exact people I’d be looking at and folks I’ve at least Liked a lot. I originally got nearly 100 notifications in (a week?) or something. Memory straining. Last time I signed in, there was something like 200-300 of them that took forever to skim with only a handful even real messages given folks knew I was avoiding Facebook.
So, that whole process was creepy as hell. Especially watching it go from strangers I guess it thought I’d like to talk to or date to people I’m cool with to close friends. A lure much like the Sirens’ song. Fortunately, it didn’t work. Instead, the services’ grip on my family and social opportunities locally are what might make me get back on. The older forms of leverage just in new medium. (sighs)
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It kind of depends on what you are trying to prevent. There are some easy wins through
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As of March 2017 US ISPs automatically opt you in to Customer Proprietary Network Information. ISPs can sell this information to 3rd parties.. You can still opt out of these.
Look for CPNI opt out with your ISP.
https://duckduckgo.com/?q=cpni+opt+out&t=ffab&ia=web -
uBlock Origin / uMatrix are great for blocking tracking systems.
These do affect sites who make they’re money based on ads however. -
Opt out of personalized adverting when possible
Reddit, Twitter, even Google give you an option for this. -
Revoke Unneeded Accesses
https://myaccount.google.com/u/1/permissions https://myaccount.google.com/u/1/device-activity
https://myaccount.google.com/u/1/privacycheckup
https://twitter.com/settings/applications -
Make your browser difficult to fingerprint.
EFF has a tool called panopticlick that can show you how common your browser’s fingerprint is. I locked down what I could (there should be instructions on panopticlick’s site), and added an extension that cycles through various common user-agents. It might sound like overkill, its not onerous to do. -
Don’t store longterm cookies.
I actually disabled this mostly. I still blocked for 3rd parties, but first party cookies are allowed now. Using a hardware key or password vault makes signing easy, but ironically the part that killed this for me more sites supporting 2FA. I use Cookie AutoDelete for Firefox. -
Change your DNS provider.
I don’t have a good suggestion for this one. I use quad-9, but I don’t really know enough to say whether or not I trust them.
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I pay $40/year for Protonmail. It is fantastic.
As for Facebook, why delete? It is actually a benefit to have an online presence for your identity, but you need to be careful with what about yourself you share. If you don’t take your online identity, someone else will. This is exactly why I’ve registered my name as a domain and kept it for years now. It is just another “string of evidence” that I am who I say I am on the internet.
My FB is just a profile picture now and nothing else. I have set my privacy settings to basically super locked down.
When it comes to socializing, there is little you can do to not be tracked. The only thing you can do is “poison the well” with fake information and keep important communication on secure channels (i.e. encrypted email, encrypted chat applications).
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I removed Facebook about 6 years ago and recently switched to Firefox beta and DDG. Gmail has had serious sticking power for me, though. I’ve had several fits and starts of switching email over the years but my Gmail is so intertwined with my identity nothing else has ever stuck.
It is possible to switch, I’m sure, but in my case, I have never committed quite enough to pull it off.
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When I got off gmail, it took about two years before I wasn’t getting anything useful forwarded to my new identity.
Setting up forwarding was quite painless and everything went smoothly otherwise. The sooner you start…
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When I looked into it, everone was suggesting FastMail if the new service needs longevity and speed. It’s in a Five Eyes country but usually safest to assume they get your stuff anyway if not using high-security software. The E2E services are nice but might not stick around. Ive found availability and message integrity to be more inportant for me than confidentiality.
People can always GPG-encrypt a file with a message if they’re worried about confidentiality. Alternatively, ask me to set up another secure medium. Some do.
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Thanks for introducing me to Dejan Nedelkovski and his Mechatronics website!
I’ve been learning electronics for a couple years, and this was a great discovery. The youtube channel is pure gold
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Wow, I considered myself a bash advanced user, but you always learn something new with one of these posts!
In this case, I found a new substitution command,
!$. I’d been using!!:2for some time but never thought of$as a “last item” replacement. Nice! -
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I might be the only person in this thread who likes the new keyboard. I use a 2017 15” Macbook Pro with Touchbar for work and find the keyboard easier to type on than my 2015 13” Macbook Pro. I like the reduced travel distance and what I perceive as a louder click when typing.
The thing that changed my life, however, is setting CAPS LOCK to be ESC. I’ve done it across all of my computers now and would not have done so without Apple giving me a nudge when removing the physical ESC key on the Touchbar Macs. I don’t miss CAPS LOCK at all and the travel distance to ESC is so much more pleasing.
I do have problems with my hand sometimes brushing the touchpad if I’ve not positioned my wrists correctly. That’s a little aggravating but I’m largely over it now in the ~4 months I’ve been using this machine. Turns out I never really used the media keys much except for volume and pause/play so I don’t mind the touchbar and the extra info it can provide in many modern apps I use (e.g. Chrome, Outlook).
To each their own?
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I can totally see switching caps lock to be esc on the touch bar model. However, people who use the CTRL key a lot, like people running Windows or Linux or spend their day inside the terminal in macOS, might find it useful to swap CTRL and Caps Lock. Vim users might then want to start using CTRL+C instead of Esc to enter normal mode.
Especially people on MacBooks or Lenovos where the Fn and CTRL keys are all wrong should consider swapping the buttons if they ever use CTRL for anything.
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Set caps lock to BOTH Ctrl and Esc!
X11: xcape (like this)
Windows: AutoHotkey (like this)
macOS: karabiner-elements-
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I haven’t tried it (I’m still on Sierra) so can’t confirm, but the Karabiner Elements repo suggests it works on High Sierra. Karabiner Elements still has far fewer features than Karabiner though.
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lattera
10 months ago
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link
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FBI uses PureVPN's 'non-existent' logs to track down internet stalker
No VPN provider is going to go to jail over the illicit use of its services by its users. It’s quite possible that prior to the FBI knocking on their door, they didn’t keep logs. I’d imagine the following scenario:
- FBI investigates, sees the suspicious traffic coming from PureVPN
- FBI gets a warrant/subpoena for PureVPN
- FBI knocks on PureVPN’s door with a warrant/subpoena
- PureVPN says “can’t fulfill that right now. We don’t keep logs.”
- FBI responds “You’ll keep logs starting today.”
- PureVPN complies, eventually providing the logs FBI needs of future accesses of the suspect
This is exactly why people should use Tor before connecting to a VPN and not the other way around. Tor hides you before you connect to an entity that can be coerced to hand over identifying information to law enforcement. But, hey, I could be completely wrong.
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This is a little tangential but I have to ask…
What do you gain by going
home → Tor → VPN → internetinstead of goinghome → Tor → internet? In the latter you have one place (home) which all your connections pass through where a wiretapper could correlate them and glean information about what you are doing from the timing information about how many packets you send when. In the former, you have two (home, VPN). This seems like a net-loss of privacy?-
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The VPN (before TOR) can hide TOR traffic.
If I remember correctly, in one case of a false bomb threat a suspect was pinned because they were the only ones on the whole school using TOR. That is, the metadata of using TOR can turn you into a suspect, as it’s not a popular service and TOR usage is scarce.
I’m curious about the other way around. How can you connect to a VPN after connecting to TOR? Routing all your traffic throuth TOR using a SOCKS proxy?
So if I’m not mistaken, a full setup (with drawbacks of course) could be:
home -> vpn (hides tor usage) -> tor -> vpn (allows UDP and hides exit node IP)
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Some sites don’t allow traffic from Tor exit nodes - routing through the VPN works around that. It also avoids the constant Cloudflare CAPTCHAs. And as @lattera said, UDP support. Some Freenet users use an anonymous VPN, via tor, to hide their IP and Freenet is UDP only.
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A VPN with more foresight could instead use a warrant canary to let its users know whether the FBI may be keeping logs.
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We looked in to this for our privacy focused VPN service for the higher education and research sector in the Netherlands. Unfortunately, the legal status of warrant canaries is unclear at best. When a intelligence agency (most have quite far-reaching powers) with jurisdiction and a legal ground compells you to cooperate, not updating the canary probably is a violation of the subpoena and/or gag order because there is no real legal difference between saying “We got a gag order!” and not saying something because you had a gag order.
Of course you can calculate the risk and potential consequences when deciding whether a warrant canary would be a good idea or not. Maybe the use of a warrant canary is worth much more to you/your organization than the potential risks of not complying with gag orders.
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The article is honestly quite poor and besides a long intro it only contains three setup instructions:
machdep.allowaperture=2pkg_add xfce xfce-extras firefox vlcexec startxfce4
FWIW, I find it much more useful to read Setup OpenBSD with full disk encryption from the same author.
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FWIW, I find it much more useful to read Setup OpenBSD with full disk encryption from the same author.
Sorry, but that one’s not much better… Why do people keep writing this up, leaving out some steps and adding their own? We’ve documented this in the FAQ and elsewhere for years now. Without suggestions like disabling swap encryption or having only a single partition for / and one for swap and no others. :(
For a relatively up-to-date and more in-depth view, see @stsp’s softraid(4) boot slides for EuroBSDCon 2015.
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carlesfe
1 year ago
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link
| on:
How I once saved half a million dollars with a one character code change
TL;DR:
I changed this:
Set<Thing> aSet = new HashSet<Thing>();To this:
Set<Thing> aSet = new HashSet<Thing>(0);on Java 1.3
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carlesfe
1 year ago
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link
| on:
This 70-Year-Old Programmer Is Preserving an Ancient Coding Language on GitHub
Non-clickbait title: Dave Shields, now 70 years old and retired, is mainly interested in just one thing these days: an obscure programming language called SPITBOL that he worked on in the 1970s and then abandoned for 30 years.
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I am a plain text fan. However, I think OP is trying to rationalize some decisions but I don’t agree at all with the conclusions.
2000+ years of education history have shown us that, even when plain text was available, people still preferred to learn via academic classes.
Books/text are a great learning resource, I agree with that, but the future of education is the natural evolution of a class: video.
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The advantage of classes isn’t the visuals, it’s the interactivity - being able to ask questions when things are unclear - and the collaboration of learning in a group. Video is the worst of both worlds - fixed-pace, no searchability, but without the advantages of class-based learning.
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I think it might be more domain/individual dependent than you’re letting on here. For example, I completely agree with you about videos being challenging to learn from in computer science or perhaps in most or all academic topics. But video is invaluable for other types of learning. Going on to YouTube and watching videos on how to service a lawnmower conveys some very dense physical information very quickly. I’ve tried reading about it—which is maybe occasionally useful because it tends to be more explanatory—but there’s nothing quite like actually seeing it done. Especially when you’re new to the task and don’t understand the vernacular or idioms used in the plain text materials.
Here’s another example. When I was learning how to build a PC many moons ago, the videos on YouTube caused me to learn a lot more quickly (and more cheaply). These days, I don’t need to watch videos any more because I can understand plain text. But getting over that initial hump was made much easier by videos.
Here’s another one. I recently purchased a basketball hoop and set out to put it together. The plain text directions with static images were pretty good, but each section of the manual included a QR code to open a video showing someone else performing that particular step. Spending 30 seconds or so watching that video gave me almost instant comprehension. Without it, I’d have to stare at the text directions and maybe fiddle with the parts a bit before I got it right.
To clarify again: I don’t outright disagree with you or @skade on this. My broader point is that if we consider all types of learning, video all of a sudden doesn’t look so bad in some areas. :-) Although, perhaps my examples demonstrate that video is only good as a supplemental tool rather than as a primary vehicle.
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Books/text are a great learning resource, I agree with that, but the future of education is the natural evolution of a class: video.
I know a lot of people that struggle with video (me included). It’s inaccessible, hard to produce, hard to remix, hard to search, linear and needs constant concentration to consume (you even have to remember to pause when there’s an interruption, instead of just coming back after wandering of). Many of these things are inherent, I can far easier bash out or read two paragraphs of wisdom anywhere, for video, I need a full setup. That’s doesn’t mean video doesn’t have its time and place. It’s just no evolution.
I once heard a great interview with a podcaster where he dispelled the notion that his medium is inferior to video. He used the image of a news show: most news show pictures are interchangable. War, bombs, some politician walking towards the senate, some people coming out of a court. Repeat an hour later, perhaps with other commentary. But yet, we choose to clog our visual channel with that. It needs concentration of all our primary channels.
Audio, on the other hand, can still transport the message, but loosing the ability to transport visual information. This means we can listen to it while doing something else, which for some people consumes better. It also doesn’t consume much energy.
I’m wandering off. The point is: video is not the evolution of written text, it’s also not the evolution of audio. They are seperate mediums.
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That’s pretty cool as a project, I guess you don’t have to take it at face value!
I work during my commute on the train, 2.5 hours every day. Thank god for laptops, phone “mobile hotspots” and noise-canceling in-ear headphones.
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What problem does this solve?
“JSON is simpler to read and write, and it’s less prone to bugs”
“For most developers, JSON is far easier to read and write than XML”
Nobody is generating or reading feeds manually, we do it with libraries. These libraries have been around for 10+ years. Users never get to read the content so aiming for readability is useless.
My code consists of object calls like
feed.item[0].contentandfeed.author. Why would I need a JSON formated feed? The object calls would be exactly the same, only to another library.Again, I honestly don’t get it. Why try to push a format which spec is exactly the same as the previous one, only implemented in another language? These guys have been around for many years so they clearly know what they’re doing.
I love json and use it everywhere but this seems like a clear case of NIH.
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Parsing a classic RSS feed is a pain though, with so many different edge cases and different implementations that it’s almost impossible to do a good one from scratch. Atom is a little better, but not as wide spread. A simple format with good documentation that’s easy to implement correctly for both new publishers and new readers can be nice.
It’s not the only one of it’s kind though, with some alternatives being eg. https://indieweb.org/h-feed which comes from the point of view that if one already has a list of posts in ones HTML, why do one need to publish another list of posts? Can’t one just decorate that list so that readers can understand them and that way get a more DRY and possibly more accurate list of posts? (Another problem with RSS-feeds has been that they often get neglected and forgotten so that meta-data such as images become a bit unrepresentative and eg. far worse than the image quality that publishers are giving to Facebook and such, so building feed technology from the perspective of the new social web and the way that Facebook, Twitter etc consumes stuff can have its advantages in data quality)
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Aside from h-feed, there’s the schema.org markup, which might be more widely supported (i.e. Google). HTML5 itself (possibly with ARIA) contains plenty of ways to mark up a blog.
I’d still stick to serving Atom to clients that request it though, there’s nothing wrong with the format, and it has precise semantics.
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The only point I disagree with you on is that this is exactly the same as RSS/Atom; it looks simpler and better defined to me. But other than that, I can only offer an anecdote on why an updated feed format might be a good idea:
When Mastodon was still getting hype, I thought it would be fun to publish my twitter feed on my own server and see who would subscribe to it. But I looked at the specs (RSS/Atom, PubSubHubBub) and thought, “Nah, I don’t want to mess with XML today.” Maybe I’m a bad person. Probably I am. :) But I bet I’m not the only one out there, so having a cleaner, nicer way to construct feeds might lower the barrier and get more people to publish.
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You’re definitely not a bad person, I’d dare say that the real bad guy is the one who invented XML ;)
However, why didn’t you use a library? It’s been a long time since I interacted with XML manually. Even DOM manipulating is XML manipulating (well, simplified XML) but we do it via selectors (CSS, xpath) and never manually parsing the XML tree.
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These libraries have been around for 10+ years.
And they still suck. We still see builds fail because a third-party web site stopped hosting a schema. We still see xpaths failing to work until you preload the list of namespaces you’re using or some other such horrible shennanigans.
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Did they provide any reason as to why you were blocked? It’s strange since your account doesn’t post copyrighted content nor retweet/participate in hatefests
No reason has been given. Was locked automatically by some rules. Unlocked manually by Twitter support team. Could not use my phone number to unlock it right away. Says it’s “not supported”.
I didn’t do anything unusual. Have no idea how to prevent future locking.