Threads for offby1
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I’m fine with this; I’ve been a 1Password user for years, and I guess I just don’t panic reflexively at the use of the word “telemetry”
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I’m at PyCon US in Salt Lake City
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If you’re still there (and it’s still there - it’s over 15 years since I was), look for a bar called the Bayou. They had the best selection of beers I’ve seen anywhere (not as many as Delirium in Brussels, but a wider variety of styles). They also did great 50:50 fries (half sweet potato, half potato). You need to be a member to go in, but you can buy a day’s membership on the door and take as many guests as you like.
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Unison. I tried syncthing, but it wasn’t able to handle the workspace I had at my previous job. My current one… maybe; I’m working with way less code now.
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I’m gonna be thinking about how github deploys github, and also upgrading the mastodon instance under wandering.shop
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Thanks for this. A great readme which leaves me with no questions.
Instead I have a question for the community more generally: do you ever need to use this class of tool if you keep multiple shell tabs open? I know I move between directories only when related to the same “theme”. With multiple shell tabs I can keep my env as I need for that task, and if I need other envs I use another tab; or if I’m on an ssh session I use multiple screen sessions.
Not a challenge to the community, rather I’m interested in learning about other people’s workflows.
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So, I use tmux, and I do use windows/panes. it’s not that I switch a single bash session between projects a lot. it’s more that I create and destroy a large amount of sessions per-project, i.e. when I decide to launch tests next to my open vim buffer I usually find myself in a situation where I don’t have an “unoccupied” shell to do so.
I could probably configure tmux to inherit environment variables from the currently active pane (I already inherit the working directory), but I feel like that would come with too many unintended consequences.
The reason we use direnv at work is quite different. We have a team dedicated to maintaining “the” developer environment. Meaning that, if you don’t want to figure out how to setup the devenv yourself, you can install direnv, check out a repo, run
direnv allow, and (at least ideally), by the time the script is done, running tests and linters should “just work”, and will continue to do so as the repo changes. That’s a good thing to have if you don’t want to onboard your frontend devs to the hellscape that is Python package management, or vice-versa with backend devs as well (yet both groups want to run the entire application end-to-end).As a result you end up with two groups of people: 1) those who value automated setup over responsiveness of their terminal 2) those who value terminal responsiveness over automated setup
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For me, the automatic shell environment tools are invaluable. Between personal and work projects, I usually have 10-30 different project environments I may need to consider at any one time, and I do jump between them in shells pretty often, especially using
z.A second use case for me is that
direnvties right into Emacs, so in each buffer I get that project’s environment automatically. I switch buffers / projects all the time.
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It removes redundancy, because the function name should already be in the call stack.
That implies that the only time you ever look at a test is when it fails. I spend a lot of time trying to navigate test organization to write new tests and review code. There’s no stack trace, so the tests just look jumbled together.
Test organization is one of the most frustrating topics, to me. It seems that every language/framework has a different approach to it, none are perfect, and it’s impossible to aggregate all the good ideas, due to technical difficulties. For example, there’s good aspects to the author’s idea, but I can’t use it in
pytestbecause test names have to start withtest_. I’ve largely broken down to using doc strings to explain tests, and I don’t love that that’s the best I can come up with.-
Test organization is one of the most frustrating topics
Yes. I haven’t seen satisfactory solutions either. One thing which helps a bit are explicit coverage marks which sometimes help you to identify where tests for specific area live.
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in pytest […] test names have to start with test_
FWIW this is configurable.
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Jeff Forcier (the author of Invoke and the maintainer of Fabric and Paramiko) wrote a plugin for Pytest that lets you specify tests in this more literate fashion as well: https://github.com/bitprophet/pytest-relaxed
It’s not quite as expressive in this regard as rspec is, but it makes for nice readable test output when it’s the right model for your tests.
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trying to keep myself and my family safe In the middle of an occupation of the capital of a G7 country. They protested at my son’s school yesterday.
Maybe trying to set up the gaming laptop into a full-fledged setup with dual monitors and an actual keyboard and mouse when I’m not doing that.
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Hey now, we are rat free!
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I’m visiting my sister for the first time in more than two years, helping her remove all of the tech traces of her ex-husband, who used to track her phone and generally did some pretty scummy shit. I’ll be installing locks with keycodes she can control, a new wifi network, and generally helping her get to a safer setup.
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Layman’s question: why is systemd not using semantic versioning? Hard to understand if any breaking changes will be coming to distros upgrading to systemd 250. I am assuming it should correspond to something like 1.250.0 if full compatibility is preserved?
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It may be as simple as Systemd predating the Semantic Versioning spec by almost five years.
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SemVer certainly matches how version numbers were first explained to me in 2007.
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The first Semver commit (ca64580) was 14 Dec 2009 with it’s first release (v0.1.0) the next day. The first Systemd commit (f0083e3) was 27 Apr 2005 with it’s first release (0.1) the same day.
I think you’re right that the first stable release of Systemd came after the Semver spec and that various forms of that practice were already around before it. In my (somewhat unreliable) memory it took years for Semver to reach the popularity it has now where it’s often expected of many projects.
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on wikipedia the initial release for systemd is listed as 30 March 2010, without any citation. perhaps it should read 27 April 2005.
also I shouldn’t have assume the initial release was called systemd 1. if they do point releases maybe they are indeed using semantic versioning.
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I think that semantic versioning is a lie, albeit a well-intentioned one. All it tells you is what the author thinks is true about their consumers’ expectations of their code, not what is actually true, so it can mislead. Having an incrementing release version says the same thing: “Something has changed” and gives the same practical guarantees: “We hope nothing you did depended on what we changed”.
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I don’t see it as a lie, more like a best effort guess at compatibility, which is really the best we could hope for.
Semantic versioning is more of a social contract than a formal proof of compatibility.
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Interesting that they support Syncthing. I was under the impression that that’s not an easy thing under iOS. Do they embed it along with this app or do something more clever? Or was my impression simply wrong?
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Do they embed it along with this app or do something more clever?
It relies on third party apps plugging into iOS via https://developer.apple.com/documentation/fileprovider
Plain Org supports any provider that hooks into the above. Folks have reported success for a handful of providers at https://www.reddit.com/r/plainorg/comments/qfrf87/please_share_how_are_you_syncing_your_files_with
Here’s how you typically enable them https://support.apple.com/en-gb/HT206481#thirdparty
In short, the Mobius Sync app seems to work for Syncthing.
Edit: added more details.
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I’d love to try setting this up, but the $9 purchase price is turning me away. It’s not that I mind paying $9 for an app, but I’d have to pay that without even knowing if there’s a suitable sync mechanism for my setup. “Seems to work” isn’t very reassuring.
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Dropbox should be fine for reading, writing, and creating new files, but not opening local links. This is for Dropbox to fix (by allowing selecting/opening folders).
Here’s a user corroborating Dropbox works fine https://www.reddit.com/r/plainorg/comments/qfrf87/comment/hi2drdl
Here’s a list of then known providers https://plainorg.com#cloud-providers and how to enable them https://support.apple.com/en-gb/HT206481#thirdparty
Please DM if I can be of more help.
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I’m being cautious here. I’ve not verified this particular syncing app myself and I don’t have a Syncthing server, so I’m a little conservative in my answer. There are a handful of users that have reported Mobius Sync app working well along Plain Org. Here’s two of them: https://www.reddit.com/r/plainorg/comments/qfrf87/comment/hi2cq9q/
ps. Refunds are possible on the App Store https://support.apple.com/en-gb/HT204084
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Well, I’m gonna go ahead and test this and will report back.
edit The combination (Mobius Sync + Plain Org) works, but syncthing files are just a regular folder that Plain Org can have access to. Since iOS doesn’t support background tasks, syncthing is active only when it’s on the foreground so essentially syncing is manual.
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Since iOS doesn’t support background tasks, syncthing is active only when it’s on the foreground so essentially syncing is manual
File providers work different than that. Syncing apps bundle additional extensions to handle file download/syncing. The extensions plug into iOS infrastructure and made available to other apps (like Plain Org) via file pickers.
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I’m not sure if this fixes the synchronization. Plain Org cannot signal to Mobius that synchronization needs to happen, so we’re stuck with Mobius having to do that. It does have a background sync functionality (https://www.mobiussync.com/faq/) but that doesn’t seem to guarantee anything beyond “this happens a few times over a day).
Perhaps this is not a big problem for most people, but I find it a bit scary that things update out-of-order – especially a problem since orgmode’s data format being simple text doesn’t support that in any way.
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Thank you!
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What’s your setup for syncing? You can test syncing without installing Plain Org itself. If the iOS Files app can view/sync the files, then Plain Org will have access to them too.
You’ll need to install whichever syncing app you need for your provider and enable it with https://support.apple.com/en-gb/HT206481#thirdparty
For users on Syncthing, they have reported using Mobius.
DM me. Happy to help.
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Thanks. I trust based off the other reviewers it does work. The lack of background syncing is probably going to keep me from purchasing, but unless you’re going to add sync natively to Plain Org nothing will likely change there.
edit: Maybe I’m the odd one here, but I’d rather have a free app that is limited without a subscription. I like to provide ongoing financial support for products I use, and this can alleviate my try before you buy concerns.
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The lack of background syncing
I’m possibly misunderstanding what is meant by background here, but when you make edits in Plain Org, they get picked up by whichever cloud syncing extension you have and synced asynchronously. The quality of each syncing provider varies with their implementation (out of the control of Plain Org).
https://developer.apple.com/documentation/fileprovider https://support.apple.com/en-gb/HT206481#thirdparty
I like to provide ongoing financial support for products I use
Tricky subject. From a developer perspective, this would make the work much more sustainable.
I asked a bunch of beta users and most were not super keen on subscriptions.
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Apple iOS restricts apps from running continuously in the background, but apps can run for short times sporadically. Möbius Sync uses various methods to invoke background behaviour. Minimum interval between quick syncs and power syncs can be configured under Settings, but iOS schedules background activity in an adaptive manner that is not predicatable and sometimes counter-intuitive. It may take 24 hours to start sync but you can expect a total of 1-2h of sync activity per day once stable.
The quality of each syncing provider surely varies, but they’re all limited by the restrictions Apple puts on background apps. I’m not asking you to re-design your app to natively to support sync, just pointing out that this is a less than ideal setup for something like notes. If I edit a note on my computer, and want to access it on my phone within a few minutes, I’ll have to open Mobius Sync force a manual sync. This is effectively what another commenter points out.
edit: I also get that technically inclined users, especially ones who have invested in an open source solution like org, aren’t keen on subscriptions. I’m just voicing my opinion in support of them, because I want the tools I like to be supported long term. :)
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Hey, thank you for Möbius Sync’s FAQ quote! I’ll reach out to author and see if things are a little different for extensions. With Plain Org being a client of the third party extension, I’d love to learn more about the extensions internals.
I’m just voicing my opinion in support of them, because I want the tools I like to be supported long term. :)
Thank you! I hope the sentiment grows. Helps all devs.
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Reading that article just brought back really painful memories of trying to grok a large and complex Perl codebase written by 4-5 different very smart people with different ideas of how they wanted to lay out the code and reference data. Arguably, I dislike the language more after reading that, mostly because I had partially forgotten how horrible it was to maintain anything written in it.
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Getting on a plane (gasp!) for the first time since Feb 2020, to fly to meet the team I now work with that has come into being entirely during the pandemic and is completely located on the far side of the country from me.
I might also do a bit of tourism in DC while I’m there.
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TIL about starship for prompts. Looks good, I will give that a try.
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I used it when it was a regular zsh script. I got tired of having to re-configure it whenever updates broke my configuration as it changed or removed features I used. I’m not sure how stable it is now but I did enjoy it while it lasted.
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I used starship previously and something happened to make it grind to a halt. I moved to romkatv/powerlevel10k and have had no such issues since. I once saw a discussion around a plug-in being implemented which was rejected as it took 10ms to run!
Edit: found the discussion, it was 11.4ms and it was reworked rather than rejected, but hopefully you get the point I was trying to make
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One aspect of my choice of Starship that doesn’t come through in this post is that I use the
fishshell as my daily driver, but I usezshandbashon remote hosts in various places. Having a consistent prompt on all three of those is a huge selling point, even if my prompt might take 50-70ms to render. -
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Doom has an active and helpful Discord. It’s actually the best place to talk about Emacs in general that I’ve found.
This is kind of sad to read. Is it related to Discord or the specific community?
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Hi I’m a moderator in the doom discord community. If it’s any consolation I have been trying to steer people toward using other resources available, particularly the mailing list.
I think we’ve grown the way we have because we’re not very strict about what the topic at hand is and understand that most users coming to doom emacs (and I expect spacemacs as well) are coming not from emacs but from vim or vim-likes and like to talk about lots of things besides emacs. This includes other text editors, games, operating systems, and more. Being off-topic is on topic in a lot of cases. Our community is also younger (at 33 I’m probably one of the oldest in the server) with lots of college and high school kids who’s online social life has been won by discord. We’re simply more approachable to them than most other emacs communities.
A lot of credit for the helpfulness can also go to Henrik who is both patient and gracious with new users and eager to help wherever he can. He sets a very friendly tone and I don’t think I’ve ever seen him troll, lighthearted or otherwise (thinking back I don’t think I’ve ever registered a swear word from him).
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If it’s any consolation I have been trying to steer people toward using other resources available, particularly the mailing list. […] Our community is also younger […] with lots of college and high school kids who’s online social life has been won by discord. We’re simply more approachable to them than most other emacs communities.
That is nice to know. As someone who is just around the “Discord generation” (22), I fear that I would have got caught up in that development. Emacs in particular was essential to my appreciation of Free Software, which is why I care about this. The other reason is that the dominance of Discord is something I often resent, as I get excluded from communities I could be interested in participating because of my own principles.
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The other reason is that the dominance of Discord is something I often resent, as I get excluded from communities I could be interested in participating because of my own principles.
In the linked comment you mentioned your hesitation to use an Electron application. Have you considered trying the Discord-Matrix bridge?
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The discord-matrix bridge allows you to communicate with a community using Discord while giving you the option of using a matrix client, which is better than being forced to use the discord client. But this requires cooperation from the moderators of the discord guild, and still doesn’t solve the problem of Discord interfering with communications on what is fundamentally their platform.
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I read that using a third party client can get your account banned for life since it is against the terms of service.
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As someone who uses
customizealmost exclusively to configure my Emacs environment, I’m curious why none of the popular Emacs enhancement frameworks use it. I found this comment in the Doom repo—does anyone have insight into what they mean here?;; Doom doesn't support `customize' and it never will. It's a clumsy interface ;; that sets variables at a time where it can be easily and unpredictably ;; overwritten. Configure things from your $DOOMDIR instead. -
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Not sure - but I will say that the community on the Doom Emacs Discord is very friendly and very helpful, and also active. So if you ask a question you’ll probably get an answer fairly quickly.
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One thing that’s helped me is having my whole dev environment set up with a Vagrant script, so I can use it in a VM on various work, home and cloud computers and still have access to all the tools I’m used to.
Another useful thing is code-server, which is a browser interface for VSCode (which is already an Electron app so it’s not too hard to put in a browser). You can run it inside Vagrant (maybe on a cloud instance) and have access to a familiar IDE.
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A little late to the discussion, but I recently switched to VSCode and I am using https://github.com/whitphx/vscode-emacs-mcx for key bindings. It’s not quite perfect of course, but nothing that trips me up on a day to day basis.
I’ve been using Emacs since ’97 or so off and on (mostly on - I used Eclipse when I was doing Java work) and so the muscle memory is quite hardwired at this point ;) I do miss recording macros on the fly (though I might guess something like that exists for VSCode already).
I do drop into a terminal and run emacs -nw or mg (usually for writing git commit messages).
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I’m not sure what is the advantage of Chezmoi over more powerful tools like Ansible, Saltstack. I take a look at the Quick Start guide and not really convinced.
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I think they are intended for different use cases. Chezmoi is about setting the user config, by copying the config files to the right places under
$HOME, while Ansible and Saltstack are for configuring the whole OS.This is a matter of a personal preference, but one should never “program” in YAML to configure anything, even the OS :)
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Author of chezmoi here. Answer to your question: https://www.chezmoi.io/docs/faq/#why-not-use-ansiblechefpuppetsalt-or-similar-to-manage-my-dotfiles-instead
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Is it just me, or are many links broken (with an unnecessary underscore at the end)?
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The chezmoi link has an additional underscore at the end, removing it redirects correctly.
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I belive that this article will interest more people: https://www.fsf.org/news/statement-of-fsf-board-on-election-of-richard-stallman
The thing with a statement like this is that I’m afraid it won’t change anyone. I see it as a reafirmatiom of RMS honesty, others won’t. I wish the conversations around these topic would become more “civilised” (for lack of a better word), so that some concensus can be reached.
That being said, I wonder what influence the open letter and the support letter had on all of this. It seems the letter of support has currently twice as many signatures as the one criticising RMS, which is supprising. Then again, I was also amused to be reminded of how small the actual community of people who actually care about these things (pro or contra) are.
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It seems the letter of support has currently twice as many signatures as the one criticising RMS, which is surprising.
As a signer of the original letter, the signatures in the original letter matter a lot more than the counterletter.
The counterletter was drafted in 4chan /g/ (I saw the thread where people were drafting it) and heavily promoted in the Eastern Bloc at first. It was posted in several Russian-speaking link aggregation sites as well as 4chan itself. Sure, it has more numbers… by a bunch of people who are not writing the free software we are using. In the original letter I see people who wrote the software I’m using, people I have collaborated in bugs with, people I have met at Debconf and Pycon. I see organisations that make free software. In the counterletter I see some personalities like esr and a lot of angry Russians who are upset that someone is telling them that women are having a bad time in free software.
A few of the signers of the counterletter managed to get some troll signatures, in Russian and 4chan references, into the original letter. They were trying to prove that this meant that there were no safeguards in the original letter and were arguing that by forcing github usernames, their signatures were more valid. Whenever I discovered these troll signatures using my limited Russian, I pointed them out and they were removed. So there were some quality checks.
Number of signatories doesn’t mean anything. The original letter even stopped accepting signatures while the counterletter kept accepting them. It’s quite easy to get a lot of people in favour of any cause if you frame that cause as being some version of “free speech”, regardless of the speech being said and regardless of all of the people RMS has alienated from free software, especially women.
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heavily promoted in the Eastern Bloc at first
I am very troubled by this. Why are opinions of free software developers in the Eastern Bloc (or Asia, for that matter) any less valid? Blend2D (a random example) is a great free software, isn’t it? Speaking as an Asian. Thanks.
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I’ve explained this elsewhere, but judging from comments they have made in Habr and presumably 4chan, their motivations are linked to anti-women, anti-LGBT initiatives common in Russia and other Slavic countries. They tend to frame kindness initiatives that do not directly benefit men as some sort of Western degeneracy. This is why their opinions on why Stallman should be head of the FSF matter less.
Also, Stallman just hasn’t toured Russia that much; most of them have probably never had to deal with him much or work with him. They don’t know him like we do.
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The way I see it, both the people around the open letter and the support letter can be divided into two respective groups. The open letter have those honestly concerned about the negative influence of Stallman on the perception of the FSF/Free Software in general, just like there are those who are honestly concerned about the integrity of the FSF/Free Software when it comes to preserving user freedoms. The second groups are respectively those who are interested in undermining Free Software and those invested in Culture-War issues issues regarding Free Speech, as you mention. The interesting thing is that both “sincere” sides will probably overestimate and focus on the latter groups. An issue structured like this will naturally lead to a cultural deadlock.
What I wonder is why you think that the open letter is in itself more legitimate than the support letter, because you recognize more developers you know. To some degree it should be expected that people you agree with will more likely be on the same side of the issue. Ultimately it would seem to me that considering that Free Software and user freedom isn’t something that should just interest developers, but users too, even if they don’t have great reputations or have met friends at conferences.
Either way, because of the deadlock and the arguing about “numbers vs. legitimateness”, I don’t think that these two sides will agree on anything. It is but another trench in this virtual conflict. All I can do is wonder if this influenced the FSF in any meaningful way.
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The original letter are people writing free software. I don’t know what the counterletter people are doing, but they’re not, for the most part, working on GNU, Debian, openSUSE, gcc, nor are they FSF members or employees or hardly anything of the sort.
This matters.
Btw: I don’t think anyone is interested in undermining free software. This is a conspiracy theory promoted by the counterletter authors and supporters, that somehow if we don’t want Stallman it must mean that we want to be serfs to FAMANG.
I support free software. I don’t have to support Stallman to do so.
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Setting aside that there are Free Software contributors that sign the support letter,
- Andrea Corallo (GCC developer, Emacs developer)
- Eli Zaretskii (GNU Emacs maintainer)
- Leah Rowe (Libreboot Project Leader)
to name a few I recognize, next to members of the same projects you mention – I repeat my question: Why does it matter?
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I think the open letter mattered a lot by starting the discussion and making it clear that a lot of people have a problem that he rejoined the board.
The support letter shows that a lot of his followers have no problem about any of his opinions or thoughts as long as he did a lot of great work.
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Demonstrably it didn’t. Neither letter mattered. The FSF did whatever it wanted.
That is what I was wondering. Did the surprising outcome of the support letter help the FSF make their decision? The reason I use the word “surprising” is that in most cases, the “right” and “wrong” sides of these discussions are quickly established, the insinuation of a majority is made on various social media platforms and the change is pushed through (such as with Stallman in 2019 or with the Linux Kernel before). I actually expected the support letter to have far less traction, whether because the position is less popular of because it is more risky to voice support for that side. The previous chapter of the controversy had the “Joint Statement” to state opposition to Stallman. The other side didn’t have anything of that sort.
Ultimately this is all speculate and doesn’t amount to anything, but it is an interesting shift (or problematic tendency, depending on your interpretations).
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it is more risky to voice support for that side
There is no greater risk to signing the counterletter. This is another conspiracy theory pushed by the counterletter, that there is a great cabal of worldwide cancellists who will harm you if you publicly support Stallman. That you need to have great bravery to sign the counterletter.
I have no hard numbers, but I believe in actuality the signers of the original letter have received more abusive emails. I got a lot when I signed the GNU joint statement asking for RMS to be removed from leadership in 2019. I’m actually really afraid about having signed the original letter. I am afraid someone will get very angry and try to track me down to my home or something like that. Well, I am not sure how likely this could be, but there’s a lot more undirected anger in the counterletter than the original letter, aimed at a vague and nebulous “cancel culture”. The original letter’s anger is more focussed on a single individual who has been holding back free software for decades.
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Not a conspiracy theory at all. I may not be hired for choosing to sign the pro-RMS letter:
https://twitter.com/jhulten/status/1376360925809106951
A tool to “block” signers of the pro-RMS letter: https://github.com/travisbrown/octocrabby
There’s even a browser extension to highlight signers, anywhere we show up.
But sure, go on. “Cancel culture” doesn’t exist!
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You’re afraid of not being hired by… some dude. I’m afraid of someone showing up in my home and trying to harm me. How many angry and threatening emails have you gotten? I got about about five in 2019.
I’m also a little afraid of not being hired by some people for having signed the letter; similar compilations exist for those who signed the original letter.
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Yes, cancel culture does exist.
However most tech companies are not bigoted enough to respect these “cancel” lists, and I’ve never seen sufficient evidence to the contrary. As to the ones who are, you would not want to work with them anyway.
Also, I predict that the future will be less woke.
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“Cancel culture” always existed, in the sense that there were entities with the power to arbitrarily take away your reputation, your livelihood, even your basic rights. Historically those entities have been major institutions such as governments and large corporations, and they have done so as a reaction against increasing liberalism.
Unsurprisingly, most of the people who now loathe and decry and bemoan “cancel culture” come down on the conservative/reactionary side and are primarily reacting to the democratization (or threat thereof) of the ability to inflict consequences based on someone’s speech, actions, associations, etc. which has been brought about by technology. When I was young, you needed a major media organization (or two or three) behind you to really “cancel” someone effectively. Now you just need a Twitter account and for what you say to catch on with enough other people. To people who were used to being the only ones wielding this power, it likely feels terrifying and so they want to treat it as a new thing. But it is simply the thing they always did, now made available to many others via technology’s ability to amplify voices, improve coordination, etc.
As to your last point, it’s worth noting that while the traditional predictor of someone’s politics (on a generic liberal <-> conservative spectrum) has been their age, it appears that is now changing and the most reliable predictors are becoming things like education level (higher education -> overwhelming more liberal tendency) and race/ethnicity (“white”/European-descended -> overwhelming more conservative tendency). So you might want to recalibrate the confidence of your prediction, especially based on a claim that measures within a young and still-developing generational cohort many of whom have not yet attended university.
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The preference of one or more organizations to avoid associating with people who publicly support someone with a behavioral track record like Stallman’s is not bigoted.
To describe it as such feels dishonest, and ignores the fact that people have legitimate concerns over how likely it is for someone who explicitly supports Stallman’s viewpoints to work in the kinds of inclusive and diverse environments that modern companies and communities seek to cultivate.
As for your prediction, I don’t think it’s very likely that the future will be less “woke”; the tweet you reference appears to be from a group that’s quite politically conservative if you go by the recent content on their timeline, so there’s quite a bit of potential for bias there.
In my experience, the tech communities that seem to be growing the most rapidly seem to focus heavily on the mind of inclusivity that I associate with “woke culture” (e.g, JavaScript and Rust).
By comparison, communities that try to stay “apolitical” (in their own words, not mine) seem to attract more abrasive and disruptive contributors who do nothing to help their relevance.
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Painting over 6000 people as being automatically opposed in some form to inclusivity, just because they stand against the witch hunt of RMS, and then seeking to “cancel” them is the very definition of bigotry (”intolerance toward those who hold different opinions from oneself”). It is also disingenuous to suggest that any organizations doing the cancellation is doing it only as a “preference”, as if there is no political / mob pressure behind the scenes.
As for your allusion to a group being (according to you) politically conservative, that only seems to be a discrediting tactic used so as to avoid having to address the central point (the statistics quoted in the tweet).
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It is not a witch hunt. He’s not a witch. He’s a guy who has demonstrably harmed free software in many ways. He was a terrible boss at the FSF (for example, refused to give raises because his logic is that wages would then increase without bound, bankrupting the FSF), he has creeped out many women, he has yelled and lost his temper at the very people who are trying to support his cause, he has defended zoophilia, pedophilia, and necrophilia, his main activism is ineffective language nitpicking and advocating technological abnegation.
Not wanting him in charge is not the same as wanting him burned at the stake.
And please don’t make me come up with links for all of these things. It’s really tiring to have to be an archivist for all of these things. Look them up yourself and if you can’t find them, then I’ll try to help.
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Oh, that’s what you were asking:
They matter less because they haven’t actually directly dealt with him. They haven’t worked on software he has tried to have a voice in, they haven’t seen him at conferences, they haven’t had him directly yell at them.
They don’t know him. So their opinions of him are less well-founded.
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More names here:
https://www.debian.org/vote/2021/vote_002
I count 20 people seconding one of “Support Stallman’s reinstatement, as in rms-support-letter.github.io” and “Denounce the witch-hunt against RMS and the FSF” proposals,
- Adrian Bunk [bunk@debian.org] [mail]
- Norbert Preining [preining@debian.org] [mail]
- Jonas Smedegaard [js@debian.org] [mail]
- Ying-Chun Liu [paulliu@debian.org] [mail]
- Barak A. Pearlmutter [bap@debian.org] [mail]
- Adam Borowski [kilobyte@debian.org] [mail]
- Micha Lenk [micha@debian.org] [mail]
- Michael Biebl [biebl@debian.org] [mail]
- Bart Martens [bartm@debian.org] [mail] [confirm]
- Jonas Smedegaard [js@debian.org] [mail] [confirm] [confirm] [confirm]
- Pierre-Elliott Bécue [peb@debian.org] [mail]
- Daniel Lenharo [lenharo@debian.org] [mail]
- Milan Kupcevic [milan@debian.org] [mail] [confirm]
- Michael Biebl [biebl@debian.org] [mail] [confirm]
- Axel Beckert [abe@debian.org] [mail]
- Gilles Filippini [pini@debian.org] [mail] [confirm]
- Filippo Rusconi [lopippo@debian.org] [mail]
- Shengjing Zhu [zhsj@debian.org] [mail]
- Matteo F. Vescovi [mfv@debian.org] [mail] [confirm]
- Mathias Behrle [mbehrle@debian.org] [mail]
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both for and against and various shades in between.
The 20 Debian folks I included however were all for (not against) supporting Stallman. I only included it (and this is only from Debian) because you wrote “the counterletter people are [….] not, for the most part, working on GNU, Debian, openSUSE, gcc,”.
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It seems the letter of support has currently twice as many signatures as the one criticising RMS, which is supprising.
RMS has a very religious almost cult following. So no surprise there. Also the RMS open letter GitHub repo stopped accepting signatures on April 1st. The support one still accepts signatures to this date.
I did a very quick look at the signers of the RMS support letter, looked at a very small amount of accounts closer and there where a couple of things that stood out and seemed fishy:
- lots of Russian sounding names
- some of them where newly created (for example 31. March), had their first PR against the repository or had very little activity the last year
This could be coincidence or people created their account because of this letter but it could also mean that people created new account or used other means to inflate the numbers.
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Russia has a well-documented state-sponsored homophobia. The recent Russian bill to ban gay marriage, even foreign-made gay marriage, had over 70% support in the polls. These attitudes trickle down and they’re popular with the general Russophone population, not just with the governments. A widespread belief in Slavic countries is that gay acceptance is some Western-induced degeneracy that didn’t really exist in Soviet times, along with some kind of desire to go back to the good ol’ days when LGBT people didn’t “exist”.
Thus, a letter that is perceived to defend someone (RMS) who has been attacked by the LGBT community will be popular in Russia and surrounding countries. The discourse in 4chan framed the counterletter as being explicitly drafted to give trans people a kick in the head. They consistently used transphobic slurs to refer to me and other signatories of the original letter.
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This is such a wild take. Heck, you could’ve said something like “they’re Russian bots” and that would be somewhat acceptable. You didn’t stop to consider that they could’ve had other motivations (so many better ones!) for having signed it? This is a very bad generalization of the Russian populace, akin to calling all Americans gun-touting redneck hillbillies.
The real reason for most of the Russian signatures was the letter being shared on some Russian link-aggregator site(s).
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No, they’re not bots, they’re real. And talking to them in the github issues of the counterletter, they are very angry about women and minorities being promoted. This seems to be a strong implicit reason for their alignment with the defense of Stallman. They want to defend their freedom of speech to be awful to women and minorities because being nice is censorship.
Of course I generalised, because we have voting numbers. At least 70% of the Russian population is homophobic.
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At least 70% of the Russian population is homophobic.
I’d really like to see what are your sources for this claim.
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I gave you the source: the voting numbers of the Russian bill passed yesterday to ban gay marriage. It had widespread support. These are not deeply-hidden facts that are difficult to find.
But here, there’s plenty more sources:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LGBT_rights_in_Russia#Public_opinion_2
If anything, I was giving Russians the benefit of the doubt with 70% It seems closer to 80%.
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Here’s how I understand your reasoning:
- Russian government is homophobic and polls show that many russian citizens also are (that is true)
- Many people who supported the counter-letter are from Russia (also true)
- Therefore they support RMS because they are homophobic.
You can tell me to go find it myself. But, it’s you making claims. When I’m making a claim, I’m ready to bear the burden of proof, or I say that it’s just my opinion that may be too far-fetched or entirely untrue. You present your statements as facts but are unwilling to present any proofs, and I don’t think it makes you look more trustworthy, even if your statements are true.
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The last claim comes as an inference and from statements I have seen in 4chan and Habr, in English and Russian. 4chan quite openly frames support for the counterletter as a homophobic and transphobic cause. It’s more subtle in the Habr comments, but it does happen there too.
It’s more difficult to find it in Habr because my Russian is rudimentary but if you’d like, I can do that too, in case your own Russian isn’t good enough.
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Yes, it was posted to Habr:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Habr
I can’t find the original post, but they coordinated attacks on the original letter from Habr, for example:
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These are the same sort of people who are trying to directly harm Molly de Blanc, getting her arrested or swatted. I won’t link to that attack, but there is a lot of anger and implied violence against the original letter. This thing posted to Habr is the same sort of angry violence, trying to get legal authorities involved.
It’s not exactly the same thing, it’s not both sides. I am not calling for Stallman to be arrested or harmed. I just don’t want him leading the FSF or GNU.
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You are accusing people of coordinating an attack and giving a link to something that clearly isn’t that (not a thread where an attack coordination took place). Then you say you won’t give a real link. Why should I believe you?
The post you linked to doesn’t call for violence towards anyone, either. Also, “calls for violence” and “calls for authorities to get involved” are kinda mutually exclusive things.
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It’s not hard to find the Molly de Blanc attack page. Look for it yourself.
Also, “calls for violence” and “calls for authorities to get involved” are kinda mutually exclusive things.
Not in the US. Swatting has gotten people killed. Swatters hope people will get killed. This is an unfortunate by-product of militarisation of the US police force: calling cops on someone can be a death sentence.
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I’m talking about the attack site on Molly de Blanc that I don’t want to link.
But incorrectly citing laws on Github is a similar sort of aggression, driven by similar rage. You’re right it won’t lead to a swatting but I have seen the same group endorse both kinds of actions.
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It’s a copy of the deleted issue that someone posted there after the fact, and it received a whole three comments (all general remarks about the situation, no specific action proposals). Since that post clearly is not about coordinating an attack, I assumed JordiGH is referring to something else—most likely the rms-support-letter itself.
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Who cares where they’re from? What matters is whether they’re just random names, or if they’re actively involved in the business of the FSF (and, therefore, are more likely to know what they’re talking about).
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It seems the letter of support has currently twice as many signatures as the one criticising RMS, which is supprising.
I don’t know. It seems to me that pretty much nobody knows who RMS is, and a significant portion of those who do don’t care about him. So it makes sense that the ones who bother to do something about it are the ones who support him.
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I used to work at AWS and nothing here surprises me (up to and including DHH beating his chest about how his decisions have always been right). I like Werner Vogels’ response to this: https://www.allthingsdistributed.com/2023/05/monoliths-are-not-dinosaurs.html
“Microservices” at Amazon also may not mean the same thing to everyone who looks at them. Each one is commonly maintained by an entire team, with operational tooling specific to them – dashboards, alerting, etc – and there is deep technical support for some kinds of them (if you work at Amazon, don’t @ me about the variability of that support; until a half year ago I was in Builder Tools and worked closely with the teams that own all the “new” stuff). There are also “many tiny lambda” services; it’s a spectrum.
Anyway, yeah, Amazon can and does “make sense of serverless”. As a company they also change direction when the one they’ve got isn’t working.