Yeah, I was pretty intimidated just looking at it for the first time. Seeing my purchases in plain view like that tipped me over into using a competing mail server.
I don't need Google's help to search through my purchase emails. My emails are well-filtered into categories. And where that's not sufficient, search terms aren't difficult to use.
Google automatically collecting a list of purchases goes beyond what I expect an email provider to do.
Personally, I'm not a fan of email being plaintext and think everyone should use encrypted email (GPG, ProtonMail, Tutanota, etc). I think it's absolutely inappropriate for Google to track such things even if it has access, and it shouldn't have access IMO in the first place.
While I understand the moral absolute standpoint, he fails to state how he sees such free facilities being maintained. While in many areas this can be done by local councils and paid for via relevant taxation, or by requiring local businesses to provide free facilities as part of their requirements of doing business in the area, those options do not cover everywhere (and the latter will be fought hard by business lobbying groups).
I hope he isn't naive enough to expect to be able to rely on human nature meaning the general public will keep free facilities in good working order and in a sanitary state!
Stallman lives in a particular bubble and that bubble has defined his viewpoints to a degree that he cannot fathom not being able to live his life in that way.
The question of "who does that" or "who pays for that" ultimately comes down to some form of slavery or coercion. Or the question is just avoided. Because "capitalism is evil". Or "what about wage slavery". Or something about how we have intrinsic value as sentient beings and shouldn't be required "to provide value" in order to "just survive".
And I'm like "Ok. But who cleans the public toilet?" How do you get someone to agree to that? I'll clean my toilet, sure. But I'm not cleaning the public toilet unless I'm being forced to or I'm being compensated for doing so.
Using the words "slavery" and "coercion" makes taxes sound like a horrible idea, but I don't think it's a radical idea to have clean public toilets paid for by taxes.
Its the perfect use case of taxes: a pool of money for public well being. Being able to pee freely in a sanitary area and not on the ground is benefitting the public well being.
Currently, that is how public toilets are cleaned. Taxes are used to pay the wages of the people who clean public toilets.
But if everything is a public good, then where is that money coming from?
Somehow I get the feeling people think that socialism or communism is something we can add on top of our existing system.
I don't buy that assumption.
If we're all "providing for the general welfare", why is there income?
No matter what, the answers always come down to either capitalism or slavery, but with extra steps. Either we acknowledge that certain tasks will need rewards attached to them to entice people to do them. Which just basically takes us to capitalism, but people feel that as long as we don't dick around with money, it's not really capitalism. Or we acknowledge that we'll have to force people to do certain tasks. And I'm not comfortable with that.
I don't know what happened to our other conversation - but thanks for the edit on 1984 - I must have pulled that from back to the future in my head!
I definitely do agree there are aspects of our lives going towards TNG. I think parts of our psyche are going towards 1984. There is definitely less fighting of the system per se these days. Much more surveillance, both from the corporate world and the government world. There are people still dying at the hands of the police - and I get the police are in danger, but some of that danger is definitely societally self-inflicted to some degree.
And all that being true there's definitely aspects of TNG that are like 1984 - can you imagine trying to hide a petty crime in TNG - they would have so much surveillance and data it would be near impossible.
If you agree with the moral standpoint, and it seems to be feasible at least in Japan, why not try to find ways to make it more widespread in other countries?
To be fair, there's a lot to dislike about each of those services/companies even if you don't agree with his uncompromising stance on Free Software. I also dislike most of those companies, but for very different reasons from him (I prefer BSD-style licenses and am 10% okay with proprietary software for noncritical stuff).
There are alternatives to them. You do not have to miss out on the fun! :) For example looking at that list, his issue is not with e-books in general, but e-books from Amazon because of DRM. You buy only access to your e-books, movies (Netflix), games (Steam), and so on. You cannot even start most single player games without having logged into Steam!
I strip the DRM from all the books I "buy" from Audible and Amazon. It's an imperfect solution, since I'm still giving them money for DRM encumbered media, but I can live with that.
It probably is since all of these services serve to alienate you from your fellow human beings in pretty insidious ways. I bet he is much more present and interesting. I stopped hanging out with people who could only regurgitate their social media lives in conversation and nothing else.
I'm kind of torn. I think he's interesting and has interesting views, but they don't really align with my own (generally). He's way more absolutist than I am though: I'm fine with Apple/Microsoft/etc. from a cost vs value perspective. He trends more towards the "the software isn't free so the software isn't good to use" line.
There have been some take downs he's done that were either spot on at the time or later showed themselves to have been almost prophetic, so I think credit must be given there.
It isn't, at least for me specifically. I don't much care being lectured at.
That said, and although I think he takes a lot of things too far, I also think that (in general) it's useful to have someone articulating one far pole of the debate about user freedoms. I suppose the counter-argument is that extremism causes some people to tune out entirely but I don't really buy that's the case here.
I mean yeah he's famous, but has he actually made anything useful or interesting? I did a quick search and it seems like his main claim to fame is copyleft activism/zealotry as well as some obscure OS I've never heard of called "GNU Project" which, as far as I can tell, nobody uses (presumably because it is in the same vein as TempleOS).
well the linux kernel is compiled with the gnu compiler project, so literally everyone uses it if they connect to the internet or have an android phone.
Most of linux's userland is GNU, including the well-used bash,gcc,grep,tar,ls,etc (it's why he rather annoyingly insists on people calling it GNU/linux). So to say nobody uses it is very, very false. Nobody uses the GNU kernel HURD, which is what you're thinking of.
That being said, he's a very eccentric person and his contributions to computing in the last 20ish years have been minimal. GCC has been losing market share to llvm and bash to zsh/fish. You could also argue that had he never created GNU, BSD would be where linux is today and we'd be just as well, if not better, off.
That seems like a pretty huge stretch to me. Yeah there may be a few people here and there that change their default shell to zsh or fish, but I don't see it happening in large swaths.
Is there some big pocket of Linux users doing this that I am unware of?
For shell scripting, no bash is still very much the champion there.
For interactive shells, I'm seeing very high usage for zsh (mostly due to oh-my-zsh) and a handful of fish users. Essentially lots power terminal users.
Interesting. I spent some time looking for information about what makes oh-my-zsh so great, and was unable to find anything of substance. Do you personally use oh-my-zsh, or you just see others using it?
I'd be interested to hear from anyone who does. I have looked at zsh (and fish, for that matter) in the past and have not come away with a burning desire to switch, but I am open to being convinced it is worth another look.
If anyone has a top 10 or top 5 reasons why they run oh-my-zsh, I'd like to hear them. I tried to find something along those lines, but didn't have any luck.
(BTW, I thought it was obvious that I was discussing interactive shells, since my original response specifically discussed people changing their default shell to zsh or fish. It would seem silly (to me) to think either of those would ever displace bash for shell scripting.)
For me, it was the more modern tab completion. Traditionally, you'd start typing something, then TAB to complete if there was a file starting with something. With oh-my-zsh, you can use a later part of a file. So if you had a file called foo-bar-file.txt you could type `ls bar` then tab and it would autocomplete foo-bar-file.txt. It's much more clever like that. It's really helpful when I'm going through strange directories and vaguely remember what I'm looking for.
oh-my-zsh also has many other well-made tab completions for other programs, so you can TAB complete for things like docker, git, brew, various OSX commands, pip, python, and TONS of other stuff.
The powerline font git integration (like here: https://raw.githubusercontent.com/Falkor/dotfiles/master/scr... ) also is a large improvement over what bash can do. There's also a lot of visual enhancements if you use pyenv or various other language equivalents (eg ruby).
...GNU provides pretty much the entire userspace on a standard Linux setup. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_GNU_packages for a list of software that's part of GNU; just a few examples are bash, coreutils (cat, ls, mv, rm, etc.), gcc, glibc (the C standard library used on most Linux systems), GIMP, and emacs.
He held a talk at my university recently. During the QA, every time a student asked RMS a question, he would spend 2 minutes correcting the formulation of the question, and then dismissing the actual question with a snarky remark.
For instance, one student asked something about RMS being the "CEO" of FSF, followed by snarky remarks by RMS that "FSF is not a company and that he is actually the president".
(I might remember wrong, but it was something along those lines)
I understand and respect him and his beliefs, but his personality just annoys me.
RMS might appear a bit difficult at times, but I don't think that was a good example. Other left-leaning founders of public benefit organizations might be mildly insulted by being called CEO as well.
I've gone to a fair few lectures by Stallman and got to hang out and chat with him afterwards.
1) He is really serious about his crummy coffee. Like, he was brewing a pot on stage as he was talking at like 9pm. Like, a Walmart brand drip coffee maker, none of this french-press stuff.
2) He has a really bad 'dead fish' handshake. Like, Really bad.
3) He is SUPER dedicated to what he does and that is super admirable. I wish his vision of software and hardware was the default idea, not the corpo-spy state that we have eneded up with. That world would be a lot better. But it's asking far to much of people with only an 8th grade reading level.
4) He actually is really cool to hang out with and talk to. However, he is for more matured and knowledgable people. He kinda talks over the new CS peeps and really doesn't have time for them and their questions. He's not a professor and that shows.
5) Unsupprisingly, he's not good with millenial/gen-z women. Some of it is that he's from a different generation and he hasn't been in the same world as them, some of it is the sterotype that he is a nerdy, doughy, Linux guru. He could be better, but he's not as bad as a Google exec. by any means.
6) All the lecutres I went to where he was speaking were amazing and have really shaped a lot of my brain around software and what it is. Time very well spent.
The biggest problem with google is not the JavaScript but the fact hat if they delete your account you lose everything including YouTube, gmail, saved stuff, etc. and appeal is virtually impossible. Anyone that relies on google accounts is at risk of having their account closed for arbitrary reasons.
No you can't. When Google blocks your login, there's no way to get your data out. This happens constantly with someone posting on Hackernews as their support channel when this happens to them.
>In general, most Google services require running nonfree Javascript code. If you refuse to run that (for instance, by running LibreJS), you'll see that you should not use those services.
Well, I use Google Maps just about every single day so Stallman's advice banning Javascript is way too hardcore for me.
But for sake of discussion, let's entertain what he's suggesting. What are the most practical alternatives to avoid Google's Javascript maps in 2019?
- other websites like Bing Maps and even openstreetmap.org also don't work without Javascript
- using local software like old CDROMs of map software means I'm using data that's 20 years old because no mainstream software publisher (e.g. Microsoft Streets, DeLorme, etc) is selling it and only cover a region instead of the entire globe. Also that CD software is proprietary and not free-as-in-libre.
- using folding paper maps like Rand McNally have similar problems to CDROMs -- the maps are old and more cumbersome.
- other alternatives I overlooked are ... ?
Inevitably, this leads to the condescending question... "How did we get by _before_ Google Maps?!?"
I got by in the past by making the usage of maps more inconvenient.
EDIT to replies about OpenStreetMap: Last I checked, OpenStreetMap doesn't have publicly accessible satellite images or 3D/birdseye views or street-level 360 degree views. Openstreetcam is missing a lot of roads. I use that type of photographic imagery even more than the line drawings of streets. Is there a practical non-Javascript alternative for that data?
Well, if you're going to cry about using something that runs on the entire web, then that's your alternative. Or grab a Garmin, though I'm sure Stallman probably believes there is a mind control listening device in those too.
I doubt there are any web clients that don't use JavaScript, though. How would that even work?
Like, I can understand being peeved at the use of JS for text that really doesn't need it. But something like a mapping app, I don't see how you get around it.
But the complaint is being misread. In "require running nonfree Javascript code" Stallman isn't saying "require running Javascript code, which we all know is inherently nonfree". He's saying "require running particular Javascript code which in this instance is nonfree." A web client that uses free (as in speech, not as in bird) Javascript code is presumably fine.
It won't satisfy rms but seriously: Apple Maps, which is actually good now.
The Maps app on Macs and iOS does not use JavaScript. It also supports satellite and 3d views, and the street view shipping in a month looks better than what Google offers:
Note that the discussion here is about JavaScript code, not JavaScript the programming language (there seems to have been some confusion in this thread).
Also note that being able to read the code doesn't entail that the code is free as in freedom (i.e., released under a corresponding license). If you share some non-trivial[0] code of yours on GitHub, or deploy a website with your own non-trivial JS code, it still fully belongs to you, and people are not free to reuse it without asking you.
[0]: you probably cannot claim much for a hello world even if you wrote it yourself
Thanks for that link and info. My reading is that it seems the GNU’s/FSF’s issue with JavaScript is that the code is not always available (to view/peruse):
“It is possible to release a JavaScript program as free software, by distributing the source code under a free software license. If the program is self-contained—if its functioning and purpose are independent of the page it came in—that is fine; you can copy it to a file on your machine, modify it, and visit that file with a browser to run it. But that is an unusual case.” [0]
JS code can obviously be client-side (generally readable in a browser via View Source, but not always, unless I am mistaken) or server-side (not generally readable, unless explicitly shared by the devs).
But based on [1] and [2] and [3], it appears that JS the language is owned and maintained by ECMA, which is a not-for-profit standards org.
So then I’m still a bit confused as to who whose lawyers would be coming after you if you published some JS code on Github or your own web-site? Not the ECMA’s right?
You can publish as much of your own javascript code as you want under any license on your website or github, or anywhere. The issue they have is not with the ownership of javascript the language. The issue is that if you wanted to take the frontend code to Facebook, Google Maps, Office 365, or something like that, and modify it to create your own version, you have two problems. One, that it probably isn't allowed by the license and the Facebook/Google/Microsoft lawyers could come after you if you tried to redistribute it. Two, it's likely it will be very difficult to attempt to do that because the code is intentionally obfuscated by a javascript minifier.
So really their (FSF/GNU) issue is not with JS at all, but with devs who don’t licence their code under a free software licence? In other words, who enforce the copyright of their own algorithms?
What I also find a bit confusing (inconsistent?) with this stance is that a dev can do a reasonable amount of interesting things with HTML+CSS+SVG (obviously there are limits on the ‘interaction’ side of things), and assumably devs can also licence their HTML+CSS+SVG under whatever licence they wish: so then why pick on JS?
I think they would if we got to a point where HTML+CSS+SVG alone was turing-complete and became useful enough to perform general computations, and large programs were written in it.
Try downloading their code, use it on your site and tell us what their lawyers thought of that argument after you've brought to court for copyright infringement.
You are misunderstanding Stallman's argument. He doesn't have a problem with Javascript. He has a problem with non-free javascript. He probably would have even more of a problem with Apple Maps because it's an entirely proprietary program.
He has nothing against javascript. He is against non-free javascript which is just non-free software running in your browser. Using Openstreetmap is fine because you don't have to run non-free software on your computer.
Almost all proprietary javascript is obfuscated and tracks everything you do, will identify you and can compromise your system. It's no different than any other non-free software maybe with some better (but nowhere near perfect) isolation from your system provided by the browser you are using.
There are also pretty good free mobile map apps that are on f-droid.
Meh, that's subjective - he's extremely cogent if you watch or read his talks. If you turn your mind to think that the society we are in is not the healthiest one, then he's very healthy.
Not everyone goes about changing the world like the unibomber does. Would you rather Stallman or his points never had existed in the first place? I would think the world rather evil if people couldn't strive to do things differently.
I'm fine with Stallman existing (of course) but his moralism is generally without merit. Sacrifices have to be made to compete in modern markets and you can't make everyone happy.
Or all the Google properties, I believe YouTube has the biggest moat and the barrier to exit, for users if not creators, because of all the content on it.
Given that all this content is publicly available, And I believe there were some legal cases, such as LinkedIn v. HiQ one, which, IMNAL, but allowed scraping of public content, I wonder if an entity can legally scrape YouTube and provide non-Google access to it, while preserving creator's copyright?
I'm pretty sure you will need the creator's permission to re host the video. Otherwise it's just piracy.
In the LinkedIn case the scraping was allowed, I don't think that HiQ is creating a mirror. Also there's a case for LinkedIn not having much copywritable content there, only information.
YouTube's real moat is that after years of operation they're managing to maybe break even, even with Google's insane infra. It's just doesn't seem that profitable to host all the videos for free.
Richard Stallman talks a lot about freedom, but what he means by this is not what's typically meant by freedom. When we say freedom, we usually mean freedom of choice. But his version is the communist version, which is freedom from choice.
His primary reasons for wanting to avoid services are not because of traditional ethical concerns. His ethics are not traditional, and he clearly states this on his personal website when he talks about pedophilia not actually being immoral.
Rather, they're because these services or companies do not give our their source code under a communistic license that Stallman approves of, one that specifically restricts a user's freedom to do what he wishes with that software, and the developer's freedom to choose how people can use the software. And all of this so that consumers have totalitarian freedom over their software.
This isn't how freedom works with anything else. You are allowed to buy the parts needed to make a flamethrower, but you're generally not allowed to assemble them into one. Your freedom over your property is restricted by the rights of others, which in this case includes the right to a safe environment.
We should not have absolute freedom over the source code that produced the software we possess just because they are digital. We received 1s and 0s that our computer knows how to execute. This doesn't mean we have an absolute right to know how it's made. In the same way, we don't have an absolute right to know how fast food chains combine their ingredients into the perfect dish. We have some right to know what ingredients they contain for the sake of safety, but they have a right to keep the recipe secret.
Communist principles are against true individual freedom, which must take into account the society that we live in and the rights of those we live with, because we don't live in a vacuum. And the GNU has fully bought into communist principles, trying to enforce limitations of freedom on individuals in the name of ultimate greater freedom for all.
> the communist version, which is freedom from choice.
Bullshit.
> Communist principles are against true individual freedom, which must take into account the society that we live in and the rights of those we live with, because we don't live in a vacuum.
Even worse bullshit. It's not communists who confuse freedom with the state not doing things.
> And the GNU has fully bought into communist principles, trying to enforce limitations of freedom on individuals in the name of ultimate greater freedom for all.
Please don't take HN threads further into generic ideological flamewar. Also, please don't call names in arguments or post in the flamewar style generally. We're trying for something a bit different than that here.
> And the GNU has fully bought into communist principles, trying to enforce limitations of freedom on individuals in the name of ultimate greater freedom for all.
Just read this twice.
GNU has some issues. But it is definitely not this.
> limiting the developer's freedom for the sake of the expanding user's freedom.
This is like saying the outlaw of murder encroaches on your freedom to end life. The elimination of freedom to hide code that's executing on CPUs I own from myself is not a bad or unethical thing.
> This is like saying the outlaw of murder encroaches on your freedom to end life.
That's a great analogy, and it further proves my point: suicide is murder, and nobody has a right to take their own life, because it doesn't only belong to them, but to society also, to anyone they have or may ever have obligations to.
People have freedom and rights, but their freedoms are restricted by the rights of others.
People have a right to use their knowledge toward a goal, which includes keeping it secret if need be, as long as it does not impose on the rights of others.
Nobody has an absolute right to all knowledge.
Therefore people are not required to give away knowledge.
So then why would you allow knowledge you don't control on a device that obeys knowledge indirectly in the form of compiled or assembled code?
If I freely can choose not to run that code--for example, I can choose an open source program over a closed one--there is no ethical dilemma.
If I can't, then it is unethical. For example, Intel requires a closed-source binary blob to be run to initialize the CPU (the Firmware Support Package), even before the UEFI is initialized, otherwise the CPU won't run. Intel does not allow reverse engineering of this code. We have no idea what it's really doing. I can't use the CPU without this.
Now, what if this code does something other than initialize the CPU, such as allow remote access to this system, perhaps as part of an industrial espionage regime or other privacy invading scheme.
I have NO WAY of legally verifying the code does what it says it does if it's hidden.
I'm failing to see how hiding code is more ethical than not hiding it in situations like these.
You can choose not to run the code by choosing not to buy that computer. Let the market come up with an alternative that guarantees that it doesn't do anything unethical and allows you to inspect it.
Alternatively, and probably a better option, is that laws could be made to enforce companies requiring to pass some kind of test to ensure that it's not doing something in a list of banned things, such as espionage. This is how emissions tests work, and although people scammed those, they were penalized for it (and probably should have been far more). But it doesn't follow that companies should have to reveal all their secrets to prove to the general public that they pass these basic tests.
What we are building is the perfect society for the rule of individualism. Capitalism is the god, greed is the motivation, and not being liable is how we be careful.
There's no way out. Even TNG predicted WWIII entire global population and for humanity to suffer its most embarrassing chapter to get out of it:
There are other modes of life, based on trust of mankind, instead of fear of it. That's the other thing TNG shows - all those people in Starfleet - they aren't being paid to be on that ship. They're trying to show that humanity is capable of post-capitalism. It doesn't have to be this way.
(That's the planet Stallman lives - or at least wants to)
My God, these posts attacking capitalism get tedious.
Capitalism is just a codification of people's wants / needs. It's structured demand mixed with some basic contract law to hold people accountable to their own promises. That's it.
If you deride capitalism you're already implicitly saying that "what people want" is "bad". By condemning the system you're already implying that even the highest desires of humans aren't good enough.
>There are other modes of life, based on trust of mankind
Capitalism is already based on trust of mankind, since it is based on giving people what they desire, as long as it doesn't infringe on the basic human rights of others.
There are other ways to allocate resources and all of them are FAR INFERIOR which has been shown time, and time and time again.
You're conflating market economies (that have been around since basically forever and that no one except the most hardcore anarcho-primitivists are attacking) and modern day capitalism (which has been around since the Industrial Revolution and is characterized by its lack of upper limit on wealth accumulation).
Sure, fair enough, I'm conflating the two for the sake of simplicity, and frankly because the idea of a "limit on wealth accumulation" is a fairly muddy distinction. (A limit placed by whom? enforced how? etc. Even with soft limits this would still be called "capitalism" would it not?)
I guarantee that most people, including the the person I'm responding to, do not make a distinction between market economies and capitalism in the manner you just did. He's talking about Star Trek utopia, nothing grounded in reality or history.
I like how absolutist you are about your guarantee. Almost as if even if I did say there's a way forward with changes to capitalism and not necessarily having "Star Trek utopia" is not even an option for me. Do you speak for others all the time?
> My God, these posts attacking capitalism get tedious.
This is hacker news. I've never said such-and-such's view on capitalism is so damn tedious. That's like a punch, an attempt to sway with no actual content.
> Capitalism is just a codification of people's wants / needs. It's structured demand mixed with some basic contract law to hold people accountable to their own promises. That's it. If you deride capitalism you're already implicitly saying that "what people want" is "bad". By condemning the system you're already implying that even the highest desires of humans aren't good enough.
You've basically set up what you think is a logic tautology for yourself - at this point nothing anyone can say can ever be useful in the context of humanity if it goes against capitalism. That's pretty useless in terms of progress. So it is impossible to have humans without capitalism? And going against that is going against humanity. Interesting take. I don't see any point in arguing that line of logic. You win.
> Capitalism is already based on trust of mankind, since it is based on giving people what they desire, as long as it doesn't infringe on the basic human rights of others. There are other ways to allocate resources and all of them are FAR INFERIOR which has been shown time, and time and time again.
Also, since the wheel has been invented, we shall not try to go further. Thanks for the optimism.
Sorry to hit a sore spot, but there was plenty of "real content" in my post, which you didn't respond to.
>You've basically set up what you think is a logic tautology for yourself - at this point nothing anyone can say can ever be useful in the context of humanity if it goes against capitalism.
Correct. Capitalism is so efficient it's the sole reason we are able to cram 7B people on this little planet, for better or worse.
Countries that move away from capitalism end up in such poor shape that they essentially collapse, and then you have tons of "economic refugees" everywhere.
It's not impossible to have humans without capitalism, but it's definitely not possible to have 7B of them splitting resources as efficiently as we do now without it.
The Federation is a post-scarcity society. They've figured out how to change matter into energy and back again. That does change a lot of things. We don't get to the Federation without solving scarcity.
And while no one is being paid to be on that ship (although that is debatable as there does seem to be some form of currency that individual Starfleet members receive and use), there is competition to be on that ship.
Being on that ship is the compensation for the work. Being one of the few selected to essentially be in this sort of elite class is the privilege.
And even on the ship, there are differences between crew members. The captain's quarters are better than the lower officers. The captain has his own private office just off the bridge.
And being a television show and work of fiction, they get to gloss over a ton of stuff. The acquisition and creation of the materials to build something like the Enterprise is as much a fantasy in the work as is the fact that they can replicate Earth-like gravity in the middle of space.
I get all that - I am just kinda hoping for you know, something between what we have and what we look forward to / dream about. I won't be disappointed if we go further away from 1985 and closer to TNG even if we never reach it.
Only Stallman would begin a "reasons to not use Google" post with a rant about modern webpages requiring JavaScript, as if there aren't a million higher priority reasons TO DUMP GOOGLE.
I can't help but feel that having such an extremist as the face of the FSF has greatly hindered it in its mission.
Stallman is the diametric opposite of Google. As such he is ground zero of the opposition. He raises awareness and has concrete if impractical solutions. The truth we seek is, IMO, somewhere close to the Google/ad network and Stallman/privacy concerns nexus.
That's like saying Fascists and Communists are polar opposites. They may disagree completely on economic policy, but they're both authoritarian assholes. Stallman is only for "freedom" as long as it's his complete and unwavering vision for his personal freedom, damn everyone else.
Yes, they're two sides of the same, "my way or the highway" coin. Stallman has made it clear that he would destroy the right of private digital property, if he had the power.
I don't know how you draw that conclusion. The goal of the FSF, since the beginning, has been to make a computing platform that the user has full control over. They aren't the ones trying to push everyone's data into the cloud.
Uh, fascists and communist are polar opposites, but authoritarianism has nothing to do with communism by definition. If Stalin implemented an authoritarian regime while using the term "communism", that does not make communism a regime based on authoritarianism. It's nice to remember North Korea consider themselves a "People's Republic" but I'm sure you do not believe it is a democracy just because of a name or official designation; likewise, late stage western capitalism consider themselves "Representative Democracies", but a solid argument could be made comparing those nations with nazifascist states of the 1930s. Things are not so simple and simplifying such complex topics is what leads to populist governments rising. I believe we should not dumb things down. Instead, we should believe people are capable of critical thinking and we must help them see the whole picture for themselves instead of spreading McCarthist stories about the communist boogeyman.
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[ 3.0 ms ] story [ 203 ms ] threadhttps://www.cnbc.com/2019/05/17/google-gmail-tracks-purchase...
Google can help you search the purchases.
If you see either of those as odd, then I pretty much don't get your viewpoint.
But sure, the next question is does Google explicitly USE that data in any other way. That's a different question, though.
Google automatically collecting a list of purchases goes beyond what I expect an email provider to do.
"What's bad about: Airbnb | Amazon | Amtrak | Ancestry | Apple | Discord | Ebooks | Eventbrite | Evernote | Facebook | Google | Intel | LinkedIn | Lyft | Meetup | Microsoft | Netflix | Patreon | Pay Toilets | Skype | Slack | Spotify | Twitter | Uber | Wendy's |"
While I understand the moral absolute standpoint, he fails to state how he sees such free facilities being maintained. While in many areas this can be done by local councils and paid for via relevant taxation, or by requiring local businesses to provide free facilities as part of their requirements of doing business in the area, those options do not cover everywhere (and the latter will be fought hard by business lobbying groups).
I hope he isn't naive enough to expect to be able to rely on human nature meaning the general public will keep free facilities in good working order and in a sanitary state!
The balance is radically weighted to the other side. Unfortunately the counter-weight must be equally radical to approach any sort of balance.
He certainly strikes up some valuable discussions
The question of "who does that" or "who pays for that" ultimately comes down to some form of slavery or coercion. Or the question is just avoided. Because "capitalism is evil". Or "what about wage slavery". Or something about how we have intrinsic value as sentient beings and shouldn't be required "to provide value" in order to "just survive".
And I'm like "Ok. But who cleans the public toilet?" How do you get someone to agree to that? I'll clean my toilet, sure. But I'm not cleaning the public toilet unless I'm being forced to or I'm being compensated for doing so.
But if everything is a public good, then where is that money coming from?
Somehow I get the feeling people think that socialism or communism is something we can add on top of our existing system.
I don't buy that assumption.
If we're all "providing for the general welfare", why is there income?
No matter what, the answers always come down to either capitalism or slavery, but with extra steps. Either we acknowledge that certain tasks will need rewards attached to them to entice people to do them. Which just basically takes us to capitalism, but people feel that as long as we don't dick around with money, it's not really capitalism. Or we acknowledge that we'll have to force people to do certain tasks. And I'm not comfortable with that.
I definitely do agree there are aspects of our lives going towards TNG. I think parts of our psyche are going towards 1984. There is definitely less fighting of the system per se these days. Much more surveillance, both from the corporate world and the government world. There are people still dying at the hands of the police - and I get the police are in danger, but some of that danger is definitely societally self-inflicted to some degree.
And all that being true there's definitely aspects of TNG that are like 1984 - can you imagine trying to hide a petty crime in TNG - they would have so much surveillance and data it would be near impossible.
If you agree with the moral standpoint, and it seems to be feasible at least in Japan, why not try to find ways to make it more widespread in other countries?
A reasonable answer is to pirate everything you buy so you always have a DRM free copy.
There have been some take downs he's done that were either spot on at the time or later showed themselves to have been almost prophetic, so I think credit must be given there.
That said, and although I think he takes a lot of things too far, I also think that (in general) it's useful to have someone articulating one far pole of the debate about user freedoms. I suppose the counter-argument is that extremism causes some people to tune out entirely but I don't really buy that's the case here.
That being said, he's a very eccentric person and his contributions to computing in the last 20ish years have been minimal. GCC has been losing market share to llvm and bash to zsh/fish. You could also argue that had he never created GNU, BSD would be where linux is today and we'd be just as well, if not better, off.
That seems like a pretty huge stretch to me. Yeah there may be a few people here and there that change their default shell to zsh or fish, but I don't see it happening in large swaths.
Is there some big pocket of Linux users doing this that I am unware of?
For interactive shells, I'm seeing very high usage for zsh (mostly due to oh-my-zsh) and a handful of fish users. Essentially lots power terminal users.
I'd be interested to hear from anyone who does. I have looked at zsh (and fish, for that matter) in the past and have not come away with a burning desire to switch, but I am open to being convinced it is worth another look.
If anyone has a top 10 or top 5 reasons why they run oh-my-zsh, I'd like to hear them. I tried to find something along those lines, but didn't have any luck.
(BTW, I thought it was obvious that I was discussing interactive shells, since my original response specifically discussed people changing their default shell to zsh or fish. It would seem silly (to me) to think either of those would ever displace bash for shell scripting.)
oh-my-zsh also has many other well-made tab completions for other programs, so you can TAB complete for things like docker, git, brew, various OSX commands, pip, python, and TONS of other stuff.
For zsh, the fish-like autosuggestions has saved me a lot of time as well: https://asciinema.org/a/37390
The powerline font git integration (like here: https://raw.githubusercontent.com/Falkor/dotfiles/master/scr... ) also is a large improvement over what bash can do. There's also a lot of visual enhancements if you use pyenv or various other language equivalents (eg ruby).
He held a talk at my university recently. During the QA, every time a student asked RMS a question, he would spend 2 minutes correcting the formulation of the question, and then dismissing the actual question with a snarky remark.
For instance, one student asked something about RMS being the "CEO" of FSF, followed by snarky remarks by RMS that "FSF is not a company and that he is actually the president". (I might remember wrong, but it was something along those lines)
I understand and respect him and his beliefs, but his personality just annoys me.
1) He is really serious about his crummy coffee. Like, he was brewing a pot on stage as he was talking at like 9pm. Like, a Walmart brand drip coffee maker, none of this french-press stuff.
2) He has a really bad 'dead fish' handshake. Like, Really bad.
3) He is SUPER dedicated to what he does and that is super admirable. I wish his vision of software and hardware was the default idea, not the corpo-spy state that we have eneded up with. That world would be a lot better. But it's asking far to much of people with only an 8th grade reading level.
4) He actually is really cool to hang out with and talk to. However, he is for more matured and knowledgable people. He kinda talks over the new CS peeps and really doesn't have time for them and their questions. He's not a professor and that shows.
5) Unsupprisingly, he's not good with millenial/gen-z women. Some of it is that he's from a different generation and he hasn't been in the same world as them, some of it is the sterotype that he is a nerdy, doughy, Linux guru. He could be better, but he's not as bad as a Google exec. by any means.
6) All the lecutres I went to where he was speaking were amazing and have really shaped a lot of my brain around software and what it is. Time very well spent.
Well, I use Google Maps just about every single day so Stallman's advice banning Javascript is way too hardcore for me.
But for sake of discussion, let's entertain what he's suggesting. What are the most practical alternatives to avoid Google's Javascript maps in 2019?
- other websites like Bing Maps and even openstreetmap.org also don't work without Javascript
- using local software like old CDROMs of map software means I'm using data that's 20 years old because no mainstream software publisher (e.g. Microsoft Streets, DeLorme, etc) is selling it and only cover a region instead of the entire globe. Also that CD software is proprietary and not free-as-in-libre.
- using folding paper maps like Rand McNally have similar problems to CDROMs -- the maps are old and more cumbersome.
- other alternatives I overlooked are ... ?
Inevitably, this leads to the condescending question... "How did we get by _before_ Google Maps?!?"
I got by in the past by making the usage of maps more inconvenient.
EDIT to replies about OpenStreetMap: Last I checked, OpenStreetMap doesn't have publicly accessible satellite images or 3D/birdseye views or street-level 360 degree views. Openstreetcam is missing a lot of roads. I use that type of photographic imagery even more than the line drawings of streets. Is there a practical non-Javascript alternative for that data?
Those days fucking sucked.
For mobile I recommend OsmAnd: https://github.com/osmandapp/Osmand
Like, I can understand being peeved at the use of JS for text that really doesn't need it. But something like a mapping app, I don't see how you get around it.
The Maps app on Macs and iOS does not use JavaScript. It also supports satellite and 3d views, and the street view shipping in a month looks better than what Google offers:
https://twitter.com/rvdsteege/status/1139264604918485005
Using a proprietary software on a proprietary OS is not going to be any better.
edit: tried to make my questions clearer :)
Note that the discussion here is about JavaScript code, not JavaScript the programming language (there seems to have been some confusion in this thread).
Also note that being able to read the code doesn't entail that the code is free as in freedom (i.e., released under a corresponding license). If you share some non-trivial[0] code of yours on GitHub, or deploy a website with your own non-trivial JS code, it still fully belongs to you, and people are not free to reuse it without asking you.
[0]: you probably cannot claim much for a hello world even if you wrote it yourself
“It is possible to release a JavaScript program as free software, by distributing the source code under a free software license. If the program is self-contained—if its functioning and purpose are independent of the page it came in—that is fine; you can copy it to a file on your machine, modify it, and visit that file with a browser to run it. But that is an unusual case.” [0]
JS code can obviously be client-side (generally readable in a browser via View Source, but not always, unless I am mistaken) or server-side (not generally readable, unless explicitly shared by the devs).
But based on [1] and [2] and [3], it appears that JS the language is owned and maintained by ECMA, which is a not-for-profit standards org.
So then I’m still a bit confused as to who whose lawyers would be coming after you if you published some JS code on Github or your own web-site? Not the ECMA’s right?
[0] https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/javascript-trap.html [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/JavaScript [2] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ecma_International [3] https://www.quora.com/Who-is-the-owner-of-javascript
So really their (FSF/GNU) issue is not with JS at all, but with devs who don’t licence their code under a free software licence? In other words, who enforce the copyright of their own algorithms?
What I also find a bit confusing (inconsistent?) with this stance is that a dev can do a reasonable amount of interesting things with HTML+CSS+SVG (obviously there are limits on the ‘interaction’ side of things), and assumably devs can also licence their HTML+CSS+SVG under whatever licence they wish: so then why pick on JS?
Almost all proprietary javascript is obfuscated and tracks everything you do, will identify you and can compromise your system. It's no different than any other non-free software maybe with some better (but nowhere near perfect) isolation from your system provided by the browser you are using.
There are also pretty good free mobile map apps that are on f-droid.
Wired connections are also a problem for him as well since the provider has your identity and they can trace you.
Stallman's rants, while they might not be technically wrong, should be read in the context of someone whose mindset is not the most positive one.
Given that all this content is publicly available, And I believe there were some legal cases, such as LinkedIn v. HiQ one, which, IMNAL, but allowed scraping of public content, I wonder if an entity can legally scrape YouTube and provide non-Google access to it, while preserving creator's copyright?
In the LinkedIn case the scraping was allowed, I don't think that HiQ is creating a mirror. Also there's a case for LinkedIn not having much copywritable content there, only information.
YouTube's real moat is that after years of operation they're managing to maybe break even, even with Google's insane infra. It's just doesn't seem that profitable to host all the videos for free.
His primary reasons for wanting to avoid services are not because of traditional ethical concerns. His ethics are not traditional, and he clearly states this on his personal website when he talks about pedophilia not actually being immoral.
Rather, they're because these services or companies do not give our their source code under a communistic license that Stallman approves of, one that specifically restricts a user's freedom to do what he wishes with that software, and the developer's freedom to choose how people can use the software. And all of this so that consumers have totalitarian freedom over their software.
This isn't how freedom works with anything else. You are allowed to buy the parts needed to make a flamethrower, but you're generally not allowed to assemble them into one. Your freedom over your property is restricted by the rights of others, which in this case includes the right to a safe environment.
We should not have absolute freedom over the source code that produced the software we possess just because they are digital. We received 1s and 0s that our computer knows how to execute. This doesn't mean we have an absolute right to know how it's made. In the same way, we don't have an absolute right to know how fast food chains combine their ingredients into the perfect dish. We have some right to know what ingredients they contain for the sake of safety, but they have a right to keep the recipe secret.
Communist principles are against true individual freedom, which must take into account the society that we live in and the rights of those we live with, because we don't live in a vacuum. And the GNU has fully bought into communist principles, trying to enforce limitations of freedom on individuals in the name of ultimate greater freedom for all.
Bullshit.
> Communist principles are against true individual freedom, which must take into account the society that we live in and the rights of those we live with, because we don't live in a vacuum.
Even worse bullshit. It's not communists who confuse freedom with the state not doing things.
> And the GNU has fully bought into communist principles, trying to enforce limitations of freedom on individuals in the name of ultimate greater freedom for all.
You just criticized them for not doing that.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Just read this twice.
GNU has some issues. But it is definitely not this.
Sounds spot-on.
> This is completely unethical.
This is an opinion, of course.
This is like saying the outlaw of murder encroaches on your freedom to end life. The elimination of freedom to hide code that's executing on CPUs I own from myself is not a bad or unethical thing.
That's a great analogy, and it further proves my point: suicide is murder, and nobody has a right to take their own life, because it doesn't only belong to them, but to society also, to anyone they have or may ever have obligations to.
People have a right to use their knowledge toward a goal, which includes keeping it secret if need be, as long as it does not impose on the rights of others.
Nobody has an absolute right to all knowledge.
Therefore people are not required to give away knowledge.
If I freely can choose not to run that code--for example, I can choose an open source program over a closed one--there is no ethical dilemma.
If I can't, then it is unethical. For example, Intel requires a closed-source binary blob to be run to initialize the CPU (the Firmware Support Package), even before the UEFI is initialized, otherwise the CPU won't run. Intel does not allow reverse engineering of this code. We have no idea what it's really doing. I can't use the CPU without this.
Now, what if this code does something other than initialize the CPU, such as allow remote access to this system, perhaps as part of an industrial espionage regime or other privacy invading scheme.
I have NO WAY of legally verifying the code does what it says it does if it's hidden.
I'm failing to see how hiding code is more ethical than not hiding it in situations like these.
Alternatively, and probably a better option, is that laws could be made to enforce companies requiring to pass some kind of test to ensure that it's not doing something in a list of banned things, such as espionage. This is how emissions tests work, and although people scammed those, they were penalized for it (and probably should have been far more). But it doesn't follow that companies should have to reveal all their secrets to prove to the general public that they pass these basic tests.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
There's no way out. Even TNG predicted WWIII entire global population and for humanity to suffer its most embarrassing chapter to get out of it:
https://memory-alpha.fandom.com/wiki/World_War_III
There are other modes of life, based on trust of mankind, instead of fear of it. That's the other thing TNG shows - all those people in Starfleet - they aren't being paid to be on that ship. They're trying to show that humanity is capable of post-capitalism. It doesn't have to be this way.
(That's the planet Stallman lives - or at least wants to)
Capitalism is just a codification of people's wants / needs. It's structured demand mixed with some basic contract law to hold people accountable to their own promises. That's it.
If you deride capitalism you're already implicitly saying that "what people want" is "bad". By condemning the system you're already implying that even the highest desires of humans aren't good enough.
>There are other modes of life, based on trust of mankind
Capitalism is already based on trust of mankind, since it is based on giving people what they desire, as long as it doesn't infringe on the basic human rights of others.
There are other ways to allocate resources and all of them are FAR INFERIOR which has been shown time, and time and time again.
I guarantee that most people, including the the person I'm responding to, do not make a distinction between market economies and capitalism in the manner you just did. He's talking about Star Trek utopia, nothing grounded in reality or history.
This is hacker news. I've never said such-and-such's view on capitalism is so damn tedious. That's like a punch, an attempt to sway with no actual content.
> Capitalism is just a codification of people's wants / needs. It's structured demand mixed with some basic contract law to hold people accountable to their own promises. That's it. If you deride capitalism you're already implicitly saying that "what people want" is "bad". By condemning the system you're already implying that even the highest desires of humans aren't good enough.
You've basically set up what you think is a logic tautology for yourself - at this point nothing anyone can say can ever be useful in the context of humanity if it goes against capitalism. That's pretty useless in terms of progress. So it is impossible to have humans without capitalism? And going against that is going against humanity. Interesting take. I don't see any point in arguing that line of logic. You win.
> Capitalism is already based on trust of mankind, since it is based on giving people what they desire, as long as it doesn't infringe on the basic human rights of others. There are other ways to allocate resources and all of them are FAR INFERIOR which has been shown time, and time and time again.
Also, since the wheel has been invented, we shall not try to go further. Thanks for the optimism.
>You've basically set up what you think is a logic tautology for yourself - at this point nothing anyone can say can ever be useful in the context of humanity if it goes against capitalism.
Correct. Capitalism is so efficient it's the sole reason we are able to cram 7B people on this little planet, for better or worse.
Countries that move away from capitalism end up in such poor shape that they essentially collapse, and then you have tons of "economic refugees" everywhere.
It's not impossible to have humans without capitalism, but it's definitely not possible to have 7B of them splitting resources as efficiently as we do now without it.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
The Federation is a post-scarcity society. They've figured out how to change matter into energy and back again. That does change a lot of things. We don't get to the Federation without solving scarcity.
And while no one is being paid to be on that ship (although that is debatable as there does seem to be some form of currency that individual Starfleet members receive and use), there is competition to be on that ship.
Being on that ship is the compensation for the work. Being one of the few selected to essentially be in this sort of elite class is the privilege.
And even on the ship, there are differences between crew members. The captain's quarters are better than the lower officers. The captain has his own private office just off the bridge.
And being a television show and work of fiction, they get to gloss over a ton of stuff. The acquisition and creation of the materials to build something like the Enterprise is as much a fantasy in the work as is the fact that they can replicate Earth-like gravity in the middle of space.
And our current system is driving us more towards TNG than 1984.
Things are better now. We're more tolerant. More peaceful. By just about any measure you can take, we're becoming better.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20830640 and marked it off-topic.
I can't help but feel that having such an extremist as the face of the FSF has greatly hindered it in its mission.
Turns out, pearjuice is a Trump supporter (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12675679, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12741738, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12675971) and hence has a reason to target Google, which is known for its employees opinions against Trump (https://www.nytimes.com/2018/09/12/technology/leaked-google-...) and conservatives in general.
This does not take away from the validity of the points made on the link itself, but I thought it worth mentioning.
>Then again, maybe you shouldn't eat any fast food. It is meant for fasting, not for eating.
read more here
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13342941