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Cake day: July 15th, 2024

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  • I’ve recently seen a nice description of that - “peasant mindset”.

    People who are not ready and willing to peacefully discuss reality with literally anyone, and most of all marginal and weird viewpoints, like sovcits and antivaxxers, because those are more interesting, - have that “peasant mindset”.

    (I’ve found something like that in my head too this morning, so sharing the thought.)

    Aggression is a sign of fear, and fear is something we feel when we are not ready to change our mind if we get some good arguments, or when we get bad, insufficient arguments, but are pressed to change our mind anyway.

    Why can we not be ready for that, feel powerless before that possibility of deciding to think differently 5 minutes from now?

    Because there’s something that we follow like a peasant follows their master. It’s the assumed identity, the family, the group, the party, the state, the nation. Such a decision, and a decision to discuss reality preceding that, is an act of defiance toward those. It’s a conflict, and we as humans sometimes try to avoid conflicts. It’s like discussing orders. Only there’s not a single soul above us who is entitled to order us how we vote or how we think.

    Every decision worth making is destructive, everything new comes in the place of something old and something that could be, there’s nothing to fear.

    Changing one’s mind by a conscious decision after careful consideration is a sign of having personal dignity. Not changing one’s mind in the same situation is too a sign of having personal dignity.

    Keeping your head down and trying to eat anyone not in line is not.

    (too long again)








  • It’s not decentralized on the level of project development, the visible proof of which is what we’ve seen happen.

    How many times have you seen two branches of a significant project to coexist with comparable popularity?

    I wonder if there’s some way to manage an open source project so that it’s not subject to particular national laws in this way.

    Yes. Pseudonymous software development. I’ve seen Ross Ulbricht’s name today, so we also know the risks.

    Naturally this is closer to some underground warez than to copyleft, because the legal ways of protecting copylefted information against appropriation will not be available. A different paradigm.


  • I’m thinking about that conspiracy theory of Linus having been made an offer one can’t refuse, when some time ago he took a vacation and returned with news about seeing the error of his ways.

    It almost coincided with Stallman being canceled for one of his usual highly socially unacceptable, but in principle consistent opinions. With most of the attackers being frankly some new random corporate-associated people, not very active in real communities.

    Maybe I’ll re-read J4F and compare Linus from there to these events. Canary and all.

    EDIT: Before you downvote this for the mush in my head (thx Linus) propagating conspiracy theories, offers one can’t refuse are not exactly an impossible thing. And WWII radio games, where, having captured an enemy station’s operator, one of the sides could either imitate their style in transmissions or just force them to transmit what it wanted.







  • I agree. We should realize the following:

    1. There are things we are not entitled to.

    2. There are things we are entitled to.

    3. There is Nintendo’s opinion on which is which.

    4. There’s someone else’s opinion on which is which.

    5. There’s law which should be a dignified compromise between these.

    6. The law may or may not be such a compromise.

    7. Our obligations before law mirror our rights.

    8. Our engagement with law mirrors our participation in forming it.

    9. We have been robbed of that ability and raise our voice where it matters.

    10. Hence Nintendo’s opinion and said law don’t matter shit.


  • I think this is intentional. Call me paranoid.

    Elaboration: we have seen in the past how RedHat’s and others’ policies would always not reach some part of Linux users, and those users still wouldn’t feel as second class citizens - it was just a matter of choice and configuration to avoid PulseAudio, systemd, Gnome 3, one can go on. That was mostly connected to escaping major environments and same applications working the same with all of them. Wayland, while not outright making Gnome the only thing to work, creates a barrier and doesn’t make that a firm given anymore.

    It won’t be too long until using Linux without Wayland will cut you off from many things developed with corporate input - and that’s developers’ time paid as opposed to donated for or volunteered, so much more effort.

    Now, there was a time when there weren’t that much corporate input and still things would get done. But it will be hard to fall back to it, when the whole environment, one can say, ecosystem, is so complex and corporate-dependent.

    I would say this is the time of all those corps whose investment into Linux was so nice in 00s and 10s reaping what they sowed. This wasn’t all for free or to profit on paid support. And people who thought that it’s GPL that was such a nice license that “forced” corps to participate in FOSS projects they benefit from, with those projects remaining FOSS, are going to have to face reality.

    Fat years are ending, so they are going to capitalize on their investments.

    This has already happened with the Web 10 or more years ago, when Facebook, Google and others have suddenly gone Hitler, while now they are in terminal stages of enshittification.

    Same process.

    You can disagree, no need to insult me.




  • Easy when there are bad people you’re interested in.

    Buy 100M worth of drones with ammo and transportation, only I’ll have to find somebody from former Artsakh Defense Army to ask where.

    Or maybe just buy samples of anthrax, bubonic plague, some particular nasty kind of covid and other such nice things, lots of pests able to carry them and, of course, rodents, bribe lots of people on my way and bring all that stuff to Baku.