The Cathedral and the Bazaar is considered a classic, but it’s been 20+ years since I read it. I’m curious how well it holds up.

I was trying to recall some points from C&B and I realized I was muddling much of it up with The Hacker Ethic by Pekka Himanen from the same era, so apparently that made an impression as well.

I’m not sure exactly what I was expecting by “Values of the Fediverse”, but I was pleasantly surprised! It focuses on what over the decades seem to be the core values of Open Source software movements, such as openness, independence, and freedom to use the software how you choose to use it. Just applied to the concept of social media. Which makes sense.

My main home account is on Lemmy.ca not Lemmy.ml ( or another Lemmy instance) because that is how I’ve chosen to associate, and I can. And I could spin up my own instance, and federate or de-federate with whomever I choose.

This isn’t a novel concept, OpenSource.com has a page on “The Open Source Way” which espouses transparency, collaboration, “Release early and often”, inclusive meritocracy, and community. I remember reading “The Cathedral and the Bazaar” back in the day, and Eric Raymond seemed to extrapolate several values or principle from the open source model.

The free software movement does implicitly have positions on “political” topics. Right to repair, DRM, and privacy come to mind immediately. These shouldn’t be seen as being “Left” or “Right”,

The whole Fediverse is still a little on the niche side, but if growth continues, I think this is exactly another development. When you work for Company X, your work email is usually somebody@companyx.com, likewise I would expect official Fediverse presences.

Where it will probably take off though is when somebody starts selling corporations a turn-key solution. Kind of how products like Outlook took over corporate email.

The police also knocked and only entered after he answered it sounded like. While certainly armed and probably prepared for something wild, they didn’t force entry with guns at the ready.

Once again, mostly comparing to videos of US police interactions, which is kind of weird as a non-USian commenting on a German police interrogation. Would be curious to see an “audit the audit” type review of this.

Respect. Only through destruction can we be purified.

Pretty much. Musk is far from a free speech absolutist as he proclaimed himself to be. I would go further and say he’s substantially worse, unpredictable and inconsistent in free speech matters.

Old Twitter would hardly be a true paragon of free expression, but they were at least relatively transparent. Good luck getting any answers from new Xitter or any consistency.

Relevant XKCD

TIL.

For purposes of this post though, RFC 3339 and ISO8601 are identical. Dates in the format YYYY-MM-DD, so 2024-08-29 is both RFC3339 and ISO8601 compliant.

Not an expert, just spent around 2 minutes looking at https://ijmacd.github.io/rfc3339-iso8601/

VAX/VMS was still around then, and as far as I recall, that was the king for uptime.

Linux back then supported much less hardware. I can remember even in the early aughts, there was while families of popular wireless network chipsets that weren’t supported.

Correct. When people say “ChatGPT isn’t real AI” they mean it’s not AGI (Artificial General Intelligence). The term “Artificial Intelligence” has been the proper term for the study of machine learning since the 1956 Dartmouth Workshop.

It’s all AI, from the computer player in Battlechess to ChatGPT. It’s not all using the same techniques, or have the same capabilities.

#1, whatever is default. The main advantage of the terminal is that it’s just a terminal, fundamentally the same terminal since the dawn of computing.

Having said that, I do sometimes install a non-default terminal. I haven’t seen any of them mentioned:

cool-retro-term It looks like an OG CRT! What other terminal emulator has this killer feature?

Byobu Technically a front end for tmux, but it gives some useful status info and multiple windows.

First computer was a Commodore Vic-20. Second was a Tandy 1000TX. I remember dialling into BBSes pre-internet, but not on the Vic-20 of course.

I can still remember the feeling of seeing my first computer in person. Even in the late seventies it was rare to see even things like Atari 2600’s. By the early eighties most of my friends had an Atari, Intellivision, Colecovision, Atari 400/800, Coleco Adam, Commodore Vic-20/64, Apple II, Tandy Coco, etc. By the late eighties most of the people I knew had PCs of some sort (Tandy 1000TX in my case), Atari ST, or Amiga. Modems were still rare. It was the nineties when modems and BBSes seemed to really explode, quickly displaced by the Internet. Granted I remember connecting to Gopher before I personally connected to BBSes.

I look back on how things changed from 1980 to 1989, and it seems so much more sweeping than 2010 to 2019.

Ubuntu was the distribution that had me switch from dual-booting with Windows as default to dual-booting with Linux as default.

I also remember ordering an actual Ubuntu disc, with the extra donation to fund the mailing for free program.

Now years later after lots of distro-hopping I just run Ubuntu LTS, and stay on the very boring LTS branch.

It kind of makes sense. First I’ve ever heard about Ubuntu Christian Edition as well, but it seems to mostly be set up with filtering in mind, with the DNS tools and such. Add in productivity software aimed at preaching I guess, and you have a “safe” OS for kids and the laptop hooked up to the projector at a church.

SATAN’s popularity diminished after the 1990s.

Wikipedia quote of the day.

That’s what I’d assume. My impression is that many Gen-Z might associate the term “Feminism” with J.K. Rowling and such, Trans-Exclusionary feminists as it were. If there were questions that could suss out concern about trans issues, or even LGBT+ issues in general, I suspect the differences between generation might match.