quitspamming

You are accusing someone by twisting their own words about their own self disclosed identity against them from a throwaway account created 5 hours ago.

And they say irony is dead.

I say this from an anonymous account but at least it isn't a throwaway. And at least I have the good taste to feel a little shame for my hypocrisy.

> There is this anguish to define the "West" as a real entity, while it's not.

The West is the Latin Church. From the Latin Church came the Protestants. From that West meant and means anything influenced by or in protest of the Latin Church in Europe and its colonies. Very easy to understand, makes less of a difference today than it might have 100 years ago but to pretend it's hard to define or not a real thing isn't serious.

I was referring mainly to Windows software, Adobe Illustrator and InDesign were major pain points on the Windows side. Sure though, add Linux compatibility to the list of things that were an issue too.

> (Or is supposed to be?)

I would be happy to eat my words "later this year" (per their timeline) but past Surface interactions lead me to believe it will be more of the same as in the past. Bad performance, bad battery life, bad build quality, bad compatibility.

For the sake of competition and options, I really hope to be proven wrong... I just wouldn't bet on it.

A former employer of mine, owned by a retired NFL player, purchased Surface devices for the sales staff in addition to their laptops. This was presumably because Microsoft and the NFL had a deal where everyone on the sidelines were using Surfaces and they thought it was a good idea. I say that because no one was asking for them, and when we received them I was inundated with tickets about poor performance: "my surface is slow", "my surface is glitchy". I dreaded working on these things. Everyone just went back to their laptops. Tens of thousands of dollars wasted.

It's a shame, Microsoft could really do something if they created an ARM device that had the battery life of Apple Silicon, yet was a real computer that wasn't locked down, ensured/promoted ARM compatibility with their ecosystem. Heck, I'd even be OK with Windows 11, I know how to remove all the garbage now and could run WSL (though I'd prefer to just boot Linux on it).

> The ones where they’re going to send brownshirts to intimidate voters in blue states?

Any actual evidence this is happening or is going to happen? I've seen some ACLU talking points, always conveniently placed above a donate button, but not any facts.

> The ones they’re going to try to disrupt like Dallas County last night?

Not from Dallas but looking at the news it looks like a state issue involving the Texas Supreme Court? No mention of Trump, GOP, ICE, or brownshirts.

> The ones they’ve trying desperately to Gerrymander to lock down their dictatorial power? Those elections?

Gerrymandering just started under Trump?

I know there is no way to verify this, but I am not a Trump supporter or Republican. I am just someone who thinks the rhetoric is completely overblown, not supported by reality, and especially comparing it to Iran they're not even in the same phylum let alone class.

Except midterm elections are literally this year. But other than that small detail, sure.

Replying authoritatively to a Simpsons quote betrays you.

We're not talking about starting wars versus getting involved in existing conflicts, we're not even talking about right versus wrong, we're talking about Pentagon spending and who benefits. The U.S. giving Ukraine our older weapons stockpiles so we can create NEW stockpiles doesn't speak to who started what, but that Democrats were sure in favor of increased spending while Republicans weren't. The assertion was one party always wants more spending on "defense" while one party doesn't. It simply isn't true, both parties are happy to find justifications to increase the Pentagon's budget.

> That said, there is one party that is consistently hawk-ish and boasts about war spending. And there is another party which most often campaigns on reducing war spending.

Maybe if you only look at the war on terror years, but look at WWI and WWII and most recently Ukraine. Both parties love Pentagon spending when it's _their_ war.

It's interesting that you don't think I'm talking about both sides. Rush Limbaugh used to call women he disagreed with feminazis. The "tea party" under Obama used to call everything communist and fascist.

I don't know how a country filled with guns can survive the normalization of calling people you disagree with Nazi, Fascist, etc. We've all been taught since grade school it was a good thing to kill Nazis, even in small percentages there are mentally unstable people who will hear you call someone a Fascist and take the logical step from "it's good to kill nazis" to "they're a nazi so I should kill them". I am both very pro freedom of speech and right to bear arms, and I think where Canada and the UK have gone with hate speech laws are too far, but I don't know how you solve this.

> When democracy and the rule of law are considered less important than (insert all the dem ills here), it’s not dems. It’s the voters.

Democracy and rule of law like... covering up the mental decline of a sitting president, foreign leaders lying to the American public saying Joe Biden is fine, only for him to finally expose himself so badly live on TV they jettison the man off the 2024 ticket while leaving him in office? Then imposing a candidate by fiat?

January 6th was absolutely a constitutional crisis, but it lasted less than a day. The cover-up of Biden's mental state was a multi-year constitutional crisis that still has not been fully acknowledged.

When there are two competing harms you fall back to things like who is going to put more money in my pocket. This is 100% the dem's fault.

So unless Forbes investigates literally every social media site and app they aren't allowed to report on one, or else they're jingoistic xenophobes?

That poor argument aside, they DID in fact report on other social media sites, the same year, a few months earlier than the even did on TikTok. https://archive.is/J1kjN

This article isn't about people being offended at seeing sexual material on TikTok. It's about how TikTok _knew_ that children were being paid in TikTok livestreams to engage is sexual behavior. It is good that _you_ didn't consume it, but many were, andd TikTok knew that many were and let it happen to profit from it.

i edited my comment to provide a little more context but just because someone provides reasons doesn’t mean it’s not influenced by the trend. reddit’s trend to dislike tiktok has valid points but it’s also fueled by the trend. i’ve criticized hn here on hn so this isn’t me trying to defend the site.

It’s trendy to hate HN by some on Twitter.

*edit to provide context. this isn’t unique to twitter/hn. it’s trendy on reddit to hate tiktok and instagram. it’s trendy on 4chan to hate reddit.

Do you really think triactual meant literally probably none, or do you think they were using a pretty common method of conveying their idea? Your comment actually supports what kayodelycaon and triactual are saying, that HN commenters can be so nitpicky and pedantic that they end up missing the plot entirely.

> Richard M. Stallman recently announced that he will be returning to the board of directors of the Free Software Foundation (FSF), a statement that the FSF has not denied

He's listed on fsf.org as being on the board so I don't know why they'd deny it.

> If we do not speak out against this, our silence may be misinterpreted as support.

I can't think of a group that does less than the FSF except for maybe OSI. Besides Stallman never left being the head of GNU and did OSI say anything about that?

This is a nothing statement from and almost nothing group.

I'll try to refine the point I was making. For years FreeBSD has explained away their problems by saying "we don't have big business helping us" and then they turn around and say "one of our key advantages is we're more friendly to big business". At some point, you need to stop offering up ONE of those arguments because while theoretically both points can be true, you have to eventually ask if FreeBSD is so good for business, why aren't there Red Hat, IBM, or Linaro for FreeBSD? And if so many businesses ARE choosing FreeBSD, why isn't it showing up in more tangible ways? Netflix might contribute a lot back to FreeBSD, but, can I watch Netflix on my FreeBSD computer? I say this mostly out of frustration with a project and product that I do really like. FreeBSD just needs better arguments in support of it.

> However, the problem is very simple: vast majority of work done in FreeBSD is being done by unpaid volunteers, unlike in case of RHEL/Fedora/Centos and Ubuntu/Debian.

You don't get to use the "unpaid volunteers" excuse when a good portion of FreeBSD's site is dedicated to explaining why GPL and copyleft is anti-corporate and big business should be/is afraid of it, and how BSD is more business friendly.

It's not missing from the site. FreeBSD never used GNU tar. FreeBSD used a very small number of GNU utilities. tar, coreutils like ls, cat, etc. where never used. It was mostly things around the GNU toolchain, which ARE mentioned in the GPLinBASE wiki on the freebsd site.

according to FreeBSD's own site, their GPLinBase tracker, you're incorrect. Only a handful of GNU or GPL stuff was ever in base, and your example of 'tar' isn't one of them.

https://wiki.freebsd.org/GPLinBase

"I employ a materialist analysis of society" translation: I regurgitate Marx's works.

"and in which the majority of the people have to sell most of their time simply to have food." as opposed to farmers who work 16 hours a day to grow food. Different occupations sell for different value and require different time.

"This is an undeniable fact of reality, and you merely choose to ignore it" a smug way of saying 'I'm right and you're wrong'.

"I mean your entire comment completely lacks substance: what do you even mean by "If the rich have money, they took it from the poor"? Which part of my beliefs are you attacking? It's completely vague." I'm attacking the fundamental assertions of Marx's conflict theory. Redistributing wealth is predicated on the ideology that someone having lots of money is the cause of someone else not having money. So you redistribute it from one person to the other, ignore any rights of the person to their private property.

"> and socialism IS force This, again, completely lacks substance. Even by bourgeois ideologue standards." - Not only isn't it lacking substance, it's empirically true. Given your next poorly thought out statement...

"The point is to look beyond individual choices" - look beyond individual choices? There is only the individual choice if you have freedom. If I don't have the individual right to choose that means I'm being forced. Hence, socialism IS force.

We fundamentally disagree. You, as a Marxist, see it as us versus them. That economics, money, and means of production (in this case software) is a zero sum game and that if others have, then someone has not. If the rich have money, they took it from the poor. If there is closed/proprietary software, that has subtracted from free/open software. And that is not true. Money isn't zero sum, Windows can have their proprietary software and GNU can have their free-as-in-freedom software. You don't have to, better yet, you don't get to force (and socialism IS force) other people.

I want people to want FOSS. I want people to be free, that's why I want them to use FOSS. Part of freedom is the choice to make unethical choices. Using government levers to force is the opposite of freedom.

Yeah, I read it, it was a bunch of Marxist buzzwords with one important line...

"How can our politics be effective, if we don't connect them to the actual source of the problem: profit?"

You also draw a really simplistic and ignorant call to action here...

"Free software activists should accept that software freedom is not an isolated issue, with its own, completely independent value set, but is just one aspect of a wider struggle for justice, and that we can never achieve full software justice under capitalism."

I am a free software activist. I write, use, modify, and evangelize free software for my paycheck. I also think socialism is a garbage philosophy. So your goal that we shouldn't take software justice as an isolated issue is betrayed by the fact that you better hope I take it as an isolated issue, because if I don't I'm going to tie it to capitalism and fight you tooth and nail. This is why Stallman is careful to not tie it to much else. He is trying to maximize the number of people involved.

I'm surprised the HN crowd isn't calling this out for what it is, anti capitalist BS. I've seen people talk about tactics, DRM, ethics, but the author's point was Stallman is right expect for one thing: profit. Stallman tries to explain over and over again how free software can be profitable, and the author of this post's whole point is, "nah, it can't be. Want free software? You need socialism."

Stupid article pushing tired socialism, in old arguments.

It's articles like this that make it very hard to continue to take RMS seriously, and that is a huge shame. He's brilliant and has contributed so much. Things he created are the reason I get a paycheck.

That said, this tribal religious you're-either-100%-with-us-or-you're-against-us and I'm going to "condemn you" ("nor have anything to do with it, nor even talk about it except with condemnation.") attitude makes it almost impossible to be sympathetic to his cause and puts him on the level of other rigid religious fundamentalist radicals.

If he IS talking about Red Hat here, as others have theorized, then he is worse than a fanatic, he's a self destructive jerk.

Red Hat just recently came out and said despite other companies abandoning GCC for Clang (See Google, Apple, FreeBSD, Android, even the Linux Foundation) they were still investing in GCC. Without GCC there is no more "GNU slash Linux" it's just Linux at that point. There are other C libraries, other userlands, but Linux still needs GCC and Red Hat is backing GCC. Keep condemning allies like Red Hat and soon they'll wonder why they even try to be your friend.

As soon as llvm.linuxfoundation.org gets Linux written in C instead of GCC, there will be no more GNU slash Linux or GNU plus Linux or whatever RMS wants it called. FreeBSD, Android, and then Linux will be fully capable of ditching GNU, FSF, and RMS and GPL'd software (save for the kernel which is GPLv2 and only nominally so, they never actually sue for violations like binary blobs) altogether. And who would be sad? Linux didn't "win" because of the philosophical views of RMS. Linux won because it worked. What happens when Linux, and companies like Red Hat, don't need this kind of garbage anymore?

Quit spamming about stupid SmartOS, you try to shoehorn it in to every topic. You're like a Mormon Missionary for SmartOS and it is super annoying.