This just seems like a lot of random sentences strung together. What Stallman says is very clear and very simple. You're also free to work on Free Software any time that you want, and free to make sure the devices in your life adhere to Free Software principles. That has nothing to do with OSS, other than OSS makes itself as available to copyleft as it is to copyright.

I'm trying to figure out who this rant is aimed at: is it complaining that people trying to get corporate jobs writing software are writing software for corporations who are using Open Source, and claiming that's some sort of contradiction that needs to be escaped? It's easy to escape. Be poor. Lots of people do it. But if that's not an option for you, writing OSS at a corporate job is no worse that writing proprietary software at a corporate job.

Are you working for scammers? Almost everybody else is too! You should quit, if you're independently wealthy (i.e. invested in scammers), or don't mind being poor. But working on OSS at your scammer job isn't any worse than writing proprietary code at your scammer job. So I don't get it.

Anybody think they've successfully translated this?

edit: also, I think a lot of people need to face that fact that a ton of OSS isn't even useful for anybody but large-scale corporations. It was written by them (or people wanting to be them), for them. Can't see anything wrong with that.

> I feel like this is really an American culture thing where parties or dinner parties are mostly the responsibility of the host. In movies or TV there’s even a common theme of guests judging the host’s hosting abilities.

This is really a function of the type of party and of the type of people one is inviting to a party rather than a universal among Americans. I was brought up that you don't come to a party empty-handed. If you're going to a party where you know everybody else was brought up that way, you call ahead to see what will be lacking (mostly so everybody doesn't bring alcohol.)

I've brought chairs to parties; if you haven't ever done that you probably don't know what I'm talking about.

There's also a "dinner party" culture, though, where you're going to cook for a bunch of people. They should bring alcohol, but they don't always because people don't always drink, and their bringing alcohol doesn't get you out of providing alcohol. The expectation is that you have a reciprocal party rather than everyone contribute at this party i.e. you're inviting people who also might have dinner parties. They're bringing a guest or two to yours, you'll also bring a guest or two to theirs.

The second type of party is more conversation-oriented, and sometimes the contribution you're making is how interesting your guest is. I'm still bringing wine or something, though. Can't show up empty-handed.

That narrative is still popular with LLMs themselves. If you ask an LLM whether it can code Rust, it will tell you that it can but not very well.

They're good at web languages, python, and C/C++. As far as I can tell Rust works if you're already good at Rust and you can catch its screwups and strange architecture choices quickly.

I've got a paste in prompt that reiterates multiple times not to remove features or debugging output without asking first, and not to blame the test file/data that the program failed on. Repeated multiple times, the last time in all caps. It still does it. I hope maybe half as often, but I may be fooling myself.

Do they even really have a choice about this? When all your platforms are locked down and proprietary you can't allow piracy apps. I never understood why people buy products like this, but I don't have to understand - some people just don't mind if Amazon or Google own their televisions, or even every sound made in their homes.

And they allowed piracy apps until now, so I was overestimating how fast the frog was boiling anyway. Must have been a good deal while it lasted.

Weird how people are acting like this is a collapse: everything was always locked down until FOSS alternatives came to free you. Megacorps invited you back by letting you pirate a bit, for a while, and now that the alternatives have been adequately starved it's time to get in line again.

Why in the hell would Amazon let you pirate the things it sells (rents?), forever? I think a lot of people got caught up in a free promotion handing out samples of a zero-marginal cost product. It didn't cost them anything to pretend like you were going to have any real control over their completely controlled device.

No, this is poison. They constantly change things, and Free Software would be racing to clone them, continually leaving familiarity behind in order to be a wonky version of the real thing. That battle is lost when it starts. Firefox was a great version of Firefox, everybody loved it (except when it locked up the entire system), nobody thought it was a knock-off of IE. Firefox then became a shit version of Chrome (I assume on Google's orders), and eventually developed into a good enough version of Chrome, shedding all of its users along the way. The Linux desktop is doing better than Firefox now.

The advantage to Free Software is that you don't have to change everything with Windows, Apple, Adobe, or Google demand you do (unless they grab control of a FOSS project, like in Firefox's case.) There are a number of writers who recommend Linux and Free software only for that reason - that once you get a workflow going, you don't want to change it according to corporate whims.

> practically never requires its user to fire up a terminal window

This can be a problem. But it will be less of a problem with LLMs. We need to encourage amateur (and proficient) Linux adopters and users to lean on AI to deal with anything giving them problems. I had an LLM walk me through updating a .deb package in MATE to match HEAD upstream, and to do it in a way that would be replaced when Debian updated the package itself. This is something I've been carefully avoiding learning for a decade, and if I had taken the effort to try to learn, it would be weeks of research and I'd have messed up the system multiple times along the way. Instead, after a few false starts, I did it and gained the knowledge to do it again.

It's not necessary to chase, just copy what Windows users have largely agreed to be good and stick to that.

So for example, a hypothetical Windows DE could offer XP, 7, and 10 modes which the user can freely switch between which would never change. This delivers on two fronts: first, it presents a familiar, comfortable UI for the user, and second, it offers a promise that most of the popular Linux desktops do not which is that significant changes will not occur, even over long time scales.

I disagree on LLMs/terminal use. Too many things can go wrong in too many different ways for LLMs to be of much use to users for troubleshooting in many cases, and there's also the issue of the user even knowing what to ask for in the first place (even many moderately technical users aren't going to have the foggiest clue what a Debian package, MATE, HEAD, or upstream are).

The system really just needs to be engineered to 1) be extremely robust and not break in the first place 2) when it does break, have the ability to silently self-heal 99% of the time. A non-essential but excellent bonus would be 3) to be able to express what's wrong and what needs to be done to the user in that last 1%. This won't be easy to accomplish, but the first distro that does will be richly rewarded with user loyalty.

> I’ve had models “redirect the problem to someone who has a greater likelihood of not failing”. Gemini in particular will do this when it runs into trouble.

I have too, and I sense that this is something that has been engineered in rather than coming up naturally. I like it very much and they should do it a lot more often. They're allergic to "I can't figure this out" but hearing "I can't figure this out" gives me the alert to help it over the hump.

> But when you’re talking about things related to failures and accuracy, they’re mostly superhuman.

Only if you consider speed to failure and inaccuracy. They're very much subhuman in output, but you can make them retry a lot in a short time, and refine what you're asking them each time to avoid the mistakes they're repeatedly making. But that's you doing the work.

This is simply not true, this is Western paranoid fantasy. It's also the kind of fantasy that allows escalation of surveillance and censorship. You should look up the "missile gap."

Also, Russian and especially Chinese leadership doesn't go unchallenged. Chinese leadership has had many transitions. While Putin has squatted on the leadership of Russia for a very long time now, it isn't because he's not popular, and he's forced to do a lot of things he'd rather not do because of pressure on his leadership.

How do the neoliberal rulers in the West stay on top with extreme minorities of popular support, like in France or the UK? Why does popular opinion have no effect on the politics of the US*, and why are its politics completely run by two private clubs with the same billionaire financial supporters (that also finance politics all over the rest of the West)? How do they do it without massive surveillance, censorship and information control? Or a better question: how can we be given the evidence of massive surveillance efforts and huge operations dedicated to censorship and information control, over and over again, and still point to the East when we talk about the subject? Isn't that "whataboutism"?

* "Testing Theories of American Politics: Elites, Interest Groups, and Average Citizens" https://doi.org/10.1017/S1537592714001595

Chinese Communist Party leadership had many transitions before Xi Jinping purged all rivals and alternative power centers, and personally took control of all key decision making. It will be "interesting" to see what happens when he finally dies.

How long would it take for anyone to whip up this site, including the copy, with AI? This could literally be teenagers.

My initial thought was DOGE/ICE or something, to catch anyone wanting report actual injustice and stop them..

I simply do not buy any aspect of this. It is absolutely untestable. It's not just that I don't think people who can't see mental images exist, I don't think that you can prove that anyone does see mental images. It's pure introspection and self-reporting, and half of the scientists named had very odd, old-timey standards of evidence that led them to many very wrong conclusions in their fields.

I couldn't say whether I, myself, have any mental images. I wouldn't even know what it meant to see without eyes. Does that mean that I don't have mental images, or does that mean that I have them so easily that they pass without notice? Or does it mean that this is horseshit, and the consequences of it very much not profound or even detectable?

People's self-reported subjective experiences, about any subject, are almost worthless. You are even an unreliable narrator to yourself. The burden of proof lies on the people who would claim these mind ghosts, not the people that deny them. These descriptions are all so much poetry, so literary.

Eric Schwitzgebel has done a lot of work on introspection, and reminds us of things like how we thought we all dreamed in black and white before the invention of the color television, and we thought that dreaming in color was a sign of mental illness; and how blind people who experienced "blindsight" had no idea that they were reflexively echolocating until you covered their ears and tested them again.

People can have entire, sound chains of reasoning that they are only aware of the conclusions of (and unaware of the process even existing.) We are not aware of all of what we're thinking or how. Our self-perception relies as much or more on our self-images than actual recall of our experiences.

Also, going through severe trauma and saying you see the world differently afterwards is not evidence of anything. If it was brain trauma, it'd be surprising if you didn't have a different understanding of the world during and after your recovery.

I understand this will be downvoted by people who have their self-image tied up in this, or synesthesia, or any number of untestable hypothetical mental states that are painted as mysterious superpowers. I do think it helps to remind ourselves in these times how far just babbling the most likely thing can get us, now that we're in the age of LLMs. There doesn't have to be anything inside.

edit: I've been paid as an artist at times in my life, and very much like to draw, and I still have no idea if I have any mental imagery. It's just not a concept I can attach any meaning to.

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edit2: I entirely forgot that there's a specific essay on this subject by Schwitzgebel.

How Well Do We Know Our Own Conscious Experience? The Case of Visual Imagery

> Philosophers tend to assume that we have excellent knowledge of our own current conscious experience or "phenomenology". I argue that our knowledge of one aspect of our experience, the experience of visual imagery, is actually rather poor. Precedent for this position is found among the introspective psychologists of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Two main arguments are advanced toward the conclusion that our knowledge of our own imagery is poor. First, the reader is asked to form a visual image, and it is expected that answering questions about certain basic features of that experience will be difficult. If so, it seems reasonable to suppose that people could be mistaken about those basic features of their own imagery. Second, it is observed that although people give widely variable reports about their own experiences of visual imagery, differences in report do not systematically correlate with differences on tests of skills that psychologists have often supposed to require visual imagery, such as mental rotation, visual creativity, and visual memory.

https://faculty.ucr.edu/~eschwitz/SchwitzAbs/Imagery.htm

other links:

Why Did We Think We Dreamed in Black and White? https://faculty.ucr.edu/~eschwitz/SchwitzAbs/DreamB&W.htm

How Well Do We Know Our Own Conscious Experience? The Case of Human Echolocation https://faculty.ucr.edu/~eschwitz/SchwitzAbs/Echo.htm

The Unreliability of Naive Introspection https://faculty.ucr.edu/~eschwitz/SchwitzAbs/Naive.htm

The last point is very interesting. I would say I have minimal, nearly nonexistent ability to visualize mentally, unless I am in a lucid dreaming state in which case it does feel like a magic power.

I never thought about it until you brought it up, but my ability to manipulate images in my head is nonetheless top notch, I can solve visual puzzles that seem difficult for most people with hardly any effort at all. And my ability to draw/paint is not something people would pay me for but is still well above average, and that also requires “holding” an image in your mind. So either these skills are unrelated to being able to “see” your imagination or we are really failing to communicate about it.

Regardless of the actual internal experience, it would be interesting that most people are quite certain they can "visualize" things, and a significant number of people are quite certain they cannot. This, in my opinion, would be worth discussing even if it was entirely down to the unreliability of people's self-descriptions.

However, the article mentions evidence that there is an actual physical difference here: fMRIs, and contraction of the pupil when imagining a bright light. Clearly something is happening.

Thanks for the link.

I obviously wasn't trying to change your mind on the main subject, since I didn't make a single argument about it. I don't have an obligation to try to explain why I think you're wrong, and I don't understand the subject well enough to be the right person to do so.

I was solely addressing your bullshit attempt to dismiss any downvotes as being people defending their own self images, by pointing out that I downvoted you without that being even slightly the reason. I used to think that what you believe was quite likely the case, and that people just have different ways of describing it, and if scientists were to prove that is indeed the case I'd be perfectly happy to change my mind again, I couldn't give a shit other than being curious to know the truth. Whether or not I can visualise things more or less than the next person is no more an important part of my self image than the exact number of hairs on my left leg is - it technically does make up a part of who I am, but not a part I'd ever bother thinking about if thinking about the subject of "me".

> "I'm guessing from the comment that you self-describe in this way?"

Your comment is confusingly worded such that I don't know what "this way" means, but no, unless someone specifically asked me how my mind works with regards to this specific subject, I wouldn't self-describe anything to do with this at all.

I have no idea why you're concerned about my feeling about downvotes, but you're free to have it. I assumed it was a different reason, but it seems you're just concerned about me. I assure you that I'm fine.

I've no idea what part of my comment gave you the impression I was concerned about you in any way or had any reason to think you might not be fine, but good for you that you are! :)