gregknicholson

9 ms·

1.
by gregknicholson 7y ago
> After 7 months, you start testing the new version. Translation: after 7 months you stop mucking about and start trying to produce something useful.
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by gregknicholson 7y ago
He also endorsed antisemitism: http://www.bbc.com/culture/story/20160912-the-dark-side-of-r... > “Hitler didn’t just pick on them for no reason.”
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by gregknicholson 7y ago
It's also a really good example of how captions (this is a caption really, not exactly alt text) are context-dependent. The caption you mention continues: > The maser observed is almost directly opposite the Sun from the center in t
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by gregknicholson 7y ago
If anyone in or near Iraq can read this, you can spread messages using person-to-person tools that don't need the internet at all. For example, using the Scuttlebutt network (SSB), you can deliver messages from your contacts, using Blu
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by gregknicholson 7y ago
(I only want to wade in here on one narrow logical point, and avoid discussing the specifics of this case.) > If Stallman's past behavior was unacceptable, then he should have been fired for that. Indeed! The fact that he wasn&#x
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by gregknicholson 7y ago
> a protocol, a specification for completely decentralised, carry-with-us social networks. Scuttlebutt is exactly this: https://scuttlebutt.nz
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by gregknicholson 7y ago
Sadly yes, because big businesses with insufficient concern for maintaining openness on the internet keep choosing siloed proprietary communication services, just because they're "more polished". cough Mozilla cough Slack
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by gregknicholson 7y ago
There's no distinction between the "desktop" and "mobile" versions of GNOME Web. It's literally the same code (compiled for the appropriate processor architecture), just at a different window size.
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by gregknicholson 7y ago
I seem to recall (correct me if I'm wrong) that European courts ruled that “agreeing” to a very-long EULA for desktop software didn't constitute informed consent, because it's trivial to demonstrate that the users didn&#x27
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by gregknicholson 7y ago
Surely Google has an obvious competitor, right? Because otherwise it would clearly be a monopoly.
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by gregknicholson 7y ago
More generally, if enough people (including the author) think the content has merit, they will choose to support it (by which I mean “collectively supply all the resources it needs to continue”). The cost of running a basic website to publi
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by gregknicholson 7y ago
Thank you for doing this!
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by gregknicholson 7y ago
1. Is it possible to use the open source Pocket client built into Firefox with any other server, e.g. by specifying another domain name in about:config? 2. Is there an open source implementation of compatible server software, that you could
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by gregknicholson 7y ago
> Pocket IS Mozilla* and it seems like people would be more ok with the integration if they knew this. I'm less forgiving. The Pocket service is proprietary - this technology couldn't fall into the right hands - and it dire
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by gregknicholson 7y ago
Nice! This would be slightly more legible if there was a clearer distinction between the tags introducing each item and the text of the item itself. Also, it would be more usable if the dates in the URLs were numeric and international-style
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by gregknicholson 7y ago
The data comes from [Wikipedia's Current Events portal][1], so the site's author isn't directly choosing those sources. [1]: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portal:Current_events
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by gregknicholson 7y ago
The sponsors are a business out to make money, not to make sound ethical decisions. The way capitalism is supposed to work is that consumers (the capitalist synonym for “people”) avoid companies they don't like for whatever reason. The
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by gregknicholson 7y ago
I've never used Facebook, so I don't know how well Diaspora can compete, but it seems like a possibility. For Twitter, there's Mastodon (and way-back-when there was identi.ca, its forerunner). > And with social networks,
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by gregknicholson 7y ago
Happily, this is no longer true! https://hacks.mozilla.org/2018/09/focus-with-geckoview/
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by gregknicholson 7y ago
They'll have a passably-functioning tool, which is a pretty low bar that I think we still set so low because we remember IE6. But the sort of people who use whatever's put in front of them because they don't know or care are
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by gregknicholson 7y ago
This sort of thing always seems to happen. A shiny new thing comes along that's a little bit faster or cleverer, and all the geeks say “Yeah, well it may be controlled by a single company, but they're probably not evil, and anyway
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by gregknicholson 7y ago
There's a rule of thumb that says any film advertised on the side of a bus is probably not a very good film. This is probably just me, but whenever I see an advert for a web service on TV or on a billboard (especially for stalwarts lik
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by gregknicholson 7y ago
By providing a coherent set of easy-to-use, privacy-respecting alternatives. It makes it easier for those who _want_ to switch, but don't have the confidence/skill/energy to figure everything out on their own. Similarly, Disr
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by gregknicholson 7y ago
I use Brief, a Firefox extension. It downloads items in the background while Firefox is open, which seems to be often enough that I don't miss anything.
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by gregknicholson 7y ago
Pocket directly competes against the open web (in the form of RSS/Atom). If Mozilla was a values-based organisation they would be promoting the open web at least as much as they promote their own proprietary system.
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by gregknicholson 7y ago
And yet the server-side part is still closed-source. Mozilla's manifesto is just marketing now — it's obvious they don't really believe it any more.
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by gregknicholson 7y ago
This is one of the problems the Librem 5 is designed to solve.
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by gregknicholson 7y ago
> GNU is risking turning into the boy who cried wolf here. As with a lot of the FSF's messaging, I think the substance of the message may be correct, but the way they convey it just isn't effective. If this is for a general aud
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by gregknicholson 7y ago
If you don't read it too closely, it sounds like an advert for the very concept of doing activities away from Facebook, which made me chuckle. “Exciting features include: Cycling through woods! Reading a story in a book made of paper!
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by gregknicholson 7y ago
The network is not the same thing as the provider. Anyone can use Mastodon for free, so Purism is part of a larger network than just Purism.

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