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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 28th, 2023

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  • Proton AG lost me as a customer the minute they backdoored a binding arbitration clause into their TOS last year.

    The difficulty of proving damages in breach of privacy cases combined with generally weak privacy legislation globally means the threat of a class action often serves as one of the only practical deterrents to abuses of power by corporations controlling sensitive personal information. By changing its terms of service, Proton essentially immunized itself from suffering any significant penalty in the event its negligence leads to a mass breach of privacy of its users.

    Tactics like the use of binding arbitration clauses are hallmarks of inherently untrustworthy corporations.










  • I’ve come to realize that semantics are vastly more important than many of us realize.

    Saying GNU/Linux isn’t about giving credit to the GNU Project so much as it is about spreading the message that GNU represents. GNU represents a cooperative, collaborative philosophy diametrically opposed to the oppressive, exploitative capitalist ideals championed by today’s ruling class. By using “GNU” we remind users that the freedom we enjoy with our computing today was made possible, not by a kernel, but by the ideals of community and camaraderie embedded into our software by way of the GPL.

    I don’t see anything antithetical about anyone wanting to share their work while at the same time wanting to be credited for it. On the contrary, most copyright regimes have specific carve outs for moral rights such as attribution. Even the most liberal of the creative commons license options includes an attribution requirement. That said, it isn’t just within your right to rename things you fork, it may be a requirement. For reference just think back to the controversy surrounding IceWeasel.




  • Another org-mode user here. No longer in studying in a formal environment, but eternally a student.

    Learning Emacs was one of the best decisions I’ve ever made. I could never fully commit to my knowledgebase when I knew my data was in a proprietary format. Moving to Emacs was not only an earth shattering upgrade over the proprietary tools I’d been using, but it gave me confidence to really put my soul into creating a distributed cognition system that will grow with me into the future.

    I’m not quite at django’s level of using Emacs for email, but it’s definitely on the list. I do use Emacs for my task management using GTD which I wouldn’t have been able to do without Rainer König’s excellent course.

    I personally use the following packages: pdf-tools - view, editing and link to pdf documents helm-recoll - fulltext search across my entire knowledgebase from within emacs, including pdf search org-transclusion - inline display of linked content from other locations in org-files (still integrating with my workflow)

    I make liberal use of org-refile, org-store-link and org-insert-link. In order to keep the cross linking robust, I’ve added the following to my dotfile

          (setq org-id-link-to-org-use-id t)
          (setq org-id-track-globally t)
    

    The learning curve is steep, but once the basics have been learned, the power is really unmatched.