rms’s statement was very mature. I hope he holds to his commitment to be better. I am still not sure he is the right person for the job but you can’t deny the work he has done in the past and his commitment to the movement.

I suppose anything eliciting emotions would be considered affective

These do seem to actually be fake. There was a real Amazon program though where Amazon would pay employees to tweet on company time about how much they liked working at Amazon. The MIT technology review has a pretty good write-up here

It is beyond doubt that rms is ‘neurodivergent,’ but that doesn’t excuse his behavior around women. If rms is going to be a leader in the free software movement, he needs to be someone people actually want to follow. If an entire half of the population is uncomfortable with his behavior, he will not be a good leader. We only stand a chance against the giant tech companies and governments if we can create a popular movement.

rms should at the very least commit himself and the fsf to being more inclusive. Its not like he is incapable of admitting he was wrong, he has done so many times in the past.

This is a good insight into the progress of the investigation, but they kind of miss the point of the lab leak hypothesis. The RaTG13 sequence is 96% similar and no one would bat an eye at the SARS-CoV-2 sequence if there wasn’t a 4 amino acid insertion right at the S1/S2 junction. 3 of the 4 amino acids constitute a polybasic cleavage site (RRAR) which is a well known motif in HIV and a few other human pathogens. The crux of the lab leak hypothesis as I understand it is that this insertion is highly unlikely to occur in nature because insertions are rare enough in coronaviruses (they do have a proofreading mechanism in their polymerase) and SARS-CoV-2 has 12 insertions right next to one another.

This isn’t to say that it is impossible to happen in nature, and they have just recently found coronaviruses in bats with insertions in that region.

I don’t mean to say you should believe on or the other hypothesis, but the article did a bad job of explaining why lab leak is even considered when the known bat strain is 96% similar.

I love it! Any chance you could link your dotfiles?

I think it should not be controversial that rms is not the person to lead the free software movement right now. While some of the criticisms against him are mischaracterizations and a few lies, he does not foster the type of welcoming environment that this movement needs in order to succeed.

Even if you think rms has no obligation to change his behavior around women, you have to admit he is pretty disconnected from the way most people interact with software. Like it or not, the free software movement has to recruit from ‘normies’ who will not learn a hundred emacs macros or wget every webpage and email it to themselves.

This is completely unrelated but I really like the font she uses for her section headers.

You can host git repos on the IPFS and there is a project called radicle that adds PRs and documentation to them all with IPFS and git. If the RIAA and other parties don’t calm down this might have to be the future.

Huh that’s really clever

How would a p2p social media network even work? Even peertube has servers it just lightens the load on them by using the BitTorrent protocol.

They make a good point. I never thought of PoS as a barrier to entry that excludes people. I was definitely one of those who thought of it as the golden goose of crypto. I can’t help but think that as long as there is millions to be made with crypto it will never really be a currency in itself. Why would you spend 0.0001 ETH on a pizza when it might be worth 20 times more in a few months?

Its not like the pirate bay hasn’t ever been a subject of a federal investigation though. 3 of its founders served jail time and it was raided by the swedish police twice. Despite this their downtime has been pretty limited.

Moore’s law has fundamental limits in that transistors can only get so small before the electrons begin to quantum tunnel through them. After which, you can only increase the number of transistors by increasing the size of the chip. I think some roadmaps predict that circuits will become more and more specialized so that the performance increases without having to increase the size.

Counter speech requires orders of magnitude more effort to create, so the type of low effort posts that radicalize people will always win out among populations susceptible to radicalization. I think deplatforming bigots is completely justified but it is worrying that a handful of people get to control what the rest of us speak about. Decentralization is the obvious way forward because while bigots may keep their platform they can be shunned by other communities and it will be harder for them to radicalize people in communities who don’t want them because they will have smaller, more hands-on moderation teams and less profit-motive.