Tom Ryder
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What if this is the End of Days?
Tom Ryder
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What if this is it?
Tom Ryder
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it's 2021 and I think this guy I know has finally taken the cake for the weirdest thing in the past 12 months.
4 Ctrls, random blank key, return needs to be chorded - the more you look at it the worse it gets.
Tom Ryder
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I was sad to learn today that Perl CPAN author KENTNL (Kent Fredric) has passed away, according to Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/kent.fredric/posts/10158837806906830
Kent taught me how to make Perl distributions. I now very much wish I’d had the chance to meet him in person—we were even countrymen. So sorry for his family’s loss—and the Perl and Gentoo communities’ loss, too.
@Petrov_Gray@twitter.com: “Cedric has been attempting to open his third eye and peer through the gate that leads to the inner realms of higher consciousness. I think he finally succeeded this morning.”
Our worst fears have been realised. Freddie has succumbed to the Great Satan. Terry and I are very worried for him.
Tom Ryder
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@tejr Hmm. I was going to respond that I don't get this feeling with Newsboat, because 99% of discussions are with people who are already into RSS. But on a second thought, it seems that I did internalize the lesson of the linked parable: in discussions with non-RSS people, I mention RSS when it seems relevant, but I don't try to persuade anyone, and certainly don't have much hope of them adopting it.
No, the world at large is what I struggle with. I'd love to live in the FSF utopia where I can just grab the code for anything, and fix/improve it as I see fit. If I could get there by preaching about the four freedoms, I would.
But as a "FOSS practitioner", I can list a myriad reasons why the utopia will never happen: the value proposition is unclear to non-hackers, there's a vast difference between "a product for fellow hackers" and "a product for everybody", it's not sustainable without money but money bring their own complications, there's a chicken-and-egg problem with adoption (e.g. a FOSS wrapper over proprietary components is most likely useless, but we can't get a 100% FOSS thing overnight), etc.
All of this would be stressful enough merely as an intellectual exercise, but I bet every one of us talked to a friend/relative/acquaintance who could benefit from FOSS, but can't, due to the aforementioned reasons. For me, it was a friend with a "smart TV" that hangs once in a while. I sniffed the TV's traffic, and it looks like a buffer overflow from an unusually long HTTP header. It was heart-wrenching to explain that: 1) I most likely posses all the necessary skills to fix this, provided I had the source code and means of installing an update; 2) I do routinely fix stuff just like this when I do have the source code and can ship updates to people; 3) all of that is useless in this particular situation because I have neither the code nor the means of compiling and installing it. Felt like teasing: here's shiny, but there's no way you can have it.
That's what bothers me the most: we the FOSS folk build a really beautiful world, but have to keep it to ourselves. Just as you say, it looks like FOSS has to abandon the idea of serving "the masses". I think I could accept that on the rational, intellectual level, but emotionally, it feels plain wrong =\
Tom Ryder
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Friends don't let friends publish truncated-article RSS.
Tom Ryder
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writing a find command to chown the libs
Tom Ryder
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Bad kid's TV show concept:
Prepper Pig
Tom Ryder
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I’m going to let everyone in on a little secret, a secret handshake that occurs in internet discussions. The group is people who use the en dash to correctly indicate numeric ranges like 3–4. They will never point it out but I guarantee to you they’re nodding to each other smugly when they see it.
