6 ms·
"I don't know how to make a screenshot" - what a fucking star.
by ekjhgkejhgk 11mo ago
"I don't know how to make a screenshot" - what a fucking star.
- jsk2600 11mo agoThis is the guy who is 'browsing' web using wget+email afterall: > For personal reasons, I do not browse the web from my computer. (I also have not net connection much of the time.) To look at page I send mail to a demon which runs wget and mails the page back to me. It is very efficient use of my time, but it is slow in real time.
- krackers 11mo agoThis makes sense if you want to reject the modern web, but using lynx or w3m would work as well. But if you generally want to champion free software and put the "personal" in PC, then I think you necessarily need to familiarize yourself with modern computing or else you can't really have a good opinion on it. For instance, if you refuse to play around with LLMs out of some dogmatic reason that they're not "truly" open (note: I don't know what his true opinions are), then you risk completely missing the boat and can't meaningfully shape the space of modern discourse.
- ekjhgkejhgk 11mo agoNo, you don't know what the reasons are. You're assuming he just wants to avoid graphical interfaces. That might not be the reason. In fact, I suspect that it has to do privacy, where lynx won't help you.
- krackers 11mo agoWhat is the privacy leak vector using lynx? It does not use JS, so I'm not sure how running wget on another server is better than lynx over ssh or mosh?
- ekjhgkejhgk 11mo agoI don't know, we're both speculating. I'm just advising against "oh he could just as well do X" - you don't know.
- johannes1234321 11mo agoI assume it is more about structure and time. If you start browsing you wait for pages to load and then probably go a page further and to the next. In the batch mode you have the designated time window to go through mail and read what is there and avoid jumping into some rats nest of neverending paths. In addition you get those privacy aspects (website operators don't know where you are) and are blocked from "non-free JavaScript programs" and only deal with text with content, all else will not come through.
- deleted 11mo ago[deleted]
- kleiba 11mo agoIf you can send and receive email, why can't you run wget yourself?
- andai 11mo agoMy guess would be that he prefers having stuff in an inbox he can process one by one.
- rightbyte 11mo agoYe I need more pure hearted dogmatism in my life such that I can say that and don't lie. Have some secretary send me webpages with obfuscated JS by fax when I need to sin.
- ekjhgkejhgk 11mo agoI get that you're being sarcastic, but I actually think the world would be a kinder place if we had more of Stallman's flavor of pure hearted dogmatism.
- rightbyte 11mo agoYe I agree. I was not sarcastic other than that I must aknowledge that I probably wouldn't go to that length becouse of weakness in my heart ;)
- DonHopkins 11mo agoI bet he knows how to make a Lisp Machine screenshot.
- gentooflux 11mo agoI bet he knows how but still won't
- jdougan 11mo agoEmacs is a (virtual) Lisp Machine
- setopt 11mo agoAt least a Lisp Image.
- shevy-java 11mo agoIt is a strange answer because I use an alias to a ruby script ("shot") which just wraps imagemagick mostly. So I don't understand the "I don't know how to make a screenshot" part of RMS really. He seems to never fully understood why python or ruby are useful.
- Sophira 11mo agoHe was using text mode at the time in 2002. The term has something of a technical meaning that he was likely referencing. To be precise: 1. He was using a virtual console (ie. what you get when you press Ctrl-Alt-F1 and similar if using X), not an X terminal. 2. The virtual console was very likely not using a framebuffer (which would be a graphics mode), but was in fact just the Linux kernel's standard text mode output for virtual consoles, using the BIOS font. Making a screenshot of such a text mode as a graphics file is actually not really something you can do. For the most part, the best you can do is to synthesize an equivalent image from scratch by rendering the text using another program. That's likely what he meant when he said that he didn't know how to do a screenshot. Yes, it's overly specific, and the person who asked was probably just wanting to see what he was looking at on the monitor, which wouldnt require an exact pixel-for-pixel copy, but there you go.
- anthk 11mo agoEither script(1) or ttyrec(1). But you have to run these before. Also, I'm pretty sure tty dumping tools (as root) do exist, this is Unix after all.
- Sophira 11mo agoThose still only work for text. What I'm trying to say is that it's possible Stallman was considering that "screenshot" means "dumping a graphics buffer to disk". In the case of text mode without the framebuffer, there is no graphics buffer to dump (at least, not one that's accessible on the computer), therefore the best you can do is dumping a text buffer instead. You can of course synthesize a new image based on the contents of that text buffer (and that would almost certainly have been fine for the purposes of the question), but you can't dump a graphics buffer that doesn't exist. He would absolutely have known about script(1).
- mvdtnz 11mo ago[flagged]
- 9dev 11mo agoHeavens, thank you. It’s like people assume genius when RMS wiggles his little toe and wonder what grand intellectual insight might have moved Him to do so.
- ekjhgkejhgk 11mo agoStallman has been right so many times, usually decades ahead of time. On each hype cycle when most of us were bewildering at the latest shiny thing, Stallman was spelling out exactly how companies would use it to exploit us. And I'm not talking about obvious garbage with zero upside like crypto and IoT, I'm talking about more subtle hype that actually did have a degree of upside, like the cloud or javascript for example. I think he deserves a little bit more respect than that. I'm not saying "lets suspend our critical thinking and just follow whatever RMS says", I'm saying "this guy has been decades ahead of time in the most fundamental matters like morality and justice, lets give his quirkness a little leeway".
- tormeh 11mo agoIndustrial IoT is far from useless. Consumer IoT is pretty dumb, but let's not get too sad about the IoT as a whole.