6 ms·
Turns out RMS has always been right. How surprising.
by xiaoyu2006 5mo ago
Turns out RMS has always been right. How surprising.
- Aloha 5mo agoIndeed, occasionally hammers do find nails to hit.
- stronglikedan 5mo agoStrange analogy considering that RMS got to where he is precisely by finding nails to hit much, much more than occasionally, and much, much more than most hammers.
- behringer 5mo agoThe analogy works if you think of RMS as a nailgun.
- Supermancho 5mo agoI think it hits perfectly. He espouses that almost every vendor everywhere is doing something immoral and it will inevitably be used against you. Eventually, some of these predictions come true enough for some part of his audiences. I don't think you've made a point about his abilities. I do think you've restated his proclivities, which reinforces the basis for the quip.
- rpdillon 5mo agoThis is particularly uncharitable to someone that saw around many corners and was articulate enough to warn us about them in advance. There's a reason there's a subreddit called "Stallman Was Right", and it's not that he was shotgun blasting opinions and landed a few of them. It's because he has a systemic understanding of the incentives our system sets up and is able to project decades into the future about how those incentives will play out.
- traderj0e 5mo agoIf RMS said not to trust Google's self-proclaimed altruism and relationship with open source, yeah. I always assumed that was a backstab waiting to happen. But that only meant I used an iPhone and didn't care that it was more closed than Android, not that I got an Arch Linux phone or something. (And a Mac more importantly, but there's not really a Google counterpart to that.)
- tgsovlerkhgsel 5mo agoTurns out that identifying a problem doesn't help without a workable solution/alternative.
- dylan604 5mo agoI hate this trite and the managers that say "don't bring me problems, bring me solutions" nonsense. I'm not the person to be able to fix it so the solution is make the problem known so others responsible can fix it. If I could fix it, I wouldn't be telling you about the problem. If anything, I would tell you how I fixed an issue in some stand up or other of the many meetings scheduled keeping me from working.
- deleted 5mo ago[deleted]
- janalsncm 5mo agoI am only aware of two solutions: 1) proof of identity, tying accounts to real-world things that are hard or impossible to replicate 2) proof of work, tying accounts or actions to the ability to run computations Proof of identity in theory can solve the problem but at the cost of privacy. Proof of work can be defeated but has the possibility of preserving privacy.
- supern0va 5mo ago>Proof of identity in theory can solve the problem but at the cost of privacy. All current implementations: yes. I do think there are some privacy preserving solutions, but they're obviously imperfect. But assuming you have a central authority that can validate and sign valid government identification, it seems like some sort of ZK scheme could allow one to verify that they have a valid government issued ID, but without disclosing which one it is. I still don't love the idea, but it sure seems better than everything else I've seen proposed.
- Worf 5mo ago
- backprop1989 5mo agoRoot mean square?
- snailmailman 5mo agorichard stallman
- janalsncm 5mo agoWhat is RMS’ solution to this problem?
- kibwen 5mo agoUncompromisingly insist on only using things you have ultimate ownership and control over, even when that means dramatic and life-altering inconvenience, and where those things don't exist, build them yourself. Unfortunately, "build it yourself" is relatively easy when it comes to software, and almost impossible when it comes to the hardware running that software. It doesn't matter if you have full ownership of a complete open-source stack if no hardware manufacturer will permit you to run unsigned arbitrary code. The lack of open hardware--chips that you could build in your garage using materials nobody could reasonably prevent you from acquiring--is the lynchpin upon which open source software will wither and die.
- bix6 5mo agoSo why doesn’t someone build these chips in their garage then?
- kibwen 5mo agoDespite my hopes, I somewhat doubt that anyone would accept computing on the sort of chips that one could produce in their garage for less than $10,000 capital investment. You can, probably, with some effort and research, produce something analogous to the original Intel chips from the 70s in your garage using off-the-shelf tools. Sam Zeloof has blazed the trail here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IS5ycm7VfXg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IS5ycm7VfXg . And for a less than a million it's not inconceivable that a municipality could produce chips that would be at home in the 90s. Maybe that would be enough for a lot of tasks, especially if you're willing to resort to hardware coprocessors for common tasks like media decoding and encryption, but it would take a huge sea change to get people to accept it, and nearly all of our software would need to be rewritten.
- Borealid 5mo agoThere is already plenty of open hardware, it's just not this-year's-top-performance. In the category of ~1-3 years' performance lag you get Rockchip and friends, which are closed hardware that allows open computation. See computers made by the company MNT as an example. In the category of ~5 years' performance lag you get "soft" cores, where you buy an FPGA (dynamically reprogrammable hardware) and make it run a CPU you design yourself. If you want to, for example, make your CPU have more cache and fewer ALUs, you can do that by tweaking some files and reprogramming the FPGA. This has a cost in terms of power efficiency and runtime speed, but you can absolutely run a full Linux desktop experience on an FPGA today, and the hardware has no way to try to prevent you from running any software. You can solve the problem of all the cellular basebands being closed source with either software-defined-radio or using a closed USB/PCIe cellular modem connected to an open processor.