tedks

Old man yells at cloud, curses future, more at 11.

As a formerly ardent software freedom lifestylist I hear this criticism and have embraced it myself. I don't encourage the "designers" I know in my life to use GIMP anymore. Much like social revolution can be tragically violent, in 2016 it sometimes falls to us to surrender our computing integrity for a shorter-term tactical gain. This isn't good, but it's not good to avoid either.

That said, I think this essay paints an overly narrow view of Stallmanism. Stallman would much prefer systematic change, even though he is a self-identifying liberal; you see this less in the blessed FSF essays and more on stallman.org and similar because he doesn't get so speculative to talk about policy in most of the exhaustively-edited technical specifications on the finer points of software freedom theory.

Stallman is I think overly pragmatic. He lives in a society where individualist liberal political action, voting with one's dollar, etc., is the only acceptable method of political change, so he only ever expresses change in these terms. This makes for a weak praxis, because liberalism always makes for a weak praxis. But this isn't Stallmanism; it's just the overpragmatism of rms. Marx thought that electoralism was a good idea, for example, but that doesn't mean communism is inherently electoralist.

I think the best thing to do is to explicitly approach software freedom from a collective liberation stance and be ready and willing to point out the contradictions between the totality and the underlying ideological motivations of software freedom. Stallman doesn't need to do this; I think he's contributed quite enough honestly, and that if you want a better praxis, you should provide it yourself, because it isn't hard.

""" 2. He doesn't let the FSF be larger than him.

Who's their 2nd in command?

Who'll take over after he passes on?

What will the FSF look like in 30 years? """

I don't actually know who the second-in-command (if there is such a position, the FSF seems very flat) is. But the first-in-command is John Sullivan and has been for like, ten years? A long time at least.

I don't think anyone will ever replace rms. You can't necessarily teach vision like he has. Honestly, maybe nobody will replace rms because free software will be illegal in the surveillance dystopia of the future. Everything else in The Right to Read has born out. But, the management of the FSF has been out of his hands for a long time. He's just the theorist; a role that's utterly critical, but not business-critical. When rms dies, it'll be like Marx dying.

I have no idea what computing will look like in 30 years but I think the fundamental premise of the FSF is that software is an extension of thought, so the sanctity of your software is the sanctity of your mind and should be regarded as such. That is an easy thing to continue on.

This is the same tired justification of injustice that "states rights" advocates trot out.

Geez. You weren't exaggerating.

>but having to share the bathroom with females

The fact this comment is not gray having such overt misogyny speaks poorly of HN as a tech community. This is what keeps women out of tech.

Mods, please delete this.

Here's how the UX actually works:

1. User chooses "attach photo."

2. The user hasn't installed the plugin. Who does that? So signal doesn't work.

3. The user sends their contact a facebook message saying "signal isn't working" and attaches the photo.

4. Both users uninstall signal and tell everyone who mentions it that it can't even send picture messages.

'Blurted' (thinking this is how a diplomatic reception works is straining) utterances don't end up on Wikileaks, and the united states isn't different now, for better or worse, than it was any number of years ago. I'm not sure what point you're trying to make with this. If you don't personally agree with Assange that's one thing, but I think it's irrational to think that accepting his goals, you should still be forgiving of collaborators.

> You're welcome to suggest measures I should undertake to be more effective at getting to the truth in these matters.

I notice you don't mention double blinding any of these interventions. Have you tried that? How would you try that for something crypto-religious like meditation?

I would say Temporal is not far off in saying "commitment to the truth," but I would go further and say that the core of humanity, of being human, is striving towards bettering ourselves through the application of intelligence. Intelligence is the human superpower and when harnessed it can create incredible things.

Doing the reverse of empowering your intelligence, and empowering your confirmation bias (as comment parent), tribalism (as Donald Trump/neo-nationalists everywhere), or credulity (as meditationists/"everything is connected maaaaaan" types), is worse than suicide. You're using the power of your brain to enhance its flaws and create a perverted version of a human, progressing, but in the opposite direction; becoming stronger, but in a domain that should be avoided at all costs.

This is somewhat like the process of building a good military sniper by progressively dehumanizing them, stripping them of their empathy and agency in order to use them as an efficient killing machine. But worse, because you can think yourself out of that -- you can't think yourself out of a totally broken mind, and the more intelligent you are, the better you are at keeping yourself broken.

>All this stuff draws contempt from curmudgeonly skeptics (of which I used to be the worst kind), but from painful experience I've found these techniques to be far more effective than any of the more conventional approaches I'd tried previously.

Yes, throwing away your critical eye towards the world in favor of starry-eyed credulity can certainly kick the placebo effect into overdrive. If you're constantly questioning whether something is working, it will probably not feel like it's working, whereas if you wholeheartedly believe, you will likely carry that through into your perceptions. This of course has nothing to do with the actual efficacy, it's just that you're selectively perceiving so as to confirm your pre-existing notions; when the object of all of this effort is your own mental state this can be confused with the technique itself being effective. In reality, people like being successful, and feeling like you are winning at one thing makes you more likely to think you can win at other things. Rinse repeat. Confirmation bias is lovely when you can weaponize it like this. The sad thing is you have to kill the most valuable part of your human self in the process. RIP.

Well, presumably their confidence to the US government helped the US in some way, or the their relationship would be pretty brief.

The web interface does show some of these things, but I think with Wikileaks you can always get a torrent of the raw files they've obtained. At least, that was usually the case. The DKIM information is verifiable, and if Wikileaks was overtly fabricating something, people would love to be able to attest to that fact. Hillary Clinton could say that Wikileaks is overtly lying, but doesn't, because there are multiple ways of verifying this particular leak and it would be nonsensical to try to outright deny it. Instead, she tries to Putin her way out of any discussion involving this. Do you think she would do that if she could just deny?