xxi

xxi wrote (edited )

TL;DR version: a sole individual can't change the world because left-wing politics require collective action and solidarity is vital in order to sustain any positive change. Don't feel bad.

Well... The line between good and bad behavior with regard to political work is blurry. On one hand, you can't save the world by yourself. On the other, the first can be used to rationalize stuff you probably could do but just choose not to do.

With that said, this is how I think when I feel like you: most left-leaning ideology, doesn't matter if you're into social democracy or anarchism, is based upon some form of principle of collective action. It's one of many things that separates leftists from neoliberals and conservatives.

The conclusion as I see is that ideally when someone drops out for any reason, there's got to be enough structure to make such unfortunate events relatively trivial, even if more hands are better than none. That's not entirely different from what McQueen seem to be asking.

So if you're sick, or something akin to that, you're in a similar situation as her. I couldn't know what she's thinking, nor do I claim to know how she reason and feel, but something tells me that she could relate to others with similar problems.

So sure, collective action requires individuals, but it also requires solidarity with the ones who have to take a step back or people who can contribute but only to extent they're allowed to by their limitations.

The myth of the "sole leftist savior" is just that, a myth. As is the thought that someone single-handedly brought about positive societal change. I'm not American and I have nothing against him, but Martin Luther King often seem to get painted in this light.

If you deem that you're unable to do more than you do now, you're most likely right. So don't feel bad.

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xxi OP wrote

Effective and tested alternative. I've done stuff like that before so I'll do it again. Thanks.

(The following is not necessarily directed at you, just clarifying in case someone else reads this).

I never mentioned that I've tried it before so it'd be unreasonable for me to demand that people won't suggest that. Any other tactics would be appreciated ruling out the one mentioned above.

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xxi wrote

I always liked XFCE, never really "got" what KDE is about. LXDE is what introduced me to DE's and Linux though. XFCE was reasonably lightweight and easy enough to use to enable my transition to Linux.

Aside: a while ago I decided to torture myself, so I ditched XFCE in favor of dwm + assorted suckless software. Insane seeing as I lack the proper C skills and knowledge of the workings of the X Window System to get the most out of it. I still suck but I've been forced to learn a thing or two.

Anyway, if people want lightweight dwm/suckless is a good alternative.

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xxi wrote (edited )

Read about it a while ago, researched it for a bit but found nothing. Now that you brought it up again took a closer look at that entry.

See: https://directory.fsf.org/wiki?title=Youtube-dl&action=history

That particular section was added by David Hedlund who seem to have a pretty decent reputation in regard to the directory and Joshua Gay seem to vouch for him.

You could always e-mail FSF or the people mentioned above. However, the directory doesn't seem like that place that would accept an elaborate troll like that. Because it would have to be sort of elaborate in order to be able to participate in a bunch of Free Software projects without someone calling you out.

For example, see this or the other references on his page.

With that said, what I propose above could be viewed as an argument from authority which is a fallacy, but if I were to make a judgment I'd say that the quip above probably is correct.

Especially if you take into consideration that he's an admin at the directory. I don't know much about their procedures for becoming one but I suspect that you must be trusted to some degree.

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xxi wrote (edited )

Short answer: No. That'd be like hating workers because they slave under a capitalist system, or the non-white people who had to live under apartheid.

You can hate the system, or operating system, without hating the people who have to exist within it. You can always resist but demanding that of your grandma, or someone like that, would be too much unless there exist practical alternatives.

Longer answer: However, people who have some reasonable way to resist and possess the knowledge for doing so but refrain for doing so I cautiously question. To actually find who that might be is impossible if it concerns populations. I won't assume that kind of privilege unless it's obvious. But embarking on endeavors to find capable people is sort of missing the point isn't it?

It's a system. Something larger than the individuals. Also proprietary OS:s do rely heavily on oppression that comes as a consequence of societal systems. It's probably easier to change OS:s than turning your workplace into something that's owned communally. It's sort of a fitting analogy though. Provide a community-based alternative (online and face-to-face) instead of something that's based on crass on individualism and the help people might need will mostly be there.

If your grandma and others can ask the community for the help they might need most people wouldn't mind using different software, if it works for people to do "their stuff". I don't think they care deeply if it's called Windows, macOS, Debian or FreeBSD.

If these things were wide-spread and people promoted Windows/macOS from ideological choice, well... Those people are worthy of all the contempt in the world. They'd be agitating for bondage well aware of that alternatives exists.

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xxi wrote

Boring answer: it depends.

Under optimal conditions: I find something that really interest me, become obsessive about it to the point of it being diagnosed as a disorder and either it was a pretty good memorable, more or less one-off, period or it becomes a part of my life.

Latent interests, burst out and cools off: Tolkien, Gaming, learning stuff connected to specific needs, i.e. writing shell scripts and the like, read about veganism (or about thirty other -ism:s), miscellaneous.

Common behaviors meant to bring me joy and that I try to do even when I feel lethargic: reading, playing/writing/listen to music, "computer stuff", writing, watching lectures, talks, documentaries...

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xxi wrote (edited )

I'm using GNU/Linux but I have found ClamAV helpful a couple of times. I remember downloading some game extensions/manuals or something like that and it happened to be infected. Now it really didn't effect me because it's exploited some Windows issue, but in theory I could've sent that to someone else.

If your home network happen to include some units running Windows it would also be a problem. I've never used Samba but seeing that's it's mentioned a lot of threads and the like I guess it's being used a lot and could present more of a threat.

Of course this could be a "user vulnerability" but I'm just saying that I tend to be semi-paranoid about these things and I made a mistake. I bet someone vastly more experienced than me makes them too. In that case ClamAV can provide some protection against oversights by the user.

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xxi wrote (edited )

And yeah, then there's the part where you don't have to rely capitalist entities to run a computer. Sure, you can use Google Chrome or iTunes if you want to but I very rarely find that it's necessary. I've set up Spotify when I've got people around and we need music, but I don't really use it in my day to day life.

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xxi wrote (edited )

At home? Never. If I can't run some piece of software on Debian I rather do other stuff. It's sort of like food places not serving vegetarian/vegan meals or someone using racial slurs, my reaction to that is pretty much "Fuck you." While helping others? When that need arises, I'd say once a month at most.

I saw someone saying that migrating to Linux is cumbersome. Funny thing is that I switched because I felt Windows was too cumbersome to use and I assure you that I'm not trying to exaggerate.

I'm not an hacker by any means, but changing/modifying stuff on Windows is horrible. The reason is that every time you want to do something that Microsoft doesn't want you to change — take theme changes — you either have to rely on stuff that they, or some "sanction vendor" provide. If you want to break away from that you have to rely on workarounds that various independent Windows communities provide. Windows 7 for example didn't really give you the option to remove window decoration in any sane manner. That's easily done in the DE Xfce for example and it's very user friendly.

Another thing is that it's hard to modify which software that run in the background or on startup sufficiently. For example, while testing something you might want to do a soft reboot, logout and login quickly or something like that. That takes like 10-20 seconds on Linux while Windows needs to do full reboots all the time for some reason. Apart from that: I can run my computer for a month without reboots even after installing a ton of new software. It's more or less common practice in Windows to reboot for all kinds of shitty reasons. My experience with MacOS is more or less the same.

With that said, sure it takes some time to get to learn the Linux system but it's not as exotic as it might appear. It sure beats trying to do a backflip while tying your shoe laces in mid-air or having to do workarounds on workarounds every time you need to do something slightly non-standard. Just trying to run low resource system on a shitty computer is more or less impossible on MacOS and Windows, they're clunky as hell. Doesn't matter which version all that I've had to deal with is just very, very cumbersome the moment you don't want to open just Word or a browser.

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xxi wrote

Reply to by !deleted1665

I kinda like it and it probably would cause less confusion.

I'm not entirely sure if this is from any actual correspondence between someone and rms, unless it's the poster's conversation.

Poked around for a bit with a search engine but didn't find anything tangible except that this image was posted on reddit too.

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xxi wrote (edited )

I embrace it at a bare minimum and my examples are probably not what most people would associate with so called "cloud computing".

I suppose that I use the"cloud" indirectly in the case of general public code stuff. It's public though so privacy violations seem less important. I try to choose carefully. Meaning that I rather go the free software route and usually there are such alternatives.

A potential privacy issue is having e-mails hosted by a provider other than myself, i.e. having mails hosted on someone else's computer in addition to storing these on my own computer. In my case I use a relatively small privacy aware provider with a long track record of being obnoxious advocates of online privacy and related issues. For example, disobeying government regulations for as long as they can until these has been tested in court, in spite of pressure and threats of hefty fines. When the regulation was legally implemented in practice they just stopped their previous data retention practices making the regulation, in effect, moot. As a consequence they cater to both private and business users of a similar mindset so one could reasonably assume that in case of a betrayal of trust the penalties would be especially severe for my provider.

With that overly verbose (sorry?) account of it all I'd like to say that what @jorgesumle said is accurate. Apart from the above I subscribe to that ideology and practice. If I could I'd host my own mail server but with my current knowledge about self-hosting I'm pretty sure I'd do a pretty shitty insecure job, void of privacy, of it.

As a person that shy away from "clouds" I've always wondered what the fuck people really need it for. Store high resolution pictures they took ages ago but will never lay their eyes on again? To me that seems like the most common use case. Sure, I have important stuff and I keep backups but if I were to lose it all in, say, a fire some photo/config /text file would be the least of my concerns. Of course I'd rather keep it and it'd be inconvenient if I lost it but yeah, I wouldn't contemplate suicide if it were to happen. For most part I'm pretty happy deleting stuff anyway. If I have something laying around for years, like a 5000 word document, the reason is most often that I just don't care that much about it and if I were to do something with it a lot of previous experiences point to that I rather just do something all over again. Picking stuff up, any type of creative work, after a long while is mostly useless because you're usually somewhere else mentally at that point.

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xxi wrote (edited )

One thing, as I see it, that the author gets wrong is that one can't really expect companies to perform some "revolution from above". The author mentions narratives a couple of times and yet he somehow fail to break out of the narrative that it's companies that must be the deciding factor so to speak.

About applications I think that the average user is pretty bad at demanding changes. To put a more political lean to it: the working class must rebel. If they don't use their potential we'll still live in this quasi-Orwellian capitalist utopia (or dystopia) in 20 years too.

Maybe one of the reasons as to why "open source" has failed in some respect is because it lacks the ethos of free software. The social component is very important.

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xxi wrote (edited )

Definitely some games; right now I'm into Fallout 1/2 for example. However I tend to prefer non-DRM games even though they're proprietary. I'm not really that into new games — there are some exceptions, Axiom Verge is awesome — so I very rarely feel the urge to directly contribute to help huge companies with earning profits.

And some non-free firmware, banking software and so on as other people has mentioned. I'm not completely Youtube free but I'm doing pretty without it most of the time. However when it comes to music (live videos and other transient things that can't be found anywhere else) Google are assholes. All the music related videos I've tried to download with avideo are DRM-protected. I hate that.

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xxi wrote (edited )

Not a directory per se but this is a decent and readable resource for someone new to the whole thing: https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/proprietary.html. Since software may change it mostly mentions about certain companies/actors instead of specific software.

I'd argue that it's enough to give someone genuinely curious about it all. I.e. not just mouthing of because you say you dislike Facebook Messenger, Google Chrome or something along these lines.

I don't know if you find this following opinion useful, but sometimes people have no intention of listening to what you have to say. In those cases it's probably better just stating your opinion — in case someone else is reading it — and move along.

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xxi wrote

I like this initiative. Apart from the tar man page and its --help option I've yet felt any need to try it out. 'tar --help | wc -l' gives me about 320 lines of output, which is bit too verbose. It's like a third of the man page.

I,ll probably try out tldr one day. Doesn't really strike me as resource heavy, which is good.

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xxi wrote (edited )

The ipfs/decentralized aspect of this project is certainly novel, but new collaborative editing projects seem to pop up every couple of weeks. Nothing bad about new free software development but it's sort of funny how people are hellbent on doing that exact thing.

Just to name a couple of other similar projects:

OnlyOffice

Collabora

Etherpad

Nextcloud

Firepad

Gobby

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xxi wrote

I'm sorry to say that this release is so far the only one that have made me disappointed in any way. I've never had any problems whatsoever with NoScript. Not once.

The options page made FF hang, it fucked up the rest of the FF UI (leaving it blank), made the browser crash a couple of times. Apart from that getting keyboard shortcuts to work, well... It didn't work. Might be that they're not supported anymore.

After an hour or two of troubleshooting, new profile, clean install, returning everything to standard settings and what not all these problems remained. I'll stick with classic for a while at least and hopefully these kind of problems will be addressed in the next release.

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