From the «doom I say» department:
Title: Nearly 10 years after Data and Goliath, Bruce Schneier says: Privacy’s still screwed
Author: Iain Thomson
Date: Sat, 15 Feb 2025 15:44:13 +0000
Link: https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2025/02/15/interview_bruce_schneier/
'In 50 years, I think we'll view these business practices like we view sweatshops today'
Interview It has been nearly a decade since famed cryptographer and privacy expert Bruce Schneier released the book Data and Goliath: The Hidden Battles to
Collect Your Data and Control Your World - an examination of how government agencies and tech giants exploit personal data. Today, his predictions feel eerily accurate.…
On Sun, 16 Feb 2025, Retrograde wrote:
From the «doom I say» department:
Title: Nearly 10 years after Data and Goliath, Bruce Schneier says: Privacy’s still screwed
Author: Iain Thomson
Date: Sat, 15 Feb 2025 15:44:13 +0000
Link: https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2025/02/15/interview_bruce_schneier/
'In 50 years, I think we'll view these business practices like we view
sweatshops today'
Interview It has been nearly a decade since famed cryptographer and privacy
expert Bruce Schneier released the book Data and Goliath: The Hidden Battles to
Collect Your Data and Control Your World - an examination of how government >> agencies and tech giants exploit personal data. Today, his predictions feel >> eerily accurate.…
Yes, it is difficult to be optimistic about privacy in this day and
age. =(
D <[email protected]> writes:
On Sun, 16 Feb 2025, Retrograde wrote:
From the «doom I say» department:
Title: Nearly 10 years after Data and Goliath, Bruce Schneier says: Privacy’s still screwed
Author: Iain Thomson
Date: Sat, 15 Feb 2025 15:44:13 +0000
Link: https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2025/02/15/interview_bruce_schneier/
'In 50 years, I think we'll view these business practices like we view
sweatshops today'
Interview It has been nearly a decade since famed cryptographer and privacy
expert Bruce Schneier released the book Data and Goliath: The Hidden Battles to
Collect Your Data and Control Your World - an examination of how government >>> agencies and tech giants exploit personal data. Today, his predictions feel >>> eerily accurate.…
Yes, it is difficult to be optimistic about privacy in this day and
age. =(
Legislation has always been slow. The industry has always taken
advantage of that. We just need to say no---if we knew how to. Optimistically, we'll get there, but, of course, by then the industry
will most likely have found another niche somewhere else.
I'm more scared about the government than the industry. With industry I >always have the choice of not using it, and they depend on customers,
so in the end, that protects me.
In message <[email protected]>, D <[email protected]> writes
I'm more scared about the government than the industry. With industry I
always have the choice of not using it, and they depend on customers, so in >> the end, that protects me.
Depending on what you mean by choosing not to use it.
I don't use any of the Meta products, but they still know about me as "friends" have uploaded pictures of me to facebook, or their contacts lists to whatsapp.
Adrian
D wrote:
On Sun, 16 Feb 2025, Salvador Mirzo wrote:
D <[email protected]> writes:
On Sun, 16 Feb 2025, Retrograde wrote:
From the «doom I say» department:
Title: Nearly 10 years after Data and Goliath, Bruce Schneier says:
Privacy’s still screwed
Author: Iain Thomson
Date: Sat, 15 Feb 2025 15:44:13 +0000
Link:
https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2025/02/15/interview_bruce_schneier/
'In 50 years, I think we'll view these business practices like we view >>>>> sweatshops today'
Interview It has been nearly a decade since famed cryptographer and >>>>> privacy
expert Bruce Schneier released the book Data and Goliath: The Hidden >>>>> Battles to
Collect Your Data and Control Your World - an examination of how
government
agencies and tech giants exploit personal data. Today, his
predictions feel
eerily accurate.…
Yes, it is difficult to be optimistic about privacy in this day and
age. =(
Legislation has always been slow. The industry has always taken
advantage of that. We just need to say no---if we knew how to.
Optimistically, we'll get there, but, of course, by then the industry
will most likely have found another niche somewhere else.
I'm more scared about the government than the industry. With industry I
always have the choice of not using it, and they depend on customers, so
in the end, that protects me.
It's got pretty hard to avoid some of these businesses. Google, Facebook, Microsoft are examples of companies that are very hard to avoid.
The government on the other hand, is based ultimately on violence and is
an inherently unethical and revolting institution, and so are the people
working for it promoting its power. This is what scares me the most.
What scares me is companies using the power of government to advance their agendas. Reading about how Musk leverages the Chinese courts to silence criticism and how it looks like the same thing is coming here
Dave.
This message is in MIME format. The first part should be readable text,
It's got pretty hard to avoid some of these businesses. Google, Facebook,
Microsoft are examples of companies that are very hard to avoid.
? Facebook is super easy to avoid. Just don't use it. They make nothing of >value.
On Mon, 17 Feb 2025, Adrian wrote:
In message <[email protected]>, D >><[email protected]> writes
I'm more scared about the government than the industry. With
industry I always have the choice of not using it, and they depend
on customers, so in the end, that protects me.
Depending on what you mean by choosing not to use it.
I don't use any of the Meta products, but they still know about me as >>"friends" have uploaded pictures of me to facebook, or their contacts
lists to whatsapp.
Adrian
Why would they do that? It does not sound like friends to me, since
they do not respect your wishes, nor your privacy.
D <[email protected]> wrote:
This message is in MIME format. The first part should be readable text, >>> It's got pretty hard to avoid some of these businesses. Google, Facebook, >>> Microsoft are examples of companies that are very hard to avoid.
? Facebook is super easy to avoid. Just don't use it. They make nothing of >> value.
It doesn't work that way. First of all, even if you don't use it, people
are putting your personal information up on it when they are talking to
their friends about you.
Secondly, if you are running a business, you may need to have a facebook presence for advertising just because that is the first place that many people look for some services. You can avoid using it but not without
losing a lot of customers.
In message <[email protected]>, D <[email protected]> writes
On Mon, 17 Feb 2025, Adrian wrote:
In message <[email protected]>, D
<[email protected]> writes
I'm more scared about the government than the industry. With industry I >>>> always have the choice of not using it, and they depend on customers, so >>>> in the end, that protects me.
Depending on what you mean by choosing not to use it.
I don't use any of the Meta products, but they still know about me as
"friends" have uploaded pictures of me to facebook, or their contacts
lists to whatsapp.
Adrian
Why would they do that? It does not sound like friends to me, since they do >> not respect your wishes, nor your privacy.
Note my use of "friends" not friends. When I asked why I was told that what I don't know can't hurt me.
As for whatsapp, as I understand it, it is all or nothing thing about what it uploads, and some of them are people that I work with, so we need each others phone numbers whilst working. They think I'm odd for not using it.
Adrian
Adrian <[email protected]> wrote:
In message <[email protected]>, D
<[email protected]> writes
On Mon, 17 Feb 2025, Adrian wrote:
In message <[email protected]>, D
<[email protected]> writes
I'm more scared about the government than the industry. With
industry I always have the choice of not using it, and they depend
on customers, so in the end, that protects me.
Depending on what you mean by choosing not to use it.
I don't use any of the Meta products, but they still know about me as
"friends" have uploaded pictures of me to facebook, or their contacts
lists to whatsapp.
Adrian
Why would they do that? It does not sound like friends to me, since
they do not respect your wishes, nor your privacy.
Note my use of "friends" not friends. When I asked why I was told that
what I don't know can't hurt me.
As for whatsapp, as I understand it, it is all or nothing thing about
what it uploads, and some of them are people that I work with, so we
need each others phone numbers whilst working. They think I'm odd for
not using it.
Adrian
I don't think you're odd at all, Adrian, I have exactly the same
concerns as you; I too shun all Meta products. I use Signal
(open source, non-proprietary) for stuff that would otherwise be
on Whatsapp and I've persuaded people who want to communicate with
me in that way to use it. Mostly it's just my family sharing videos,
etc. I can imagine that it might be different getting colleagues to
do that.
Are you based in the US? Uploading your information, that enables
someone to identify you, without your consent, is illegal in the EU and >punishable by up to 4% of the global revenues of the company.
Another option is to have 2 phone numbers. One for work, and one for
friends (without quotationmarks).
I use the same technique with email. I have a spam-email that currently
has around 20k spam messages in it, and this is the one most companies
get.
I don't think you're odd at all, Adrian, I have exactly the same
concerns as you; I too shun all Meta products. I use Signal
(open source, non-proprietary) for stuff that would otherwise be
on Whatsapp and I've persuaded people who want to communicate with
me in that way to use it. Mostly it's just my family sharing videos,
etc. I can imagine that it might be different getting colleagues to
do that.
On Mon, 17 Feb 2025, Dave Yeo wrote:
It's got pretty hard to avoid some of these businesses. Google, Facebook,
Microsoft are examples of companies that are very hard to avoid.
? Facebook is super easy to avoid. Just don't use it. They make nothing of value.
If you have a job at a global mega-corp I agree, M$ and Google are
difficult to avoid. =(
In private you can do just fine to avoid them as well.
Indeed, so long as you block all FB's scripts and images on
otherwise unrelated websites. Although I don't tend to make close
friends so I don't need to worry about controlling their FB usage.
Quite mysteriously, all sorts of otherwise respectable open-source
software developers are happy to use GitHub even though it's owned
by M$. So even having ditched their software long ago, M$ are now
very hard to avoid online if, ironically, you want to use, and
especially work on, open-source software. I find that truely
unfathomable, but others barely seem to see my problem with it.
In comp.misc, Computer Nerd Kev <[email protected]d> wrote:
Indeed, so long as you block all FB's scripts and images on
otherwise unrelated websites. Although I don't tend to make close
friends so I don't need to worry about controlling their FB usage.
Doesn't stop people from posting about you on FB. (Or worse, posting
photos of you on there.)
Quite mysteriously, all sorts of otherwise respectable open-source
software developers are happy to use GitHub even though it's owned
by M$. So even having ditched their software long ago, M$ are now
very hard to avoid online if, ironically, you want to use, and
especially work on, open-source software. I find that truely
unfathomable, but others barely seem to see my problem with it.
Many, I suspect, started using Github before Microsoft bought them in
2018. Lately I've been seeing people advocating for a switch to
Codeberg. I started using it recently, but haven't moved my old projects there, at least yet.
Elijah
------
doesn't use public repositories for much anyway
D <[email protected]> wrote:
On Mon, 17 Feb 2025, Dave Yeo wrote:
It's got pretty hard to avoid some of these businesses. Google, Facebook, >>> Microsoft are examples of companies that are very hard to avoid.
? Facebook is super easy to avoid. Just don't use it. They make nothing of >> value.
Indeed, so long as you block all FB's scripts and images on
otherwise unrelated websites. Although I don't tend to make close
friends so I don't need to worry about controlling their FB usage.
If you have a job at a global mega-corp I agree, M$ and Google are
difficult to avoid. =(
In private you can do just fine to avoid them as well.
No, Google can track you via their Captchas, which I guess even
many NoScript users allow by default because the three page reloads
to let them through when a website requires it is a real pain in
the neck.
Quite mysteriously, all sorts of otherwise respectable open-source
software developers are happy to use GitHub even though it's owned
by M$. So even having ditched their software long ago, M$ are now
very hard to avoid online if, ironically, you want to use, and
especially work on, open-source software. I find that truely
unfathomable, but others barely seem to see my problem with it.
On Tue, 19 Feb 2025, Computer Nerd Kev wrote:
No, Google can track you via their Captchas, which I guess even
many NoScript users allow by default because the three page reloads
to let them through when a website requires it is a real pain in
the neck.
Oh, I simply don't use web sites where I get captchas.
In comp.misc, Computer Nerd Kev <[email protected]d> wrote:
Indeed, so long as you block all FB's scripts and images on
otherwise unrelated websites. Although I don't tend to make close
friends so I don't need to worry about controlling their FB usage.
Doesn't stop people from posting about you on FB. (Or worse, posting
photos of you on there.)
Quite mysteriously, all sorts of otherwise respectable open-source
software developers are happy to use GitHub even though it's owned
by M$. So even having ditched their software long ago, M$ are now
very hard to avoid online if, ironically, you want to use, and
especially work on, open-source software. I find that truely
unfathomable, but others barely seem to see my problem with it.
Many, I suspect, started using Github before Microsoft bought them in
2018.
Lately I've been seeing people advocating for a switch to
Codeberg.
Quite mysteriously, all sorts of otherwise respectable open-source
software developers are happy to use GitHub even though it's owned
by M$. So even having ditched their software long ago, M$ are now
very hard to avoid online if, ironically, you want to use, and
especially work on, open-source software. I find that truely
unfathomable, but others barely seem to see my problem with it.
This is a great mystery to me! I have no clue how so many open source
users can be so clueless! =( They also loooooove slck and
discord. That's revolting! IRC works percectly fine, and if you need
blinken lights, you can just add some of the numerous web IRC programs
out there, or at least use matrix or xmpp.
I think the reason must be that many open source users are young and
naive and do not remembre how M$ tried to close down linux decades
ago.
When I teach, I make it a point to bring up these things. Sadly the
students then go on to work, and get stuck in github and various
proprietary tools. But such is life! We must continue to fight the
good fight. =)
Quite mysteriously, all sorts of otherwise respectable open-source
software developers are happy to use GitHub even though it's owned
by M$. So even having ditched their software long ago, M$ are now
very hard to avoid online if, ironically, you want to use, and
especially work on, open-source software. I find that truely
unfathomable, but others barely seem to see my problem with it.
I also believe that second hand exposure is less than first hand
exposure. A small comfort as well.
Note my use of "friends" not friends. When I asked why I was told
that what I don't know can't hurt me.
As for whatsapp, as I understand it, it is all or nothing thing about
what it uploads, and some of them are people that I work with, so we
need each others phone numbers whilst working. They think I'm odd for
not using it.
Note that signals backend is not open source. The backend software
might be, but we have no direct access to their implementation and
running of it.
That said however, I trust them way more than FB, and I think they
have high ethical standards, so I would not worry about it.
Another option is to have 2 phone numbers. One for work, and one for
friends (without quotationmarks).
I use the same technique with email. I have a spam-email that
currently has around 20k spam messages in it, and this is the one most companies get.
I thought about that. The thing is that 3 years ago we seemed to
manage happily without it, but one person changing job meant that it
now seems to be essential. I've asked higher ups why we now seem to
have a defacto requirement to use WA, but no one seems to know. And I
don't see why I should buy a second phone (and ongoing costs with
running it) for what this year is likely to be 10 days use.
I use the same technique with email. I have a spam-email that
currently has around 20k spam messages in it, and this is the one
most companies get.
I have my own domain. Companies usually get a unique email
address. Those that abuse it, or leak it, are soon found out, and may
lose business as a result.
In message <1r7xd1r.15ikg3vz0019vN%[email protected]>, Sn!pe <[email protected]> writes
I don't think you're odd at all, Adrian, I have exactly the same
concerns as you; I too shun all Meta products. I use Signal
(open source, non-proprietary) for stuff that would otherwise be
on Whatsapp and I've persuaded people who want to communicate with
me in that way to use it. Mostly it's just my family sharing videos,
etc. I can imagine that it might be different getting colleagues to
do that.
Where whatsapp etc. is concerned, I've taken to asking two simple
questions, with the caveat that you can't answer "yes" to both.
Q1: Do you respect other peoples privacy ?
Q2: Do you use "social media" tools such as whatsapp and facebook ?
This usually results in "Yes" to Q1, and an awkward pause at Q2.
Salvador Mirzo <[email protected]> wrote:
D <[email protected]> writes:
[...]
Note that signals backend is not open source. The backend software
might be, but we have no direct access to their implementation and
running of it.
That said however, I trust them way more than FB, and I think they
have high ethical standards, so I would not worry about it.
Can't Signal eventually be bought off?
They claim that it's end-to-end encrypted but whatever, it has
Whatsapp's functionality without being Meta and that's good
enough for me.
Lately I've been seeing people advocating for a switch to
Codeberg.
I don't know about Codeberg, but there have been lots of
alternatives all along. Tons of projects switched from SourceForge
to GitHub. Many projects have their own websites too, so why not
self-host? GitHub do offer a lot of extra features for free, but
that's dealing with the devil IMHO. Especially as the more tied in
to GitHub-specific systems a project gets, the less practical it is
to move away if M$ get more greedy later on.
D <[email protected]> wrote:
On Tue, 19 Feb 2025, Computer Nerd Kev wrote:
No, Google can track you via their Captchas, which I guess even
many NoScript users allow by default because the three page reloads
to let them through when a website requires it is a real pain in
the neck.
Oh, I simply don't use web sites where I get captchas.
Yikes! No online shopping then? I'm always getting them, from the
shopping sites, PayPal, or Credit Card payment processors.
Alibaba/Aliexpress at least self-host theirs - but half the time
they decide I'm a robot and won't let me through at all!
[email protected]d (Computer Nerd Kev) writes:
[...]
Quite mysteriously, all sorts of otherwise respectable open-source
software developers are happy to use GitHub even though it's owned
by M$. So even having ditched their software long ago, M$ are now
very hard to avoid online if, ironically, you want to use, and
especially work on, open-source software. I find that truely
unfathomable, but others barely seem to see my problem with it.
That's well pointed out. And there are alternatives such as hosting
your own Forgejo. Moving a git repository is easy. And you can even
put a link on your old git repository saying---we're here now.
tallman has been saying it for decades: people prefer convenience.
Eli the Bearded <*@eli.users.panix.com> wrote:
In comp.misc, Computer Nerd Kev <[email protected]d> wrote:
Indeed, so long as you block all FB's scripts and images on
otherwise unrelated websites. Although I don't tend to make close
friends so I don't need to worry about controlling their FB usage.
Doesn't stop people from posting about you on FB. (Or worse, posting
photos of you on there.)
What I don't tell, they can't post, and the same with what they
don't photograph. Although I guess that does leave a bit of an
information vacuum there which some nutcase could exploit to make
up missing personal info/photos on me if they so desired.
Quite mysteriously, all sorts of otherwise respectable open-source
software developers are happy to use GitHub even though it's owned
by M$. So even having ditched their software long ago, M$ are now
very hard to avoid online if, ironically, you want to use, and
especially work on, open-source software. I find that truely
unfathomable, but others barely seem to see my problem with it.
Many, I suspect, started using Github before Microsoft bought them in
2018.
For software projects I use, many more seem to have moved to there
since 2018 than before. You'd think they like the M$ acquisition. Occasionally I object and am ignored.
Lately I've been seeing people advocating for a switch to
Codeberg.
I don't know about Codeberg, but there have been lots of
alternatives all along. Tons of projects switched from SourceForge
to GitHub. Many projects have their own websites too, so why not
self-host? GitHub do offer a lot of extra features for free, but
that's dealing with the devil IMHO. Especially as the more tied in
to GitHub-specific systems a project gets, the less practical it is
to move away if M$ get more greedy later on.
D <[email protected]> writes:
[...]
Quite mysteriously, all sorts of otherwise respectable open-source
software developers are happy to use GitHub even though it's owned
by M$. So even having ditched their software long ago, M$ are now
very hard to avoid online if, ironically, you want to use, and
especially work on, open-source software. I find that truely
unfathomable, but others barely seem to see my problem with it.
This is a great mystery to me! I have no clue how so many open source
users can be so clueless! =( They also loooooove slck and
discord. That's revolting! IRC works percectly fine, and if you need
blinken lights, you can just add some of the numerous web IRC programs
out there, or at least use matrix or xmpp.
Lol---well said. (I call Discord a Christmas Tree. And Slack is no different.) Quite right. And USENET, which is way more appropriate for technical discussion than IRC.
I think the reason must be that many open source users are young and
naive and do not remembre how M$ tried to close down linux decades
ago.
That's very likely part of the reason.
When I teach, I make it a point to bring up these things. Sadly the
students then go on to work, and get stuck in github and various
proprietary tools. But such is life! We must continue to fight the
good fight. =)
Teaching can only go so far.
D <[email protected]> writes:
[...]
Note that signals backend is not open source. The backend software
might be, but we have no direct access to their implementation and
running of it.
That said however, I trust them way more than FB, and I think they
have high ethical standards, so I would not worry about it.
Can't Signal eventually be bought off?
D <[email protected]> writes:
I also believe that second hand exposure is less than first hand
exposure. A small comfort as well.
A lot better. These ``friends'' are not people who understand what
we're talking about here. If you start explaining why they shouldn't
put your picture there and so on, it will really be a lot of work. And
you might end up losing these friends because, you know, people have
little tolerance for politics.
People wanna have fun. Eat, drink, play video games, watch TV, ... They
get fed up with political stuff---it's hard to understand and it all
seems to boil down to same thing over and over again.
But, yeah, we're all probably better off away from these ``friends''.
We just need to face our loneliness, which is healhty.
D <[email protected]> writes:
[...]
Another option is to have 2 phone numbers. One for work, and one for
friends (without quotationmarks).
Two phones is a good idea. Or two chips, but then you have to be
careful not to accidentally share your contacts with the app. Gotta be careful. Two phones is safer because then you have no contacts in the
second one.
I use the same technique with email. I have a spam-email that
currently has around 20k spam messages in it, and this is the one most
companies get.
It's also nice to host your own mail. It's not as difficult as people
have been saying lately. A few weeks of reading (YMMV) can take you
from zero to up and running.
Adrian <[email protected]> writes:
I thought about that. The thing is that 3 years ago we seemed to
manage happily without it, but one person changing job meant that it
now seems to be essential. I've asked higher ups why we now seem to
have a defacto requirement to use WA, but no one seems to know. And I
don't see why I should buy a second phone (and ongoing costs with
running it) for what this year is likely to be 10 days use.
I totally agree that it's absurd. But it's essentially a war and a
second phone is a weapon.
I use the same technique with email. I have a spam-email that
currently has around 20k spam messages in it, and this is the one
most companies get.
I have my own domain. Companies usually get a unique email
address. Those that abuse it, or leak it, are soon found out, and may
lose business as a result.
And I think we have to take back this spirit of running the Internet ourselves. Remember---we are the ones that really know how to run it,
not Whatsapp, Facebook users. So I think we all should host our own
mail again, host our own code, our own NNTP servers, our own mailing
lists...
I also feel that things are changing. To what I don't know, but
essentially when the changes become more clear, we'd be ourselves ready
with solutions and also not worried that we're helping the movement
that's hurting us. It feels great to realize that we don't put in even
a cent towards this movement.
On Wed, 20 Feb 2025, Computer Nerd Kev wrote:
Eli the Bearded <*@eli.users.panix.com> wrote:
In comp.misc, Computer Nerd Kev <[email protected]d> wrote:
Indeed, so long as you block all FB's scripts and images on
otherwise unrelated websites. Although I don't tend to make close
friends so I don't need to worry about controlling their FB usage.
Doesn't stop people from posting about you on FB. (Or worse, posting
photos of you on there.)
What I don't tell, they can't post, and the same with what they
don't photograph. Although I guess that does leave a bit of an
information vacuum there which some nutcase could exploit to make
up missing personal info/photos on me if they so desired.
Quite mysteriously, all sorts of otherwise respectable open-source
software developers are happy to use GitHub even though it's owned
by M$. So even having ditched their software long ago, M$ are now
very hard to avoid online if, ironically, you want to use, and
especially work on, open-source software. I find that truely
unfathomable, but others barely seem to see my problem with it.
Many, I suspect, started using Github before Microsoft bought them in
2018.
For software projects I use, many more seem to have moved to there
since 2018 than before. You'd think they like the M$ acquisition.
Occasionally I object and am ignored.
You have been heard! I will not be hosting my stuff on github. On the
other hand, I have nothing interesting to host, so perhaps a moot
point. ;) My home made scripts and little utilities live on my laptop
and sometimes on my server, and are shared upon request.
Lately I've been seeing people advocating for a switch to
Codeberg.
I don't know about Codeberg, but there have been lots of
alternatives all along. Tons of projects switched from SourceForge
to GitHub. Many projects have their own websites too, so why not
self-host? GitHub do offer a lot of extra features for free, but
that's dealing with the devil IMHO. Especially as the more tied in
to GitHub-specific systems a project gets, the less practical it is
to move away if M$ get more greedy later on.
I have heard about gitea. It seems as if it allows you to setup
graphical git hosting yourself. I personally use a fossil repository accessible only over ssh. I don't use any of the wiki/ticket/chat functionality included in it.
D <[email protected]> writes:
On Wed, 20 Feb 2025, Computer Nerd Kev wrote:
Eli the Bearded <*@eli.users.panix.com> wrote:
In comp.misc, Computer Nerd Kev <[email protected]d> wrote:
Indeed, so long as you block all FB's scripts and images on
otherwise unrelated websites. Although I don't tend to make close
friends so I don't need to worry about controlling their FB usage.
Doesn't stop people from posting about you on FB. (Or worse, posting
photos of you on there.)
What I don't tell, they can't post, and the same with what they
don't photograph. Although I guess that does leave a bit of an
information vacuum there which some nutcase could exploit to make
up missing personal info/photos on me if they so desired.
Quite mysteriously, all sorts of otherwise respectable open-source
software developers are happy to use GitHub even though it's owned
by M$. So even having ditched their software long ago, M$ are now
very hard to avoid online if, ironically, you want to use, and
especially work on, open-source software. I find that truely
unfathomable, but others barely seem to see my problem with it.
Many, I suspect, started using Github before Microsoft bought them in
2018.
For software projects I use, many more seem to have moved to there
since 2018 than before. You'd think they like the M$ acquisition.
Occasionally I object and am ignored.
You have been heard! I will not be hosting my stuff on github. On the
other hand, I have nothing interesting to host, so perhaps a moot
point. ;) My home made scripts and little utilities live on my laptop
and sometimes on my server, and are shared upon request.
I think most little scripts should be documented (with a manual) and put online. It will make it easier for others to use and it will certainly encourage others to improve it and share the improvement. So you could
see your little script turn into a nice polished program simply because someone saw the idea and knew what to do to make it a lot better. Could
be a good source of joy.
One time I wrote a function---just a function---and added to some
archive online. This was a pretty niche programming language. Years
later, I looked it up---I was still called the author of the function,
but the code was completely rewritten, with much more expertise
knowledge. I thought it was ironic that my name was still there. We
value the pioneer perhaps too much.
Lately I've been seeing people advocating for a switch to
Codeberg.
I don't know about Codeberg, but there have been lots of
alternatives all along. Tons of projects switched from SourceForge
to GitHub. Many projects have their own websites too, so why not
self-host? GitHub do offer a lot of extra features for free, but
that's dealing with the devil IMHO. Especially as the more tied in
to GitHub-specific systems a project gets, the less practical it is
to move away if M$ get more greedy later on.
I have heard about gitea. It seems as if it allows you to setup
graphical git hosting yourself. I personally use a fossil repository
accessible only over ssh. I don't use any of the wiki/ticket/chat
functionality included in it.
There's Forgejo, too. It looks very good. Like in Github, you can
disable all such modules---wiki, ticket system et cetera.
On Wed, 19 Feb 2025, Salvador Mirzo wrote:
D <[email protected]> writes:
I also believe that second hand exposure is less than first hand
exposure. A small comfort as well.
A lot better. These ``friends'' are not people who understand what
we're talking about here. If you start explaining why they shouldn't
put your picture there and so on, it will really be a lot of work. And
you might end up losing these friends because, you know, people have
little tolerance for politics.
People wanna have fun. Eat, drink, play video games, watch TV, ... They
get fed up with political stuff---it's hard to understand and it all
seems to boil down to same thing over and over again.
But, yeah, we're all probably better off away from these ``friends''.
We just need to face our loneliness, which is healhty.
Many are the "friends" I have left behind because they could not be bothered to
contact me through phone or email. Since I am not on FB, and since their only way of interacting is through FB and whatsapp, they simply faded out of my life,
and to be honest, weren't much friends to begin with.
The ones who remain, I call real friends, because they do bother to shoot me an
sms or an email from time to time, and likewise, I do give them a call.
So I find this to be a hueg benefit! I am also lucky because I run my
own company, so my business partners know that if they want to reach
me, they have 2 options, email or phone, and all of them accept that.
Last, but not least, let us not forget that friends is not a static
concept, there are always plenty of ways to meet new friends in life
if one feels the need and has the motivation. =)
On Wed, 19 Feb 2025, Salvador Mirzo wrote:
D <[email protected]> writes:
[...]
Note that signals backend is not open source. The backend software
might be, but we have no direct access to their implementation and
running of it.
That said however, I trust them way more than FB, and I think they
have high ethical standards, so I would not worry about it.
Can't Signal eventually be bought off?
Interesting question. They are a foundation so that does put some
legal limitations on such scenarios. However! So was/is Open AI and
look what happened there.
So I assume, since it is based in the US that the answer to your
question is a "yes". But I am not a lawyer. ;)
On Wed, 19 Feb 2025, Salvador Mirzo wrote:
D <[email protected]> writes:
[...]
Quite mysteriously, all sorts of otherwise respectable open-source
software developers are happy to use GitHub even though it's owned
by M$. So even having ditched their software long ago, M$ are now
very hard to avoid online if, ironically, you want to use, and
especially work on, open-source software. I find that truely
unfathomable, but others barely seem to see my problem with it.
This is a great mystery to me! I have no clue how so many open source
users can be so clueless! =( They also loooooove slck and
discord. That's revolting! IRC works percectly fine, and if you need
blinken lights, you can just add some of the numerous web IRC programs
out there, or at least use matrix or xmpp.
Lol---well said. (I call Discord a Christmas Tree. And Slack is no
different.) Quite right. And USENET, which is way more appropriate for
technical discussion than IRC.
It is strange that usenet has disappeared from the common mind. I find it excellent! Especially since google disconnected it got even better!
There is a challenge though. In todays reincarnation, I find the nr of posts more than manageable. But if I think of a scenario where the nr of posts would
increase tenfold, there would be no chance of catching up, except using the narrowest of the narrow sorting based on author and subject line.
Today, I can casually browse and glance at most posts, but with 10x the nr of posts, that would not be feasible.
I think there is a limit where the usenet model breaks down for most users who
are not into cli clients.
I think the reason must be that many open source users are young and
naive and do not remembre how M$ tried to close down linux decades
ago.
That's very likely part of the reason.
When I teach, I make it a point to bring up these things. Sadly the
students then go on to work, and get stuck in github and various
proprietary tools. But such is life! We must continue to fight the
good fight. =)
Teaching can only go so far.
In every class of about 35, there's always 4-9 or so that "get it" and become completely obsessed with the terminal, self-hosting, they buy numerous raspberry
pis, they stay awake until 5 in the morning tinkering.
Those guys go on the become rock stars!
The rest go to the office at 09 and leave at 17, and that's about it.
I use the same technique with email. I have a spam-email that
currently has around 20k spam messages in it, and this is the one most
companies get.
It's also nice to host your own mail. It's not as difficult as people
have been saying lately. A few weeks of reading (YMMV) can take you
from zero to up and running.
I buy this from a local european cloud provider. I am very happy with
their service. I have thought about hosting myself, but I cannot
justify the time.
I do self-host my web site, and 2 SaaS products though on rented
servers. =)
My dream is that people will start to use small self-hosted,
end-to-end encrypted chat services, so that the laws forbidding
encryption become meaningless.
D <[email protected]> writes:
On Wed, 20 Feb 2025, Computer Nerd Kev wrote:
Eli the Bearded <*@eli.users.panix.com> wrote:
In comp.misc, Computer Nerd Kev <[email protected]d> wrote:
Indeed, so long as you block all FB's scripts and images on
otherwise unrelated websites. Although I don't tend to make close
friends so I don't need to worry about controlling their FB usage.
Doesn't stop people from posting about you on FB. (Or worse, posting
photos of you on there.)
What I don't tell, they can't post, and the same with what they
don't photograph. Although I guess that does leave a bit of an
information vacuum there which some nutcase could exploit to make
up missing personal info/photos on me if they so desired.
Quite mysteriously, all sorts of otherwise respectable open-source
software developers are happy to use GitHub even though it's owned
by M$. So even having ditched their software long ago, M$ are now
very hard to avoid online if, ironically, you want to use, and
especially work on, open-source software. I find that truely
unfathomable, but others barely seem to see my problem with it.
Many, I suspect, started using Github before Microsoft bought them in
2018.
For software projects I use, many more seem to have moved to there
since 2018 than before. You'd think they like the M$ acquisition.
Occasionally I object and am ignored.
You have been heard! I will not be hosting my stuff on github. On the
other hand, I have nothing interesting to host, so perhaps a moot
point. ;) My home made scripts and little utilities live on my laptop
and sometimes on my server, and are shared upon request.
I think most little scripts should be documented (with a manual) and put online. It will make it easier for others to use and it will certainly encourage others to improve it and share the improvement. So you could
see your little script turn into a nice polished program simply because someone saw the idea and knew what to do to make it a lot better. Could
be a good source of joy.
One time I wrote a function---just a function---and added to some
archive online. This was a pretty niche programming language. Years
later, I looked it up---I was still called the author of the function,
but the code was completely rewritten, with much more expertise
knowledge. I thought it was ironic that my name was still there. We
value the pioneer perhaps too much.
Lately I've been seeing people advocating for a switch to
Codeberg.
I don't know about Codeberg, but there have been lots of
alternatives all along. Tons of projects switched from SourceForge
to GitHub. Many projects have their own websites too, so why not
self-host? GitHub do offer a lot of extra features for free, but
that's dealing with the devil IMHO. Especially as the more tied in
to GitHub-specific systems a project gets, the less practical it is
to move away if M$ get more greedy later on.
I have heard about gitea. It seems as if it allows you to setup
graphical git hosting yourself. I personally use a fossil repository
accessible only over ssh. I don't use any of the wiki/ticket/chat
functionality included in it.
There's Forgejo, too. It looks very good. Like in Github, you can
disable all such modules---wiki, ticket system et cetera.
Salvador Mirzo <[email protected]> writes:
D <[email protected]> writes:
On Wed, 20 Feb 2025, Computer Nerd Kev wrote:
Eli the Bearded <*@eli.users.panix.com> wrote:
In comp.misc, Computer Nerd Kev <[email protected]d> wrote:
Indeed, so long as you block all FB's scripts and images on
otherwise unrelated websites. Although I don't tend to make close
friends so I don't need to worry about controlling their FB usage.
Doesn't stop people from posting about you on FB. (Or worse, posting >>>>> photos of you on there.)
What I don't tell, they can't post, and the same with what they
don't photograph. Although I guess that does leave a bit of an
information vacuum there which some nutcase could exploit to make
up missing personal info/photos on me if they so desired.
Quite mysteriously, all sorts of otherwise respectable open-source >>>>>> software developers are happy to use GitHub even though it's owned >>>>>> by M$. So even having ditched their software long ago, M$ are now
very hard to avoid online if, ironically, you want to use, and
especially work on, open-source software. I find that truely
unfathomable, but others barely seem to see my problem with it.
Many, I suspect, started using Github before Microsoft bought them in >>>>> 2018.
For software projects I use, many more seem to have moved to there
since 2018 than before. You'd think they like the M$ acquisition.
Occasionally I object and am ignored.
You have been heard! I will not be hosting my stuff on github. On the
other hand, I have nothing interesting to host, so perhaps a moot
point. ;) My home made scripts and little utilities live on my laptop
and sometimes on my server, and are shared upon request.
I think most little scripts should be documented (with a manual) and put
online. It will make it easier for others to use and it will certainly
encourage others to improve it and share the improvement. So you could
see your little script turn into a nice polished program simply because
someone saw the idea and knew what to do to make it a lot better. Could
be a good source of joy.
One time I wrote a function---just a function---and added to some
archive online. This was a pretty niche programming language. Years
later, I looked it up---I was still called the author of the function,
but the code was completely rewritten, with much more expertise
knowledge. I thought it was ironic that my name was still there. We
value the pioneer perhaps too much.
Lately I've been seeing people advocating for a switch to
Codeberg.
I don't know about Codeberg, but there have been lots of
alternatives all along. Tons of projects switched from SourceForge
to GitHub. Many projects have their own websites too, so why not
self-host? GitHub do offer a lot of extra features for free, but
that's dealing with the devil IMHO. Especially as the more tied in
to GitHub-specific systems a project gets, the less practical it is
to move away if M$ get more greedy later on.
I have heard about gitea. It seems as if it allows you to setup
graphical git hosting yourself. I personally use a fossil repository
accessible only over ssh. I don't use any of the wiki/ticket/chat
functionality included in it.
There's Forgejo, too. It looks very good. Like in Github, you can
disable all such modules---wiki, ticket system et cetera.
Sorry---you'd have to switch to git. I don't think Gitea or Forgejo
work with fossil. But fossil has its own web server, so you'd be fine
with it, too.
Salvador Mirzo <[email protected]> wrote:
Can't Signal eventually be bought off?
They claim that it's end-to-end encrypted but whatever, it has
Whatsapp's functionality without being Meta and that's good
enough for me.
Many are the "friends" I have left behind because they could not be bothered to
contact me through phone or email. Since I am not on FB, and since their only
way of interacting is through FB and whatsapp, they simply faded out of my life,
and to be honest, weren't much friends to begin with.
Same here! I ``lost'' many.
The ones who remain, I call real friends, because they do bother to shoot me an
sms or an email from time to time, and likewise, I do give them a call.
Same here and this does make me happy. So it turns out that we've sort
of optimized life a bit and increased the security level. We don't need
to waste time with non-friends and found some real ones. That's a hack. :)
So I find this to be a hueg benefit! I am also lucky because I run my
own company, so my business partners know that if they want to reach
me, they have 2 options, email or phone, and all of them accept that.
Nice to hear you run your own business.
Last, but not least, let us not forget that friends is not a static
concept, there are always plenty of ways to meet new friends in life
if one feels the need and has the motivation. =)
Exactly.
It is strange that usenet has disappeared from the common mind. I find it
excellent! Especially since google disconnected it got even better!
That's right! Thanks, Google Inc., for leaving us alone. :)
There is a challenge though. In todays reincarnation, I find the nr of posts >> more than manageable. But if I think of a scenario where the nr of posts would
increase tenfold, there would be no chance of catching up, except using the >> narrowest of the narrow sorting based on author and subject line.
Today, I can casually browse and glance at most posts, but with 10x the nr of
posts, that would not be feasible.
I already find it unwieldy. But I don't think we have to follow every thread. You can follow that subthread you got yourself involved. Using Gnus, there are two things that I do. Articles that I'd like to
follow-up are ticket---so appear in red for me. Articles that were
replies to my own posted articles get the highest score and so they
appear in bold.
https://0x0.st/8Tsq.png
I ticked your article just to show you something red. It wasn't red
before. Yes, I also only show three letters for each author because I usually don't care to know who I'm talking to, but since identity does
help to understand what the person is saying, three letters is enough.
I think there is a limit where the usenet model breaks down for most users who
are not into cli clients.
Yeah. It's not going to work for regular people. However, there's
something that I think it should work for regular people---low volume
NNTP servers.
But it turns out that even mailing lists don't work for regular people because e-mail doesn't work for regular people. Even Discord or Slack doesn't quite work for regular people. Perhaps nothing works for
regular people. They do not find ways to tame information on their
computer screens. Regular people don't want to use desktops anymore;
they want to use their phones.
NNTP, the USENET, e-mail, these are systems that only the people thristy
for knowledge really use---that 17% of your class of 35.
In every class of about 35, there's always 4-9 or so that "get it" and become
completely obsessed with the terminal, self-hosting, they buy numerous raspberry
pis, they stay awake until 5 in the morning tinkering.
Those guys go on the become rock stars!
The rest go to the office at 09 and leave at 17, and that's about it.
And I think that's fine for us because these about 6 people of every
class of 35 is enough to pack the USENET. But most of them are not
here. That's what's sad. They should be here. They would enjoy being
here. But I think somehow they're not. This suggests a certain
inertia. But what I find more likely is that you're overestimating.
Perhaps it's more like 0.35 rock stars in every class of about 35.
I take it seriously that they could be right---that somehow we should
all be on Discord. But, no, intelligence always wins and the fact is
that the tools we're using here (for communication) is absolutely
better[1] than the more recent commercial alternatives.
[1] Better for fact, knowledge seekers.
Adrian <[email protected]> writes:
[...]
Note my use of "friends" not friends. When I asked why I was told
that what I don't know can't hurt me.
Speechless.
Can't Signal eventually be bought off?
Interesting question. They are a foundation so that does put some
legal limitations on such scenarios. However! So was/is Open AI and
look what happened there.
So I assume, since it is based in the US that the answer to your
question is a "yes". But I am not a lawyer. ;)
Lol. When you want to say you're not a lawyer, you should say IANAL,
which is one of these ridiculous USENET acronyms. :) But what I really
think is that nobody should say IANAL. Lol. First, who cares? Lol.
Second, it's almost never illegal to give your opinion on anything.
But, yeah. You gave us a great example. Open AI was a non-profit organization later turned for-profit. So, the same nonsense could
happen to Signal unless it has made any sort of unusual special
arrangements.
Companies and political parties (which are the same thing) should
formalize for-life commitments. For example, a Senate candidate, a
Republic president and so on should register in writing some principles
and promises that they actually must live up to, lest they be impeached.
Take a look at YouTube. The world has invested 15 billion videos in it
and now it needs to pay for viewing them by lack of privacy and ad
viewing. I can't recall when the world actually agreed to this deal.
Deals should be clear from the very start.
For me to use Signal, say, I'd need a for-life promise that it would
never be taken over from me. But, actually, I wouldn't use it either
way because I just prefer a decentralized system. Signal should
redesign itself in a decentralized manner so that perhaps I could host
my own server (for my own communication), say. Just like e-mail and
news are.
D <[email protected]> writes:
[...]
I use the same technique with email. I have a spam-email that
currently has around 20k spam messages in it, and this is the one most >>>> companies get.
It's also nice to host your own mail. It's not as difficult as people
have been saying lately. A few weeks of reading (YMMV) can take you
from zero to up and running.
I buy this from a local european cloud provider. I am very happy with
their service. I have thought about hosting myself, but I cannot
justify the time.
I do self-host my web site, and 2 SaaS products though on rented
servers. =)
You're good.
I decided to host my everything. I'm running notqmail with some patches
on top. My phone e-mail checker is K9, which I believe is actually Thunderbird. But it turns out that now there's the Thunderbird for
Android, too. It looks the same as K9, except that it's blue instead of
red. On the desktop, I run Gnus with an IMAP4 server local. And it's
not over---I also run fdm to fetch my mail from my own server to me
locally. So, yes, it's very complicated. And I'm not even close to
finish because I didn't talk about public-inbox and mailing lists, which
is involved with Gnus because it's where I read and write mail. It's
almost a life project.
But it's fun to do these things *if* you have the free time.
On Thu, 20 Feb 2025, Salvador Mirzo wrote:
Salvador Mirzo <[email protected]> writes:
D <[email protected]> writes:
On Wed, 20 Feb 2025, Computer Nerd Kev wrote:
Eli the Bearded <*@eli.users.panix.com> wrote:
In comp.misc, Computer Nerd Kev <[email protected]d> wrote:
Indeed, so long as you block all FB's scripts and images onDoesn't stop people from posting about you on FB. (Or worse, posting >>>>>> photos of you on there.)
otherwise unrelated websites. Although I don't tend to make close >>>>>>> friends so I don't need to worry about controlling their FB usage. >>>>>>
What I don't tell, they can't post, and the same with what they
don't photograph. Although I guess that does leave a bit of an
information vacuum there which some nutcase could exploit to make
up missing personal info/photos on me if they so desired.
Quite mysteriously, all sorts of otherwise respectable open-source >>>>>>> software developers are happy to use GitHub even though it's owned >>>>>>> by M$. So even having ditched their software long ago, M$ are now >>>>>>> very hard to avoid online if, ironically, you want to use, and
especially work on, open-source software. I find that truely
unfathomable, but others barely seem to see my problem with it.
Many, I suspect, started using Github before Microsoft bought them in >>>>>> 2018.
For software projects I use, many more seem to have moved to there
since 2018 than before. You'd think they like the M$ acquisition.
Occasionally I object and am ignored.
You have been heard! I will not be hosting my stuff on github. On the
other hand, I have nothing interesting to host, so perhaps a moot
point. ;) My home made scripts and little utilities live on my laptop
and sometimes on my server, and are shared upon request.
I think most little scripts should be documented (with a manual) and put >>> online. It will make it easier for others to use and it will certainly
encourage others to improve it and share the improvement. So you could
see your little script turn into a nice polished program simply because
someone saw the idea and knew what to do to make it a lot better. Could >>> be a good source of joy.
One time I wrote a function---just a function---and added to some
archive online. This was a pretty niche programming language. Years
later, I looked it up---I was still called the author of the function,
but the code was completely rewritten, with much more expertise
knowledge. I thought it was ironic that my name was still there. We
value the pioneer perhaps too much.
Lately I've been seeing people advocating for a switch to
Codeberg.
I don't know about Codeberg, but there have been lots of
alternatives all along. Tons of projects switched from SourceForge
to GitHub. Many projects have their own websites too, so why not
self-host? GitHub do offer a lot of extra features for free, but
that's dealing with the devil IMHO. Especially as the more tied in
to GitHub-specific systems a project gets, the less practical it is
to move away if M$ get more greedy later on.
I have heard about gitea. It seems as if it allows you to setup
graphical git hosting yourself. I personally use a fossil repository
accessible only over ssh. I don't use any of the wiki/ticket/chat
functionality included in it.
There's Forgejo, too. It looks very good. Like in Github, you can
disable all such modules---wiki, ticket system et cetera.
Sorry---you'd have to switch to git. I don't think Gitea or Forgejo
work with fossil. But fossil has its own web server, so you'd be fine
with it, too.
This is the truth. I'm a contrarian kind of guy, so when the world
goes git, I go fossil. ;) Jokes aside, I like the concept of one
binary and how it works for my own personal use case.
On Thu, 20 Feb 2025, Salvador Mirzo wrote:
D <[email protected]> writes:
On Wed, 20 Feb 2025, Computer Nerd Kev wrote:
Eli the Bearded <*@eli.users.panix.com> wrote:
In comp.misc, Computer Nerd Kev <[email protected]d> wrote:
Indeed, so long as you block all FB's scripts and images on
otherwise unrelated websites. Although I don't tend to make close
friends so I don't need to worry about controlling their FB usage.
Doesn't stop people from posting about you on FB. (Or worse, posting >>>>> photos of you on there.)
What I don't tell, they can't post, and the same with what they
don't photograph. Although I guess that does leave a bit of an
information vacuum there which some nutcase could exploit to make
up missing personal info/photos on me if they so desired.
Quite mysteriously, all sorts of otherwise respectable open-source >>>>>> software developers are happy to use GitHub even though it's owned >>>>>> by M$. So even having ditched their software long ago, M$ are now
very hard to avoid online if, ironically, you want to use, and
especially work on, open-source software. I find that truely
unfathomable, but others barely seem to see my problem with it.
Many, I suspect, started using Github before Microsoft bought them in >>>>> 2018.
For software projects I use, many more seem to have moved to there
since 2018 than before. You'd think they like the M$ acquisition.
Occasionally I object and am ignored.
You have been heard! I will not be hosting my stuff on github. On the
other hand, I have nothing interesting to host, so perhaps a moot
point. ;) My home made scripts and little utilities live on my laptop
and sometimes on my server, and are shared upon request.
I think most little scripts should be documented (with a manual) and put
online. It will make it easier for others to use and it will certainly
encourage others to improve it and share the improvement. So you could
see your little script turn into a nice polished program simply because
someone saw the idea and knew what to do to make it a lot better. Could
be a good source of joy.
You have a point! Sigh... so much one wants to do, so little time. =(
Let met tell you about my little scripts. I have my old backup script utilizing rsync and replicating over tor, so it can go through
firewalls, and uses a hidden service for a permanent global address,
so it is not dependent on DNS or domain names. I once had delusions of grandeur and thought about rewriting a small part of tor to remove all
hops since I do not need anonymity for that use case.
I have my calendar sync scripts. They pull in ics from corporate
calendar and converts it to remind format.
Then I have a slightly rewritten leafnode that pulls down usenet
articles and stores them in Maildir format so I can read and write
offline news in my favourite email client alpine.
I also have some custom rss2email scripts, and a script that allows me
to take any url in an email, and fetch the page and email it to me.
Now... do you seriously think anyone would ever be interested in that? ;)
Yeah. It's not going to work for regular people. However, there's
something that I think it should work for regular people---low volume
NNTP servers.
Leafnode I think would be quite a nice piece of software for small, local nntp
servers.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leafnode
I use part of its functionality to pull in usenet into my mail client.
But it turns out that even mailing lists don't work for regular people
because e-mail doesn't work for regular people. Even Discord or Slack
doesn't quite work for regular people. Perhaps nothing works for
regular people. They do not find ways to tame information on their
computer screens. Regular people don't want to use desktops anymore;
they want to use their phones.
This is the truth! I am worried that people are turning more into digital consumers than digital producers. used in such a way, digital technology can become a drain on the soul.
Computers were supposed to be creative tools! I get the feeling that for many,
they have instead become devices of slavery. It is a very sad development. I love text only interfaces, I love reading. I don't own a smart phone and I feel
very sad when I'm on a bus or in a subway car and see 99% of people staring in
silence into their phones. It seems like quite a dystopia for me. =(
NNTP, the USENET, e-mail, these are systems that only the people thristy
for knowledge really use---that 17% of your class of 35.
I wonder if they will discover it? I was happy when I offered a 1 hour free and
voluntary session with the topic of learning the basics of vim, and 11 out of 35
said it was interesting! =D
This makes me feel hope!
In every class of about 35, there's always 4-9 or so that "get it" and become
completely obsessed with the terminal, self-hosting, they buy
numerous raspberry
pis, they stay awake until 5 in the morning tinkering.
Those guys go on the become rock stars!
The rest go to the office at 09 and leave at 17, and that's about it.
And I think that's fine for us because these about 6 people of every
class of 35 is enough to pack the USENET. But most of them are not
This is the truth! Hmm, maybe I should add an hour or two next semester on the
topic of retro-computing? ;)
here. That's what's sad. They should be here. They would enjoy being
here. But I think somehow they're not. This suggests a certain
inertia. But what I find more likely is that you're overestimating.
Perhaps it's more like 0.35 rock stars in every class of about 35.
I take it seriously that they could be right---that somehow we should
all be on Discord. But, no, intelligence always wins and the fact is
that the tools we're using here (for communication) is absolutely
better[1] than the more recent commercial alternatives.
Well, I do sometimes chat on my business partners mattermost, but only if live
audio/video and email is not an option. Fortunately for me, that turns out to be
about once or twice a year. ;)
But the young whipper snappers do chat happily away from time to time, and I am
happy that they are just not dragging me into it.
Only today was one of my younger partners telling the class that my emails are
quite something to behold. Long and packed with all the information the person
needs to perform the task. At first he found it draining and stressful, but then
he learned that I do not demand instant replies when I email (then I call or write in the email that it is urgent) and after a while he learned to appreciate
that all information he might need is in the email.
On Thu, 20 Feb 2025, Salvador Mirzo wrote:
Many are the "friends" I have left behind because they could not be bothered to
contact me through phone or email. Since I am not on FB, and since their only
way of interacting is through FB and whatsapp, they simply faded out of my life,
and to be honest, weren't much friends to begin with.
Same here! I ``lost'' many.
The ones who remain, I call real friends, because they do bother to shoot me an
sms or an email from time to time, and likewise, I do give them a call.
Same here and this does make me happy. So it turns out that we've sort
of optimized life a bit and increased the security level. We don't need
to waste time with non-friends and found some real ones. That's a hack. :)
Amen! Quite an efficiency hack! =D Another "security" hack I have implemented for my father is that I have forbidden him from getting government digital ID on
his smart phone. This is very funny, because once scammers called him and told
some kind of story that ended with them asking him to confirm what ever they wanted by opening the digital ID app (this is how most old people get scammed where I live) and he told them that he doesn't have it, due to security reasons...
... the scammers sighed heavily and just hung up. =D
So I find this to be a hueg benefit! I am also lucky because I run my
own company, so my business partners know that if they want to reach
me, they have 2 options, email or phone, and all of them accept that.
Nice to hear you run your own business.
Yes, it is the best thing that has ever happened to me except for my wife. I am
truly blessed and am very thankful for it every single day. =)
On Thu, 20 Feb 2025, Salvador Mirzo wrote:
Can't Signal eventually be bought off?
Interesting question. They are a foundation so that does put some
legal limitations on such scenarios. However! So was/is Open AI and
look what happened there.
So I assume, since it is based in the US that the answer to your
question is a "yes". But I am not a lawyer. ;)
Lol. When you want to say you're not a lawyer, you should say IANAL,
which is one of these ridiculous USENET acronyms. :) But what I really
think is that nobody should say IANAL. Lol. First, who cares? Lol.
Second, it's almost never illegal to give your opinion on anything.
I was thinking about it, but in the end, didn't go all "acronym". ;)
But, yeah. You gave us a great example. Open AI was a non-profit
organization later turned for-profit. So, the same nonsense could
happen to Signal unless it has made any sort of unusual special
arrangements.
Companies and political parties (which are the same thing) should
formalize for-life commitments. For example, a Senate candidate, a
Republic president and so on should register in writing some principles
and promises that they actually must live up to, lest they be impeached.
I don't see how that could ever be done? I mean there are trusts and foundations, but I assume they can be broken or dismantled.
On the other hand... there are active companies who are several 100s
of years old, and the catholic church has been going strong for
what... 1980 years or so? So clearly it is possible to build
organizations centred around an ideology, business plan or other
concept, that has been working for 100s if not 1000s of years.
Take a look at YouTube. The world has invested 15 billion videos in it
and now it needs to pay for viewing them by lack of privacy and ad
viewing. I can't recall when the world actually agreed to this deal.
Deals should be clear from the very start.
I find it very fascinating that you can find all kinds of copyrighted material
on youtube, and that is fine, and no one cares. But when the piratebay guys built a web site that links to movies (not hosting it themselves) it was prison
+ fines for them. Different rules for google and private persons. This is very
sad.
For me to use Signal, say, I'd need a for-life promise that it would
never be taken over from me. But, actually, I wouldn't use it either
way because I just prefer a decentralized system. Signal should
redesign itself in a decentralized manner so that perhaps I could host
my own server (for my own communication), say. Just like e-mail and
news are.
I don't use anything to chat with family since they would not be interested, but
one project I do like, and which would probably be my choice if I tried to get
my family to use it is delta chat. I like the concept behind it. I also think,
but don't remember at the moment, that it is possible to use it on iphones, android and for me, on regular computers and they all work together.
For audio/video I use jitsi. I don't host it myself, but my companys cloud provider sells their own version of hosted jitsi. It works really well!
I decided to host my everything. I'm running notqmail with some patches
on top. My phone e-mail checker is K9, which I believe is actually
Thunderbird. But it turns out that now there's the Thunderbird for
Android, too. It looks the same as K9, except that it's blue instead of
red. On the desktop, I run Gnus with an IMAP4 server local. And it's
not over---I also run fdm to fetch my mail from my own server to me
locally. So, yes, it's very complicated. And I'm not even close to
finish because I didn't talk about public-inbox and mailing lists, which
is involved with Gnus because it's where I read and write mail. It's
almost a life project.
But it's fun to do these things *if* you have the free time.
This is the truth! It is fun! =) My at home self hosting is limited to
2 x 2 bay NAS boxes (in two separate countries with replication
between them), 1 x radxa zero with kodi on it, which pulls movies from
one of the NAS boxes, and a backup server which receives backups from
my laptop and my fathers laptop.
That's about it, when it comes to personal self-hosting.
Salvador Mirzo <[email protected]> wrote:
D <[email protected]> writes:[...]
[...]
My dream is that people will start to use small self-hosted,
end-to-end encrypted chat services, so that the laws forbidding
encryption become meaningless.
That's my idea, too. I don't think the USENET is actually a perfect
project. I think communities should not too large. So I think we
should build more NNTP servers to be used by small communities. And
then these servers should have a standard API so that an index could be
created somewhere where people can discover communities.
Imagine how many closed NNTP servers, mailing lists are out there and
nobody knows.
Closed NNTP newsservers are not Usenet, just local proprietary news.
They're operated by a server owner who has the power of booting users
off his server if he doesn't like their opinions. Those users have no alternative server to use for those local groups so they've effectively
been censored, exactly like web forums with a cadre of moderators.
With Usenet there are many servers, each carrying a subset of groups
from the full group list. If a server operator TOSes a user they're at liberty to use another service and still access their groups uncensored.
Salvador Mirzo <[email protected]> wrote:
Adrian <[email protected]> writes:
[...]
Note my use of "friends" not friends. When I asked why I was told
that what I don't know can't hurt me.
Speechless.
This is pretty typical of Americans today, I think. If you talk about privacy, they say they have nothing to hide and accuse you of being suspicious.
Sn!pe <[email protected]> wrote:
Salvador Mirzo <[email protected]> wrote:
Can't Signal eventually be bought off?
They claim that it's end-to-end encrypted but whatever, it has
Whatsapp's functionality without being Meta and that's good
enough for me.
Signal does the encryption within the app, much like PGP. So if Signal were to compromise the app, it could be sniffed.
Sn!pe <[email protected]> wrote:
Salvador Mirzo <[email protected]> wrote:
Can't Signal eventually be bought off?
They claim that it's end-to-end encrypted but whatever, it has
Whatsapp's functionality without being Meta and that's good
enough for me.
Signal does the encryption within the app, much like PGP. So if Signal were to compromise the app, it could be sniffed.
The good news is that sniffing the data between the sender and receiver gives you nothing useful at any point unless the app is compromised.
The bad news is that updates are constantly being pushed, and just as it is possible to push a security update, it is possible to push an insecurity update too.
--scott
Salvador Mirzo <[email protected]> wrote:
Adrian <[email protected]> writes:
[...]
Note my use of "friends" not friends. When I asked why I was told
that what I don't know can't hurt me.
Speechless.
This is pretty typical of Americans today, I think. If you talk about privacy, they say they have nothing to hide and accuse you of being suspicious.
--scott
This is the truth. I'm a contrarian kind of guy, so when the world
goes git, I go fossil. ;) Jokes aside, I like the concept of one
binary and how it works for my own personal use case.
I went fossil when I had to teach a class. I thought git was more complicated than fossil. But it turns out that fossil was seen as
crazily complicated by nearly all students (anyway). I think fossil is
just fine, though I confess I prefer the file system over a database.
D <[email protected]> writes:
[...]
My dream is that people will start to use small self-hosted,
end-to-end encrypted chat services, so that the laws forbidding
encryption become meaningless.
That's my idea, too. I don't think the USENET is actually a perfect
project. I think communities should not too large. So I think we
should build more NNTP servers to be used by small communities. And
then these servers should have a standard API so that an index could be created somewhere where people can discover communities.
Imagine how many closed NNTP servers, mailing lists are out there and
nobody knows.
The web is like that. A website sends you to another one. This is decentralization. No NNTP servers send you to another one, except those
that have peers, but then it's as if they're all the same. My idea is
to make NNTP servers more like the web.
I don't know if it works. I'm thinking out loud.
D <[email protected]> writes:
I decided to host my everything. I'm running notqmail with some patches >>> on top. My phone e-mail checker is K9, which I believe is actually
Thunderbird. But it turns out that now there's the Thunderbird for
Android, too. It looks the same as K9, except that it's blue instead of >>> red. On the desktop, I run Gnus with an IMAP4 server local. And it's
not over---I also run fdm to fetch my mail from my own server to me
locally. So, yes, it's very complicated. And I'm not even close to
finish because I didn't talk about public-inbox and mailing lists, which >>> is involved with Gnus because it's where I read and write mail. It's
almost a life project.
But it's fun to do these things *if* you have the free time.
This is the truth! It is fun! =) My at home self hosting is limited to
2 x 2 bay NAS boxes (in two separate countries with replication
between them), 1 x radxa zero with kodi on it, which pulls movies from
one of the NAS boxes, and a backup server which receives backups from
my laptop and my fathers laptop.
That's about it, when it comes to personal self-hosting.
You know, I have not worked on backup yet. :) I've done a lot of work on
this system and I don't really have a backup, except for one project or
two that I happen to once in a while push some commits to a remote
server. But my remote server doesn't have a backup strategy either.
And my needs are pretty simple. If I can stop to just write a Makefile
that copies files to a remote server, that will keep me safe. Gotta
stop to do this.
I also have some unallocated space on my solid state drive. OpenBSD is
able to dump partitions and using these dumps for recovery. It could be something that would be very effective, too. Gotta get some things out
of the way here first and start new projects. I'm taking my chances for
now.
D <[email protected]> writes:
[...]
Yeah. It's not going to work for regular people. However, there's
something that I think it should work for regular people---low volume
NNTP servers.
Leafnode I think would be quite a nice piece of software for small, local nntp
servers.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leafnode
I use part of its functionality to pull in usenet into my mail client.
I need to look into leafnode again. Now I don't think leafnode can peer
with a USENET server, right? I think we should have a server that does.
I'm willing to write it.
My desire is to have an NNTP server that can host your local groups
there, easily. And your friends who will connect to see your local
groups should also see some USENET groups along with them. So the NNTP server should also be able to peer with a USENET server. Doesn't need
to be a powerful server like INN2 does. All in one.
I would be surprised if INN2 doesn't do all of this, but I think we
should have other alternatives with newer ideas too. For instance, I
think these smaller servers should be mostly closed (with passwords or cryptographic keys or certificates) because they're meant for a group of friends who know each other. Each user should be able to create local
groups and new accounts, forming a small community. (A good community
is one in which every member has roughly the same powers as every other member.) This small community should have access to the USENET (by
using their very community server). That's roughly the idea. The
server should be hackable; perhaps hackable in real time; so a dynamic language seems the right fit for it.
But it turns out that even mailing lists don't work for regular people
because e-mail doesn't work for regular people. Even Discord or Slack
doesn't quite work for regular people. Perhaps nothing works for
regular people. They do not find ways to tame information on their
computer screens. Regular people don't want to use desktops anymore;
they want to use their phones.
This is the truth! I am worried that people are turning more into digital
consumers than digital producers. used in such a way, digital technology can >> become a drain on the soul.
Computers were supposed to be creative tools! I get the feeling that for many,
they have instead become devices of slavery. It is a very sad development. I >> love text only interfaces, I love reading. I don't own a smart phone and I feel
very sad when I'm on a bus or in a subway car and see 99% of people staring in
silence into their phones. It seems like quite a dystopia for me. =(
It's sad indeed. On the bright side, we seem to be immune to that. At
least *we* are not in such a pit. :) Better than nothing. :)
Only today was one of my younger partners telling the class that my emails are
quite something to behold. Long and packed with all the information the person
needs to perform the task. At first he found it draining and stressful, but then
he learned that I do not demand instant replies when I email (then I call or >> write in the email that it is urgent) and after a while he learned to appreciate
that all information he might need is in the email.
Yeah---young people don't quite get e-mail. They never read about
e-mail. Perhaps one thing that's against them (and it was not against
us) is that they have a lot of options today. We didn't have this many options. We started out on a simpler world. So we were able to stay at
the top of the game over the years. And so we mastered it. Now we're experienced and we handle the complexities of the world with the help of
our experience. They don't have these tools available. They could get
here quickly, but they're lost. Instructions we give them don't
suffice: perhaps because people must discover things for themselves.
That's perhaps why education only works for those who actually don't
need one.
[email protected] (Sn!pe) writes:
Salvador Mirzo <[email protected]> wrote:
D <[email protected]> writes:[...]
[...]
My dream is that people will start to use small self-hosted,
end-to-end encrypted chat services, so that the laws forbidding
encryption become meaningless.
That's my idea, too. I don't think the USENET is actually a perfect
project. I think communities should not too large. So I think we
should build more NNTP servers to be used by small communities. And
then these servers should have a standard API so that an index could be
created somewhere where people can discover communities.
Imagine how many closed NNTP servers, mailing lists are out there and
nobody knows.
Closed NNTP newsservers are not Usenet, just local proprietary news.
They're operated by a server owner who has the power of booting users
off his server if he doesn't like their opinions. Those users have no
alternative server to use for those local groups so they've effectively
been censored, exactly like web forums with a cadre of moderators.
With Usenet there are many servers, each carrying a subset of groups
from the full group list. If a server operator TOSes a user they're at
liberty to use another service and still access their groups uncensored.
That's right. But I think we need the closed ones too. But I also
think the closed ones are a good way to show people that there's
something out there that's the USENET. So if they every get censored on
a closed NNTP server, they could still go to a USENET server and still
have a community they can't be banned from.
Amen! Quite an efficiency hack! =D Another "security" hack I have implemented
for my father is that I have forbidden him from getting government digital ID on
his smart phone. This is very funny, because once scammers called him and told
some kind of story that ended with them asking him to confirm what ever they >> wanted by opening the digital ID app (this is how most old people get scammed
where I live) and he told them that he doesn't have it, due to security
reasons...
... the scammers sighed heavily and just hung up. =D
Lol. If that's not a super inconvenience to your father, then I think
it's a great solution. Over here these scams are quite a problem too.
I also do talk to my father quite a lot about such matters. And
anything suspicious at all, he always talks to me. In fact, I've talked
to my entire family about such things. To always let one another know
about these events---to talk often among us. We learn more and so we
protect ourselves more.
The reason we can be so good at handling this computing world is because
we are pretty much obsessed about it; we spend the entire day thinking
about it; reading about it; writing about it. By talking more with our families about these matters, they do learn more from us. Of course, we can't expect they'll be coworkers. We need to take things very slowly
and only as much as they can handle it. Then it becomes kind of fun for
them too and then they learn a bunch.
So I find this to be a hueg benefit! I am also lucky because I run my
own company, so my business partners know that if they want to reach
me, they have 2 options, email or phone, and all of them accept that.
Nice to hear you run your own business.
Yes, it is the best thing that has ever happened to me except for my wife. I am
truly blessed and am very thankful for it every single day. =)
Nice to hear that your wife is the best thing that ever happened to you.
I unfortunately can't yet say the same. I'm single, although I'd love
to have little kids running around and through the house. :) But first
I gotta find someone who I love and who loves me.
Congratulations! I think you've nailed it.
And it's interesting that I've found you here to be one of the most
upbeat ones around here. And I guess this explains something. You seem
to have a healthy life. Well done!
I don't see how that could ever be done? I mean there are trusts and
foundations, but I assume they can be broken or dismantled.
On the other hand... there are active companies who are several 100s
of years old, and the catholic church has been going strong for
what... 1980 years or so? So clearly it is possible to build
organizations centred around an ideology, business plan or other
concept, that has been working for 100s if not 1000s of years.
I got carried away with the wording. A Senate candidate should keep his promises when in office. Let's erase the ``for-life''. When you vote
for someone, you should vote because that person will do something that
they promised. The system would not let them promise soemthing they can
do; for example, a president cannot promise something that Congress must approve, say.
When someone is running for office, they make a bunch of promises. They should be obliged to do what they said they would. So there should be a formal process of writing it down and then hold them accountable later.
In some cases, they'll be excused; in other cases, they'll just be
removed from office.
Campaigns should be held more accountable.
Take a look at YouTube. The world has invested 15 billion videos in it
and now it needs to pay for viewing them by lack of privacy and ad
viewing. I can't recall when the world actually agreed to this deal.
Deals should be clear from the very start.
I find it very fascinating that you can find all kinds of copyrighted material
on youtube, and that is fine, and no one cares. But when the piratebay guys >> built a web site that links to movies (not hosting it themselves) it was prison
+ fines for them. Different rules for google and private persons. This is very
sad.
``This is the truth.'' :)
For me to use Signal, say, I'd need a for-life promise that it would
never be taken over from me. But, actually, I wouldn't use it either
way because I just prefer a decentralized system. Signal should
redesign itself in a decentralized manner so that perhaps I could host
my own server (for my own communication), say. Just like e-mail and
news are.
I don't use anything to chat with family since they would not be interested, but
one project I do like, and which would probably be my choice if I tried to get
my family to use it is delta chat. I like the concept behind it. I also think,
but don't remember at the moment, that it is possible to use it on iphones, >> android and for me, on regular computers and they all work together.
Wow---I had not heard of delta chat. I really liked the idea! Can
someone use delta chat and another just plain e-mail? That would likely
be neat. I, for one, don't like chat interfaces and prefer e-mail. I wouldn't mind replying chat messages by e-mail, for example.
For audio/video I use jitsi. I don't host it myself, but my companys cloud >> provider sells their own version of hosted jitsi. It works really well!
Cool. I've been using Jitsi on meet.jit.si. I've used it while on
Windows. Now I've been running OpenBSD and I've noticed that Jitsi
spins up my CPU a bit more than I was expecting. I then tried Google
Meet using Chrome and it didn't spin that much. I'm gonna try Jitsi on Chrome and see what happens (next).
Now... do you seriously think anyone would ever be interested in that? ;)
LOL! It turns out I'm *highly* interested in your leafnode. Please,
can you put a package somewhere and let me look at it, try it out et
cetera? I've been thinking about doing something like that myself. I
can probably just live with your changes.
I think I once packaged noffle (and not leafnode) for myself, but I
think I stopped using noffle for a news server, too. I think I use
leafnode now, but I use it only as a local news server. I'd like to
have an NNTP server that's simple to use, easily hosts local news server
and also easily peers with a USENET server for just a non-huge list of groups. I actually would like to write this server myself.
Let me share with you an upload script to https://0x0.st. This is a no nonsense temporary file uploader. It works well as a paste bin, too.
The script below takes a series of files from the command line and
uploads each one to 0x0.st. If you specify no file, then it will read
from the standard in. The webserver at 0x0.st will print a URL for each
file uploaded, which is the address where you file is then stored.
--8<-------------------------------------------------------->8---
#!/bin/sh
args="$@"; test $# -lt 1 && args='-'
for f in $args; do
curl --silent --show-error -X POST -F "file=@$f" https://0x0.st
done
--8<-------------------------------------------------------->8---
The next script uses upload to invoke scrot, which is a screen shot
taker. It will take the URL printed by upload and store it in X's
primary selection area, which you can paste anywhere with your mouse or
with a keyboard shortcut. (This is done by xsel.)
--8<-------------------------------------------------------->8---
#!/bin/sh
usage()
{
printf 'usage: %s [options]\n' $(basename "$0")
}
test "$1" = '-h' && usage && exit 0
scrot --border -F- "$@" | upload | tr -d '\n' | xsel --8<-------------------------------------------------------->8---
So if you call this script as /screenshot/ then all you need to do is to invoke it and wait a moment then press the mouse middle button to paste
the URL somewhere. The bug in it is that you don't know when /upload/ finishes. It would be nice if somehow we could get a sign somewhere
that the URL is already in X's primary selection.
For the upload script, I would also like to write a GNU EMACS procedure
that takes a region of text and feeds upload's standard input. That's a
nice way to share a bit of code or output or something. I'm sure these things exist already somewhere. But it's nice to do them and perhaps
it's easier to do then to actually find where they are and then learn to
use them.
On Thu, 20 Feb 2025, Scott Dorsey wrote:
This is pretty typical of Americans today, I think. If you talk about
privacy, they say they have nothing to hide and accuse you of being
suspicious.
I am surprised! I thought one of the hallmarks of american culture was its >suspicion of government and authority. It seems this attitude goes against >that? =(
D <[email protected]> wrote:
On Thu, 20 Feb 2025, Scott Dorsey wrote:
This is pretty typical of Americans today, I think. If you talk about
privacy, they say they have nothing to hide and accuse you of being
suspicious.
I am surprised! I thought one of the hallmarks of american culture was its >> suspicion of government and authority. It seems this attitude goes against >> that? =(
Your guess is as good as mine. I see lots of people who are very suspicious of the government but think it's perfectly fine to give as much information to large corporations as possible. Personally I would put far more faith
in the government than in health insurance companies or even Amazon.
--scott
On Thu, 20 Feb 2025, Salvador Mirzo wrote:
This is the truth. I'm a contrarian kind of guy, so when the world
goes git, I go fossil. ;) Jokes aside, I like the concept of one
binary and how it works for my own personal use case.
I went fossil when I had to teach a class. I thought git was more
complicated than fossil. But it turns out that fossil was seen as
crazily complicated by nearly all students (anyway). I think fossil is
just fine, though I confess I prefer the file system over a database.
This is very interesting! What was it that the student thought was crazy complicated compared with git?
I have taught classes with git (basics) and at the end of the day,
regardless of if you use git or fossil, it just requires a few simple commands to get started at the basic level (we were not discussing
rebasing and huge software projects).
On Thu, 20 Feb 2025, Salvador Mirzo wrote:
D <[email protected]> writes:
[...]
My dream is that people will start to use small self-hosted,
end-to-end encrypted chat services, so that the laws forbidding
encryption become meaningless.
That's my idea, too. I don't think the USENET is actually a perfect
project. I think communities should not too large. So I think we
should build more NNTP servers to be used by small communities. And
then these servers should have a standard API so that an index could be
created somewhere where people can discover communities.
Imagine how many closed NNTP servers, mailing lists are out there and
nobody knows.
The web is like that. A website sends you to another one. This is
decentralization. No NNTP servers send you to another one, except those
that have peers, but then it's as if they're all the same. My idea is
to make NNTP servers more like the web.
I don't know if it works. I'm thinking out loud.
That would be a nice take on NNTP. A kind of "federated" nntp model,
as opposed to todays standardize and "global" version. Federated is
perhaps not the right word for it.
I think I see your vision here... we could think of the local nntp
servers as small communities, you could opt-in to make them public,
keep them private, or just register them with a search engine if you
want.
That model also would avoid all the newsgroup hierarchy stuff, you
just name your groups what ever you want, and you can decide to setup
peers with other communities you know.
On Thu, 20 Feb 2025, Salvador Mirzo wrote:
D <[email protected]> writes:
[...]
Yeah. It's not going to work for regular people. However, there's
something that I think it should work for regular people---low volume
NNTP servers.
Leafnode I think would be quite a nice piece of software for small,
local nntp
servers.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leafnode
I use part of its functionality to pull in usenet into my mail client.
I need to look into leafnode again. Now I don't think leafnode can peer
with a USENET server, right? I think we should have a server that does.
I'm willing to write it.
I think you are right. It doesn't peer, but it does pull selected
groups and latest posts from a "real" nntp server.
However!
It saves all messages in a local spool folder, and since nntp is a
nice and simple retro-protocols, it is trivial to understand the
format. So what you could do, between 2 leafnode servers, is to just
reverse engineer the format and "copy" the spool directory between the
two leafnode installations and all the messages will pop up on the
other leafnode as well.
I would be surprised if INN2 doesn't do all of this, but I think we
should have other alternatives with newer ideas too. For instance, I
The reason I did not go the INN2 route was that I wanted some small
and simple, for pulling messages one way only. Leafnode at first had
some restrictions such as needing a valid DNS name which was a pain,
so I simply deleted its checks, and now the server can be named
anything I want, which is fine, since I'm not peering. This can of
course be added back if you want it.
Only today was one of my younger partners telling the class that my
emails are quite something to behold. Long and packed with all the
information the person needs to perform the task. At first he found
it draining and stressful, but then he learned that I do not demand
instant replies when I email (then I call or write in the email that
it is urgent) and after a while he learned to appreciate that all
information he might need is in the email.
Yeah---young people don't quite get e-mail. They never read about
e-mail. Perhaps one thing that's against them (and it was not against
us) is that they have a lot of options today. We didn't have this many
options. We started out on a simpler world. So we were able to stay at
the top of the game over the years. And so we mastered it. Now we're
experienced and we handle the complexities of the world with the help of
our experience. They don't have these tools available. They could get
here quickly, but they're lost. Instructions we give them don't
suffice: perhaps because people must discover things for themselves.
That's perhaps why education only works for those who actually don't
need one.
I think is perhaps somewhat of a downward trend. I feel awe when
talking to the older generations who had to learn the hardware,
program in assembler and so on.
In my generation, hardware and assembler were solved problems, so the programming was done in higher level languages.
Todays generation don't even see the hardware, they all use cloud
servers and python.
So the original foundation gets further and further away. Only a small
set of hw wizards still care and know about that layer of the stack.
On Thu, 20 Feb 2025, Salvador Mirzo wrote:
Now... do you seriously think anyone would ever be interested in that? ;) >>LOL! It turns out I'm *highly* interested in your leafnode. Please,
can you put a package somewhere and let me look at it, try it out et
cetera? I've been thinking about doing something like that myself. I
can probably just live with your changes.
Of course!
Please grab a copy here: https://send.vis.ee/download/749384a5de2f4f33/#6ZgrL_j_qwmhqBNuXenoJA
I think I once packaged noffle (and not leafnode) for myself, but I
think I stopped using noffle for a news server, too. I think I use
leafnode now, but I use it only as a local news server. I'd like to
have an NNTP server that's simple to use, easily hosts local news server
and also easily peers with a USENET server for just a non-huge list of
groups. I actually would like to write this server myself.
Why did you not use noffle in the end? Never heard of it before, but seems to be
similar perhaps to leafnode.
On Thu, 20 Feb 2025, Salvador Mirzo wrote:
Amen! Quite an efficiency hack! =D Another "security" hack I have
implemented for my father is that I have forbidden him from getting
government digital ID on his smart phone. This is very funny,
because once scammers called him and told some kind of story that
ended with them asking him to confirm what ever they wanted by
opening the digital ID app (this is how most old people get scammed
where I live) and he told them that he doesn't have it, due to
security reasons...
... the scammers sighed heavily and just hung up. =D
Lol. If that's not a super inconvenience to your father, then I think
it's a great solution. Over here these scams are quite a problem too.
At the moment, everything essential in society has to be able to be
done on paper, so it really is not a problem, and costs about 20-40
minutes per year in extra writing on actual paper.
This scares me though! I fear the day when a smartphone is mandatory
in order to participate in society. This will be a sad day indeed. Add
to that, centralbank managed electronic currencies, that can be clawed
back from you, or where you are blocked from spending them in an
instant, if you go against the government, and we have a very
dystopian situation indeed. =/
I also do talk to my father quite a lot about such matters. And
anything suspicious at all, he always talks to me. In fact, I've talked
to my entire family about such things. To always let one another know
about these events---to talk often among us. We learn more and so we
protect ourselves more.
This is good advice! My father and I, and my wife, talk about these
things, but we never formalized it, so that we say that we should talk
to each other in case anyone does get a weird message.
I read that in order to protect against voice cloning, you should
decide on a family password as well. This we also haven't done. But I
am currently working on a small IT-security curriculum for retired
people, and that class will include an example of voice cloning to
show them how it works, and what they can expect.
The reason we can be so good at handling this computing world is because
we are pretty much obsessed about it; we spend the entire day thinking
about it; reading about it; writing about it. By talking more with our
families about these matters, they do learn more from us. Of course, we
can't expect they'll be coworkers. We need to take things very slowly
and only as much as they can handle it. Then it becomes kind of fun for
them too and then they learn a bunch.
This is true. But this also requires some amount of simplification in
order for it not to become an energy drain. That is why I like my way
of limiting communication to phone and email. It only leaves two doors
open which is easier to defend than 3 or 4 or 5 doors open. ;)
So I find this to be a hueg benefit! I am also lucky because I run my >>>>> own company, so my business partners know that if they want to reach >>>>> me, they have 2 options, email or phone, and all of them accept that. >>>>Nice to hear you run your own business.
Yes, it is the best thing that has ever happened to me except for my
wife. I am truly blessed and am very thankful for it every single
day. =)
Nice to hear that your wife is the best thing that ever happened to you.
I unfortunately can't yet say the same. I'm single, although I'd love
to have little kids running around and through the house. :) But first
I gotta find someone who I love and who loves me.
In my experience, as long as you are living a positive life, and don't
get caught in depression, and caught by unreasonable aesthetic
standards, this will happen in time.
As for children, no such thing for me, since biologically I have an
extremely low chance of having children. On the other hand, my parents
got the same diagnosis from the doctor, and they had me, and the
doctor said it was not possible according to science, so who knows? ;)
D <[email protected]> writes:
On Thu, 20 Feb 2025, Salvador Mirzo wrote:
This is the truth. I'm a contrarian kind of guy, so when the world
goes git, I go fossil. ;) Jokes aside, I like the concept of one
binary and how it works for my own personal use case.
I went fossil when I had to teach a class. I thought git was more
complicated than fossil. But it turns out that fossil was seen as
crazily complicated by nearly all students (anyway). I think fossil is
just fine, though I confess I prefer the file system over a database.
This is very interesting! What was it that the student thought was crazy
complicated compared with git?
Not compared to git. They did not get to see git. They just hated
fossil to the point of almost giving up on the whole course altogether.
Very likely they knew that other courses would give them the same
credits and they could try it afresh on the next semester.
I don't have much information. The command line seemed an awful
experience to them. I suspect that they thought that the command line
was archaic means of system interface and that perhaps it was just a
teacher idiosyncrasy.
This experience gave me the following feeling---they ask for real-world, pratical experience, but they're not up to an introduction to the tools
used in the real-world.
I have taught classes with git (basics) and at the end of the day,
regardless of if you use git or fossil, it just requires a few simple
commands to get started at the basic level (we were not discussing
rebasing and huge software projects).
I think it boils down to a lot more because these are compouter users
that even ``environment variable'' is a never-seen concept. I watched
them opening a c:\> prompt on their Windows system, slowlying typing up
their very long path to their project, say, and then doing it again on
the next class---paths with spaces and other complicated symbols.
D <[email protected]> writes:
On Thu, 20 Feb 2025, Salvador Mirzo wrote:
D <[email protected]> writes:
[...]
My dream is that people will start to use small self-hosted,
end-to-end encrypted chat services, so that the laws forbidding
encryption become meaningless.
That's my idea, too. I don't think the USENET is actually a perfect
project. I think communities should not too large. So I think we
should build more NNTP servers to be used by small communities. And
then these servers should have a standard API so that an index could be
created somewhere where people can discover communities.
Imagine how many closed NNTP servers, mailing lists are out there and
nobody knows.
The web is like that. A website sends you to another one. This is
decentralization. No NNTP servers send you to another one, except those >>> that have peers, but then it's as if they're all the same. My idea is
to make NNTP servers more like the web.
I don't know if it works. I'm thinking out loud.
That would be a nice take on NNTP. A kind of "federated" nntp model,
as opposed to todays standardize and "global" version. Federated is
perhaps not the right word for it.
I think I see your vision here... we could think of the local nntp
servers as small communities, you could opt-in to make them public,
keep them private, or just register them with a search engine if you
want.
That model also would avoid all the newsgroup hierarchy stuff, you
just name your groups what ever you want, and you can decide to setup
peers with other communities you know.
Yeah---that's the idea. But it's also future. First thing is to get a
nice prototype with the mundane work done so that we can start dreaming
up something cool like that. More to follow eventually.
This is very interesting! What was it that the student thought was crazy
complicated compared with git?
Not compared to git. They did not get to see git. They just hated
fossil to the point of almost giving up on the whole course altogether.
Very likely they knew that other courses would give them the same
credits and they could try it afresh on the next semester.
I don't have much information. The command line seemed an awful
experience to them. I suspect that they thought that the command line
was archaic means of system interface and that perhaps it was just a
teacher idiosyncrasy.
This experience gave me the following feeling---they ask for real-world, pratical experience, but they're not up to an introduction to the tools
used in the real-world.
I have taught classes with git (basics) and at the end of the day,
regardless of if you use git or fossil, it just requires a few simple
commands to get started at the basic level (we were not discussing
rebasing and huge software projects).
I think it boils down to a lot more because these are compouter users
that even ``environment variable'' is a never-seen concept. I watched
them opening a c:\> prompt on their Windows system, slowlying typing up
their very long path to their project, say, and then doing it again on
the next class---paths with spaces and other complicated symbols.
It saves all messages in a local spool folder, and since nntp is a
nice and simple retro-protocols, it is trivial to understand the
format. So what you could do, between 2 leafnode servers, is to just
reverse engineer the format and "copy" the spool directory between the
two leafnode installations and all the messages will pop up on the
other leafnode as well.
Okay, but the question was to just to confirm my mostly-forgotten recollections of Leafnode. I wouldn't mind working on it to make it
peer via NNTP itself. But I would much rather write a completely new in
a non-C language.
I would be surprised if INN2 doesn't do all of this, but I think we
should have other alternatives with newer ideas too. For instance, I
The reason I did not go the INN2 route was that I wanted some small
and simple, for pulling messages one way only. Leafnode at first had
some restrictions such as needing a valid DNS name which was a pain,
so I simply deleted its checks, and now the server can be named
anything I want, which is fine, since I'm not peering. This can of
course be added back if you want it.
I never used INN2, but I do suspect that it's made for a serious USENET server and that it's more complex that it needs to be for the idea of a network of small NNTP servers.
I think is perhaps somewhat of a downward trend. I feel awe when
talking to the older generations who had to learn the hardware,
program in assembler and so on.
I feel the same. Like you, I feel great learning from the older
generations. In fact, I often think that they were privileged for being
able to be there first. I identified this easily enough to develop a
passion for studying the history of computer science, which makes me
look very old now because I use a lot of very old tools, which are
awesome tools despite their age. I got a web post by Joel Spolsky the
phrase that ``software doesn't get dusty''.
In my generation, hardware and assembler were solved problems, so the
programming was done in higher level languages.
Todays generation don't even see the hardware, they all use cloud
servers and python.
So the original foundation gets further and further away. Only a small
set of hw wizards still care and know about that layer of the stack.
That's quite right. I went through the same. The whole thing was
pretty much already done. I believe I am not very fond of directly interacting with hardware myself. For example, I usually like to have a
very clean office---no wires (if I could), not a lot of gadgets around.
Nevertheless, I feel obsessed by computers and I try to get close to the hardware by more abstract means. For instance, I've been reading about
the 6502 and it seems like such a simple CPU that it makes up for a very great computer architecture first introduction, unlike x86, say.
D <[email protected]> writes:
On Thu, 20 Feb 2025, Salvador Mirzo wrote:
Now... do you seriously think anyone would ever be interested in that? ;) >>>LOL! It turns out I'm *highly* interested in your leafnode. Please,
can you put a package somewhere and let me look at it, try it out et
cetera? I've been thinking about doing something like that myself. I
can probably just live with your changes.
Of course!
Please grab a copy here:
https://send.vis.ee/download/749384a5de2f4f33/#6ZgrL_j_qwmhqBNuXenoJA
Thanks! Got the package and unpacked it fine. By the way, fdm is
already pulling my mail and I know it's able to download NNTP articles
too, so chances are it can do what leafnode has been doing for you.
I'll keep you posted. Thanks very much for providing the package.
I think I once packaged noffle (and not leafnode) for myself, but I
think I stopped using noffle for a news server, too. I think I use
leafnode now, but I use it only as a local news server. I'd like to
have an NNTP server that's simple to use, easily hosts local news server >>> and also easily peers with a USENET server for just a non-huge list of
groups. I actually would like to write this server myself.
Why did you not use noffle in the end? Never heard of it before, but seems to be
similar perhaps to leafnode.
When I used noffle I didn't know leafnode. :) I got to know leafnode
because I started asking people for something more my way than noffle.
I complained that I preferred articles written on the file system than
stored in a database, so someone pointed out leafnode. Let me see which
I'm still running. It's leafnode-2.0.0.alpha20140727b. So I must have really stopped noffle. But I did not package leafnode with my customizations---that I did to noffle only.
And by now I am willing to write a new one from scratch, so I intend to
make leafnode obsolete as well.
At the moment, everything essential in society has to be able to be
done on paper, so it really is not a problem, and costs about 20-40
minutes per year in extra writing on actual paper.
This scares me though! I fear the day when a smartphone is mandatory
in order to participate in society. This will be a sad day indeed. Add
to that, centralbank managed electronic currencies, that can be clawed
back from you, or where you are blocked from spending them in an
instant, if you go against the government, and we have a very
dystopian situation indeed. =/
I would think that there are so many poor people in the world that governments could never really ask anyone to always have a phone.
However, I think it's already real that without such tools, the
alternative way will be so painful that a person like you or I will
likely not choose not to use a phone.
I think that's already more or less true in commerce. For instance,
I've been at times confronted with the situation that without using
Whatsapp, I could not get service.
During the pandemics, for example, so many people could not find a way
out of following protocols they did not want to follow and even taking chemical substances they did not want to take. So many people I know
did not want to do it and did it anyway because it was a hassle
otherwise.
As for children, no such thing for me, since biologically I have an
extremely low chance of having children. On the other hand, my parents
got the same diagnosis from the doctor, and they had me, and the
doctor said it was not possible according to science, so who knows? ;)
I am sorry for hearing the news, but I also feel that we should hope for
the best here. I think nobody should trust doctor's predictions. I certainly don't know the reasons you might have low chance of having
children and let's remember this is a public forum. The subject does me remind me of a conversation with epidemiologist Shanna Swan, which I
have been slowly rewatching again---it's a 2h conversation. The entire conversation is very interesting. In this conversation, we can learn
that male fertility is decreasing by 1% *per year*.
Shanna Swan on male fertility (et cetera)
https://youtu.be/C9aqGqjC1kE
Salvador Mirzo <[email protected]> wrote:
D <[email protected]> writes:
On Thu, 20 Feb 2025, Salvador Mirzo wrote:
This is the truth. I'm a contrarian kind of guy, so when the world
goes git, I go fossil. ;) Jokes aside, I like the concept of one
binary and how it works for my own personal use case.
I went fossil when I had to teach a class. I thought git was more
complicated than fossil. But it turns out that fossil was seen as
crazily complicated by nearly all students (anyway). I think fossil is >>>> just fine, though I confess I prefer the file system over a database.
This is very interesting! What was it that the student thought was crazy >>> complicated compared with git?
Not compared to git. They did not get to see git. They just hated
fossil to the point of almost giving up on the whole course altogether.
Very likely they knew that other courses would give them the same
credits and they could try it afresh on the next semester.
I don't have much information. The command line seemed an awful
experience to them. I suspect that they thought that the command line
was archaic means of system interface and that perhaps it was just a
teacher idiosyncrasy.
For some (most? all?) they likely had only ever used a "touch/feely" interface (i.e., phone) and so, yes, they were very ill equiped to even comprehend a command line, much less be productive in one.
This experience gave me the following feeling---they ask for real-world,
pratical experience, but they're not up to an introduction to the tools
used in the real-world.
They likely have never been out of their smartphone protected bubble.
I have taught classes with git (basics) and at the end of the day,
regardless of if you use git or fossil, it just requires a few simple
commands to get started at the basic level (we were not discussing
rebasing and huge software projects).
I think it boils down to a lot more because these are compouter users
that even ``environment variable'' is a never-seen concept. I watched
them opening a c:\> prompt on their Windows system, slowlying typing up
their very long path to their project, say, and then doing it again on
the next class---paths with spaces and other complicated symbols.
Which is (almost) the same they would do using a GUI or their phone.
Wherever the file manager defaults, they then meticiously "step" their
way over to where they want to be. The concept of saving a 'bookmark'
(of sorts) to "go directly there" is likely foreign to them. In fact,
they sound like the types who open the google search page, then type a
URL into the google search box, to go to that URL.
On Sun, 23 Feb 2025, Salvador Mirzo wrote:
This is very interesting! What was it that the student thought was crazy >>> complicated compared with git?
Not compared to git. They did not get to see git. They just hated
fossil to the point of almost giving up on the whole course altogether.
Very likely they knew that other courses would give them the same
credits and they could try it afresh on the next semester.
Ahh, got it! Yes, sadly this happens to me as well. At the slightest hint of difficulty or effort, about 20% of the class riots, complains to the school that
the teacher is evil, that the difficulty level should be lowered etc. They do not realize, that the only ones they are cheating by doing that are themselves.
The sad thing is that business owners (including myself) have noted a dramatic
drop in skill from graduates over the past 3-4 years. One reason is that the government has changed the funding of the schools, rewarding schools that pass
all students. So of course, the schools pass all students, since it means more
money for them (they are paid by the government upon graduation) and you get the
situation where awful students graduate, and now, where companies no longer hire
them.
Usually in order to buck the trend somewhat, I make my first course more difficult in order to get rid of the unmotivated ones. If I don't have the first
course of the semester, the following 1-2 are pure hell, since the bad ones remain and complain about everything, but after 1-2 semesters they usually quit.
It is just sad that I could not make them realize this after 3 weeks, and instead they waste 1-2 semesters. But such is life.
I have taught classes with git (basics) and at the end of the day,
regardless of if you use git or fossil, it just requires a few simple
commands to get started at the basic level (we were not discussing
rebasing and huge software projects).
I think it boils down to a lot more because these are compouter users
that even ``environment variable'' is a never-seen concept. I watched
them opening a c:\> prompt on their Windows system, slowlying typing up
their very long path to their project, say, and then doing it again on
the next class---paths with spaces and other complicated symbols.
Haha, yes... I think I have to tell them about ls, cd, pwd etc. about 30-40 times before they finally start to remember what it is. ;)
On Sun, 23 Feb 2025, Salvador Mirzo wrote:
At the moment, everything essential in society has to be able to be
done on paper, so it really is not a problem, and costs about 20-40
minutes per year in extra writing on actual paper.
This scares me though! I fear the day when a smartphone is mandatory
in order to participate in society. This will be a sad day indeed. Add
to that, centralbank managed electronic currencies, that can be clawed
back from you, or where you are blocked from spending them in an
instant, if you go against the government, and we have a very
dystopian situation indeed. =/
I would think that there are so many poor people in the world that
governments could never really ask anyone to always have a phone.
However, I think it's already real that without such tools, the
alternative way will be so painful that a person like you or I will
likely not choose not to use a phone.
True!
It seems that god was listening in on this and sent me this article on the same
theme:
https://www.theguardian.com/money/2025/feb/22/the-tyranny-of-apps-those-without-smartphones-are-unfairly-penalised-say-campaigners
I think they have a good point! One business idea I have is hosting "virtual phones" in the cloud. So people who do not want a smartphone or who can not afford one, can rent a small VM in the cloud for 4-8 EUR per month or so, and use that to run their apps.
The provlem is that not all apps work on a VM, since app developers can do some
kind of magic that blocks them from running on an emulator. The governments national ID has this, so refuses to run on an emulator.
But I think that the majority of apps might run in that configuration. So if I
need an app, I get start my VM, do what I need to do, and then shut it
down.
I think that's already more or less true in commerce. For instance,
I've been at times confronted with the situation that without using
Whatsapp, I could not get service.
During the pandemics, for example, so many people could not find a way
out of following protocols they did not want to follow and even taking
chemical substances they did not want to take. So many people I know
did not want to do it and did it anyway because it was a hassle
otherwise.
Oh that was a pain. My wife got vaccinated once against her will because of it.
I did not, and I spent many 100s of hours avoiding the unethical restrictions. I
printed my own corona vaccination qr codes for a while, until that didn't work,
I found a medical loop hole to allow me to travel without a mask, towards the end, I copied other peoples foreign qr codes, which would get me into stores, despite being unvaccinated, since the system in the stores only checked if the
qr was valid, and nothing else like last country of use, or matching it with id
checks.
As for children, no such thing for me, since biologically I have an
extremely low chance of having children. On the other hand, my parents
got the same diagnosis from the doctor, and they had me, and the
doctor said it was not possible according to science, so who knows? ;)
I am sorry for hearing the news, but I also feel that we should hope for
the best here. I think nobody should trust doctor's predictions. I
certainly don't know the reasons you might have low chance of having
children and let's remember this is a public forum. The subject does me
remind me of a conversation with epidemiologist Shanna Swan, which I
have been slowly rewatching again---it's a 2h conversation. The entire
conversation is very interesting. In this conversation, we can learn
that male fertility is decreasing by 1% *per year*.
Shanna Swan on male fertility (et cetera)
https://youtu.be/C9aqGqjC1kE
I've actually seen the video before, when my wife was the most crazy about our
problem. In my case, it is just a chance mutation that resulted in low quality
sperm. That's all. It is not impossible, but but very, very low probability of
fertilizing eggs.
On Sun, 23 Feb 2025, Salvador Mirzo wrote:
D <[email protected]> writes:
On Thu, 20 Feb 2025, Salvador Mirzo wrote:
Now... do you seriously think anyone would ever be interested in that? ;) >>>>LOL! It turns out I'm *highly* interested in your leafnode. Please,
can you put a package somewhere and let me look at it, try it out et
cetera? I've been thinking about doing something like that myself. I >>>> can probably just live with your changes.
Of course!
Please grab a copy here:
https://send.vis.ee/download/749384a5de2f4f33/#6ZgrL_j_qwmhqBNuXenoJA
Thanks! Got the package and unpacked it fine. By the way, fdm is
already pulling my mail and I know it's able to download NNTP articles
too, so chances are it can do what leafnode has been doing for you.
I'll keep you posted. Thanks very much for providing the package.
Really?? I had no idea! Maybe I can scrap my leafnode setup then and
move to fdm? I think fdm (well I guess, I haven't actually checked)
might be more minimal even than leafnode, so thank you for the
pointer! I will definitely have to check out the fdm manual today! =)
And by now I am willing to write a new one from scratch, so I intend to
make leafnode obsolete as well.
Best of luck! =) Sounds like a nice project!
On Sun, 23 Feb 2025, Salvador Mirzo wrote:
This is very interesting! What was it that the student thought was
crazy complicated compared with git?
Not compared to git. They did not get to see git. They just hated
fossil to the point of almost giving up on the whole course
altogether. Very likely they knew that other courses would give
them the same credits and they could try it afresh on the next
semester.
Ahh, got it! Yes, sadly this happens to me as well. At the
slightest hint of difficulty or effort, about 20% of the class riots, complains to the school that the teacher is evil, that the difficulty
level should be lowered etc.
They do not realize, that the only ones they are cheating by doing
that are themselves.
The sad thing is that business owners (including myself) have noted a dramatic drop in skill from graduates over the past 3-4 years. One
reason is that the government has changed the funding of the schools, rewarding schools that pass all students. So of course, the schools
pass all students, since it means more money for them (they are paid
by the government upon graduation) and you get the situation where
awful students graduate, and now, where companies no longer hire
them.
Usually in order to buck the trend somewhat, I make my first course
more difficult in order to get rid of the unmotivated ones. If I
don't have the first course of the semester, the following 1-2 are
pure hell, since the bad ones remain and complain about everything,
but after 1-2 semesters they usually quit. It is just sad that I
could not make them realize this after 3 weeks, and instead they
waste 1-2 semesters. But such is life.
This experience gave me the following feeling---they ask for
real-world, pratical experience, but they're not up to an
introduction to the tools used in the real-world.
True. But from time to time it is fun to see when they really "get"
the terminal. It's such an eye opening experience for them, and
they, themselves become completely amazed at what they can do with a
computer all of a sudden! One guy told me he had no idea and it was
amazing the day he understood the terminal concept. He went on to
become a rock star! Those students are what makes it worth it for
me.
D <[email protected]> writes:
On Sun, 23 Feb 2025, Salvador Mirzo wrote:
This is very interesting! What was it that the student thought was crazy >>>> complicated compared with git?
Not compared to git. They did not get to see git. They just hated
fossil to the point of almost giving up on the whole course altogether.
Very likely they knew that other courses would give them the same
credits and they could try it afresh on the next semester.
Ahh, got it! Yes, sadly this happens to me as well. At the slightest hint of >> difficulty or effort, about 20% of the class riots, complains to the school that
the teacher is evil, that the difficulty level should be lowered etc. They do
not realize, that the only ones they are cheating by doing that are themselves.
The sad thing is that business owners (including myself) have noted a dramatic
drop in skill from graduates over the past 3-4 years. One reason is that the >> government has changed the funding of the schools, rewarding schools that pass
all students. So of course, the schools pass all students, since it means more
money for them (they are paid by the government upon graduation) and you get the
situation where awful students graduate, and now, where companies no longer hire
them.
Usually in order to buck the trend somewhat, I make my first course more
difficult in order to get rid of the unmotivated ones. If I don't have the first
course of the semester, the following 1-2 are pure hell, since the bad ones >> remain and complain about everything, but after 1-2 semesters they usually quit.
It is just sad that I could not make them realize this after 3 weeks, and
instead they waste 1-2 semesters. But such is life.
Such is life. :)
I have taught classes with git (basics) and at the end of the day,
regardless of if you use git or fossil, it just requires a few simple
commands to get started at the basic level (we were not discussing
rebasing and huge software projects).
I think it boils down to a lot more because these are compouter users
that even ``environment variable'' is a never-seen concept. I watched
them opening a c:\> prompt on their Windows system, slowlying typing up
their very long path to their project, say, and then doing it again on
the next class---paths with spaces and other complicated symbols.
Haha, yes... I think I have to tell them about ls, cd, pwd etc. about 30-40 >> times before they finally start to remember what it is. ;)
Oh, yes, memory is another thing I notice. Not only students, but
teachers, too; I'm known as having a superb memory or something. Truth
is, though, it's their memory that is not doing very well.
But I think that the majority of apps might run in that configuration. So if I
need an app, I get start my VM, do what I need to do, and then shut it
down.
I suppose commerce itself can do that. For instance, someone could walk
in a store with cash and exchange it for a temporary credit card to be
used at the machines, say.
You know what I mean? Government offices can make their systems all
based on phone apps, but then people can walk in some place to use a
phone and get their bureaucracy done. It's your idea up there, but
instead of virtual machines, real phones instead. This will likely be
done, I think.
And I think that's a good solution.
I think that's already more or less true in commerce. For instance,
I've been at times confronted with the situation that without using
Whatsapp, I could not get service.
During the pandemics, for example, so many people could not find a way
out of following protocols they did not want to follow and even taking
chemical substances they did not want to take. So many people I know
did not want to do it and did it anyway because it was a hassle
otherwise.
Oh that was a pain. My wife got vaccinated once against her will because of it.
I did not, and I spent many 100s of hours avoiding the unethical restrictions. I
printed my own corona vaccination qr codes for a while, until that didn't work,
I found a medical loop hole to allow me to travel without a mask, towards the
end, I copied other peoples foreign qr codes, which would get me into stores,
despite being unvaccinated, since the system in the stores only checked if the
qr was valid, and nothing else like last country of use, or matching it with id
checks.
I did the same. (It's amazing the kind of parallels we can find on the USENET.) I'm happy to hear you managed it too. I did a COVID exam
every week, getting it negative 100% of the times, for an entire
semester and archived my exams with my employeer. I was very happy with
the alternative: I would not have taken any substance at all. I would
have gone to the last resort. I saw no point in taking in an unknown substance so try to avoid an aggressive /cold/.
As for children, no such thing for me, since biologically I have an
extremely low chance of having children. On the other hand, my parents >>>> got the same diagnosis from the doctor, and they had me, and the
doctor said it was not possible according to science, so who knows? ;)
I am sorry for hearing the news, but I also feel that we should hope for >>> the best here. I think nobody should trust doctor's predictions. I
certainly don't know the reasons you might have low chance of having
children and let's remember this is a public forum. The subject does me >>> remind me of a conversation with epidemiologist Shanna Swan, which I
have been slowly rewatching again---it's a 2h conversation. The entire
conversation is very interesting. In this conversation, we can learn
that male fertility is decreasing by 1% *per year*.
Shanna Swan on male fertility (et cetera)
https://youtu.be/C9aqGqjC1kE
I've actually seen the video before, when my wife was the most crazy about our
problem. In my case, it is just a chance mutation that resulted in low quality
sperm. That's all. It is not impossible, but but very, very low probability of
fertilizing eggs.
I'm not a religious person in the traditional sense of the word, but
turns out I find myself one of the most religious person I've ever met because patience, perseverance, lack of ambition and a certain mastery
of the art of listening seem pretty religious to me. For instance,
pretty much every religious person I know has at least one tattoo on
their skin. I think that's totally non-religious because a tattoo effectively destroys (at least a bit) something natural that took a
zillion years to be prepared---to protect the person. I think that if
God speaks to us at all, it is done through the movement of nature.
Lol. I'm saying all of this to say that I would never believe that it's really impossible for you to have kids. Life is full of adversities.
My idea is that we should work on them 'til the end---unconcerned with
the end result.
End results imply a direction, a strategy.
We try to fix the bug in the software because we want to understand what caused the bug and how it works. Not because we want the software to be flawless. So we don't fret if we can't figure it out, but we always
work on it. We work directionless because we don't really mind not
getting to the end result. Anywhere we go is natural enough; it's
divine enough.
D <[email protected]> writes:
On Sun, 23 Feb 2025, Salvador Mirzo wrote:
D <[email protected]> writes:
On Thu, 20 Feb 2025, Salvador Mirzo wrote:
Now... do you seriously think anyone would ever be interested in that? ;)
LOL! It turns out I'm *highly* interested in your leafnode. Please, >>>>> can you put a package somewhere and let me look at it, try it out et >>>>> cetera? I've been thinking about doing something like that myself. I >>>>> can probably just live with your changes.
Of course!
Please grab a copy here:
https://send.vis.ee/download/749384a5de2f4f33/#6ZgrL_j_qwmhqBNuXenoJA
Thanks! Got the package and unpacked it fine. By the way, fdm is
already pulling my mail and I know it's able to download NNTP articles
too, so chances are it can do what leafnode has been doing for you.
I'll keep you posted. Thanks very much for providing the package.
Really?? I had no idea! Maybe I can scrap my leafnode setup then and
move to fdm? I think fdm (well I guess, I haven't actually checked)
might be more minimal even than leafnode, so thank you for the
pointer! I will definitely have to check out the fdm manual today! =)
Precisely---fdm is minimal. The reason I am not yet setting it up for
news is because fdm all by itself is not enough. You need to reply to articles and fdm will not send articles out for you. It will only download'em, so you can read them. (I assume this. I haven't tried
it.)
So for fdm to work with Gnus, say, (which is what I use), Gnus will need
to somehow know to which NNTP server to post my follow-ups. If I use
Gnus in its traditional sense, then this work is already done. If I
change to fdm, Gnus will likely see all messages as mail. So it's not a complete solution. It's a hacker thing. It always takes various
modules and need to work together to work. It's the price we pay.
And by now I am willing to write a new one from scratch, so I intend to
make leafnode obsolete as well.
Best of luck! =) Sounds like a nice project!
It is. :) It's the most fun I've ever had with programming. I think
Common Lisp is a big part of it. I tried Racket before Common Lisp.
Common Lisp is so much my way than Racket is.
On Mon, 24 Feb 2025, Salvador Mirzo wrote:
Oh, yes, memory is another thing I notice. Not only students, but
teachers, too; I'm known as having a superb memory or something.
Truth is, though, it's their memory that is not doing very well.
I think smartphones and google are a huge part of the problem. I do
not have a smartphone, so I have to remember things like codes,
shopping lists, directions, and I am convinced it helps my memory
somewhat.
The young ones, just google everything, so they don't exercise their
memory.
For instance, one of the students the other day was amazed at how I
could live without google maps, and wondered how I do it.
My answer, I check where I want to go, before I leave home. Most of
the time I remember it. If I don't know exactly where to go, I ask
someone in the street, or ask a hotel. The hotels are nice, because
often they give you a map. For long trips I might print out the map
on a piece of paper. This has the advantage of having zero value, so
I never have to worry about dropping it, forgetting it or someone
stealing it.
The students were chocked! ;)
D <[email protected]> wrote:
On Sun, 23 Feb 2025, Salvador Mirzo wrote:
This is very interesting! What was it that the student thought was
crazy complicated compared with git?
Not compared to git. They did not get to see git. They just hated
fossil to the point of almost giving up on the whole course
altogether. Very likely they knew that other courses would give
them the same credits and they could try it afresh on the next
semester.
Ahh, got it! Yes, sadly this happens to me as well. At the
slightest hint of difficulty or effort, about 20% of the class riots,
complains to the school that the teacher is evil, that the difficulty
level should be lowered etc.
The result of 20+ years of "everyone gets a participation trophy, and
no winners are declared" parenting.....
They do not realize, that the only ones they are cheating by doing
that are themselves.
They lack the wisdom that comes with age to recognize this fact. Some
of them will wise up early enough to be able to succeed. The rest will
be set for "table waitress with master's degree" careers.
The sad thing is that business owners (including myself) have noted a
dramatic drop in skill from graduates over the past 3-4 years. One
reason is that the government has changed the funding of the schools,
rewarding schools that pass all students. So of course, the schools
pass all students, since it means more money for them (they are paid
by the government upon graduation) and you get the situation where
awful students graduate, and now, where companies no longer hire
them.
Pass them all along has been more the norm here in the US for a quite
long time, as it is easier to just push them up (then out) than it is
to actually try to devote the time to find out how to educate them.
The result is huge numbers of table waitresses with master's degrees.
Usually in order to buck the trend somewhat, I make my first course
more difficult in order to get rid of the unmotivated ones. If I
don't have the first course of the semester, the following 1-2 are
pure hell, since the bad ones remain and complain about everything,
but after 1-2 semesters they usually quit. It is just sad that I
could not make them realize this after 3 weeks, and instead they
waste 1-2 semesters. But such is life.
Provided you can withstand the heat, this is the best option. Clear
out the ones unfit as early as possible. I still remember the carnage
of the freshman Engineering courses when I went through. Began with
120+ students per lecture. End of each of both semeters could see the shrinkage. Start of second year and more than half were no longer
anywhere to be seen in the courses. Sadly, I can only imagine what
kind of complaints would be going to the dean's office now 40 years
later for such carniage in the first year.
This experience gave me the following feeling---they ask for
real-world, pratical experience, but they're not up to an
introduction to the tools used in the real-world.
True. But from time to time it is fun to see when they really "get"
the terminal. It's such an eye opening experience for them, and
they, themselves become completely amazed at what they can do with a
computer all of a sudden! One guy told me he had no idea and it was
amazing the day he understood the terminal concept. He went on to
become a rock star! Those students are what makes it worth it for
me.
And he was someone who *should* have been in that course. Many of the
others were likely only present because they had been told the degree
was a magic paper towards a big salary (while omitting that they have
to know what the F they are doing for the magic paper to gain them the
big salary).
On Mon, 24 Feb 2025, Rich wrote:
D <[email protected]> wrote:
On Sun, 23 Feb 2025, Salvador Mirzo wrote:
This is very interesting! What was it that the student thought was
crazy complicated compared with git?
Not compared to git. They did not get to see git. They just hated
fossil to the point of almost giving up on the whole course
altogether. Very likely they knew that other courses would give
them the same credits and they could try it afresh on the next
semester.
Ahh, got it! Yes, sadly this happens to me as well. At the
slightest hint of difficulty or effort, about 20% of the class riots,
complains to the school that the teacher is evil, that the difficulty
level should be lowered etc.
The result of 20+ years of "everyone gets a participation trophy, and
no winners are declared" parenting.....
This is the truth! You are a philosopher king! In sweden, they stopped scoring goals in football for children. When I was a child, and you were
bad at foot ball, you sat on the bench. Then you found another sport that
you actually had some aptitude for. Much better system if you ask me, and also an experience that teaches valuable life lessons early!
Usually in order to buck the trend somewhat, I make my first course
more difficult in order to get rid of the unmotivated ones. If I
don't have the first course of the semester, the following 1-2 are
pure hell, since the bad ones remain and complain about everything,
but after 1-2 semesters they usually quit. It is just sad that I
could not make them realize this after 3 weeks, and instead they
waste 1-2 semesters. But such is life.
Provided you can withstand the heat, this is the best option. Clear
Amen! I started to study engineering, and I could not stand the heat. I discovered that physics and math was extremely boring. I could push
through by sheer force of will, but after 1 years I realized... why?
Wouldn't it be better to study something I actually enjoyed?
out the ones unfit as early as possible. I still remember the carnage
of the freshman Engineering courses when I went through. Began with
120+ students per lecture. End of each of both semeters could see the
shrinkage. Start of second year and more than half were no longer
anywhere to be seen in the courses. Sadly, I can only imagine what
kind of complaints would be going to the dean's office now 40 years
later for such carniage in the first year.
Severe complaints! The cruel irony is... do a good job at a school, and you'll be kicked out for failing too many students. This has happened to
me.
My revenge was when the school told me... you know, there is something
very strange with your program. I said... what?
The students who graduate from your program, all have jobs in IT, and
their salaries are all way above the average starting salary.
But your program is the program where 40% drop out.
In our other programs, 100% graudate. But only 50% work in IT, and they
have very low salaries.
I cannot understand how they could not see cause an effect.
True. But from time to time it is fun to see when they really
"get" the terminal. It's such an eye opening experience for them,
and they, themselves become completely amazed at what they can do
with a computer all of a sudden! One guy told me he had no idea
and it was amazing the day he understood the terminal concept. He
went on to become a rock star! Those students are what makes it
worth it for me.
And he was someone who *should* have been in that course. Many of
the others were likely only present because they had been told the
degree was a magic paper towards a big salary (while omitting that
they have to know what the F they are doing for the magic paper to
gain them the big salary).
Haha... yes, reminds me of one of my teachers at a school, and on
the first day they had an open question session. One arabian
gentleman asked...
"Hey you... what's the salary? Will I be rich when I'm done?"
The teacher: I'm X, you can call me X, that's perfectly fine."
He: "What ever... what's the money?"
The teacker: Sigh.... "if you are good, you earn well, if you are
bad, find another program."
The student looked dissatisfied with the answer. ;)
I think that's already more or less true in commerce. For instance,
I've been at times confronted with the situation that without using
Whatsapp, I could not get service.
During the pandemics, for example, so many people could not find a way >>>> out of following protocols they did not want to follow and even taking >>>> chemical substances they did not want to take. So many people I know
did not want to do it and did it anyway because it was a hassle
otherwise.
Oh that was a pain. My wife got vaccinated once against her will
because of it. I did not, and I spent many 100s of hours avoiding
the unethical restrictions. I printed my own corona vaccination qr
codes for a while, until that didn't work, I found a medical loop
hole to allow me to travel without a mask, towards the end, I copied
other peoples foreign qr codes, which would get me into stores,
despite being unvaccinated, since the system in the stores only
checked if the qr was valid, and nothing else like last country of
use, or matching it with id checks.
I did the same. (It's amazing the kind of parallels we can find on the
USENET.) I'm happy to hear you managed it too. I did a COVID exam
every week, getting it negative 100% of the times, for an entire
semester and archived my exams with my employeer. I was very happy with
the alternative: I would not have taken any substance at all. I would
have gone to the last resort. I saw no point in taking in an unknown
substance so try to avoid an aggressive /cold/.
It is amazing! It was the 2 worst year of my life, and destryoed my trust in democracy. I stopped voting after that.
I did one corona test and they almost damaged my nose by showing some stuff up
into my brain. Extremely painful, and I had an irritated nose for several days
after that. That's when I decided, no more tests for me.
But I found a company that did saliva-based tests, and I called a doctor who watched me perform the saliva based tests on the phone, and eventually she was
so tired of the process that she said, what ever... write your own certificate,
slap my name and signature on it, and just email me if you travel so I know.
So for 1 years, that's what I did. =D
But towards the end they hooked up all testing facilities to some EU surveillance register, so then it did not work anymore, but it was towards the
end, so I didn't have the energy to get connected to it, but if it would have continued, I would have started my own corona clinic.
As for children, no such thing for me, since biologically I have anI am sorry for hearing the news, but I also feel that we should hope for >>>> the best here. I think nobody should trust doctor's predictions. I
extremely low chance of having children. On the other hand, my parents >>>>> got the same diagnosis from the doctor, and they had me, and the
doctor said it was not possible according to science, so who knows? ;) >>>>
certainly don't know the reasons you might have low chance of having
children and let's remember this is a public forum. The subject does me >>>> remind me of a conversation with epidemiologist Shanna Swan, which I
have been slowly rewatching again---it's a 2h conversation. The entire >>>> conversation is very interesting. In this conversation, we can learn
that male fertility is decreasing by 1% *per year*.
Shanna Swan on male fertility (et cetera)
https://youtu.be/C9aqGqjC1kE
I've actually seen the video before, when my wife was the most crazy
about our problem. In my case, it is just a chance mutation that
resulted in low quality sperm. That's all. It is not impossible, but
but very, very low probability of fertilizing eggs.
I'm not a religious person in the traditional sense of the word, but
turns out I find myself one of the most religious person I've ever met
because patience, perseverance, lack of ambition and a certain mastery
of the art of listening seem pretty religious to me. For instance,
pretty much every religious person I know has at least one tattoo on
their skin. I think that's totally non-religious because a tattoo
effectively destroys (at least a bit) something natural that took a
zillion years to be prepared---to protect the person. I think that if
God speaks to us at all, it is done through the movement of nature.
Never been a fan of tattoos. But in my case it is a conservative upbringing where tattoos where seen as low class.
It is strange how things like that still stick with you. On the other
hand, it is permanent, and since I don't have anything permanent to
say, I don't really see why I should get a tattoo.
It was funny, at a consulting gig there was a woke witch, constantly harping on
how evil I was as a white man.
She tattooed the logo of the company on her arm.
Then 6 months afte I quit the consulting gig, she kicked her out.
I laughed a lot! What goes around, comes around. I still wonder if she has that
tattoo? =D
Lol. I'm saying all of this to say that I would never believe that it's
really impossible for you to have kids. Life is full of adversities.
My idea is that we should work on them 'til the end---unconcerned with
the end result.
This is a very sound philosophy! I do feel perfectly at ease with either result,
child or no child, but I have told my wife that as long as she wants it, I support us continuing trying. No matter the outcome, I'm fine with it. She is not however, which does make me sad.
End results imply a direction, a strategy.
We try to fix the bug in the software because we want to understand what
caused the bug and how it works. Not because we want the software to be
flawless. So we don't fret if we can't figure it out, but we always
work on it. We work directionless because we don't really mind not
getting to the end result. Anywhere we go is natural enough; it's
divine enough.
I think enjoying the process is very conducive to being able to perform the activity for a long time. It's almost as if you describe some zen like state.
On Mon, 24 Feb 2025, Salvador Mirzo wrote:
D <[email protected]> writes:
On Sun, 23 Feb 2025, Salvador Mirzo wrote:
D <[email protected]> writes:
On Thu, 20 Feb 2025, Salvador Mirzo wrote:Thanks! Got the package and unpacked it fine. By the way, fdm is
Now... do you seriously think anyone would ever be interested in that? ;)
LOL! It turns out I'm *highly* interested in your leafnode. Please, >>>>>> can you put a package somewhere and let me look at it, try it out et >>>>>> cetera? I've been thinking about doing something like that myself. I >>>>>> can probably just live with your changes.
Of course!
Please grab a copy here:
https://send.vis.ee/download/749384a5de2f4f33/#6ZgrL_j_qwmhqBNuXenoJA >>>>
already pulling my mail and I know it's able to download NNTP articles >>>> too, so chances are it can do what leafnode has been doing for you.
I'll keep you posted. Thanks very much for providing the package.
Really?? I had no idea! Maybe I can scrap my leafnode setup then and
move to fdm? I think fdm (well I guess, I haven't actually checked)
might be more minimal even than leafnode, so thank you for the
pointer! I will definitely have to check out the fdm manual today! =)
Precisely---fdm is minimal. The reason I am not yet setting it up for
news is because fdm all by itself is not enough. You need to reply to
articles and fdm will not send articles out for you. It will only
download'em, so you can read them. (I assume this. I haven't tried
it.)
Sounds perfect for my needs. Alpine, my email client, has built in
news functionality. The thing is that you can activate it by turning
on "rich headers" and if you do that a Newgrp: field pops up. If you
fill in the newsgroup there, alpine then magically takes care of
posting it to the group.
So if fdm can download the files in a nice spool folder format, I
might even be able to apply my small python script to copy the news
posting into Maildir folders, and there I can read, and alpine then
posts.
And by now I am willing to write a new one from scratch, so I intend to >>>> make leafnode obsolete as well.
Best of luck! =) Sounds like a nice project!
It is. :) It's the most fun I've ever had with programming. I think
Common Lisp is a big part of it. I tried Racket before Common Lisp.
Common Lisp is so much my way than Racket is.
Go is the next on my list. What is it that makes you like lisp so
much? I have never considered it, so I am curious. Doesn't it wear out
the () keys on your keyboard? ;)
D <[email protected]> wrote:
On Mon, 24 Feb 2025, Salvador Mirzo wrote:
Oh, yes, memory is another thing I notice. Not only students, but
teachers, too; I'm known as having a superb memory or something.
Truth is, though, it's their memory that is not doing very well.
I think smartphones and google are a huge part of the problem. I do
not have a smartphone, so I have to remember things like codes,
shopping lists, directions, and I am convinced it helps my memory
somewhat.
The young ones, just google everything, so they don't exercise their
memory.
There have been studies to the effect that yes, using 'google' or 'the
phone' to remember everything does indeed erode the ability to actually 'remember' without said crutches.
For instance, one of the students the other day was amazed at how I
could live without google maps, and wondered how I do it.
My answer, I check where I want to go, before I leave home. Most of
the time I remember it. If I don't know exactly where to go, I ask
someone in the street, or ask a hotel. The hotels are nice, because
often they give you a map. For long trips I might print out the map
on a piece of paper. This has the advantage of having zero value, so
I never have to worry about dropping it, forgetting it or someone
stealing it.
The students were chocked! ;)
I saw a news report once (credibility slightly suspect) which posited
that there were even some of the "youngins" that use "gps phone nav"
for navigating routes they travel frequently, such that without the
"nav tool" they are unable to recall how to get "there" from "here"
even though they have made the exact same trip 200 prior times.
I often 'frustrate' my wife by going off the beaten path (major roads)
onto back roads (I'll admit, sometimes done specifically for the value
of the 'frustration' part) to get "there" from "here" with no GPS nav
or pre-planning at all and in almost all instances I get "there" even
though the entire route is brand new for me.
Those students that rely on gmaps would be even more shocked with one
of those 'side trips'.
So if fdm can download the files in a nice spool folder format, I
might even be able to apply my small python script to copy the news
posting into Maildir folders, and there I can read, and alpine then
posts.
I'm sure fdm can download and write them to a Maildir: it's how I use
it.
Go is the next on my list. What is it that makes you like lisp so
much? I have never considered it, so I am curious. Doesn't it wear out
the () keys on your keyboard? ;)
Lol. [L]ots of [S]tupid, [I]rritating [P]arenthesis.
Have you ever used paredit-mode in the GNU EMACS? It makes you love the parenthesis. You're a vim user, so you likely never heard of paredit.
If you have the energy, the time and the curiosity, you could watch a 3-minute demo at
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D6h5dFyyUX0
A few seconds will be enough to get the spirit, but I don't care if you
watch it---just skip it.
It's a pleasure to use paredit-mode. Let me quote Donald Norman. I'm
gonna show a larger quote, but my point here is on pleasure of use and a ``feeling of control''.
It is amazing! It was the 2 worst year of my life, and destryoed my trust in >> democracy. I stopped voting after that.
I stopped voting by never quite beginning. As soon as I could vote, I
went to live abroad. I got back 10 years later, when I didn't want to
vote anymore. A vote contributes to a perpetuation of a system.
Politicians use our votes to make their money. I want nothing to do
with this. Similarly to why I don't run Whatsapp.
But I found a company that did saliva-based tests, and I called a doctor who >> watched me perform the saliva based tests on the phone, and eventually she was
so tired of the process that she said, what ever... write your own certificate,
slap my name and signature on it, and just email me if you travel so I know. >>
So for 1 years, that's what I did. =D
Lol. She got tired. :)
But towards the end they hooked up all testing facilities to some EU
surveillance register, so then it did not work anymore, but it was towards the
end, so I didn't have the energy to get connected to it, but if it would have
continued, I would have started my own corona clinic.
That wouldn't been wild. :)
Never been a fan of tattoos. But in my case it is a conservative upbringing >> where tattoos where seen as low class.
I also grew up in a world that didn't approve them, but I think for the
wrong reasons. Today, I don't recommend them for religious reasons. :) Although I'm not religious (at all), I don't think we should destroy the health that's given us at birth. Destroying your skin, even if it's a
tiny bit for something so frivolous... It's appalling.
It is strange how things like that still stick with you. On the other
hand, it is permanent, and since I don't have anything permanent to
say, I don't really see why I should get a tattoo.
Precisely.
``I would never die for a cause because I might be wrong.''
-- Who said this? The Internet says it was Bertrand Russell.
But I don't buy it up front.
Even if I had something permanent to say, I could put it in a book and
make lots of backups of it. It doesn't have to be on my skin.
What about those who wear t-shirts with messages and put stickers in
their cars? Why is it that they want to keep shoving the world with
their messages?
It was funny, at a consulting gig there was a woke witch, constantly harping on
how evil I was as a white man.
Lol.
She tattooed the logo of the company on her arm.
Omg.
Then 6 months afte I quit the consulting gig, she kicked her out.
They kicked her out. Sad. But pretty typical.
I laughed a lot! What goes around, comes around. I still wonder if she has that
tattoo? =D
She could do another one on top, which is a typical thing. But the more
you do it, the more it hurts your skin. So if she removed it (somehow)
or did something over, it's just getting worse.
Sad, but can we do? People can be pretty... You know.
Lol. I'm saying all of this to say that I would never believe that it's >>> really impossible for you to have kids. Life is full of adversities.
My idea is that we should work on them 'til the end---unconcerned with
the end result.
This is a very sound philosophy! I do feel perfectly at ease with either result,
child or no child, but I have told my wife that as long as she wants it, I >> support us continuing trying. No matter the outcome, I'm fine with it. She is
not however, which does make me sad.
She's not fine with either result? Meaning she wants kids no matter
what?
End results imply a direction, a strategy.
We try to fix the bug in the software because we want to understand what >>> caused the bug and how it works. Not because we want the software to be >>> flawless. So we don't fret if we can't figure it out, but we always
work on it. We work directionless because we don't really mind not
getting to the end result. Anywhere we go is natural enough; it's
divine enough.
I think enjoying the process is very conducive to being able to perform the >> activity for a long time. It's almost as if you describe some zen like state.
There's just no other way, really. In fact, if you're ever struggling
to do something, I think it's the perfect sign that something has to
change. Surely it doesn't mean that we should just stop doing it. It
could be our jobs, for example. But surely something is wrong and then
we should have the light to find out what it is and somehow be able to continue on another path.
I think life can be pretty joyful. I pray to God (not literally) to
help me keep doing what I'm doing because I've been enjoying it.
Perhaps, though, there are even new things that I'd enjoy even more. If
I need to change my life radically, I will. God should show me the way
in His own way. Lol---my language has been getting wildly religious. :)
This is the truth! You are a philosopher king! In sweden, they stopped
scoring goals in football for children. When I was a child, and you were
bad at foot ball, you sat on the bench. Then you found another sport that
you actually had some aptitude for. Much better system if you ask me, and
also an experience that teaches valuable life lessons early!
Fail to learn that the real world is an unforgiving mistress, and you
will be constantly at odds with reality forever. The "no score,
everybody wins" method just breeds an enormous amount of snowflakes
that expect everything handled to them on a silver platter. Sadly,
life hands you nothing unless you work to get it.
Amen! I started to study engineering, and I could not stand the heat. I
discovered that physics and math was extremely boring. I could push
through by sheer force of will, but after 1 years I realized... why?
Wouldn't it be better to study something I actually enjoyed?
I enjoyed Engineering, so most of the classes were /easy/ (relative
measure, University Physics was significantly harder than high school
Physics -- we covered all year from HS in the first month, then set off
into uncharted territory) from my perspective. Calculus classes were terrible, largely due to awful professors (Indian, thick accents, spoke 250wpm, wrote on board at 400wpm, skipped writing the 13 critically important intermediate steps in between each line that did get written on the
board because they were trivially obvious *to the professor*). Electromagnetic Theory was the other one that was 'ugh', but a lot of
that was that it was almost "calculus 4" in disguise.
In our other programs, 100% graudate. But only 50% work in IT, and they
have very low salaries.
I cannot understand how they could not see cause an effect.
It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary
depends upon his not understanding it.
Their (the admin's) performance measure was "number passed out", not
"percent earning above average salary in job related to degree".
Haha... yes, reminds me of one of my teachers at a school, and on
the first day they had an open question session. One arabian
gentleman asked...
"Hey you... what's the salary? Will I be rich when I'm done?"
The teacher: I'm X, you can call me X, that's perfectly fine."
He: "What ever... what's the money?"
The teacker: Sigh.... "if you are good, you earn well, if you are
bad, find another program."
The student looked dissatisfied with the answer. ;)
Likely a royal prince or duke or some other such 'secondary royal
family member' who's been pampered and such his entire life, and so has
no basis for understanding how the world really works.
The web is like that. A website sends you to another
one. This is decentralization. No NNTP servers send
you to another one, except those that have peers, but
then it's as if they're all the same. My idea is to
make NNTP servers more like the web.
That would be a nice take on NNTP. A kind of "federated"
nntp model, as opposed to todays standardize and "global"
version. Federated is perhaps not the right word for it.
I think I see your vision here... we could think of the
local nntp servers as small communities, you could opt-in
to make them public, keep them private, or just register
them with a search engine if you want.
That model also would avoid all the newsgroup hierarchy
stuff, you just name your groups what ever you want, and
you can decide to setup peers with other communities you
know.
On Mon, 24 Feb 2025, Rich wrote:
I often 'frustrate' my wife by going off the beaten path (major roads)
onto back roads (I'll admit, sometimes done specifically for the value
of the 'frustration' part) to get "there" from "here" with no GPS nav
or pre-planning at all and in almost all instances I get "there" even
though the entire route is brand new for me.
This is excellent! Always going the same way, or driving the same route gets very boring after a while. Sometimes when I walk a new path, I discover a new store I didn't know existed.
On Mon, 24 Feb 2025, Salvador Mirzo wrote:
It is amazing! It was the 2 worst year of my life, and destryoed my
trust in democracy. I stopped voting after that.
I stopped voting by never quite beginning. As soon as I could vote, I
went to live abroad. I got back 10 years later, when I didn't want to
vote anymore. A vote contributes to a perpetuation of a system.
Politicians use our votes to make their money. I want nothing to do
with this. Similarly to why I don't run Whatsapp.
Yes, not to perpetuate the system is one of my reasons for not
voting. It is funny, when I was young, I was very conservative. And as
the years have passed, I've become more libertarian. My father, when
he was young, was a communist, and during his life, he becase a
moderate conservative.
But I found a company that did saliva-based tests, and I called a
doctor who watched me perform the saliva based tests on the phone,
and eventually she was so tired of the process that she said, what
ever... write your own certificate, slap my name and signature on
it, and just email me if you travel so I know.
So for 1 years, that's what I did. =D
Lol. She got tired. :)
Yep! But the did also not like the vaccine, and let me in on a little
secret. About 30% of her clinics staff were not vaccinated because
they thought the tests were too few and it was too early. Officially
all said they were, and no one spoke about it out of fear of getting
kicked out of the clinic, but in private, during hushed lunch
conversations, many admitted to not getting vaccinated.
But towards the end they hooked up all testing facilities to some EU
surveillance register, so then it did not work anymore, but it was
towards the
end, so I didn't have the energy to get connected to it, but if it would have
continued, I would have started my own corona clinic.
That [would have] been wild. :)
Yes. I hope I will never have to. An acquaintance told me about a
croatian doctor who earned good money with fake vaccinations of
italian patients. Italians who did not enjoy getting vaccinated
traveled to croatia to this doctor, he would fake a vaccination,
emptying the vials and putting on a fake bandaid and all, enter "all
good" into the EU system, and that was it.
Then 6 months afte I quit the consulting gig, she kicked her out.
They kicked her out. Sad. But pretty typical.
I laughed a lot! What goes around, comes around. I still wonder if
she has that
tattoo? =D
She could do another one on top, which is a typical thing. But the more
you do it, the more it hurts your skin. So if she removed it (somehow)
or did something over, it's just getting worse.
Sad, but can we do? People can be pretty... You know.
Lol. I'm saying all of this to say that I would never believe that it's >>>> really impossible for you to have kids. Life is full of adversities.
My idea is that we should work on them 'til the end---unconcerned with >>>> the end result.
This is a very sound philosophy! I do feel perfectly at ease with
either result, child or no child, but I have told my wife that as
long as she wants it, I support us continuing trying. No matter the
outcome, I'm fine with it. She is not however, which does make me
sad.
She's not fine with either result? Meaning she wants kids no matter
what?
Well, not no matter what, but let's say there is a very strong desire there.
D to Salvador Mirzo:
The web is like that. A website sends you to another
one. This is decentralization. No NNTP servers send
you to another one, except those that have peers, but
then it's as if they're all the same. My idea is to
make NNTP servers more like the web.
That would be a nice take on NNTP. A kind of "federated"
nntp model, as opposed to todays standardize and "global"
version. Federated is perhaps not the right word for it.
I think I see your vision here... we could think of the
local nntp servers as small communities, you could opt-in
to make them public, keep them private, or just register
them with a search engine if you want.
That model also would avoid all the newsgroup hierarchy
stuff, you just name your groups what ever you want, and
you can decide to setup peers with other communities you
know.
Is the difference from the current Usenet so big? There
already are many servers, public and private, and peering
with one another. news.tilde.club is an example of a small
NNTP community.
I'm not a religious person in the traditional sense of the word, but
turns out I find myself one of the most religious person I've ever met
because patience, perseverance, lack of ambition and a certain mastery
of the art of listening seem pretty religious to me. For instance,
pretty much every religious person I know has at least one tattoo on
their skin. I think that's totally non-religious because a tattoo
effectively destroys (at least a bit) something natural that took a
zillion years to be prepared---to protect the person. I think that if
God speaks to us at all, it is done through the movement of nature.
Never been a fan of tattoos. But in my case it is a conservative upbringing where tattoos where seen as low class. It is strange how things like
that still
stick with you. On the other hand, it is permanent, and since I don't have anything permanent to say, I don't really see why I should get a tattoo.
D <[email protected]> writes:
On Mon, 24 Feb 2025, Rich wrote:
[...]
I often 'frustrate' my wife by going off the beaten path (major roads)
onto back roads (I'll admit, sometimes done specifically for the value
of the 'frustration' part) to get "there" from "here" with no GPS nav
or pre-planning at all and in almost all instances I get "there" even
though the entire route is brand new for me.
This is excellent! Always going the same way, or driving the same route gets >> very boring after a while. Sometimes when I walk a new path, I discover a new
store I didn't know existed.
That really happens when you walk instead of driving. Not to mention
that if you're walking, it's okay to stop by at a store. If you're
driving, it's not okay because (at least where I live), it's never easy
to find a parking place. And you might not want to interrupt the song
that's playing or get out of the air conditioning.
I don't have much information. The command line seemed an awful
experience to them. I suspect that they thought that the command line
was archaic means of system interface and that perhaps it was just a
teacher idiosyncrasy.
Salvador Mirzo <[email protected]> wrote:
I don't have much information. The command line seemed an awful
experience to them. I suspect that they thought that the command line
was archaic means of system interface and that perhaps it was just a >>teacher idiosyncrasy.
This is something I see a lot of... we get interns who are engineering students or computer science students and they have never seen a command
line of any sort before. Not bash, not powershell, not anything. They
first of all don't get the command line concept and secondly they don't
get the concept of the heirarchical filesystem. "The file is on the computer!" "But where on the computer?" "It's on the computer!"
We even got a guy with a PhD in CS from a university that I had
previously thought reputable who had never used a command line and
who just could not understand how make works in spite of the O'Reilly
book.
I think some of these concepts have to be introduced early on, but they
NEED to be introduced early on in order to get any kind of basic computer literacy.
Salvador Mirzo <[email protected]> wrote:
I don't have much information. The command line seemed an awful
experience to them. I suspect that they thought that the command line
was archaic means of system interface and that perhaps it was just a
teacher idiosyncrasy.
This is something I see a lot of... we get interns who are engineering students or computer science students and they have never seen a command
line of any sort before. Not bash, not powershell, not anything. They
first of all don't get the command line concept and secondly they don't
get the concept of the heirarchical filesystem. "The file is on the computer!" "But where on the computer?" "It's on the computer!"
We even got a guy with a PhD in CS from a university that I had previously thought reputable who had never used a command line and who just could
not understand how make works in spite of the O'Reilly book.
I think some of these concepts have to be introduced early on, but they
NEED to be introduced early on in order to get any kind of basic computer literacy.
--scott
Yes, not to perpetuate the system is one of my reasons for not
voting. It is funny, when I was young, I was very conservative. And as
the years have passed, I've become more libertarian. My father, when
he was young, was a communist, and during his life, he becase a
moderate conservative.
I can say the same. I was quite more leftist years ago. It is very sensible: if people need protection, say, it makes perfect sense that
we'd use our resources to protect them. But then, with more experience,
you realize how non-trivial the situation is and that all of the
/sensible/ policy actually ends up working against itself.
But I found a company that did saliva-based tests, and I called a
doctor who watched me perform the saliva based tests on the phone,
and eventually she was so tired of the process that she said, what
ever... write your own certificate, slap my name and signature on
it, and just email me if you travel so I know.
So for 1 years, that's what I did. =D
Lol. She got tired. :)
Yep! But the did also not like the vaccine, and let me in on a little
secret. About 30% of her clinics staff were not vaccinated because
they thought the tests were too few and it was too early. Officially
all said they were, and no one spoke about it out of fear of getting
kicked out of the clinic, but in private, during hushed lunch
conversations, many admitted to not getting vaccinated.
Very interesting. I have a similar experience. Every now and then I
hear from someone that they did not take any vaccine, or took one the
first shots, giving up afterwards. Some (sadly) remark that they took a first shot (or a few shots) but they never wanted to. I have a very
close friend, for instance, who said she wouldn't take anything at all,
but that her son unfortunately took because he wanted to go to the
cinema. (I almost couldn't believe what I heard.) Another friend
remarked that she took three shots because she couldn't find a way out
due to her work---but she works in the same organization as I do. The
rules were the same for the two of us, so that's a case of unclear understanding of the rules. That's something I've been telling my
family for many years. We need to understand how the system works---in
this case, what was available at our work place that we could use to
protect ourselves? The more we understand, the better we can protect ourselves.
But towards the end they hooked up all testing facilities to some EU
surveillance register, so then it did not work anymore, but it was
towards the
end, so I didn't have the energy to get connected to it, but if it would have
continued, I would have started my own corona clinic.
That [would have] been wild. :)
Fixing my typo above. Instead of ``have'', I effectively added ``not''.
Yes. I hope I will never have to. An acquaintance told me about a
croatian doctor who earned good money with fake vaccinations of
italian patients. Italians who did not enjoy getting vaccinated
traveled to croatia to this doctor, he would fake a vaccination,
emptying the vials and putting on a fake bandaid and all, enter "all
good" into the EU system, and that was it.
I think the fake vaccinations certificates can be seen as self defense.
It's harder to argue for the profit generated. Perhaps one line of
defense is to make everything look perfectly normal for a perfect self defense strategy.
Then 6 months afte I quit the consulting gig, she kicked her out.
They kicked her out. Sad. But pretty typical.
I laughed a lot! What goes around, comes around. I still wonder if
she has that
tattoo? =D
She could do another one on top, which is a typical thing. But the more >>> you do it, the more it hurts your skin. So if she removed it (somehow)
or did something over, it's just getting worse.
Sad, but can we do? People can be pretty... You know.
Lol. I'm saying all of this to say that I would never believe that it's >>>>> really impossible for you to have kids. Life is full of adversities. >>>>> My idea is that we should work on them 'til the end---unconcerned with >>>>> the end result.
This is a very sound philosophy! I do feel perfectly at ease with
either result, child or no child, but I have told my wife that as
long as she wants it, I support us continuing trying. No matter the
outcome, I'm fine with it. She is not however, which does make me
sad.
She's not fine with either result? Meaning she wants kids no matter
what?
Well, not no matter what, but let's say there is a very strong desire there.
Which is understandable. Desires are something to pay very close
attention to. I believe that sometimes a desire is really a call from nature---not to say religious words here as I've been too religious
lately. :) But sometimes a desire is really pathological pleasure
seeking. You know, you eat a chocolate, which feels awesome, and then
on the next day you want it again, and then again and again and again...
Even if it's not in excessive amounts, that's very likely a repetitive
search for pleasure, which might be more properly classified as a
dysfunction than something natural, but that's for the experts to
consider, not me.
So I pay very close attention to myself. I do want kids and I seriously
want it. But let's have a look at another side. I have a close friend
who in years past worked on a non-governmental organization for
empowering women. We've had lots of conversation about her work, which
was always very interesting to me. One time she remarked that in poor
areas, young women often want to have kids because it gives them a
status in their community. Women with kids are seen as more respectful because they have to take care of kids and all that comes with it. She
then concluded the story by remarking that, consequently, many young
women end up having kids without really wishing for the kids themselves.
In such cases, I can't say the desire to have kids is healthy. So
desires are complicated matters to be paid close attention.
Anton Shepelev <[email protected]> writes:
D to Salvador Mirzo:
The web is like that. A website sends you to another
one. This is decentralization. No NNTP servers send
you to another one, except those that have peers, but
then it's as if they're all the same. My idea is to
make NNTP servers more like the web.
That would be a nice take on NNTP. A kind of "federated"
nntp model, as opposed to todays standardize and "global"
version. Federated is perhaps not the right word for it.
I think I see your vision here... we could think of the
local nntp servers as small communities, you could opt-in
to make them public, keep them private, or just register
them with a search engine if you want.
That model also would avoid all the newsgroup hierarchy
stuff, you just name your groups what ever you want, and
you can decide to setup peers with other communities you
know.
Is the difference from the current Usenet so big? There
already are many servers, public and private, and peering
with one another. news.tilde.club is an example of a small
NNTP community.
It's not too different. It's close. But not quite. For instance, in
my idea---which I acknowledge that I did not present it properly---, the
NNTP server is meant for a small community of people who would like to
have an interesting community. I'm writing ``interesting'' on purpose because it is completely vague. But you'll get the meaning of the words
from the properties of the community.
Which properties? Let's leave that open as well. Let's go straight to
the implementation of system behavior that has been designed to support
these properties---whether it will work or not.
In an NNTP server of such desired communities, every member should have
the same rights as every other member---meaning powers in the system.
So every member can create whatever groups he wishes. How could NNTP
systems allow this? Clients don't have a way to send arbitrary commands
to servers. So the idea of such NNTP server is to allow a remote TCP connection to let users interact with the server beyond of what NNTP
really allows. In other words, the system should be hackable. And it
might be even literally hackable. For example:
--8<-------------------------------------------------------->8---
$ telnet nntp.server.somewhere.com 119
Trying 1.2.3.4...
Connected to nntp.server.somewhere.com.
Escape character is '^]'.
200 Welcome!
repl
REPL> (+ 1 1)
2
LOOP> quit
200 Okay, done.
quit
205 Good-bye.
Connection closed by foreign host.
$
--8<-------------------------------------------------------->8---
You get the idea. Honestly, this look rather pointless to me right now.
(You can use the REPL to use someone's account, say, without the person
ever finding out.) It's really just a joke in taking ``hackable'' to
the extreme. I can also say it's a homage paid to the MIT hackers in
the 50s and 60s, who built debuggers that let you fix problems in the
system as you used it, stories told in the book ``Hackers'' by Steven
Levy, 1984.
Anyway, sorry for the tangent. Let's get back. So by way of shells
like that, you can have commands that let you create groups and create
user accounts and other things. For instance, we can implement search
beyond XPAT, say, and many more things for fun or whatever.
So I want to provide people with a tool that's very easy to install and
lets them create a closed community with a tree of users. What tree?
To get an account, someone on the inside must create your account and
then the system records has invited who. It's clear to everyone who
knows who, who invited who. This might create a certain sense of responsibility in the users. There should be a command that lists all
users and the tree of users, so that's public information:
users
200 List of current users:
A, last seen on Mon Nov 25 14:40:16 2024, invited (B C)
B (account locked: disappeared for over 3 months), last seen on Sun Nov 17 23:39:21 2024, invited nobody
C, last seen on Tue Feb 25 14:42:24 2025, invited (D E F ...)
[...]
You get the idea.
This idea stems from my hypothesis that a good community is one that
unites people in cyberspace, but these people have a real connection
with one another that goes beyond the mere interaction that might be
taking place between them in cyberspace. Say I invited you. Then
that's because I already know you somehow. You then invite someone
else, whom I have no idea about, but I do know that that person has a connection with you, so it has an indirect connection with me. Of
course that people might just randomly invite one another; it's a system
with mathematical guarantees.
Just let you understand me a bit more: I came to the conclusion that an
a community in cyberspace should have a connection in the offline world.
So I invite a friend from mine school, who might invite someone across
the world, but this remote person has a connection with my friend, who
has an external-world connection with me.
And there's much more---I think it's nice to have a cohesive group,
which could use the knowledge of who is reading the groups, closing
accounts of people who don't have the interest in participating. This
allows a person who is writing to answer the question---what's my
audience? Those that have been logging on.
In other words, there's no privacy. The idea is for a closed community. USENET access doesn't interfere with the community because the USENET
can't read the local groups.
Although there's no privacy, many experiments can be done. We could
have a command, for example, that enables randomization of names in a
certain group so that nobody ever knows who posted what. But such idea
is nothing but a game---it's usually very easy to detect who writes what
in a small group.
The idea really started out as a playground for programmers, but it has evolved to some of these ideas. There's much more to it, but I plan to dissertate on it only if I release a first prototype.
If you have any ideas, I'd love to hear about it.
The prior can also largely be blamed on modern GUI OS'es. They've
reached the point where the unknowing can make use of a computer
without ever needing a command line at any point.
line of any sort before. Not bash, not powershell, not anything. They
first of all don't get the command line concept and secondly they don't
This was a painful read. =( I thought I saw this due to the fact that I
teach at the vocational school level and not university level. Are yo >useriously telling me that this b.s. goes one (and comes out of) the >university level?
We also have a bunch of IT programs which are really business school programs >with some computing added. I think those are pretty much worthless, but they >get a lot of students.
Has ™someone™ experiences with Cyrus-NNTP?
<https://www.cyrusimap.org/imap/reference/admin/nntp.html>
The last time I wanted to try it, it's dependencies on Debian were
broken and I've not retried it since then.
.
On 2/25/25 8:08 PM, Rich wrote:
The prior can also largely be blamed on modern GUI OS'es. They've
reached the point where the unknowing can make use of a computer
without ever needing a command line at any point.
Which meant that computer hardware and software vendors could thus
market their wares to a much larger consumer audience.
Scott Dorsey <[email protected]> wrote:
We also have a bunch of IT programs which are really business school >>programs with some computing added. I think those are pretty much >>worthless, but they get a lot of students.
Oh, and I will say that most of the students that I deal with
personally are not CS students at all but engineering students. They
get one programming class, usually in Matlab, and no basic computer
literacy stuff at all.
and an assembler (CDC Cyber 7000 - a really weird CPU on the inside)
class, all required classes for Engineering. Pascal class was trivial
(had already done plenty of UCSD Pascal on Apple II in high-school) so
just had to adjust to the small difference in the CDC Cyber Pascal we
were using. Fortran was similarly trivial, but oh did I come to hate
Fortran in the end. Just had to learn the "fortranisms", as I already >understood the over-arching "how to program" aspects. The assembler
class was also itself trivial (had done loads of 6502 assembler by this >point, and some 8086 assembler, provided one considered DOS's debug an >'assembler' of sorts). Just had to "learn the language" rather than
the "how to program" part.
Sounds interesting! I don't know which way would be the best one to
go. To fork leafnode, and add/remove stuff, or to write from scratch.
If you only focus on a subset of nntp maybe writing from scratch might
not be such a huge task?
On 2/24/25 4:28 PM, D wrote:
I'm not a religious person in the traditional sense of the word, but
turns out I find myself one of the most religious person I've ever met
because patience, perseverance, lack of ambition and a certain mastery
of the art of listening seem pretty religious to me. For instance,
pretty much every religious person I know has at least one tattoo on
their skin. I think that's totally non-religious because a tattoo
effectively destroys (at least a bit) something natural that took a
zillion years to be prepared---to protect the person. I think that if
God speaks to us at all, it is done through the movement of nature.
Never been a fan of tattoos. But in my case it is a conservative
upbringing where tattoos where seen as low class. It is strange how
things like that still stick with you. On the other hand, it is
permanent, and since I don't have anything permanent to say, I don't
really see why I should get a tattoo.
Most intelligent people realize that the subcutaneous inks used in
tattooing cause cancer. It's not difficult to predict, when one
observes that most all foreign substances admitted to the body
(whether by breathing, ingestion, etc) lead to cancer.
On Tue, 25 Feb 2025, Scott Dorsey wrote:
Salvador Mirzo <[email protected]> wrote:
I don't have much information. The command line seemed an awful
experience to them. I suspect that they thought that the command line
was archaic means of system interface and that perhaps it was just a
teacher idiosyncrasy.
This is something I see a lot of... we get interns who are engineering
students or computer science students and they have never seen a command
line of any sort before. Not bash, not powershell, not anything. They
first of all don't get the command line concept and secondly they don't
get the concept of the heirarchical filesystem. "The file is on the
computer!" "But where on the computer?" "It's on the computer!"
Please scott, you are breaking my heart! =(
We even got a guy with a PhD in CS from a university that I had previously >> thought reputable who had never used a command line and who just could
not understand how make works in spite of the O'Reilly book.
Stop, please, for the love of god!
I think some of these concepts have to be introduced early on, but they
NEED to be introduced early on in order to get any kind of basic computer
literacy.
--scott
This was a painful read. =( I thought I saw this due to the fact that
I teach at the vocational school level and not university level. Are
yo useriously telling me that this b.s. goes one (and comes out of)
the university level?
If so... we'll soon enter a period of decline, if even universities
turn out CS student so ill equipped to develop new brilliant services
in todays world. =(
D <[email protected]> wrote:
This was a painful read. =( I thought I saw this due to the fact that I >>teach at the vocational school level and not university level. Are yo >>useriously telling me that this b.s. goes one (and comes out of) the >>university level?
In the US there is not so much of a clear distinction between college, university, and trade school. We have for-profit trade schools that
now call themselves universities, and colleges with full university
programs.
I can think of a number of places that call themselves universities that
have CS programs that are basically programming programs... they exist
to teach kids to write code so they can get a job and only teach the currently popular buzzwords and have no actual CS anywhere.
I can think of one place that calls itself a college which has a CS
program that is almost entirely theoretical... lots of proofs and lots
of algorithm analysis. Enough programming to be useful but it's expected students will learn that on their own. A full year of graph theory, two years of continuous mathematics.
And there is a standard ACM curriculum and there are places that follow it, but there are a whole lot of places that don't. I think the ACM curriculum is very balanced between theory and practice and includes things like an assembler class and a digital logic class which are not themselves useful
but which need to be taught in order to explain just what a computer actually is.
But all of these places call themselves CS programs even though they have
a huge diversity in what they actually teach.
We also have a bunch of IT programs which are really business school programs with some computing added. I think those are pretty much worthless, but they get a lot of students.
Scott Dorsey <[email protected]> wrote:
Scott Dorsey <[email protected]> wrote:
We also have a bunch of IT programs which are really business school >>>programs with some computing added. I think those are pretty much >>>worthless, but they get a lot of students.
Oh, and I will say that most of the students that I deal with
personally are not CS students at all but engineering students. They
get one programming class, usually in Matlab, and no basic computer
literacy stuff at all.
Just one programming class..... in Matlab??? For Engineering. Ugh.
I had (if memory serves) at least one Pascal class, one Fortran class,
and an assembler (CDC Cyber 7000 - a really weird CPU on the inside)
class, all required classes for Engineering. Pascal class was trivial
(had already done plenty of UCSD Pascal on Apple II in high-school) so
just had to adjust to the small difference in the CDC Cyber Pascal we
were using. Fortran was similarly trivial, but oh did I come to hate
Fortran in the end. Just had to learn the "fortranisms", as I already understood the over-arching "how to program" aspects. The assembler
class was also itself trivial (had done loads of 6502 assembler by this point, and some 8086 assembler, provided one considered DOS's debug an 'assembler' of sorts). Just had to "learn the language" rather than
the "how to program" part.
But, /just/ matlab. That is so wrong on so many levels.
In article <[email protected]>, Richmond <[email protected]> wrote:
[email protected] (Scott Dorsey) writes:
line of any sort before. Not bash, not powershell, not anything. They
first of all don't get the command line concept and secondly they don't
Isn't a command line just like a chat box to students?
That's a great analogy, thank you for it! I will use it!
In article <vpo4uc$2omvt$[email protected]>, Rich <[email protected]d> wrote:
I had (if memory serves) at least one Pascal class, one Fortran class,
and an assembler (CDC Cyber 7000 - a really weird CPU on the inside)
class, all required classes for Engineering. Pascal class was trivial
(had already done plenty of UCSD Pascal on Apple II in high-school) so
just had to adjust to the small difference in the CDC Cyber Pascal we
were using. Fortran was similarly trivial, but oh did I come to hate >>Fortran in the end. Just had to learn the "fortranisms", as I already >>understood the over-arching "how to program" aspects. The assembler
class was also itself trivial (had done loads of 6502 assembler by this >>point, and some 8086 assembler, provided one considered DOS's debug an >>'assembler' of sorts). Just had to "learn the language" rather than
the "how to program" part.
That's pretty unusual. The reason why Fortran is a good thing is because engineers can't be trusted with pointers.
And COMPASS? That's a very very strange assembler to teach....
I went to gatech which had Cyber machines which the CS folks avoided
like the plague. COMPASS is not exactly a normal assembler and has a
lot of fast-float-performance craziness... it is not something I'd
really teach anyone whom I was trying to teach about the principles
of computing or how systems work.
And the PPUs code? That's worse than IBM channel controller stuff.
I'm sorry you had to do that. --scott
Rich <[email protected]d> writes:
Scott Dorsey <[email protected]> wrote:
Scott Dorsey <[email protected]> wrote:
We also have a bunch of IT programs which are really business school >>>>programs with some computing added. I think those are pretty much >>>>worthless, but they get a lot of students.
Oh, and I will say that most of the students that I deal with
personally are not CS students at all but engineering students. They
get one programming class, usually in Matlab, and no basic computer
literacy stuff at all.
Just one programming class..... in Matlab??? For Engineering. Ugh.
I had (if memory serves) at least one Pascal class, one Fortran class,
and an assembler (CDC Cyber 7000 - a really weird CPU on the inside)
class, all required classes for Engineering. Pascal class was trivial
(had already done plenty of UCSD Pascal on Apple II in high-school) so
just had to adjust to the small difference in the CDC Cyber Pascal we
were using. Fortran was similarly trivial, but oh did I come to hate
Fortran in the end. Just had to learn the "fortranisms", as I already
understood the over-arching "how to program" aspects. The assembler
class was also itself trivial (had done loads of 6502 assembler by this
point, and some 8086 assembler, provided one considered DOS's debug an
'assembler' of sorts). Just had to "learn the language" rather than
the "how to program" part.
But, /just/ matlab. That is so wrong on so many levels.
I know of a leading university that gives all engineering students (all
of them), two courses on Python. The first course is just so students
get a minimum of the Python syntax---of course, the course design calls
it ``how to program''. The second half of the year is to learn the very basics of the so-called OOP and then some packages such as numpy, scipy
and matplotlib are *introduced*.
And what do we see in these courses? Nearly all engineering students consider them accessory to their degrees and so they try to ignore these courses to the maximum because they need to work on calculus and physics.
And I can't blame them: these courses are totally uninteresting. I
would have done the same.
On Tue, 25 Feb 2025, Salvador Mirzo wrote:
Yes, not to perpetuate the system is one of my reasons for not
voting. It is funny, when I was young, I was very conservative. And as
the years have passed, I've become more libertarian. My father, when
he was young, was a communist, and during his life, he becase a
moderate conservative.
I can say the same. I was quite more leftist years ago. It is very
sensible: if people need protection, say, it makes perfect sense that
we'd use our resources to protect them. But then, with more experience,
you realize how non-trivial the situation is and that all of the
/sensible/ policy actually ends up working against itself.
Many good hearted leftists are leftists because they cannot see or do not think
about second order, or third order, or N order effects. They get stuck at the immediate problem and do not think of how the consequences of their immediate,
knee jerk, solution will cause more pain down the line. This is sad. =(
Then of course you have evil leftists who are fully aware of this, and
are leftists due to political power gains.
But I found a company that did saliva-based tests, and I called a
doctor who watched me perform the saliva based tests on the phone,
and eventually she was so tired of the process that she said, what
ever... write your own certificate, slap my name and signature on
it, and just email me if you travel so I know.
So for 1 years, that's what I did. =D
Lol. She got tired. :)
Yep! But the did also not like the vaccine, and let me in on a little
secret. About 30% of her clinics staff were not vaccinated because
they thought the tests were too few and it was too early. Officially
all said they were, and no one spoke about it out of fear of getting
kicked out of the clinic, but in private, during hushed lunch
conversations, many admitted to not getting vaccinated.
Very interesting. I have a similar experience. Every now and then I
hear from someone that they did not take any vaccine, or took one the
first shots, giving up afterwards. Some (sadly) remark that they took a
first shot (or a few shots) but they never wanted to. I have a very
close friend, for instance, who said she wouldn't take anything at all,
but that her son unfortunately took because he wanted to go to the
cinema. (I almost couldn't believe what I heard.) Another friend
remarked that she took three shots because she couldn't find a way out
due to her work---but she works in the same organization as I do. The
rules were the same for the two of us, so that's a case of unclear
understanding of the rules. That's something I've been telling my
family for many years. We need to understand how the system works---in
this case, what was available at our work place that we could use to
protect ourselves? The more we understand, the better we can protect
ourselves.
I heard about a woman who was kicked out of blue shield due to not taking vaccines. She won a law suit and got millions in damages! =D There is hope!
Scott Dorsey <[email protected]> wrote:
In article <vpo4uc$2omvt$[email protected]>, Rich <[email protected]d> wrote:
I had (if memory serves) at least one Pascal class, one Fortran class, >>>and an assembler (CDC Cyber 7000 - a really weird CPU on the inside) >>>class, all required classes for Engineering. Pascal class was trivial >>>(had already done plenty of UCSD Pascal on Apple II in high-school) so >>>just had to adjust to the small difference in the CDC Cyber Pascal we >>>were using. Fortran was similarly trivial, but oh did I come to hate >>>Fortran in the end. Just had to learn the "fortranisms", as I already >>>understood the over-arching "how to program" aspects. The assembler >>>class was also itself trivial (had done loads of 6502 assembler by this >>>point, and some 8086 assembler, provided one considered DOS's debug an >>>'assembler' of sorts). Just had to "learn the language" rather than
the "how to program" part.
That's pretty unusual. The reason why Fortran is a good thing is because
engineers can't be trusted with pointers.
There might be that. I was there before the rise of C as the "be all" language, which is how I had the Pascal and Fortran classes. Five
years later and it was all C.
And COMPASS? That's a very very strange assembler to teach....
It was the timeshare system the university had for students. They had
a Cyber 7600 and a Cyber 8600, I only ever had accounts on the 7600.
But since it was the system they used, Compass (I'd forgotten that
name, but that was it) was the assembler.
I went to gatech which had Cyber machines which the CS folks avoided
like the plague. COMPASS is not exactly a normal assembler and has a
lot of fast-float-performance craziness... it is not something I'd
really teach anyone whom I was trying to teach about the principles
of computing or how systems work.
Well, the assembly class did come after two semesters of the other
languages, and it did begin by presuming you "knew how to program" in
the general sense. But yes, indeed, a weird CPU and assembler as
compared to other microprocessors that I was used to at the time.
And the PPUs code? That's worse than IBM channel controller stuff.
I'm sorry you had to do that. --scott
Thankfully they didn't expect us to make use of the PPU stuff. They
just had us essentially cause an abort and effectively a Cyber core
dump and that was what we turned in for our "execution runs", with
circles around the hex (or was it octal?) digits in the dump that were
the "answers". I didn't question the "logic" of it, I just turned in
what they wanted to see. And although a 'weird' CPU to program,
actually making the code perform whatever the assigned task they wanted wasn't hard, provided one knew how to program in the first place.
D <[email protected]> wrote:
This was a painful read. =( I thought I saw this due to the fact that I
teach at the vocational school level and not university level. Are yo
useriously telling me that this b.s. goes one (and comes out of) the
university level?
In the US there is not so much of a clear distinction between college, university, and trade school. We have for-profit trade schools that
now call themselves universities, and colleges with full university
programs.
I can think of a number of places that call themselves universities that
have CS programs that are basically programming programs... they exist
to teach kids to write code so they can get a job and only teach the currently popular buzzwords and have no actual CS anywhere.
I can think of one place that calls itself a college which has a CS
program that is almost entirely theoretical... lots of proofs and lots
of algorithm analysis. Enough programming to be useful but it's expected students will learn that on their own. A full year of graph theory, two years of continuous mathematics.
And there is a standard ACM curriculum and there are places that follow it, but there are a whole lot of places that don't. I think the ACM curriculum is very balanced between theory and practice and includes things like an assembler class and a digital logic class which are not themselves useful
but which need to be taught in order to explain just what a computer actually is.
But all of these places call themselves CS programs even though they have
a huge diversity in what they actually teach.
We also have a bunch of IT programs which are really business school programs with some computing added. I think those are pretty much worthless, but they get a lot of students.
--scott
All well. There are differing kinds of intelligence and his strength
lay in spatial relations and tangible physical forms, not language.
But people taking a university-level Great Books course are a
different matter. So are people studying how computers operate.
Language is a fundamental intellectual tool. Shopping, stichomythia,
ideas reduced to 168-char squibs and, yes, shopping look to me like degenerate forms of disciplined thinking.
As a digression, an assignment left for the reader, consider the
command line, even one as intimidating as that for gcc. After decades
of change, with the accretion of a multitude of options, it retains
the same linguistic form of a command.
But how do you get along with a GUI for something of similar
complexity when someone 20 or 30 or 40 years your junior, decides that
a complete redesign of of the GUI is a desirable and necessary
improvement? He grew up in a mental Manhattan or a Mental Tokyo,
demolishes the graphical Boston of your favorite tool and rebuilds it
to match his visual head-space.
So you can learn it all over again. Life-long learning is supposed to
be about learning new stuff, but about learning the same stuff over
and over.
D <[email protected]> writes:
Sounds interesting! I don't know which way would be the best one to
go. To fork leafnode, and add/remove stuff, or to write from scratch.
If you only focus on a subset of nntp maybe writing from scratch might
not be such a huge task?
Totally right. Specially if you know the language quite well, which is
not actually my case---this is my first program in Common Lisp.
Nevertheless, it's the most enjoyable project I've ever worked on in my
life.
On Wed, 26 Feb 2025, Salvador Mirzo wrote:
And I can't blame them: these courses are totally uninteresting. I
would have done the same.
OOP, yuck! It never worked well for me. ;) On the other hand, I never
worked as a professional programmer. ;)
Rich <[email protected]d> writes:
Scott Dorsey <[email protected]> wrote:
In article <vpo4uc$2omvt$[email protected]>, Rich <[email protected]d> wrote:
I had (if memory serves) at least one Pascal class, one Fortran class, >>>>and an assembler (CDC Cyber 7000 - a really weird CPU on the inside) >>>>class, all required classes for Engineering. Pascal class was trivial >>>>(had already done plenty of UCSD Pascal on Apple II in high-school) so >>>>just had to adjust to the small difference in the CDC Cyber Pascal we >>>>were using. Fortran was similarly trivial, but oh did I come to hate >>>>Fortran in the end. Just had to learn the "fortranisms", as I already >>>>understood the over-arching "how to program" aspects. The assembler >>>>class was also itself trivial (had done loads of 6502 assembler by this >>>>point, and some 8086 assembler, provided one considered DOS's debug an >>>>'assembler' of sorts). Just had to "learn the language" rather than >>>>the "how to program" part.
That's pretty unusual. The reason why Fortran is a good thing is because >>> engineers can't be trusted with pointers.
There might be that. I was there before the rise of C as the "be all"
language, which is how I had the Pascal and Fortran classes. Five
years later and it was all C.
And COMPASS? That's a very very strange assembler to teach....
It was the timeshare system the university had for students. They had
a Cyber 7600 and a Cyber 8600, I only ever had accounts on the 7600.
But since it was the system they used, Compass (I'd forgotten that
name, but that was it) was the assembler.
I went to gatech which had Cyber machines which the CS folks avoided
like the plague. COMPASS is not exactly a normal assembler and has a
lot of fast-float-performance craziness... it is not something I'd
really teach anyone whom I was trying to teach about the principles
of computing or how systems work.
Well, the assembly class did come after two semesters of the other
languages, and it did begin by presuming you "knew how to program" in
the general sense. But yes, indeed, a weird CPU and assembler as
compared to other microprocessors that I was used to at the time.
And the PPUs code? That's worse than IBM channel controller stuff.
I'm sorry you had to do that. --scott
Thankfully they didn't expect us to make use of the PPU stuff. They
just had us essentially cause an abort and effectively a Cyber core
dump and that was what we turned in for our "execution runs", with
circles around the hex (or was it octal?) digits in the dump that were
the "answers". I didn't question the "logic" of it, I just turned in
what they wanted to see. And although a 'weird' CPU to program,
actually making the code perform whatever the assigned task they wanted
wasn't hard, provided one knew how to program in the first place.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but despite all the idiosyncrasy of the tools
and equipment you worked with, I would say---as it seems pretty clear
from your very posts here---that the educational opportunities you got
did their job pretty well.
And the fact that you had to know how to program is still an unsolved
problem today, not any failure from the institution you were at the
time.
When I look at almost any programming textbook, I see the problem
is still open. Perhaps the book
How to Design Programs
Matthias Felleisen, Robert Bruce Findler,
Matthew Flatt and Shriram Krishnamurthi
MIT Press, 2014, URL https://htdp.org
is the only meaningful candidate to a solution---as far as I have
looked.
On Wed, 26 Feb 2025, Scott Dorsey wrote:
We also have a bunch of IT programs which are really business school
programs with some computing added. I think those are pretty much
worthless, but they get a lot of students.
I think maybe those programs try to sell that you can get a nice
FAANG job with 300k starting salary with very little effort. ;)
On Tue, 25 Feb 2025, Salvador Mirzo wrote:
D <[email protected]> writes:
On Mon, 24 Feb 2025, Rich wrote:
[...]
I often 'frustrate' my wife by going off the beaten path (major roads) >>>> onto back roads (I'll admit, sometimes done specifically for the value >>>> of the 'frustration' part) to get "there" from "here" with no GPS nav
or pre-planning at all and in almost all instances I get "there" even
though the entire route is brand new for me.
This is excellent! Always going the same way, or driving the same route gets
very boring after a while. Sometimes when I walk a new path, I discover a new
store I didn't know existed.
That really happens when you walk instead of driving. Not to mention
that if you're walking, it's okay to stop by at a store. If you're
driving, it's not okay because (at least where I live), it's never easy
to find a parking place. And you might not want to interrupt the song
that's playing or get out of the air conditioning.
This is the truth! I like walking. It is one of the few forms of exercise
I engage in. =) It is also relaxing and can almost be a bit meditative if
you get into it.
In article <vpol5t$2r3ql$[email protected]>, Rich <[email protected]d> wrote:
Scott Dorsey <[email protected]> wrote:
And COMPASS? That's a very very strange assembler to teach....
It was the timeshare system the university had for students. They had
a Cyber 7600 and a Cyber 8600, I only ever had accounts on the 7600.
But since it was the system they used, Compass (I'd forgotten that
name, but that was it) was the assembler.
gatech used the Cybers to teach an emulated assembler... first they used Donald Knuth's idealized machine, then later an 8080 emulator. Much easier to teach than a 60-bit assembler with pipeline issues.
line of any sort before. Not bash, not powershell, not anything. They
first of all don't get the command line concept and secondly they don't
Isn't a command line just like a chat box to students?
In article <vpq63t$36lja$[email protected]>, Rich <[email protected]d> wrote:
D <[email protected]> wrote:
On Wed, 26 Feb 2025, Scott Dorsey wrote:
We also have a bunch of IT programs which are really business school
programs with some computing added. I think those are pretty much
worthless, but they get a lot of students.
I think maybe those programs try to sell that you can get a nice
FAANG job with 300k starting salary with very little effort. ;)
Those are also the same "puppy farms" that curn out developers who only >>know how to string together calling already written libraries to do
various tasks.
This is true...BUT those developers are getting highly-paid jobs stringing together library calls that they don't understand. Just like they were promised. And then WE have to deal with the issues their code creates.
But ask them to do something for which they can't find an already
created library, and they are hopelessly lost.
I was told by an interviewee that it is much faster to do a sort in
Java than C because in Java it only takes one line of code whereas in
C it takes many lines of code.
On Thu, 27 Feb 2025, Rich wrote:
D <[email protected]> wrote:
On Wed, 26 Feb 2025, Scott Dorsey wrote:
We also have a bunch of IT programs which are really business school
programs with some computing added. I think those are pretty much
worthless, but they get a lot of students.
I think maybe those programs try to sell that you can get a nice
FAANG job with 300k starting salary with very little effort. ;)
Those are also the same "puppy farms" that curn out developers who only
know how to string together calling already written libraries to do
various tasks.
But ask them to do something for which they can't find an already
created library, and they are hopelessly lost.
Makes sense. Those type of programmers I think are the ones who will
suffer the most when AI:s becoming better at generating simple code
snippets.
On Wed, 26 Feb 2025, Salvador Mirzo wrote:
This was a painful read. =( I thought I saw this due to the fact that
I teach at the vocational school level and not university level. Are
yo useriously telling me that this b.s. goes one (and comes out of)
the university level?
I'm afraid it is.
=(
If so... we'll soon enter a period of decline, if even
universities turn out CS student so ill equipped to develop new
brilliant services in todays world. =(
Perhaps the crowd that's brilliant is a minority that hasn't changed
much compared the previous times. (Perhaps it has.) Just because a
lot of people are joining university and coming out of them pretty
clueless, it doesn't mean that we've reduced that small group that
carries the rest of the world on their shoulders. Perhaps this
group is still the same percent compared to the last centuries.
(Just guessing hypotheses here.)
That would be a comforting thought! Maybe the nr of brilliant people
stays at the same percentage!
In my experience, the brilliant guys hardly need a teacher. All I do
is to feed them problems when they get bored. Then they go away,
work at it 24/7 until they solve it, and come back for more. When I
teach, and have to keep it at a level that is appropriate for the
average level, they get bored and space out.
So I give them the lecture slides and material to read at their
leisure and keep feeding them problems. Occasionally they get stuck,
but very rarely, and then I zoom in.
Those students give me immense joy!
But I think you're totally right in that we've entered a period where we
have a lot of people who are completely wasting their degrees, specially
in an area such as computer science. I could be wrong, but it seems
that computer science is housing a lot of nonsense. I'm sure there are
declines in mathematics and physics too (likely more so on physics than
in mathematics, I'd guess), but I believe computer science might be the
worst. When I look at the student body in computer science, the vast
majority seems totally uninterested in computer science---they're
interested in /playing/ video-games, not producing them.
When I wwas young, it was considered a virtue to expand your mind, to learn new
things, to develop yourself. My home was full of books, we watched documentaries, went to museums. When the computer arrived, I was fascinated with
linux, BSDs, programming.
I hope that this culture is still alive.
It would be so incredibly depressing if the majority of the young
today were to waste away their lives watching podcasts and playing
computer games. It feels they would just waste their lives that way
instead of exploring it and challenging their limits, and breaking
through their limits.
But I've also long felt that 'intelligence', just like most everything
else, tends to follow surprisingly closely a bell curve. There's
always a small percentage of "ultra high" on one end, a large middle of
"good to great, but not at the same level of the 'ultra high'" and a following tail who just can't, ever, get it. It just is the way it is.
When I wwas young, it was considered a virtue to expand your mind,
to learn new things, to develop yourself. My home was full of
books, we watched documentaries, went to museums. When the computer
arrived, I was fascinated with linux, BSDs, programming.
I hope that this culture is still alive.
It is. Go look into the "maker community" or "maker space". It has
shifted somewhat from our days back then but much of it is still there.
It would be so incredibly depressing if the majority of the young
today were to waste away their lives watching podcasts and playing
computer games. It feels they would just waste their lives that way instead of exploring it and challenging their limits, and breaking
through their limits.
Sadly, remember my 'bell curve' above. Half of them will fall on the
"below median" point, and those will often be the ones who *do* waste
away their life on consuming that which others create.
And a lot of it is motivation. They, for whatever reason, seem to be unmotivated by most any argument to do other than consume for
consumptions sake.
In my experience, the brilliant guys hardly need a teacher. All I do
is to feed them problems when they get bored. Then they go away,
work at it 24/7 until they solve it, and come back for more. When I
teach, and have to keep it at a level that is appropriate for the
average level, they get bored and space out.
I've seen this too. Actually, we all have. The "brainiac" in the
front row of the calculus or physics class that's the one asking
questions that sometimes befuddle the instructor for a moment....
But I've also long felt that 'intelligence', just like most everything
else, tends to follow surprisingly closely a bell curve. There's
always a small percentage of "ultra high" on one end, a large middle of
"good to great, but not at the same level of the 'ultra high'" and a following tail who just can't, ever, get it. It just is the way it is.
And the ones who strike it rich if you go digging you find out that
they were the "survivor bias" ones (i.e., the lucky one that survived)
or that they had "generational backing" (family wealth) that could be leveraged to "buy" the right people to increase their odds of becoming
the "survivor bias" one.
I've also seen what you describe at $job. I spent somewhere on 15-20
years helping train new hires, and it didn't take very long until I got
quite good at "picking out" the new ones who were going to succeed from
the ones who were likely to wash out just by interacting with them for
a surprisingly short period of time.
So I give them the lecture slides and material to read at their
leisure and keep feeding them problems. Occasionally they get stuck,
but very rarely, and then I zoom in.
Those students give me immense joy!
Yes, these are the students you want, sadly, they usually are never
more than about 3-4% of the class. They are also the ones you want HR
to filter through to you from new applicants, but sadly, HR is piss
poor at doing that filtering.
But I think you're totally right in that we've entered a period where we >>> have a lot of people who are completely wasting their degrees, specially >>> in an area such as computer science. I could be wrong, but it seems
that computer science is housing a lot of nonsense. I'm sure there are
declines in mathematics and physics too (likely more so on physics than
in mathematics, I'd guess), but I believe computer science might be the
worst. When I look at the student body in computer science, the vast
majority seems totally uninterested in computer science---they're
interested in /playing/ video-games, not producing them.
When I wwas young, it was considered a virtue to expand your mind, to learn new
things, to develop yourself. My home was full of books, we watched
documentaries, went to museums. When the computer arrived, I was fascinated with
linux, BSDs, programming.
I hope that this culture is still alive.
It is. Go look into the "maker community" or "maker space". It has
shifted somewhat from our days back then but much of it is still there.
It would be so incredibly depressing if the majority of the young
today were to waste away their lives watching podcasts and playing
computer games. It feels they would just waste their lives that way
instead of exploring it and challenging their limits, and breaking
through their limits.
Sadly, remember my 'bell curve' above. Half of them will fall on the
"below median" point, and those will often be the ones who *do* waste
away their life on consuming that which others create.
And a lot of it is motivation. They, for whatever reason, seem to be unmotivated by most any argument to do other than consume for
consumptions sake.
Eli the Bearded <*@eli.users.panix.com> wrote:
Doesn't stop people from posting about you on FB. (Or worse, postingWhat I don't tell, they can't post, and the same with what they
photos of you on there.)
don't photograph. Although I guess that does leave a bit of an
information vacuum there which some nutcase could exploit to make
up missing personal info/photos on me if they so desired.
Lately I've been seeing people advocating for a switch to
Codeberg.
I don't know about Codeberg, but there have been lots of
alternatives all along. Tons of projects switched from SourceForge
to GitHub. Many projects have their own websites too, so why not
self-host? GitHub do offer a lot of extra features for free, but
that's dealing with the devil IMHO.
In comp.misc, Computer Nerd Kev <[email protected]d> wrote:
I don't know about Codeberg, but there have been lots of
alternatives all along. Tons of projects switched from SourceForge
to GitHub. Many projects have their own websites too, so why not
self-host? GitHub do offer a lot of extra features for free, but
that's dealing with the devil IMHO.
Codeberg is a German non-profit with a lot a github features. Self
hosting is always an option, but not one I necessarily like for a lot of >projects. I've found it not entirely obvious how to download source
(as opposed to just view one version) from some self-hosted projects
and having a issues tracker with an easy sign-up is useful, if only
to see how issue response works. For some things I'm entirely okay
with zero response to bugs, but for other things I'd like to see more.
On Thu, 27 Feb 2025, candycanearter07 wrote:
This is the truth! I like walking. It is one of the few forms of exercise >>> I engage in. =) It is also relaxing and can almost be a bit meditative if >>> you get into it.
I enjoy walking, but I rarely get to actually do it..
Why not?
D <[email protected]> wrote at 10:48 this Saturday (GMT):
On Thu, 27 Feb 2025, candycanearter07 wrote:
This is the truth! I like walking. It is one of the few forms of exercise >>>> I engage in. =) It is also relaxing and can almost be a bit meditative if >>>> you get into it.
I enjoy walking, but I rarely get to actually do it..
Why not?
Suburban hell.
On Wed, 5 Mar 2025, candycanearter07 wrote:
D <[email protected]> wrote at 10:48 this Saturday (GMT):
On Thu, 27 Feb 2025, candycanearter07 wrote:
This is the truth! I like walking. It is one of the few forms of exercise >>>>> I engage in. =) It is also relaxing and can almost be a bit meditative if >>>>> you get into it.
I enjoy walking, but I rarely get to actually do it..
Why not?
Suburban hell.
This is very sad. Maybe you can move? Or drive to a close by park?
In article <[email protected]>, Richmond <[email protected]> wrote:
[email protected] (Scott Dorsey) writes:
line of any sort before. Not bash, not powershell, not anything. They
first of all don't get the command line concept and secondly they don't
Isn't a command line just like a chat box to students?
That's a great analogy, thank you for it! I will use it!
--scott
D <[email protected]> wrote at 12:39 this Wednesday (GMT):
On Wed, 5 Mar 2025, candycanearter07 wrote:
D <[email protected]> wrote at 10:48 this Saturday (GMT):
On Thu, 27 Feb 2025, candycanearter07 wrote:
This is the truth! I like walking. It is one of the few forms of exercise
I engage in. =) It is also relaxing and can almost be a bit meditative if
you get into it.
I enjoy walking, but I rarely get to actually do it..
Why not?
Suburban hell.
This is very sad. Maybe you can move? Or drive to a close by park?
Yeah I could see if theres some nearby
On 2025-02-19, D wrote:
On Tue, 18 Feb 2025, Eli the Bearded wrote:
In comp.misc, Computer Nerd Kev <[email protected]d> wrote:
Indeed, so long as you block all FB's scripts and images on
otherwise unrelated websites. Although I don't tend to make close
friends so I don't need to worry about controlling their FB usage.
Doesn't stop people from posting about you on FB. (Or worse,
posting photos of you on there.)
That's an absurd argument. In no world, in no universe can you
reasonably expect people to not talk about you, think about you,
write about you, if they so choose.
Publishing photos and videos of you, without your consent, on the
other hand, is illegal, and can be punished severely.
On Tue, 18 Feb 2025, Eli the Bearded wrote:
In comp.misc, Computer Nerd Kev <[email protected]d> wrote:
Indeed, so long as you block all FB's scripts and images on
otherwise unrelated websites. Although I don't tend to make close
friends so I don't need to worry about controlling their FB usage.
Doesn't stop people from posting about you on FB. (Or worse, posting
photos of you on there.)
That's an absurd argument. In no world, in no universe can you
reasonably expect people to not talk about you, think about you, write
about you, if they so choose.
Publishing photos and videos of you, without your consent, on the
other hand, is illegal, and can be punished severely. I have on
several occasions asked web sites to remove information about me,
sometimes they do it, sometimes they don't. I found a workaround by de-registering myself from the country I live in, and this removed my
data from a hueg nr of linked systems.
Then I can just live as a non-registered person, and that works quite
alright to be honest.
It takes time. Intelligence *always* prevails, directly or
indirectly.
On Thu, 27 Feb 2025, Salvador Mirzo wrote:
Many good hearted leftists are leftists because they cannot see or
do not think
about second order, or third order, or N order effects. They get stuck at the
immediate problem and do not think of how the consequences of their
immediate,
knee jerk, solution will cause more pain down the line. This is sad. =(
Quite right. And there is the folly of rewarding A while hoping for B.
Kerr, Steven. ``On the folly of rewarding A, while hoping for B.''
Academy of Management journal 18.4 (1975): 769-783.
True!
Then of course you have evil leftists who are fully aware of this, and
are leftists due to political power gains.
And there's the post-modernist movement, with their sheer nonsense and
confusion, that finds good reception in such groups---probably more so
than in others.
It will destroy itself in time. Since they have abandoned objective
truth, and built their ethos on being the most vulnerable group, they
will go down in flames and in fighting, since nothing can be resolved
without any kind of objective truth to ground discussions. Sadly it
takes time.
D <[email protected]> writes:
On Tue, 18 Feb 2025, Eli the Bearded wrote:
In comp.misc, Computer Nerd Kev <[email protected]d> wrote:
Indeed, so long as you block all FB's scripts and images on
otherwise unrelated websites. Although I don't tend to make close
friends so I don't need to worry about controlling their FB usage.
Doesn't stop people from posting about you on FB. (Or worse, posting
photos of you on there.)
That's an absurd argument. In no world, in no universe can you
reasonably expect people to not talk about you, think about you, write
about you, if they so choose.
Publishing photos and videos of you, without your consent, on the
other hand, is illegal, and can be punished severely. I have on
several occasions asked web sites to remove information about me,
sometimes they do it, sometimes they don't. I found a workaround by
de-registering myself from the country I live in, and this removed my
data from a hueg nr of linked systems.
Then I can just live as a non-registered person, and that works quite
alright to be honest.
Nice hack.
Salvador Mirzo <[email protected]> wrote:
It takes time. Intelligence *always* prevails, directly or
indirectly.
The only thing you safely can bet on is human greed.
D <[email protected]> writes:
On Thu, 27 Feb 2025, Salvador Mirzo wrote:
Many good hearted leftists are leftists because they cannot see orQuite right. And there is the folly of rewarding A while hoping for B.
do not think
about second order, or third order, or N order effects. They get stuck at the
immediate problem and do not think of how the consequences of their
immediate,
knee jerk, solution will cause more pain down the line. This is sad. =( >>>
Kerr, Steven. ``On the folly of rewarding A, while hoping for B.''
Academy of Management journal 18.4 (1975): 769-783.
True!
Then of course you have evil leftists who are fully aware of this, and >>>> are leftists due to political power gains.
And there's the post-modernist movement, with their sheer nonsense and
confusion, that finds good reception in such groups---probably more so
than in others.
It will destroy itself in time. Since they have abandoned objective
truth, and built their ethos on being the most vulnerable group, they
will go down in flames and in fighting, since nothing can be resolved
without any kind of objective truth to ground discussions. Sadly it
takes time.
It takes time. Intelligence *always* prevails, directly or indirectly.
On Fri, 7 Mar 2025, Salvador Mirzo wrote:
It takes time. Intelligence *always* prevails, directly or indirectly.
That is the way! Even though it takes time, and the wait is
depressing, eventually, as you say, intelligence and positivity always prevail! =)
My proof: We've had nuclear weapons for many decades, and despite all
the idiots in power, we have _not_ ended civilization. This proves
that there is more good than bad in man. =)
D <[email protected]> writes:
On Fri, 7 Mar 2025, Salvador Mirzo wrote:
[...]
It takes time. Intelligence *always* prevails, directly or indirectly.
That is the way! Even though it takes time, and the wait is
depressing, eventually, as you say, intelligence and positivity always
prevail! =)
My proof: We've had nuclear weapons for many decades, and despite all
the idiots in power, we have _not_ ended civilization. This proves
that there is more good than bad in man. =)
Hey now, hey now... :) I hope you never regret saying that. :)
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