Notices by Charles U. Farley (freakazoid@retro.social), page 4

@alilly You should delete this before someone from the SCP Foundation notices it.

@Jdreben
@lykso
It's certainly not going to happen in a country with as powerful a commercial software industry as the US has. Or if it did the intent would probably be to destroy copyleft.

@ramsey @alcinnz @flabberghaster

I guess this is the kind of thing you do when you're completely clueless about how to reverse your population decline and have just decided to accept it?

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/jan/03/million-yen-per-child-to-leave-tokyo-japans-offer-to-families

What does --max-unused on #restic prune even do? I have it set to 10%, but it still seems to do all the same stuff even with only 2.7% unused. Does it just force repacks that wouldn't normally happen due to --max-repack-size and --repack-cacheable-only?

It's kind of amazing how often people end up crashing and burning not because they made a mistake, but because when someone pointed out their mistake they decided to double down on it.

@ramsey I imagine policies against copyleft software would evaporate pretty quickly if a lot fewer developers were willing to donate their free labor toward software that corporations could freely modify and redistribute or sell without having to share the source code for their modifications.

@alcinnz

The Americans complain that it's impossible to prevent any kind of technology shared with China from benefitting the Chinese military. Because, you know, it's so easy to ensure that technologies shared with the US don't benefit the US military.

One thing I hadn't realized about computers with 6 or 7 bit bytes is that at least some of them were "alphanumeric" or "character oriented", which I think means that any numbers it used (except perhaps addresses) would appear in memory as a sequence of decimal digits. Which may explain #BASIC.

Then there's the #Burroughs #B2500 and #B3500, both of which operated exclusively in decimal including for addresses, were addressible down to the 4 bit digit, and could interpret an 8 bit byte as 2 4 bit BCD digits or as an ASCII or EBCDIC character. I assume there must have been different instructions for the different types.

I like the idea of having only a "character" data type. It must have made debugging and programming in machine language a lot easier.

#retrocomputing

@alcinnz "and lempel-ziv compresses well like most crypto algorithms."

Uhh, what? I'm guessing you're not referring to the ciphertext, since compressible ciphertext would indicate a broken crypto algorithm.

Wow, MacOS is complete fucking garbage. Ventura upgrade has now failed twice. If it's not "the year of the Linux desktop" it's sure as fuck not the year of the MacOS or Windows desktop. Linux blows both of these OSes out of the water and only someone suffering from severe Stockholm Syndrome would run either.

@alcinnz One can also argue that LLVM and GCC aren't really comparable projects. LLVM was explicitly designed as a modular compiler framework that would be easy to embed and extend, while GCC is far less modular.

@alcinnz One could argue that it's because of Google, but had Google chosen a BSD instead of Linux, even if they did choose to contribute back in the short term, it seems very likely they would have eventually stopped based on their choice to prohibit GPL in userspace on Android, and the fact that they now have a fully non-GPL OS of their own.

LLVM vs GCC might be a good counter-argument. But there was no LGPL third option. And one wonders how things might have gone if the Language Server Protocol had existed when they decided to go with LLVM.

@alcinnz Companies that use Linux are forced to contribute back, while companies like Apple that use BSD code don't.

As a result, BSD sees a whole bunch of commercial use, but that hasn't resulted in greater non-commercial use. The end result was that Linux ended up so far ahead in the long term that companies have started switching from BSD derivatives to Linux despite the additional hurdle of having to contribute back any improvements they make.

I've used #email as an example of a #federated service myself. But using email as an example may not say what one thinks it says: how many people still use email for personal communication? They flooded into the commercial silos because email sucks. And email sucks because all the development expertise got sucked up by the commercial silos while ESR completely obliterated free software by convincing people that it was all about how software was developed rather than ideology or freedom.

GPL is the reason Linux won out over the BSDs. The ONLY reason.

Have the #V8 (or #SpiderMonkey for that matter) devs started caring about any use other than the browser yet, or are the #NodeJS devs still spending most of their time fixing breakage caused by V8 API changes?

Alternatively, is there a #Javascript implementation with performance comparable to V8 or SpiderMonkey that is targeted at applications other than the browser?

All we have to do to fix the web is force all web developers to use Lynx and only Lynx.

Especially Google's.