I like this a lot! the idea of buying a new (and usually quite expensive) device that intentionally does less has never really sat right with me, but repurposing old or secondhand devices with purpose-built software has always made quite a bit more sense.

to expand on the idea in hopefully not too much of a tangential direction, one very nice thing about repurposed hardware over new bespoke hardware is that if the repurposed device is running an open source software stack with resources to spare (which is often the case), you can extend the functionality of the device in ways that are specifically useful to you personally.

as a real-world example, when I set up a new computer for myself these days I usually start with Linux that boots straight into emacs, which is a very competent typewriter running on a kernel that supports most of the hardware I’ll throw at it and comes with a wide compatibility base and fairly minimal hardware requirements. next if I need to work with more complicated documents, I pull in X11 and go graphical. if I need applications, I pull in EXWM and now I have everything I need for a generalized computing environment. but there’s no need to go that far — and every step of the way, I can customize what I’m doing to fit my own needs.

I usually do all of the above on NixOS, but it feels like the general idea has possibly outgrown Nix, and it might do even better as a dedicated Linux distro targeting repurposed devices.

I decided to waste my fucking time and read the awful medium article that keeps getting linked and, boy fucking howdy, it’s exactly what I thought it was. let’s start with the conclusion first:

TLDR: my conclusion is that it is far more likely that Proton and its CEO are actually liberals.

which is just a really weird thing to treat like a revelation when we’ve very recently seen a ton of liberal CEOs implement fash policies, including one (Zuckerberg) who briefly considered running as a Democrat before he was advised that nobody found him the least bit appealing

anyway, let’s go to the quick bullet points this piece of shit deserves:

• it’s posted by an account that hasn’t done anything else on medium
• the entire thing is written like stealth PR and a bunch of points are copied straight out of Proton’s marketing. in fact, the tone and structure are so off that I’m just barely not willing to accuse this article of being generated by an LLM, because it’s just barely not repetitive enough to entirely read like AI
• they keep doing the “nobody (especially the filthy redditors) read Andy or Proton’s actual posts in full” rhetorical technique, which is very funny when people on mastodon were frantically linking archives of those posts after they got deleted, and the posts on Reddit were deleted in a way that was designed to provoke confusion and cover Proton’s tracks. I can’t blame anyone for going on word of mouth if they couldn’t find an archive link.
• like every liberal-presenting CEO turned shithead, Andy has previously donated a lot of money to organizations associated with the Democrats
• not a single word about how Proton’s tied up in bitcoin or boosting LLMs and where that places them politically
• also nothing about how powerless the non-profit associated with Proton is in practice
• Andy can’t be a shithead, he hired a small handful of feminists and occasionally tweets about how much he supports left-wing causes! you know, on the nazi site
• e: “However, within the context of Trump’s original post that Andy is quoting, it seems more likely that “big business” = Big Tech, and “little guys” = Little Tech, but this is not obvious if you did not see the original post, and this therefore caused outrage online.” what does this mean. that’s exactly the context I read into Andy’s original post, and it’s a fucking ridiculous thing to say and a massive techfash dogwhistle loud and shrill enough that everybody heard it. it’s fucking weird to falsely claim you’re being misinterpreted and then give an explanation that’s completely in line with the damning shit you’re being accused of, then for someone else to come along and pretend that somehow absolves you

there’s more in there but I’m tired of reading this article, the writing style really is fucking exhausting

e: also can someone tell me how shit like this can persuade anyone? it’s one of the most obvious, least persuasive puff pieces I’ve ever read. did the people who love proton more than they love privacy need something, anything to latch onto to justify how much they like the product?

tech apologists love to tell you the legal terms attached to the software you’re using don’t matter, then the instant the obvious happens, they immediately switch to telling you it’s your fault for not reading the legal terms they said weren’t a big deal. this post and its follow-up from the same poster are a particularly good take on this.

also:

When you use Firefox or really any browser, you’re giving it information

nobody gives a fuck about that, we’re all technically gifted enough to realize the browser receives input on interaction. the problem is Mozilla receiving my website addresses, form data, and uploaded files (and much more), and in fact getting a no-restriction license for them and their partners to do what they please with that data. that’s new, that’s what the terms of use cover, and that’s the line they crossed. don’t let anybody get that shit twisted — including the people behind one of the supposedly privacy-focused Firefox forks

tons of communities are now insulated to a point where you can’t even get in if you want to, because unless you’re large enough or have enough booster points (which, to no one’s surprise, cost money, and only last for a limited time) you can’t generate permanent invite links, so you gotta know someone to get in.

you fucking what now? I’m unwillingly in so many discords but I avoid anything to do with their shitty micropurchase economy so I didn’t know about this. that’s why so many projects have expired discord links in their docs? holy fuck this is unworkable. discord is a shitty landlord rentseeking from so many open source projects with this crap

legally, it absolutely does, and it gets even worse when you dig deeper. Mozilla is really going all in on being a bunch of marketing creeps.

oh good, the open source discords I’m unwillingly a part of already had an unbearable number of zero effort generated meme images, and now they’ll have even more!

Discord hired a pile of ex-Meta management in mid-2023, to disastrous internal effect.

of course they did. nobody does confidently wrong and incredibly damaging like an ex-Facebook PM

so Firefox now has terms of use with this text in them:

When you upload or input information through Firefox, you hereby grant us a nonexclusive, royalty-free, worldwide license to use that information to help you navigate, experience, and interact with online content as you indicate with your use of Firefox.

this is bad. it feels like the driving force behind this are the legal requirements behind Mozilla’s AI features that nobody asked for, but functionally these terms give Mozilla the rights to everything you do in Firefox effectively without limitation (because legally, the justification they give could apply to anything you do in your browser)

I haven’t taken the rebranded forks of Firefox very seriously before, but they might be worth taking a close look at now, since apparently these terms of use only apply to the use of mainline Firefox itself and not any of the rebrands

after Proton’s latest PR push to paint their CEO as absolutely not a fascist failed to convince much of anyone (feat. a medium article I’m not gonna read cause it’s a waste of my time getting spread around by brand new accounts who mostly only seem to post about how much they like Proton), they decided to quietly bow out of mastodon and switch to the much more private and secure platform of… fucking Reddit of all things, where Proton can moderate critical comments out of existence (unfun fact: in spite of what most redditors believe, there’s no rule against companies moderating their own subs — it’s an etiquete violation, meaning nobody gives a fuck) and accounts that only post in defense of Proton won’t stick out like a sore thumb

you’re fucking right! my brain recombined that into a still wrong but slightly more sane claim when I first read it: “what if the packages you installed lose all their maintainers?” and, like, I think the only package manager that sometimes solves for that is Nix, and it solves it in the most annoying way possible (removal from nixpkgs and your config breaks, instead of any attempt at using an incredibly powerful software archival tool for intentionally archiving software (and it pisses me off that nixpkgs could trivially be the archive.org of packaging and it just isn’t, cause that’s not a murder drone))

but no, something about arch being relatively manually configured broke that poster’s brain into thinking that arch of all things didn’t have basic package management functionality, somehow. arch, the linux for former BSD kids too exhausted to deal with compatibility. nah, only red hat knows about, uh, basic software maintenance

it’s beautiful how you can pick out any sentence in that quote and chase down an entire fractal of wrongness

• “Users are expected to handle system upgrades” nope, pacman does that automatically (though sometimes it’ll fuck your initramfs because arch is a joy)
• “manage the underlying software stack” ??? that’s all pacman does
• “configure MAC (Mandatory Access Control), write profiles for it” AppArmor clearly isn’t good enough cause red hat (sploosh) uses selinux
• “set up kernel module blacklists, and more. Failing to do this results in a less secure operating system.” maybe I’m showing my ass on this one but I don’t think I’ve ever blacklisted a kernel module for security. usually it’s a hacky way to select which driver you want for your device (hello nvidia), stop a buggy device from taking down the system (hello again nvidia! and also like a hundred vendors making shit hardware that barely works on windows, much less linux), and passthru devices that are precious about their init order to qemu (nvidia again? what the fuck)

and bonus wrongness:

For example, DNF in Fedora handles transitions like moving from PulseAudio to PipeWire, which can enhance security and usability.

i fucking love when a distro upgrade breaks audio in all my applications cause red hat suddenly, after over a decade of being utterly nasty about it, got anxious about how much pulseaudio fucking sucks

that’s the one I ended up grabbing, and from the setup-only usage I’ve been giving it, it’s surprisingly good

there’s a post where they claim that secure boot is worthless on linux (other than fedora of course) and it’s not because secure boot itself is worthless but because someone can just put malware in your .bashrc and, like, chef’s kiss

I stumbled upon this poster while trying to figure out what linux distro normal people are using these days, and there’s something about their particular brand of confident incorrectness. please enjoy the posts of someone who’s either a relatively finely tuned impolite disagreement bot or a human very carefully emulating one:

• weirdly extremely into everything red hat
• outrageously bad takes, repeated frequently in all the Linux beginner subs, never called out because “hey fucker I know you’re bullshitting and no I don’t have to explain myself” gets punished by the mods of those subs
• very quickly carries conversation into nested subthreads where the downvotes can’t get them
• accuses other posters of using AI to generate the posts they disagree with
• when called out for sounding like AI, explains that they use it “only to translate”
• just the perfect embodiment of a fucking terrible linux guy, I swear this is where the microsoft research money goes

“if you’re so inclusive name every lgbt” is real and I can’t believe it

It was a good faith discussion. Not everything you disagree with is “debatefan horeshit”. How many languages can you speak? Have you lived in any other countries? Do you have any kind of exposure to non-english speaking LGBT communities?

ahahahaha my god, thanks for making the next part easy

@Alphane_Moon@lemmy.world, about this

the moderation principles you vehemently disagree with are principles we’ve built our communities on, and you’ve been posting with us long enough to know that.

if the trans community in Ukraine don’t face certain forms of bigotry that trans people do in the west, that’s lovely! where I’m from, trans people are facing a rapidly increasing amount of systemic bigotry and danger, and maintaining a space where they can communicate without fuckheads getting in the way is a top priority.

when I read this:

You don’t know whether trans folk in non-english speaking countries are in 100% alignment with you on this issue.

I will admit I don’t either. But unlike you I do have some exposure to our local LGBT community and to me this comes off as almost orientalist.

I don’t see someone trying to reach a mutual understanding. I see someone who saw an opportunity to shout down a trans poster with a bunch of debatefan horseshit and took it, and I don’t think I want that kind of person on our instance. I don’t care that this was posted elsewhere — this is about who you are.

what I’d like to see is that you can exist as a positive part of an explicitly trans-friendly community. I can’t ask your local LGBT community about it, and in any case we’re talking about online communities here — so show me you can positively contribute to an online trans community. that should be easy enough, since you’ve got some pretty heavy opinions regarding how online trans-inclusive communities should be run.

yeah, this is nothing but red flags

so the nix devenv CLI tool that was gaining popularity around the time I left nix is now doing extremely invasive telemetry and quietly implemented a feature that exfiltrates your entire repo and all related files to their servers to feed into an LLM. if you’d like a reminder of the extreme bad faith the corporate assholes who own nixpkgs operate under, someone tried to add DO_NOT_TRACK to Nix’s wrapped version of devenv, and the devenv lead maintainer used their elevated privileges on the nixpkgs repo to revert that change instantly without following any existing processes or asking for the community’s consensus.

I ranted some time ago about how all these shit commercial tools are just ways to capture and monetize large parts of the nix ecosystem, and the bill has finally come due. lixpkgs can’t happen soon enough (and the nix infra people seem to agree — they’ve been using lix for a while now, cause the regular evaluator is too unstable for large-scale use)

a very old concept with useful applications dating back in the 80s.

wait a fucking minute

you came here to lecture us and you think algorithms from the field of AI only started seeing serious use in the 80s? the Mark I Perceptron was built in 1958

(I admittedly didn’t know about the machine before today, but I know more than enough about AI to know perceptrons as software are old as hell)

why do all these papers have their own microsites, dedicated domain names (in Anguilla no less!), and shitty graphics? I can’t think of another branch of research that consistently does this shit. it’s almost like it’s all marketing fluff or something!