Ed Marshall @esm@mastodon.social

heyyy uh

quick reminder

ESR took a cool counterculture and got his shitty right-wing UNIX ideology all over it—he's not just a bad person, he's a exceptionally bad historian and you shouldn't take his word for anything, the jargon file that he "curates" reflects nothing like an actual 70s/80s programming culture.

here's a pre-ESR jargon file for reference: https://www.dourish.com/goodies/jargon.html

COUNTRY ROADS
TAKE ME ROADS
TO THE ROADS
WHERE I'M A ROAD

We've just published a (long-overdue) update on the status of Liberapay: https://medium.com/liberapay-blog/liberapay-status-update-a76403f4e0

I'm realizing that there's a common misunderstanding regarding tech principles such as "Free Software" or "transparency" or "standards." Even democracy!

The point has never been that every single person should edit source code and submit FOIA requests, all while running for parliament...

Even if you never intend to do so any such things yourself, if you have the option, it means you (or your community) can, if necessary, recruit an expert who will.

Having such options matters a lot.

(cont'd)

privacy is your local scope where you perform your local reasoning

maybe people who don't think privacy is important are okay with programming by only mutating global variables

Me: *big long sigh of resignation and disappointment*
You: What’s up?
Me: *gestures wildly at the universe*

Devil's Triangle (disambiguation) Wikipedia article edited anonymously from US House of Representatives https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?diff=861497321&oldid=839322382

Rage Against the Pusheen

GPLv2 is irrevocable. @pchestek wrote a new section for the copyleft.org guide to explain how. https://sfconservancy.org/news/2018/sep/26/GPLv2-irrevocability/

every time i write code

CSS corgis. A poster I saw at random

Unmarshalling JSON in Go, still

Today Members of the European Parliament adopted three terrible proposals in the new #CopyrightDirective and rejected every good one, setting the stage for mass, automated surveillance and arbitrary censorship of the Internet. (1/6) https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2018/09/today-europe-lost-internet-now-we-fight-back

Me trying to ask someone out