Just an old FOSS coder who spews way too much vitriol about how nobody gets it except him.

He mostly wrote xscreensaver and once built a timebomb into it because he didn’t like Debian’s release policy.

And look at that article: he only links back to his own previous blog posts. Everything he writes is “I’ve been saying it for years, see how right I am?”

And I’m not even going into how dubious his timing is with yet another attack on Signal. I mean there’s nothing new in that article except “now even Trump agrees with me”?!

JWZ has had nothing but arrogant takes on a lot of things over the years decades. Mostly shitting on his fellow coders when xscreensaver really isn’t any better. He is the embodiment of FOSS meritocracy-fueled sociopathy.

deleted by creator

… the blurb

Why did you provide a long summary if you’re going to ridicule people who didn’t click on the link?

Also, I should have written “I did not read this article, but did read others”

I was giving you the benefit even though I’ve noticed before that you post stuff I … find problematic, but this is just classic troll behavior.

The real kicker with deepseek is not its ties to China but that it is coded in a way that makes much better use of resources than anything the Silicon valley tech bros have achieved so far. By orders of magnitude.

Deepseek is opensource (according to Ed Zitron whom I trust with such things).
The data it (I guess the publicly available instance located in China?) has been fed on is not.
You can build your own DeepSeek and feed it whatever you want. Fully transparent, no ties to China.

I did not read this article, but the blurb above just assumes that DeepSeek has ties to the Regime. Which isn’t a wrong assumption per se, but it’s still a claim that needs to be backed with something. Without that it sounds suspiciously like the FUD said tech bros have been sowing for a while now, shitting their pants about their next government subsidy.

That said, there’s a very simple solution to ALL of that “controversy”: don’t use A-not-I.

Deepseek is opensource (according to Ed Zitron whom I trust with such things).

The data it (I guess the publicly available instance located in China?) has been fed on is not.

You can build your own DeepSeek and feed it whatever you want. Fully transparent.

The real kicker with deepseek is not its ties to China but that it is coded in a way that makes much better use of resources than anything the Silicon valley tech bros have achieved so far. By orders of magnitude.

That said, there’s a very simple solution to ALL of that: just don’t use A-not-I

Right. Not in my case anyhow, my blog is even a top ten search result for a specific topic.

FWIW every user gets a unique IP address.

It would be the nice thing to do to inform those keeping up these blacklists whenever the owner changes. Maybe they do. Or maybe they’ll do it on your behalf if you ask.

Their websites or their servers? Frankly I have no idea what you’re talking about.

I never liked IceWM, it’s way too limited as a window manager (refering to key- and mousebinds mostly, manual tiling).

That said, antiX has plenty more to offer.

That was a few years ago. Prices and offers change constantly. Netcup.

Somehow I have difficulty believing that the Chinese are capable of fully respecting the GPL.

OTOH they’ve already been using their own Android spin for a while; how did that go so far?

No direct answer, but even as a US resident you should consider going EU.

Most hosting providers dangle convenience (“one click solution”) to make clueless customers pay way too fucking much. Or customer service, which I always found to be about the same regardless of price: good enough, miracles not included.

FWIW I pay ~€7/mo for a full (root access, self-installed) VPS with 80GB storage, 4GB RAM, 4 CPUs (edit: this was a few years ago. Now their cheapest offer is €8/mo for 8GB of RAM and 256GB of storage).
The same would cost $72/mo (with less storage) on Linode 🤣

Ouf, you got me down a rabbit hole. I’ll start at the end, where I clicked on a comment of yours laying out why Andreas Kling and Brendan Eich are assholes. This FOSS tendency to support 100% meritocracy becomes a bullshit lie the moment some lead devs use their position to spread vile views, deny harmless PRs to improve phrasing etc.
I have yet to meet a single self-proclaimed “centrist” who isn’t just a racist/misogynyst/homophobe in sheep’s clothing.

Meritocracy enables sociopaths.
Well really it should be “Pure unadultarated meritocracy in FOSS development enables latent sociopathic behavior to come out unchecked in nerdy devs” or some such, but that’s not much of a slogan.

Anyhow, about Kagi & Vlad & the writer of this blog post (I really read it all) - I am always so skeptical about FLOSS trying to go financially sustainable. Usually people applaud it because they think it’s a solution to “slow development and clunky UIs”, and usually people like Vlad like to support that feeling without really committing to anything.

Also always interesting the lack of commitment when you press them about data collection. You can’t run a web app like this without data collection, and the distiction between personally identifyable, private, anonymised or anonymous is - facile because as legal terms they were coined by people who have no clue about fingerprinting and such.

All in all I’m glad with the road I have chosen in device & software usage and just like the Brave hype did not get me, neither will the Kagi hype or the next one.

Great breakdown, esp. the license issues and the case in point of MINIX. Subscribed.

I just checked, Archlinux already has uutils-coreutils in [extra], but there’s no surprise there, they’ve always been relatively unconcerned about such things.

Thanks for sharing, always nice to see!

But nowadays I’d be surprised if one of these display devices ran Windows or some similar crap that is NOT Linux.

Ubuntu/Canonical did, imho, the right thing to offer paid support for what is otherwise a free OS. That’s what companies care for, that cannot afford a full IT employee or even department. Of course Redhat et. al. also offer that but Ubuntu seems more suitable for smaller solutions?

Hand in glove
The sun shines out of our behinds... 🎶

Sorry that phrase always gets me. Fuck Facebook an’all that.