Her concern with landscapes and living creatures was passionate. This concern, feebly called, “the love of nature” seemed to Shevek to be something much broader than love. There are souls, he thought, whose umbilicus has never been cut. They never got weaned from the universe.

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Cake day: October 24th, 2025

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  • I have offered to do a lot of education and technical effort surrounding this, e.g. helping groups migrate in some of the circles I’m involved with and all it’s really gotten me is abuse and condescension, bafflingly. No one cares and if they do it’s mostly superficial and they want the easiest way out—someone/something do everything for me, and I mean everything. I don’t want to click more than two buttons and even that is pushing it, buster. Sometimes there aren’t easy solutions, though, and I think this is one of those times. Big Tech is massive and in the world we live in now we cannot have all of the things it promises without immense tradeoff, and for the most part it just isn’t worth it. The modern web being almost completely centralized around Discord is really harmful, like what happened with Facebook years ago. What used to be simple, publicly accessible websites for all these groups, locations and interests with email, forums and chat rooms for asynchronous as well as real-time communication is now entirely on Discord or Facebook. It’s disastrous. Neither of those things are easily accessible or friendly to archival…why do I need to be in a Discord chat room or Facebook group for community events around my public library? It’s absurd. I hate all of this so much, and basically no one around me agrees with me so we’ll just circle the drain forever while the “pet cameras” start calling DHS on our neighbors.

    I’m just going back to xmpp, maybe mumble for voice calls. They’re both friendly and simple and xmpp supports modern features just fine. I can host it for myself and my friends who care; I don’t have much hope for the masses anymore. I don’t really like how bloated Matrix/Synapse is, and everything else is riding coattails we don’t need to ride. I don’t care about video games or streaming to people in a chat room or anything like that, and if I did I’m sure something like Jitsi handles that well enough. Oh no, a second program!! We are all so dependent on tech in our lives but it seems like so many want nothing to do with being informed about it on any level…I just don’t get it.


  • But at some people don’t want to keep learning how to use stuff, they want to start using it.

    That is impossible, then. I don’t know what else to say to it. You can’t use something without first learning how to use it. Life is learning new things, forever. We don’t know how to do anything without learning first, and in the age of the web learning something has never been easier.

    And before you say that the first steps are easy, let me rename all commands in your CLI and see how quickly you find out how to read a man page.

    If I wanted to do something, then I’d figure it out. I do this all the time in my work. I don’t know how every tool works, I don’t know how every environment fits together. I still don’t see how this is an argument for “I do not want to learn.”



  • The allergy to CLI is always strange to me. Computers didn’t always have mice, or GUIs, and people had to learn them when they came around. It’s like saying “I want to ride a bike but I don’t want to learn how.” After a certain point, I don’t really know what to say to something like that. You have to learn how to do anything that is new to you. That doesn’t make it bad, or even necessarily difficult…but anything you don’t know will be unfamiliar, and one just has to be OK with that for a while until it’s not anymore. I think the usability of most mainstream distros is right where it should be. GNOME and KDE have done a very good job of it (edit: barring some very important accessibility concerns, which the GNOME and KDE teams have both shown to be open to learning from and improving on).







  • Some years ago I got in touch with one of the primary maintainers of that fork in the interest of continuing the project after realizing it was so stagnant, and I was essentially warned that doing so would open myself to immense harassment, and that harassment was why everyone involved stopped with the project in the end. So…what is all of this about “if you don’t like X, fork it” if that is what will happen when one does? Seems pretty rotten advice to give if it’s just going to be sabotaged anyway. Someone I know still uses the outdated Glimpse regardless.



  • Given the current world we live in I do not want anything that I create or contribute to itself contributed to an exploitative corporation’s bottom line (at best) without my consent or their assuredly begrudging reciprocation. This should not be controversial. The GPL accomplishes this. Nothing more lax or permissive does or will. You are not a cool or chill guy because you don’t care what someone does with the code you write. You are handing all of those who would sack you the keys to the castle, ushering them inside. That is not abstaining, it’s letting your opponents win. No thanks.