1mo ago

the temporality of an era

41 comments

I think there are examples of projects getting criticized for not recreating the corposhit. Take GIMP --- sure some folks really like it, but there are huge swaths of people who basically just say, "why doesn't it work like Photoshop?!" and get very frustrated with its different approach.
Personally, I like Google Photos --- the interface, not the product --- so when Immich came along and basically cloned it, I was really happy (I think Immich is fantastic, and at this point calling it a Photos clone is kinda offensive tbh --- it's way cool).
Some corposhit just sucks, yeah, but some is actually well thought out --- no shame in taking the concept and running with it, IMHO.
- I like GIMP and have never used Photoshop.
  
  I've never used either, honestly, so I'm pretty sure I'm not entitled to an opinion, but I do know that every time someone says they 'use' or 'like' GIMP all I can imagine is the dude from Pulp Fiction going, "Eh, it's a living!" with a defeated sort-of shrug (a la the wooly mammoth-cum-showerhead from the Flintstones)
  I mean, either way, you do you and all, I don't kink/platform-shame

cat -vconsidered harmful
- undefined
  
  Bell Laboratories Murray Hill, NJ (dec!ucb)wav!research!rob It seems that UNIX has become the victim of cancerous growth at the hands of organizations such as UCB. 4.2BSD is an order of magnitude larger than Version 5, but, Pike claims, not ten times better. The talk reviews reasons for UNIX's popularity and shows, using UCB cat as a primary example, how UNIX has grown fat. cat isn't for printing files with line numbers, it isn't for compressing multiple blank lines, it's not for looking at non-printing ASCII characters, it's for concatenating files. We are reminded that ls isn't the place for code to break a single column into multiple ones, and that mailnews shouldn't have its own more processing or joke encryption code. Rob carried the standard well for the "spirit of UNIX," and you can look forward to a deeper look at the philosophy of UNIX in his forthcoming book.
  
  Yeah there are some pieces of code that are super bloated in the FOSS community. I think it does not help overall because it mixes the primitive meaning for an application. Such as systemd or even GCC. I'm starting to like much more simple designs like GNU Shepherd. Or the idea of having a Hurd like kernel (which does not need to be Hurd). Or shifting to more simple CPU ISAs. Designs should have the necessary entropy, not more not less. Trying to allocate more stuff in a design does not help.
  I think some part of the GNU community is starting to understand that.
  Emacs is bloated? Probably more than it should be. Maybe it should be more minimalistic and move most of it to modules. But is LEGO bloated? Emacs can be regarded bloated because how it is shiped, but not for what it is. Not being modular and programmable would make Emacs not Emacs.
  This is a topic very interesting to touch but probably not to talk about it in a comment section hahahha.
  
  Rob carried the standard well for the "spirit of UNIX,"
  if (isatty(1)) {
  undefined
  
  if (ioctl(1,JMUX,0) >= 0) { struct winsize win; if (ioctl(1,JWINSIZE,&win) >= 0) { screenwidth = win.bytesx; if (screenwidth == 0) screenwidth++; } } qflg = Cflg = 1; (void) gtty(1, &sgbuf); if ((sgbuf.sg_flags & XTABS) == 0) usetabs = 1; }

Tiling window managers fit this for me.
- The first version of Windows used tiling.
  
  Not really. The tiling in windows didn't work in the same automatic "turn it on and watch it go" way that it does on Linux. But don't let that get in the way of your bizarre Linux trolling as I know you've been waiting all day for your moment to "shine"
  
  I used Windows 2.something on an old Compaq 386 (16MHz) and it didn't automatically title anything. There was an option to tile (or cascade) the current window set, but a new window would not cause a retiling. Neither would a window closing.

so we can keep being stuck with corposhit products with no alternatives?
- Yeah, there's room for both, but I think replacing proprietary software is actually a bit higher priority than just being different.
  I suppose it depends on what you are replacing, tho.

What’s #cat-v?
- Considered harmful.
  It's the IRC channel for https://cat-v.org/ There are some very clever people there with very specific ideas and opinions about computing.
  
  I open the site and see:
  ‘The Internet is not for sissies.’ -- Paul Vixie
  It's always important to make a good first impression or whatever.
  
  Clearly they can't adjust the CSS to make it fit for phones
- Well, it cites Milton Friedman and Thomas Sowell in the affirmative, so clearly, it is a place for 🤡

You can always start your own project. Just saying.

Clones are also great for publicity and awareness. People are searching for alternatives to (insert program here).

what's the white pin on her coat?
- uxn
  
  @pmjv @npe And now, make #orca a weapon of freedom.
  
  tasteful, ty
- I believe it's an axlotl

Maybe. Got any ideas? 🤷

Working on it.

Open source projects create corposhit because the developers working on them work for corporations who pay them to create the corposhit. The fact that they’re open source is just so that the corporation can benefit for free from contributions by developers outside the company. That’s all.
- girl says FOSS not OSS. i think its about the FLOSS part of FOSS, thats most of the time not corpo driven