Mike Gerwitz @mikegerwitz@mastodon.mikegerwitz.com

@colby @jfred @vu3rdd @civodul Oh, my, this is terrible.

@mmu_man @eff Yes, I can't help but feel like this article presents a false dichotomy. Apple has put themselves in this easily foreseeable situation, and could have avoided it entirely and respected privacy in the process.
This tricky situation is one of their own making.

I typically expect the EFF to make that clear by explicitly noting that such a situation should have never happened in the first place. This instead reads like a dismissal. Why?

https://news.wbfo.org/post/erie-county-awaits-word-albany-covid-yellow-orange-or-red-status

The county I live in has the highest COVID-19 infection rate in the entire state of New York (7-day rolling avg), and is on the verge of another shutdown of non-essential businesses.

The entire state. That includes New York City, on the opposite end of the state.

This also as my wife is heading back to work as a nurse on a floor with COVID-19 patients. Nearly half of them, according to the county, under the age of 64.

Whether you care or not, your actions affect those who actually do.

@cronomaestro (I haven't see the video you're describing. I'm speaking from my own observations.)

@cronomaestro Please don't let it turn you away. We need more people who do care to help to stand against hatred and intolerance in the free software community, and make it clear to everyone that it undermines our cause.

And that it's simply wrong regardless.

For those who may be wondering: it's an X200, and the script simply polls /sys/class/drm/card0-HDMI-A-2/status.

The `xrandr` utility can be used to configure outputs for X11 from the command line. For example, you can use it to configure and inspect resolution, position (relative to other monitors), rotation, scaling, refresh rate, DPI, and much more. It can even apply geometric transformations.

As an example, since I don't use a desktop environment, I have a script that detects when I connect/disconnect my laptop to/from its dock, and applies the appropriate monitor configuration.

#thanksfreesw

@colby @civodul @cwebber @codeberg @ArneBab Actually, its not ironic at all---the principal reason for this proliferation is IMO is that it's so easy to download all those dependencies (recursively) that people don't even realize how many there are, and even if they do, don't really care; just allocate some more disk space to those CI boxes and call it a day.

@colby @civodul @cwebber @codeberg @ArneBab This thread has taken a number of turns. A complex acquisition process is certainly no good, but that's just one level of complexity. Committing 100s of MiB of dependencies to a repository simplifies getting a hold of them, but it doesn't make the system any less complex.

Certainly not even being able to build the software is an unnecessarily high barrier to entry. But ironically I haven't had that problem with NPM.

@jfred @colby Yes, this was the essence of my FF toot just now.

More importantly, most of us who work on free software do so in our own time, which is hard to come by. I'm also a father, so at the end of the day, I have only a couple hours to select from a queue of things that I can't hope to complete in a lifetime, and have to sacrifice sleep to get more time.

So a large barrier to entry is effectively a DOS attack on all of us who don't have the luxury of time.

@jfred @colby @JordiGH Firefox is a good example.

In GNU, we have IceCat, which has suffered from lack of maintenance; Mark Weaver was applying patches for Guix. So I decided to take up maintainership, along with both Mark and Amin Bandali.

Then some events happened that kept me busy. Then COVID-19 happened. And still, many many months later, I have not had the time to even begin to grok this monstrosity. It's incredibly demotivating. And sadly, I may never find the time.

@pganssle That's actually something I have to play around with more; I'm so used to living within Emacs, where such composition can be done any number of ways (including the wonderful LaTeX input mode).

But I'm lost in any other situation, like my web browser, and end up having to compose in Emacs or Vim and copy it in.

@colby @jfred I'm not concerned about the binary as long as I can be confident that I (a) have a copy of the corresponding source code and (b) can reproduce that binary myself, bit-for-bit. If that's true, then it doesn't matter what comes out the other end of a compiler. Binaries are _not_ substitutes for sources (which is explicit in the GPL).

https://reproducible-builds.org/

The problem I speak of is the inherent complexity in the source code itself and the _process_ of getting it to build.

`setxkbmap` can be used to modify the keyboard layout under X11. For example, I use `setxkbmap -option ctrl:nocaps` to bind capslock to ctrl, to cut my pinky and wrist some slack.

Some people bind capslock to escape (e.g. `-option caps:escape`) because that's the keyboard layout under which vi was developed. I don't bother, because ^[ is equivalent to escape in a terminal, so I get more utility out of having ctrl:nocaps.

(See `man xkeyboard-config` if your system has it.)

#thanksfreesw