arborelia @arborelia@computerfairi.es

Since I see that a notable VC-famous is now telling us that he wish he'd "stood by" Eich way back, I'd like to tell you a true fact that situation: Eich didn't lose the CEO's job for his (reprehensible) Prop-8 donation.

Everyone wants to believe that's true, because fits nicely into narratives a number of invested camps want to believe, whether it's somebody being ousted for reprehensible views the woke SJW mob somehow pulling down a great leader (tm) but that's not what happened.

https://youtube.com/watch?v=zprSxCMlECA

There’s #demoscene, and then there’s this abomination of nature and genius

Somebody must have bet him that he couldn’t make a demo without the computer itself

(completely fucking up on my first day at the printing press) uhhh maybe nobody will notice

It's late enough to be hacker hours, if you're as old as I am. Gonna write down a bunch of rambly thoughts about #xz and #autoconf and capital-F Free Software sustainability and all that jazz. Plan is to edit it into a Proper Blog Post™ tomorrow. Rest of the thread will be unlisted but boosts and responses are encouraged.

Imagine if every time you looked up anything in the Yellow Pages or encyclopedia, there was this big section at the top of the page called "Notes from Gary" where some guy named Gary who seems to know about 20% less than the average person just sorta gets to say whatever he wants about the subject, no matter how irrelevant it is.

This is what it's like to use Google now.

I'm declaring P8X8 good enough for public release! It's a tool to convert #pico8 carts to #picotron -- it's not perfect and it requires some manual intervention in most cases, but it's magical being able to play a bunch of games on the new system without much effort

https://github.com/pancelor/p8x8/

Wait, it's even worse. The dataset is based on @swheritage's archive, containing way more than just GitHub (e.g. @Codeberg is archived, too).

I assumed they were somewhat neutral, but they're praising the LLM usage of this unlicensed code:

https://www.softwareheritage.org/2024/02/28/responsible-ai-with-starcoder2/

Also, they're refusing to remove deadnames, even outright ignoring GDPR demands for it:

https://cohost.org/arborelia/post/5169338-the-software-heritag

I can only conclude that they're a bad actor and should be considered harmful by the #OpenSource community.

sometimes the Steam Community pages are good

[from the Steam community page for alpha centauri uploaded by someone whose steam name won’t render in my client]

oh hey just as a PSA, any code any of y'all may have on github might have been scraped by @swheritage, a self-proclaimed "preservation" org which

- just hoovered up vast amounts of data without asking or telling anyone
- insists on deadnaming trans people forever for "integrity" reasons
- used it to build an LLM training data set

https://huggingface.co/datasets/bigcode/the-stack-v2 to check and for opt-out instructions

Every time I boot to a flash drive I'm reminded of Jersey Jack's pinball update process

You flash the new software to a flash drive, open up the coin door, put t' plug int' 'ole and wait a bit until it's done.

And then you IMMEDIATELY TAKE THAT FLASH DRIVE AWAY AND WIPE IT CLEAN right then and there before you do anything else

Because if you leave it lying around, and someone (MAYBE FUTURE-YOU) goes "Huh what's on this" and plugs it in, and then forgets to unplug it between reboots, it will format your hard drive and turn your computer into The Hobbit Pinball *completely automatically and without any input from you whatsoever*

@arborelia @swheritage

To the best of our knowledge, all files contained in the dataset are licensed with one of the permissive licenses (see list in Licensing information) or no license.

Emphasis mine.

What the cinnamon toast fuck?