dell: designs a laptop that cannot simultaneously accomodate a 2.5" SSD and an M.2 SSD

me: "fuck that, we're having Second SSD"

if you or a loved one has suffered from building gcc, you may be entitled to compilation

oh yeah, advent of code

i should decide on a programming language to use

i received a DM earlier. i am not going to call out the person who DM'd me, but i am going to publicly share my response, because it is important. the context is @drewdevault@fosstodon.org's blog post earlier today about RMS. the person DMing me suggests for the "proper" place for this discussion was in the FSF channels and with RMS himself.

my response is this, verbatim:


"no. if we cannot discuss issues like this in places not directly controlled by the people at the root of the issue - e.g. in this instance, RMS and people sympathetic to him - then the reality is that we cannot discuss them at all.

we cannot restrict the discussion of difficult topics to forums controlled by people who might rather not have those topics talked about. there is a power imbalance, whether or not that power is used.

is free speech still free speech if, whether by rule or by cultural norm, you are only to criticize a king from within his castle, surrounded by his guards, with only the audience of himself and those who have chosen to be in that environment? even if the guards take no action against you, and allow you to freely speak your mind, there is no question in that situation that you do not hold the power, and you are at the mercy of those who do.

and, ever so frequently, they do exercise the power to silence or eject you, and if we do as you suggest, you are left with no acceptable avenue in which to exercise your right to speak.

you must be able to criticize the king in your home, or in the tavern, or on the streets, or wherever you choose, in places where his guards have no power. you must be able to do this with other people who would not have chosen to subject themselves to the king's court. you must be able to loudly proclaim his faults, so that those who would never have had reason to find themselves in his castle may hear, and understand.

the king will not dethrone himself because someone entered his court and made a good point. he will dethrone himself because crowds of people outside his court are making their opinions known, and he knows that if he does not, the castle he worked so hard to build will fall with him inside."

i have outright deleted a major patchset i wrote for a project under freedesktop.org stewardship, which someone else is probably going to write again in a year or two, because i realized the project had a real-name policy, and decided it wasn't worth it. i then lost motivation for the cool thing i was working on that needed me to write that patch

this is not the intended effect of a "real-name" policy, but it is the actual effect. and, as the cool kids say, "the system is what it does".

there is no such thing as a "real name". the concept of a "legal name" is fraught, and most certainly is not what you think it is, or what you are looking for, if you are a software developer. many assumptions you have about what a "legal name" is probably are not true.

consider this: the name on my birth certificate is different than the name on my drivers license, and that is different from the names i am called by my friends. those names are all different from what is likely to be on my passport when i get it, and all of those are different than the name i publish my open source projects under. all of these, in different jurisdictions, might or might not be something you could consider a "legal name". which one do you want me to use when i submit a major feature to your library? are you going to turn me away if i try to submit it as "linear cannon"? why? if i have a website and contact information under that name, why does this matter? how is it substantially different than an author of fiction novels publishing under a pen name? does it change if i produce a piece of government-issued documentation with that name on it? why, or why not?

if your real name policy does not answer these questions adequately, then there's a very good chance i'm just going to assume that you're going to turn me away, as has happened to me several times already

it would be nice if it were actually as easy to contribute to free/open source software as the developers and maintainers of such software claim it is

but meritocracy is a lie, and bullshit policies and procedures (see: "real name" policy) scare away minorities who might otherwise do important work