I was talking to that guy on IRC yesterday. He was saying he still stands by his defence of Kovid in that thread. The people asking for the change were not submitting patches, just demanding that he undertake a multi-year porting effort because they wanted him to. Ultimately it did end up being ported to py3 and the process did take several years in the end.

Is Goyal still trying to maintain python 2 by himself? That thread was very funny a few years ago https://bugs.launchpad.net/calibre/+bug/1714107

The 2nd argument there, the one you claim to be making, is advocating for political violence.

I don’t think you’re debating in good faith here.

Your argument here is just saying, “Political violence is justified if a minority are being oppressed.”

Maybe you are tweaking it to be, “Political violence is to be expected if a minority are being oppressed.”

This is literally the dictionary definition of advocating for something.

Advocate, verb, to publically suggest an idea, development or way of doing something.

You are being disingenuous here. I’m not shifting their argument. Here is their full comment with annotations -

Sooner or later, a trans woman forced through male puberty by arbitrary rules/culture-war politics will snap

Annotation 1: politicians making incorrect choices are going to force the hand of activists for this cause…

and attempt to assassinate the PM or health minister.

A2: which will inevitably lead to political violence against members of the government

Then the other boot will come down: the Daily Mail will demand a crackdown, and the usual voices in the Guardian will join in, and the government will follow.

A3: Then the media will blame the activists instead of themselves

In what world is that not advocating for political violence?

Let’s replace the issue in question and see if it still sounds ok to you:

Sooner or later, a white nationalist forced to experience mass imigration due to arbitrary rules/culture-war politics will snap and attempt to assassinate the PM or home secretary. Then the other boot will come down: the Guardian will demand a crackdown, and the usual voices in the Daily Mail will join in, and the government will follow.

Does the above sound acceptable?

In the UK we have had 2 MPs assassinated in the past 10 years. One Labour and one Conservative. Comments that essentially say, “The government should do what I want or there will be more political violence”, are inciting violence.

The figleaf of being like “unless X happens, someone will do Y” is the same as 4chan maniacs threatening to commit acts of terror “in minecraft” or whatever.

He seems to have no filter whatsoever. His comments are inexcusable but he seemed to set himself up to broadcast every single thought that ever goes through his head to the entire world. I suspect there would be some clangers in there if I - or anyone else - spewed all of their halfbaked thoughts out all the time like that.

Personally I’m never going to meet the guy and my opinion of him doesn’t particularly matter. That provides an opportunity to pick out the bits of his thoughts that I find interesting and leave out the bits that are crass. Appreciate not everyone has that luxury though, especially if they have been personally affected by one of the issues he’s crashed into like a bull in a china shop.

He’s a living meme who wrote some amazing software back in his day.

Yeah the toxicity of the politics on here is pretty bad. I’ve read several comments in the UK politics sublemmy in recent weeks advocating for political violence.

Edit: this was a charming recent example https://leminal.space/comment/9489619

Europe is just better, sorry.

Linux is just better, sorry.

Hard agree with everything else.

Depends how interested you are in the infrastructure I suppose. Obviously it’s not essential for any project. I see a few that have both self hosted resources and additionally a Github mirror.

An advantage to the “old school” approach is that you don’t end up tied into a large SAAS platform like Github.

A server hosting a copy of the repo, git send-email, a mailing list and a bugzilla instance is all that an open source project really needs.

The advantage of github/gitlab et al. is that it merges all of the above functionality to one place, however it’s not absolutely essential. Git itself is extremely versatile and can be as useful as you are want it to be if you put in the time to learn it.

lol we used to call it Buttbucket at my old work where we used it. Should be a relatively easy product to deliver but Atlassian just couldn’t keep it up and bug free

This is the main development path for most distros - Debian, Gentoo, etc.

Issues are tracked on bugzilla and then the patch is sent to the developer mailing list citing the bug ticket with git send-email. Not sure about Debian but in the case of Gentoo they accept contributions via their git mirror and email. The developers keep both in sync so that new contributors (who likely use github) are encouraged but more established users can stick to the mailing list.

I’ve had great results asking about emulators such as PPSSPP

In GNU coreutils the implementation of rm doesn’t allocate memory however I believe alternative implementations do.

Here’s an example from the OpenBSD source code - https://github.com/openbsd/src/blob/222e275fb89ffb67abe0726dee2b107220092dc3/bin/rm/rm.c#L335

Presumably other *BSDs use something similar? Didn’t check out FreeBSD or anything.

Edit: So I suppose if you are using a BSD-type system (maybe including macOS?), and memory safety was important to you (to the point of extreme paranoia), then you might want to look into this rust project. Or just use the GNU implementation.

I had it on an old thinkpad for years but swapped back to Debian on there recently. It’s a neat OS for hobbyists but the desktop experience is rough around the edges.

It’s similar to how linux used to be 15 years ago in terms of software compatibility.

One positive thing about it is that the source code for their corelibs is beautiful (!) GNU corelibs have been optimized to within an inch of their life to make them as fast as possible at the cost of legibility.

At the end of the day he’s a fragile human being who appears to suffer from moderately bad mental health issues. I’d argue that he is more of a symptom of something going wrong with our society than a cause, even if he does amplify certain undesirable viewpoints.

If he didn’t exist some other charlaton would get niche internet celebrity status by making hot takes from a similar perspective.

Ketamine is more in the ballpark of being bad for your body like cocaine than MDMA is. More addictive and can damage your kidneys/bladder with long term use. It also puts a moderate amount of strain on your heart like what happened with Matthew Perry earlier this year.

It’s kind of a side effect for us having regenerating cells. From what I understand it’s an umbrella term for a variety of diseases that emerge from us living long lives with - relatively - versatile/adaptable bodies. In some ways it’s amazing that our bodies work at all.

That said, it’s not easy to be philosophical about it when you or someone you know is affected. Lost a family friend to cancer just a few months ago.