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We need more of Richard Stallman, not less
by Ploum.net (English posts only) 19 Jun '23

19 Jun '23

WE NEED MORE OF RICHARD STALLMAN, NOT LESS by Ploum on 2023-06-19 https://ploum.net/2023-06-19-more-rms.html The Free Software movement has been mostly killed by the corporate Open Source. The Free Software Foundation (FSF) and its founder, Richard Stallman (RMS), have been decried for the last twenty years, including by my 25-year-old self, as being outdated and inadequate. Drew DeValut’s FSF is dying https://drewdevault.com/2023/04/11/2023-04-11-The-FSF-is-dying.html Free Software is not enough by j3s https://j3s.sh/thought/drones-run-linux-free-software-isnt-enough.html Viznut asking if permacomputing should be the successor of Free Software https://venera.social/display/85a863ed-1064-8cb8-f689-e51559784396 Myself arguing for RMS replacement in 2006 https://ploum.net/97-it-s-a-long-way-to-the-top/index.html I’ve spent the last 6 years teaching Free Software and Open Source at École Polytechnique de Louvain, being forced to investigate the subject and the history more than I anticipated in order to answer students’ questions. I’ve read many historical books on the subject, including RMS’s biography and many older writings. And something struck me. RMS was right since the very beginning. Every warning, every prophecy realised. And, worst of all, he had the solution since the start. The problem is not RMS or FSF. The problem is us. The problem is that we didn’t listen. The solution has always been there: copyleft ============================================ In the early eighties, RMS realised that software was transformed from "a way to use a machine" to a product or a commodity. He foresaw that this would put an end to collective intelligence and to knowledge sharing. He also foresaw that if we were not the master of our software, we would quickly become the slave of the machines controlled by soulless corporations. He told us that story again and again. Forty years later, we must admit he was prescient. Every word he said still rings true. Very few celebrated forward thinkers were as right as RMS. Yet, we don’t like his message. We don’t like how he tells it. We don’t like him. As politicians understood quickly, we care more about appearance and feel-good communication than about the truth or addressing the root cause. RMS theorised the need for the "four freedoms of software". - The right to use the software at your discretion - The right to study the software - The right to modify the software - The right to share the software, including the modified version How to guarantee those freedoms ? RMS invented copyleft. A solution he implemented in the GPL license. The idea of copyleft is that you cannot restrain the rights of the users. Copyleft is the equivalent of the famous « Il est interdit d’interdire » (it is forbidden to forbid). In insight, the solution was and still is right. Copyleft is a very deep concept. It is about creating and maintaining commons. Commons resources that everybody could access freely, resources that would be maintained by the community at large. Commons are frightening to capitalist businesses as, by essence, capitalist businesses try to privatise everything, to transform everything into a commodity. Commons are a non-commodity, a non-product. Capitalist businesses were, obviously, against copyleft. And still are. Steve Ballmer famously called the GPL a "cancer". RMS was and still is pictured as a dangerous maniac, a fanatic propagating the cancer. Bruce Perens and Eric Raymond tried to find a middle ground and launched the "Open Source" movement. Retrospectively, Open Source was a hack. It was originally seen as a simple rebranding of "Free Software", arguing that "free" could be understood as "without price or value" in English. RMS quickly pointed, rightly, that the lack of "freedom" means that people will forget about the concept. Again, he was right. But everybody considered that "Free Software" and "Open Source" were the same because they both focused on the four freedoms. That RMS was nitpicking. RMS biggest mistake =================== There was one weakness in RMS theory: copyleft was not part of the four freedoms he theorised. Business-compatible licenses like BSD/MIT or even public domain are "Free Software" because they respect the four freedoms. But they can be privatised. And that’s the whole point. For the last 30 years, businesses and proponents of Open Source, including Linus Torvalds, have been decrying the GPL because of the essential right of "doing business" aka "privatising the common". They succeeded so much that the essential mission of the FSF to guarantee the common was seen as "useless" or, worse, "reactionary". What was the work of the FSF? The most important thing is that they proof-bombed the GPL against weaknesses found later. They literally patched vulnerabilities. First the GPLv3, to fight "Tivoisation" and then AGPL, to counteract proprietary online services running on free software but taking away freedom of users. But all this work was ridiculed. Microsoft, through Github, Google and Apple pushed for MIT/BSD licensed software as the open source standard. This allowed them to use open source components within their proprietary closed products. They managed to make thousands of free software developers work freely for them. And they even received praise because, sometimes, they would hire one of those developers (like it was a "favour" to the community while it is simply business-wise to hire smart people working on critical components of your infrastructure instead of letting them work for free). The whole Google Summer of Code, for which I was a mentor multiple years, is just a cheap way to get unpaid volunteers mentor their future free or cheap workforce. Our freedoms were taken away by proprietary software which is mostly coded by ourselves. For free. We spent our free time developing, debugging, testing software before handing them to corporations that we rever, hoping to maybe get a job offer or a small sponsorship from them. Without Non-copyleft Open Source, there would be no proprietary MacOS, OSX nor Android. There would be no Facebook, no Amazon. We created all the components of Frankenstein’s creature and handed them to the evil professor. More commons ============ The sad state of computing today makes computer people angry. We see that young student are taught "computer" with Word and PowerPoint, that young hackers are mostly happy with rooting Android phones or blindly using the API of a trendy JS framework. That Linux distributions are only used by computer science students in virtualised containers. We live in the dystopia future RMS warned us about. Which, paradoxically, means that RMS failed. He was a Cassandra. Intuitively, we think we should change him, we should replace the FSF, we should have new paradigms which are taking into account ecology and other ethical stances. We don’t realise that the solution is there, in front of us for 40 years: copyleft. Copyleft as in "Forbidding privatising the commons". We need to rebuild the commons. When industries are polluting the atmosphere or the oceans, they are, in fact, privatising the commons ("considering a common good as their private trash"). When an industry receives millions in public subsidies then make a patent, that industry is privatising the common. When Google is putting the Linux kernel in a phone that cannot be modified easily, Google is privatising the common. Why do we need expensive electric cars? Because the automotive industry has been on a century-long mission to kill public transport or the sole idea of going on foot, to destroy the commons. We need to defend our commons. Like RMS did 40 years ago. We don’t want to get rid of RMS, we need more of his core philosophy. We were brainwashed into thinking that he was an extremist just like we are brainwashed to think that taking care of the poor is socialist extremism. In lots of occidental countries, political positions seen as "centre" twenty years ago are now seen as "extreme left" because the left of twenty years ago was called extremist. RMS suffered the same fate and we should not fall for it. Fighting back ============= What could I do? Well, the first little step I can do myself is to release every future software I develop under the AGPL license. To put my blog under a CC By-SA license. I encourage you to copyleft all the things! We need a fifth rule. An obligation to maintain the common to prevent the software of being privatised. This is the fifth line that RMS grasped intuitively but, unfortunately for us, he forgot to put in his four freedoms theory. The world would probably be a very different place if he had written the five rules of software forty years ago. But if the best time to do it was forty years ago, the second-best moment is right now. So here are The four freedoms and one obligation of free software ===================================================== - The right to use the software at your own discretion - The right to study the software - The right to modify the software - The right to redistribute the software, including with modifications - The obligation to keep those four rights, effectively keeping the software in the commons. We need to realise that any software without that last obligation will, sooner or later, become an oppression tool against ourselves. And that maintaining the commons is not only about software. It’s about everything we are as a society and everything we are losing against individual greed. Ultimately, our planet is our only common resource. We should defend it from becoming a commodity. Copyleft was considered a cancer. But a cancer to what? To the capitalist consumerism killing the planet? Then I will proudly side with on the cancer side. Disclaimer: I’m aware that Richard Stallman had some questionable or inadequate behaviours. I’m not defending those nor the man himself. I’m not defending blindly following that particular human (nor any particular human). I’m defending a philosophy, not the philosopher. I pretend that his historical vision and his original ideas are still adequate today. Maybe more than ever. Picture of RMS by Frank Karlitschek https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Richard_Stallman_(124442297).jpeg

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Losing Signal
by Ploum.net (English posts only) 09 Mar '23

09 Mar '23

LOSING SIGNAL by Ploum on 2023-03-09 https://ploum.net/2023-03-09-losing-signal.html Warning to my friends : Until further notice, consider I’m not receiving your Signal messages. Signal, the messaging system, published a blog post on how we were all different and they were trying to adapt to those differences. Signal was for everyone, told the title. Ironically, that very same day, I’ve lost access to my signal account. We are all different, they said. Except myself. Signal is for everyone (except me) https://signal.org/blog/signal-is-for-everyone/ What is this difference? I’m not sure but it seems that not having a standard Android phone with Google Play services play a huge part. How I lost access ================= I’m using an Hisense A5 Android phone. This is one of the very rare phones on the market with an eink screen. While this is not recommended for most users, I like my eink phone: I only need to charge it weekly, it’s not distracting, I don’t want to use it most of the time. I feel that coloured screens are very aggressive and stressful. The Hisense A5 comes with proprietary crapware in Chinese and without Google Play Services. That’s fine for me. I don’t want Google services anyway and I’m happy with installing what I need from Aurora store and F-Droid. For the last three years, it worked for me (with some quirks, of course). Signal worked fine except for notifications that were sometimes delayed. I considered that as a feature: my phone is in do not disturb all the time, I don’t want to be interrupted. On March 7th, I made a backup of my Signal messages and removed the application temporarily as I wanted to quickly try some open source alternatives (signal-foss and molly). Those didn’t work, so I reinstalled Signal and asked to restore the backup. Signal asked for my phone number, warned me that I had no Google Play Services then re-asked for my number then re-warned me. Then asked me to prove that I was a human by solving a captcha. I hate captcha. I consider the premises of captcha completely broken, stupid and an insult to all the people with disabilities. But those were the worst I had ever seen. I was asked to look on microscopic blurry pictures, obviously generated by AI, and to select only "fast cars" or "cows in their natural habitat" or "t-shirt for dogs" or "people playing soccer". Now, I’ve a question for you. Is a car looking like an old Saab fast enough? While a cow on the beach is probably not in its natural habitat, what about a cow between two trees? What if the t-shirts are not "for" dogs but with dogs on them. And what if the drawing on the t-shirt is a mix between a dog and a cat? What if there’s a player holding a golf club but hitting a soccer ball? Even with a colour screen, I’m not sure I could answer those. So imagine on an eink one… Signal is for everyone but you need to answer those idiocy first. It should be noted that I have a very good eyesight. I cannot imagine those with even minor disabilities. Of course I did try to solve the captcha. But, after each try, I was sent back to the "enter your phone number" step, followed by "no Google services warning" then… "too many attempts for this number, please wait for four hours before retrying". I have no idea if my answers were bad or if there’s a bug where the captcha assumes Google Play Services. I’ve tried with the APK official version and the Google Play Store version (through Aurora), they all fail similarly. In three days, I’ve managed twice to pass the captcha and receive an SMS with a confirmation code. But, both times, the code was rejected, which is incomprehensible. Also, I learned that I could only read the code from the notification because opening the SMS app reinitialised Signal to the "enter your number" step, before the captcha. Centralisation is about rejection of differences ================================================ What is interesting with corporatish marketing blog posts is how they usually say the exact opposite of what they mean. Signal blog post about differences is exactly that. They acknowledge the fact that there’s no way a single centralised authority could account for all the differences in the world. Then proceed to say they will do. There’s only one way for a centralised service to become universal: impose your vision as a new universal standard. Create a new norm and threat every divergence as a dangerous dissidence. That’s what Facebook and Google did, on purpose. Pretending to embrace differences is only a way to reject the differences you don’t explicitly agree. Interestingly, Signal is only realising now that they have no choice but do the same. At first, Signal was only a niche. A centralised niche is not a real problem because, by definition, your users share a common background. You adapt to them. But as soon as you outgrew your initial niche, you are forced to become the villain you fought earlier. Moxie Marlinspike, Signal’s founder, is a brilliant cryptographer. Because he was a cryptographer, he did what he found interesting. He completely rejected any idea of federation/decentralisation because it was not interesting for him. Because he thought he could solve the problems of world with cryptography only ("when you have a hammer…"). He now must face that his decision has led to a situation where the world-freeing tool he built is publishing facebookish blog post about "differences" while locking out users who do not comply with his norm. Like Larry Page and Serguei Brin before him, Moxie Marlinspike built the oppression tool he was initially trying to fight (we have to credit Bill Gates, Steve Jobs and Mark Zuckerberg for being creepy psycho craving for power and money since the beginning. At least, they didn’t betray anything and kept following their own ideals). That’s the reason why email is still the only universal Internet communication tool. Why, despites its hurdles, federation is a thing. Because there is no way to understand let alone accept all variations. There’s a world of difference between Gmail interface and Neomutt. Yet, one allows you to communicate with someone using the other. Centralisation is, by its very definition, finding the minority and telling them "you don’t count". "Follow the norms we impose or disappear!" It is really about Google’s services after all… =============================================== One problem I have with my Hisense A5 is that my banking application doesn’t work on it, expecting Google Play Services. To solve that issue, I keep in a drawer an old Android phone without sim card, with a cracked screen, a faulty charging port and a bad battery. When the bills-to-pay stack grows too much, I plug that phone in the charger, fiddle with it until the phone start, launch the banking app, pay the bills, put that phone back in the drawer. After fiddling for two days with Signal on my eink phone, I decided to try on that old phone. I installed Signal, asked to connect to my account. There was no captcha, no hassle. I immediately received the SMS with the code (on the Hisense eink phone) and could connect to my Signal account (losing all my history as I didn’t transfer the backup). At least, that will allow me to answer my contact that they should not contact me on Signal anymore. Signal automatically trusted a phone without sim card because it was somewhat connected to Google. But cannot trust a phone where it has been installed for the last three years and which is connected to the related phone number. Signal vision of the world can thus be summarised as: "We fight for your privacy as long as you agree to be spied on by Google." Centralisation is about losing hope =================================== One thing I’ve learned about centralised Internet services is that you can abandon all hopes of being helped. There’s no way Signal support could help me or answer me. The problem is deep into their belief, into the model of the world they maintain. They want to promote differences as long as those differences are split between Apple and Google. They probably have no power to make an exception for an account. They could only tell me that "my phone is not supported". To solve my problem, they should probably reconsider how the whole application is built. Technically, this specific problem is new. Three years ago, I had no problem installing Signal on my phone and no captcha to solve. But once you sign up for a centralised service, you are tied for all the future problems. That’s the deal. I was similarly locked out from my Whatsapp account because I didn’t accept a new contract then forgot to open the app for several months (I was disconnected at the time ). Le suicide de mon compte Whatsapp https://ploum.net/le-suicide-de-mon-compte-whatsapp/index.html That’s what I like so much about federated protocols (email, fediverse). I can choose a provider where I know I will have someone in front of me in case I have a problem. Either because I’m a customer paying the expensive tiers for quick support (Protonmail) or because I trust the philosophy and donate appropriately (my Mastodon server is hosted by La Quadrature du Net, I trust that team). I also know that I can easily migrate to another provider as soon as I want (considering mailbox.org instead of protonmail). As a chat tool, Signal is better than many other. But it’s centralised. And, sooner or later, a centralised service faces you with a choice: either you comply with a rule you don’t agree, either you lose everything. With every centralised service, the question is not if it will ever happen. The question is "when". Either you conform to the norm, either you are too different to have your existence acknowledges. That’s also why I’ve always fought for the right to differences, why I’ve always been utterly frightened by "normalisation". Because I know nobody is immune. Think about it: I’m a white male, cis-gendered, married with children, with a good education, a good situation and no trauma, no disability. I’m mostly playing life with the "easy" setting. I’m sure lots of reaction to this post will be about how I made mistakes by "trying signal-foss" or by "using a completely weird and non-standard phone". That’s exactly the point I’m trying to prove. I’ve suddenly been excluded from all the conversations with my friends because I very slightly but unacceptably deviated from the norm. Because, three years ago, I thought having a black and white screen on my own phone was more comfortable for my eyes.

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About Bluesky and Decentralisation
by Ploum.net (English posts only) 03 Mar '23

03 Mar '23

ABOUT BLUESKY AND DECENTRALISATION by Ploum on 2023-03-03 https://ploum.net/2023-03-03-bluesky.html Jack Dorsey, Twitter co-founder, is trying to launch Bluesky, a "decentralised Twitter" and people are wondering how it compares to Mastodon. I remember when Jack started to speak about "project bluesky" on Twitter, years ago. ActivityPub was a lot more niche and he ignored any message related to it. It definitely looked like a NIH syndrome as he could, at least, have started to discuss ActivityPub pros and cons. I was myself heavily invested in decentralised protocols (from blockchain to ActivityPub). It was my job to keep an eye on everything decentralised and really tried to understand what BlueSky was about. My feeling was, in the end, clear: Jack Dorsey wanted a "decentralised protocol" on which he had full power (aka "VC-style decentralisation" or "permissioned-blockchains"). You have to keep in mind that those successful in the Silicon Valley know only one kind of thinking: raise money, get users, sell off. They can’t grasp decentralisation other than as a nice marketing term to add to their product (and, as Ripple demonstrated during the Cryptobubble, they are completely right when it comes to making tons of money with shitty tech which pretends to be decentralised while not being it at all). To my knowledge, acknowledgement of ActivityPub existence by BlueSky came very late after the huge Mastodon burst caused by Elon Musk buying Twitter from Jack Dorsey. It’s more a "oh shit, we are not the first" kind of reaction. But even without that history, it’s important to note that you don’t simply design a decentralised protocol behind closed doors then expect everybody to adopt it. You need to be transparent, to discuss in the open. People need to know who is in charge and why. They also need to know every single decision. Decentralisation cannot be done without being perfectly free and open source. That’s the very point of it. If we don’t want to consider the hypothesis that "bluesky decentralisation" is simply cynical marketing fluff, I think we can safely assume that Jack Dorsey has hit his mental glass ceiling. He doesn’t get decentralisation. He doesn’t have the mental model to get it. He will probably never get it (he became a billionaire by "not getting it" so there’s no reason for him to change). The whole project is simply a billionaire throwing money at a few developers telling him what he expects to hear in order to get pay. A very-rich-man’s hobby. There’s no need to analyse the protocol or make guess about the future. It’s a closed source beta application with invite-only membership. It is not decentralised. It cannot be decentralised. Discussion on Hacker-News https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35009723

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We need to talk about your Github addiction
by Ploum.net (English posts only) 22 Feb '23

22 Feb '23

WE NEED TO TALK ABOUT YOUR GITHUB ADDICTION by Ploum on 2023-02-22 https://ploum.net/2023-02-22-leaving-github.html Listen my fellow geeks in code, we need to have a serious conversation about Github. At first, Github was only a convenient way to host a git repository and to collaborate with others. But, as always with monopolies, once you are trapped by convenience and the network effect, the shitification process starts to try to get as much money and data from you. First of all, let’s remember that Github is a fully proprietary service. Using it to host the development of a free software makes no sense if you value freedom. It is not like we don’t have many alternatives available (sourcehut, codeberg, gitlab, etc). It should be noted that those alternatives usually offer a better workflow and a better git integration than Github. They usually make more sense but, I agree, it might be hard to change ten years of suboptimal habits imposed by the github workflow. One thing that always annoyed me with Github is the "fun factor". Emojis appearing automatically in messages I’m trying to post, intrusive notifications about badges and followers I earned. Annoying, to say the least. (Am I the only one using ":" in a sentence without willing to make an emoji?) But I discovered that Github is now pushing it even more in that direction: a feed full of random projects and people I don’t care about, notifications to get me to "discover" new projects and "follow" new persons. They don’t even try to pretend to be a professional platform anymore. It’s a pure attention-grabbing personal data extorting social networks. To add insult to injury, we now know that everything published on Github is mostly there to serve as training data for Microsoft AI engines. Developers are now raw meat encouraged to get stars, followers and commit counters, doing the most stupid things in the most appealing way to get… visibility! Yeah! Engagement! Followers! Audience! Good code is written when people are focused, thinking hard about a problem while having the time to grasp the big picture. Modern Github seems to be purposely built as a tool to avoid people thinking about what they do and discourage them from writing anything but a new JavaScript framework. There’s no way I can morally keep an account on Github. I’ve migrated all of my own projects to Sourcehut (where I’ve a paid account) or to my university self-hosted gitlab. But there are so many projects I care about still on Github. So many important free software. So many small projects where I might send an occasional bug report or even a patch. For the anecdote, on at least two different occasions, I didn’t send a patch I crafted for small projects because I didn’t know how to send it by mail and was not in the mood to deal with the Github workflow at that particular time. By keeping your project on Github, you are encouraging new developers to sign up there, to create their own project there. Most importantly, you support the idea that all geeks/developers are somehow on Github, that it is a badge of pride to be there. If you care about only one of software freedom, privacy, focus, sane market without monopoly or if you simply believe we don’t need even more bullshit in our lives, you should move your projects out of Github and advocate a similar migration to projects you care about. Thanks to git decentralisation, you could even provide an alternative/backup while keeping github for a while. If you don’t have any idea where to go, that should be a red light in your brain about monopoly abuses. If you are a professional developer and using anything other than Github seems hard, it should be a triple red light warning. And I’m not saying that because grumpy-old-beard-me wants to escape those instagramesque emojis. Well, not only that but, indeed, I don’t wanna know the next innovative engagement-fostering feature. Thanks. The best time to leave Github was before it was acquired by Microsoft. The second-best time is now. Sooner or later, you will be forced out of Github like we, oldies, were forced out of Sourceforge. Better leaving while you are free to do it on your own terms…

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Modern AI and the end of privacy
by Ploum.net (English posts only) 15 Feb '23

15 Feb '23

MODERN AI AND THE END OF PRIVACY by Ploum on 2023-02-15 https://ploum.net/2023-02-15-ai-and-privacy.html When you think about it, the gigacorps currently developing consumer- facing AI chatbots are also the same companies which are spying the most heavily on our private life. Well, it’s obvious because every single company is now trying to spy on you as much as it can and gathering so much data that they can’t even handle it (no later than last week, I have asked to be removed from some shop databases, received a reply telling me that everything was erased yet I’m still receiving daily spam from them). Companies have so many data, duplicated in many backups, they don’t even know what to do with it. And those data, sooner or later, will be used to train AI. In fact, they already were for years: look no further than reply suggestions from Gmail. The first consequence is that AI chatbot will quickly start to argue with you, insult you or, why not, send you dick pics. Those are, after all, a huge part of written human communications. But the terrifying part is probably that there’s no way to prevent leaks. Anybody using a trained chatbot will quickly find ways to ask if Alice and Bob were exchanging emails and what it was about. If Eve was sick or not. Worst of all, most of it will probably be hallucinations: false data invented by the AI itself. But a few clickbait stories with real information leakage will be enough to cast a doubt that any answer by an AI "might be true". Despite many warnings, we have offered total control of our lives to a few monopolies. Even if you were careful enough, public data about you are probably enough to "sounds mostly true". Most of your emails ended in a Gmail or Outlook inbox even if you don’t use those services yourself. In my latest book, the short story "Le jour où la transparence se fit" is about the brutal and sudden disappearance of privacy. I’m glad the book is now in stores because, in a few months, it will probably not sound like science fiction any more…

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On Humans and Machines
by Ploum.net (English posts only) 11 Feb '23

11 Feb '23

ON HUMANS AND MACHINES by Ploum on 2023-02-11 https://ploum.net/2023-02-11-human-and-machines.html In the ultimate form of marketing-capitalism, companies try to transform human workers into replaceable working machines and ask them to produce machines that should sound like they are humans. To achieve that, they build machines that learn from humans. While humans believe that, in order to gain success, they need to act like machines acting like humans. That’s because the success is defined by some counters created by the machines. The machines, themselves, are now learning from machines that act like humans instead of learning from humans. So, in the end, we have humans acting like "machines learning from machines acting like humans" built by humans actings like machines. That’s make "being human" really confusing. Hopefully I don’t need to think about what "being a machine" means.

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Drowning in AI Generated Garbage : the silent war we are fighting
by Ploum.net (en) 05 Dec '22

05 Dec '22

DROWNING IN AI GENERATED GARBAGE : THE SILENT WAR WE ARE FIGHTING by Ploum on 2022-12-05 https://ploum.net/2022-12-05-drowning-in-ai-generated-garbage.html All over the web, we are witnessing very spectacular results from statistic algorithms that have been in the work for the last forty years. We gave those algorithms an incredibly catchy name: "Artificial Intelligence". We now have very popular and direct applications for them: give the algorithm a simple text prompt (don’t get me started on the importance of text) and it generates a beautiful original picture or a very serious-sounding text. It could also generate sounds or videos (we call them "deep fakes"). After all, it generates only a stream of bits, a bunch of 1 and 0 open to interpretation. All of this has been made possible because billions of humans were uploading and sharing texts and pictures on the commons we call "the Internet" (and more specifically the web, a common more endangered every day because of the greediness of monopolies). People upload their creation. Or creations from others. After all, does "owning" a text or a picture has any meaning anywhere except in the twisted minds of corrupted lawyers? What we are witnessing is thus not "artificial creativity" but a simple "statistical mean of everything uploaded by humans on the internet which fits certain criteria". It looks nice. It looks fantastic. While they are exciting because they are new, those creations are basically random statistical noise tailored to be liked. Facebook created algorithms to show us the content that will engage us the most. Algorithms are able to create out of nowhere this very engaging content. That’s exactly why you are finding the results fascinating. Those are pictures and text that have the maximal probability of fascinating us. They are designed that way. But one thing is happening really fast. Those "artificial" creations are also uploaded on the Internet. Those artificial artefacts are now part of the statistical data. Do you see where it leads? The algorithms are already feeding themselves on their own data. And, as any graduate student will tell you, training on your own results is usually a bad idea. You end sooner or later with pure overfitted inbred garbage. Eating your own shit is never healthy in the long run. Twitter and Facebook are good examples of such algorithmic trash. The problem is that they managed to become too powerful and influential before we realised it was trash. From now on, we have to treat anything we see on the Internet as potential AI garbage. The picture gallery from an artist? The very cool sounding answer on Stackoverflow? This article in the newspaper? This short viral video? This book on Amazon? They are all potential AI garbage. Fascinating garbage but garbage nonetheless. The robot invasion started 15 years ago, mostly unnoticed. We were expecting killing robots, we didn’t realise we were drowned in AI generated garbage. We will never fight laser wearing Terminators. Instead, we have to outsmart algorithms which are making us dumb enough to fight one against the other. Time to enter into resistance, to fight back by being and acting like decent human beings. Disconnect. Go outside. Start human discussions. Refuse to take for granted "what was posted on the Internet". Meet. Touch. Smell. Build local businesses. Flee from monopolies. Refuse to quickly share and like things on your little brainwired screen. Stop calling a follower number "you community" and join small online human communities. Think. How to recognise true human communities free of algorithmics interferences? I don’t know. I don’t even know if there are any left. That’s frightening. But as long as we can pull the plug, we can resist. Disconnect!

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[ploum.net]Reinventing How We Use Computers
by Ploum.net (en) 03 Dec '22

03 Dec '22

REINVENTING HOW WE USE COMPUTERS by Ploum on 2022-12-03 https://ploum.be/2022-12-03-reinventing-how-we-use-computers.html Nearly two years ago, I put into words the dream I had for a durable computer. A computer that would be built for a lifetime. A computer that would not do everything but could do 80% of what I expect from it. I called this idea the Forever Computer. The computer built to last 50 years https://ploum.be/the-computer-built-to-last-50-years/index.gmi I expected to launch a conversation about what we really expect from computers. What do we really want from them? What are some limitations that could N free us? What if we didn’t have a pointer but still wanted to be user-friendly by avoiding cryptic key combinations? What if we only had rare and intermittent connections? What if we didn’t have a high-resolution screen? Thinking about that gave birth to Offpunk, a command-line and offline web browser. Offpunk https://sr.ht/~lioploum/offpunk/ Unsurprisingly, most of the reactions I had from my Forever Computer dream where about hardware. Every idea, every project I saw could be summarised as "How to make hardware we can repair while not questioning what we do with this hardware?" The (very interesting) Framework laptop is available as… a Chromebook. This is like transitioning to electric cars while having electricity generated from coal and not questioning why we ride in the first place. Oh, wait… By developing and using Offpunk, I had to think about what it means to use a computer. I ended up putting my fingers on a huge paradigm problem : we don’t have computers any more. We have "content consuming devices". The Consuming Screen ==================== On my typewriter, two small retractable metal holders allow the page to stand up while being written. It’s fairly common. I realised that I retract them to keep the paper flowing horizontally. Instead of building a wall of text between me and my environment, I stay open to my surroundings, I catch the ideas that are besides the machine, further away. On the Freewrite, the horizontal e-ink screen does exactly the same. And it works great. It allows me to see what I’m writing without being absorbed by it. On our computers, the screen is always bigger, shinier, brighter. It is designed to consume you while you consume content. It is a wall to lock you in, to make you prisoner of your little space. Developers need three screens to habit this virtual space. Meetings are now little rooms where everyone put a screen behind himself and others while pretending to listen to someone who connected his own screen to a projector (because the only way to have us outside of our own little screen is a bigger shared screen). Tablets and phones are screen-only computers designed to take our attention, to make us consume more and more contents even when we are with beloved ones. Browsing the Gemini network with Offpunk allowed me to realise how "consuming and producing content" was a disease and not something we ever wanted to do as humans. There is no content on Gemini https://ploum.be/2022-10-05-there-is-no-content-on-gemini.gmi The Lost Input ============== But while computers were transformed into screens, we completely lost the main input mechanism: the keyboard. It is not that the inefficient and absurd misaligned qwerty keyboard didn’t evolve. It actually worsened. We lost the mechanical keys in the search for flatness. We lost comfort. We lost any ergonomics. The only point was to make a keyboard as flat as possible and the same size as the screen to fit it in a laptop. With its infamous butterfly keyboard, Apple even managed to make it painful to type. And I’m not talking about those small touchscreen keyboards which still mimic a full, often misaligned, qwerty keyboard. We know what a good keyboard is. Independent tinkerers managed to build awesome stuff. There were some really interesting experiments but, in the end, it looks like every attempt at reinventing the keyboard ends in some kind of split orthogonal form with alternative layout (Dvorak, Colemak or, for me, Bépo). The Moonlander keyboard https://ergodox-ez.com/ The Typematrix keyboard http://typematrix.com/ Why haven’t we seen a single computer with such a built-in keyboard? Because computers are not built to type any more. There are built to consume content. Even professional coders spend more time consuming Slack messages and Github badge notifications than writing code. The Clamshell Compromise ======================== When you add a bright screen to a cramped keyboard, you end up with the worst possible design: the clamshell laptop. The clamshell is perfect to close it and put it in a bag. It is awful to use. It is like giving a triangle to a cello player before a concert because, hey, the triangle is easiest to travel with. With a clamshell, the keyboard and the screen are never where there should be. The keyboard is too high, forcing our arms and shoulders in a stressful position while the screen is too low and deforms our neck. Our body is suffering because we don’t want to think about what we do with our computers. As I was thinking why it was so relieving to let the paper roll horizontally on my typewriter, I realised that it allowed me not to read it all the time. I was encouraged to look outside while typing, having only glances at the paper. When lying lower, text is more comfortable to read horizontally. You only need a really slight angle to read a book open on a table. What it means for the Forever Computer ====================================== All those points made me realise that a true Forever Computer should be built "keyboard first". The keyboard should be the most important part, with a housing for travel. The same housing could host a small screen, possibly an e-ink one. While travelling, that would allow you to read deeply (with the screen in your hand, like an e-reader) or to attach it to the keyboard to write while not being absorbed by the screen. You separate the action of reading and writing instead of being always between two chairs. The keyboard would feature a port to plug a bigger screen that you could have at home or in your office. Those screens could be put on the wall or, like any external monitor, configured to be at eye level. When you think about it, it allows us to reintroduce the locality of action. Want to watch videos? Go to the living room and plug to the big screen. Want to code in an IDE or do some graphic work? Go to the office and plug into your desk’s screen. Not at your desk? You can read, takes notes, answer your emails (that will we synchronised when needed). But don’t pretend to code a little, answer a message, watch a video while eating at a restaurant. Flipping the trend ================== We currently own a screen with very minimal input to allow us to consume content and access our own data which are on some company servers. The only thing we own, the only thing we pay for is a screen. Sometimes with a bad keyboard. What I call the Forever Computer is exactly the opposite. You own your input (your favourite keyboard and trackball). You own your data (stored with the computer itself in the keyboard housing). The screen is only a commodity. You can share the screen, you can use someone else screen, you can plug to the one in your hotel room. This is the point where my dream made me realise what a nightmare our tech dystopia has become. When did building the same old laptop or phone with a handful of replaceable part became the epitome of sustainability and innovation? Why is cramming a few more pixels and a few more CPU cycles to allow hundred megabytes of JavaScript to render some text using a cool new font seen as "a revolution". Like any other tool, we should accept that you need to learn how to use a computer. Short-term UX marketing and regular updates with arbitrary changes in the interface have killed the very notion of "learning to use a computer". People have been reduced to "consumers having to adapt to the change of their consuming machine". We forgot that a computer should not hide how it works to be easy but instead allow its user to learn gradually about it. If we want durability, learnability is the key. When you learn something, you take care of it. You start to like it, to maintain it. It’s the opposite of forced upgrade cycles. I don’t know if there will be something like my "Forever Computer" in my lifetime. But there’s one thing I’m now certain: the ethical computer will be radically different of what we have in 2022. Or it will never be. Links and further resources =========================== I’m closely following the work done by MNT on its Reform and its future Reform Pocket computers. People like them are probably those that could reinvent computing and free us from the current paradigm. MNT Research https://mntre.com/ MNT Reform Pocket. https://mntre.com/media/reform_md/2022-07-01-july-update.html While not radical at all, the Framework is probably the most interesting project for regular computer users. Frawework laptops https://frame.work/fr/en

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