The FOSS community have generally grown a kind of tacit acceptance of proprietary computer games. Everyone loves them, so nobody wants to make too much of a fuss, but I think we have good reasons to treat them differently.

Computer games do not - by default - require environment interaction. They can (mostly) operate …

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A lot of people who see the Gemini protocol for the first time come up with the same criticism:

If you hate the modern web's bloat, why not just use minimal html?

Gemini has a number of advantages over a series of small html websites.

Unity

When people say 'minimal html', they all have different ideas about what that …

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People often talk in terms of the false dichotomy between pragmatic software use, and ethical software use.

'Us pragmatic folks', they begin, 'just want to use what works'. We should understand of course that they have nothing against people who have principles, but would prefer functioning to non-functioning …

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I love LaTeX because it can do things nothing else can. I have to use it, because it can do things nothing else can.

But it has some deep problems.

Packages

I think the biggest root of problems is having packages, rather than just having people submit a pull request on a central repository and add whatever feature …

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These are some commands you can do from any Linux terminal. They all run through someone else's server, so any information you send will be visible to the owner.

Get the Current Weather

curl wttr.in

It's best to open the terminal full-screen here to see the full result.

You can also do a city. For some reason, the …

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Privacy for one makes very little sense. As individual as an individual might be, humans think in groups. We talk, research, and revise ideas together.

I once had super-encrypted email with Tutanota. Nobody could see it, even with a court order, because the emails were persistently encrypted on the server's disk, and …

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