@hipsterelectron do u think linus knows that most kernel mantainers are being paid to get backdoors in there or is he just blissfully unaware
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@fiore linus signed off on the (VERY OBVIOUS) backdoor in ML-DSA module signature verification back in march. while david howells (the red hat guy who did it) was obfuscating the changes made to his linux-fs branch from the general public by swamping the crypto/ changes in massive LLM-addled bullshit in the ceph filesystem, linus reviewed the change individually, and accepted it into his tree, while retaining the backdating that howells applied to foil git log traversal by date.
@fiore
every single thing linus accepts into his tree goes through the review board system at kernel dot org e.g. https://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/torvalds/linux.git/commit/?id=b6ee92d7f7f0498d1f776d0b125a2f6bcedf0891 there were stamps of approval from the entire linux crypto team collectively on the whole series of backdoors in crypto/ that went in during the 7.0 rc cycle (no individuals signed off on the changes except david howells, it was just a stamp of approval applied collectively which implicated the entire system in an instant)
@fiore so yes, i believe linus is in fact the top dog fuckboy extraordinaire and literally more dangerous than bill gates because he's incredibly effective at PR. the linux foundation is not laundering money to him from google and microsoft for no reason--he has clearly been an asset of the US security state for many years. i don't know or really care whether he started out that way--but i will note that the amoeba OS by andrew s tannenbaum is one of the two actually interesting operating systems ever made, and it was made during the 90s, when he was famously telling linus how monolithic kernels are an incoherent design methodology, after he expatriated from the US to the netherlands (somewhat the reverse of linus)
@hipsterelectron so basically when he dies itll just be the same but worse
like a free for all backdoor party
@fiore i think stallman was much closer to linus than either of them would like to believe and in fact i would be curious how much linus himself served to buttress the free software movement as a controlled opposition to the capitalism+fascism exercised by US intelligence agencies. particularly after learning from @astraleureka recently about the technological significance of tivo being a linux box that was also an incredibly popular product (and also the thing that directly spawned the GPLv3 after it failed to uphold copyleft provisions, causing stallman to repeat the phrase "tivoization" ad nauseum), i hadn't realized how much that in itself was not just a side note in the history of free software but in fact was also a huge impetus that led to linux becoming massive and overpowering every other unix-alike
@fiore i'm still confused as to why stallman accepted making coreutils, glibc, and gcc as the build and packaging system for linux instead of devoting any time at all on the hurd kernel. if stallman was such an MIT fuckboy he should have been all over making an operating system. instead he argued endlessly with gcc developers not to make a plugin system because uhhhhh his best buddy larry lessig said it would weaken copyleft!!!!
@fiore i get so pissed off about this page now https://www.gnu.org/licenses/why-not-lgpl.html because it has the fundamentally best prompt fucking ever
Proprietary software developers have the advantage of money; free software developers need to make advantages for each other.
huey p newton (who took courses for years at uc hastings law school) took this kind of comparison and then developed the black panther party out of it by leveraging the asymmetric advantages of legalized hipocrisy again and again in endlessly creative ways--the free breakfast program in particular was not just a genius move but one that they knew would never be matched by white supremacists.
that's an advantage you have by really thinking in opposition to your adversaries
@fiore stallman starts again:
Proprietary software developers, seeking to deny the free competition an important advantage, will try to convince authors not to contribute libraries to the GPL-covered collection.
this is it! this is the big moral distinction! this is where you explain how corporations like microsoft seek to disempower and disenfranchise everything they touch! how you can't give up control of your labor without turning your back on the poor, the tempest-tossed, the huddled masses yearning to breathe free!
@fiore it's the classic faustian bargain! indeed the reverend dr. martin luther king jr. wrote of his dissatisfaction with the white moderate in his letter from a birmingham jail:
First, I must confess that over the past few years I have been gravely disappointed with the white moderate. I have almost reached the regrettable conclusion that the Negro's great stumbling block in his stride toward freedom is not the White Citizen's Counciler or the Ku Klux Klanner, but the white moderate, who is more devoted to "order" than to justice; who prefers a negative peace which is the absence of tension to a positive peace which is the presence of justice; who constantly says: "I agree with you in the goal you seek, but I cannot agree with your methods of direct action"; who paternalistically believes he can set the timetable for another man's freedom; who lives by a mythical concept of time and who constantly advises the Negro to wait for a "more convenient season."
@fiore the white moderate is the mutex protecting the sanctity of the critical section, as if the practice of law and courtroom decorum were not artifacts written in blood, as if law were a form of logic, a theological claim from the book and not a compromise adopted between 12 angry men who hung their own jury because they could no longer bring themselves to condemn another human to death so casually!
@fiore but stallman, who was jealous of marvin minsky's success in developing computers to break cryptography for the navy and subsequently led to the first AI winter in the 1970s which would end the gravy train of "symbolic" computations that funded stallman's work writing emacs lisp in the MIT AI lab
Perceptrons is now viewed as of more historical than practical interest, but his theory of frames was in wide use as of 1975.[43]
and richard instead just stalls the budding resistance in its tracks again:
For example, they may appeal to the ego, promising “more users for this library” if we let them use the code in proprietary software products.
EGO? i don't give a FUCK about "MORE USERS". i'm not solving the problems of a corporation unless they pay me half a million a year for me to allow them to waste my fucking time solving their problems instead of catching up to leonhard fucking euler
@fiore imagine never having to learn or achieve anything in your entire life because the military just pays MIT unbelievable sums of money to keep up the illusion of "intelligence". and then suddenly it falls apart and it turns out you were never interested in doing science, just the ~idea~ of being a ~scientist~:
Popularity is tempting,
never in my entire life have i been tempted by popularity
and it is easy for a library developer to rationalize the idea that boosting the popularity of that one library is what the community needs above all.
i know this was in fact a relatable moment of genuine vulnerability offered to the reader from the MIT AI lab bro, but i in fact have never felt that the harm of fucking people over would be made up for in the future somehow
@fiore and watch him playing out his first semester coursework in game theory from von neumann:
But we should not listen to these temptations,
says the guy who sexually harasses any woman who has ever been starry-eyed about the dream of the free software movement
because we can achieve much more if we stand together.
says the libertarian whose email signature still mentions snowden and the NSA and who has never once been interested in developing safe cryptography or operating systems
We free software developers should support one another.
meaning you should support my centrist utopia where we engage with the legal system at face value instead of undermining or subverting it. the prisoner's dilemma is the common scenario where you would like to fuck someone over, but are faced with a temporary embarrasment of your accustomed riches
@fiore look he really cannot possibly conceive of how any community-owned software project could ever be genuinely better than the proprietary "counterparts":
By releasing libraries that are limited to free software only, we can help each other's free software packages outdo the proprietary counterparts.
that's not what "outdoes" proprietary software. you need to develop spaces where people can take a chance on things that are unprofitable and in fact anti-profitable. there's no "counterpart" to this!
@fiore cryptography that achieves real safety and robustness for real humans by connecting and protecting data streams to serve the linguistic communication between users is not fucking exciting at all.
there's no element of risk at all if you're doing it right. the titanic was sinkable because its entire bit was edging itself into orgasm over how bold it was to just build a big ship that didn't follow any engineering principles. it's all just variations on the pump and dump ad nauseum ad absurdum
@fiore LINUX DELENDA EST!
that's basically how the architecture of linux is designed--to actively reject any sense of aesthetics, and indeed to actively spite any attempt at cohesion, and to defile beauty since it serves as a counterexample to the blissful nihilism among fascists
