I remember free software used to be fun and local. I would say like peasantly pleasant.
We were amazed by how much it would make our « old computers » raise from the dead whereas bros with expensive hardware were stuck with a huge learning curve to do in years what we could do fast.
In my years of coding I learnt one thing : the importance of not building frameworks, but to focus on solving small problem fast and, eventually to draw.
or
#!/usr/bin/bash
chr() { [[ $1 == 0 ]] && echo -n \0 || printf \\$(printf '%03o' $1) ; }
W=$( cut -d "," -f 1 /sys/class/graphics/fb0/virtual_size )
H=$( cut -d "," -f 2 /sys/class/graphics/fb0/virtual_size )
S=$(( $( cat /sys/class/graphics/fb0/stride ) / $W ))
echo -n $( chr 65 )
echo $( chr 80 )
die() {
echo "$@";
exit 1;
}
[[ "$S" == 4 ]] || die "ça va pas marcher"
for ((y=0;y<H;y++)); do
for ((x=0;x<W;x++)); do
echo -n $( chr $(( x % 255)) )$( chr $(( y%255)) )$( chr $(( ( x + y ) % 255 )) )$( chr 255)
done;
done
Resulting in this
I always loved the fact that if you focus on doing something with all the tools you have and have no « religion » you can go fast on linux, hacking like a brute your way to a result in very few "lines of code".
I used to be a perl monger, go to linux user group, and computing was funnier when it was making relationships between users and without ... gatekeeping.
I do blame linux and the notoriety brought to free software by big corporation to be the problem. Most big companies loves free code and are lousy contributors on more than one level.
But, well, the real matter is not the strength of the companies but the weakness of the community.
First of all, what is the community made of today ?
People craving for fame. Because most free software are poors, while a few one get all the bucks.
If we don't discuss the awesome contributors begging for money to do great work while some incompetent know all but do nothing are living in luxury we are missing something here.
There is a struggle in this community that revolves about gatekeeping and gaslighting. It pretty obvious to me now, that the great offenders are the same responsible for toxicity in information technology : the bro coders.
There are not only the shiny brod dudes of web3.0 and crypto shit, they are also and most often the well educated from the Ivy League and university alike. They made a hell of the community by imposing their standards.
Coding and getting the job done is not what matters nowadays. It is mostly how you dissert on it, present it, make it available to the community. Free software as become as flawed as public research. People don't want to share their work, they want the fame of being noticed, even project that are already famous steal other people's code without attributing the paternity. I am very disturbed when I check on a python binding on libmagick to discover the « guenine code » from the libmacick python module is posterior to another one, with a different licence, and no attribution. It actually sickens me to see a project already famous doing that to a small contributor doing its job correctly.
I do not count the number of time like in the log4j case coders that are never supported are bullied into working for free and almost insulted. That's the day I am so fucking glad I am not notorious enough to have my code used. People seem to think they have a right to not care of developers state poverty and boss them around for their selfish interests of shining in their own organization.
Well, fuck you the wealthy stinky guys.
Also, you see, I don't like ALL major geeky news website doing a ban on political or polemic topic. There should be a lot of discussion about political outcome of computer usage.
From what is the actual contribution to climate change of our use of computers and the infrastructure they require (electricity does not come magically) to bias in dataset that are then propagated in the software learning from them, to the danger of creating databases of people with their location, sex, age, political opinions and addresses. We could also the discuss the unfair share of value being distributed to the persons actually doing the code in free software community to the one making money out of it. I am not here to actually talk about this, I do rant against the fact we tabooed any political discussions in computer related field for the sake of « avoiding conflicts », and it is making me uneasy. Because, this is only what people profiting from exploitation and bullying do. Hence, we see here a troubling pattern of free software having structured itself in pyramidal structures (fundations, projects) and borrowing all the bad behaviours of clergymen.
First free software has a huge problem of cult of personality. We see the community worthy only for those who are succeeding and present them like stars. Except for events like FOSDEM that are still better.
But, there has been a trending concern of religious like evangelism with technology. If crypto-scam comes into mind, languages, frameworks, « one best ways » of structuring a project comes into mind.
What I call religious is trying to impose views and brushing aside all polemics. Rust community comes to my mind has a language that seems interesting to learn but which community is so painfully arrogant I don't want to code in that language.
I do code in python, but since it structured itself in an elitist community with actually awesome core developers it has become also quite tough to talk to them.
There is like a sectarist way of getting your contributions being accepted. Since all this people are PhD at least you have to use their language and their « commonly accepted wisdom » are non disputable. They refuse critics too and are driving people not breathing with python in disputable death marches.
Among them were the python3, the asyncio death march that I fearly doubt will result in an outstanding improvement in regard to the effort poured by maintainer, the religion of typing.
But, you hear no one complain. And that's what bugs me the most. Coders at the bottom of the pyramid not endure this shit without complaining, they even seems to accept more shit further.
Like our platforms for collaborating have always been a pain in the ass since sourceforge (the old github) and savannah (the old gitlab). Being a sysadmin I hate installing these tools and maintaining them. The tools for ticketing, documentation, peer reviews, interacting online have had a phenomenal bloat in complexity and death by a one thousand cut of attention sucking and ritualisation. I would even in all fairness command line use of git.
Very few in the community seem to think an actual static website with a few doc, an email and tarballs is an acceptable way of sharing code anymore in our modern days. We all have industrial standards for our projects to help the companies rip off our values better so they don't have to adapt to us.
Hence we face a dilemna : either we spend money we don't have in hosting our own tools to be independent and relieve ourselves of the toxic IT like openBSD hermits or we use their tools that puts on us an overload of administrative tasks that are infuriating.
We are buying a world of « one best ways » by convenience. But this « one best way » is often a forced point of view that is based solely on the point of view of elitist cunts that often come out of bias on the « best way to work and having no fun ». Yep, Free Software has been depleted of fun by trying to prove something, like it's where we craft the best tools, and that's when we enter competition that we forget cooperation and cease to be a caring community.
At one point, all the mass of funding in free software is allocated on fame, because some idiots don't actually believe in the community but the « bests among us ». I won't paste the xkcd dependency referring to internet depending on imageMagick being maintained by an obscure one man army in nebraska since 2003 but it pretty much highlight the problem. The fairest way of solving the growing fragility of free software supply chain and dependency would be to ensure ALL humanity has decent wages and enough time for hobbies without distinction of birth, sex, religion, origin, countries, but funnily enough most free software coders I know are ferociously more anti unionist and anything that is close to a society where wealth is shared than the average joe.
I know how it is gonna ends up very soon : with the recession coming, the « great depression » and possibly an internet bubble explosion the mental health of most precarious maintainers and benevolent is gonna be sucked dry. The only sectors that are gonna still pay are organized crime. The acceptable one called government, and the more shady ones relying on scamming the vulnerable ones.
Once out of the keyboard world all this free time spent cut from their local communities and building « real world » skills will leave former free software contributors on the pavement like decaying useless turds with depression.
They will be all the more depressed then they will discover computers prevent us from buying actual reliable production goods. There is a computer with pig coded software everywhere that is brittle that replaced almost all appliance. Even fucking ovens. And we cannot fix them, because by listening to the idiots of « the ARM/USB/IEEE XXXX/ISO/ANSI/W3C/(put any language, platform, cloudish idiocy, framework or OS here)/ is the one best way, », we are cornering ourselves in a world where if you don't have money and comprehension and possession of an outstanding range of hardware equipment and tools we are driven away from even the most trivial hardware manipulation with a computer.
We have basically by denying ourselves the right to be free and raise our concerns helped to build a future in which the skills we honeyed are gonna be useless and we are gonna be powerless.
Diversity matters, but not the one of displaying pictures with blue, yellow, short or tall humans. The real diversity in a community is the social diversity. And since well educated with good intentions took over the playfield of free software ideologically, technically, economically and in public influence, it had become a dystopian aristocratic orwellian nightmare.
The inertia is such I don't believe the tendency will curb any time soon. But, in my new life out of this community I learned to not make the same mistakes again.
First I went back to coding, but only for fun. And I discovered the interesting code for companies has to be boring to use and create. Like confined (github) which basically is a research on how to do a « safe eval » templating language.
Well, no for, no while, no goto, no function, no access to file or hardware, memory, boring binary coded decimal that are harder to use than float an int. You only have a stack to work with and limited number of cycles, limited stack, limited string size. I think I will stop there, because it is not the language I want to build for my daughter to learn computer programming. Fun is inherently unsafe. So I will probably build a new toy forth like uxn forth. Forth are really easy to make into a language.
Secondly, I discovered it is actually faster to have a result in rushing like a boar. Coding requires focus. Our modern tools and ritual of doing stuff the « one best way » (including, CI, tests, docs, trying to gate fame/attentions/recognition) perturbs our precious focus.
Once you are focused you rediscover the pleasure of getting things done and working. You even achieve results better than the one you envision you could, and it is often by not « following the one best way ». For the fun I installed prompt_toolkit which is a very complete framework for doing command line utility, but I soon discovered I was best done hacking an history saving manually than using there most complete solution. Dependencies are not a problem of creating a weakness and sucking 20 times your code size in dependency for a luxury, they also suck you in a mindset that can conflict with yours that is often your actual best tool at hand.
Lastly by attacking problems that I was told were too complex to be done correctly without using a framework, I discovered that our foundations are more than questionable, often because of aggregated layers of conservatism called necessary progresses crusted in all our full stack from the hardware up to the languages. I am even more and more convinced we should have a talk about unicode, integers and floats, documents, files and the utility of cryptography (except for ssh). All these solutions rose often from brilliant mind having maybe solved the wrong problem and half knowledgeable people being persistent (because money matters) and famous enough to not only built them but forced their adoptions. This cult of personality that bloats the software world is the same as the one in the real world, at one point. And if it basically destroyed the « virtual » community, it destroys the real world in the same way. I got rid of my « impostor syndrome » by forgetting my ego, and rejecting trying to be a member of a community which values I don't recognize anymore as welcoming (except maybe BSD communities that are a different bunch even in real life and the only one I still frequent).
My final thought is that it is weird that by becoming bigger and valuating so much personal achievement, we have actually destroyed what made communities interesting : ourselves, selfishly. Because when you dilute yourself in the « one best way » of doing progress you actually lose your originality which makes you an interesting asset to the community. You don't need to shine, or be famous to be an asset. You just need to enjoy and have fun not fulfilling the greedy needs of foreigners who don't care, but sometimes you, your family and friends with small improvements. We have lost the sense of helping trivially. I do long for the community computer club were people from all ages and background would gather in a crappy community room to crack games exchange the cheat codes, try to repair old stuffs, help with installing the dreadful printer, experiment, assist others in beginning to code in assembly, solder to replace a burnt condensator...
Oh, I really miss it, and I checked google, according to it there is not a single one in my half a million inhabitant city except in the « MIT » and « oxbridge » like places near me where you guessed I won't set a foot and meet the toxic bros of higher education.
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