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posted by mrpg on Saturday December 16 2017, @03:09PM   Printer-friendly
from the #! dept.

Lifehacker has an Interview with Brian Fox, the author of the Bash shell.

Brian Fox is a titan of open source software. As the first employee of Richard Stallman’s Free Software Foundation, he wrote several core GNU components, including the GNU Bash shell. Now he’s a board member of the National Association of Voting Officials and co-founder of Orchid Labs, which delivers uncensored and private internet access to users like those behind China’s firewall. We talked to him about his career and how he works.

[...] I first recall being interested in technology at the age of 6. My father, a physicist at Bolt, Beranek and Newman, had a teletype machine in the basement of the house we were living in. It connected to BBN via a modem. The baud rate was probably around 110bps—quite low. I used to hold down the CTRL key while pressing “G”, which would cause the bell to ring.

[...] I joined with my other 4 co-founders in 2017 to create the Orchid Protocol for a truly decentralized, surveillance-free internet.


Original Submission

 
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  • (Score: 0, Offtopic) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday December 16 2017, @04:12PM (6 children)

    by Anonymous Coward on Saturday December 16 2017, @04:12PM (#610715)

    I don't mind OT comments like this because it is true that a smaller and smaller percentage of websites contain a reasonable content/junk ratio. This is a big problem that needs to be dealt with somehow (perhaps the web needs to be forked or something, can we just put all crap like that directly on Facebook?).

    However, I will say that I've removed soylent from my favorites due to too much political content and will probably slowly forget about it. Even many non-political topics get turned toxic by political commentators now.

    The final straw for me was my post (the FP) here: https://soylentnews.org/article.pl?sid=17/12/10/2256224 [soylentnews.org]

    There was a response that "FTF[me]" using a quote that had nothing to do with what I was saying. Then a pointless political debate ensued. It is like these political posts are made by bots...

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  • (Score: 4, Interesting) by requerdanos on Saturday December 16 2017, @04:29PM (5 children)

    by requerdanos (5997) Subscriber Badge on Saturday December 16 2017, @04:29PM (#610718) Journal

    Even many non-political topics get turned toxic by political commentators now.

    This is very, very annoying; I'd love to see a "-10 Pointlessly Political" mod similar to but perhaps not quite as penalizing as the "spam" mod.

    I really view the "Yeah, well [current story] is all because [a politician i do not like] is such an [insult deliberately and childishly misspelled], and you are an [insult to intelligence] if you say you don't see it!!!eleventy-one!" posts as a more pernicious form of spam, because they falsely claim to be on-topic, and a certain percentage of commenters actually fall for the premise that they are on-topic instead of just trolling garbage, and reply to them, derailing discussions into pointless political sewage as you note.

    That said, I believe that GP is on-topic because Stallman actually does object to his words and images being presented in such an environment; he says things like "if you're recording a video of me, please don't encode it in em pee anything, and please don't post it to youtube." With Fox being the author of Bash, one of GNU's flagship applications, I do think it's interesting that their views seem to differ on things like that.

    • (Score: 3, Interesting) by Justin Case on Saturday December 16 2017, @04:33PM (4 children)

      by Justin Case (4239) on Saturday December 16 2017, @04:33PM (#610721) Journal

      I'd love to see a "-10 Pointlessly Political" mod

      Would you settle for "Offtopic"?

      More to the (offtopic) point, perhaps we could have a "Political" mod understood to have the same applicability as "Offtopic" but with an option so you could filter such posts in or out of your "Soylent experience (TM)".

      • (Score: 2) by requerdanos on Saturday December 16 2017, @04:39PM (3 children)

        by requerdanos (5997) Subscriber Badge on Saturday December 16 2017, @04:39PM (#610724) Journal

        I'd love to see a "-10 Pointlessly Political" mod

        Would you settle for "Offtopic"?

        No; I see "offtopic" as a mild frown, compared to what I would rather see, "heavy munitions."

        More to the (offtopic) point, perhaps we could have a "Political" mod understood to have the same applicability as "Offtopic" but with an option so you could filter such posts in or out of your "Soylent experience (TM)".

        This wouldn't do what I am thinking about here, because taking it out of the stream just for those who choose to ignore it would not prevent it from pretending to be ontopic just enough to derail discussion. Your post and my reply here are offtopic, sure, but are not likely to degenerate into a pointless flame war about which unrelated political group "sucks" or "rocks" more, and that's the difference that concerns me.

        • (Score: 2) by Justin Case on Saturday December 16 2017, @04:43PM (2 children)

          by Justin Case (4239) on Saturday December 16 2017, @04:43PM (#610726) Journal

          Controlling your own behavior is much easier than controlling everyone else. What's the difference to you if you don't see it vs. nobody can see it?

          Maybe you would like it better if your personal setting that filters out comments with the "Political" mod would also trickle down (not trying to get political here!) to all child posts.

          • (Score: 2) by requerdanos on Saturday December 16 2017, @04:55PM (1 child)

            by requerdanos (5997) Subscriber Badge on Saturday December 16 2017, @04:55PM (#610731) Journal

            Maybe you would like it better if your personal setting that filters out comments with the "Political" mod would also trickle down (not trying to get political here!) to all child posts.

            That's actually not too bad an idea, but it still fails to discourage the pointless-political-posturing-posts from siphoning energy and comments away from the community and into pointless-political-posturing-pisspots.

            Discouraging that sort of derailing of the conversation is effective even if I personally never see it, and failing to discourage it is ineffective even if I am somehow able to personally read everything but the problem 24/7.

            • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday December 18 2017, @04:46PM

              by Anonymous Coward on Monday December 18 2017, @04:46PM (#611449)

              You are seeking a technological solution to a problem based on the nature of humans.
              All I can say is nobody has yet succeeded with that. People talk about what they want to talk about. Add really heavy moderation and that becomes a problem in itself with power tripping a-hole types.