Git turns 20: A Q&A with Linus Torvalds

Pretty sure he’s older than that. And calling people names isn’t nice!

There may still be lawsuits, however. There are still many ways that he could lose a lot of what he gained.

First, we’ll take away the headphone jack.

Then, we’ll remove everything else!

My understanding from what you’re writing (and from this article) is that the phone number is really the account number. That’s all well and fine, but then they force you to verify that the number is yours (or at the very least, one that you have access to because you need to receive a confirmation over SMS), so you can’t use something more private. And sure, it makes it a little harder to find your new contact, but I don’t think it’s really that big of a deal - just exchange your other “account number” via some other channel.

Besides, don’t think for a second that when this identifying information inevitably falls into the wrong hands that it will benefit you in any way. “What are you hiding, citizen?” and all that bullshit.

The part of it that bothers me is the sense of entitlement that these companies exhibit. The “Give us your phone number or fuck off” sentiment is something I just refuse to accept. If Google forces us to do the same and we refuse, what makes Signal think that we’ll do it for them when they’re so much smaller by comparison? Especially when you’re trying to claim you’re more secure and private to people that much more tech savvy than average, this just comes off as not understanding your audience very well. I’m sure I’m not the only one that is holding out against using Signal because of this.

I’m surprised this hasn’t been said yet… but what I hate most about Signal is its requirement for a phone number. I don’t want to be identified, and I want to be able to create multiple separate accounts with different identities if I want to.

I also hate the fact that it’s a mobile-first service. Yes, there is a desktop application (and just one really crappy one at that), but it’s clearly designed to revolve first and foremost around your phone and be virtually impossible to use without one. As someone who hates writing on a 3-inch screen, this is a also non-starter for me.

I understand the arguments about perfectionism, but this is too much. I’ll stick with XMPP, Matrix and IRC, thanks.

but I no longer believe that it is possible to build a competitive federated messenger at all.

The fact that we have a telephone system that works with separate providers contradicts this sentiment. If I want to pick up the phone and talk to my cousin’s puppy in New Zealand, I can do that without creating an account on his provider’s service.

I don’t understand why we’ve forgotten this as a society. Yes, it was difficult to upgrade the phone systems over the past century, but it’s worth it in my opinion. I really wish we’d start seeing government regulation that says “you should be able to talk to someone on a service without having to create an account on said service.” I thought the DMA would do this, but sadly, Whatsapp still requires an account to talk to people using that service. Very disappointing.

The colors in the peertube logo are pretty hideous.

Are we claiming now that Activity Pub is the only protocol that we can use for the fediverse? I think XMPP is roughly 30 years old at this point, and I’m pretty sure Activity Pub is much younger than that. I could be wrong though.

But regardless, I don’t see why Activity Pub has to be the only protocol we accept to be considered a part of the fediverse. It’s not even like different AP implementations talk to each other all that well. My understanding is that Mastodon doesn’t federate that well with Lemmy, and I haven’t seen Loops or Pixelfed on Lemmy yet either.

I’d be happy to be corrected on any of this though, I haven’t looked too closely into exactly how AP works or how it’s supposed to interoperate with different applications.

No you don’t! That’s why we have key-signing parties!

It is very sad indeed. I went through the same experience when I wanted a license plate to commemorate Albert Heijn.

While I think this is a good idea (because copyright is a stupid concept in the digital age), the problem with this proposal is that Europe is also very pro-copyright. Doing something like this would probably piss off Americans, but if it also pisses off your next best ally as well, it’s probably not going to work out.

That’s actually very easy to do and you don’t need any special equipment. Simply use a male-male 3.5mm cable and connect one end from the stereo output of the cassette player and the other end into the microphone jack of any computer you own. Play the cassette - you can test the audio quality by running arecord -f cd - | aplay - - you will have to tune the volume output of the cassette player and the input sensitivity of the microphone.

From there, if you’re paranoid, you could use arecord to save the output to a .wav file and encode it once the recording is done, but I had no problem just using oggenc directly on the piped audio. The final command looked like this: arecord -f cd - | oggenc -q 5 -o file.ogg - (change to -q 10 if you want lossless encoding).

I’m not sure if this is the best quality per se, but I would definitely recommend it over using specialized equipment like cassette-mp3 converters. The problem with those devices is that if they use underpowered hardware, you might experience buffering issues where the encoding hardware can’t keep up with the audio stream or something like that. But doing it on a computer ensures that you will have all the processing power you need to make sure that this doesn’t happen.

Good luck! I found it very easy to do - it took 5-10 minutes of setup.

For me, the most important thing is always simply understanding who has what role in the company. When I have a question, knowing whether I ought to ask my direct manager, other colleagues on the team, a subject matter expert, other management teams, our sysadmins, etc. is the most difficult thing to figure out. It can take months sometimes.

For-profit companies are perpetually locked in a conflict of interest. Inevitably, they will have to decide between what is in the best interest of their users (or other public interests such as the environment for example) with their never-ending obsession to make ever more money. No matter what they say or do publicly, they will always sell out for more profit.

In this case, a bunch of Silicon Valley investors (people who have collectively made trillions over every iteration of IT progress) are forcing “AI” to be the next thing. They have basically decided that they want all tech progress to focus on this area and are forcing every company they invest in to make that happen, regardless of the societal impact.

As a result, you can see clearly that all of these companies (Google, Microsoft, Facebook, Reddit) are basing all their business decisions into trying to make this fantasy become a reality. Even Apple now, the masters of creating a facade of privacy is falling straight into line. And the one thing they all have in common: investors.

And that is why you should always be wary of interacting with big business interests - they will inevitably sell you out someday.

And innovative gameplay too. Large companies are too afraid to try new things, and all the games feel like the same rehashed mechanics with a fresh coat of paint… but indie developers are much more willing to try new, interesting concepts.

MOBILE USERS CAN GO FUCK THEMSELVES.

Phew. That felt good.

Website redesigns. Just more whitespace all over the place, less information on the screen, and more trouble trying to get anything done.

Github is especially bad about this. I’m so tired of only being able to fit about 50 lines of code on the screen at a time, or issues with a similar lack of information density. I can understand this paradigm for websites that you only use once every year or so, but for something that most people use regularly every day, it’s such a backwards anti-productivity trend. I hate it… hope it dies someday.

Search engines are websites that people used to go to in order to get helpful information. These days, they just spam out a bunch of SEO garbage, AI-generated bullshit, and ads.

Google, probably

But part of the appeal of Linux is the fact that you can repurpose existing computers running other OSes to run Linux instead. This is a great way to lower the barrier to entry for Linux, because it’s easy to test it on a Live USB or a dual boot. It’s much harder to do this on phones because they have locked bootloaders.

Another problem is that phones are not productivity devices - they’re consumption devices. Maybe this is just my personal bias, but I don’t think people will be as passionate about liberating their phones because they’re inherently less useful than computers. Convenient, yes, but useful? Not as much.

That said, I would love to be proven wrong. I would definitely consider a Linux phone if they become more popular/useful, but I can’t really justify spending hundreds of euros/dollars on something for which I don’t see any particular use.

I think each of these needs to be handled in separate ways. For example, search could continue to be a conglomeration that includes maps, mail and possibly cloud. Android can just be split very easily into a separate company and same for Youtube, since that would basically be another Netflix or whatever.

Ads, in my opinion, is the most important one though. That absolutely has to be shattered into thousands of tiny pieces, all of which need to be forced to compete with each other, for the benefit of all internet companies anywhere. It would be a massive boon to companies everywhere and would provide an opportunity for lots of innovation in the advertising space, ie. trying ads that are less intrusive or ones that are cheaper because they don’t rely on tracking information.

And another thing I think people need to understand about search is that building the search engine is not the hard part - the hard part is figuring out how to pay for it. Search is really expensive - crawling websites, indexing, fighting spam abuse. That’s what really makes Google successful - the fact that they coupled it with advertising so that they could cover all the expenses that come with managing a search engine. That’s much more important than the quality of the results, in my opinion.

And as for Chrome: well, personally I think that monopoly has been the most damaging to the internet as a whole. I would love to see it managed as part of a non-profit consortium. There should not be any profit motive whatsoever in building a web browser. If you want a profit motive, build a website - the browser should just be the tool to get to your profit model, not the profit model itself. And therefore it should be developed by multiple interest groups, not just one advertising company.

Anyway, I know this is all an impossible fantasy. Nothing in the world is done because it’s right or wrong, it’s done because it serves whoever holds the most power. But if there were a just world, this is what I think it would look like.