motters

As a long time C coder I checked this out, because I have my own malloc replacement. The source code is nonsensical garbage.

It's not embodiment that's important so much as situatedness. An agent can be situated without having a physical instantiation.

An agent which does not have a place or time is not recognisable as being autonomous, or capable of recognising others as such.

I hope that this will also apply to mobile phones.

The answer is quite likely to be yes. But then when you consider who is the primary typical user of a spreadsheet and ask yourself "are they likely to learn Lisp?" then the answer is no.

Mediagoblin is also available as an app on Freedombone (https://freedombone.net)

For software I've written while working at companies I didn't have control over the license choice, but for that which I've written voluntarily nearly all of it (and there's quite a laundry list now) is under GPL or AGPL. This is because, as some other comments have mentioned, I want any other users of the software to have the same capabilities to change it as I did. I don't want there to be secret proprietary versions which then get distributed in closed form denying the potential for participation.

The ability of users to have genuine control over their systems has been under sustained attack for a long time. I may be only one developer but at least I can make a small ding in the dark empire of bad software practices.

"If you live here, even if you are the poorest person in the country, you are rich beyond the dreams of half the population of the world"

Really? Have you ever been in The Work Programme? Have you ever visited a food bank? Have you ever had neighbours pleading with you for food for their children because they have no money? You can prefer to live inside of a cosy bubble of ignorance if you wish, but this is the UK in 2016.

As someone who has always been a UK citizen and is old enough to remember decades past I can say with confidence that this statement is not accurate.

The BBC is very much a state run organization. The people who ultimately decide what happens to the BBC - The BBC Trust - are appointed by "queen in council", which in practice means government ministers.

I think GNU Social should be pretty scalable, and that's because it's not a centralized paradigm with all users in one titanic database. Currently I'm running my own instance (one user on the server) and then federating with the rest, so that kind of setup should be scalable to the size of the web.

Again that may just be the wrong paradigm. If you are especially concerned about disappearance of a server then just run your own installation. This is partially why I'm making debian packages for GNU Social, to make that process easy.

There isn't really any "different federation". You just follow whoever you want to follow, regardless of what server they're on.

It's just not a centralized paradigm. Joining an existing server means you'll be subject to whatever moderation policy the admin has. Or you can just run your own server and then federate with the rest, as I do.

Although I dislike capitalism in general I think that message should be changed to something more neutral. Maybe some capitalists might want to have their own GNU Social site where they can boast about swindling, exploitation and their beloved centralization of everything.

In my debian package for the qvitter plugin that message already gets replaced, but I can also submit a patch upstream.

I run a system called Freedombone, and maintenance of GNU Social is not really an issue. If I'm not actively working on it there is no maintenance involved.

GNU Social is on the road map for FreedomBox and that's why I've recently been making debian packages for it.

I've recently been making some debian packages for GNU Social, if anyone wants to try them out.

https://git.gnu.io/bashrc/gnusocial-debian https://git.gnu.io/bashrc/gnusocial-qvitter-debian

In particular it's the qvitter plugin which makes this system really usable, both on desktop and mobile.

I hope it's not another recession. We've not even recovered from the last one yet.

I think this is a straw man, because whether the internet is centralised or decentraised doesn't depend on how knowledgeable its users are.

We have a decentralised transport system, and modern vehicles are very sophisticated, but that doesn't mean that every driver needs to be an expert mechanic or embedded systems engineer.

It is scary to think about because automated exploits could perhaps be scaled up and cause real mayhem. Hopefully it doesn't have to get that far before some elementary redesign of network architecture inside of vehicles. It's not rocket science. Just separate the safety critical network (which include brakes, steering, etc) from the non critical information and entertainment network.

Sadly, accidents are probably going to happen before infotainment gets decoupled from CAN bus. You don't just need a firewall, those need to be on physically separate networks.

Since notifications from Facebook will contain mostly predictable content won't these just become cribs for crackers?

Also see https://github.com/bashrc/libdeep-python

See also https://github.com/bashrc/fin

That's the thing about unix-like systems. No matter how much you have learned there's always some command you don't know.

Seeing people with lots of money doesn't depress me, although reading about people struggling with money or health issues can be depressing.

In my case I don't care that person X has more money than I do, since as long as I have enough for basic living money itself isn't something which I care deeply about.

As far as I can tell from his Wikipedia bio, Thiel hasn't done anything significantly innovative since PayPal. It looks like he supplied money for some other things, but that's about it.

My current strategy is to host on Github and mirror to Gogs on my own server. I might eventually swap that around. There are advantages to Github in terms of the number of eyeballs and ability to search, but I expect that it will go the way of all proprietary systems and probably will start becoming evil sooner or later. Developers have faith in Github in the same manner that they once had faith in Google and Google Code.