| ▲ | gentooflux 10 hours ago |
| RMS could have taken a photo of his screen, or done something cheeky like dump his screen to a padded ASCII text file and submitted that. Stick in the mud. |
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| ▲ | jasongill 6 hours ago | parent | next [-] |
| I met RMS at the Atlanta Linux Showcase in 1998. In the area with vendor booths in the lobby area of the show, he had laid down a blanket and was sitting in the middle with his legs crossed. He had printed copies of man pages printed and stapled together with covers laid out in front of him. I walked up and introduced myself and said that I was a big fan, appreciated his hard work, etc. He looked at me coldly and just said "so are you going to buy something?" and motioned toward the booklets. I didn't need a printed copy of the `sed` man page so I shrugged and he seemed quite annoyed, turned to his assistant with a notebook computer and started dictating something to them, as almost to make it clear that our interaction was over. I'm not sure what the point of posting this is, but that's my RMS story - it was my first "never meet your heroes" moment, I guess. |
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| ▲ | dotancohen 2 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | For what it's worth, I've never met the guy but I wrote to him once regarding the image of free software that people who are selling unsupported LibreOffice CDs are causing. He was willing to civilly discuss and listen to a different point of view. We never reached agreement, but I felt that so long as an interesting twist on something dear to him is being discussed, he is patient for discourse. | |
| ▲ | kh_hk an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | YMMV I guess, he was cool with signing my laptop at FOSDEM in 2013 and even exchanged a couple of jokes. Humans be humans. | |
| ▲ | BobbyTables2 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | Did he print those out on a printer with closed source software? (;-> | |
| ▲ | Longlius 6 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | I feel like rms just doesn't like human interaction generally. I've noticed that a lot of visionaries are that way. | | |
| ▲ | tjr 5 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | I've worked with RMS a good bit over the past few decades, and, in my interactions with him, he has always come across kind, helpful, and professional. | |
| ▲ | wahnfrieden 5 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | [flagged] |
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| ▲ | pmontra 17 minutes ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| Most likely that photo would have been on film in 2002. Shoot it, then wait to shoot all the pictures on the roll, bring the roll to a shop, get the prints, either scan the screenshot or mail it, with a stamp. A Polaroid would cut most of the wait time to zero. Anyway, still a lot of trouble compared to a few years later. By the way, I think RMS doesn't have a mobile phone even now. Somebody's else could have taken a picture for him. Phones with cameras were not common back then because what would you do with it on GSM? |
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| ▲ | ekjhgkejhgk 10 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| "I don't know how to make a screenshot" - what a fucking star. |
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| ▲ | jsk2600 10 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | This is the guy who is 'browsing' web using wget+email afterall: > For personal reasons, I do not browse the web from my computer. (I also have not net connection much of the time.) To look at page I send mail to a demon which runs wget and mails the page back to me. It is very efficient use of my time, but it is slow in real time. | | |
| ▲ | krackers 10 hours ago | parent [-] | | This makes sense if you want to reject the modern web, but using lynx or w3m would work as well. But if you generally want to champion free software and put the "personal" in PC, then I think you necessarily need to familiarize yourself with modern computing or else you can't really have a good opinion on it. For instance, if you refuse to play around with LLMs out of some dogmatic reason that they're not "truly" open (note: I don't know what his true opinions are), then you risk completely missing the boat and can't meaningfully shape the space of modern discourse. | | |
| ▲ | 29 minutes ago | parent | next [-] | | [deleted] | |
| ▲ | ekjhgkejhgk 10 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | No, you don't know what the reasons are. You're assuming he just wants to avoid graphical interfaces. That might not be the reason. In fact, I suspect that it has to do privacy, where lynx won't help you. | | |
| ▲ | krackers 9 hours ago | parent [-] | | What is the privacy leak vector using lynx? It does not use JS, so I'm not sure how running wget on another server is better than lynx over ssh or mosh? | | |
| ▲ | ekjhgkejhgk 9 hours ago | parent [-] | | I don't know, we're both speculating. I'm just advising against "oh he could just as well do X" - you don't know. |
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| ▲ | rightbyte 10 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | Ye I need more pure hearted dogmatism in my life such that I can say that and don't lie. Have some secretary send me webpages with obfuscated JS by fax when I need to sin. | | |
| ▲ | ekjhgkejhgk 9 hours ago | parent [-] | | I get that you're being sarcastic, but I actually think the world would be a kinder place if we had more of Stallman's flavor of pure hearted dogmatism. | | |
| ▲ | rightbyte 18 minutes ago | parent [-] | | Ye I agree. I was not sarcastic other than that I must aknowledge that I probably wouldn't go to that length becouse of weakness in my heart ;) |
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| ▲ | shevy-java 9 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | It is a strange answer because I use an alias to a ruby
script ("shot") which just wraps imagemagick mostly. So
I don't understand the "I don't know how to make a
screenshot" part of RMS really. He seems to never fully
understood why python or ruby are useful. | |
| ▲ | DonHopkins 9 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | I bet he knows how to make a Lisp Machine screenshot. | | | |
| ▲ | mvdtnz 7 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | He's just a contrarian wanker. Of course he knows how to take a screenshot. He just absolutely has to tell you that he uses text mode. | | |
| ▲ | 9dev 2 hours ago | parent [-] | | Heavens, thank you. It’s like people assume genius when RMS wiggles his little toe and wonder what grand intellectual insight might have moved Him to do so. | | |
| ▲ | ekjhgkejhgk 30 minutes ago | parent [-] | | Stallman has been right so many times, usually decades ahead of time. On each hype cycle when most of us were bewildering at the latest shiny thing, Stallman was spelling out exactly how companies would use it to exploit us. And I'm not talking about obvious garbage with zero upside like crypto and IoT, I'm talking about more subtle hype that actually did have a degree of upside, like the cloud or javascript for example. I think he deserves a little bit more respect than that. I'm not saying "lets suspend our critical thinking and just follow whatever RMS says", I'm saying "this guy has been decades ahead of time in the most fundamental matters like morality and justice, lets give his quirkness a little leeway". | | |
| ▲ | tormeh 14 minutes ago | parent [-] | | Industrial IoT is far from useless. Consumer IoT is pretty dumb, but let's not get too sad about the IoT as a whole. |
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| ▲ | nighthawk454 10 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| On the contrary, I think that was a wonderful answer and reflects the POV well. Hard to imagine something more Stallman-esque! |
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| ▲ | zvmaz 8 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| "I don't know how to make a screenshot" Linus Torvalds often says that he does not know how to do X (like install a Linux distribution, or other simple stuff). I wager that it's a status thing. |
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| ▲ | ekjhgkejhgk 19 minutes ago | parent | next [-] | | > I wager that it's a status thing. Yes, it's a form of signaling. It's like a milloinaire showing "I have so much money that I can dump 10k on a Rolex and not even think about it", or a billionaire showing "I have so much money I don't even need to dump 10k on a Rolex to show how much money I have". These guy's version is "I'm so technically accomplished, that I can tell you I don't know X basic thing and you'll interpret it as a sign of my genius". That's ok. In our society we attribute too much importance on money, I don't mind if the likes of Stallman and Linus get a bit more fanhood from the wider society than they currently do. | |
| ▲ | hombre_fatal 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | It’s disdain. | | |
| ▲ | ekjhgkejhgk 16 minutes ago | parent [-] | | Nah, I think he's right, it's signaling. I think Linus and Stallman don't have disdain for "civilians". I think Linus in particular has deep disdain for people who pretend to be competent and then are not up to scrutiny; he doesn't have those blowouts with dumbasses that he doesn't work with. On the other hand, someone who strikes me has having universal disdain is Carmack. |
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| ▲ | DANmode 10 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| He’s…something. |
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| ▲ | bigyabai 10 hours ago | parent | prev [-] |
| The Trisquel website has some screenshots. The 7.0 LTS is from 2014 so it's likely he was probably running something like this: https://trisquel.info/en/7.0-screenshots |
