Greetings, i was an active reader for a bit way back (more than 2 1/2 decades ago) upon first engaging with the internet back when this was a newsgroup
i attended libreplanet in Boston back in March of this year (and it was not my first year doing so); as a result, i subscribed to the libreplanet mailing list, where i just noticed a message there (tagged onto the end of a thread which people were debating the "on-topic-ness" of) from Jorge P. de Morais Neto <jorge+l...@disroot.org> Thank you so much Jorge for alerting me to the fact that this forum still exists. My introduction to technology really happened as a direct result of my engagement with gnu stuff (and a lot of it had to do with this newsgroup opening my eyes). i remain a free software zealot to this day, although i also do make a lot of compromises (my day job involves dealing with a lot of proprietary applications, though i certainly try to push for the use of free options when i feel like i can do so without "rocking the boat") but i'm pretty much all debian all the time myself now it used to be i would dual boot due to certain things being "necessary" to have a windows platform underneath, and while this laptop (owned by my employer) would probably still boot into windows, i've not even tried in quite a while (almost a year?) and the two other computers i use regularly (a desktop and a laptop) only boot debian i guess (and this was hammered home by visiting libreplanet2023 and engaging there), another level of "compromise" i'm making is not seeking out hardware with no proprietary BLOBs anywhere (firmware, necessary drivers, etc..) but life itself is a compromise certainly if there are options any of you know about that you recommend, i'd be willing to consider those for my next purchase finally (not in terms of all i want to say on every topic, but in terms of "confessing my sins" in terms of the compromises i've made), i was keeping my public-facing stuff "totally free and open" for many years via my organicmeat.net domain (hosted on a VPS) -- but due to a number of problems (mostly with me), i "lost control" of that system, both via comment spam on the plone site i'd been using for years, and also as a result of a technical snafu where i locked myself out of root access somehow -- so i ended up doing a lot of public writing on proprietary platforms (see links in .sig below) until i recently spun up a couple of cheap (publicly facing) VMs, which i'm trying to be far more careful with there are so many dreams i have, and a number of them really relate directly to freedom of information, and unlocking what societies, cultures and (perhaps most of all?) capitalism seem to really want to "seek rent" from but this email is going to be long enough without me iterating over all my personal dreams (there are too many of them for me to succeed at manifesting every one of them, but it's my hope that i'll get to pushing forward on some or at least one) i'm happy to take emails off-list if any of you reading might be too shy to post publicly as i really do love interacting with others who understand what so many don't: that proprietary code/systems really divert us away from the more beautiful world our hearts know is possible -- free software may not solve all of humanity's problems, but it's definitely a component of getting us pointed in a better direction as a species (imnho) - and i feel it really is necessary to educate folks on how important this is while simultaneously trying to make fewer compromises myself in terms of specific technologies that interest me (and which i'd love to learn more about), there are a bunch gnupg is something i've been using for a long time, though i've not yet generated a key for this particular identity (i should) i have a strong interest in wiki software, information commons, and platforms which enable the spreading of knowledge -- i would really love to contribute to building something distributed (and especially to be involved in a collaboration as to exactly what to build and how to structure it) i'm a huge fan of emacs, and am just now beginning to try to understand how to use gnus for email i love org-mode Joseph Turner from ushin.org gave an amazing presentation at libreplanet on the work he and his colleagues are doing with respect to trying to create a deliberation framework. This has inspired me to try to lean into elisp (as they're beginning with emacs as their "OS" and/or development stack), which i'm slowly making progress with, over the last few weeks (over the decades i've made many attempts to learn lisp variants, but not really gotten that far). The other technology (which i was not familiar with previously) they are using in prototyping stuff is a distributed one: hyperdrive. i use git daily (and have been for years) but am not a power user (i still don't really get how to "appropriately" merge conflicts) the language i'm most comfortable with is python (though i've not written code for a bit now, as my job involves more management than i'd prefer, and due to other circumstances, we no longer write our own applications for the most part (which is what my job used to be, doing a lot of development work)) i'm fairly competent with php i once wrote a pretty complicated app in ruby even earlier (now more than 2 decades ago) i was employed as a java developer i know very little about javascript html isn't really a full-blown language, but i can muck around w/the basics there i never learned LaTeX (but always wanted to, sort of like lisp) maybe it's less important than any of the rest of what i'm sharing with you, but i've also enjoyed "creating alternate identities", although i've never really made any effort to truly hide my "real name" when posting and/or interacting with others on the internet -- i just enjoy having "versions" of myself so yeah, if you might want to try to collaborate on any of the dimensions i listed above, by all means, weigh in (either on-list or privately) -- we can make the world a better place -- free software components, and the paradigm of open-ness can help a lot, and may be crucial to succeeding more quickly mostly however, my email to the list is a thank you for what i was exposed to in 1996 when i found this newsgroup, which i've never let go of, and hope to "pass on" to others as best i can, namaste, ~c p.s. the best job i ever had was when a friend hired me over 2 decades ago (this was when i was forced to learn java) to try to create software/machines capable of cognition and/or with "intelligence", way back long before the recent spate of tremendous successes with narrower AI efforts - a number of years ago, i tried to re-engage with this, and to some extent i have -- my plan is to get to Stockholm Sweden in June for AGI2023 to continue that involvement and try to extend my own learning and education about this field, and how we might get to a "place" that is better than what so many fear -- yeah, there are a lot of dangers with AI, but my strong feeling is that transparency (and of course free software being a central part of that) can go a long way towards mitigating what we might end up running up against p.p.s if you have any interest in any of what i shared above (or in my sig links) reach out please! p.p.p.s please share your gnupg public key with o...@emergencyguild.org to give me the motivation to generate a new ECC one here and figure out how to integrate with mutt (and/or gnus?)... -- http://emergentground.org https://photos.app.goo.gl/sDV8xdFi334trtRW6 https://cderr.medium.com/10-years-since-the-accident-99941343e3ea https://photos.app.goo.gl/6PJnLE1qHWoyoTTY9 https://edoubt.tumblr.com/ signal: 1.475.295.0502 https://emergenceguild.com/psychotherapy/