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.
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.
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.
I assume it is more about structure and time. If you start browsing you wait for pages to load and then probably go a page further and to the next. In the batch mode you have the designated time window to go through mail and read what is there and avoid jumping into some rats nest of neverending paths.
In addition you get those privacy aspects (website operators don't know where you are) and are blocked from "non-free JavaScript programs" and only deal with text with content, all else will not come through.
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?
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.
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.
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.
He was using text mode at the time in 2002. The term has something of a technical meaning that he was likely referencing. To be precise:
1. He was using a virtual console (ie. what you get when you press Ctrl-Alt-F1 and similar if using X), not an X terminal.
2. The virtual console was very likely not using a framebuffer (which would be a graphics mode), but was in fact just the Linux kernel's standard text mode output for virtual consoles, using the BIOS font.
Making a screenshot of such a text mode as a graphics file is actually not really something you can do. For the most part, the best you can do is to synthesize an equivalent image from scratch by rendering the text using another program.
That's likely what he meant when he said that he didn't know how to do a screenshot. Yes, it's overly specific, and the person who asked was probably just wanting to see what he was looking at on the monitor, which wouldnt require an exact pixel-for-pixel copy, but there you go.
Those still only work for text. What I'm trying to say is that it's possible Stallman was considering that "screenshot" means "dumping a graphics buffer to disk". In the case of text mode without the framebuffer, there is no graphics buffer to dump (at least, not one that's accessible on the computer), therefore the best you can do is dumping a text buffer instead.
You can of course synthesize a new image based on the contents of that text buffer (and that would almost certainly have been fine for the purposes of the question), but you can't dump a graphics buffer that doesn't exist.
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.
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".
He’s also fairly arrogant and unreasonable in various interactions¹, forcing people to bend over backwards to accommodate his requests. He puts off a lot of people and severely harms his own movement by making people who are not part of it think he’s gross, both physically (the infamous picking something of his feet and eating it) and intellectually (I have examples in mind but don’t wish to start a flame war).
What good is it being a visionary if people ignore or actively reject the message because they are put off by the messenger? It’s not useful being a harbinger of doom if nothing changes anyway.
Stallman should be commended and recognised for starting the free software movement, but he should’ve stepped aside long long ago and let someone more charismatic be its figurehead.
¹ I’m sure someone reading this has had a different experience, but please do a cursory web search and recognise people’s negative interactions with Stallman are not rare.
The point is precisely that there are plenty of stories, there’s no need to single out any of them. Look for his treatment of women or while being a house guest. Heck, you can even read about disappointing (if minor) interactions in this very submission. I won’t link to them specifically because I remember more than one woman mentioning how they were harassed by Stallman fans after telling their stories. I have no desire to contribute further to that, I’m sure you’re capable of coming up with the searches yourself, it’s not remotely hard.
Disagree with you about crypto, it allows me to purchase high quality drugs online.
Also disagree with you about "IoT", I use zigbee devices that I can control remotely.
What seems like "obvious garbage" to you, might be a treasure to another person.
