“Falsehood flies, and truth comes limping after it, so that when men come to be undeceived, it is too late; the jest is over, and the tale hath had its effect: […] like a physician, who hath found out an infallible medicine, after the patient is dead.” —Jonathan Swift
It’s not even the style on its own*; it’s that you wrote a frankly bloviating short essay about an obvious concept that can be summarized as “most people who watch the weather don’t know what a public key is or how to use one”. I’m disgustingly long-winded, and even I wouldn’t expend that much effort. The style is what escalates that from “padding a high school essay” to “Oh, yup, a GPT wrote this.”
* “It’s not X, it’s Y” yeah, yeah, I know.
Dude, I’m sorry for saying this (because I get this a lot for my often overly formal writing, and I get it’s ironic on this post), but…
Your writing reads like it’s LLM-generated. Like, really heavily reads like an LLM wrote it. Long scrawls for pretty simple concepts, I don’t know how to describe why the cadence feels LLM-y other than “vibes”, flawless grammar, needless lists of nouns and adjectives, “it’s not X; it’s Y”, and this weird fucking lifeless demeanor that feels like it has no voice.
I feel bad when Reddit mods get the brunt for stuff like this; in my opinion, it’s usually not their fault. It’s the fault of Reddit which relies on unpaid labor to make its entire website work literally at all. Maybe that was “fine” back in the early days when Reddit was smaller, but Reddit nowadays is one of the largest websites on Earth and represents the lowest common denominator of Internet users.
I mod a couple communities here and don’t mind because this whole sphere is non-profit, the people on average are pretty cool, and vastly fewer people makes it so I can usually recognize people and resolve problems by talking. But the idea of working pro bono pseudononymously for a corporation with a market cap of 26.5 billion USD to keep their millions of (on average) stupid fucking users in line is one of the most soul-crushing things I can imagine. You really do have to take actions like this because, without stern moderation, communities will inevitably go to shit. They’ll return to the LCD, and your community will just melt into the rest of the front page with tenuously related, zero-effort posts.
All things considered, I think most of Reddit’s mods are doing a good job (and well more than what they owe Reddit or even the random end user, which is fucking nothing and next to fucking nothing, respectively). Yeah, the mods could quit at any time, and they probably should at least on ethical grounds, but I also understand sunk cost and wanting to continue fostering a community about a subject you like that hundreds of thousands of people can enjoy.
I wasn’t necessarily suggesting apt in the CLI; just the APT repository generally, which ZorinOS’ built-in package manager has access to. If sudo apt install hardinfo will find it, I have to imagine the GUI frontend will. Granted I don’t use Ubuntu or its derivatives because Ubuntu is terrible, so I can’t say for sure, but this sure doesn’t seem like their fault.
Okay, so:
I tried installing a program called “hardinfo”. My ZorinOS software store didn’t find it through flathub.
That’s fair. Repo fragmentation is a real thing on Linux, and it seems like Ultimate Systems didn’t put their software on Flathub.
So I googled it, found a .deb file, which my Zorin store loaded up to install.
So instead of just using apt – like every introductory tutorial to Ubuntu and its derivatives leads off with – you chose to do it (effectively) the Windows way that you’re familiar with where you hunt and peck around the Internet for an install file. It’s an understandable mistake (that I think most Windows expats make at some point), but the blame from this point on lies squarely on you.
Then I hit install, and it spits out a message like “Software was not installed. Requires these three dependancies, which will not be installed”. Didn’t tell me why they didn’t install. Just said "Hardinfo needs these programs. Good luck figuring it out asshole.
You didn’t have the dependencies, and it told you which ones to install. Why does it need to tell you why it needs them? Nice to have, I guess, but if it’s mandatory, it’s mandatory. No amount of explanation is going to get you around the fact that this software will not function without them. Dependencies aren’t a Linux thing; they’re a reality of modern programming. And I imagine apt would’ve automatically resolved this and asked you to also install the deps.
That’s not true.
Okay, then you’ll need to explain the annual emails I’ve gotten saying “Your application to the Wikipedia Library has been approved” after I apparently tripped and fell and filled out a manual form applying to the library every year.
It doesn’t seem selective once you meet the four aforementioned criteria, but you do need to manually apply.
The idea you’re talking about, meanwhile, is nonsensical and doesn’t address basically anything about the massive structural problems blacklisting archive.today imposes. I wholly support expanding out the Wikipedia Library, but even this pie-in-the-sky version of it falls too far short of what archive.today provides – and that’s just going forward in an ideal world where you can snap your fingers and make this fantasyland WPL happen as soon as archive.today is blacklisted.
The “backcatalogue”, so to speak, is what’s going to be the most catastrophic part of this by far. I spent years where my main focus was just on bringing dead sources back to life; I don’t know the full extent of how bad this is, but I know for damn sure what you’ve suggested (which won’t ever happen) undoes barely a fraction of the damage.
I think you have a very severe misunderstanding of the Wikipedia Library, which I have access to and frequently use. The WPL allows active editors in good standing to access paywalled sources.
I can’t emphasize enough how absurd this comparison is. “Solar farms exist; building a Dyson sphere would be basically the same thing. Let’s get to work.” And the thing is: I wish you were right.
Edit: That said, if you ever need copyleft material, we do maintain Wikimedia Commons for media generally and Wikisource which is a transcribed digital library of free sources. Much narrower in scope than this, but I highly recommend them!
So my suggestion, brainstorm ideas that would make you independent:
Editors have been doing this for years.
Make agreements with IA to improve retention,
The IA already lives on a razor’s edge in terms of copyright and is doing everything it thinks it can to push that. Many websites leave the IA be because having free, independent archives can benefit them, but it doesn’t take a lot for a copyright holder to say: “Hey, you’re hosting my IP verbatim, I sent you a takedown request, you didn’t comply, and I’m taking you to court.”
You can’t just “make agreements” for the IA to violate copyright law (more than it arguably already is). They’re already doing the best they can, and pushing them to do more would endanger Wikipedia even worse. It’s not an exaggeration to say that the IA dying would be a project-wide apocalypse.
roll your own archiver,
I’d bet it could be done if the IA went down, triggering a project-wide crisis, but among other things, I’m sure the Wikimedia Foundation doesn’t want to paint a target on its backs. We’re very cautious when it comes to copyrighted material hosted on Wikimedia projects, and this would be dropping a fork into a blender for us.
make a deal with news orgs to show their articles as citations (this last one I actually like most the more I think about it. A good negotiator can call it advertising for the news org and you’ll at the same time not infringe on copyright like archive[.]today is).
I don’t think I understand one. The Wikimedia project gets to host verbatim third-party news articles? This is creative but completely unrealistic; you’d be asking news organizations to place their work under a copyleft license for citing on Wikipedia (that’s what we host except for minimal, explicitly labeled fair use material that has robust justification). It’d be a technical nightmare any way you slice it, and logistically it’d be a clusterfuck.
Even if you magically overcame those problems, Wikipedia exists to be neutral and independent, and this “wink wink nudge nudge ;)” quasi-advertising deal would look corrupt as fuck – us showing preferential treatment for certain sources not based on their quality but on their willingness to do us favors.
If you wait until point of no return, the choice has already been made for you whether you like it or not. And worst part is that you’d scramble to find a solution instead of the best solution.
Here’s the thing: we know. This RfC is full of highly experienced editors deciding if Wikipedia is going to amputate. Option A means immediate, catastrophic, irreversible, mostly unfixable damage to Wikipedia. That is something that needs to be thought through, and your suggestions – which are appreciated for showing you’re giving it real thought – reflect that people who don’t regularly edit can’t really, viscerally understand how completely screwed Wikipedia is by this.
I don’t really see it as a complicated issue.
That makes sense from (what I think is) an “outsider’s” perspective. From an “insider’s” perspective*, here’s the problem:
If you’ve ever tried to add a citation on Wikipedia to a sentence that says “citation needed”, you’ve rubbed up against Brandolini’s law. A corollary is that it’s much, much harder to cite an uncited statement than it is to create one. If you remove archive.today, you flood Wikipedia with hundreds of thousands of these. It’s dampened a bit by the fact that the citation metadata is still there and that some URLs will still be live, but I cannot emphasize – as an editor of nearly 10 years, with over 25,000 contributions, and who’s authored two featured articles – that you’d introduce a workload that could never be done, whose repurcussions would be felt for decades at a time when Wikipedia is already on shaky footing.
Even if you somehow poofed away all that work, there are bound to be tens of thousands of statements in articles you have to get rid of because they simply cannot be reasonably sourced anywhere else. For many, many statements, this is not incidental information independent from the rest of the article; many of these removals would require you to fundamentally restructure the surrounding prose or even the entire article.
It’s hard for me to explain that you just have to “trust me bro” that those people voting “Option C” take what archive.today did very seriously and recognize that either option is going to mean major, irreparable damage to the project. Wikipedia is a lot different from the editing side than it is on the reading one; sometimes it’s liberating, sometimes it’s horrifying, and in this case it’s “I could use a hug”.
* “Outsider” and “insider” used to denote experience editing; most anyone can do anything on Wikipedia from the get-go.
As a longtime editor who makes heavy use of archive.today (it’s often much more effective than the Wayback Machine), I’m deeply conflicted about this, and this is disgusting behavior on the part of archive.today; regardless of what a piece of shit the blog owner is, I hope they see prison time for abusing their trust to perpetrate this DDoS.
Right now, the Wikipedia RfC seems pretty split. This is a complicated issue, so I’m going to need to read and think more before I chime in. Just wild.
Yeah, I have to back you up here. This person’s alleged experience is completely divorced from my experience working on PCSX2 and tells me they have no idea what they’re talking about. We have to answer questions over and over and over again, but usually there’s a command to quickly give a canned answer.
And the questions aren’t repeated because there’s no way for users to search (there is); it’s because it’s usually lightning-fast in that kind of environment to just ask and because dedicated help forums are a form of selection bias. You’re generally going to get more thought-out questions from users who use dedicated, thread-based support forums because either a) they needed to make an account just to ask that question, b) they already have an account and so are more dedicated than the average user, or c) all the others who didn’t want to make that investment either just gave up or found the answer some other way.
Edit: I guess people who have no experience with FOSS user support are upset at reality. Next time, give me a list of things you want me to say, and I can bring that along with some choccy milk and some ointment for your sore ass.
We do also maintain docs. I put a lot of effort into the Setup ones but got burnt-out before really getting into the other ones (which need a lot of work). And for actual bugs, we use GitHub.
Discord’s search functionality is reasonably robust, and as long as you’re already there, you can usually find old conversations about the problem you’re having. The biggest problem is that it’s gated off from the wider Internet, which is shitty.
I think what we all like about it over forums for providing support is that it’s closer to real-time communication, it’s more flexible (conversations can flow in and out of each other instead of being permanently stuck in one subject-specific thread), and it’s more casual.
I can say as a member of the PCSX2 project that I understand why we and other FOSS emulators use it as official support – but nevertheless wish that we didn’t. We’ve discussed practicalities before, and the project doesn’t stay there just from inertia or because of personal preference; there are major practical reasons to prefer it over a forum (which we have), a wiki (which we have), or Matrix.
I’d be willing to endure the pain points and to scale back support in order to be off of that shithole, but I also get that’s a fringe minority sentiment shared by only a couple others. All of us would be tech-literate enough to use a client like Signal or Element for intra-project discussion, but very few people would come to Matrix for support (nor would we probably want them to due to the much greater moderation burden per end user), and the chatroom model – to most of us – is much easier for support than a forum. The only reason I’m still begrudgingly on Discord is for PCSX2.
I share your hope, but I seriously doubt this will come even close to dislodging us. Smaller projects, perhaps.
Fuck up their schemes? Putin’s scheme to wreck US hegemony is going insanely well and would’ve been going even better if he hadn’t greedily, groundlessly invaded Ukraine. Trump’s plan to abuse the presidency for personal gain seems to be doing well too.
You’re getting downvoted for pointing out that this technology, at optimal efficiency on Earth, generates about 1/100,000 the power of a solar panel. “Not very useful” is an understatement (it’s currently fucking useless). Even worse: the title saying “at night” implies a terrestrial usage and misdirects from this technology’s only potential useful application in the future once and if it becomes much better – namely on deep-space missions.
This research is interesting. I hope it yields something useful. Your comment is still 100% correct for the foreseeable future.
Edit: I was conflating the optimal efficiency of 1 W/m2 and the actual efficiency of 1/100,000 the solar panel. Sorry for introducing that confusion.
The post is just an ad disguised as a guide
That said:
its obvious they want to be like google but with “privacy” as a gimmic because its only private until they get a government order telling them to do something to unmask a user or monitor an email.
Besides the fact that Proton is based in Switzerland where government warrants aren’t issued willy-nilly, please learn how the mathematics behind encryption works – or, if not, at least trust that it does. For emails that are sent E2EE, Proton can only have garbled data that requires a key they don’t have.
You’re just constantly talking out your ass, and I have no idea why; it’s so unearned. Like I’m not going to debate you on whether ads or corporations are good because a) I broadly agree and b) that’s just, like, our opinions, man, but then you just say shit that’s so demonstrably untrue that all I can think is: “I fucking hate what this decade has done to people.”
Before I address the substance: that’s not what an ad hominem is in the context of an argument. I’d already 100% finished attacking the substance of their argument. An ad hominem would be if I fallaciously appealed to a personal characteristic (real or otherwise) to attack an argument of theirs. “You’re wrong because you’re a dipshit”.
Anyway: man, I dunno. It’s 2026, and I’ve gotten really fucking sick of being unilaterally bound by etiquette when the bullshit asymmetry principle and the Dunning–Kruger effect are being stretched to their limits by insufferable, insolent shitheads who’ve unburdened themselves of critical thinking and assume having a platform to the entire world makes them qualified to say anything about everything (I can fall into this trap too, but holy shit sometimes).
I was still more polite than they were, still exercised more critical thought than they did, and still addressed the substance, and that’s fine enough by me not to tone police myself.
but i guess thats why I don’t work in marketing
Yeah, I guess it is, because this article works in Proton’s favor on multiple levels:
You’re so smarmy about this but just come off as a complete dipshit who gave this two seconds of thought.
No problem at all. Full disclosure: I’m a longtime member of and frequent contributor to Wikipedia. I have a bias in this. I’ll say, however, that because we’re not a monolith, internal criticism of the project is varied, rampant, and welcomed. It’s no surprise when everyone is a volunteer and the entire draw of editing is “this thing sucks; make it better”. Criticism is so prolific that for the project’s 25th anniversary, the English Wikipedia’s official newsletter, The Signpost, published a dire, 6500-word warning about our trajectory.
We’re constantly looking for criticism so we can improve, and it’s why, if you can believe it, we love seeing new faces and articles published like “I tried to edit Wikipedia for a week; here’s how it burned my house down”. What we don’t value is criticism made in bad faith; there’s nothing to talk about when one side of the discussion wants to just sit around and Gish gallop all day for transparent political ends.
Wow, thanks! Let’s switch topics. I’m trying to start a business where I sell fruit to weathermen. Can you help me with that?