LessWrong virtual meetup this Saturday evening
Several months ago jwhendy called for people who can’t make it to regular LW meetups (or just can’t get enough of the LW crowd) to meet online instead. Several months later, a small number of us still do, on a near-weekly basis. We socialise, teach each other about our fields, throw theories around and discuss LW material. We’re looking for fresh blood after losing some of our regulars to real life commitments.
Meetup details:
Time: Saturday, 19th November, 9pm EST
Location: Skype (add me as erratio1 on there)
Format: Variable. The last few meetups have been text-only due to connection problems at my end, but since the overall quality of the meetup was much higher when we had voice chat I’d like to get back to that if possible. Although if a majority of interested people would prefer text-only, we can do that too.
For those who can’t make it to this meetup but are interested, comment with your availabilities here or at our Google Group so we can potentially accommodate you in future weeks.
I would be personally interested by a IRC (or Jabber) virtual meetup, but not by a Skype one, for three reasons :
Skype is non-free software, proprietary protocol, and therefore puts a lot of constraints on who can use it.
For non-native English speakers like me, following/participating in a verbal complicated discussion in English is much harder than using text-based interaction.
My Internet bandwidth is limited, making VoIP unreliable, very low quality and very painful to use.
But I hope those who will be able to participate will enjoy it !
Doesn’t Skype still advertise itself as free? It did when I just googled it. Or do you mean something else by “non-free software”?
Free Software is Open Source Software.
*infodump ahead*
Richard Stallman came up with the idea of using copyright to safeguard the Four Essential Freedoms (which he considers ideologically/philosophically/morally/ethically/politically important in the same way many people consider Free Speech important) and called software guaranteeing these freedoms Free Software. Years later, Eric Raymond and others came up with the term Open Source Software; they felt that Free Software’s adoption among mainstream businesses was being slowed down by its ideological focus and that they should switch to a practical name which emphasized the alternative development model and technological advantages that came along with giving people access to the program’s source code and freedom to make changes and improvements. Stallman thinks they are missing the point. Raymond thinks it was a marketing success. Stallman concludes that “Open Source is a development methodology; Free Software is a social movement.”
Thanks for the infodump.
Cf my answer to erratio, non-free software is software which doesn’t grant the user the 4 fundamental freedoms not about the price.
I’m sorry; I had no idea, it was free when I downloaded it. Or do you mean for calling others? That’s never been an issue for any of us either, so I’m not sure what you mean. Do you know of a decent IRC interface that makes it easy to tell speakers apart and isn’t hard to read? How do you feel about Google Hangouts? The program we’re using shouldn’t be the main barrier stopping people from joining in, although I’m reluctant to go to IRC because of the trivial inconveniences involved.
By “non-free” I meant free as in freedom, not as in price. Which implies many problems, from being dependent on platforms supported by the company, to having crappy unstable/unreliable ports on non-mainstream platforms (the GNU/Linux version of Skype doesn’t work well), to requiring blind trust in the corporation.
As for decent IRC interface, there are countless decent IRC clients : XChat on GNU/Linux, Silverex on Windows, Colloquy on MacOS or iOS, or web-based like mibbit. Or for the geeks among us : irssi in screen !
The standard sound byte is “free speech, not free beer”
Well, I’ll bring it up with whoever attends and see wheir preferences are. Would you be able to make that time/day or something similar if there were no software issues?
It’s a bit let for me with my own timezone, but it’s Saturday evening, so I could make it for about 1 hour at most, yes. But don’t bother too much for me, I wanted to state the problems I have with Skype for further meetings, you can go on with yours as planned, and we’ll see next time ?
But if it happens to be using a more open and text protocol (reasons 1. and 2. are independent of Skype itself), I’ll try to come for a little while.
That’s the current plan :)
No need to get all RMS’d and ESR’d out of shape. Rationality trumps ideology.
Note that most of the code you use daily is free for you to use, but proprietary, exactly like Skype: insides of your cell phone (or a regular phone), server side of Google, MS IIS on many sites you visit, firmware in the car you drive or in a bus you ride. Electric company, banks, phone company, your local and federal government use mostly proprietary software (like Oracle), with some exceptions.
A pragmatic approach would be to use what works best for you, possibly opting for OSS all else being equal.
Correct… but rationality also trumps pseudorationality. Ideology isn’t about addressing where things are, but about influencing the direction society takes. The mere fact that many things are broken does not mean that, when given the choice between a broken and a mended thing, you should choose the broken one.
That being said, I myself am not averse to using non-free software when there is no practicable alternative. Wherever I can have a say in what software is used, I promote FlOSS (though I also recognize that others need not share my prioritizations.).
This reasoning puts you squarely in a gilded cage. Surely, a preference for freedom can rationally have more weight than as a mere tiebreaker after comparisons of raw, short-term pragmatism. There is certainly room for discussion and dissension around what particular weightings are appropriate, but the lexicographic ordering applied in that last sentence is something I strongly reject.
Almost nobody cares about existential risk. Almost nobody cares about not making the most basic probability-related mistakes.
Appeal to majority is not sometihg to trust.
As for “works”—XMPP clients work predictably. Skype works worse for non-Windows platforms (I don’t know or care about Windows version).
« Rationality trumps ideology. » doesn’t mean « short term pragmatism trumps all form of ethic ». Confusing rationality and short-term pragmatism is not a mistake I was excepting to see here.
And all your examples are meaningless, it’s like saying “but your taxes will pay for wars, so why can’t you murder ?”. I’m not responsible of what other people, even if I can advise them to act otherwise. I’ve no real way to change the software use by the government of by EDF. But by pointing to issues about non-free software, I can have some hope to make people use Free Software alternative in places like here.
Non-free software poses a lot of ethical AND pragmatic issues. It does require to put some blind trust into the corporation to install backdoors (and that’s not paranoia, it did occur). It does create a domination link since you are totally dependant of the editor to fix flaws, especially security holes. And it does create a lot of problems, forcing you to chose your hardware and software supported by the editor (the GNU/Linux version of Skype is very crappy, doesn’t work with many sound cards or webcams, …), while with Free Software you can always port it (or write a compatible clone). I could continue for long on why freedom is, on the long run, pragmatically better for everyone (yourself and society as a whole) then centralised control.
Serves me right for trying to reason with people who write “GNU/Linux” instead of just Linux. Here is a point of view I can support: Some Myths That Need To Die and How To Successfully Compete With Open Source Software. XMPP clients vs Skype is a perfect example.
One of the myths is obviously wrong in it’s strong form, but has a much weaker version that’s still very applicable:
Yes, not all bugs get fixed, not all features get implemented. This is true of all software. Anyone trying to sell you this is way over-excited, a liar, or both.
However, the weaker version:
is most of what I need out of software, and radically better than my experiences with large proprietary-software companies. Why is this the case? Because if something is bugging me, I can hire someone to fix or add it. In the closed source world, the only people I could conceivably hire to do this (outside any extension support, which seems more common in OSS anyway) are the people at the original company, and it’s far more likely that anyone will be interested in doing it for a price I’m willing to pay than that those particular people will. (Being a coder myself, of course, the person I most often hire for this task is me—saving me the costs of coordination, taxes, and whatnot—but the principle is the same.)
I’ve always had a hard time finding a good time to connect, as I live on Beijing time (UTC + 8) and work weekends. Anyway, it’ll be nice to take part when I have the time.