I stand in full support of the Free Software Foundation and its ethical and moral stance on free software. I oppose the misguided recent attacks against Richard M. Stallman, the accusations against whom are baseless and lacking in factual evidence. I am a signatory to the open letter in support of Richard M. Stallman.

Richard Stallman support letter

Sunday, Mar 28, 2021 Post 200 words 1 min read

I signed the Richard Stallman support letter and you should do it too . Keep in mind that the signers of the letter are subjected to harassment .

Please think about how to treat other participants with respect, especially when you disagree with them. For instance, call them by the names they use, and honor their preferences about their gender identity.

Honoring people’s preferences about gender identity includes not referring to them in ways that conflict with that identity. For instance, not to use pronouns for them that conflict with it. There are several ways to avoid that; one way is to use gender-neutral pronouns, since they don’t conflict with any possible gender identity.

Those statements apparently make Stallman a transphobe.

Also fuck Tor . And I think it’s time to ditch Mozilla and let them die by their own actions.

Mачете: Mачете

Tuesday, Mar 23, 2021 Music 50 words 1 min read

Alternate realities in the every day: extremism, the internet, and the death of truth

Sunday, Mar 21, 2021 Link https://www.neondystopia.com/featured/alternate-realities-in-the-every-day-extremism-the-internet-and-the-death-of-truth/

The majority of people read headlines and go no further, ignoring the substance by which they could create a developed worldview. A few words without context or explanation, and people genuinely believe that they are informed about the workings of complex political, economic, and psychological systems. Constantly awash in facts, propaganda has taken on a new form. Those with destructive agendae don’t have to lie to you to get you to believe what they want.
They are comfortable doing so, and a society with atrophied critical thinking skills will make such falsehoods easy to buy, but far easier than fabricating facts is using extremely selective presentation of those facts to push people towards a philosophy. Barraging people with events, which they can understand, rather than context and interpretation, which requires more effort, you can effortlessly make the world seem however you want. If you want to demonize a group of people, highlight every time a member of that group commits a crime.
John Farrell

More Schiller

Sunday, Feb 28, 2021 Post 455 words 3 mins read

Since I’ve been working a lot lately on Hoshi (updates will follow later) and there is no better music to listen to, while working, than Schiller, I’ve been thinking a lot about their different live albums, the people behind Schiller and how they influenced the music.

Sehnsucht

Year: 2008

Band components: Ralf Gustke (drums), Cliff Hewitt (electronic drums), Mickey Meinert (guitar), Tissy Thiers (bass guitar), Christian Kretschmar (synthesizer) and Christopher von Deylen (keyboards).

Heavy electrock (a term I “might” have invented) sounds. Mickey Meinert is very good, Petra Marklund (September) does really nice vocals on “Breathe”. I love this album!

Atemlos

Year: 2010

Band components: Ralf Gustke (drums), Cliff Hewitt (electronic drums), Andreas Binder (guitar), Thissy Thiers (bass guitar), Christian Kretschmar (synthesizer) and Christopher von Deylen (keyboards).

Cliff Hewitt with long hair! Andreas Binder is ok, not bad but nothing to remember. Amazing drumming by both Ralf and Cliff. Very good “Salton Sea”.

The Propaganda Multiplier

Thursday, Feb 11, 2021 Link https://swprs.org/the-propaganda-multiplier/

It is one of the most important aspects of our media system, and yet hardly known to the public: most of the international news coverage in Western media is provided by only three global news agencies based in New York, London and Paris.
The key role played by these agencies means Western media often report on the same topics, even using the same wording. In addition, governments, military and intelligence services use these global news agencies as multipliers to spread their messages around the world.
A study of the Syria war coverage by nine leading European newspapers clearly illustrates these issues: 78% of all articles were based in whole or in part on agency reports, yet 0% on investigative research. Moreover, 82% of all opinion pieces and interviews were in favor of a US and NATO intervention, while propaganda was attributed exclusively to the opposite side.
Swiss Policy Research

Before/After effect in Javascript using jQuery

Tuesday, Feb 9, 2021 Post 1111 words 6 mins read

Sometimes you need a simple tool to visually show the difference between two images and a basic jQuery plugin is quite suited for that (if you can stomach ~89KB just for jQuery, ~30KB if you gzip it but you probably already have it on your site, especially if you’re running Wordpress ). There are better ways to implement this, someone might suggest React or Vue or Angular or assembler or running it on the blockchain or in the bootloader but this is how I did it.

A jQuery-less version would be quite easy to implement too, perhaps in a future post.