RMS is a huge figure head and representative of free software, so it matters what he says and does.

I have seen no-one argue that everything RMS has said is bunk because of this, personally I think he has had some good ideas, sure; but that doesn’t mean I just ignore everything else because “its politics and not free Software related”.

Free Software is in itself political, maybe the links between RMS’s words and actions, and Free Software are not direct or even close - but separating “politics” and Free Software just seems like burying your head in the sand.

A lot of the ‘debunking’ here is very poor, it assumes Stallman’s innocence at every junction, argues that Stallman’s word is more important than his actions, fails to engage with the full complexity of arguments against him, and more than once uses “but he’s tender hearted, so he can’t be bad” as an argument.

Certainly not “rational and objective” like it claims.

Kanary definitely looks good - although they are US only at the moment (rules it out for me unfortunately). Thanks for your insight!

I’m not really adding to the conversation with this but wanted to share anyway:

I can’t disagree with you on that, you’re absolutely right - I suppose my read just gives the author the benefit of the doubt that it’s not ‘better AI’ that we deserve, but a better internet (i.e. with no AI whatsoever).

Personally I read it as a general “demand better”, “don’t accept crap wrapped in gold” as an offensive principle against (de)generative AI. Perhaps I’m inserting my own positive spin on their words, but it seems to me that their point is “don’t let the hype win”; if these companies are pushing AI, forming dependencies on bad tech, then we need to say “not good enough” and push back on the BS. Deny the ability of low quality garbage to ‘fulfil’ our needs. It’s not a directly practical line to be sure (how do we do this exactly?), but it does drill down past “AI is bad” to a more fundamental (and arguably motivating) point - that we, all of us, deserve better than to drown in a sea of crap and that’s still important.

Recommendation for Posteo - best email provider I’ve used and it’s ridiculously affordable.

Thanks for recommendation - that looks perfect; will try it out!

I really like Neocities - highly recommended for a personal website.

I feel like this is just investing in the tech hype of AI - AI/LLMs are really just probability calculators, if very impressive ones.

We’re not going to see ‘god-like’ AI run rampart and become sentient (at least not any time soon) - the real dangers of AI are the applications of it that are done my humans. The people who force it into spheres that it is ill-equipped to benefit, to undercut people who’s work can be ‘replaced’ or ‘enhanced’ by AI.

AI will inevitably be harmful. But not because it becomes uber-advanced; it will be harmful because techbros and grifters will use it badly, driven by money, hype or plain stupidity. Believing AI is more advanced than it is just feeds into the human machine that’s going to do real harm.

I personally use Zathura, it’s minimalistic and uses VIM bindings.

But if you want something feature-dense, with a way of organising your library, eReader integration, file converting and more, Calibre is pretty amazing (and the actual reader part of Calibre is quite nice to use in my opinion).