RMS was correct, as usual. Of course he could not have predicted the additional 1 million deaths due to military action (and estimated 3.5 million more from subsequent effects) in the resulting Middle Eastern/Central Asian conflicts over the following years.
Just to clarify because my own mental parser failed:
He's not predicting that thousands will die because of mass surveillance--he's saying that the deaths of thousands in the 9/11 attacks are going to let the government deprive millions of their civil liberties.
I had to double check the date. I even saw 2001 in the title but I still think of every post-2000 date as "fairly recent" so didn't make the connection to 9/11.
I never imagined how to pronounce it until now, "commander taco", isn't? I remember the old days of Slashdot all pools included CmdrTaco in one option.
> “Given that the human face recognition performed by the check-in agents did not keep the hijackers out, there is no reason to think that computer face recognition would help.”
Even though I agree with the premise of the essay, this is absurdly false today. Computers are really good at this type of thing now, scarily so.
Wrote some of my thoughts somewhat related to this recently [1]. I've simply concluded that its a matter of numbers: the more centralized data becomes the easier it is for the government to coerce access. If the government could obtain the data of a million citizens by coercing or engaging in law fare against one or two companies, it's much easier done. If they had to individually coerce, sue, or otherwise hack into those same million customers, it becomes a lot more expensive and difficult. It sucks that's the way it is, but that's why I think the new internet has to reverse the rules and make authorities more particular about who they track rather than just casting a dragnet across N major providers.
I've never been super alarmist about this stuff. But recently was looking back and it really is staggering the amount of simple freedoms we've lost in the last 25 years. Partly through government overreach for 'security' and partly through technology becoming so pervasive. It really feels like rules get added regularly, and none ever get removed. Things just get stricter. And with technology we add a layer of self/citizen policing of everything. The 'disallowed' but relatively innocent things we could get up to as kids/teenagers just 20 years ago kids today could only dream of.
As someone who's lived fairly near the Canadian border for ~30 years, yup.
It's hard to conceive that up until 2008 you could cross the border both ways without a passport. We treated them like the culturally and economically linked neighbors they are. Now it feels like a pointless, hostile interrogation in both directions.
Tor, Tails, Bitcoin, TLS each give freedom. These tools still exist, and still work, and there's a plethora of other tools, too. Something else: security.txt and ethical hacking took off, too.
Patriot Act, Snowden revelations each made us lose freedoms.
Yes, I'm aware of Trump's efforts in this regard, but GOP was rotten ever since Bush. Even before that, right-wing populism existed, too. But WWII was still too fresh for fascism to rise in the West.
Also, law isn't very useful if it isn't applied. For example, copyright law regarding LLMs.
As someone on the spectrum/neurodivergent myself, no, it does not excuse his behavior whatsoever (or the lack of action by MIT).
Stallman predicting that a technical capability could be abused and then somebody eventually abusing it is not Cassandra syndrome, it's just threat modeling run amuck. It gets old after a while (I should know, I remember classic Slashdot lol). The actual question is whether his proposed cure(s) were worth the cost, and that has very much not been "proven right" (if anything, LLMs/agents are rapidly eroding some of the practical premises his arguments depended on, IMO)
> if anything, LLMs/agents are rapidly eroding some of the practical premises his arguments depended on, IMO
As someone who also remembers classic Slashdot, it's staggering how many of the things Stallman was writing about back then came true. Software is centralized and subscription based, and largely not under the consumer's control. I fail to see how LLMs make any of these situations better, care to elaborate?
> Software is centralized and subscription based, and largely not under the consumer's control.
Is it really though? I'll grant that you might have a point with iOS/Android and things like banking apps (no problem with the apps existing, it's when there's no web-based alternative is where the real issue lies). But there's more (F)OSS code out in the wild then there's ever been, more (F)OSS alternatives to most major software, Steam runs on Linux, major companies like Google and Nintendo putting licensing notices where you can read them). Not to mention the rise of open source hardware, the whole makersphere, etc.
> I fail to see how LLMs make any of these situations better, care to elaborate?
By driving the cost of software to zero. I've had great success over the past year or so constructing a whole range of system software, the original "no driver for this printer" complaint Stallman had would be solved with an evening of Claude/Codex/etc usage now (and to prove my point, we just had someone crank out a Linux GPU driver for M4 Apple Silicon using LLMs)
Don’t throw other people under the bus to justify what a wretched person he is. Being autistic doesn’t make you defend pedophilia or any of the other unpleasantness he’s implicated in.
Eventually some of them will be right. Choosing which to heed without hindsight is the problem. Though in this case, Stallman was not a lone kook at the time.
I think it's a good, analogous, contemporary example of how RMS tends to be misunderstood.
In this context, his comments tend to be:
a) Correct, if you read them precisely (which is how RMS writes -- precisely)
b) Horrible, if you read them with the subtext implied in mainstream culture (which is how people read what RMS writes)
That combination results in "with the terrorists" in 2001, "with Epstein" in 2026, and a lot of similar things in between.
Coincidentally, it's highly unlikely Minsky did anything wrong. All the people thrown under the bus by MIT were either the people who acted ethically and came forward or, like Minsky, were dead. All the people who did unethical things didn't come forward, and are in the Epstein files. Not all the MIT folks in the Epstein files did unethical things, but many presumably did....
The MIT transparency report is worth reading in the light of the release. MIT had most of that information about its faculty at the time.
> Coincidentally, it's highly unlikely Minsky did anything wrong.
Virginia Giuffre said that she had sex with Minsky when she was 17 and he was 73. I think no matter how you look at it (even if she was technically above the age of consent in the jurisdiction of Epstein's island), it is still wrong and he absolutely should have known that.
I am a big fan of Stallman's work and his views considering computer science and its role in society, but his views are not precise or correct in this matter.
> but his views are not precise or correct in this matter.
The views he expressed re sexual assault were abhorrent
I have huge respect for RMS. Being this wrong once shows the bad way (we) men of a certain age were raised. The idea that sexual assault must involve violence or the threat of violence is old, out of date, and at one point RMS held it along with society at large
Times change, and as we get older we need to change with them.
In this instance, Stallman was arguing semantics. His long-term criticism [1] is that ‘sexual assault’ is being used to cover a wide range of wrongful actions, where a more nuanced terminology to distinguish between them would be more appropriate. That in itself doesn’t imply he finds any of those actions acceptable, only that he’d like them to have more specific names.
He might not have picked a good time and place to share his terminological views, but I don’t think there’s anything wrong with them per se.
The topic seems to be warnings and predictions coming true even if they seem far-fetched at first. The linked article doesn’t talk about any warnings or predictions. It only recounts (in a way) how RMS, while discussing the topic of Epstein’s abuse, said some things which many people found offensive, leading to his resignation.
I guess it is marginally relevant; it just seems odd to drop a marginally relevant link unaccompanied by further comment. Usually people seem to mention what brought it to mind, or which part they found particularly interesting.
You were correct to dismiss pizza gate, as it was completely unfounded and pure right wing fantasy about satanist democrats eating babies in a basement.
Now that we have an actual conspiracy involving the elites of the world in a child sex trafficking ring, the people previously pushing the pizza gate narrative are nowhere to be found. They can't accept that their guy was Epstein's best friend for decades and the second most cited name in the files (after Epstein himself).
Haven't seen a single republican distance themselves from Trump because of his deep ties with Epstein.
Informed? How about the 'Informed Trading' that was observed September 10, 2001? Yesterday I transcribed https://youtu.be/PrI8g3yHxAM after having just found and learned about Marc Chesney.
I'll make a confession: These days I find Slashdot to be much better curated than HN. Pretty much every day I find something worthwhile on Slashdot. I can't say the same for HN.
Ironic given that I left Slashdot for HN so many years ago.
RMS was correct, as usual. Of course he could not have predicted the additional 1 million deaths due to military action (and estimated 3.5 million more from subsequent effects) in the resulting Middle Eastern/Central Asian conflicts over the following years.
Just to clarify because my own mental parser failed:
He's not predicting that thousands will die because of mass surveillance--he's saying that the deaths of thousands in the 9/11 attacks are going to let the government deprive millions of their civil liberties.
I had to double check the date. I even saw 2001 in the title but I still think of every post-2000 date as "fairly recent" so didn't make the connection to 9/11.
Huh, small world, I'm the one who submitted that to Slashdot.
CmdrTaco is a cool handle. :-)
I think he meant he was Hobart the one that submitted the story. CmdrTaco is Rob Malda who use to run Slashdot and who created the post.
Ah, I see now. Thanks for educating me, it wasn't obvious at a passing glance.
I never imagined how to pronounce it until now, "commander taco", isn't? I remember the old days of Slashdot all pools included CmdrTaco in one option.
CowboyNeal was the default poll response.
> “Given that the human face recognition performed by the check-in agents did not keep the hijackers out, there is no reason to think that computer face recognition would help.”
Even though I agree with the premise of the essay, this is absurdly false today. Computers are really good at this type of thing now, scarily so.
Wrote some of my thoughts somewhat related to this recently [1]. I've simply concluded that its a matter of numbers: the more centralized data becomes the easier it is for the government to coerce access. If the government could obtain the data of a million citizens by coercing or engaging in law fare against one or two companies, it's much easier done. If they had to individually coerce, sue, or otherwise hack into those same million customers, it becomes a lot more expensive and difficult. It sucks that's the way it is, but that's why I think the new internet has to reverse the rules and make authorities more particular about who they track rather than just casting a dragnet across N major providers.
[1]: https://dntls.substack.com/p/the-new-internet
I've never been super alarmist about this stuff. But recently was looking back and it really is staggering the amount of simple freedoms we've lost in the last 25 years. Partly through government overreach for 'security' and partly through technology becoming so pervasive. It really feels like rules get added regularly, and none ever get removed. Things just get stricter. And with technology we add a layer of self/citizen policing of everything. The 'disallowed' but relatively innocent things we could get up to as kids/teenagers just 20 years ago kids today could only dream of.
As someone who's lived fairly near the Canadian border for ~30 years, yup.
It's hard to conceive that up until 2008 you could cross the border both ways without a passport. We treated them like the culturally and economically linked neighbors they are. Now it feels like a pointless, hostile interrogation in both directions.
Lost, and gained.
Tor, Tails, Bitcoin, TLS each give freedom. These tools still exist, and still work, and there's a plethora of other tools, too. Something else: security.txt and ethical hacking took off, too.
Patriot Act, Snowden revelations each made us lose freedoms.
Yes, I'm aware of Trump's efforts in this regard, but GOP was rotten ever since Bush. Even before that, right-wing populism existed, too. But WWII was still too fresh for fascism to rise in the West.
Also, law isn't very useful if it isn't applied. For example, copyright law regarding LLMs.
st iGNUtius called it, amen. :-P
Every time "these type of people" are dismissed as lunatics, as extremist and alarmist, time comes back to prove they were right.
I frankly dismissed the idea of "a group of extremely powerful and rich pedos" under a pizza store... and yes there were none under any pizza store.
From the accounts I've read, RMS is a deeply unpleasant and problematic person.
Doesn't mean he's wrong.
He's deeply problematic in the same way as someone with autism, Tourette syndrome, echolalia, or OCD are problematic.
He's not neurotypical.
Once you deal with it, he stops being problematic.
And the striking thing is Cassandra syndrome: Virtually everything he has said:
a) Proves right, decades later
b) Sounds crazy to most people, at the time
As someone on the spectrum/neurodivergent myself, no, it does not excuse his behavior whatsoever (or the lack of action by MIT).
Stallman predicting that a technical capability could be abused and then somebody eventually abusing it is not Cassandra syndrome, it's just threat modeling run amuck. It gets old after a while (I should know, I remember classic Slashdot lol). The actual question is whether his proposed cure(s) were worth the cost, and that has very much not been "proven right" (if anything, LLMs/agents are rapidly eroding some of the practical premises his arguments depended on, IMO)
> if anything, LLMs/agents are rapidly eroding some of the practical premises his arguments depended on, IMO
As someone who also remembers classic Slashdot, it's staggering how many of the things Stallman was writing about back then came true. Software is centralized and subscription based, and largely not under the consumer's control. I fail to see how LLMs make any of these situations better, care to elaborate?
> Software is centralized and subscription based, and largely not under the consumer's control.
Is it really though? I'll grant that you might have a point with iOS/Android and things like banking apps (no problem with the apps existing, it's when there's no web-based alternative is where the real issue lies). But there's more (F)OSS code out in the wild then there's ever been, more (F)OSS alternatives to most major software, Steam runs on Linux, major companies like Google and Nintendo putting licensing notices where you can read them). Not to mention the rise of open source hardware, the whole makersphere, etc.
> I fail to see how LLMs make any of these situations better, care to elaborate?
By driving the cost of software to zero. I've had great success over the past year or so constructing a whole range of system software, the original "no driver for this printer" complaint Stallman had would be solved with an evening of Claude/Codex/etc usage now (and to prove my point, we just had someone crank out a Linux GPU driver for M4 Apple Silicon using LLMs)
Disagree. RMS has unapologetically crossed some pretty bright societal lines. Being neurospicy doesn't absolve him of any of that.
(also I don't think Tourette's is fair to include in that set but whatever)
Don’t throw other people under the bus to justify what a wretched person he is. Being autistic doesn’t make you defend pedophilia or any of the other unpleasantness he’s implicated in.
> defend pedophilia or any of the other unpleasantness he’s implicated in.
Oh, well, time to link stuff again, I guess:
• <https://stallmansupport.org/>
• <https://sterling-archermedes.github.io/>
Thanks, but I’m not I’ll-informed, I just disagree with you.
This is true for many visionaries throughout history. Also true of many governments, corporations, religions, etc.
Being wrong, being malicious, being harmful, and being unpleasant are all mostly separate, but get mixed up occasionally.
Rebels are rarely pleasant and compliant. Literally everybody that challenges the status quo gets slandered as unpleasant and problematic.
Eventually some of them will be right. Choosing which to heed without hindsight is the problem. Though in this case, Stallman was not a lone kook at the time.
https://www.npr.org/2019/09/17/761718975/free-software-pione...
How is the link relevant to the topic at hand?
I think it's a good, analogous, contemporary example of how RMS tends to be misunderstood.
In this context, his comments tend to be:
a) Correct, if you read them precisely (which is how RMS writes -- precisely)
b) Horrible, if you read them with the subtext implied in mainstream culture (which is how people read what RMS writes)
That combination results in "with the terrorists" in 2001, "with Epstein" in 2026, and a lot of similar things in between.
Coincidentally, it's highly unlikely Minsky did anything wrong. All the people thrown under the bus by MIT were either the people who acted ethically and came forward or, like Minsky, were dead. All the people who did unethical things didn't come forward, and are in the Epstein files. Not all the MIT folks in the Epstein files did unethical things, but many presumably did....
The MIT transparency report is worth reading in the light of the release. MIT had most of that information about its faculty at the time.
> Coincidentally, it's highly unlikely Minsky did anything wrong.
Virginia Giuffre said that she had sex with Minsky when she was 17 and he was 73. I think no matter how you look at it (even if she was technically above the age of consent in the jurisdiction of Epstein's island), it is still wrong and he absolutely should have known that.
I am a big fan of Stallman's work and his views considering computer science and its role in society, but his views are not precise or correct in this matter.
> but his views are not precise or correct in this matter.
The views he expressed re sexual assault were abhorrent
I have huge respect for RMS. Being this wrong once shows the bad way (we) men of a certain age were raised. The idea that sexual assault must involve violence or the threat of violence is old, out of date, and at one point RMS held it along with society at large
Times change, and as we get older we need to change with them.
In this instance, Stallman was arguing semantics. His long-term criticism [1] is that ‘sexual assault’ is being used to cover a wide range of wrongful actions, where a more nuanced terminology to distinguish between them would be more appropriate. That in itself doesn’t imply he finds any of those actions acceptable, only that he’d like them to have more specific names.
He might not have picked a good time and place to share his terminological views, but I don’t think there’s anything wrong with them per se.
[1] https://stallman.org/antiglossary.html#assault
How is RMS's connection/response to Epstein not relevant?
The topic seems to be warnings and predictions coming true even if they seem far-fetched at first. The linked article doesn’t talk about any warnings or predictions. It only recounts (in a way) how RMS, while discussing the topic of Epstein’s abuse, said some things which many people found offensive, leading to his resignation.
I guess it is marginally relevant; it just seems odd to drop a marginally relevant link unaccompanied by further comment. Usually people seem to mention what brought it to mind, or which part they found particularly interesting.
Stallman and "rich pedos" aren't even close in terms of lunacy. I never thought that Stallman's rants were far fetched at all.
You were correct to dismiss pizza gate, as it was completely unfounded and pure right wing fantasy about satanist democrats eating babies in a basement.
Now that we have an actual conspiracy involving the elites of the world in a child sex trafficking ring, the people previously pushing the pizza gate narrative are nowhere to be found. They can't accept that their guy was Epstein's best friend for decades and the second most cited name in the files (after Epstein himself).
Haven't seen a single republican distance themselves from Trump because of his deep ties with Epstein.
alt link: https://www.stallman.org/millions.html
Some previous discussion:
2013 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5839549
Along the same lines, "Welcome to the New and Improved Police State" by Dave McGowan, September 12 2001: https://centerforaninformedamerica.com/welcome-to-the-new-an...
Informed? How about the 'Informed Trading' that was observed September 10, 2001? Yesterday I transcribed https://youtu.be/PrI8g3yHxAM after having just found and learned about Marc Chesney.
Whoa ...
... Slashdot still exists?
I'll make a confession: These days I find Slashdot to be much better curated than HN. Pretty much every day I find something worthwhile on Slashdot. I can't say the same for HN.
Ironic given that I left Slashdot for HN so many years ago.
i was an active slashdot reader many years ago. i don't actually remember when/why/ or even where to i left. i guess it's worth taking a look back
I probably left when CmdrTaco left.
Not only that, alterslash.org still exists.