Aw it’s sweet this is framed as a Pride contribution. Really what he’s done is add support for larger Unicode combining graphemes, including the pride flag. The linked bug report is an excellent writeup.
To just add a little bit of context; the patch was written because “Happy Pride 🏳️🌈” wasn’t rendering correctly in the topic of the Norwegian demoscene IRC channel :)
Perhaps because Screen is a GNU project and so requires copyright assignment. Last time I did this, it required posting a physical piece of paper to the FSF offices in the US, which takes ages to process. Perhaps the author wanted people to be able to use the patch before the end of Pride month (the patch was submitted 3 days before)?
The FSF has (had?) a policy of going after GPL violators. To do this, they needed copyright assignment for two reasons:
So that they had standing to sue for copyright infringement, without needing all individual contributors to agree each time.
To allow them to relicense the work. Typically, they wanted to avoid court (it’s expensive) and so did the people they were going after. They would offer a retroactive time-limited license to the code that meant that the infringement was legal. In exchange, they would get money and a commitment that the infringement would stop.
Assigning copyright is non-trivial. I’m not sure if they now have some online process, the last time I talked to someone going through the proxies it was still paper.
The FSF requires that you email a maintainer and ask for a copy of the copyright assignment form. The process is widely disliked, but RMS objected to having a web form.
Nick, we spent lots of time talking on and in private messages here over the years and I’m pretty used to the way you talk. This message does not read like any conversation we’ve ever had and it deeply troubles me to see how drastically your thoughtful conversations with me have changed and someday I hope you go through and read those to compare.
Honestly, as someone who used to consider you an “internet friend” I hope you get banned. This sort of rhetoric is eliminationist by nature and is not just a statement of differences of opinion. This is what makes people feel less safe.
I really don’t care for the way this nice Unicode hack for Pride has been denigrated by someone who comes back, repeatedly, to spread hate and lies about people like me. It makes me not want to be here.
Edit so I’m relatively new here; how am I supposed to respond to hate speech written directly to me? I’m trying very hard to be polite but it’s just so exhausting having even the most innocuous LGBT content be attacked by bigotry.
Peter (@pushcx) will probably prune this comment thread any moment from now (does not relate to computing), but Banning someone just for having a different viewpoint than your own seems a bit harsh.
It’s not clear cut, of course. But I do not think it would be disproportionate to at least give a time limited ban with a warning. Because it is not just a different viewpoint; Nick attacked a marginalized group just because they were mentioned. When moderating a community you sort of have to choose between the attackers and those being attacked. You either force out the former or they will alienate the latter.
It’s not fine. I don’t think it’s fine. See also his massive amount of flags, and the deluge of people telling him to shut it. Going to -10 is practically unheard of on Lobsters.
I’ve been a long time active member (9+ years 1600+ comments), and this is by far the worst anti-LGBT garbage I’ve seen on this site. I wholeheartedly support a ban.
I think your comment is off-topic here because lobste.rs is primarily a computing-focused forum, but your commentary has no relation to computing.
Then, pseudoscience to back the new lifestyle.
But since I read the linked paper anyways, I’ll include my summary of its argumentation for other readers:
A behavior or property which is common throughout a population is not automatically “ordered” or disordered.
Behavior can be considered “disordered” without physical or mental distress induced in the self or others.
Behavior which doesn’t serve to enhance sexual fitness is “disordered”.
Regardless of whether one agrees or disagrees with those points, this doesn’t seem like a matter of pseudoscience at all, but rather philosophy discussing the classification of “disorder”. It doesn’t directly make claims like “individuals of population X are more likely to have property P than those of population Y”, which would be more scientific. Nor does it make a claim that treating non-distressing disordered behavior would be good.
Overall, I am concerned because your comment is citing sources that don’t seem to justify the statement you’re making.
Oops, I realize now that my comment is serving to artificially push this post higher in the rankings, along with the rest of this thread.
Meta question: How does this comply with the following paragraph?
Some things that are off-topic here but popular on larger, similar sites: entrepreneurship, management, news about companies that employ a lot of programmers, investing, world events, anthropology, self-help, personal productivity systems, last-resort customer service requests via public shaming, “I wanted to see what this site’s amazing users think about this off-topic thing”, and defining the single morally correct economic and political system for the entire world when we can’t even settle tabs vs. spaces.
Is it OK now to promote political issues just because they are loosely tied to a technical matter?
P.S. The Debian bugreport itself seems fine – relevant subject, text focused on Unicode… Could we have also the posts here in the same style?
Someone wrote a patch for proper unicode handling as they observed a bug trigged by a pride flag. How is that a political issue? screen was not rendering unicode characters properly and the author fixed that. That’s all.
In the hopes of skipping a rehash of “what is politics” and “why are people’s lives political” and “why is what is political itself a political question” from many previous meta discussions, the answer is roughly yes, that moderation is a bit looser about politics when a conversation starts from a strong technical post rather than a post that starts from a strongly political stance and mentions technology. This will often be a fuzzy, unsatisfying judgment call in particular examples.
you seem to have a personal issue with what is promoted and thus start holding up your interpretation of the rules - because we’ve had many instances of people promoting $sidething by talking about $ontopic thing (motivation)..
![Foxboron avatar](data:image/svg+xml,<svg xmlns="http://www.w3.org/2000/svg" width="16" height="16"><rect fill-opacity="0"/></svg>){kind=small}
Aw it’s sweet this is framed as a Pride contribution. Really what he’s done is add support for larger Unicode combining graphemes, including the pride flag. The linked bug report is an excellent writeup.
To just add a little bit of context; the patch was written because “Happy Pride 🏳️🌈” wasn’t rendering correctly in the topic of the Norwegian demoscene IRC channel :)
I thought I could replicate this in tmux too, but it turns out that mosh is the culprit in that case.
Very neat! It’s a bit strange to me though that this was submitted to debian instead of upstream.
Perhaps because Screen is a GNU project and so requires copyright assignment. Last time I did this, it required posting a physical piece of paper to the FSF offices in the US, which takes ages to process. Perhaps the author wanted people to be able to use the patch before the end of Pride month (the patch was submitted 3 days before)?
oh yeah, forgot about that.
it required WHAT NOW?!
Yeah, and I was so pissed off at those CLA web forms that had asked for a “real” name and a physical address, which no one would actually check…
The FSF has (had?) a policy of going after GPL violators. To do this, they needed copyright assignment for two reasons:
Assigning copyright is non-trivial. I’m not sure if they now have some online process, the last time I talked to someone going through the proxies it was still paper.
The FSF requires that you email a maintainer and ask for a copy of the copyright assignment form. The process is widely disliked, but RMS objected to having a web form.
[Comment removed by moderator pushcx: Religion is off-topic.]
[Comment removed by moderator pushcx: Religion is off-topic.]
[Comment removed by moderator pushcx: Religion is off-topic.]
[Comment removed by moderator pushcx: Even supposedly friendly bigotry is unwelcome.]
Nick, we spent lots of time talking on and in private messages here over the years and I’m pretty used to the way you talk. This message does not read like any conversation we’ve ever had and it deeply troubles me to see how drastically your thoughtful conversations with me have changed and someday I hope you go through and read those to compare.
Honestly, as someone who used to consider you an “internet friend” I hope you get banned. This sort of rhetoric is eliminationist by nature and is not just a statement of differences of opinion. This is what makes people feel less safe.
Serious q: do we tolerate this on lobsters? Anyone going to do something (ban)?
I really don’t care for the way this nice Unicode hack for Pride has been denigrated by someone who comes back, repeatedly, to spread hate and lies about people like me. It makes me not want to be here.
Edit so I’m relatively new here; how am I supposed to respond to hate speech written directly to me? I’m trying very hard to be polite but it’s just so exhausting having even the most innocuous LGBT content be attacked by bigotry.
It’s considered very abusive and not allowed here. I banned the user and the comments are all removed.
Ban after one comment? Isn’t this a bit harsh?
I read the multiple comments expressing religiously motivated bigotry before they were removed. The ban was entirely justified.
Peter (@pushcx) will probably prune this comment thread any moment from now (does not relate to computing), but Banning someone just for having a different viewpoint than your own seems a bit harsh.
It’s not clear cut, of course. But I do not think it would be disproportionate to at least give a time limited ban with a warning. Because it is not just a different viewpoint; Nick attacked a marginalized group just because they were mentioned. When moderating a community you sort of have to choose between the attackers and those being attacked. You either force out the former or they will alienate the latter.
Leaving a hatted comment to note that this is pretty much the mod philosophy at work here, yes, the paradox of tolerance.
[Comment removed by moderator pushcx: Even supposedly friendly bigotry is unwelcome.]
There is no realistic pro-LGBT movement. There are anti-LGBT, and anti-anti-LGBT movements (this is not a logical negation).
Bigotry with a nice veneer does not become a “different viewpoint” simply because of that nice veneer.
[Comment removed by moderator pushcx: Pruning politics off meta thread.]
Seems like exterminist bigotry is fine and dandy on this site, which is a real shame. Makes me much less inclined to hang around.
It’s not fine. I don’t think it’s fine. See also his massive amount of flags, and the deluge of people telling him to shut it. Going to -10 is practically unheard of on Lobsters.
I’ve been a long time active member (9+ years 1600+ comments), and this is by far the worst anti-LGBT garbage I’ve seen on this site. I wholeheartedly support a ban.
[Comment from banned user removed]
Railing against gay people on a tech focused site is massively off-topic, which is why you are getting your comments flagged.
You are free to express your views on these topics elsewhere. When posting here, please confine yourself to tech, where I know your input is valued.
did not read this but I think you are confused and it is a shame to see you being negative about gays.
[Comment removed by moderator pushcx: Pruning politics out of an already heated meta thread.]
[Comment from banned user removed]
[Comment removed by moderator pushcx: Pruning politics out of an already heated meta thread.]
[Comment removed by moderator pushcx: Even supposedly friendly bigotry is unwelcome. ]
[Comment removed by moderator pushcx: Pruning politics out of an already heated meta thread.]
This reads like copypasta
I think your comment is off-topic here because lobste.rs is primarily a computing-focused forum, but your commentary has no relation to computing.
But since I read the linked paper anyways, I’ll include my summary of its argumentation for other readers:
Regardless of whether one agrees or disagrees with those points, this doesn’t seem like a matter of pseudoscience at all, but rather philosophy discussing the classification of “disorder”. It doesn’t directly make claims like “individuals of population X are more likely to have property P than those of population Y”, which would be more scientific. Nor does it make a claim that treating non-distressing disordered behavior would be good.
Overall, I am concerned because your comment is citing sources that don’t seem to justify the statement you’re making.
Oops, I realize now that my comment is serving to artificially push this post higher in the rankings, along with the rest of this thread.
[Comment removed by moderator pushcx: Pruning religion out of the already heated meta conversation.]
[Comment removed by moderator pushcx: Pruning religion out of the already heated meta conversation.]
[Comment removed by moderator pushcx: Pruning religion out of the already heated meta conversation.]
[Comment removed by moderator pushcx: Pruning meta thread.]
[Comment from banned user removed]
Meta question: How does this comply with the following paragraph?
Is it OK now to promote political issues just because they are loosely tied to a technical matter?
P.S. The Debian bugreport itself seems fine – relevant subject, text focused on Unicode… Could we have also the posts here in the same style?
What politics are being promoted?
Someone wrote a patch for proper unicode handling as they observed a bug trigged by a pride flag. How is that a political issue? screen was not rendering unicode characters properly and the author fixed that. That’s all.
In the hopes of skipping a rehash of “what is politics” and “why are people’s lives political” and “why is what is political itself a political question” from many previous meta discussions, the answer is roughly yes, that moderation is a bit looser about politics when a conversation starts from a strong technical post rather than a post that starts from a strongly political stance and mentions technology. This will often be a fuzzy, unsatisfying judgment call in particular examples.
you seem to have a personal issue with what is promoted and thus start holding up your interpretation of the rules - because we’ve had many instances of people promoting $sidething by talking about $ontopic thing (motivation)..