Fossil was written for Sqlite in the same way that git was written for Linux. It's really a shame that more projects don't use it. I think that a github competitor (with social features, PRs, CI, etc) with a fossil backend would be very popular.

In fossil's case, every instance includes those features, this makes the social platform "the web itself"

Having said that, there are central hosting projects, but where that has some value with git, git proper is distributed and does not need it but all the auxiliary stuff does. with fossil it provides almost no value. All the auxiliary stuff is built in so all it provides is a place to host. Which is fair but hosting is not hard with fossil.

https://chiselapp.com/

With everything included in fossil I abuse it as a personal social platform(think discord) super easy to host and it gets me chat, forums, wiki, and file storage. None of them great, but it is so easy I don't really care. voice and video do require an additional service, so there is that. Now I just need to find some friends...

So many people treat git commands like magic words, and then are terrified when they mess up their repo (example in this xkcd... https://xkcd.com/1597/)

Reading documentation is a superpower

I'd wager a small sum that git is the tool most of us learned by accident, some of them fortunate, some less so. Thankfully, this one was the former.

Yeah, but Git is a tool, that in the face of an accident shoves you it's manual in the face.

I'm definitely the friend in the alt-text of this comic. What do you mean you haven't read gitcore-tutorial(7)??

> If their scare was honest, they would stop.

therefore, their scare is marketing.

In my mind no; an agent is an llm wrapped in more software (most trivially a while loop, but probably more then that)

> people’s private messages being released easily to the masses was common, Im not really surprised.

He, personally, did a lot to enable this reality.

Reminds me of playing Runescape back in the late 90s, you could double your money by just pressing alt-F4

Yeah, but "<company> at <ridiculously inflated price> is not far-fetched" is a great way to get people to think "it's not there now, but it will be", which is almost explicitly an attempt to boost stock prices.

Not everything is about stock prices, but some things are.

This will likely result in more "No pets allowed" leases

Basic cable had ads, premium cable (HBO, Showtime, etc) usually only advertised future programming in between programs, but nothing during a program.

> 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)