From his website stallman.org:

Richard Stallman has cancer. Fortunately it is slow-growing and manageable follicular lymphona, so he will probably live many more years nonetheless. But he now has to be even more careful not to catch Covid-19.

Recent video of him speaking at GNU 40 Hacker Meeting. Screenshots of video stream.

  • makeasnek@lemmy.ml
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    1 year ago

    Sad news about a pioneer of internet freedom. He has earned his fair share of criticism and detractors, but he has also given a lot to the Linux and free software ecosystem. I personally run !boinc@sopuli.xyz on all my rigs to support open-source cancer research, I hope one day we can finally cross cancer off the list of humankind’s foes.

  • QuentinCallaghan@sopuli.xyz
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    1 year ago

    Seeing him without his beard and hair feels so wrong and even uncanny. I hope he has a lot more years ahead of him and he kicks cancer’s ass.

  • katy ✨@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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    1 year ago

    Eff cancer :(

    Hopefully some day we get to the point where it’s as rare as polio. I think that’s the same kind that Hank Green had though, IIRC. Hopefully it’s as manageable.

    • 520@kbin.social
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      1 year ago

      I have a hard time deciding what to do with this.

      On the one hand… Dude, even as someone who loves dark humour, I couldn’t bring myself to make a cancer joke upon news of a diagnosis unless the person was a true shitstain on the earth, like Trump.

      On the other hand…that was fucking brilliant and works on so many levels.

      • I had pretty much the same thought process.
        It’s dark, but brilliant.
        Yet I can’t imagine RMS being offended by this, so I shouldn’t either.
        That’s the kind of thing I wouldn’t be too surprised to hear from the guy himself.

        The world is a better place because of him and I wish him well.

    • galoisghost@aussie.zone
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      1 year ago

      That’s a terrible joke that deserves the downvotes, because cancer is shit and I only wish the best to anyone who is diagnosed with it, but I laughed.

        • schnurrito@discuss.tchncs.de
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          1 year ago

          You know, serious question from someone relatively new to the fediverse: how do you make sure that people won’t just create many accounts across instances if they want to evade bans or create one-time throwaways for posting abusive comments? One instance has no idea about users on other instances after all.

          • 520@kbin.social
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            1 year ago

            You can’t, not effectively. This ain’t necessarily a federation problem though, centralised social media has the same problem. You can do the same on Reddit.

            That’s not to say there aren’t things that can be done. Instances can agree to implement shared banlists that include known-abusive IPs or, if an abusive user has a habit of using a pattern in their evasion usernames, you can use a Regex to hunt them out.

            • schnurrito@discuss.tchncs.de
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              1 year ago

              On reddit the entire user database is in the hands of one company, so they might be able to tell whether two people are (likely) the same person. So I think that might actually be a problem made worse by federation.

              • 520@kbin.social
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                1 year ago

                You’d be surprised how hard the task is. Any given identifier can be trivially changed. IP addresses aren’t permanent and change frequently for home users. Multiple people genuinely use the same IP. People are likely to have very similar writing styles to someone else by complete coincidence. Browser fingerprinting can be thrown off by simply using another browser or fucking with the User Agent.

                That about puts paid to any identifiers either Reddit or an instance owner may have.

      • 520@kbin.social
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        1 year ago

        Dunno why you of all people are insulting their intelligence.

        While they made a clever double reference to the GNU/Linux meme and tying it in with the Ballmer ‘Linux is cancer’ rant, you not only come out with a one word response, but that one word makes you look infinitely worse than the person who literally made a cancer joke upon news of a diagnosis.

        Maybe ableist slurs weren’t the best idea?

        • losewon157@sh.itjust.works
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          1 year ago

          While they made a clever double reference to the GNU/Linux meme and tying it in with the Ballmer ‘Linux is cancer’ rant

          No. It’s an unfunny and retarded “meme” that is overused by redditors. And this obviously isn’t related to the steve ballmer rant. They just use the same template with any subject.

          • 520@kbin.social
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            1 year ago

            Just because you ain’t got the braincells to make the connection doesn’t mean others can’t.

            Speaking of overuse, you sure are using the r-word liberally for someone who couldn’t get the joke. Or is it one of those “I’m black therefore I can use the N-word” kind of things?

            • losewon157@sh.itjust.works
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              1 year ago

              Fucking retard. The subject of this post is cancer. That is all. You think you’re smart for overthinking the connection.

              • 520@kbin.social
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                1 year ago

                Why yes, that slur does apply to me! You see, I have autism and don’t take particularly kindly to that slur.

                Unlike you though, I actually have to tell people before they know there’s something wrong with me. Because, again unlike you, I can act like a normal human being. As opposed to acting like a 5 year old that just learned the r-word. Sorry, I can tell you need an explanation for these things!

  • Bali@lemmy.cafe
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    1 year ago

    Yes Stallman have issues but you dont wish someone dead! I know someone who is currently battling cancer and on chemotherapy and its an awful situation just to see it. I hope RMS can beat the cancer.

    • MaxHardwood@lemmy.ca
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      1 year ago

      I don’t think we’re too far away from AI’s that can refactor compiled code into any language of your choice; then all software will be open source.

      Edit: lul; at least 50 people are butt hurt over the idea that an AI can decipher assembler in 5-10 years

        • lemmesay@discuss.tchncs.de
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          1 year ago

          GPT, for example, fails in calculation with problems like knapsack, adjacency matrix, Huffman tree, etc.

          it starts giving garbled output.

            • lloram239@feddit.de
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              1 year ago

              The current LLMs can’t loop and can’t see individual digits, so their failure at seemingly simple math problems is not terrible surprising. For some problems it can help to rephrase the question in such a way that the LLM goes through the individual steps of the calculation, instead of telling you the result directly.

              And more generally, LLMs aren’t exactly the best way to do math anyway. Human’s aren’t any good at it either, that’s why we invented calculators, which can do the same task with a lot less computing power and a lot more reliably. LLMs that can interact with external systems are already available behind paywall.

                • lloram239@feddit.de
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                  1 year ago

                  Humans are wrong all the time and confidently so. And it’s an apples and oranges competition anyway, as ChatGPT has to cover essentially all human knowledge, while a single human only knows a tiny subset of it. Nobody expects a human to know everything ChatGPT knows in the first place. A human put into ChatGPTs place would not perform well at all.

                  Humans make the mistake that they overestimate their own capabilities because they can find mistakes the AI makes, when they themselves wouldn’t be able to perform any better, at best they’d make different mistakes.

  • electromage@lemm.ee
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    1 year ago

    Is he accepting medical treatments that require non-free software? Serious question, from what I know of him he would rather die. I don’t know if that changes when you’re actually faced with it though.

    • Captain Beyond@linkage.ds8.zone
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      1 year ago

      Software freedom applies only to hardware you personally own. It wouldn’t even apply to machines you interact with but do not own (such as ATMs or kiosks) since you aren’t the one who agrees to the proprietary software license.

      Stallman himself explains it in his computing FAQ.

    • merthyr1831@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      It’s incurable but usually has a good long term prognosis (97% 5 year survival rate and most people live 20+ years from diagnosis). Seems that the best RMS will get is remission but not cancer free.