The work need not be “for me” and nowhere did I say it was or ought to be.

> "You are responsible for keeping your Account secure."

That is a non-zero amount of work.

> "You may not use GitHub in violation of export control or sanctions laws of the United States or any other applicable jurisdiction"

That requires you to be aware of those laws and put a non-zero amount of work into complying with them.

> "You will promptly notify GitHub by contacting us through the GitHub Support portal if you become aware of any unauthorized use of, or access to, our Service through your Account,"

That is a commitment to do some work.

> "For contractual purposes, you (1) consent to receive communications from us in an electronic form via the email address you have submitted"

That is a commitment to have a working email server/account.

If you don't do these things at times which are required, Github may close your account and your repo will go with it.

> "If you’re asking me which of those statements I disagree with, 1 and 3."

And on what grounds do you disagree? That "I will do something" is not saying that you will do something, or that "letting something rot" counts as "maintaining it"?

What I'm getting from you and akerl_10 is "la la la I don't want words to have meanings so I'm just going to deny that they do".

1. The difference between ‘abandoned’ and ‘maintained’ is that ‘maintained’ is bounded at the lower end to a greater-than-zero amount of maintenance work. Not a specific amount but necessarily >0. (Without that, “maintained” and “abandoned” become the same thing and that’s absurd).

2. “I am the maintainer” can be a voluntary statement, it’s not compelled (e.g. by a gun to the head).

3. The role of ‘maintainer’ is ‘doing that >0 amount of maintenance work’.

?

By the time we’re arguing how much maintenance, you’re agreeing with my position. In the case of your garden, if I saw it on fire I would think it reasonable to contact you about the fire given you are the gardener. I wouldn’t contact someone who was not the gardener.

If you put a note on the public noticeboard saying "I have planted some things in this area of the public commons and I am the maintainer them" can you defend the idea that you are not voluntarily offering to maintain something?

And

“This is maintained and I am the maintainer”

Are different states. 'Maintenance' is not work-free or effortless, so the second sentence is explicitly volunteering to do some non-zero amount of work, right?

I don't see how it can be read any other way, you either have to argue that maintenance isn't work, or that "I am the maintainer" is not volunteering oneself into the role of doing that work.

Just ordinary evidence. If there was a charity event which asked for a volunteer to organise drinks, and you volunteered, and then there were no drinks, and you said “I don’t owe you anything stop being entitled, if you want an event with drinks you can fork the idea and organise your own”, people would be unhappy and reasonably so. It’s not that you had a legal obligation to do that work, it’s that you told everyone you would and that stopped other people from doing it.

If rsync had no maintainer and someone publicly offered to take it on and maintain it, that would also block other people taking that spot. It stops people investing time effort and money into a fork or replacement to an abandoned project. If the volunteer then either didn’t do anything or wrecked it and said “I don’t owe you anything etc.” that would be bad in a similar way.

If you want to be able to tell people you are the maintainer, that the thing is maintained, and you get to control what happens to a widely used project, you can’t really stand by the position “why did people expect me to maintain it? I only told them I would maintain it, why would they believe me, that’s not fair”.

Make it clear that it’s abandonware and has no maintainer, and you can totally uphold the “not my problem, says so in the license, deal with it” position. But if your thing becomes popular then you should expect a company like RedHat to fork it into ‘redsync’ and run it their way as their project, not look to you as ‘upstream’ and sideline you completely. Which is what a lot of open source people say they want but don’t behave as if they want that. Probably because there actually is some prestige and power and status and reputation involved, even though people try to claim there isn’t.

The uk didn’t block sharing sites because of a threat to the social order, sharing sites blocked uk viewers because they don’t want to comply with uk laws like “don’t gather children’s personal data”.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c4gzxv5gy3qo

Can you people PLEASE use an LLM to give you something creative and original to say instead of this thought-free copypasta?

https://hn.algolia.com/?query=shove%20throat&sort=byDate&typ...

You can make a similar argument with a company like ASML where their secret sauce is the organisational ability to fine-tune 100,000 components into a precision Silicon-wafer etching machine. You're far more likely to accidentally stumble upon "how to recreate a mud hut" than "how to recreate ASML". Okay, and...?

Now any study of the program or compiler source code will not show any vulnerability, but compiling the program will make a vulnerable program, and recompiling the compiler from its clean source code will not fix the situation.

This carrying down of a pattern which is not written down anywhere, a flaming torch lighting a torch lighting a torch, is analogous to four billion years of life on Earth. We talk like DNA is an everything-code that defines a human and a human brain, but it’s the implicit behaviour of cells (‘compiler’) and the mechanisms inside them which interpret DNA. The unbroken chain of life getting more and more complex and never being restarted from scratch, with the behaviours not written down anywhere for us to study. How does DNA arrange for x, y, z to happen? Maybe it doesn’t at all.

Accidentally stumbling on a mechanism that is simple enough to be recreated with every human birth might be possible, accidentally stumbling on a mechanism that took evolution billions of years to find and which it has hung onto by copying it and has never recreated it from scratch, could be much less likely, in a much bigger search space.

“Nothing happens unless it has an explanation within the laws of physics” is an assumption; if it was broken then it would be broken. The mountain would be inexplicably gone, not explicably gone.

God: “Ok”

Man: “We measure that the mountain is gone, its mass-loss has measurably changed Earth’s orbit, weather patterns have changed, visually it’s not there anymore, we can walk though the space where it used to be.”

God: “Where is the mass of the mountain, and how did I make it disappear?”

Man: “God only knows! Pardon me; If I saw you do magic and can measure and test it, then that means it wasn’t magic. Internet people said so.”

God: “that doesn’t sound like a satisfying explanation”

Man: “it didn’t sound like a satisfying claim when it was just words on the internet either, but what can you do?”

God: “I’m God I can do anything”

Man: “can you make a boulder so heavy you can’t lift it?”

God: “yes”

Man: “how?”

God: “haven’t we just gone over showing you that I can do ‘impossible’ things, and you seeing them happen with your own eyes, and still refusing to accept?”

“I cut my finger with the kitchen knife”

“Maybe don’t hold it by the blade”

It’s something along the lines of sarcastic and deliberately unhelpful because “duh, of course don’t do that”.

Reform's manifesto includes[2]: "Stop the Boats with our 4 Point Plan. Leave the European Convention on Human Rights."

[1] https://fra.europa.eu/en/law-reference/european-convention-h...

[2] Page 5 of https://reformuk.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2025/10/Reform_UK...

The second is not a strawman, you claimed that only criminals are attracted to E2EE messaging when the link you gave showed some 170 thousand users of that specific messaging app with no suggestion that most of them were criminals. "I just said that it primarily interests "illegitimate" use for now" yes you did say that, and that thing you said is not supported by your link.

The third is about your writing about how people who want privacy are performative victims who are falling into anti-government conspiracy theories, but your link shows a thing which was not a conspiracy theory and the government in question actually was accused of targetting their political enemies with gangs, and it would be reasonable to want privacy against such.

> "I don't know how you managed to extract such a thing out of what I wrote"

> "But I digress. I wouldn't wanna spread conspiracy theories after all, would I?"

maybe write less of this winky-face bs and just say what you mean.

First, the secure end-to-end encryption was broken by international police and messages were read without making it illegal.

Second they suggest reading hundreds of thousands of people’s messages to catch a dozen or so gang members - not supporting your claim that only crooks use it.

Third, the video ends by the gang leader saying he was working for the President; not supporting your implication that criticism of government is all baseless conspiracy theories.

a) immediately, so it's always unsuspended, leaving you back in the original position.

b) you hope that after telling the government they cannot buy from you, they contact you to ask you to unsuspend your account so they can buy from you, then you login and unsuspend it, then they buy from you, then you login to report that purchase, and suspend your account again. This doesn't sound like less timewasting.