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by jsk2600 199 days ago
This is the guy who is 'browsing' web using wget+email afterall:

> For personal reasons, I do not browse the web from my computer. (I also have not net connection much of the time.) To look at page I send mail to a demon which runs wget and mails the page back to me. It is very efficient use of my time, but it is slow in real time.
2 comments
krackers 199 days ago
This makes sense if you want to reject the modern web, but using lynx or w3m would work as well. But if you generally want to champion free software and put the "personal" in PC, then I think you necessarily need to familiarize yourself with modern computing or else you can't really have a good opinion on it.

For instance, if you refuse to play around with LLMs out of some dogmatic reason that they're not "truly" open (note: I don't know what his true opinions are), then you risk completely missing the boat and can't meaningfully shape the space of modern discourse.

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ekjhgkejhgk 199 days ago
No, you don't know what the reasons are. You're assuming he just wants to avoid graphical interfaces. That might not be the reason. In fact, I suspect that it has to do privacy, where lynx won't help you.
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johannes1234321 198 days ago
I assume it is more about structure and time. If you start browsing you wait for pages to load and then probably go a page further and to the next. In the batch mode you have the designated time window to go through mail and read what is there and avoid jumping into some rats nest of neverending paths.

In addition you get those privacy aspects (website operators don't know where you are) and are blocked from "non-free JavaScript programs" and only deal with text with content, all else will not come through.

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krackers 199 days ago
What is the privacy leak vector using lynx? It does not use JS, so I'm not sure how running wget on another server is better than lynx over ssh or mosh?
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ekjhgkejhgk 199 days ago
I don't know, we're both speculating. I'm just advising against "oh he could just as well do X" - you don't know.
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kleiba 198 days ago
If you can send and receive email, why can't you run wget yourself?
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andai 198 days ago
My guess would be that he prefers having stuff in an inbox he can process one by one.
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