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.

    • 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.

    • chuck@lemmy.ca
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      1 year ago

      Well it’s dark humor and I can see how some are deeply offended. The post even says it’s a slow growing treatable form, so personally I’ll laugh at the joke. It’s not like he’s end stage untreatable form of cancer. Like you know arch linux running on WSL level cancer.

    • Gamey@feddit.de
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      1 year ago

      My humor is fucking dark so I had to laugh but that one dose go a little far, it’s a good joke but with that timing I certainly wouldn’t make it!

      • 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!

                  • Gamey@feddit.de
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                    1 year ago

                    They are certainly cooler than you and I can tell that from three really stupid messages, you aren’t on Reddit anymore pal!

                  • YaBoyMax@programming.dev
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                    1 year ago

                    What do you have to gain from being this rude to strangers and using slurs against them? This behavior is legitimately antisocial, and unless you’re literally 13 years old it’s inexcusable.

        • 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.