Old Fucking Punk @lwriemen@librem.one

"Our politicians and our media, it appears, find it difficult to handle more than one conflict at a time. So as Mr Trump’s lunatic military escapade in and around Iran has stumbled on, the fighting in Ukraine has largely been forgotten, apart from occasional squeaks of fear or aggression from western leaders and pundits. Now that Iran seems to be settling into a long-term economic struggle that the US will lose, attention is shifting back North again, and we are suddenly realising that an awful lot has happened there since the beginning of the year.

"As usual, we do not understand what we are seeing, or why things are happening as they are. This is essentially because the western security complex does not understand Strategy and how it is applied, and does not care to understand Russia and its objectives. So I thought it was about time for this essay..."

https://aurelien2022.substack.com/p/the-russians-are-coming

Apparently, over on Bluesky, worrying about the mental health effects of chatbots means I'm discriminating against people with mental illness

Sometimes I wonder why I bother. Retail or tourism is starting to look good in comparison 😑

I've been asked by several clients over the past year to help them find senior software engineering talent. You need to play down the "AI" rhetoric if you want to attract people who genuinely care about the work and who really know what they're doing.

Advertising that you intend to install them into some kind of "reverse centaur" role will pretty much guarantee they won't be applying.

@tmw @kbm0 @davidgerard Yeah, I don't know for sure, but considering Linux is basically a corporate project, this change will also provide welcome ambiguity for lawyers that either want to enforce copyright claim on the kernel or deny copyright infringement. The ambiguity will also be useful for lobbyists when arguing for favorable changes to laws, "It's already deeply embedded, and there's no way to tell what was written by what!"

How much slop is in Linux now? Ehh we decided not to tell you

https://lore.kernel.org/lkml/20261009083137.3-1-sashal@kernel.org/

lol yeah sure, bro, your datacenter sized LLM is going to install itself on a device whose flash size is measured in the megabytes 🙄

fucking stochastic script kiddies, the whole lot of them

I just don't have any desire to use #AI, for anything. It does not interest me at all.

. . .

None of the #AI tools available to me are anything I have use for. It's all solutions I don't want for problems I don't have.

. . .

PS, to my fellow writers and artists of all stripes: It is a uniquely demoralizing time to be working right now, I know. But please don't stop. Do it for love, or do it for spite, whatever gets you through the day. But do not stop. They don't get to win.

– Becky Chambers, I Do Not Like These Robots https://www.otherscribbles.com/aizine

(Transcript and descriptions in 🧵)

#NoAI #writing #zine

My mastodon instance of 1 user is getting hammered to its limits by AI scrapers.

Gigabytes of cached data and bandwidth for absolutely nothing.

Low disk space. Energy spikes. Memory spikes. CPU spikes. Human labor...

The cost is truly staggering, and this is for a single instance belonging to a single, otherwise insignificant individual.

Imagine the scale of resource abuse, theft, and climate destruction across the internet.

Just so people can use a shitty #AI prompt on their shitty site.

When I started tracking these things my biggest concerns were how toxic the tech is for knowledge work, education, media, and the arts; the environment; the inevitable bubble; and how it makes everything it touches less reliable. I genuinely thought the concerns about the mental health of heavy chatbot users were overblown but it now looks to me to be a major and widespread issue

If you haven't been paying attention to this story, it's truly wild - a supposed European alternative to big tech social media that lured in politicians and made waves but is incredibly poorly thought-out and is effectively doxxing its users. @_elena has been on it from the beginning. https://blog.elenarossini.com/public-by-design-how-w-social-makes-their-verified-users-personal-details-visible-on-the-open-web/

@lydiaconwell

Agreed - the weaponising of unfounded antisemitism accusations to defend both the unconscionable actions of the Israeli government, and the short-term interests of the far-right elsewhere, was and is particularly short-sighted for anybody that cares about either the welfare of Israelis or jews in general, because it undermines the very idea of antisemitism, and disguises its reality.

Anthropic is bragging about rolling their own from-scratch in-house version control system because git couldn't keep up with their 30,000 commits per day, and it doesn't seem to occur to them for a nanosecond that they are not fixing the actual problem in their engineering practices but making it exponentially worse

I have to use Google for one of my jobs. (Boo) But I just discovered that if you set your region to Cuba, you don't get any AI nonsense in your search results. 🙌

Little tip if you run into an AI agent for your next job interview and you don’t want the job:

Waste as MUCH tokens as possible, keep them busy as long as possible

Make sure the AI costs outweigh humans even more, that’s what they deserve 🤷‍♂️

https://www.theguardian.com/business/2026/oct/13/ai-share-crash-risk-global-imf-debt-corrowing-cyber-attacks "An AI crash was one of three “salient risks” to stability identified by the IMF, alongside rising government borrowing costs and the threat of a big cyber-attack." Yikes - wonder who'll be the victim of the 'big cyber-attack'? I have a weird feeling it won't be libre software...

I recently posted a link that got just 2 boosts and 6 faves, but the linked page was requested by about 300 fedi servers so they could generate a preview.

Which is actually fine! Because even though my photo gallery runs on a 15 year old laptop in my basement, I wrote the gallery software in a fast language (Rust) and so a trickle of requests maxing at 4 per second is not actually a problem.

I'm guessing that people complaining about fedi hammering their servers are using PHP or Python. Even if my post had "done numbers" I don't think the number of fedi *servers* involved would have exceeded 10x what I saw.

We’re hitting the road tomorrow with STATUS SYMBOL! If you’re in the area, come by! You can warm up with our brand smashing new demo here: