Old Fucking Punk @lwriemen@librem.one

Dear fediverse , what kind of a connector is this?

40 pin, 0.5mm pitch, motherboard side, going to an eDP display panel.

I'd like to buy the socket, but nothing I've seen quite matches the shape.

#laptop #repair #lvds #electronics #askfedi

To all who’re criticizing itself the mounting criticism of LLMs and who'd rather like to emphasize these models can also be used for good:

POSIWID (aka The Purpose Of a System Is What It Does) is very much applicable here, i.e. there is “no point in claiming that the purpose of a system is to do what it constantly fails to do”.[1]

For the moment (and I don’t detect _any_ signs of this changing), LLMs conceptually and the way they’re handled technologically/politically, are harmful, more than anything, regardless of other potential/actual use cases. In a non-capitalist, solarpunk timeline this all might look very different, but we’re _absolutely not_ in that world. It’s simply ignorant and impossible to only consider LLM benefits anecdotally or abstractly, detached from their implementation, their infrastructure required for training, the greed, the abuse, the waste of resources (and resulting conflicts), the inflation, disinformation, and tangible threats (with already real impacts) to climate, energy, rights, democracy, society, life etc. These aren't hypotheticals — not anymore!

A basic cost-benefit analysis:

In your eyes, are the benefits of LLMs worth these above costs?
Could these benefits & time savings have been achieved in other ways?
Do you truly believe a “democratization of skills” is achievable via the hyper-centralization of resources, whilst actively harvesting and then removing the livelihood and rights of entire demographics?
You’re feeling so very productive with your copilot subscription, how about funding FLOSS projects instead and help building sustainable/supportive communities?
How about investing $500 billions into education/science/arts?

Cybernetics was all about feedback loops, recursion, considering the effects of a system and studying their influence on subsequent actions/iterations. Technologists (incl. my younger self) have made the mistake/choice ignoring tech’s impact in the world for far too long. For this field to truly move forward and become more holistic, empathetic and ethical, it _must_ stop treating the above aspects as distracting inconvenient truths and start addressing them head on, start considering secondary and tertiary effects of our actions, and use those to guide us! Neglecting or actively denying their importance and the more-than-fair criticism without ever being able to produce equally important counter examples/reasons just make us look ignorant of the larger picture... Same goes for education/educators in related disciplines!

Nothing about LLMs is inevitable per se. There’s always a decision and for each decision we have to ask who’s behind it, for what purposes, who stands to benefit and where do we stand with these. Sure, like any other tech, LLMs are “just a tool”, unbiased in theory, usable for both positive and negative purposes. But, we’ve got to ask ourselves at which point a “tool” has attracted & absorbed a primary purpose/form as a weapon (incl. usage in a class war), and any other humanist aspects have become mere nice-to-have side effects, great for greenwashing, and — for some — surfing the hype curve, while it lasts. We’ve got to ask at which point LLMs currently are on this spectrum and in which direction they’re actively accelerating (are being accelerated)...

(Ps. Like many others, for many years I’ve been fascinated by, building and using AI/ML techniques in many projects. I started losing interest shortly after the introduction of GANs and the non-stop demand for exponentially increasing hardware resources and obvious ways how this tech will be used in ever more damaging ways... So my criticism isn’t against AI as general field of research, but about what is currently sold as AI and how it’s being pushed onto us, for reasons which actually have not much to do with AI itself, other than being a powerful excuse/lever for enabling empire building efforts and possible societal upheavals...)

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_purpose_of_a_system_is_what_it_does

#AI #LLM #Cybernetics #NoteToSelf

So I've been using my laptop with the wrong date for a while and #certificate errors meant I could only see #websites when the stars aligned.

This was the most productive I've been for a while.

So I decided to make this a #browser extension:

**Block selected websites, 90% of the time**

https://codeberg.org/dcz/webBlocker

No more mindless scrolling! No more constant Wikipedia binges! Just occasional ones. It's fine to have fun once in a while.

$ ssh-add ~/.ssh/id_ecdsa.dcz

Warning: Program '/bin/bash' crashed.

Wow, this is new.

#bash

#DeutscheBahn : personal data or 3x the price!

Me: not going to #conferences until further notice.

It doesn't seem right that a government-subsidized #monopoly is allowed to fleece customers :(

https://www.vzbv.de/pressemitteilungen/deutsche-bahn-ticketkauf-am-automaten-muss-weiterhin-moeglich-sein

#db #trains #privacy

When I asked researchers if they have started planning what to do if the US gov't decides to restrict access to GitHub or other bits of US-hosted digital infra, I was hoping some people would say that they are forming federated multi-institution/multi-national collaborations because any single site in any single country is just another single point of failure. It's not "can my university spin up a self-hosted version of [thing]" but "let's figure out how to federate this stuff."

Starmer is warned against ‘appeasing’ Trump with tax cut for US tech firms - https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2025/mar/23/starmer-is-warned-against-appeasing-trump-with-tax-cut-for-us-tech-firms the more #starmer concedes, the more #trump will demand; the time to say no is now....

Your ongoing support helps radical independent publishing alive, which is critically important in these turbulent times. Join via the link in our bio.

https://www.paccusa.org/conference.html

The upcoming #Abra #CoopCloud release has 9 contributors 🎉 That's encouraging ☀️ In total, we've seen 24 contributors to the project in 4 years. Hacking on abra is no joke: it's a 75K LOC #Golang codebase with 700+ unit/integration tests and a growing userbase using it directly for their work (~ 14 tech collectives, at least that we know about from fedi membership) 🤸 Thank you abra hackers past, present and future for your efforts 🔥

#Forgejo 10.0.3 was just released!

We recommend that all installations are upgraded to the latest version.

Check out the release notes and download it at https://forgejo.org/releases/. If you experience any issues with this release, please report to https://codeberg.org/forgejo/forgejo/issues.

#forgejorelease

This week's comic: Zero dimensional chess

#cartoon #comic #uspol #media #journalism #authoritarianism #democracy

We are seeking applicants to be the Editor-in-Chief of IEEE Computer.

This is the IEEE Computer Society's flagship magazine.

The deadline has been extended to April 18.

https://www.computer.org/press-room/seeking-2026-editors-in-chief

I had a coworker—someone who should know better!—use an LLM to get their research “started” the other day.

They asked the LLM a variation of “has X ever done Y.”

The LLM answered “oh yes, X has done Y many times.”

So I demanded how the LLM could “know” the answer, and my coworker asked the LLM “what are your sources for that?”

And the LLM answered, nearly verbatim “numerous news articles and scholarly papers about X doing Y.”

So I did a quick web search and could find no evidence of X doing Y.

The LLM was prompted to produce statistically plausible text about X and Y, so it generated some. It was prompted to produce statistically plausible text about sources. It never actually “knew” anything. It was cued to answer that question in a manner that a human would find persuasive and maybe even authoritative, completely independent of any truth-value of the text it generates.

What a fucking waste.

In preparation for the upcoming phosh release we've released new versions of #gmobile 0.2.0 and #feedbackd 0.8.0. Feedbackd is now more flexible regarding haptic feedback for events so if e.g. feedback is too intrusive (or too weak) you can consider submitting adjustment for your device to https://source.puri.sm/Librem5/feedbackd-device-themes/

#phosh #LinuxMobile

If you can't avoid traveling here, take warning. https://www.dailykos.com/story/2025/3/21/2311600/-Cartoon-Travel-advisories

Elon #Musk lashes out at US #judges as they rule against #Doge - https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2025/mar/22/elon-musk-doge-judges-usaid "Musk lambastes judges as leftwing activists in more than 20 posts as Trump administration’s judiciary clash intensifies" and yet right-wing judges are strangely acceptable...

The official statement from Columbia is at https://president.columbia.edu/content/fulfilling-our-commitments. The link to that was in an email so bland and uninformative that I ignored the links (one of which doesn't work anyway).

My undergrad degree is from Columbia, and I'm a faculty member for a few more months, though no longer teaching. I intend to continue wearing my mask, since I wear it for health reasons and not “for the purpose of concealing one’s identity in the commission of violations of University policies or state, municipal or federal laws.” After all, it's for health reasons, which is explicitly permitted by policy. My next step: an email to my chair and the dean. I have two thesis defenses coming up this semester; other than those, I don't need to be inside any campus buildings, and I'll run the defenses over Zoom if I have to.
https://flipboard.com/@newyorktimes/new-york-bat3un55z/-/a-0zIWJwAfQXmPJsJLILatFg%3Aa%3A3195393-%2F0

@GottaLaff "The GOP said they will stop your Social Security unless Elon Musk gets access to all your records" seems like a good simple message to get out to the public.

Automattic Operating System

I was interviewed by Inc magazine for almost two hours where we covered a lot of great topics for entrepreneurs but almost none of it made it into the weird hit piece they published, however since both the journalist and I had recording of the interview I've decided to adapt some parts of it into a series of blog posts, think of it as the Inc Article That Could Have Been.

https://ma.tt/2025/03/aos/