Old Fucking Punk @lwriemen@librem.one

The city that arrested a person for clapping at a data center meeting has now moved to virtual meetings, meaning residents can only watch and not provide public comment or participate. Says its for 'public safety'

https://www.404media.co/city-that-arrested-person-for-clapping-at-data-center-meeting-moves-to-virtual-townhalls-for-public-safety/

"When a person feels he knows a thing or two which other people have been too stupid to discover, he is a wise person. Then a feeling comes to him—a kind of a desire to enlighten the public concerning the things they do not know; incidentally—how smart he is."

https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/79325/pg79325-images.html

@zzt as a former open source community manager (volunteer and paid) I'm gonna say if you don't want want to deal with LLM and synthetic contributors to your project you don't have to. It's your project, you set the rules and community tone. Feel free to ban on sight with no apologies.

"If the “West” would take a break from sanctioning and bombing Iran, it just might find something to learn there—if they don’t destroy it first. As we mentioned in a post on Iranian architecture back in February, the Persians have hundreds of years practice at cooling buildings in one of the harshest heats on the planet without the use of AC..."

https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2026/08/architectural-answers-to-an-overheating-world.html

Today on the Ben Joravsky show, Senior Editor at In These Times Miles Kampf-Lassin speaks about why many centrists would rather defeat progressives than defeat Trump. https://open.spotify.com/episode/3rXfS4EtcMcV3r3mQbkXw8?si=Wgnzt9QkQYmBXWmZTEGbyw&utm_source=copy-link

RE: https://shakedown.social/@aburtch/117073557960386055

The President of the United States is a dullard who wants our children to suffer and die from preventable illness.

It is noteworthy when the even the Los Angeles Police Department finds that Flock just isn't worthwhile.

https://www.gadgetreview.com/one-in-three-alerts-wrong-high-error-rates-and-data-concerns-force-cities-to-drop-flock

Help get this new book, Herbalism and State Violence: Practical Herbal Medicine for Surviving State Repression edited by Nicole Rose, into the world and into many more hands. This book is a call to heal, to support one another, and to keep fighting for a world free from state violence.
Back the project here: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/ww3/herbalismstateviolence?ref=8rw6qd&token=16c3bc83

Wordgard 0.4.0 is out, with somewhat fewer bugs than 0.3.0 had. https://code.haverbeke.berlin/wordgard/wordgard/src/branch/main/CHANGELOG.md#0-4-0-2026-08-10

RE: https://mastodon.social/@colincornaby/117069185435215102

Holy shit, so the "Claude plagiarised an app" story is actually "Claude produced the same app twice when prompted to do so by two separate developers" 😅

Involved from the sidelines in a volunteering project and reviewing their website. It’s made by a developer who has switched to “vibe coding”.

Me and the other contributors have now spent maybe twice as much time pointing out VERY OBVIOUS issues (both with the code, design, and copy) than it would have taken me to code it all from scratch without gen AI.

But sure, ✨ it’s the future ✨

We ran out of missiles and need some ingenuity if the war crimes are to continue. https://www.gocomics.com/brian-mcfadden/2026/08/10

Surveillance monger Flock is such a scummy company that a "vigilante movement" has emerged to fight its abuses -- and even its existence. The passion to curb this corporate evil is great. But we also need to force Congress to do its job, and enact real privacy laws. https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/ng-interactive/2026/jul/25/flock-surveillance-cameras

We need to learn this, understand it, and make sure the rest of the voting population 'get it'! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JfjKQSPoamU This is the Modern Monetary Theory understanding of public finances. It is inherently more appropriate than the approach of *all* our previous Gov'ts. We need smarter Gov't.

So, I'm looking for a job, please boost. I'm an aspiring #Unity developer with game jam and 2.5 years of non-gaming professional experience. I additionally bring professional experience in DevOps (as project lead) and web development (as freelancer). I've been coding since I was 8, so while not all my knowledge might be very up-to-date, I sure can learn all things coding. I like automation. I'm very communicative. I often ask "why". See next toot for conditions.
#Unity3D #fediHire #lookingForJob

There's been no real innovation that's improved household chores (Sorry, Roomba, you can't do rugs, corners, stairs, curtains, furniture, etc.) in decades because all the tech money people haven't had to do any ever.

This story should terrify any open source project or company that allows LLM-generated code into their project.

Someone created a new app, using Gemini. Only it wasn’t a new app, it was clearly plagiarised because it happened that there was an example in the training set that exactly matched the requirements. The similarity was well within the range that courts have previously used to determine a derived work.

When you have this level of similarity, the requirement comes to you to prove that there was no way that the original work could have flowed to your project. Companies that have this concern usually do it by ensuring that no one on the team has been exposed to the original and that the code for the original never goes near their systems. But when one of the systems that you use is a language model trained on, among other things, all of the open-source code that it could scrape (and which does not disclose its training set), being able to prove that there was no path from some other codebase to yours is impossible.

Just because the US copyright office has ruled that you, as the person promoting an LLM, cannot assert copyright on the output, does not mean that someone else can’t. If you take a DVD and transcode it to H.264, there is no creative step and so the new copy is not something subject to independent copyright, but it is a derived work of the DVD (itself a lower-quality derived work of the original masters) and so subject to the same copyright.

Importantly in this story, the person prompting Gemini had no idea that the original app existed. To safely use the code, they would need to search everything in the training data and discard outputs that would meet the bar of being substantially similar. And that’s something that requires human judgement.

Over the last 13 years as a software dev at SaaS companies, I've developed a fondness for graphs. I spend a lot of time staring at them to answer questions (mostly boiling down to "Why is the website sad?" and "Wait, *is* the site sad?") and I've learned to configure and read them quite well. But there are still many mysteries

I think it might be fun to present a series of graphs with interesting patterns to see what other people think.

Sometimes, I'll have my own answer. Sometimes I won't!

I'm calling it #GraphMystery.

We often frame the damage LLMs do to open source as side effects, but realistically, this is Claude operating precisely as intended… by the vendor. The aim is to convert the value created by other devs into profits for the AI company. It does so by automating the process of finding existing code, stripping it of authorship, matching it to the prompted task, and redeploying it for the company's customer. That, whether they realize it or not, is what the customer is paying the AI company to do.

Here's a vivid demonstration of one hazard of using AI for app development: "the web app I had launched using Claude was strikingly similar to his open source project, even reproducing a bug he had later fixed…" https://blog.terrygodier.com/2026/08/09/mea-culpa-dark-hours.html