Old Fucking Punk @lwriemen@librem.one

The LLM discourse on the Fediverse has really irked me the last few days.

Refusing to read writing made with the use of LLMs and refusing to give time to writers who use, promote or justify the use of LLMs is not purity culture, it's a boycott. It's a political act of withdrawing my time, resources and support for something that I find deeply morally wrong. It's protest. I have a choice and I refuse.

LLMs are exploitative, destructive, biased, mediocre parroting machines. Using them has a negative impact on the climate, the arts, the quality of the internet, the job market, the economy, the accessibility of electronics, even on skill development, creativity and mental health. LLMs are made and trained on the unpaid labour of millions -if not billions- of people who didn't consent. Their generic output litter the path to finding anything by true human creators.

Wherever I can, for as long as I can, I reject LLMs and anything that is related to them. I'm boycotting.

@ludicity For the record, I work at a software company that employs ~10k developers.

Before LLMs, I'd encounter such engineers a couple of times a month, but I interact with a lot of engineers, specifically the ones that need help or are new at the company or industry at large, so it's a selected sample. Even the most inexperienced ones are willing and able to learn with some guidance.

After LLMs, there's been a significant uptick, and these new ones are grossly incompetent, incurious, impatient, and behave like addicts if their supply of tokens is at all interrupted. If they run out of prompt credits, its an emergency because they claim they can't do any work at all. They can't even explain the architecture of what they are making anymore, and can't even file tickets or send emails without an LLM writing it for them, and they certainly lack in any kind of reading comprehension.

It's bleak and depressing, and makes me want to quit the industry altogether.

Hacktivists tried to find a workaround to Discord’s age-verification software, Persona. Instead, they found its frontend exposed to the open internet, and that was just the beginning.

https://www.therage.co/persona-age-verification/

If you have to put up a sign asking cyclists to please use your shared pedestrian path, you've designed it wrong.

As a commuter cyclist, I want to get from point A to point B as fast as I can, without dying. Just like a car driver.

When given the option of riding on the road verge, or weaving in and out of people walking their dogs with headphones on and children walking to school and friends walking along chatting to each other, and giving way to cars at every little side road, then I choose the road verge. So do people on road bikes zipping past me at >30 km/hr.

I really like the separated cycleways that Christchurch city has built. They're safe and fast and well used.

I worry about the recent proliferation instead of "shared paths" in new road developments which combine cyclists with pedestrians and discourage bikes from being on the road at all.

Shared paths are useful for children on bikes, if we teach them how to ride around pedestrians, but they're impractical for an adult cyclist trying to travel 20–30 km/hr.

Please, let's keep investing in separated cycleways for cycle commuters. That's what will get more commuters out of cars, not shared paths.

#cycleways #bikeTooter #nz #biking

It seems like Medium has joined DEV in becoming a useless repository of slop and slop-related discussions.

This trash is destroying the places we used to share useful ideas, and it really is a loss.

What *is* true: if I go to the NZ Lenovo site, there're no laptops available with Linux right now. If, however, I go to the US Lenovo site, a 'Build your own ThinkPad L14 Gen 5 AMD (14")' laptop (the sort of thing I'd be interested in), you have the option of Ubuntu Linux pre-installed, with a price reduction of $140 vs. the default Windows 11 Home install.

Wow, Lenovo says they're losing money on every computer pre-installed with MS Windows due to it sucking. They are apparently moving to Ubuntu Linux installed by default. Windows will only be an extra-cost option... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k8OMjEWOo_M No more default Windows Tax, no more bloatware & nagware. The world might just get slightly better as a result of Microsoft losing out.

Does anybody have any good artists that they follow here? I’m looking for unconventional stuff; thrift store artists.

@onepict the Homeless Workers Movement from Brazil has a technology chapter (I am part of it) and we have a short comic book in English: https://digilabour.com.br/wp-content/uploads/2025/09/Other-Tech-Worlds-Are-Possible-Vol.-1-Homeless-Workers-Movement-in-Brazil-English.pdf

We also have a non fiction book released last year that probably will get translated into English as well.

Tiny reminder FediFriends to add alt-text
to your images and media so that your posts are accessible to all, and (bonus point) more people will boost them.

Thank you!

#Mastodon #Fediverse

AI is killing, harming, delaying, or forcing higher prices on a wide range of technologies and tech products and services. The AI industry is doing to technology:
https://www.computerworld.com/article/4134728/is-ai-killing-technology.html

Brendan Carr is the State Media Critic, and his recommendations are MANDATORY. https://www.dailykos.com/story/2026/2/20/2369531/-Cartoon-FCC-guide

Kyle Cheney @kyledcheney.bsky.social‬
👀The federal judges in West Virginia, where ICE has been pulling over and detaining people on the freeway, are literally screaming about ICE's tactics.

"It is an assault on the constitutional order," Judge Goodwin says. https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.wvsd.242928/gov.uscourts.wvsd.242928.28.0.pdf

Do NOT verify your Linkedin profile. Here's why:
https://thelocalstack.eu/posts/linkedin-identity-verification-privacy/

After years of activist pressure, lawsuits, and bad press Ring made much needed reforms. Now, they’re pivoting back to mass police surveillance as a business model. https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2025/07/amazon-ring-cashes-techno-authoritarianism-and-mass-surveillance

Those who live by the grind will die by the burnout.

Do any moots know someone who we might be able to consult about restructuring a mid-size FOSS project? Essentially to migrate from a BDFL model to a more flat-structured democratic organisation.

We are discussing how to restructure #postmarketOS so that it can continue to scale up and be a truly community-run project.

We have some idea of how co-ops like Igalia do this, but we have a lot of differences (like being largely volunteer run and having very different goals) which leave us with a lot of unknowns.

To give an example of the kind of structure we're thinking of (by no means final, there hasn't been any broad agreement on a new structure yet):

We have the relevant pieces in place to form an assembly (everyone listed on https://postmarketos.org/team/ ) which could then democratically form teams and delegate responsibilities to them (e.g. finance/budget, technical policy-making, maintainers for various OS components).

The assembly would then also be responsible for deciding on focus areas and long term goals for the project (e.g. improving reliability, building a production-ready immutable version of the distro)

We could then form working groups to enable cross-team collaboration to move towards our specific goals.

Currently we lack a lot of understanding of the potential implications of something like this, how we can ensure the project doesn't get hijacked, that we don't drift too far from our mission statement, etc etc...

If you have a background in sociology and/or relevant experience from other projects then I would love to reach out and be able to discuss this in more detail!

#decentralization #opensource #freesoftware #foss

Signal boosting once more! Let's give it up for @jadehopepunk who gave this great talk recently 🎉

Neighbourhood-First Software: the open web without expecting everyone to self-host

https://tv.lumbung.space/w/nzuB248U2LQA1LCn7vYmER

It's fresh off the re-uploaded with consent presses over on @coopcloud@tv.lumbung.space.

This proposal for Neighbourhood-First Software is a wonderful tapestry of ideas, fed by a concrete bottom-up practice of self-organisation.

It weaves threads between @p2panda, #permacomputing, Co-op Cloud and more.

An inspiring and recommended watch 😻

Moar links:

- https://jade.hopepunk.me
- https://lores.tech.
- https://www.merri-bek.tech

-- d1

#Persona leak continued

Integration with Government Systems: The platform is capable of filing Suspicious Activity Reports (#SARs) directly to #FinCEN (U.S. Treasury) and #FINTRAC (Canada), and integrates with blockchain analytics tools like #Chainalysis to monitor cryptocurrency addresses.

Suspicious Checks: Some checks, like "SelfieSuspiciousEntityDetection" and "SelfiePoseRepeatedDetection", lack clear definitions of what constitutes a "suspicious" face or repeated pose, raising concerns about bias and opacity.

This is a big deal. I’ve been telling y’all that age verification was just a way to gather intelligence.

https://www.therage.co/persona-age-verification/

@xgranade
Here's an excellent article by @tante criticising that broader rhetorical point: https://tante.cc/2026/02/20/acting-ethical-in-an-imperfect-world/

It's really long, but totally worth the time IMO.

Somewhat tangentially, the backlash on the fedi along the lines of "Cory considered bad now" prompted tante to write a followup article which really gets one thinking: https://tante.cc/2026/02/20/on-alliances/

I recommend reading both.