Old Fucking Punk @lwriemen@librem.one

There's tremendous value to being a strict LLM Abstentionist in the current political climate, whether or not there are any "valid use cases for LLMs" (there are—not nearly as many as most people think, but sure, more than zero) or the LLM was "created ethically" (to my knowledge no such model exists, but yeah, it's technically possible that someone has or will eventually build one).

Tech workers especially who refuse to interact with this technology are telling their coworkers and employers that ethics and morality are more important to some people than convenience and profit. This is a bold stance to take during good times—and downright foolhardy in the current job market—but the more people who draw the line here, the better the outcomes will be for literally everybody on the whole planet (except, perhaps, for some billionaire investors).

Microsoft is intrinsic to machinery of fascism in the US, and profiting from it. From minds to tools, storage to data analysis and automation, leaked files show just how deep they are in the engine room of ICE.

https://www.972mag.com/ice-microsoft-azure-leaked-files/

#BigTech

#Australia’s Social Media Ban Is Isolating Kids With Disabilities—Just Like Critics Warned - https://www.techdirt.com/2026/02/17/australias-social-media-ban-is-isolating-kids-with-disabilities-just-like-critics-warned/

Is there a website that promotes tech jobs at companies that don't use AI?

I'm not looking for work right now. However, I know a few people who are, and they don't want to work for someone who forces them to use GenAI, either for code, for infrastructure management, or for writing documentation.

For them, the prospect of working in tech in 2026 is just bleak.

#AskFedi

@noboilerplate@namtao.com It's pretty easy to move to something better like Codeberg. Git is a free and distributed version management system after all. All you have to do is "git push" to a new repo and your entire history is there.

PSA: If you block the `claude` user on GitHub, you'll get a warning every time you view a repo with that user in its commit history.

Now, the moment you look at a repo, you can immediately adjust your expectations.

You may do so here: https://github.com/settings/blocked_users

So, I started to volunteer in our local community centre to help (mostly) elder people with their computer and smartphone problems.

It's fascinating. We have people there up to their 90s and they are all every open for change.

We remove ad ID's from phones, change default browsers, switch from MS Office to #Libreoffice.

And for next time I already have a date with an elder lady to switch her old Windows 10 laptop to Linux Mint.
And she is not the only one!

What a time to be alive.

We have slightly tuned our rate-limiting after not touching it in a while. It should be "better" for most users now, but we value feedback in any case.

Check the full announcement and don't forget to subscribe to the changelog if you don't want to miss any news around Codeberg's services: https://codeberg.org/Codeberg/changelog/issues/2#issuecomment-10671812

After a long and Kafkaesque ordeal to set up a new bank account, we're happy to announce that we're once again in a position to accept donations!

A huge thanks to everyone who has reached out to ask how they could financially support us over the past year or so.

Thankfully, we had a bit of a nest egg that the project was able to survive off during that time. But we are definitely in need of regular financial support to help keep the project going, and to realize our future goals. So if you are in a position to do so, please consider signing up as a monthly sustainer, support independent anarchist infrastructure, and help grow Kolektiva.

https://kolektiva.info/donate/

Gen AI is an expensive way to create text and images. Right now, much of that cost is being subsidized and hidden, but it will eventually need to be paid. Because charging the actual cost will likely negate most of the value proposition of genAI, the companies that run the big models are focused on altering the social and economic context so that there are big external costs to opting out. E.g. getting companies to fire staff makes it difficult to pivot back away from AI because hiring and training replacement staff can be difficult and costly. Hence, the huge rush and hysterical sense of urgency around adoption: the demand for profitability is an approaching tidal wave, and they need to lock entire industries in before that wave hits.

That's why resistance IN THE PRESENT counts for a great deal. Right now, we have the approaching wave in our favor, and they're counting on cultivating enough dependence before it hits that we'll have no choice to accept the actual costs. The closer they get to locking society into dependence on hyperscale AI systems, the more difficult it becomes to opt out of even the plainly dystopian uses of the technology. And the longer we "wait and see," the less say we may ultimately have in how this technology shapes our society.

I wish #matrix the best, but #XMPP #Jabber still rocks:

> If deployed on a 16 GB RAM machine with at least 4 cores, a single ejabberd node can typically handle 200-300 K online users.

From: https://docs.ejabberd.im/get-started/

My 17 years old server is on 8GiB RAM with four 1.2GHz cores. I don't notice it. User data takes up 200MiB of space (it massively increased recently for some reason). Unlike Synapse :)

#messaging #im #decentralized #federated

Media consolidation is so bad, eventually towns will have to bring back their crier positions. Hear ye, hear ye, City of Boston: I can ring a bell and be real annoying about it.

I am immensely grateful to the Fediverse for all the encouragement I got here to embark on a #selfhosting journey.

#YunoHost has empowered my digital life in immeasurable ways.

My way of giving back - and fighting the broligarchs of Big Tech - is to create a guide that demystifies the process. I have compiled all my posts so far in a single page:

🔗 : https://blog.elenarossini.com/a-newbies-guide-to-self-hosting-with-yunohost/

If you're curious about self-hosting but you haven't taken the leap yet, I hope my articles will be helpful to you ❤️

Today in InfoSec Job Security News:

I was looking into an obvious ../.. vulnerability introduced into a major web framework today, and it was committed by username Claude on GitHub. Vibe coded, basically.

So I started looking through Claude commits on GitHub, there’s over 2m of them and it’s about 5% of all open source code this month.

As I looked through the code I saw the same class of vulns being introduced over, and over, again - several a minute.

#CBS refused to broadcast this Stephen Colbert interview. Here's how to watch it anyway - https://mashable.com/video/stephen-colbert-cbs-talarico-interview-banned-broadcast-watch "The late show host called out his network for pre-emptively capitulating to the U.S. government." #hero

@tommi @boris @Holly @youjungnoh great plan! Maybe check out @coopcloud as replacement for yunohost: A growing supportive community of comrades with democratic decision making about the project through a federation. There are also a couple of groups/collectives running the community hosting approach.
The more the merrier. 🙌

Covid cautious folks…. I’ve got a dilemma. I’m sick and throwing up so it’s hard for me to mask.

I’ve had a plumbing emergency and someone will be in my unit for approximately 2 hours tomorrow. They will wear an N95 and be in bathroom with exhaust fan on. I will be in bedroom at opposite end of apartment.

I’ve got multiple air purifiers and will open the window in the main living space.

Would you be comfortable not masking under those circumstances? I will mask to let him in obviously.

It’s Been a heck of a 24 hours and I highly doubt I would be able to keep the mask on sadly. My face is too swollen to tolerate it at all right now.

Any tips appreciated!

#covidisairborne #covidisnotover #longcovid #n95

Happy Presidents Day.

Two weeks ago, the CIA shut down the World Factbook - a public
domain reference on every country, used by 6 million people
monthly since 1997.

We built a replacement:
https://openfactbook.org

261 countries · Instant search · Country comparisons

Public data should stay public.

#OpenData #CivicTech #OpenSource #PresidentsDay
#PublicDomain #DataRescue