Old Fucking Punk @lwriemen@librem.one

When everything falls apart, why do we always insist on a return to "normal"? Normal sucks, for most people in most places.

"Post covid", after the Iran war, or after Trump, or after *whatever* is going on, the best we look for is back to "normal".

Why do we lack imagination, that "back" is the best we can look forward to?

The bad guys? They are sure as shit building toward something they think is better. We need to do the same, or what we had is the best we can hope for.

Playing games is usually good for your brain, but you need to have one to begin with. https://www.dailykos.com/story/2026/3/20/2373927/-White-House-games

It really bums me out that I keep seeing blog posts from technical people like "putting aside the obvious moral and ethical implications of LLMs, I'm interested in evaluating whether they can be useful for my work."

Like "putting aside the obvious moral and ethical concerns of breaking into my neighbours' houses, I'm interested in evaluating whether this can be useful for acquiring other people's valuables."

A bit course, but spot on: https://www.otherstrangeness.com/2026/03/14/have-a-fucking-website/

This is POSSE <- to which we should all aspire. https://indieweb.org/POSSE

A Georgetown University teacher to her students: Don't be part of the "AI" lemming brigade.

https://medium.com/center-on-privacy-technology/an-open-letter-to-georgetown-students-in-response-to-recent-announcements-about-generative-ai-8869dcd523ef

NEW: Protesters Fill Minnesota Capitol, Read Letters from Children Held in Immigration Custody

More than 100 people filed into the Minnesota State Capitol on Feb. 26 to protest the prolonged detainment of children in ICE facilities around the country.

After being led into the capitol building by UnidosMN to protest a legislative session, an array of speakers read letters sent by children detained in ICE detention centers in Texas aloud. 🧵

On another day, we'll discuss why this is happening.

Effective altruists and overall TESCREAL bundle billionaires have infiltrated the labor movement and journalism, offering fellowships with staggering amounts of money like they invested ridiculous amounts of money into these companies claiming to build machine gods.

Money for the "problem" and money for "the solution."

Here's a deep dive into the politics of protocols - including the ActivityPub protocol that Mastodon instantiates
https://connectedplaces.online/the-purpose-of-protocols/

Funded by NLnet.

It says the protocol design community
> has developed exceptional sophistication about technical architecture and individual rights while remaining largely inarticulate about collective governance.

It notes
> ActivityPub delegates governance to the instance level and assumes that local accountability will produce acceptable outcomes at the network level, though nothing in the protocol ensures this. ATProto relies on competition between service providers as a sufficient governance mechanism, which presupposes that the market conditions for meaningful competition will materialize. Matrix has gone furthest toward institutional governance, placing a foundation in the role of commons custodian.

Is a heavy read but worth studying by social.coop ppl for example . What must the coop provide, that the protocol neglects?

Senator David McCormick says that voting is a privilege. What a horror show.

You can tell we've been through the looking glass for some time now, because I keep seeing these completely credulous "news reports" about how "rich billionaire invested in rocketry and AI says datacenters in space are necessary to make AI better", with nary a "p.s., for readers unaware, this is an incredibly stupid idea along every single axis" to be seen.

Important Man Says Thing!!!!!!!!

Fuck off with this "journalism". That goes for you too, Eric Berger. So what if you wrote a book about this category of asshole. Doesn't mean you have to lap up their piss.

#SickAndGrouchy

Germany kicks sand in Microsoft's face by mandating the Open Document Format for all public documents.

https://linuxiac.com/germany-mandates-odf-for-public-administration/

'Germany’s move aligns with broader European efforts to promote digital sovereignty and interoperability, including the European Interoperability Framework and the Cyber Resilience Act. These policies emphasize the importance of open standards in ensuring secure, transparent, and future-proof digital services.'

Equinox makes it look like it's plural. Today's the vernal equinock.

Through the end of March, CREDO Mobile customers can vote for EFF and two other organizations to receive a generous donation from the CREDO community. Vote for EFF today to support our work defending civil liberties in the digital world! https://www.credodonations.com/

Chuck Norris facing death and once again proving he was all talk.

New comics section up at In These Times!
https://inthesetimes.com/article/homage-to-the-orphanage-chicago-political-comics-trump

Can you imagine Mastodon raising 100 MILLION dollars from a crypto VC fund and failing to disclose it... for a full year? No I can't either.

And from their actual press release: "The Atmosphere currently contains about 20 billion public records—the posts, likes, comments and other interactions that bring the ecosystem to life. It's an astonishing collection of what open social infrastructure makes possible."

https://bsky.social/about/blog/03-19-2026-series-b

How I read it: data harvesting at its finest 💁‍♀️

#Bluesky

😂

"To underscore the consequences of not having that kind of data, Smiley pointed to a recent attempt to rewrite SQLite in Rust using AI."

"It passed all the unit tests, the shape of the code looks right," he said. It's 3.7x more lines of code that performs 2,000 times worse than the actual SQLite. Two thousand times worse for a database is a non-viable product. It's a dumpster fire. Throw it away. All that money you spent on it is worthless."

https://www.theregister.com/2026/03/17/ai_businesses_faking_it_reckoning_coming_codestrap/

#AIBubble

Good to know/remember at Springtime.

May the society change for a better future ...

#Spring #springtime #nature

#AI probably does lead to more computer security disasters - https://algorithmwatch.org/en/ai-probably-does-lead-to-more-computer-security-disasters/ this is a fab encapsulation: "#Chatbots, in fact, are not built to help, but to please."