Old Fucking Punk @lwriemen@librem.one

RE: https://kolektiva.social/@beka_valentine/116845902133405690

An excellent thread here. So much of what I see people pointing to as LLM's benefits for coding relates to long-standing problems in software engineering that the field just hasn't addressed. And LLMs don't solve these problems, at best the just paper them over and make dealing with them less tedious -- while reinforcing the problematic dynamics.

So yes it's great that people with no programming skills can create software to solve their prolems. But if we had collectively spent a chunk of the literally billions of dollars that are going to "AI" building on the early approaches to this from 25+ years ago (Hyperscript, Logo) that don't have the same downsides, we'd be in a much better place today.

I know we've talked about this before but I'm just so disgusted with how useless most search engines are now. They all second guess me.

The most obscure or unusual word is ignored so it's very hard to search for the intersection of a popular thing and an obscure thing.

I have a theory that for many people search has never worked well for them since they just didn't use computers very much, or it was not explained well. Now those of us who found search effective get to see what it was like.

I'm glad to announce there will be another edition of the Tunnel intensive training running from August 3-6.

Sign up if you'd like to learn system administration fundamentals while building up your own very private, sovereign, fast and diversely flexible VPN, running on geothermal energy in Iceland.

Generate dozens of free configs, and give them to fam, friends, colleagues.

Participants are fully supported. No prior experience needed.

https://courses.nikau.io/tunnel/

Seats going fast, 4 left.

@vampiress

"ethically fucked averaging machine" is genius. It's my new favorite term for AIs.

Amazing photo by Cheney Orr from today. Black woman sitting alone on the DC Metro with a crowd of masked white supremacists on their way to the capital to march with confederate flags.

There is also a deeper analogy for what I keep hearing over and over from Black people: finding themselves surrounded by white people who either do not know, or do not care, about how America looks from the Black person's perspective.

#Photography #PoliticalPhotography #July4th

This Independence Day, celebrate freedom with more than words. Celebrate 250 years of American independence with a phone designed to place digital sovereignty back into your hands.

Get $250 off the Liberty Phone featuring Made-in-USA Electronics and transparency of both its hardware and software. If you believe independence should extend to the device in your pocket, this is the moment to make the switch!

#Privacy #LibertyPhone #Librem5 #Linux #FOSS #PureOS

https://puri.sm/posts/celebrating-250-years-of-us-independence-with-250-off-the-liberty-phone/

Knowing the difference could save a planet. https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2026/7/3/800064438/cartoon/climate-exhaustion-or-denial/

New reviews up:
ALBUTEROL
LAMICTAL
DEAF BLIND & DUMB
THE DISILLUSIONED
BIG
ANIMATED VIOLENCE
BARREN CANYON

thanks to @THINK @ThinkAndGrowRich and @somepunk

https://the-counterforce.org/tag/reviews/

America turns 250 this year, and we brought some receipts.
Sale runs all thru 8/1. Get 40% off all titles included in the reading lists with code 250 at checkout.
Shop here: https://pmpress.org/index.php?l=product_list&c=277

Today and tomorrow only get these books for just $5 (no code required). A portion of this weekend’s sales will be donated to the Minnesota 15’s legal defense. Shop at https://pmpress.org.

“What all these people really opposed is that the United States was not founded to be a Christian nation, in the way they imagined a Christian nation should be.”

A 250th anniversary read on religion, democracy and the fight over America’s founding.

https://inthesetimes.com/article/christian-right-founding-fathers-conservative-movement-trump-american-heretics

In 2024, Trump and Vance turned Haitian immigrants in Springfield into political targets.

Now TPS protections are being stripped from Haitians and Syrians, putting communities at risk of deportation.

The opposite of independence and freedom.

https://inthesetimes.com/article/trump-vance-migrants-springfield-ohio-2024

The Secret Service agent who cuts his hot dogs so he doesn't choke should take today off.

Congratulations to all my US friends on making it to the end of your epic 250 year experiment with democracy! May the subsequent imperial phase be mercifully brief and the aftermath painless.

"We have to start doing things for each other again without expecting it to trigger a revolution overnight. In other words, we have to rebuild the foundation of actual kindness and caring before we ask anything else of them."

www.the-sentinel-intelligence.net/heads-above-water-why-it-looks-like-americans-dont-care/

I've been running hot with go-away (https://git.gammaspectra.live/git/go-away) for a while now and I'm really starting to like the results.

I had to put a few massively violent rules for scrapers trying to smash my blog posts, which is doing the job at blocking fake users when the signaled bots find themselves locked at the door.

It's also very good at more fine rules to allow certain federated legitimate needs pass through.

I'm far from done at tweaking, however, the results of reducing non-genuine traffic from thousands an hour to 100 legitimate users every few days is a great show to see that I'm not wasting my resources on Sam's Plagiarism Machine

Like, every time I read somebody arguing we shouldn't judge people for using chatbots as it's the first time they've had somebody at their constant beck and call I think, no, that actually makes me think less of them

“Financial Nonsense”

https://2ndbreakfast.audreywatters.com/financial-nonsense/

> What looks like a bad investment academically and increasingly like a bad investment politically may also soon be calculated as a bad investment financially as well.

I like this cartoon.

Credit: Jesse Duquette (https://www.jesseduquette.com)

#humor

No AI for Al. I wrote on Boing Boing about "Weird Al" Yankovic canceling his participation in a commercial for an artificial intelligence software company.
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https://boingboing.net/2026/07/03/no-ai-for-al-weird-al-yankovic-yanks-ai-commercial.html