Old Fucking Punk @lwriemen@librem.one

I may need to unfollow the postmarketOS hashtag due to a weird flood of negative doom posting about it not being ready to fully replace Android yet. I know people are worried about Android locking down app development and such, but don't take that out on one of the few projects trying to remove Google and Apple's dualopoly :( Complaining can't make development faster.

When education is under attack, now's the time to pick up these resources on teaching resistance and facilitating radical learning spaces outside the state and capital. Get 40% off all Education and Parenting titles with code ARM thru 9/1 here: https://pmpress.org/index.php?l=product_list&c=42

Bea Lumpkin was already a seasoned labor organizer when she became a teacher at 47.

She was also a mother, mathematician, feminist and lifelong communist.

Stacy Davis Gates remembers a woman whose life was too expansive to fit into any one political label.

https://inthesetimes.com/article/bea-lumpkin-obituary-chicago-ctu-rest-in-power-antifa-antifacism-activist-communism

#AI is making #Africa’s cheapest #smartphones harder to afford - https://techcabal.com/2026/08/20/ai-is-making-africas-cheapest-smartphones-harder-to-afford/ the poor suffer just to make the rich richer...

Is anyone running a matchmaking service to pair recently-retired programmers with open source projects that need maintainers?

the thing is, when companies insist on making software worse and worse and worse, “this makes no sense and i’ve never had to do it before” stops being the first line of defense against low-effort bullshit like this: https://bird.makeup/users/moonlock_com/statuses/2088010016926109872

you know what else companies never insisted on until they did? sharing phone numbers for multi-factor auth. completing at least one motherfucking captcha every time you want to view a website. or, alternatively, watching a strange catgirl fill a progress bar or complain that your browser won’t accept cookies every time you want to view a website. having a microsoft account to install windows. agreeing to have your whole-ass face scanned to, again, view a fucking website. being asked to set up something called a “passkey” even though you just signed in with your fuckin’ pass*word* and a code you retrieved from an app that generates these funny six-digit keys but always makes it so you have enough time to view a key but not enough time to be confident it’s going to be valid when you copy it so you have to wait for the next one to be generated.

“$COMPANY would never ask you to do $STUPID_BULLSHIT” only works if you aren’t living in the era of every company asking the people unfortunate enough to still use their products to constantly do stupid bullshit.

The core argument from an upcoming piece; something I've come to view as nearly an iron rule in BigCo's:

Going from decent to excellent performance is a technical challenge, but moving from poor to decent performance is fundamentally a management and culture problem.

#DOGE’s #Screwworm Legacy May Be Tons Of Euthanized #Cats And #Dogs - https://www.techdirt.com/2026/08/20/doges-screwworm-legacy-may-be-tons-of-euthanized-cats-and-dogs/ "it’s obvious that there were no taxpayer cost savings due to DOGE’s fuckery. If anything, it seems like we’ll be spending more money to remediate the problem than we did keeping it from becoming one. "

Attention Nerd Friends:

Does anyone here have a connection with anyone that worked at Humongous Entertainment? I desperately want one of the podcast episodes next year to be talking to delightful people about designing children's video games.

The Force is strong with this one. https://www.commondreams.org/news/darth-vader-flock

RE: https://techhub.social/@jonathanreed/117129903538588670

Admirable, having the courage to follow his convictions.

While everyone is rightfully concerned about ICE’s new ‘Shock Gloves’, it’s important to know that shock devices have been used in prisons and schools for disabled children for years.

The Gloves killed an inmate in Kentucky after a guard held them to his body for well over a minute.

Disabled children are exposed to electric shocks to ‘correct’ their behaviour.

ICE should not have access to these weapons, but we must also fight to get them out of schools and jails.

We must refuse to accept atrocities.

https://www.disabledginger.com/p/ices-new-shock-gloves-are-already

#uspol #ice #abolishice #shockgloves #disability #ableism #eugenics

I’ve been thinking a lot about the gulf between people who think LLMs can cut 90% of the cost of software development or whatever and people who think that’s a pile of catastrophes balanced on top of a nonsense wish.

I think a lot of that chasm boils down to the fact that software is already •terrible•, and people have very different feelings about that. I don't just mean “Liquid Glass is ugly” terrible; I mean “it’s broken and insecure and unreliable and just doesn't flipping WORK” terrible, like Arbiter Sports.

We are right now in a war between people who think software should treat humans humanely and people who are perfectly willing to offload their development costs onto captive users in the form of wasted time, anger, anxiety, and even more severe forms of personal harm. That war was raging well before LLMs entered the picture, but they’re exaggerated. I’m extremely skeptical of the idea that LLMs make any significant positive contribution to the long-term speed or cost of writing •good• software, but they clearly have the potential to lower the floor for •bad• software to unheard-of levels at unheard-of speeds. How you feel about that probably predicts a lot about how you feel about the “LLMs can 10x software dev!” hype.

3/3

In 2016, most unions backed the establishment over Bernie Sanders. A decade later, Hamilton Nolan argues that organized labor faces a similar choice as DSA-backed candidates gain power:

“Unions can help be part of the solution to the party’s reform, or they can get left behind.”

https://inthesetimes.com/article/labor-unions-dsa-democratic-socialists-of-america

“As nonprofit newsrooms, we’re struggling with both the attacks on journalism and the attacks on philanthropy.”

Prism’s editor in chief told CJR that the outlet’s focus on BIPOC communities makes it a target for the Trump administration.

https://www.cjr.org/analysis/movement-journalism-struggling-loss-funding-walking-targets-prism-scalawag-press-on-philanthropy-grant-rescinded.php

AI’s Rise is Being Fueled by the Sprawling U.S. Military State https://inthesetimes.com/article/ai-military-tech-workers-palantir

“Unfortunately, if you are on a machine that’s been issued by your workplace, you should expect that there’s some type of monitoring,” EFF’s @htsuka told @AssociatedPress. https://apnews.com/article/employer-surveillance-bossware-tracking-workplace-7d61e74242b872457bbfcf2223f9ebd5

Never thought I'd say this, but I'm drawing WAY too many comics about diarrhea this year.

@thomasfuchs
But then AI companies came and destroyed all of that. Apparently copyright law doesn't exist if you operate piracy at a large enough scale. I think there are two parts to why "we" accepted it. First was "Open" AI's weird corporate structure with the 501c3 that clouded the for profit motives. Second that the entire planet is being held hostage in a software cold war where the, legitimate, concerns are that rival countries will have more powerful AI that can exploit vulnerabilities

RE: https://dialup.space/@TechTangents/117128373167235184

I figured I would self quote this because replies are weird on mastodon. This is a big part of why I have a hard line "Never AI" stance.

Water usage can be mitigated, energy can be renewable, manufacturing can catch up, but generative AI will always be built on theft because it needs so much data.