Old Fucking Punk @lwriemen@librem.one

My mastodon instance of 1 user is getting hammered to its limits by AI scrapers.

Gigabytes of cached data and bandwidth for absolutely nothing.

Low disk space. Energy spikes. Memory spikes. CPU spikes. Human labor...

The cost is truly staggering, and this is for a single instance belonging to a single, otherwise insignificant individual.

Imagine the scale of resource abuse, theft, and climate destruction across the internet.

Just so people can use a shitty #AI prompt on their shitty site.

When I started tracking these things my biggest concerns were how toxic the tech is for knowledge work, education, media, and the arts; the environment; the inevitable bubble; and how it makes everything it touches less reliable. I genuinely thought the concerns about the mental health of heavy chatbot users were overblown but it now looks to me to be a major and widespread issue

If you haven't been paying attention to this story, it's truly wild - a supposed European alternative to big tech social media that lured in politicians and made waves but is incredibly poorly thought-out and is effectively doxxing its users. @_elena has been on it from the beginning. https://blog.elenarossini.com/public-by-design-how-w-social-makes-their-verified-users-personal-details-visible-on-the-open-web/

@lydiaconwell

Agreed - the weaponising of unfounded antisemitism accusations to defend both the unconscionable actions of the Israeli government, and the short-term interests of the far-right elsewhere, was and is particularly short-sighted for anybody that cares about either the welfare of Israelis or jews in general, because it undermines the very idea of antisemitism, and disguises its reality.

Anthropic is bragging about rolling their own from-scratch in-house version control system because git couldn't keep up with their 30,000 commits per day, and it doesn't seem to occur to them for a nanosecond that they are not fixing the actual problem in their engineering practices but making it exponentially worse

I have to use Google for one of my jobs. (Boo) But I just discovered that if you set your region to Cuba, you don't get any AI nonsense in your search results. 🙌

Little tip if you run into an AI agent for your next job interview and you don’t want the job:

Waste as MUCH tokens as possible, keep them busy as long as possible

Make sure the AI costs outweigh humans even more, that’s what they deserve 🤷‍♂️

https://www.theguardian.com/business/2026/oct/13/ai-share-crash-risk-global-imf-debt-corrowing-cyber-attacks "An AI crash was one of three “salient risks” to stability identified by the IMF, alongside rising government borrowing costs and the threat of a big cyber-attack." Yikes - wonder who'll be the victim of the 'big cyber-attack'? I have a weird feeling it won't be libre software...

I recently posted a link that got just 2 boosts and 6 faves, but the linked page was requested by about 300 fedi servers so they could generate a preview.

Which is actually fine! Because even though my photo gallery runs on a 15 year old laptop in my basement, I wrote the gallery software in a fast language (Rust) and so a trickle of requests maxing at 4 per second is not actually a problem.

I'm guessing that people complaining about fedi hammering their servers are using PHP or Python. Even if my post had "done numbers" I don't think the number of fedi *servers* involved would have exceeded 10x what I saw.

We’re hitting the road tomorrow with STATUS SYMBOL! If you’re in the area, come by! You can warm up with our brand smashing new demo here:

They're going to kill us all to build a beach resort.

#Starlink's plan to avoid orbital near-misses: Ephemeris sharing - https://www.theregister.com/offbeat/2026/10/07/starlinks-plan-to-avoid-orbital-near-misses-ephemeris-sharing/5301650 " Hang on. How about not chucking tens of thousands more satellites into space? "

The government shouldn’t be able to secretly obtain journalists’ phone records without court approval.

But DHS is abusing its authority to do just that.

Read more about what Congress, journalists, and tech companies can do about it:

https://freedom.press/issues/these-secret-subpoenas-are-targeting-journalists/

passkeys are generally hated and distrusted by users? the things that keep trying to dark pattern me into using them instead of the password manager I chose? the things that won’t prevent my account from getting compromised when the service nagging me about passkeys gets hacked again? god I wonder why

"Releasing over 700 files at once is not a demonstration of scholarship, but a demonstration of power. We urge mathematicians to discontinue their work with #OpenAI and to return to a vision of science that centers human understanding." - https://www.ahmath.org/statements #ai

RE: https://mograph.social/@dilmandila/117432072219819451

Please help finance GIMP, Inkscape and Krita instead of spending your money on trying to get Claude to make you a Photoshop clone.

https://www.gimp.org/donating/
https://inkscape.org/support-us/donate/
https://krita.org/fr/donations/

Books to Bewitch You
Get 40% of select titles, tarot decks, and merch with code WITCHY thru 11/1 here: https://www.pmpress.org/category/witchy-sale

#IPCC is under pressure to delay publication of key global climate report - https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2026/oct/13/ipcc-pressure-delay-publication-climate-report-ar7-cop33 more delay; just ignore it

It’s not our job to fix our employers

https://www.baldurbjarnason.com/2026/06-its-not-our-job-to-fix-our-employers/

This broken industry is too big of a problem for software developers to solve alone

(And a Patreon launch)

Please be advised that Kolektiva.social will be down tomorrow (Oct 14) from approximately 8am EDT (12UTC) until 1pm EDT (5pm UTC) due to planned server maintenance. Sorry for the inconvenience!