Old Fucking Punk @lwriemen@librem.one

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

This story needs context. Namely: Big Tech owns Ireland's government. If that "sovereign" nation does any serious regulating of Musk's company it will be because other tech companies ordered it to do so.

https://www.dw.com/en/ireland-launches-data-protection-probe-into-groks-deepfakes/a-75997610

@elle my problem with serde isn't AI/LLM, it's that the author is vocally defending Palantir as an ethical place to work at

Reässessing the “West” from John Winthrop to Marco Rubio:

**From Plato to NATO to MAGA: Marco Rubio’s Myths & the Real "Western Alliance”**
<https://braddelong.substack.com/p/from-plato-to-nato-to-maga-marco>
2026-02-16 Mo
##from-plato-to-nato-to-maga-marco-rubios-myths-the-real-western-alliance
##neofascism
#from-plato-to-nato-to-maga
#marco-rubios-myths-the-real-western-alliance
#marco-rubio
#western-alliance
#mythmaking
#city-upon-a-hill
#american-exceptionalism
#us-foreign-policy
#liberal-democracy

I was shocked that a very progressive colleague (a university professor, younger than me, and incidentally USian) had never heard of the environmental impact of LLMs nor of the fact that LLMs trample copyrights. All they knew was the bit about LLMs making things up. They said they themself use LLMs to "help with writing," and seemed to want me to assure them that that was ethical, "setting aside the environment and copyright." I responded honestly that I couldn't "set those aside." #LLM

It's either very funny or very depressing to watch executives trip over themselves to prove who has the worst understanding of what software development actually entails.

If an "AI" company can sell you access to software that will replace a $250k/year software engineer. They're going to charge $249k/year for it.

That's how capitalism works.

Well, they're going to charge $20k/year at first, during the land rush phase. Wait for some competitors to die off. Keep it low a while longer to kill off the incumbents. Then it'll jump up a bunch, before finally being even more expensive than the original thing.

See also: Uber & AirBnB.

Federal judges keep ruling that Trump's violent, masked goons are illegally arresting and jailing people, but the regime goes right on doing it.

How close are we to outright fascism? This close.

https://www.reuters.com/legal/government/courts-have-ruled-4400-times-that-ice-jailed-people-illegally-it-hasnt-stopped-2026-02-14/

here’s a worked example of why nobody believes firefox’s AI kill switch will be anything but a marketing wedge

these showed up in my File menu, displacing the New Private Window item and fucking up my muscle memory, in spite of having browser.ml.enabled set to false. the setting for this is a new nonsensically named option, extensions.ml.enabled. a merry fuck you to the guys who showed up in my replies telling me to just disable the config flag I already disabled months ago.

Obviously going to have to mute a bunch of tech people who've had their brains rotted by the ELIZA effect. smdh.

I suppose I could add this to the blog post as Exhibit A

If this sounds familiar, it's likely because these kinds of mutations are a great way of testing your unit tests. There are some neat libraries out there for doing that! See cargo-mutants for instance.

But this one doesn't just modify the AST—it performs surgery on the raw text, preserving comments and whitespace structure.

It was really fun to write!

I made a tool that converts open source code into LLM poison: https://codeberg.org/timmc/scraggle

It mutates Rust source code in ways that *preserve* the ability to compile the code. (That is, you can't detect the changes by looking for compiler errors.) For example, it switches `+` and `*`, or `==` and `!=`.

If you fork a Rust repo, run this tool on it, and push it somewhere, then crawlers will end up ingesting all sorts of incorrect code.

#scraggle #RustLang #LLMPoisoning

STOP KILLER COPS
STOP ICE DEPORTATIONS
STOP PAYING YOUR RENT
STOP FUNDING GENOCIDE
STOP THE TERF AGENDA

9" x 2" red vinyl stickers with glossy laminate. Made with durable materials to handle the elements sun, snow, rain, pepper spray, sleet, etc. https://pmpress.org/index.php?l=product_list&c=247

I wrote on Boing Boing about the cool new exhibit at NYC's Society of Illustrators on the show poster king, Mike King.
https://boingboing.net/2026/02/16/from-punk-rocker-to-poster-king-mike-kings-5-decade-journey.html

Celebrate Presidents Day with President Deals' Discount Prescriptions! https://www.gocomics.com/brian-mcfadden/2026/02/16

AI productivity gains are being to show up in economic metrics.

According to the Financial Times, US productivity increased of 2.7% for 2025. This is a nearly doubling the 1.4% annual average that characterised the past decade.

TL;DR The job market is shrinking while GDP is going up. The K-shaped economy is accelerating.

https://www.ft.com/content/4b51d0b4-bbfe-4f05-b50a-1d485d419dc5

Hey newbies: (english below)
Ihr wollt allen Bands / Accounts vom @FediPunkGuide in auf eurer Mastodon/Pixelfed/Friendica Instanz folgen und habt keine Ahnung wie?

Dann geht mal auf https://fedi.punk.guide/faq.php , da ist jetzt alles für euch erklärt!

Danke an den @FediPunkGuide dafür <3
-----------

Hey newbies:
Want to follow all bands/accounts from @FediPunkGuide on your Mastodon/Pixelfed/Friendica instance but don't know how?

Then go to https://fedi.punk.guide/faq.php , where everything is explained for you!

Thanks to @FediPunkGuide for that <3

New post:

"A newbie's guide to self-hosting with #YunoHost. Part 4: backups"

🔗 : https://blog.elenarossini.com/a-newbies-guide-to-self-hosting-with-yunohost-part-4-backups/

Or: this is how newbies do it.

Dear sysadmins, you have all my respect and admiration, truly. One day I will learn how to do incremental backups with Borg, I promise.

#blog #sysadmin #selfhosting

"In a world in which lies replace truth and black becomes white, we need something to hang on to. A line that we do not cross. And that line, if it’s anything, is surely the rape and abuse of children? In Europe, at least, that line is holding. The revelations in these documents have caused political noise and heat and actual consequences."

~ Carole Cadwalladr

#Epstein #Trump #EconomicElites #pedophiles #coverup #media
/1

https://broligarchy.substack.com/p/the-us-coup-one-year-on