Old Fucking Punk @lwriemen@librem.one

New article on too many satellites and ways that we SHOULD be allocating orbits (by Gregory Radisic with me as second author) https://theconversation.com/too-many-satellites-earths-orbit-is-on-track-for-a-catastrophe-but-we-can-stop-it-275430

Been up for about 30 minutes and I already got a media inquiry. Nice.

Marisa Kabas is doing some of the best reporting on the Trump regime's abuses of law and people. In this case, she explains the chicanery involved in a massive program to build new concentration camps -- in warehouses. (Big Journalism hasn't noticed, of course.)

https://www.thehandbasket.co/p/ice-concentration-camps-wexmac-titus?utm_source=www.thehandbasket.co&utm_medium=newsletter&utm_campaign=for-ice-to-build-concentration-camps-quickly-they-re-leaning-on-this-dept-of-war-program

The Wisconsin Senate is voting on S.B. 130/A.B. 105, a problematic age verification bill that effectively bans VPN access to certain websites. If you live in Wisconsin, now is the time for you to contact your State Senator and urge them to vote down this bill. https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2026/02/eff-wisconsin-legislature-vpn-bans-are-still-terrible-idea

Today in questions I am biting my tongue at:
"Is there a term for the point when trying to prod a LLM in the right direction where you realise it would have been quicker not to use it at all?"

Microsoft only gets more and more likeable, eh. https://www.972mag.com/ice-microsoft-azure-leaked-files/

For those who haven't seen it: web.archive.org/web/20051013072349/http://www.vanwensveen.nl/rants/microsoft/IhateMS_1.html It's old, but it's spot on, and it's a fun read. My verdict: Microsoft is the most completely unworthy global force imaginable.

@rfheller indeed - if the universities don't trust their tech educators... why should industry? Isn't that the whole point?

"Financing freedom: how we funded our co-op", from Ray of Wirksworth Co-op.

https://raythespirit.com/blog/2025/12/8/financing-freedom-how-we-funded-our-co-op

#HousingCoop #Coop #Housing #Wirksworth

There's tremendous value to being a strict LLM Abstentionist in the current political climate, whether or not there are any "valid use cases for LLMs" (there are—not nearly as many as most people think, but sure, more than zero) or the LLM was "created ethically" (to my knowledge no such model exists, but yeah, it's technically possible that someone has or will eventually build one).

Tech workers especially who refuse to interact with this technology are telling their coworkers and employers that ethics and morality are more important to some people than convenience and profit. This is a bold stance to take during good times—and downright foolhardy in the current job market—but the more people who draw the line here, the better the outcomes will be for literally everybody on the whole planet (except, perhaps, for some billionaire investors).

Microsoft is intrinsic to machinery of fascism in the US, and profiting from it. From minds to tools, storage to data analysis and automation, leaked files show just how deep they are in the engine room of ICE.

https://www.972mag.com/ice-microsoft-azure-leaked-files/

#BigTech

#Australia’s Social Media Ban Is Isolating Kids With Disabilities—Just Like Critics Warned - https://www.techdirt.com/2026/02/17/australias-social-media-ban-is-isolating-kids-with-disabilities-just-like-critics-warned/

Is there a website that promotes tech jobs at companies that don't use AI?

I'm not looking for work right now. However, I know a few people who are, and they don't want to work for someone who forces them to use GenAI, either for code, for infrastructure management, or for writing documentation.

For them, the prospect of working in tech in 2026 is just bleak.

#AskFedi

@noboilerplate@namtao.com It's pretty easy to move to something better like Codeberg. Git is a free and distributed version management system after all. All you have to do is "git push" to a new repo and your entire history is there.

PSA: If you block the `claude` user on GitHub, you'll get a warning every time you view a repo with that user in its commit history.

Now, the moment you look at a repo, you can immediately adjust your expectations.

You may do so here: https://github.com/settings/blocked_users

So, I started to volunteer in our local community centre to help (mostly) elder people with their computer and smartphone problems.

It's fascinating. We have people there up to their 90s and they are all every open for change.

We remove ad ID's from phones, change default browsers, switch from MS Office to #Libreoffice.

And for next time I already have a date with an elder lady to switch her old Windows 10 laptop to Linux Mint.
And she is not the only one!

What a time to be alive.

We have slightly tuned our rate-limiting after not touching it in a while. It should be "better" for most users now, but we value feedback in any case.

Check the full announcement and don't forget to subscribe to the changelog if you don't want to miss any news around Codeberg's services: https://codeberg.org/Codeberg/changelog/issues/2#issuecomment-10671812

After a long and Kafkaesque ordeal to set up a new bank account, we're happy to announce that we're once again in a position to accept donations!

A huge thanks to everyone who has reached out to ask how they could financially support us over the past year or so.

Thankfully, we had a bit of a nest egg that the project was able to survive off during that time. But we are definitely in need of regular financial support to help keep the project going, and to realize our future goals. So if you are in a position to do so, please consider signing up as a monthly sustainer, support independent anarchist infrastructure, and help grow Kolektiva.

https://kolektiva.info/donate/

Gen AI is an expensive way to create text and images. Right now, much of that cost is being subsidized and hidden, but it will eventually need to be paid. Because charging the actual cost will likely negate most of the value proposition of genAI, the companies that run the big models are focused on altering the social and economic context so that there are big external costs to opting out. E.g. getting companies to fire staff makes it difficult to pivot back away from AI because hiring and training replacement staff can be difficult and costly. Hence, the huge rush and hysterical sense of urgency around adoption: the demand for profitability is an approaching tidal wave, and they need to lock entire industries in before that wave hits.

That's why resistance IN THE PRESENT counts for a great deal. Right now, we have the approaching wave in our favor, and they're counting on cultivating enough dependence before it hits that we'll have no choice to accept the actual costs. The closer they get to locking society into dependence on hyperscale AI systems, the more difficult it becomes to opt out of even the plainly dystopian uses of the technology. And the longer we "wait and see," the less say we may ultimately have in how this technology shapes our society.

I wish #matrix the best, but #XMPP #Jabber still rocks:

> If deployed on a 16 GB RAM machine with at least 4 cores, a single ejabberd node can typically handle 200-300 K online users.

From: https://docs.ejabberd.im/get-started/

My 17 years old server is on 8GiB RAM with four 1.2GHz cores. I don't notice it. User data takes up 200MiB of space (it massively increased recently for some reason). Unlike Synapse :)

#messaging #im #decentralized #federated

Media consolidation is so bad, eventually towns will have to bring back their crier positions. Hear ye, hear ye, City of Boston: I can ring a bell and be real annoying about it.