Old Fucking Punk @lwriemen@librem.one

They are banning books in addition to banning the web because they want to prevent children from coming into contact with ideas.

I am older than the www, I lived in an underdeveloped country, didn't get a computer until I was 14. Libraries were my window into the world. I became a member of the adult library aged 11 because there was not much to read in the children's library. My mother tried to keep me away from the library after I showed her Cosmos by Carl Sagan and said: "See, this book also says that god does not exist, it is not just me".

That's why to this day I have a thing for libraries. We have to make sure they are preserved, because the web surely won't be.

https://hsnl.social/@Dany/116271552680700342

Systemd: preemptive compliance with fascism (HT: @aral )

#ageVerification #FOSS #FLOSS #surveillance #surveillanceState

A British school library banned around 200 books deemed inappropriate. Including books about totalitarianism, toxic masculinity and books aimed at queer teenagers.

This is a worrying move, and extra worrying is the use of AI to classify the books. It demonstrates the Bias as a Service that is inherently part of what AI is.

https://www.indexoncensorship.org/2026/03/school-book-banning-escalates-in-the-uk-as-greater-manchester-secondary-school-censors-scores-of-books/

@cwebber ugh, as someone who loves the rust programming language, it's been so depressing to see everything around it progressively get worse

there are many reasons why i love rust:
- having a haskell-like type system is super nice
- mutable xor shared is a very good idea
- the borrow checker is great to work and promotes having simple ownership graphs
- have a crate as the basic compilation unit, rather than a rust file, is a very sane trade-off, and i like it more than having per-file compilation units
- the culture around correctness is very nice
- rustfmt creating a very consistent way to use rust
- embracing inclusivity from the start

there is a reason why i have "rust is my favorite dirty haskell" on my profile

but then, there are a lot of things which are very bad:
- being co-opted by corporations very quickly
- embracing github and discord
- no stance against proprietary software
- no stance against centralization
- crates.io is very centralized and does not play well with distribution package managers
- cargo being the one blessed build tool, rather than embracing variety
- rust applications being annoying to package properly in distributions

seeing people who i used to respect a lot, like fasterthanlime[0][1] and niko matsakis[2][3][4] embracing the slop machines has also been very depressing

it really makes me look more in the direction of embracing c and zig, but those have their own issues

there is a lot to like about zig, and the project itself seems to have a moral compass[5]. the compiler has a stance against llms and moved away from github. sadly the zig ecosystem does not seem to share this stance. for example ghostty[6] embraces it

0: ewie.online/posts/20260214-arborium-is-ai-slopw/
1: github.com/facet-rs/facet/tree/main/.claude
2: github.com/nikomatsakis/zulook
3: github.com/nikomatsakis/retcon/tree/main/.claude
4: github.com/nikomatsakis/dada/tree/main/.claude
5: codeberg.org/ziglang/zig#strict-no-llm-no-ai-policy
6: github.com/ghostty-org/ghostty/blob/main/AI_POLICY.md#ai-is-welcome-here

#Australia’s Teen Social Media Ban Is Just Training A Generation In The Art Of The Workaround - https://www.techdirt.com/2026/03/20/australias-teen-social-media-ban-is-just-training-a-generation-in-the-art-of-the-workaround/

@cwebber "They claim nearly every line was rewritten by a human" smells the same as "I have reviewed all the code in this 40k lines monstrosity PR that I made with Claude"

UK police force presses pause on live facial recognition after study finds racial bias - https://www.theregister.com/2026/03/20/uk_police_force_suspend_live_faical_recog_racial_bias/ never mind the pause, bin it

When everything falls apart, why do we always insist on a return to "normal"? Normal sucks, for most people in most places.

"Post covid", after the Iran war, or after Trump, or after *whatever* is going on, the best we look for is back to "normal".

Why do we lack imagination, that "back" is the best we can look forward to?

The bad guys? They are sure as shit building toward something they think is better. We need to do the same, or what we had is the best we can hope for.

Playing games is usually good for your brain, but you need to have one to begin with. https://www.dailykos.com/story/2026/3/20/2373927/-White-House-games

It really bums me out that I keep seeing blog posts from technical people like "putting aside the obvious moral and ethical implications of LLMs, I'm interested in evaluating whether they can be useful for my work."

Like "putting aside the obvious moral and ethical concerns of breaking into my neighbours' houses, I'm interested in evaluating whether this can be useful for acquiring other people's valuables."

A bit course, but spot on: https://www.otherstrangeness.com/2026/03/14/have-a-fucking-website/

This is POSSE <- to which we should all aspire. https://indieweb.org/POSSE

A Georgetown University teacher to her students: Don't be part of the "AI" lemming brigade.

https://medium.com/center-on-privacy-technology/an-open-letter-to-georgetown-students-in-response-to-recent-announcements-about-generative-ai-8869dcd523ef

NEW: Protesters Fill Minnesota Capitol, Read Letters from Children Held in Immigration Custody

More than 100 people filed into the Minnesota State Capitol on Feb. 26 to protest the prolonged detainment of children in ICE facilities around the country.

After being led into the capitol building by UnidosMN to protest a legislative session, an array of speakers read letters sent by children detained in ICE detention centers in Texas aloud. 🧵

On another day, we'll discuss why this is happening.

Effective altruists and overall TESCREAL bundle billionaires have infiltrated the labor movement and journalism, offering fellowships with staggering amounts of money like they invested ridiculous amounts of money into these companies claiming to build machine gods.

Money for the "problem" and money for "the solution."

Here's a deep dive into the politics of protocols - including the ActivityPub protocol that Mastodon instantiates
https://connectedplaces.online/the-purpose-of-protocols/

Funded by NLnet.

It says the protocol design community
> has developed exceptional sophistication about technical architecture and individual rights while remaining largely inarticulate about collective governance.

It notes
> ActivityPub delegates governance to the instance level and assumes that local accountability will produce acceptable outcomes at the network level, though nothing in the protocol ensures this. ATProto relies on competition between service providers as a sufficient governance mechanism, which presupposes that the market conditions for meaningful competition will materialize. Matrix has gone furthest toward institutional governance, placing a foundation in the role of commons custodian.

Is a heavy read but worth studying by social.coop ppl for example . What must the coop provide, that the protocol neglects?

Senator David McCormick says that voting is a privilege. What a horror show.

You can tell we've been through the looking glass for some time now, because I keep seeing these completely credulous "news reports" about how "rich billionaire invested in rocketry and AI says datacenters in space are necessary to make AI better", with nary a "p.s., for readers unaware, this is an incredibly stupid idea along every single axis" to be seen.

Important Man Says Thing!!!!!!!!

Fuck off with this "journalism". That goes for you too, Eric Berger. So what if you wrote a book about this category of asshole. Doesn't mean you have to lap up their piss.

#SickAndGrouchy

Germany kicks sand in Microsoft's face by mandating the Open Document Format for all public documents.

https://linuxiac.com/germany-mandates-odf-for-public-administration/

'Germany’s move aligns with broader European efforts to promote digital sovereignty and interoperability, including the European Interoperability Framework and the Cyber Resilience Act. These policies emphasize the importance of open standards in ensuring secure, transparent, and future-proof digital services.'

Equinox makes it look like it's plural. Today's the vernal equinock.

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