Old Fucking Punk @lwriemen@librem.one

Help get this new book, Herbalism and State Violence: Practical Herbal Medicine for Surviving State Repression edited by Nicole Rose, into the world and into many more hands. This book is a call to heal, to support one another, and to keep fighting for a world free from state violence.
Back the project here: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/ww3/herbalismstateviolence?ref=8rw6qd&token=16c3bc83

Wordgard 0.4.0 is out, with somewhat fewer bugs than 0.3.0 had. https://code.haverbeke.berlin/wordgard/wordgard/src/branch/main/CHANGELOG.md#0-4-0-2026-08-10

RE: https://mastodon.social/@colincornaby/117069185435215102

Holy shit, so the "Claude plagiarised an app" story is actually "Claude produced the same app twice when prompted to do so by two separate developers" 😅

Involved from the sidelines in a volunteering project and reviewing their website. It’s made by a developer who has switched to “vibe coding”.

Me and the other contributors have now spent maybe twice as much time pointing out VERY OBVIOUS issues (both with the code, design, and copy) than it would have taken me to code it all from scratch without gen AI.

But sure, ✨ it’s the future ✨

We ran out of missiles and need some ingenuity if the war crimes are to continue. https://www.gocomics.com/brian-mcfadden/2026/08/10

Surveillance monger Flock is such a scummy company that a "vigilante movement" has emerged to fight its abuses -- and even its existence. The passion to curb this corporate evil is great. But we also need to force Congress to do its job, and enact real privacy laws. https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/ng-interactive/2026/jul/25/flock-surveillance-cameras

We need to learn this, understand it, and make sure the rest of the voting population 'get it'! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JfjKQSPoamU This is the Modern Monetary Theory understanding of public finances. It is inherently more appropriate than the approach of *all* our previous Gov'ts. We need smarter Gov't.

So, I'm looking for a job, please boost. I'm an aspiring #Unity developer with game jam and 2.5 years of non-gaming professional experience. I additionally bring professional experience in DevOps (as project lead) and web development (as freelancer). I've been coding since I was 8, so while not all my knowledge might be very up-to-date, I sure can learn all things coding. I like automation. I'm very communicative. I often ask "why". See next toot for conditions.
#Unity3D #fediHire #lookingForJob

There's been no real innovation that's improved household chores (Sorry, Roomba, you can't do rugs, corners, stairs, curtains, furniture, etc.) in decades because all the tech money people haven't had to do any ever.

This story should terrify any open source project or company that allows LLM-generated code into their project.

Someone created a new app, using Gemini. Only it wasn’t a new app, it was clearly plagiarised because it happened that there was an example in the training set that exactly matched the requirements. The similarity was well within the range that courts have previously used to determine a derived work.

When you have this level of similarity, the requirement comes to you to prove that there was no way that the original work could have flowed to your project. Companies that have this concern usually do it by ensuring that no one on the team has been exposed to the original and that the code for the original never goes near their systems. But when one of the systems that you use is a language model trained on, among other things, all of the open-source code that it could scrape (and which does not disclose its training set), being able to prove that there was no path from some other codebase to yours is impossible.

Just because the US copyright office has ruled that you, as the person promoting an LLM, cannot assert copyright on the output, does not mean that someone else can’t. If you take a DVD and transcode it to H.264, there is no creative step and so the new copy is not something subject to independent copyright, but it is a derived work of the DVD (itself a lower-quality derived work of the original masters) and so subject to the same copyright.

Importantly in this story, the person prompting Gemini had no idea that the original app existed. To safely use the code, they would need to search everything in the training data and discard outputs that would meet the bar of being substantially similar. And that’s something that requires human judgement.

Over the last 13 years as a software dev at SaaS companies, I've developed a fondness for graphs. I spend a lot of time staring at them to answer questions (mostly boiling down to "Why is the website sad?" and "Wait, *is* the site sad?") and I've learned to configure and read them quite well. But there are still many mysteries

I think it might be fun to present a series of graphs with interesting patterns to see what other people think.

Sometimes, I'll have my own answer. Sometimes I won't!

I'm calling it #GraphMystery.

We often frame the damage LLMs do to open source as side effects, but realistically, this is Claude operating precisely as intended… by the vendor. The aim is to convert the value created by other devs into profits for the AI company. It does so by automating the process of finding existing code, stripping it of authorship, matching it to the prompted task, and redeploying it for the company's customer. That, whether they realize it or not, is what the customer is paying the AI company to do.

Here's a vivid demonstration of one hazard of using AI for app development: "the web app I had launched using Claude was strikingly similar to his open source project, even reproducing a bug he had later fixed…" https://blog.terrygodier.com/2026/08/09/mea-culpa-dark-hours.html

A good little thread, but I’ll be thinking about this line for a while: “One critical purpose of vibecoding, it seems to me, is to manufacture consent for what comes next.”

https://merveilles.town/@lrhodes/117065629405634327

Do good things and talk about them. And if good things are done to you, for you, around you, also talk about then.

Because knowing may inspire others. Because folks feel lonely and caught in endless doom. Because we sometimes need a push to do something: it's easier if we know there is someone else, even of they are just a voice on the little screen in our pockets. Because we need to combat the negativity bias.

"This is a man who is a white nationalist. And he is in sole control of #Rails, this framework we all love."

https://davidcel.is/articles/rails-needs-new-governance

@davidgerard I have advised a bunch of NGOs to basically do that: The only grants for infrastructure they get are about "AI" so think about processes you actually need to change and label standard infra as "sovereign AI". Works as a pragmatic strategy especially for cash poor NGOs

#Doonesbury by #GarryTrudeau for August 9, 2026 | GoComics

https://www.gocomics.com/doonesbury/2026/08/09

#Humour #Cartoon

The man in the audience who attended a literary festival but doesn’t value human translation at least noticed the negative reaction when he advised an author to use AI instead of a professional human translator.

He said testily, as if addressing dim-witted children: "I mean a langauge learning machine. I’m not talking about Google Translate."

That struck me as a typical TechBro Reply Guy attitude. He assumes people object to generative AI because they don’t understand it, not because they do.

People: Why did my PC/laptop with AMD graphics started crashing when I try to play a video, after a minute or so?
Linux: oh yeah that's a bug we introduced in kernel 7.1 a couple of days ago :)
People: okay I can just switch to LTS kernel, right?
Linux: actually we backported the bug into LTS too :)
People: but surely it will soon be patched?
Linux: actually we won't backport the fix into LTS, because LTS is for important fixes only :)
People: but at least the latest kernel wil be patched?
Linux: maybe in a couple of months; for now the fix is just sitting there in its separate branch :)
Linux: also did you hear we embrace Vibe Coding now? :)