Old Fucking Punk @lwriemen@librem.one

“Immigrant women have always been the most vulnerable people in the prison system because there is no accountability for the guards.”

Khawla Nakua investigates how strip searches are normalized as security and used as tools of abuse.

https://inthesetimes.com/article/investigation-prison-abolition-invasive-humiliating-routine-violence-incarceration-women-strip-searches

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Stop Gen Al: Open House Action Planning

Saturday, September 12th, 2026

UTC: 5pm

Pacific (Americas): 10am

Central: Noon

Eastern: 1pm

BST (British): 6pm

CEST (Europe): 7pm

CST (China): 1am Sunday

AEST (Australia): 3am Sunday

Meeting will take place via Zoom, free-of-charge, and open to all*. All Al features in Zoom will be turned OFF, and any attendees caught using Gen Al will be removed from the meeting.

Feel free to speak up, and let your voice be heard. Or stay quiet and lurk. Its up to you.

We need your help to plan: coordinating with datacentre protesters, fundraising activities to help humans who have lost their income, future media appearances, help for people to overcome chatbot addiction, help for parents to protect their kids from slop at school, and how to plan for survival once the bubble’s burst.

Attendees may be removed for bigotry, pro torment nexus views, harassment, Al use, or being bots, at host’s discretion.

https://stopgenai.com/open

You’re allowed to use a pseudonym/fake name. On scheduling page, click forward to September 12th.

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#NoAI

Find these zines and more at my table at the Berlin Punk Rock Market this Sunday! 💥

Thanks a lot to @The_Counterforce ✌️👌

#punk #berlinpunkrockmarket

Lol, after having two weeks off on leave, I've just realised that every technological development over the past few years has pretty much entirely killed my enthusiasm for technology.

I just don't give a shit about any of it any more haha

Well, this is about as comprehensive of a list that anyone's going to get!

https://codeberg.org/ethical-foss/open-slopware

I forgot to share the review I contributed to the Counterforce! 📚

HERE : https://the-counterforce.org/jeff-miller-temporary-palaces/

Social Security was designed to replace about 40% of a worker's income — not to be a full retirement plan. As pension access has declined for decades, one study finds universal retirement access could cut elder poverty more than 25% by 2045. https://inthesetimes.com/article/big-idea-universal-retirement-access-pensions

Given Debian's recent vote to allow slop in their OS, I think we should have a second vote on whether or not to redirect the 500 GBP that we were going to donate to them somewhere else. I don't think they would have been a winner of our largesse if the votes were held today. #SocialCoopGovernance

Will Lawrence says opposition to data centers comes down to a basic question: Who decides the future of a community—its residents or Silicon Valley and Wall Street?

Rebecca Burns speaks with the insurgent candidate taking on the GOP in Michigan

https://inthesetimes.com/article/meet-will-lawrence-the-tenant-organizer-running-for-congress-in-a-deep-purple-district

Not only were reporters from major national outlets inexplicably denied access to the G20 summit, so were local news outlets from the host city of Asheville, NC, a venue supposedly selected to showcase the region's recovery from Tropical Storm Helene.

https://avlwatchdog.org/watchdog-other-selected-media-denied-access-to-cover-g20-finance-summit-in-asheville/

The final issue of Another Subculture is out now - here's the newsletter for the newsletter. I'm having a rest, there are wonderful DIY online alternatives, and I want to start something new. MAKE YOUR OWN MEDIA.

https://buttondown.com/anothersubculture/archive/the-final-issue-of-the-punk-paper-out-now/

Oh, great. Just looked at Hetzner’s new pricing for VPS servers:

CPX22 (dedicated vCPU): €7.99 → €19.49 (+143.8%)

So that’s fun. I guess one way to ensure the Small Web doesn’t happen is to make it prohibitively expensive for people to have their own servers.

(Before anyone mentions it, prices of single-board computers are also increasing and shipping hardware is an even bigger challenge.)

If anyone knows cheaper EU-based hosts, please leave a comment.

It’s so much fun to constantly have the rug pulled out from under you while you’re trying to make progress.

@baldur And of course they have totally missed the point in wanting to generate more code.

I always thought the idea was to write absolutely as little code as possible to achieve the required specification and to make the minimum possible changes whenever there's a requirement to fix bugs or add new features.

*Everything* is bloated these days. Despite huge increases in computing power, every modern computer reacts more slowly than was the norm 40 years ago.

e.g. Why does my bank require me to install a 126 Mb app ? I object not only because this is a ludicrously large waste of resources, nor just because their app is horribly slow and buggy, nor because the UI keeps changing for no good reason, and also not only because *I* have no idea what all that code is doing on my phone. I also object because *they* don't know what all that code is for either.

They didn't write all that code themselves (it's far too huge for that), so what exactly are all those libraries that they trust which they linked into the bank app in order to make it so huge ? Are the libraries proven to be secure ? Is the entire app secure ? I know for certain that they cannot possibly have checked every single path through an app of such gargantuan size so it's clear that they actually don't know if it works properly. So why are they forcing this on me ?

Banks used to know what they were doing. They ran everyone's accounts using much smaller software, which they audited, and which ran on far less powerful smaller machines. I don't understand how they switched from being ultra careful to clearly not giving two hoots about the quality of code used for banking.

AI slop is of course making all of this, and all of everything else, much worse.

I admittedly i don’t have that many coding client projects left these days but in the ones I’ve got left, most of the coders I work with have adopted LLMs

For what it’s worth, they do seem to understand much less, work much slower towards the project’s actual goals, with much more code, and at a lower quality

While asking sillier questions

But they think they’re working so much faster because the tools find the occasional bug and generates so much code

🤷🏻‍♂️

Article starts out, literally kicks off the opening sentence with, “We’ve all used AI to help us write code” and brudda, let me stop you right the hell there. No, we all have not. Some of us are still resolutely hewing code out of text editors and actual human thinking, and it’s still usually better than whatever your steroidal autocomplete extruded for you.

@cwebber The saying "Give a developer three lines of code, and they'll find three bugs. Give a developer three hundred lines of code, and they'll find none." comes to mind.

Also here's a list of anti-ai software maintained by the amazing @the: https://noai.starlightnet.work/list.html

@cwebber

> And I know, you say, you'll be responsible about it.

A really important skill that we have abandoned is having the ability to say "I am not atypical and I am prone to the same mistakes as everybody else."

We have decades of research, probably more than decades of research showing that human beings *do not consistently concentrate and are bad at vigilance".

But no, suddenly every programmer has decided they're uniquely immune to cognitive fatigue.

@cwebber I thought that one of the main advantages of FOSS was that anyone could inspect the code and make sure it didn't have security issues, data privacy issues, etc. I don't know enough to do that myself, but I was always comforted by the idea that others were checking the code of well-known FOSS projects.

If even the people making the software don't fully understand the code anymore, is that advantage still there?

@bignose @cwebber as long as someone tends the garden it will not become overgrown. When I leave they can choose to replant some of the beds, and that's fine, and things will probably be ok. I can exercise aesthetic control now because I have power and standing; that evaporates when I leave, and any aesthetic control has to be exercised by someone else. The best I can hope for is that I have imparted my sensibilities upon my coworkers.

@erincandescent @cwebber well also the overriding theme I get from these posts is just "the software industry has been seriously immature for a long time", and I think to a large extent LLMs are just holding a mirror up to all the ills of the field...

I don't think good engineering has to be at odds with commercial forces, and in fact I think engineering stuff well gives you a competitive advantage in many cases; but since the industry is so immature and so stuck in a particular almost-mythological way of thinking about things, I feel like we'd long since given up on trying to reproducibly encourage well-engineered code and instead just crank out whatever takes a random developer's fancy this week