Old Fucking Punk @lwriemen@librem.one

US corporate lobbyists mounted ‘blitz’ to dilute landmark EU #deforestation law, report finds - https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2026/oct/17/us-corporate-lobbyists-europe-deforestation shame on #eu politicians for letting them...

You don't have to go broke for Halloween decorations. https://patreon.com/BrianMcFadden

On December 31, we are shutting down our legacy Codeberg Pages in favor of its already available replacement.

In our blog post we share how you can check if your pages are deployed via the legacy setup, and if so how you can migrate: https://blog.codeberg.org/migrate-your-site-to-the-new-git-pages-backed-codeberg-pages-now-were-sunsetting-codeberg-pages-v2.html

@zzt@mas.to

"when our labor is stolen that’s a personal betrayal"

Brazilian Amazon deforestation falls to lowest on record as pivotal vote looms - https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2026/oct/16/brazil-amazon-deforestation-lowest-on-record-election fab achievement, but I fear it won't save lula...

RE: https://mastodon.social/@eurasiareview/117454933852735643

given chinese investment and influence, to be expected....

Something Else To Look Forward To: #AI #Worms - https://www.techdirt.com/2026/10/16/something-else-to-look-forward-to-ai-worms/ get ready for the attack of the lawnmower botnets...

@luca Yeah. It's fast fashion https://tante.cc/2026/01/15/software-as-fast-fashion/

The term "single use software" currently lives rent free in my head.

People use LLMs to create software specific for their needs. But neither can other people use it (hardcoded variables, no rights management, too specific), nor do they use it again (too specific, easier to produce a new one).

Single use software is not maintained. Nobody understands it or has an interest in keeping it working.

The creation of single use software feels cheap, but isn't. It takes time to create the software, it needs infrastructure and power. The time is experienced as short compared to how long it takes to create maintainable and reusable software. But once you take into account how many people benefit from reusable software, the single use software takes way more time to create than what it saves. The infrastructure and power costs are hidden because the data center isn't visible. The costs are subsidized by venture capital.

Like other single use items, single use software brings risks of unforeseen consequences. From data loss or leaks to issues for maintainers of reusable software (eg. verbal abuse, less motivation and lost income).

As an example of single use software is a German LinkedIn post of a person who slopcoded a HEMS (home energy management system). It took them more than a week. While open source projects like https://evcc.io/ already provide the same functionality. They could have used it for free or paid 100€ and got support for some additional devices. But they decided that they know better how it should work and now have a single use software. If it breaks there is nobody they can ask. There won't be updates and no community to discuss and develop new features. No organization will ever be interested in officially supporting it. And even if it works, it only benefits that one person.

(This doesn't mean people shouldn't build things that only they use. But they should enjoy doing so.)

The amount of financial anxiety I can suddenly detect permeating the people I know in the AI sector gives me the strength to go on

I have avoided commenting on speculating on when we're nearing Peak Bubble for the past two years, and I still probably wouldn't do it in the press, but by pure social intuition (of the sort no one should use to guide their investments), I think we're hitting it around June 2027

Shoot the reckoning straight into my veins, I'm so ready

@Wtebbens In caseyou hadnt seen, that article is also available as a web page -https://www.linux-magazine.com/Online/Features/How-the-Fediverse-Found-Parts-for-Its-Platforms

@Bonfire @cwebber @coopcloud @SocialCoop @nlnet

@GoldenRetrieverGF Don't forget, these were also usually the people who would not lower themselves to use standard and proven libraries, they would insist on using their own, at best mediocre, cobbled together, shaky, flaky, plagiarized, stack exchange copy-pasta, buggy "solution" and praise it as the most genius thing since sliced bread.

Something I've noticed while on book tour for the past couple of weeks is that Mastodon is really good way to let people know about bookstore events. So many people I've met on the road have told me that they found out about my book tour from me or other folks on the fedi. I think it's partly because so many book-loving people are on Mastodon. But also if you compare Mastodon to places like Bluesky or Insta, the community here has a higher percentage of actual humans vs. bots or operatives.

News stories about the weird and corrupt Kimberly Guilfoyle all seem to mention that she was Trump Jr.'s fiance but don't mention that she was married to Gavin Newsom.

Both are relevant or neither is relevant. (Both are.)

Members of The Peoples Want are kicking off a tour of Turtle Island next week to promote their manifesto Revolutions Of Our Times, which was recently published in English by Haymarket Press. They are hoping to meet those transformed by revolt, politicized diaspora and exile communities, and all who want to build a common plan to hasten the fall of Empire. The first leg of the tour, taking place across so-called Quebec and Ontario, will feature presentations by Leila al-Shami and Elia Ayoub. Not to be missed!

📩 Read our weekly newsletter:

- Congrats to our inaugural Penlight Prize winners
- Frivolous lawsuits show need for federal anti-SLAPP law
- Maryland gov. retaliates against press
- Court smacks down Trump’s media ban again
- Plus, what we're reading...

https://freedom.press/issues/this-is-the-best-unpaywalled-public-records-based-reporting-of-the-year/

And here's a good companion piece, about how to go about reversing that structural disadvantage:

https://www.laborpolitics.com/p/what-evangelicals-can-teach-leftists

@MaddieM4 @glyph yes, a thing I've been saying a lot is that someone resorting to LLMs to solve a problem seems pretty well correlated with the problem being one that shouldn't have existed in the first place.

Last year I talked to someone who said a large and tedious part of his job used to be transcribing tabular data out of nicely typeset PDF manuals into a machine-readable representation that can be fed to software. And then he started getting an LLM to do that for him.

But the PDFs were generated by another part of the same company! Steam came out of my ears. Why the hell is the company making life difficult for _themselves_ in that way in the first place? The people creating the data should provide it in a machine-readable format _already_, so that nobody has to convert it back into one!

In fact they ought to have been doing that all along. The red flag of "this job was so tedious I outsourced it to an LLM" _shouldn't_ have been necessary. The fact that you were making life pointlessly difficult for other humans should have been enough. But I guess a lot of this kind of nonsense exists in the world just because organisational boundaries hide the costs to _this_ department from _that_ department who caused them.

(Also, with the right tools – I quite like the Python 'pdfminer' library – you can automate that process _without_ an LLM, and have, you know, testing and repeatability and far lower computational costs. If I were receiving a PDF of that kind from some organisation I had no hope of influencing, that's what I'd do.)

RE: https://journa.host/@fulelo/117450253815434419

action was needed 30 years ago....

"Anyone who’s spent even the slightest amount of time in left spaces has heard the cliche about what is to be done in answer of every problem: Organize! It’s funny because it’s true. But it’s true because organizing—in its thousand meanings—always aims at generating structural or positional advantages, so that when the time comes for a campaign, the deck is stacked favorably. Organizing is a way of waging a war of position. The war of maneuver succeeds because successful wars of position preceded them."
#Organizing

https://www.un-diplomatic.com/p/riots-of-refusal-as-wars-of-maneuver