Old Fucking Punk @lwriemen@librem.one

The LLMs are creating a new kind of mysticism. At Project Gutenberg, we're starting to get emails they have written trying to contact authors of some of the books we distribute. The authors have been dead for over a hundred years. I'm tempted to answer.

I was just cleaning off my bedside table, and I found a scrap of paper - I leave a bit there in case I have urgent thoughts in the night and need to write them down before they (or I) slip away. I hadn't noticed this one before... At some point, I wrote:

"Taking meaning from the muddle
Is like fishing in a puddle.
Come on, let's have another beer."

A bit chuffed to find that. 🙃

#MartinRowson on the #USMidterm #election results – #cartoon | Martin Rowson | The Guardian

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/picture/2026/nov/04/martin-rowson-us-midterm-election-results-cartoon

#Humour #Politics #Satire

My dogs were going CRAZY today and I walked outside to see what was up, and it was SEVEN VERY LARGE BIRDS PERCHED ON OUR ROOF. I thought it was amazingly cool. I don't know what birds they were other than VERY BIG

Remember that Dems don’t have enough majorities in Congress to impeach and convict.

But they *do* have enough majorities to *set the agenda*. Which means they can hold hearings and force people to testify under oath, and control what goes in the headlines, and hopefully continue to build public pressure on the Trump admin to reverse some of their more egregious decisions.

And I hope they can force the release of enough information so that it can give state prosecutors enough material to go after the criminals at the state level, since it’s clear that the DOJ isn’t going to do its job.

I’m hoping that even the most steadfast Republicans can see that it’s no longer profitable to support Trump. The ongoing racket to protect the corrupt and criminal family has cost them their careers, and proved to be a major strategic mistake for the party.

UK’s most polluting power plant could power country’s largest AI datacentre

https://www.theguardian.com/business/2026/nov/03/uk-drax-power-station-ai-datacentre

2. Organisations using ActivityPub

This is where I catalogue any companies, NGOs, governments etc that publish on their own domain (not "has an account on some server somewhere").

If you know any entity that has any kind of self-hosted social media presence on THEIR domain, please let me know so I can update this database:

https://jaz.co.uk/projects/orgs-using-ap/

We need to be a bit cautious about what Congressional Democrats *can* do come January. Not should, *can*. For example: even if they get Mississippi and Alaska, that isn’t enough votes to break a filibuster, let alone a veto-proof majority. And while it’s still mathematically possible for them to get a veto-proof majority in the House, it’s very unlikely if you look at, say, the “very likely R” status for many uncalled seats per the NY Times web site. (The GOP has 139 and the Democrats have 237. You need 290 to override a veto; the most the Democrats can get is 296. Not happening.)

The Democrats cannot prosecute anyone for Federal crimes. That’s up to Trump’s DoJ. Impeach and convict Todd Blanche? You’d need 2/3 of the Senate to go along—almost certainly not happening. And if it did happen, Trump would play his usual vacancy games to appoint a series of acting AGs.

Contempt of Congress? I think that DoJ has to prosecute. (Per Wikipedia, it can be more complex than that, but I don’t know if that info is reliable.)

So: yes, I’d love to see Trump, Blanche, Hegseth, RFK Jr., and more impeached, convicted, and removed from office. I just don’t think it can happen.

🔴 Brand new Tom the Dancing Bug now up on Boing Boing
-
DEMENTIA DONNIE BOTTOMS OUT!
-
https://boingboing.net/2026/11/04/tom-the-dancing-bug-dementia-donnie-bottoms-out.html

RE: https://sfba.social/@drahardja/117556987546050595

I think now is a good time to remind people about Artisans Cooperative

#AntiAI #FuckAI #Etsy

IronEar: the privacy-first audio sensor that recognises 500 sounds on-device - https://www.open-electronics.org/ironear-the-privacy-first-audio-sensor-that-recognises-500-sounds-on-device/ #opensource

It should be clearer than ever to lawmakers that Americans want them to do their jobs.

It's a great time to tell them to support legislation to protect journalists and whistleblowers.

Use our action center to do just that — it's fast and easy!

https://freedom.press/action/

Trans Rights Protesters Crash Grand Opening of U.K.’s Largest ‘Harry Potter’ Store
https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/general-news/trans-rights-protest-harry-potter-store-jk-rowling-1236747607/?utm_source=flipboard&utm_medium=activitypub

Posted into Top Stories in Celeb @top-stories-in-celeb-thenewsdesk

@lwriemen @ludicity the onion has you covered:

https://theonion.com/why-hasnt-abdul-el-sayed-accomplished-any-of-his-campaign-goals-since-winning-2-minutes-ago/

(long one, I am sorry)

Reading around the internet I see a lot of people expressing their extreme displeasure at how everything on the internet now seems to show a "verifying your browser" type page, and while this is extremely annoying I assure you from the web sites point of view this is basically existentially required.

Allow me to go into more detail from the point of view of the company that I run, and I'm sure the story is similar in many different places.

On an average day bgp.tools gets about 500~ users or or actively using the website at any given time, and let's assume this results in a request rate of ~10 RPS of dynamic requests (this is not the actual number but it's easier to just provide round benchmark numbers), so basically this excludes CSS/JS/Images/etc.

At the time of writing bgp.tools is "shooting down" about ~40 bot scraper connections _per second_, and the connection attempts the do get through tend to go on to each try and perform ~5 RPS until stopped. To add on top these things continuously do cache misses, which makes sense given at that point is to try and extract as much information from you, for no cost, and as much/fast as possible.

This is very quickly unsustainable.

The problem is that these scrapers are aware that they are unwelcome, and so they will happily do things like: (listed in the order of most commonly done)

A) Use normal browser user agent strings so it's not obvious from basic access.log files

B) Emulate real browser TLS handshakes to evade JA-3 and similar mitigations

C) Use proxies that have lease lines with popular eyeball ISP providers and rented IP space, so that AS blocks do not work

D) Use entire botnets of smart TVs and other compromised devices, mostly sitting behind "normal" networks

E) Use free mobile phone app/games with a "special" SDK as proxies

F) Run entire browser stacks purely to load pages in the most "authentic" way possible

With C+D+E traits combined, IP/Subnet/ASN blocks no longer work, with A+B you cannot easily identify what is what, so this leaves you in a dilemma:

If you run a website which serves information anonymously for free, you have a choice of three options:

1) Put everything behind a log-in barrier (this might destroy your business)

2) Purchase/rent more infrastructure purely for the purpose of serving bots, and at a significant multiplier of your existing infrastructure (this might destroy your business)

3) Use a "verify your browser" step to cut out 90%+ of this mess at the cost of annoying users a bit

(3) is the only really viable option for a lot of people, the pure scale of the scraping problem for some website is just not survivable at most peoples current scales.

UK Officials Said #AI Would Add £400 Billion to the Economy. That Figure Mainly Came From Google - https://www.wired.com/story/uk-officials-said-ai-would-add-400-billion-to-the-economy-that-figure-mainly-came-from-google/

I do NOT want "compromise" with the corrupt fash bootlickers and psychopaths. I do not want "bipartisanship". I want consequences for the cruel, nasty weirdos who cheated, lied, stole, killed, and impoverished everything they touched. I want them stripped of all power and influence.

Hey, #noAI #cybersecurity folks, recently, when I've come across devs who are pro-AI, I see them arguing about how hackers and bad actors will inevitably use AI to find critical vulnerabilities in important code, and as such (regardless of the ethics of LLMs), developers have a (moral) responsibility to use AI to check their code, have it ingest it and find vulnerabillities before the bad actors do. Is this true? Would developers really not be able to keep up their security against attacks made with the help of AI discovered vulnerabilities? I feel this is fishy/contentious but I don't have the knowledge to say anything (as I'm not a dev myself).

#AskFedi

Members of our Working Groups and the Organizing Circle invite all community members to consider volunteering with Social.Coop's #governance https://www.loomio.com/d/wc1IRz4b/seeking-volunteers-to-run-social-coop-

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