Old Fucking Punk @lwriemen@librem.one

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

@mcc @tapafon @techokami they recently put out an RC that didn't compile on that obscure little used platform amd64, so i'm not sanguine it's clear of the slop

https://lkml.org/lkml/2026/10/13/1619

gregkh's second is sasha levin, Nvidia sloperator who was one of the guys who spent the last year pushing slop into the kernel as hard as possible

@MaddieM4 @glyph When coding LLMs first came on the scene, and people were recommending them for, like, generating kubernetes yaml, my take at that time was: If a language processor is the best kind of automation that can be applied to this problem, then that's a scathing indictment of our profession. If you want to automate something, there's still nothing better than a program, and we all know how to write one.

Attention: We currently advise against upgrading to Forgejo 17.0.0. An issue is currently being investigated that prevents pushing, merging, or other code operations in some cases.

If you haven't updated yet, please wait until the issue has been investigated more thoroughly, if possible.

I joined the @coopcloud intro call last night and feel like I understand the proposition much better now. It's not just an extra layer on top of docker compose, it's a common library for public infrastructure providers to share and a network for those providers to work together under.

It looks like it wouldn't take much for me to migrate my stuff over to using coopcloud, and then I'd be contributing bug fixes to the commons rather than just maintaining my own stuff.

The downside being reliance on Docker (a commercial product) and Linux (increasingly slopified). But I feel like we're not getting away from either of those anytime soon

In-depth article by Linux Magazine on the Fediverse with interviews with Ivan and Mayel from @Bonfire and @cwebber

A good read to share

- About the Open Science Network, the archipielago set-up and the Jacobin.de case (all Bonfire)

- About the ActivityPub standard with federation between servers and client-server with the apps

- About living systems that are brought in by sensor networks about which the neighbours can have conversations.

- About solidarity networks. Such as @coopcloud – a community first and a set of
deployment tools and recipes second - of which Bonfire and also the #DemocraticTechFund are members

- Also about how #VentureCapital money typically results in shiny but extractive businesses that turn into an #enshittification process to return maximum profit to shareholders. Instead we can have networks of community centred ventures and cooperative platforms, such as @SocialCoop. And public funding channeled through e.g. @nlnet

https://nlnet.nl/media/Digital-Autonomy-Fediverse.pdf

Horror has always been a political genre. So, for October, we've compiled a list of 13 horror films and some suggested reading to go with them. Here's part 1 of 2. What would you add to the list?
Get 40% off select titles with code HORROR thru 11/1 here: https://www.pmpress.org/category/horror-is-political-sale

RE: https://unstable.systems/@jneen/116618931097778342

Worth looking at both the quoted text here and •especially• the linked page, which is quite good.

I’ll add another item of my own. The first screenshot mentions giving an LLM the task of “implementing an HTTP server in JavaScript from scratch” in 90 minutes. Sounds impressive, right? Until you remember that every open-source Javascript HTTP server in existence ••was in the training data••.

1/

It’s just •astonishing• how many eye-popping stories of LLMs doing amazing omg-verge-of-magical-superintelligence things turn out to be just unvarnished plagiarism.

In the first months after ChatGPT’s release, I remember a French dept colleague being amazed that GPT could translate and summarize a passage of Le Petit Prince.

It was a lot less impressive when I dug up the 2 or 3 online passages which it had copied almost verbatim and stitched together (sprinkling in a couple of extra words that made it less accurate).

3/

Periodic reminder: 404 Media is the same Vice bros who broke their confidentiality agreement with Naomi Wu and put her in danger to satisfy the prurient interests of the Gamergate crowd.

Don't be surprised when they run slopaganda pieces. These people are not our friends, even if they are doing some useful reporting too.

There are so many reasons to deny the reality of climate #collapse:

"In the face of extreme climate risks, I am under pressure to cut my forecasts for the losses that disasters will cause in order to make insurance more affordable – and get my employer more business."
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2026/oct/14/climate-crisis-insurance-risk-disaster-catastrophe

One thing I'm only just now appreciating is how the shift to "agentic AI" serves to undermine any privacy benefits you might get from using a local model. Maybe the model isn't sending every prompt back to a data center, but if you're handing tasks over to agents, then they're likely out there leaving a trail of data all across the internet — and maybe with a preference for sites that filter back to the model vendor.

RE: https://mastodon.social/@lobsters/117449825505376513

“Matt Mullenweg Orders Accessibility Revert, Tells Core Committer to “Contribute Your Talents to Another Project” - The Repository”

https://www.therepository.email/matt-mullenweg-orders-accessibility-revert-tells-core-committer-to-contribute-your-talents-to-another-project

> Days after six years of accessibility work finally landed in core, Matt Mullenweg ordered it reverted, and Andrea Fercia’s WordPress.org account was briefly banned.