Ambrose Andrews @znalo@librem.one

Labour has (quietly) dropped its appeal against the striking down of Suella Braverman's anti-protest law, but what that now means, as Katy Watts (Liberty) argues, is that all those arrested under the law, now found itself to be unlwful, should have their cases quashed.

The attrition against protest is anti-democratic, and those caught up in the state's illegal action(s) need to be released from its grip

#protest #politics

https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/protest-law-braverman-overturned-labour-yvette-cooper-liberty-greta-thunberg/

Denmark’s Ministry of Digital Government is phasing out its use of Microsoft Office.. to switch to open source alternatives like LibreOffice instead.

Why? Because relying too heavily on a US tech giant for your nation’s digital infrastructure is starting to feel a bit... well, risky.

Denmark's relationship with the US is under strain, following Donald Trump's clearly stated ambition to seize control of Greenland, and recent reports of increased spying by the States on Greenland and Denmark.

Since I've left my last job, I've been thinking about the guy who used me as an alternative to ChatGPT whenever he hit a problem that he couldn't vibe code the answer out of at work.

He basically rotted his own brain by compulsively using ChatGPT in lieu of actually thinking with most any of the projects he was working on. Instead of taking the time to read through code in our framework, look up documentation, or do any sort of debugging, he instead just begged and pleaded with ChatGPT to try and get somewhere because "it was faster." Basically just really hammering his brain with the Programmer's Slot Machine. (@davidgerard wrote a really good article here about this specific gambling addiction angle here. I highly highly recommend reading/watching the corresponding YouTube video:
https://pivot-to-ai.com/2025/06/05/generative-ai-runs-on-gambling-addiction-just-one-more-prompt-bro/ )

Back to the story; When that wasn't working, which was a significant portion of the time, he'd then just turn and use me as a "more informed alternative" to ChatGPT.

I worked fully remote and the majority of our interactions was via a Teams chat. which apparently crossed some wires in his monkey brain and made him start just... Basically verbally barraging me like he would with the company ChatGPT instance. No thoughts at all, just an immediate process of:

- Ask vague question
- Get guess for an answer with a request for more details
- Try applying the guess blindly without thinking if it's applicable at all
- Have it not work and just report back that it didn't work.
- No follow-up details, no further explanation of what was going on or what he's trying to do. Nothing added past the original vague situation
- If lucky, I might get a screenshot of part of the error, meticulously sliced before it gave something useful in the output because he stopped reading error output to things and made no attempt to understand it. (Why? ChatGPT can do that part!)
- Rinse and Repeat until I get fed up and get into a call with him
- Fix the thing in less than a minute, pointing out that he should have been able to tell what was wrong almost immediately if he actually dropped a break-point and debugged the code at *literally any point* along the way
- Fuck off immediately after getting his fix, no thank you or anything
- start the process anew the following day when he vibe coded himself into a corner all over again

I literally had to go to leadership and make them have a talk with him and get him to leave me the fuck alone at work, after repeated attempts to establish boundaries about it, due to how much time it sucked out of me being able to work on other projects. Effectively just doubling up my work and slamming me with burn out right at the start of the year for absolutely no reason other than his belligerent insistence to just Not Do His Job Without His Hand Being Held By A Chat Window.

It rapidly went from a "He sometimes asks informed questions that I can answer and help him with. I enjoy working with him" to "The dude isn't even trying in the slightest and is now basically offloading his work onto me because he broke his capacity to actually do work independently of an external chat window. I fucking hate him and I hope he gets in a car wreck so I can get a break from the bleakness of dealing with him every goddamn morning"

ChatGPT has basically just been an absolute blight for me since it's inception. Going from the team being generally pro-crypto to intensely pro-genAI/LLM because their favorite scammers (er.. I mean YouTubers) had them hooked on a fantasy of some day making it Big by jumping from one Hype cycle to the next. I sincerely was very close to just finding an entirely different career path altogether because of just how incredibly shitty it was working with that team on just about anything, but lacking the job experience on the resume to land someplace else.

Nobody wanted to be an actual expert, nobody really wanted to learn anything. They had their degree and ChatGPT, which means they learned all they ever will need. ...While working in an industry that tends to re-invent itself every half decade or so while half-assing solutions with an outsourced bullshit generator. 🫠

All in the name of "Well it got me from point A to point B faster." and leaving it at that, despite taking significantly longer than they should have from the get go over it.

I've seen and lived what an AI Fueled future looks like:
Mediocre men harassing their talented and likely autistic peers until their peers just up and fuckin leave to a different organization out of frustration and exhaustion.

I think down the road, we'll be able to measure the negative impact using LLMs has on people's cognitive faculties by comparing it to horse kicks to the head, and only be exaggerating it by a little bit.

"Let's put LLM in everything" is the new...

Unis are moving away from Adobe due to their constant price rises and cutting of student discount / education institute freebies.

Could Microsoft be next on the chopping block with its enforced AI, spyware, online accounts and services for things that should be local / third party products not baked in to the OS?
From: @RonjaBiernat
https://chaos.social/@RonjaBiernat/114577990337600982

Trump just got SCOTUS to rule that 500,000 previously documented people are now undocumented.

A reminder that whenever MAGA cultists claimed they only opposed "illegal" immigration and not "legal" immigration, they were lying. They oppose non-white people, because MAGA is a white supremacist cult.

#Israel has blockaded any food, water, and medicine to Gaza for over two months now with the aid of the #USA.

They are starving the people of #Gaza with famine.

Cartoon by Carlos Latuff.

#Genocide #freepalestine #palestine #boycottisrael #bds #Children #SaveTheChildren #SaveOurChildren

Gaza: ‘Worst-case scenario’ unfolds as brutal aid blockade threatens mass starvation

https://news.un.org/en/story/2025/05/1162851

We have setup our first bounty as part of #dephcom (we started as #debphoshfund but Open Source Collective suggested a name change and community picked the new name via a poll).

https://opencollective.com/dephcom/projects/pipewire-echo

If you have a Librem 5 and you'd like more choice with Operating System, especially newer versions of software than currently being shipped in PureOS #byzantium or even upcoming #crimson please support.

#debian #pureos #mobian #librem5 #FreeSoftware #OpenSource

This is a subtoot and should probably be a blog post. But basically some techbros are re-inventing mesh radios (badly) going on like my 20th year of tinkering in this corner of tech.

Low cost, developer friendly mesh radios have kinda been going in circles for decades.

So in many ways I guess I shouldn't be surprised to review yet another cheap mesh radio project and realize, "dude this just plain sucks and isn't improving at all, oh and the community is kinda awful".

#meshtastic

Announcing the NNCPNET Email Network

From 1995 to 2019, I ran my own mail server. It began with a UUCP link, an expensive long-distance call for me then. Later, I ran a mail server in my apartment, then ran it as a VPS at various places.

But running an email server got difficult. You can’t just run it on a residential IP. Now there’s SPF, DKIM, DMARC, and TLS to worry about. I recently reviewed mail hosting services, and don’t get me wrong: I still use one, and probably will, because things like email from my bank are critical.

But we’ve lost the ability to tinker, to experiment, to have fun with email.

Not anymore. NNCPNET is an email system that runs atop NNCP. I’ve written a lot about NNCP, including a less-ambitious article about point-to-point email over NNCP 5 years ago. NNCP is to UUCP what ssh is to telnet: a modernization, with modern security and features. NNCP is an asynchronous, onion-routed, store-and-forward network. It can use as a transport anything from the Internet to a USB stick.

NNCPNET is a set of standards, scripts, and tools to facilitate a broader email network using NNCP as the transport. You can read more about NNCPNET on its wiki!

The “easy mode” is to use the Docker container (multi-arch, so you can use it on your Raspberry Pi) I provide, which bundles:

Exim mail server
NNCP
Verification and routing tools I wrote
Automated nodelist tools; it will request daily nodelist updates and update its configurations accordingly, so new members can be communicated with
Integration with the optional, opt-in Internet email bridge

It is open to all. The homepage has a more extensive list of features.

I even have mailing lists running on NNCPNET; see the interesting addresses page for more details.

There is extensive documentation, and of course the source to the whole thing is available.

The gateway to Internet SMTP mail is off by default, but can easily be enabled for any node. It is a full participant, in both directions, with SPF, DKIM, DMARC, and TLS.

You don’t need any inbound ports for any of this. You don’t need an always-on Internet connection. You don’t even need an Internet connection at all. You can run it from your laptop and still use Thunderbird to talk to it via its optional built-in IMAP server.

#email #nncp #uucp

Hamas's application to the UK Home Secretary to remove its designation as a terrorist organization aims to build international support for Palestinian resistance and affirm the group's role as a political actor in determining the future of Gaza.

https://mondoweiss.net/2025/04/hamas-files-challenge-to-overturn-uk-terror-designation/

#Palestine #Israel #Gaza
@palestine @israel