I've been thinking about the FCC's insane new ban on foreign-made routers. Note the end of the BBC story at https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c74787w149zo:
"One exception to the general absence of US-made routers is the newer Starlink WiFi router. Starlink is part of Elon Musk's company SpaceX.

"The company says the Starlink routers are made in Texas."

And per the FCC's FAQ (https://www.fcc.gov/faqs-recent-updates-fcc-covered-list-regarding-routers-produced-foreign-countries), even US-written software (or, I assume, open source software like OpenWRT) won't exempt foreign-made routers from the ban.

I'm looking for full-time work!

I work at the intersection of social and technical systems, and specialize in building up people, programs, partnerships, and organizations around open source.

I have a deep track record in complex community relations, am fluent in the nuts and bolts of many technologies, and have spanned governance, org development, nonprofit and people management, comms, marketing, events, and beyond.

Let's fly!

#FediHired #GetFediHired #OpenSource #FOSS

My #Wikipedia request for comment just closed, finally banning #AI content in articles! "The use of LLMs to generate or rewrite article content is prohibited"

Kudos to all who participated in writing the guideline (especially Kowal2701) and the whole WikiProject AI Cleanup team, this was very much a group effort!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Writing_articles_with_large_language_models/RfC

It really bums me out that I keep seeing blog posts from technical people like "putting aside the obvious moral and ethical implications of LLMs, I'm interested in evaluating whether they can be useful for my work."

Like "putting aside the obvious moral and ethical concerns of breaking into my neighbours' houses, I'm interested in evaluating whether this can be useful for acquiring other people's valuables."

"And some people say 'These people, they're not even trying to be British. They come here, they bring their own culture, their food, speak their own language, and try to take over the whole bloody place.'

Dunno. Sounds pretty British to me."

~Trevor Noah
😂

The goal is to make corporate data less profitable.

Even stuff as simple as setting your birthdate to 1970-01-01 everywhere, adding [TEST] or [DELETED] as your name or account notes anywhere you don't need them to know your name.

Using plugins like AdNauseam to poison ad trackers (and cost them marketing dollars).

Using VPNs set to different locations.

Signing into data broker sites to "correct" outdated info (they'll often let you do that with little-to-no proof of identity, but will require your passport or state ID in order to delete your info). Bonus points if you correct it to someone else's info on their site that's similar to yours.

Only fill in required fields when you sign up for anything, but only provide correct info if it matters for you to use the service, otherwise provide plausible, but incorrect, data.

If you use LLMs anywhere, use the free tier and always vote thumbs up for bad answers and down for good ones. It wastes their resources and drives up their costs while making their training data worse.

Every single PR that is extruded or summarized by an AI product weakens exit strategies by undermining parallel tooling. Our choice to adopt AI, or even to insufficiently oppose its adoption, means we are that much more vulnerable to *infrastructure* becoming enclosed.

That's true in the obvious way: in the most generous interpretation of AI, if you're renting your brain, someone else can jack the prices on you or turn off projects they don't like.

Sigh.

New boss: “You’re good at writing notes.”

Me: “Thank you, it helps me to remember so I have been writing summaries for many years.”

New boss: “You should try CoPilot and see what it can do.”

Me: “Well I enjoy summarizing my notes, and it helps me to learn and remember.”

New boss: “Let me show you something I did in CoPilot.”

Ugh. Writing it myself helps me LEARN and REMEMBER. Why are these AI zombies so intent on changing a process that is helpful to me? Feeding notes through CoPilot won’t benefit me when it’s the act of writing that works for me.

One of the weirder things in "AI" is the whole "skills" thing. It sounds as if those were somehow little programs or tools integrated into your agents but they are just markdown files with strings that you pull into your prompt to hope the slop machine does better. Crazy shit.

You know what the most likely next career step in tech is for a woman my age?

Leaving.

It just really sits with me. When my friends leave. Which a lot of them have this year. Learning scientists like me study pathways. All opportunity is preconditioned by access. Trajectory comparisons are not full comparisons unless they include leaving.

When we fixate on "getting in" and not fixing what's within, this happens. But every day, the future changes. I'm here for that.

The kernel patch series removing IPV6=m is out! I am quite happy about it and I hope I did not mess up :)

A lot of people were CC'ed, sorry about the noise ^^

https://lore.kernel.org/netdev/20260309022013.5199-1-fmancera@suse.de/

Wrote a new blog post: "Against Vibes: When is a Generative Model Useful" https://www.williamjbowman.com/blog/2026/03/05/against-vibes-when-is-a-generative-model-useful/

OpenWrt 25.12.0 - Stable Release https://forum.openwrt.org/t/openwrt-25-12-0-stable-release/247228 #openwrt

We could have had these cool EV innovations developed in Europe before if German carmakers hadn't been so bloody stubborn about petrol and diesel engines.
I will never not be cross about their delaying the green transition.

https://mastodon.social/@clim8_solutions/116191427518755095

Is empathy political?

An article on autistic empathy.

#Autism #ActuallyAutistic #Neurodivergent #AuDHD #Neurodiversity #Empathy #DoubleEmpathy

https://www.neurofabulous.org.uk/autistic-empathy.html

RE: https://lifeiswoohoo.net/@mookie/115982440586817820

Peak LinkedIn

Boy I was wrong about the Fediverse https://matduggan.com/boy-i-was-wrong-about-the-fediverse/

Using a free software stack, you could be an effective developer with a relatively low budget. A cheap or used laptop and an internet subscription.

LLM coding is changing that too. You either need a very powerful and expensive machine to run a local model, or (currently more likely) an LLM subscription. We are lead to believe you have to pay a monthly fee to be an effective developer.

The prospect of your output as a developer being tied to a proprietary service seems risky at best.

It's my birthday today! Woohoo!!! I'm 42 now but mentally still in 2006, hah!

This celebratory image is 4 of Wands from the Everyday Witch Tarot, illustrated by me, written by Deborah Blake, and published by Llewellyn Worldwide.

I'd be so grateful if you shared my art today!

My portfolio and original art shop is at http://www.albaillustration.com.

I also have signed decks, art prints, stickers, and more at http://albaillustration.etsy.com!

every time I see this graph

it reminds me that the status quo thinkers and talkers and powers are an oil slick in our minds

telling us things can never change

what they really mean: STOP THE CHANGE

our answer: no
#SolarIsRadical