giving impressionable still-developing young men "ai girlfriends" who cannot ever say no and that they can customize with sliders and parameters down to minuscule detail will probably break them in unfixable ways and permanently foreclose on their healthy participation in human relationships but beep boop what does computer know

Today’s mustread is from Alexander Stubb, Prime Minister of Finland.

“The global West cannot simply attract the global South by extolling the virtues of freedom and democracy; it also needs to fund development projects, make investments in economic growth, and, most important, give the South a seat at the table and share power.”

#dkpol https://www.foreignaffairs.com/united-states/wests-last-chance

Støt og del gerne dette borgerforslag: #opensource

"Anerkendelse af frivilligt arbejde med open source som samfundsgavnlig indsats med juridiske og skattemæssige fordele"

📝 https://www.borgerforslag.dk/se-og-stoet-forslag/?Id=FT-22237

`CONFIG_PSI` in the kernel config should be renamed to `CONFIG_BAR`

#linux #kernel

Hey! I’m CEO of a company that has just raised $10 billion for an app that takes the hard work out of enjoying music. Did you know, some people waste hours each day listening to “tunes”. Our AI will listen to it for you and summarise it in a 15 second scream leaving you more time to focus on what's really important in life: adding value.

In the early 2000s the ReactOS team paused development for years; to engage in a project wide audit, under accusations that a developer may have SEEN leaked windows sourcecode.

In the 2020s folks keep insisting it's cool for #FLOSS devs to use AI's trained on random other projects to generate code; when it is known that such AI assistants occasionally reproduce code verbatim, without regard to the original software license. #llm #AI #eliza #generativeAI

The Dread Pirate Robert Nozick
http://existentialcomics.com/comic/631
#ExistentialComics

We could house everyone. We could feed everyone. We could care for everyone. We could build devices designed to last as long as possible. We could align our manufacturing around the needs of the people and the planet.

We materially have the resources to do so.

That's why leftists are so angry. The resources we need to build a world everyone can thrive in literally already exist. We are just using them mostly to pamper the rich or murder the poor.

Your `pip` unwrapped 🎇

- you tried to install `requirements.txt` 18 times this year. Doing better than last year!
- of the packages you installed 67% started with py, 11% python, and 6% Py. You guessed wrong 85 times.
- your love for building source has no bounds, except maybe the 92 failed compiles
- you updated `requests` 18 times. Urllib is feeling lonely.
- the average time between updating `pip` was 97 days. But we warned you 338 times!

@drscriptt @dwm that's not a bad idea, actually!

@dwm haha, yes indeed. Now, to figure out how to remember this when I next have to pay attention to it in another decade or so...

@dwm @fanf yes, this does indeed look like that I should have done. Ah well 🤷‍♂️

Got a notification from my registrar that I was using an outdated DNSSEC key algorithm for my domain, so decided to re-learn how DNSSEC signing actually works in Bind.

Discovered that there's now a mode where Bind will manage keys and signing automatically. Yay! Only problem is, the domain in question was not configured that way.

Decided to use the occasion to swap over the config to that mode. Which of course caused Bind to generate new (managed) keys without doing any of the smooth gradual rollover that it otherwise implements. Oops!

Ah well, everything is set up correctly now, and it'll only be a single TTL until the whole world agrees. Should be fine; right? 😅

#DNS #DNSSEC #OpsFail

As pointed out on an irc channel, yet another example of kernel developers having to do crazy things to paper over hardware bugs: https://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/torvalds/linux.git/commit/?id=f076ef44a44d02ed91543f820c14c2c7dff53716

December again. Christmas is getting near, winter is coming*, and... The call for proposals for the eBPF Devroom at FOSDEM'26 is about to close. Today is your last chance to submit! If you have things to say about eBPF, send an abstract ⚙️ 🐝

https://ebpf.io/fosdem-2026.html

* Subject to availability in your hemisphere

#fosdem #fosdem2026 #eBPF

In 2017 Randall Munroe posted a strip called "Seven Years" about being the caregiver for a loved one dealing with cancer:

https://xkcd.com/1928/

That strip literally made me cry, it was such a clear telling of what that experience is like; much of it could have been about my own life.

Except that my own experience had a different ending.

Today he put out "Fifteen Years":

https://xkcd.com/3172/

This one made me want to cheer. What a joy to see a story that has played out so differently, so much better. I have never crossed paths with Mr. Munroe, but I rejoice in his and his family's good fortune as if he were a good friend.

Here's to many more years.

@GrapheneOS is being threatened by French authorities for refusing to add backdoors and they're dealing with coordinated attacks in French media right now. They're pulling out of France entirely, moving all their servers, and fighting off a wave of bullshit one-sided reporting that makes them look like they're helping criminals.

They need us to fight back. Support them however you can, whether that's a dollar, sharing their story, pushing back on the garbage news coverage when you see it, or just telling someone you know about what's happening. All of it matters because they're drowning in attacks from governments and media and bad actors who want them gone.

This is the only Android OS that actually makes me feel like privacy isn't just marketing. They fight for us now they need us to fight for them.

The EU is allowing this, governments think they can just threaten developers into compliance, and if we stay quiet we're letting it happen. Show up for them in whatever way you're able to.

#grapheneos #Privacy #NoBackdoors #encryption #security #chatControl

Recent discussion about the perils of doors in gamedev reminded me of a bug caused by a door in a game you may have heard of called "Half Life 2". Are you sitting comfortably? Then I shall begin.

I feel this needs to be repeated 🍪

The annoyance of cookie banners
doesn't come from the regulations, but from the malicious compliance of the corporations who want to exploit your personal data.

No data-harvesting cookies = No banner.
Simple.

My websites have no cookie banners,
because they don't use any non-essential cookies and don't track visitors.

Yours shouldn't either.

#Privacy #Cookies #PrivacyLaw

On some visceral level the incompleteness theorem is awe-inducing and wildly optimistic, to me. The simple elegance and total comprehensibility we might want doesn’t exist. It can’t. Embrace complexity and your arms will never get all the way around it. There is always more, and there will always be more.

The world is provably beyond comprehension and somehow still full of structure and beauty. Simplicity is only self-delusion. Empathy is infinitely more real than categorization.