Sometimes, people make fun of guys for doing stuff like this, but I think it's way more cool to do something you are passionate about, that is actually constructive, than buying guns for a self-created Apocalypse and harassing women online, because they won't have sex with them.

Nerds rule!

I wonder how much productivity is being lost by people using LLMs to write long things where the meaningful content remains very small in comparison.

I've noticed that looking up how to do $THING with a command-line $TOOL now almost always gives me an LLM-generated page with pages of boilerplate nonsense (what is $TOOL? How to install $TOOL on Ubuntu, how to install $TOOL on macOS, and so on), with the actual two sentences of content right at the end. These are obviously generated to provide more space for ads, but there's a lot of this cropping up in other contexts.

Saving a few seconds of writing time in exchange for wasting a few minutes of reading time for each of your readers is a staggering drop in overall efficiency.

Just my layman’s take here: if you go to work for a company named after an object of dark magic that was used by the Dark Lord to spy on people and communicate with his lieutenants, and then months or years later you suddenly realize that you *might* be working for an organization that is doing bad and wrong things, you are a fucking moron and you have been for a while. Sure, you can get out, but you will always have the stain of evil on you.

We now require proof of work before you can submit a #curl security report.

Like mowing @bagder 's lawn or washing his car.😌

BREAKING! Meshcore team splits over dispute over AI-generated code disclosure, and hostile trademark takeover.

Meshcore is an off-grid, decentralised mesh radio platform powered by low-cost and public access LoRa radio technology for reliable, long-range emergency text and embedded sensors communication. It can communicate across kilometres — no towers, no subscriptions, no single point of failure.

https://blog.meshcore.io/2026/04/23/the-split

#meshcore #meshtastic #lora #radio #opensource #foss #drama #privacy #security #selfsovereignty #ai #copyright #takeover

With Windows 9x Subsystem for Linux you can run all your favourite Windows and Linux apps side-by-side with a modern Linux kernel running cooperatively with the Windows kernel in ring 0. And unlike modern WSL, no hardware virtualisation is used so even your 486 can run it!

Please enjoy, I think this might be one of my greatest hacks of all time

https://codeberg.org/hails/wsl9x

The Dungeon of Dark Patterns

Sources and bonus timelapse: https://www.peppercarrot.com/en/miniFantasyTheater/049.html

#webcomic #krita #miniFantasyTheater

my dude has rediscovered the commons and I could not be happier for them

Cory Doctorow on how Comrade Trump is destroying the US empire to save it for fossil fuel companies:
"The Strait of Epstein crisis is going to do more to accelerate permanent, unidirectional migration away from fossil fuels to cleantech than decades of environmental activism. Cleantech is so much better than fossil fuels – cheaper, more reliable, cleaner – that anyone who tries it becomes an instant convert. That's why the fossil fuel industry has been so insistent that no one get to try it!"
https://pluralistic.net/2026/04/20/praxis/
#CleanTech #GreenTech #USPolitics #CoryDoctorow

Side note, if you want to see how common of a pattern this is, and I can't believe I didn't think of this earlier, go search Github.com for 'deleteduser.com', lots of examples of delete functions from apps there that do this type of thing.

I've already reduced my personal footprint. Sold my ICE car in 2018. Ride my bike and the bus as much as possible. Grow lots of my own food. If I count all the biochar I make, I'm a net remover of CO2 and have been for quite some time.

I don't do business with billionaires. I deleted my accounts with all the social media sites, shut down my AWS instances, and moved my Kiwisaver out of all US equities.

How much impact has any of this had on CO2 levels in the atmosphere?

Sweet.

Fuck.

All.

The only possibility we have to turn this thing is to change the system, and the only way we do that is with radical accountability for everyone who profits from our collective misery.

Don't tell me to take individual action. I've been doing that most of my adult life and I can see the results. I'm taking names.

**AI Assistance Reduces Persistence and Hurts Independent Performance. **A paper from researchers at Oxford, MIT, Carnegie Mellon and UCLA that needs to be seen by everyone in the education community.

Full Abstract in alt text.

#ai #GenAI #chatbots #edtech #education #academia #academicchatter

https://arxiv.org/abs/2604.04721

we're destroying the open web

we're burning down the closest thing i've ever seen in my life to the library of alexandria

and people are explaining to me how warm it keeps their hands, and maybe, in the future, the ashes will contain the secrets of the universe

i only know three people who've had a psychotic break in the last year, so maybe i am simply biased against progress

alas i am resigned to be "anti science" for daring to believe in the parade of studies that talk about skill fatigue

i am simply not capable of understanding how "a machine that makes you bad at thinking" is also "the machine that gives people agency" but i guess i don't have the right growth mindset

My stance on #LLM :

1. There _might_ be some useful use cases with this technology that could be worth exploring.

2. However, it is glaringly obvious that, as of now, their main purpose is to power the mother of all investments bubbles.

3. Which leads us to the present trillion dollar business case for "we must build energy- and water-wasting data centers everywhere so that we can scrape every single website a thousand times a month for new training data!"

4. Thus, there is currently pretty much no ethical way of using LLMs.

5. Any ethical exploration of LLM use cases will thus have to wait until the bubble has burst, the investors have moved on to the next scam, and we can sort through the rubble to check what is left.

At no point in the past 30 years of my career in the technology industry has any boss ever said "gee Ross, the latest technological advances have made you 5x more productive, would you like to cut back to working 8 hours a week for the same pay?" and I have very much noticed the absence of that discussion.

If you program, you should read this piece.

"Ada's successes — the aircraft that have not crashed, the railway signalling systems that have not failed, the missile guidance software that has not misguided — are invisible precisely because they are successes. The languages that failed visibly, in buffer overflows and null pointer exceptions and data races and security vulnerabilities, generated the discourse. [Ada did not]"

https://www.iqiipi.com/the-quiet-colossus.html

“Stuck Character Service”

https://2ndbreakfast.audreywatters.com/stuck-character-service/

> "It's early days" – people toss out that cliche all the time to defend the failures of "AI" to work well, to be embraced, to make money, and so on. But it's not early days. Not remotely. We've been trapped in Sam Altman's ChatGPT hustle for almost five years now.

@futurebird

"He's one waffle shy of a teleport, if you know what I mean."

"Her teleporter doesn't go all the way to the Waffle House."

"The teleporter's on, but the Waffle House is closed."

Advice for community managers:

Use the Olivia Hill rule.

It's surprisingly easy to enforce:

Fascists get really upset and will talk to you about why the rule is bad.

You then ban them.

That's it, that's all the work it takes!