Students learning to code should not use LLMs because the stuff that the LLMs are good at is the stuff you should be practicing.

Learning a language takes practice. Shortcuts deprive you of that practice.

@chu @kkarhan

I want to springboard off of your post, as a random person living in the US, if that is okay. This is to the international community.

There are many people here in the United States who want to take action, they do care, but they are scared of the consequences. They see all the people around them going on about their business, the siren call of normalcy bias makes wanting to go about your normal life irresistible. There are also a lot of people, myself included, who live in predominantly red (as in fascist republican) areas that believe when they start pushing back it could lead to hardship and ruin.

We are a heavily corporate controlled society that has been plied with bread and circuses for far too long. That's why it is important that we, including the international community, keep shouting from the rooftops that this is not normal.

There are answers to our fears here in the states. Efforts like mutual aid and grassroots networks of like-minded individuals. I see this happening. I'm personally working hard to get myself into a position where I can be more effective, and I try to encourage other people doing that. We don't have to attack the entire thing. We can pool our individual talents for the benefit of the wider resistance movement.

But, again, we're still learning what all this means and how to do it. Because it's not like in the movies we all grew up on, the ones that lied to us and told us we were all just embarrassed heroes, or main characters. It's very different when the production isn't being directed by Steven Spielberg.

All I ask is, please do not give up on us. You're disappointed, angered, frustrated, pissed off, etc, at the lack of the average American's response to this dive into a fascist state that America is turning in to. I get that. I share those feeling.

Just please don't give up on those of us who know this is bad but are having to learn resistance from the ground up.

Mastodon is my online echo chamber of people who give a crap about what happens to other people.

My long inaccessible FB account was my glimpse closer to reality of a world where people DGAF about other people. Endless posts about beach vacations, lunch, new purchases.

I had to leave FB because it got too much. I preferred to believe that more people were like me. But this is also an illusion.

I finally understand how concentration camps came to be and how life carried on despite it. My own sibling in the US has told me that things are "pretty normal" where he is.

I don't see how people around you getting arrested, your government literally building a concentration camp and flying people to foreign lands can be classified as "normal". But he just goes about his business.

All he cared about was paying less taxes and making money. He will soon discover the cost of 'normal' was having scientists keep track of diseases and prevent their outbreaks, educators toiling to maintain an educated workforce, air traffic controllers keeping planes from falling out of the sky.

All he ever saw were the dollars that things cost him, not the benefits, direct or indirect.

As things falls apart, he won't care until it affects him personally. It will be too late. As long as he can keep doing his work, running his business, selling his stuff... it's all "normal"

But he is a better reflection of "normal" than I am. The army of people who care here are outside the norms.

And it's the inertia of not caring that allows horrors to go on. The gatekeepers of media will make sure the population continues to care as little as possible. They will keep showing us beach photos and handbag purchases.

Distributed information sharing like Mastodon will be important in any kind of resistance efforts as the information will still be visible.

Then the next challenge is getting people who don't think any of this is important to care. You don't need everyone, but enough people. You need people who just want to get to work and do their thing to think that the lives of other people are worthy of caring about.

that numb rmx~~~

when you wake up from a nap and damn near have a panic attack :>

FREAKY FRESH OPEN SOURCE SOFTWARE

not all implementations are as enlightened as #honk

The village elders used to tell us stories of how the ancients responded to rising costs with something called prices. We should investigate this lost science.

Dear #Fediverse.
Or really, Dear #internet.
For the 30th year.
#OctaviaButler

oh by the way... my new ink is healed

My gpu can’t handle such graphics #theLudarium

type of girl whose brand new laptop dies in 2025 and so she just installs os/2 warp 4 on a thinkpad a30 and decides that's good enough

Would you look at that, it's tmp.0ut Volume 4! Happy Friday, hope you enjoy this latest issue!

https://tmpout.sh/4/

after i budget my taxes i should just quit and freelance.... with the fire under my ass maybe id actually make it work... stupid? probably; but the bouts of cognitive dissonance are getting pretty frequent

tired of touching computers, i wanna touch grass and girls

new world chaos 6: sephirot subspace distortion | https://nilfm.cc/mixes.html

black fire aflame | https://nilfm.cc/black_fire_aflame.html

uspol? electoralism

seeing a lot of election analysis today bemoaning that gen z is rife with accelerationists. not sure what to think of that except "what do you expect from the most illiterate, most abandoned cohort of the last seventy years"

I want more devs to internalize that simplicity is the ultimate expression of skill.

Making the complex easy to understand is the mark of true intellect.

NotImplementedException

I propose that I cease working for capitalist megacorp and spend my time tinkering with electronics, computers and associated ephemera.

And also that everyone is able to do this or any other thing that interests them without fear of being evicted or starving.

I don't think this is unreasonable.

yes hello i would like my livelihood without the capitalism please

girl whose bedside reading is "a thousand plateaus" and "programming perl"

this is one of those weekends thats just, more hustle =_=

If I look at the work I've been doing this week, maybe 5% of my time was spent writing the code that I eventually shipped.

The rest was spent understanding the problem space, researching potential solutions and their impacts on other production systems, consulting with domain experts, waiting for pipelines to pass, learning about edge cases I hadn't considered, then doing it again.

The code I shipped is trivial, an LLM could've written it 10x faster. Everything else? Still needs a human.

@anders when you remove capitalism from the equation, you're left with Writing software for fun. It's a good alternative.
https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/anonymous-alienation-marvelous-pursuits-and-the-new-nomadic-sciences

i just wanna do art and feed my friends n family delicious food and cuddle with my girlfriends, is that really so much to ask? >>

#honk the planet

How to cast a Magic Seal?

External Attachment:

#screenshotSunday

nwc6 is _almost_ done!!

Puffin and Rabbit with their respective emergency bags.

Added a few extra drawings to populate the Emergency Bag page on Rabbit Waves.

https://rabbitwaves.ca/site/emergency_bag.html

when u literally have to look someone in the face and tell them "im a girl..." =_=

in the city

you must fight to survive

he sold tortillas on the corner

and the mob wanted in...

freudians gonna oedipalize... smh

So it turns out the geniuses over at Bluesky trust the client app to fetch, and honestly report, webpage metadata for preview cards, so with a little tinkering in the debug tools you can post whatever news stories you like and they look exactly the same as real ones.

https://bsky.app/profile/andrewt.net/post/3ljo2dja62224

day 4 and i can both wear pants and tie my shoes without feeling like my skin is made of paper~~~

🙅‍♀️ cloud computing
🙆‍♀️ sunny computing

was making the bed and misstepped and...

broke the L2 button off my PS3 controller :<

oh well -_-

Glitch pieces made over the weekend

Apparently my idea of vacation is more art

Cell-site simulators (CSS, also known as Stingrays or IMSI catchers) are devices that masquerade as legitimate cell-phone towers, tricking phones within a certain radius into connecting to the device rather than a tower. Our new tool, Rayhunter, can help you find them. https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2025/03/meet-rayhunter-new-open-source-tool-eff-detect-cellular-spying

login to a windows server for the first time, see "applying personalized settings: windows media player"

day 3: pants?

cis people should not be allowed to say amab/afab. if you are talking about motherfucking genitals then SAY THAT you goddamn coward

xenosaga cause i cant be bothered with much else, its a vibe n im enjoying it

i have been using the solar power bank to charge my uhh, rechargables, since i got back. one day's sunlight gets my mobile devices power for most of the week it looks like! nice to have a diverse energy portfolio i guess :3

during the work week im always like wow can't believe im working on my stupid computer for my stupid job indoors instead of touching grass as god intended. but now it's saturday and i'm working on my stupid computer on my stupid website indoors anyway

if you are a company that sells things then having a public database of all the things you ever made that lets you easily compare them is great. if you aren't a company but are autistic about things from diverse sources, making your own database is also great and i love you

#Photo #Montreal #Quebec #Canada

mobile setup: mmx02 | https://nilfm.cc/mmx02.html

photojournal updates - 2025 baby | https://nilfm.cc/photojournal.html

first weekend back in my city, time to hack the planet n shred the gnar :>

unspecified horror

I don't wanna hear "free and open Web" anymore, lol. Shit is not free, and it's as open as a few companies permit.

Yes, the W3C and IETF exist, and they have to carry the bloat of 25+ of standards that have now pushed us into this space/corner. And bullshit market econ of a race to the bottom for browsers has led us here.

I'll be *shocked* to see any government even adept enough to consider funding a Web engine for development, only because there's going to be lobbyists at every turn trying to crush that from even being proposed (again: fuck lobbying, all of it is literal bribery, leave the choice to the people on how their money is spent)

smol web of frozen web standards- really this shit been good enough for a hot minute now. we should use it as is while letting go of the hegemony and develop new things to compliment it instead of constantly shoehorning stuff into/on top of it

nothing like capping off the workweek with a phat NAP

Liberal: "Checkout my punny protest sign! I'm very clever!"

Fascist: "We are going to enjoy drinking the blood of your slaughtered family in front of you while you die slowly, tomorrow, at 7:35pm. Nothing matters but force, and I delight in the knowledge you have made no material preparations to stop me."

Liberal: "Lol, what you're saying is technically against the law. It's illegal."

The system cannot.

first date

#unix_surrealism #cirno #9front #glenda #comic #docker

I strongly believe fighting to return to the status quo in the midst of this current upheaval is a losing game.

The talent and knowledge the government is expunging isn’t vanishing off the face of the earth. It still exists.

Imagine if that talent could be organized outside of the auspices of the state. Imagine what would happen to the empire if it was starved of our skills and abilities to propagate itself.

Because rich people don’t have skills.

We do.

Remember to draw your protective sigil before interacting with the cache coherency engine, lest you become Invalid or Owned yourself.

it's on like donkey kong

Staying informed in the US is not going to get easier anytime soon, especially as old standbys fall to billionaires or preemptive obedience to the authoritarian regime.

I've assembled a list of 40+ outlets that I find valuable, prominently featuring:

* nonprofit, co-operative, and independent news rooms,
* outlets relevant to Petaluma and the Bay Area,
* international outlets,
* and, yes, a selection of for-profit outlets.

Many of them are on fedi or Bluesky.

https://blog.riley.pub/news-and-information-in-2025/

#News

🌱 faeputing

USpol, trans rights

The Pennsylvania State Senate is trying to introduce a new bill, SB.213, known as the "Two Gender Protection Act".

This bill is meant to erase any existence of trans, nonbinary, and intersex people. And it's absolutely fucking vile and disgusting.

Trans people exist. Nonbinary people exist. Intersex people exist. They all deserve rights and a peaceful existence. Christofascists are trying to destroy society. We can't let them.

The bill can be seen on the state website: https://www.legis.state.pa.us//cfdocs/Legis/CSM/showMemoPublic.cfm?chamber=S&SPick=20250&cosponId=45218

If you're in Pennsylvania, call your reps at 1-866-581-7519 and tell them to vote "NO" on this bill. Outside the state? Call them anyway and give them an earful.

Bills like this should not be allowed to pass! Fight them every time they rear their ugly heads!

The trans community needs allies. Stand up for trans rights; they are human rights!

Be the rust upon the gears of fascism!

#TransRights #HumanRights

I have feelings about AI & the web & my experience being trans "in tech" in 2025 - so I screamed some thoughts onto my personal web log.

I hope for all of us a more queer & humane future. Keep building communities & dreaming better paths.

https://www.miriamsuzanne.com/2025/02/12/tech-ai-wtf/

IT'S ALIVE!!!!

#plan9 #9front

pissing in the men’s as a show of dominance

opacity.ru/rapture projected in the area

External Attachment:

Apparently some tech bros are having to learn the hard way that the creator of #Linux is a leftist

Advanced wife, advanced life

No more pixelfedding for me. Moved back to my own webshit gallery with rss feeds and stuff.

https://ftrv.se/_/gallery/

the integrative tattoo journey continues... give it about a month :>

Me on DOGE for the MIT Tech Review:

"So we should plan for the worst, even if the likelihood of the worst is low. We need to dust off those “in the event of an emergency” disaster response procedures dealing with the failure of federal government."

https://www.technologyreview.com/2025/02/07/1111283/elon-musk-doge-and-the-evil-housekeeper-problem-government-technology/

#unix_surrealism #9front #qr #cirno #diy

Current vibe

The Open Source Torment Nexus

One of the most popular memes when it comes to talking about the tech sector is Alex Blechman’s tweet about the Torment Nexus:

One can interpret the tweet in a bunch of ways. As a comment on the level of reading comprehension that billionaire tech leaders like Mark Zuckerberg or Elon Musk or some ghoul that Peter Thiel funded constantly show: Calling one’s products or comapnies “Metaverse” and “Palantir” does not express an understanding of who and what is criticized in the respective works of fiction. And we are not even asking for nuance here.

Another interpretation is that the products that are being brought to market as massive innovations seem to be less than stellar. Best case scenario they are just weird stuff nobody asked for (think Juicero), most of the time they are “here’s a thing you kinda want but you have to pay rent for it now instead of buying it and we might shut it down any time”. And a lot of the time they are just bad for you, products that insult your existence as a human being.

Obviously there is no objective way to make these calls, to decide what is dumb but meaningless or what is evil. People have different values, different needs and sometimes can accept different levels of crap for a specific product or service.

We talked about this a bit in the Q&A part of my talk at Fluconf that gave a bit of criticism of the Open Source movement and its beliefs. But while my argument in the talk was mostly that the beliefs that Open Source is based on might not actually be based on or support the actual political values that people might have there is value to having Open Source software. Software that you can use and change to suit your needs and demands (if you can of course).

But Open Source software does not happen in a vacuum, it is written by people. Often to serve their needs, sometimes to serve a community’s needs: To provide a better solution for users. The “Open Source Alternative to proprietary X” thing.

If you’ve been on the Internet for about 7 seconds you will have come into contact with guys (using a gendered term here because they are mostly male) who will respond to any criticism of or issue you have with a proprietary software with “Just use this Open Source tool”. It’s a bit annoying because a lot of the time that answer doesn’t come from a genuine desire to help based on empathy and an understanding of the problem the original post expressed. But It’s also oftentimes better than one might think.

The Open Source community has gotten quite good at replacing proprietary tools with open source solutions. The feature set might not be 100% there and some things might not work but there are totally valid alternatives to Slack or Chrome or Microsoft Office (if you really just need office tools and not something that specifically depends on MS’s ideosyncracies). There are whole websites dedicated to listing Open Source alternatives to proprietary tools with at least one of those alternatives being pretty much a copy.

This has tremendous value and provides a bunch of people with the software tools to do their thing – me included. But when building those replacements the Q&A at FluConf made me wonder: Are we maybe doing a tech-bro? Are we not properly reading and understanding the texts we reference?

Any artifact is a text. You can read for example any piece of software as a document about the beliefs and assumptions of the programmer about the users. The software tells you how the programmer sees and understands the user. It’s just a form of text that is maybe a bit harder to read and it might have animations and sounds and can send bits somewhere.

What triggered this train of thought was me thinking about social media platforms. With Meta and X and all US tech companies finding their love for fascism currently many people want to jump off those platforms to find a better home. And there are Open Source Alternatives to Twitter/Instagram/WhatsApp/etc. Which in general is good. Maybe. Sometimes.

(Quick sidebar: I’m gonna use an example of an Open Source project here but don’t read this as me shitting on that project. People can build what they want and have their reasons for doing things. My feelings and needs are not “right” and other perspectives are wrong. I’m using the project as an illustration.)

I don’t use Instagram. Not because I don’t like seeing pictures or because it is “beneath me” and not even because it’s Meta and Mark Zuckerberg bend the knee to Trump. (In fact I have an account I use to follow tattoo artists but that I only use for exactly that research because tattooers live on Instagram sadly) I don’t use Instagram because it’s bad for my mental health. The affordances and the social practices of Instagram have lead to every picture (and the people and lives in it) looking like an ad. Perfectly designed and sculpted representations of better lives of better people. It just makes me feel bad about myself, my looks, my life. For me Instagram is the Torment Nexus.

Now that might just be a me-problem. But when I see an Open Source project like Pixelfed that basically attempts to provide users with a federated, open source drop-in replacement for Instagram I wonder: Are we just building an Open Source Torment Nexus? Because Pixelfed looks like Instagram. Has all the bones of Instagram. The same basic logic of the app (maybe the recommendation algorithms aren’t as aggressive but you can always patch that). There is nothing that would lead me to believe that – should Pixelfed get very popular – it would not also develop similar esthetics. Would also help people feel bad about themselves (if they are vulnerable to that kind of thinking).

And Pixelfed isn’t the only tool here. Bluesky is basically a carbon copy of Twitter a few years ago (not technology wise but in the way that interactions work, the way in which status is produced). Mastodon isn’t hat different either. Which in this case doesn’t feel as bad for me – but I also liked Twitter.

It feels like too often we are bound to think about what’s possible in the framing of what businesses think is possible. I recently argued against scale and that topic is a perfect example: Meta needs any new product to scale to millions if not billions of users. Amazon needs to scale products to the whole world. Google needs to scale. Microsoft needs to scale. And they all need to do the things you need to do to scale. Build interaction loops that enforce you coming back to an app or platform regularly ideally daily, to make it a habit. Build tools promising you a view on everything, to give you feelings of power, understanding and control.

We here on the open, decentralized, free web don’t need to do that. Pixelfed does not need to scale. Mastodon does not need to scale. At least not in the way that Facebook needs to.

We are doing a tech-bro. Just like Peter Thiel calls his surveillance company after the stones the evil wizards use in The Lord of the Rings because he doesn’t seem to have understood that those are the baddies we are building tools that are built for growth hacks and scamming VCs out of their money because we don’t read them properly. Because we just take what’s there and make it open source.

Just is doing a lot of work in that last paragraph. The amount of work that goes into duplicating those proprietary functionalities is incredible, awe inspiring. Thousands of people put work into building those tools, often without payment, without a lot of thanks. Spending their limited time on this planet contributing to the commons with software.

But recognizing the amount of work and time and life that goes into building this huge pile of software shouldn’t we spend it on something good? Something that is actually good for the people using it? And are we always so sure that the things we build do that, enable that?

We should stop building the Open Source Torment Nexus. Because the problem with the Torment Nexus is not the software license or opaqueness of the code: It’s the part with the torment.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

#fluconf #openSource #tormentNexus