Sven Slootweg (soft-deprecated) @joepie91@pixie.town

@ehashman I've thought a lot about what you've said re: self-hosting being just a form of libertarian rugged individualism, and to me that points to the importance of mutual aid as one of the fundamental principles of interaction

"We know that there is no help for us but from one another, that no hand will save us if we do not reach out our hand."

as compelling as the declaration of digital autonomy is, it feels like without this critical cornerstone it's somewhat watered down

So let's drop the "open source vs. free software" debate please. What has it accomplished? Whether it's open source or free software, the software licensing movement alone is not enough to achieve any of these movements' stated goals.

FOSS is necessary but not sufficient to ensure digital autonomy. https://techautonomy.org/

If I cannot recommend your movement to anyone other than able-bodied cishet white dudes in western countries, and on top of that I have to caveat it with "it's prickly, hostile, and everyone does what Dear Leader says", then who the fuck is it for? That demographic is the *least* harmed by proprietary software.

The manifestos of free software got me in the mindset of serving users and protecting fundamental rights. But the practice of free software is just like open source, with more hostility.

The FSF and free software movement have failed because they prioritized the hero worship of a single individual over the actual furthering of their ideology. They have had nothing new or useful to contribute to the public conversation in over a decade.

So I can't believe people are still parroting "open source is about efficiency, free software is about ethics" or similar. Free software is about the ethics of one man, it's not a movement. They have spent all their energy alienating new blood.

To the vast majority of people these terms do not mean different things. Semantically, free software and open source mean the same thing and agree on the same software licenses.

The philosophical differences people attribute to "open source" vs. "free software" are usually a combination of development practices (dependent on the individual author) and arguing about copyleft licenses (even though the FSF agrees "permissive licenses" still make "free software").

Anyone comparing the philosophy of "open source" to "free software" without acknowledging the harmful stagnation and single-mindedness in the latter community is not making a thoughtful critique in the year 2022.

pro tip if ur a fossbro hacking type guy: don't randomly message a transfem you heard about on a podcast who does interesting things to ask them to meet up with you and then start sending sad guilt tripping messages if they don't reply to you within less than a day, this will only make you seem more creepy and will make it even less likely i reply to you

PSA: Lilies are dangerously toxic to cats. Even one small sniff or nibble can cause kidney failure and death. Rapid vet intervention cannot reliably save their lives.

*Never* keep true lilies (lilium) in the house if you have cats.

Make sure your family and friends know too! There's no warning at the store about the danger of lilies, so they get around in the holidays.

#Caturday #Cats #CatsOfMastodon

in the good timeline, GPT finally trains humanity to understand that someone who's eloquent is not therefore automatically trustworthy

Quora, StackOverflow, etc. try to rebrand themselves and leverage their karma/social graphs as walled gardens of verified Real Human (TM) experts. This creates incentives for humans to cheat, of course.

Like I knew this was gonna be used for fake-grassroots political messaging--remember talking with a friend about a DoD project to do exactly this circa 2012. Somehow took me a bit to connect that to "finding any kind of meaningful information is going to get harder".

Searching for "replace air filter on a Samsung SG-3560lgh" is gonna return fifty Quora/WikiHow style sites named "How to replace the air filter on a Samsung SG3560lgh" with paragraphs of plausible, grammatical GPT-generated explanation which may or may not have any connection to reality. Site owners pocket the ad revenue. AI arms race as search engines try to detect and derank LLM content.

Wikipedia starts getting large chunks of LLM text submitted with plausible but nonsensical references.

God, search results are about to become absolute hot GARBAGE in 6 months when everyone and their mom start hooking up large language models to popular search queries and creating SEO-optimized landing pages with plausible-sounding results.

the funniest part of all this I'm realising now though is that these dipshits can no longer just scrape the internet for posts as examples of human writing, they've already polluted that data with their own bots