Sven Slootweg @joepie91@pixie.town

does anybody know any good books on anarcho-leftist theory and practice? i want to reccomend to a friend who is interested in learning more

espeically concerning details of how we envision the future, how it will work and be built, and anarchist action

P.S.: also especially some stuff on the harm of black-white thinking

To say nothing of how this affects people in countries without access to speedy low latency internet or end user devices that are capable of solving these challenges in a reasonable amount of time.

We’re excluding whole swaths of the planet because we’re lacking the will as a people and a profession to stomp these companies into the ground.

Proof-of-work challenges have become the current hotness for defeating AI scrapers. I think it’s great we have these and that they’re getting deployed to great effect. But I’ve also seen a lot of people claim the “AI scrapers” problem is now solved and I’m sorry to tell you this but no it’s not.

The reason it’s solved right now is because most of these scrapers don’t execute JavaScript. But with enough people deploying PoW proxies, the economics around that change enough to make it worthwhile for AI companies to do so. AI companies have more money than you. Yes it’ll cost them, but that cost is worth it to them because otherwise they don’t have a business.

(Also Anubis and other solutions default to only triggering if the User-Agent header contains Mozilla so guess what! It’ll soon need to be enabled regardless of the value of that header because it’s trivial to circumvent. Then the cost goes up for the operator too as more and more users get affected.)

The JS needed for the PoW stuff isn’t complicated. A small JS interpreter can handle that. What mostly remains is then the cost of the hash. Right now most things use SHA256, for which we have CPU extensions and AVX instructions to speed this up. Constantly increasing the PoW rounds doesn’t solve this. Eventually the experience degrades too much for real users, whereas servers literally don’t care. Nobody is sitting there waiting for the output to be rendered. All they want is to get the content to train on.

PoW proxies are a stopgap, and a very useful one. But a stopgap nonetheless. We’re buying ourselves time. But we’re going to need more than this. Including legislation that outlaws some of this shit entirely.

AI is a technology, but the root of the problem we’re facing is a societal and political one. We cannot ignore those aspects and exclude them from a solution.

Feels weird that there's a demographic of people who boo and hiss that "immigrants are taking our jobs" but will cheer and holler that "AI is taking our jobs"

going to admit now that even though I do this every 3 months and nothing is new to me I get confused by the instructions of how to take the sample probes, every time.

and I still blame myself and it took time for me to admit that if I'm confused other people will be confused too, like I'm a bimbo but I'm not the literal bimboest girl in town, plus all of the sex stuff is very chill for me but a lot of people will be ashamed or anxious or afraid and that impairs thinking, right?

I could write a lot on the specifics of why I think the instructions are bad and confusing but that would make little sense I think, since it's not relevant to anyone else. but what I'm thinking is how in my time as a teacher I learned that if even one student can't understand your explanation that means your explanation has a problem, not the student, and in my current job as a sysadmin users blame themselves all the time for not being able to make sense of some terrible UI and every time it's a convoluted and overly confusing UI that was "designed" by programmers who have never read a single textbook on design—still when I myself struggle to understand instructions, I too blame myself instead of wondering what could be changed in the instructions to make them clearer. Once I look at them from this angle all the problems suddenly become obvious.

Have you been watching the #Fosstodon thing happen over the past week, and wondering, "what the heck's going on?" "who said what?" "what's a carrotcypher?"

Guess, and be confused, no more. I put together exactly what you need to see in order to understand what these people did, and why their instance is being silenced.

Neutrality, the biggest problem with large Mastodon instances.

(general warning for topics relating to fascism and the current political climate in the US)

https://mkultra.monster/social-media/2025/04/28/fashtodon

The frustrating thing about the #fosstodon drama has been that instead of stepping down and throwing a hissy fit about being called out, the admins could have, when presented with evidence of the fascist views of their mod, said "oh, we didn't know, thanks for bringing it to our attention", and then removed the mod.

It's as easy as that, and none of the drama would have happened.

I made a website. It's called "one million chessboards." It has a million chessboards on it.

moving a piece moves it for everyone, instantly. No turns. You can move between boards.

that's it. Have fun!

onemillionchessboards.com

the real joke is that "apolitical" people who complain about "snowflakes" and their "safe spaces" actually love safe spaces; it's just that their safe spaces are ones where they're free to be openly misogynistic, homophobic, racist, bigoted, and say nazi shit out loud without repercussions