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

the LLM is not a learning aid, it is an absolute barrier to learning. it is not similar in kind to copy/pasting from stackoverflow or cliffs notes. it fully supplants the entire process of learning, and the person using the LLM never improves their understanding because the LLM cognitive workflow never engages with even the shape of the problem.

if you haven't taught someone who is helplessly addicted to LLMs, LLM brain is so much worse than you can possibly imagine. the problems i'm seeing from someone i am currently teaching are indistinguishable from illiteracy - this person literally cannot read single-line, fully descriptive error messages, and proceeds to just copy and paste whatever they say into the chatbot and copy/paste whatever it spits out, and in this problem domain the LLM is wrong nearly 100% of the time. when i ask them to stop and think about what the problem is, what steps they might need to take to diagnose and resolve it, and how does that fit in with the context of what we've been doing together for >6 months, they literally can't.

Edit: Oop this post escaped containment. I am not implying that it is impossible to learn with an LLM, so if it works for you then that is basically irrelevant to my description of this one very specific pattern of learning with which I have direct and repeated experience. This person is otherwise very smart and competent, I am describing the impact of the LLM on their mode of learning the things I am trying to teach them.

Leftist, anti-fascist activists have got to begin making more of an effort to educate themselves about the spyware capitalist tech that they insist on continuing to use. From Substack, gmail, twitter, facebook to youtube, etc. At least make the effort to use and encourage others to use the alternatives. Make an active effort to migrate away from the spyware to the free/libre alternatives that respect users, privacy and democracy. It's an UPGRADE.

#AntiFascism #Democracy #Resist #FreeSoftware

Blåhaj à grande Vitesse !

Hmm I only just realized they're called toasts because they pop up. oops

Once again time to remark about how significant electronic paper (e-paper, commonly called "e-ink" after the "E Ink" company that seems to make like, all of it) as a technology has been for us. Like it completely changes our ability to read digital media in a normal way.

There's not a single other piece of technology that we can think of that's had nearly such a direct impact on our lives. Most of everything else we've used is just incremental improvements on existing tech but commercialised e-paper and e-readers came out in our lifetime and have only gotten better since.

Hackers in 2003: "Hey look, I hooked up my fridge to the internet!"

Hackers in 2025: "phew, finally got my fridge off the internet! 💪"

Ever wondered how many CI systems are involved in Nixpkgs and #nixos? Where they're configured and how they integrate with each other?

I wanted to figure this out and document it somewhat, so here's a blog post about how NixOS is built.

https://blog.erethon.com/blog/2025/07/31/how-nixos-is-built/

every once in awhile we must challenge our assumptions and do the thing wrong. otherwise, how will we know how to recover, or if we could make things better?

Most types of business exhibit linear growth. But VC will only fund exponential growth.

The result: companies that would create a lot of jobs and actually maintain their products never get funded and never start. If you must hire more to make more product, that's unacceptable linear growth.

We live in an exhausting VC hype machine because it's more profitable to repeatedly hype up and cash out of short-term exponential growth spurts than to build something real.

Paragraphs by @Mer__edith

Packing for #why2025 @why2025camp

Yes it's early but I also need to pack all the camping gear, pack an order of magnitude more things for Team:Warehouse, write half of a talk, make 75% of the slides, pick up deliveries (personal and Warehouse), get groceries, and more.

And I leave extra early for the earliest of build-up.

And also somehow eat, sleep, survive, repeat.

would anyone who's driving to #why2025 and/or #nixcon with their car be up for giving me a ride from somewhere near Berlin? i'm currently dealing with a dire financial and legal situation due to my landlord illegally trading me to another landlord which means i now have like 30 EUR left and need 5000 EUR in a month or have sued them until then

alternatively give me money so i can afford food at https://liberapay.com/alina/ but dont feel pressured, i'm trying to find a way to not become homeless again on my own and dont mean to stress others with this,,,

boosts appreciated

if you use an "ai" code review bot, you deserve all the shit "ai"-fueled pull requests you ever receive imo: live by the sword, die by the sword