Interesting developments reported by ars technica: Inside the web infrastructure revolt over Google’s AI Overviews

I don’t think any of this is actually good news for the people who’re actually suffering the effects of ai scraping and bullshit generation, but I do think it is a good idea that someone with sufficient clout is standing up to google et al and suggesting that they can’t just scrape al the things, all the time, and then screw the source of all their training data.

I’m somewhat unhappy that it is cloudflare doing this, a company who have deeply shitty politics and an unpleasantly strong grasp on the internet already. I very much do not want the internet to be divided into cloudflare customers, and the slop bucket.

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Aside from the name being stupid and annoying (and their justifications and comparisons being additionally stupid and annoying) I’m… not entirely against this license? As a less shitty (AFAICT) version of the BUSL, I’d rather companies used this than the BUSL or just going closed-source (which is an option a bunch of firms have chosen, after all).

I’m attempting to get my employer to open-source some of our stuff, and there are several people at the top who are proprietary software folk at heart and this seems like a reasonable way to trick them into relaxing a their grip a little.

Fosstodon does not have a good history in this regard. It took some effort to get them to drop a far-right mod earlier this year, and even with a shuffle of leadership they’re clearly all about the centrist acceptance of the right wing and the repeated assertion that tech isn’t political and that all this is just so much drama.

“If you cannot quit everything you may as well not quit anything” is not a great rallying cry, because there’s a strong risk that people will take you up on your suggestion.

Doing something imperfect is better than doing nothing. Let’s not purity test.

I appreciate that licenses are not magic shields, and that you’re exposed to significant risks that I am not, so apologies if I came across a bit “have you tried googling”, which I was trying to avoid.

Still, even without getting involved yourself it might be worth finding some local radio folk (if there are any) if only to see what they do, and what equipment they use, and whether they’ve got into any trouble over it.

But setting one of these up would definitely get me on a list here

Is that the standard state attitude to amateur radio there, too? I mean, obviously getting an amateur radio license involves actively putting your name on a government list and paying money for the privilege, and I can understand you not wanting to do that, but it looks like the 430 band is available to amateur radio licensees there, and you can get lora devices in that range. Amateur radio folk seem to be mostly viewed as peculiar last century fossils (and to be fair, many of them are) because everyone else (legal and otherwise) has vastly better equipment, which might give you some leeway to experiment with mesh networking?

I suspect we all knew it already, but Bruno Dias offers some receipts: the bluesky crackdown on people suggesting that charlie kirk should rest in piss came several days before the government leaned on social media firms.

September 12th: bluesky mourns kirk: https://aftermath.site/bluesky-charlie-kirk-dead-rest-in-piss

September 15th: whitehouse nastygram : https://bsky.app/profile/chipnick.com/post/3m2k6va63222m

(also, bitter lol at “gentlemen”, because running a tech company is a mans job, don’t you know)

They complied well in advance, because it’s what they wanted to do anyway.

Polyphasic sleep was a thing for a while. Was that it?

Techbros learn anything from history, even recent history… difficulty level: impossible.

That’s impressively awful.

Was it economically rational to discover America?

I ain’t gonna buy this crap, and I don’t think I can be bothered to steal it, but… I hear that the triangle trade was quite lucrative back in the day. I wonder how they characterise the slave trade in their book, and whether they consider its ending a good thing or not.

I mean, maybe even pause briefly to think about why the west indies were called that. Or think about what empires value. Or to think at all, really.

from the Manhattan Project and the Apollo program to Moore’s law and Bitcoin

No vaccines or antibiotics, but bitcoin is a world-changing invention? Someone’s been insulated from consequences all their life. Here’s hoping they lose everything in the Great Depression 2: Greater and More Depressing, whilst loudly proclaiming that a the invention of ai waifus was worth the destruction of civilisation.

Shoutout to gleam.run whose web page has always (AFAIK) said

Black lives matter. Trans rights are human rights. No nazi bullsh*t.

Not that I want to minimise the problems that open source and tech in general very definitely have, but in this specific case it is a small number of people who are very loud and/or very rich, and sometimes both.

For the most part, the sudden rash of people deciding that their bigotry is now publicly acceptable is mostly around non-loadbearing things, because aggrieved entitled nerds aren’t great at working in a team (hyprland has definitely suffered from alienating people and missing out on fixes and compatibility work).

The rubygems stuff was a special case, because it was a hostile takeover of some important infrastructure by a shitty company, but most of the rest are unexciting projects that have found that giving it the old H-H is good publicity and more importantly: there are some rich folk throwing money around. Not a lot of cash in open source under normal circumstances.

Actually, according to grokipedia,

Mercifully image-free article from rolling stone on how easy it is becoming to get grok to generate porn, including deepfakes of real people and bestiality.

https://www.rollingstone.com/culture/culture-features/elon-musk-grok-hardcore-porn-1235442715

Includes a relevant quote from musk back in august:

https://xcancel.com/elonmusk/status/1954791048934244394

I still remember 6th/7th grade debates with classmates about VHS vs Betamax!

VHS won in the end, in part because they allowed spicy mode 😉

I guess that’s a product “moat” of sorts.

The answer probably looks a lot like “here’s how to install omarchy on your laptop in 14 easy steps! And 88 great apps you can install afterwards!”

Ahh, I just zapped my original comment, because irelephant had posted the same link plus a bit more earlier.

Anyway, it is nice to see that there is pushback on this elsewhere. I doubt it will be enough to change framework’s mind substantially… they’re obviously happy with their sponsorship and it was clearly a very deliberate choice, but they need to be reminded from as many directions as possible that it was a shitty choice by shitty people.

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Framework getting into the fashtech game.

They’re a gold tier sponsor of hyprland:

https://xcancel.com/hyprwm/status/1975917930576785581

Apparently they’ve been shilling omarchy on twitter too, though I’ve only found a guide on their website for now:

https://guides.frame.work/Guide/Omarchy+Linux+Installation+on+the+Framework+Laptop+13/564

After the revelation that their desktop machine was going to be aimed at ai bros and had soldered-on ram I was concerned that they might be abandoning the principles behind their laptops. Now I don’t think it matters how great or terrible their next offerings are going to be. What a disappointment.

(h/t to cari, https://sunny.garden/@cari/115336460488524197)