CIRCLE WITH A DOT

"Unlike other mediums, Cyberspace requires capital just to exist. No part of it is passive. A book can sit on a shelf for centuries, asking nothing of its surroundings but space. Every element of Cyberspace – electricity, hardware, supply chains, software maintenance, protocols, the network – all of it must be actively maintained by someone, somewhere, continuously, forever. There is no such thing as an inert digital object."

"When the server goes dark, we go dark, too. We’ve built an entire civilisation on an unthinkably brutal and comically unreliable stack while hallucinating it as literally anything else. We condemn AI today for making shit up, but what about us? We’re building on a fantasy just as brittle, we are just as demonstrably wrong. Yet we pretend a file isn’t just a gesture that can disappear in an instant. We hallucinate that the server is somehow both fleeting and forever." https://newdesigncongress.org/en/pub/who-will-remember-us-when-the-servers-go-dark/

alright imma let you cook but if this is going to culminate in "we're just as bad as the AI so therefore using AI is fine and good actually!" there will be fisticuffs

I used to be all “just use the MIT license” or “there are situations where the GPL is the best we’ve got” but now I think exclusionary licenses are the way to go. Something like this https://ball.disco.coop/Peer_Production_License or “MIT but if your name is Elon Musk or you work for a company that he owns or does business with you owe me $10,000 per download” or “PPL unless you’re a fucking Nazi” all make more sense to me than “please take my freely given work and turn it into money because I will realistically have no recourse if you decide to steal it directly or launder it through LLMs except to be really, really self-righteous about it.”

tbh if someone wants to just yank GPL’d code to enable better filesystem support on OpenBSD, fuck it, that’s more honorable than asking LLMs (plural) to do it for you.

maybe “the license is bad!” or “this violates so many people’s copyright!” isn’t the best reason to deny slop, but at least it’s A Reason.

(my hot take: corporations have proven they don’t give a fuck about copyright by doing things like torrenting every written work ever published, and it sucks ass that this makes them more punk than supposedly counter-cultural movements and groups. violate licenses! steal code! sabotage open source projects that capitulate to Big Tech or Johnny Law in advance! there is no honor in continuing to abide by The Rules when your opponent has made it clear they won’t, and will continue to take advantage of you if you do; and if you don’t see them as your opponent you have already lost.)

RE: https://social.treehouse.systems/@endrift/116266194667097984

I was already feeling my age because I triggered my back issues yesterday, but seeing the GBA is 25… woof.

Let's say I want to set up a website that:

1. Can have Iocaine[0] parked in front of it
2. Doesn't require any kind of analytics
3. Will be expected to serve HTML and CSS over both HTTP and HTTPS
4. Relies on as little slop[1] as possible
5. Allows me to post via "not a web interface" (read: CLI, TUI, Emacs, etc.)
6. Isn't costly

What should I be doing? Signing up for Hetzner, slapping OpenBSD on a VM, and calling it a day? Signing up for a managed blogging service so I don't have to cosplay as a sysadmin and can just write? Let me know what's up.

Also, I originally wanted to say "doesn't rely on slop" but, if you peruse the open-slopware project, its issues, and its pull requests, it's clear that simply isn't possible. Good luck finding a stack that doesn't use LLVM, curl, and/or one of Python or Ruby anywhere!

I have considered Mataroa, but it's also slop[2], and it seems both Hugo and Zola are fine with slop as well. (See 1.)

[0] https://iocaine.madhouse-project.org/
[1] https://codeberg.org/small-hack/open-slopware
[2] https://github.com/mataroablog/mataroa/blob/main/AGENTS.md

Damn. I was excited about Astral's tooling. At least I'd already given up on Python when slop made its way into the language itself! https://openai.com/index/openai-to-acquire-astral/

I love it when people thoroughly satisfy their own curiousity and then share it for the rest of us to enjoy: https://terts.dev/blog/no-semicolons-needed/

RE: https://mastodon.social/@sundogplanets/116253229325555807

Oh, but any time I've wanted to use profanity...

It's funny that we still have to enumerate this: https://whynothugo.nl/journal/2026/02/25/they-and-them-as-singular-pronouns/

(Not that I'm personally invested in this, feds! Me big, strong, all-American boy!)

This marks two occasions in the last week—one at my daughter's birthday party, where someone responded to my complaints about Microsoft gating reference / citation management behind some fucking "add-in" by explaining how she just uses Copilot to generate her references, and now this—where I have successfully contained my fury.

Not to brag or anything.

$KID1's teacher has assured me that she "resisted ChatGPT too" but has started using it because the instructors for her graduate classes no longer forbid it. So she's included "AI" usage in a "working in the 20th century" [sic] worksheet.

This is despite her husband, a college professor, complaining about how "AI" makes his students dumber. Yet apparently the solution to that is to introduce their usage in elementary school?

We're fuckin' cooked, chat.

@brettm I didn’t initialize the first projects that presented this problem, but I assume zig init wasn’t run as root. I honestly don’t remember if I needed root permissions with my later tests—sleep-deprived and shouldn’t be awake right now—but I’ll double-check in a bit.

I’m attempting to use Zig on OpenBSD-current. I have to perform seemingly every action, from viewing zig build —help to actually building a project, as root. This hasn’t been a problem with make, the uxn assembler, etc. What do I need to do to make this easier?

(I am using zig-0.15.2 from the package repo; maybe I should be using the latest snapshot? I saw there were some OpenBSD-related changes made not that long ago but I figured the version available from ports would either work out of the box or give me instructions for making it work.)

#OpenBSD #Zig

@kkarhan silly me, time to doas some more…

I had eyed Alpine over Chimera because it’s a bit better established (bus factor != 1) and I understand this is all in service to “minimalism” but the package break-ups and busybox are just driving me bonkers.

(Chimera doesn’t do this.)

apk add networkmanager
apk add networkmanager-doc
apk add networkmanager-cli
apk add networkmanager-tui
apk add networkmanager-wifi

for the love of god

As long as we're on the subject, this was also a very cathartic listen: https://aftermath.site/podcasts/aftermath-hours-podcast-ai-ram-crisis/

It's so refreshing to listen to smart, articulate people allow themselves to be as scathing as they want to be instead of A) toning it down to avoid offending someone or B) feeling too burnt out to do anything but roll their eyes and sigh.

I’ve been listening to “Tech Won’t Save Us,” and the latest episode with Gita Jackson is great. https://www.techwontsave.us/episode/319_the_left_doesnt_hate_technology_w_gita_jackson

“They want these things to be ubiquitous, so that we don’t remember what it’s like to not use them. But I do! I do! And I remember when you could search things on Google and find what you were looking for!”

The discussion on going from being a techno-optimist to being a techno-cynic because of the tech indusry’s constant lies—and complete lack of consequences for those lies—also hit home. Tech used to promise clean air, renewable energy, and true disruptions to predatory markets! Computer used to be good! Now we’re getting LLMs in toys and chatbots telling people to kill themselves! Of course I’m cynical and upset, dude, I still have a fuckin’ soul.