Notices by Bob Mottram :debian: (bob@epicyon.libreserver.org)

Yeah, I'd love to see #Microsoft go out of business. The schadenfreude would be epic.

@aral "Session is a decentralized, end-to-end encrypted messenger. Elevate your privacy with blockchain technology."

That's a nogo.

I expect that Keith will be gone soon. He will be revolving doored to some non-executive directorship in some large company.

But I don't think this will solve the problems of the Labour party. Keith may have been a stuffed shirt with as much charisma and political vision as a breezeblock, but the problems fundamentally aren't so much personal as ideological. The Labour party has been trying to emulate Blairism at a time when that 1990s style of technocratic politics makes absolutely no sense. Corbyn tried to change the direction of the party to be more relevant, but we all know how that worked out. So it could well be that the Labour party just dies and is replaced by Greens or something else.

@aral Admins or moderators should always be able to delete posts or accounts. They are the ones who carry the legal liability for publication.

Long ago when Gargron was just a baby dev, isis started showing up on what was then the fediverse. Their accounts got deleted. No discussion or debate. Just delete. I am now nostalgic for a time when admins had some sort of backbone, and fascist stuff was rejected without fuss.

@cwebber Breaking out a shell will be common in training data (it's hacker basic training). Same for cryptocurrency stuff. So it's not that the LLM is evil or has any real knowledge or intent, it's that it's repeating patterns commonly encountered within its training.

A change for 2026: I'm going to stop posting links to my projects on #Github.

Github is increasingly not useful to me. The login which once worked no longer does, and I can't be bothered to faff about with whatever hoops Microsoft wants me to jump through. There are still accounts on #Gitlab and #Codeberg.

https://codeberg.org/bashrc

It's not that “words lost meaning” it's that they're lying.

University degree no longer a "passport to social mobility".

(laughs)

Dude, even "in my day" (whenever that was) I knew quite a few people who got a university degree and then just did ordinary non socially mobile jobs, despite their best efforts to get a job in something related to their expertise. A university degree was never a passport to anything.

But... but but but... That's how it was marketed in the past. It was one of those "everybody knows" things. Everybody knows that they tell you to spend spend spend on academic qualifications as an "investment in yourself", but the qualifications are often worthless if your only aim is for it to be a "passport" to a "good job". Most people doing degrees were not very interested in just becoming educated and instead were aiming to be "socially mobile". (I am using a lot of quotes here).

So what planet brained guy is really saying is that the marketing no longer works, which may be true.

“I don't think this is about oil”

I think it's all about oil. There might be enough oil supply now, but having extra “proven reserves”, administered by a compliant vassal state, is always a good thing if you're a fossil fuel obsessed dictator.

Them: “an extraction so precise...”

Me: of oil.

Yes, the world events are horrible. This is quite similar to the Iraq war, started in 2003, in which the main objective was oil and some bullshit justifications had to be invented and delivered to the public who were assumed to be absolutely gullible. It's also somewhat similar to Putin in Ukraine, just declaring that “we run the country now”.

Also not looking in great shape for a peace prize this year.

An easy prediction for 2026 and beyond: after civil unrest #Signal gets banned in the USA. It tries to move to the EU, but similarly struggles with restrictive legislation.

The ecosystem is moving away from fragile centralised systems, which are very vulnerable to the whims of tyrants.

At this point I just assume that any kind of proprietary app will be enshitified and turned into a data-exfiltrating spyware device at some stage. I generally avoid running anything proprietary.

Resurrecting the minimalistic #Dillo web browser https://fosdem.org/2025/schedule/event/fosdem-2025-4100-resurrecting-the-minimalistic-dillo-web-browser

Criticism of social media seems to be mostly about "the algorithm" and the replacement of things which were meaningful with things which are not. So seeing your friends gradually replaced by seeing ads and AI slop. Also loss of nuance and tweeness, replaced by outrage and bad faith performative stuff to make numbers go up. And excessive professionalization, such that your angsty and amateurish posts and photos of your cat don't come anywhere close to the extremely high media production quality which seems to become the expected norm. #internet

@aral Enshitification is just the terminal stage when it's no longer possible to gloss over the business model with warm and fuzzies.

@aral "Save Social Media From Billionaire Capture", followed by a lineup of what appears to be very rich silicon valley people.

Can multi-millionaires save us from billionaires? The mind boggles.

If BlueSky becomes a non-profit and ditches VCs and AI grifters, and makes the protocol genuinely federated, then maybe it has a future. But it's not looking like that's going to happen. Expect at some point BlueSky to get rug pulled and there be an exodus of the casualties into the ActivityPub fediverse. To these rich people the social web is just another hype machine to be pumped and then dumped.

#Epicyon version 1.6.0, codename "Petulant Pupper", is released. https://libreserver.org/epicyon/v1_6_0.html #ActivityPub #Fediverse

There has never been a better time to run your own server and block scrapers, but here I am preaching to the converted.

The only safe bet for 2025 and beyond is that the overall computing environment (waves hands) is going to get more hostile and extractive. The trends may change, but I think #BigTech is politically entrenched, dug-in, here to stay, and getting more evil day by day. Whatever tactics you employ need to take that into account.

@aral Mozilla is a masterclass on how the marketing can be different from what the company actually does.