Notices by Cassandra has had an adventure (xgranade@wandering.shop)

Nope, just got transferred to a *different* slopbot.

At least this instance could be bypassed by just saying "operator" over and over again.

For the third time this month, called a place and got redirected to an "AI assistant" instead of a human who could help me.

I do not love this trend, especially when two of those cases involved medical billing shit that should not be disclosed to AI vendors *and* that slopware is categorically unable to help with.

@dalias @glyph Absolutely. I was focusing on the vote itself, but you're right, it's more systemic than just that one vote.

@dalias @glyph I agree in the abstract, but I think to Glyph's point, that's hard when there's as many ghouls "contributing" to Debian. I vehemently disagree with Debian's position, but I understand how someone dealing with said ghouls get there.

I would love a moratorium of that kind, I think that's a very good idea, I just don't know how to get there with so many people with Debian voting privileges are of the ghoul bent.

Seriously, where do we go from here? Debian is the basis for so many other distros, too. I don't know how you'd make a new, reliable distro given how many other components have gone slop, right down to the kernel itself.

I do not believe that software engineers are, by and large, capital owners. I do believe that software engineers, by and large, currently act like and believe that they are capital owners.

AI is an example of that dynamic, but far from the only example.

Software engineers need to be unionized *and* to not work against the labor interests of those in other disciplines.

It is so many kinds of demotivating to watch CPython, the Linux kernel, Debian, and so many other projects embrace slop. This didn't need to happen, open source could have continued to mean something positive.

I almost *almost* have the last of my Gandi domains moved over, good gods.

Another good reason to not rely on cloud-hosted personal drive services more than necessary.

This is fucking dystopian as hell, in any case.

https://www.erininthemorning.com/p/amnesty-uk-reportedly-using-copyright

@whitequark Yeah it's a terrible term for self-hosting. Our homelab at least includes a PPE station, for fuck's sake.

RE: https://federate.social/@dmarti/117123714378499193

brb having nightmares about a political dissident who uses ai to compose missives in order to defeat stylometric analysis that could de-anonymize them, not realizing that said ai product embedded a universally unique id in its output. printer dots walked so this dystopia could run off the cliff.

RE: https://journa.host/@z_everson/117128221176085157

More for the "but Anthropic is the *good* AI company" files.

With apologies to dril, you don't gotta hand it to them, actually. My best argument against ATProto is that Bluesky, a company that by all apparent actions hates me and would rather that I die, thinks it is in their best interests if I use ATProto.

It may well be that our interests overlap, but I haven't gone too wrong in listening to what my enemies want me to do, then not doing that; it at least works as a pretty good heuristic.

It feels very odd to have a conference dedicated to federated social media highlight ATProto, a protocol which turns out to be anything *but* federated in actual practice.

Any good faith I was willing to extend towards Bluesky and ATProto has long since been incinerated, with a few special highlights along the way:

• Overriding their own moderation team to protect Jesse Singal
• The then-CEO workshopping new transphobic slurs with Singal (that hilariously failed to take off, thankfully)
• Bluesky's declaration via Attie that anything reachable via ATProto is theirs for AI training
• Bluesky adopting vibe coding to piss off trans people they don't like

I really wish we could collectively stop pretending that Bluesky is anything other than a centralized, VC-backed, corporate social media enclave. It's just so exhausting to have Bluesky likers demand to be included in every conversation about decentralization and federation, only for the net result to be that Bluesky-the-company gets more money and gets to claim that they're "billionaire proof."

Looking for suggestions for a better IRC client... I've been using HexChat, but its support for IRCv3 is not amazing.

In particular, I'm looking for something that:
• Isn't slop and doesn't push slop on me
• Works on Linux (ideally via an Ubuntu package or Flatpak)
• Uses Gtk, Qt or similar instead of being Electron based
• At least mostly up to date with v3 features

Really appreciate your recommendations! ♥

A take whose temperature coincides with the triple point of water: outrage at AI watermarks is, in essence, the fear of being caught out doing something that one claims is a good thing to be doing.

It is, from that perspective, an artifact of either cognitive dissonance or outright dishonesty.

I am once again begging local businesses to not require a Facebook login in order to learn absolutely anything about said businesses. And yes, it happened again: a cool local vintage store seems to exist exclusively on Instagram.