Notices by Leah Rowe is not a Rowebot (libreleah@mas.to)

every now and then, i have a moment of pure inspiration, and i come up with bangers like this:

19:53 <@leah> ai can't do anything without humans
19:53 <@leah> human beings wrote your irc client
19:53 <@leah> the ai merely removes copyright notices

this is literally what i said to someone on irc just now (they wrote a really crap irc client using AI. i know it's crap because i read the code. it's garbage)

Anyway: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2026/sep/07/why-far-right-afd-state-victory-significant-german-politics-germany-explainer

Yes, the east suffered massive deindustrialisation in the 1990s. Countless people lost their jobs and are still poor. State services were completely decimated, especially healthcare (polyclinics, which worked, replaced with inefficient private care). This, combined with massive brain drain to the west.

Then their new leaders in the west consistently failed to invest properly or meaningfully in the east. The east of Germany has suffered tremendously, in ways reminiscient of what happened in the English north since 1980s.

The irony is that people in the east of Germany are voting for a party that will accelerate such policies, privatising and defunding yet more services, making everyone poorer.

When asked directly, and I've seen this in several polls, east Germans want properly funded public services, affordable homes, you name it, but they're being collectively duped by fascist thugs.

People don't vote for fascists when they're well-off. Just saying.

speaking of librewolf. i recently also did this:

lwmk: https://codeberg.org/libreboot/lbmk/src/branch/lwmk_wip

LibreWolf MaKe

i'm much further ahead locally. i don't want to publish something close to completion so this is from an older branch i have locally.

guess how much AI i used? none! yes, i'm forking the libreboot build system into a new project that builds librewolf, and i will propose it to librewolf when ready. libreboot's build system is highly generalised and configurable, and does a lot of things librewolf's build system currently doesn't, such as reliably checking revisions and checksums of sources that it downloads. i started doing it when i noticed that librewolf source.git lacks integrity checking on a bunch of things it downloads, such as... firefox tarballs.

because it's lbmk-based, i don't use tarballs. i use git repos. this is bigger on disk usage, but more flexible for lbmk's multi-tree design. fork is: lwmk

and here is my openbsd port, also created without AI:

https://cvsweb.openbsd.org/ports/www/librewolf

chatgpt didn't teach me how to do this. burning my thumb did. yes, i learned how to avoid burning my thumb.

chatgpt can't do shit

anyway, as a result of this policy change, i now actually *use* the built-in no-AI duckduckgo search on librewolf, instead of typing "google.com"

not that duckduckgo is any good either. i mean, it's crap actually, i should set up searx or something, so as to continue using google (i assume searx can do google)

i remember the world before AI. some people have called me a genius in the past, not because i know everything, but because of how quickly i learn everything. for example, i learned how to solder in a month, and got really good at it in a month. the photo shows how i soldered after a month of practise (this one several years after, but i did stuff like this after only a month)

in 2013, i had no idea how a package manager worked, then accidentally reinvented package management when i started the libreboot project. libreboot is a package manager for building coreboot images. after a year, i thought: hang on, this is just like debian apt-get!

i'm glad we didn't have AI in 2013

i recently wrote that I become anti-AI, having previously been neutral towards it - critical in some aspects, positive in others.

when you use AI, you stop thinking. you don't reason about anything. google search really annoys me, because it's so seductive when the bot tells you what you want, regardless of whether it's true... and you're enticed to *not* click links anymore

anyway, i don't want to further articulate or intellectualise, but OpenBSD pretty much predicted this 17 years ago:

https://www.openbsd.org/lyrics.html#46

OpenBSD predicted chatgpt.

This is really insidious. Even really smart people get sucked into it. My friend is one such person, but lots of really smart people I know seem to be taken by it.

None of us are immune. When you have a sycophant whispering in your ear and tell you all the answers (whether they're right or not, more often they are wrong), you stop thinking.

It's called: deskilling

I say think for yourself. It's OK even to be wrong, or slow. Think for yourself!

@draken @1dark1 AI didn't even teach me german anyway. completely useless technology. watching tagesschau24 all day did that. and also some germans i know.

inspired by such a negative example, and others as i have witnessed recently, i've decided that i myself will also stop using AI. i had a lukewarm opinion about it befyore, not positive or negative, because i like to see the nuance in things.

if we were a more enlightened species, we could have AI, but no. i will remove it from my life as well, so as to practise what i preach.

i didn't use it that much myself anyway. i had a chatgpt subscription a while ago, for (verbal) german practise, and i had a bit of fun dabbling with it for a bunch of silly things. you know, nothing critical. and even i saw myself at times feeling really good while using it.

it's basically just a completely relentless sychophant whispering in your ear. it will do whatever you tell it to do, regardless of whether it does it well, and... yeah, it basically offers humanity a shortcut that discourages it from doing anything itself

i think it will destroy education, and thus the future of this planet. fuck AI.

I recently watched a good friend of mine fall victim to chatbot psychosis. She's been making stuff with AI and having all sorts of delusions about it, even becoming defensive when I question her

I mean, it's all fun and games. I recently found out how to access the service menu on my CRT TV, because a chatbot was able to find obscure russian forum posts that say how to do it, you know, that's awesome.

but yeah, I used to be like: AI could be used responsibly, implemented sustainable (e.g. don't centralise it, run it all p2p and use solar and wind...)

no. fuck AI. my friend, who i will not name, is a small example of just what people have been warning about with this tech. i see the future. and what do i see?

i see a world where nobody knows how to do anything, of everyone being thoroughly deskilled, and ripping off other people's work and calling it their own. i see a trillion dollar industry controlling everything.

my friend feels great now, but what if they turn off the AI?

@CerberusGames the author refuses to say so on their repos, and i asked them politely several times. thus i will say it:

this IRC client, copperline, is entirely vibe-coded. it was written by an AI.

@CerberusGames the author refuses to say so on their repos, and i asked them politely several times. thus i will say it:

this IRC client, copperline, is entirely vibe-coded. it was written by an AI.

@CerberusGames the author refuses to say so on their repos, and i asked them politely several times. thus i will say it:

this IRC client, copperline, is entirely vibe-coded. it was written by an AI.

@CerberusGames the author refuses to say so on their repos, and i asked them politely several times. thus i will say it:

this IRC client, copperline, is entirely vibe-coded. it was written by an AI.

i'm not sure what to do about Reform UK though. perhaps call them traitors, and proscribe them as a terrorist group. it's what i would do, if i had access to that button. i would ban them from existing. there must be a myriad of laws that could be used to derail them. incitement to racial hatred for example, which is a thing in the UK, and quite punishable in the british courts, if only it would be actually, you know, enforced. that's just off the top of my head.

i hope one day to wake up in a world that went sane again. for now, i will just keep calling nazis what they are: nazis

if it talks like a nazi, walks like a nazi, has policies to deport legal citizens like the nazis did, and generally feels like a nazi, then he's probably a fucking nazi, wouldn't you agree?

i digress.

the british home secretary has the power to deny entry through UK customs to any non-citizen, including members of the french far-right, and i hope that they do: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2026/aug/28/french-far-right-leader-jordan-bardella-address-reform-uk-party-conference

fuck nazis. it wouldn't be the first time. in 2009, the then home secretary denied entry to the netherlands' own Geert Wilders, another neo-nazi:

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2009/feb/12/far-right-dutch-mp-ban-islam

let's hope that the labour party of 2026 has as much or more guts as the one that existed in 2009. calling the french national rally neo-nazis isn't even theoretical, they were literally originally the national front; they once shared a platform with the UK's erstwhile BNP (british national party).

yes, i want nazis to be prevented from, you know, existing. fuck nazis.

if governments just openly denounce nazis like they did in 2009, and openly denounce nazi ideology like they did in... 2009, instead of sucking up to them like they do in 2026, then maybe we might, you know, send nazi ideology back where it belongs: 1945.

we'll see.

@Walrus i thought they were a recent invention. i only heard of them over the last few years. yes, turns out the technology was invented in the 1960s; another post of mine in this thread suggests otherwise. i stand corrected.

@holsta it was invented a few years ago for the gaming market, but has all the same benefits as a mechanical keyboard in terms of tactile feedback. i bought one to replace my mechanical keyboard.

i don't care much for the gaming aspect. i just wanted a decent keyboard.

Been busting in my new keyboard (Keychron Q6 HE 8K). It's just like busting in a new pair of shoes, or getting used to a new car.

This is the standard 15-second test on monkeytype. I don't get this score regularly. 156wpm is pretty high. I normally get 130-140, higher when I'm in the zone.

I use British Dvorak keyboard layout, of course. My old keyboard was some cheap chinese red cherry switch thing. I wanted something quieter and more comfortable to type on.

Hall effect keyboards are the best thing ever.

Been busting in my new keyboard (Keychron Q6 HE 8K). It's just like busting in a new pair of shoes, or getting used to a new car.

This is the standard 15-second test on monkeytype.

Good news! I've finished setting up the new lab for my company: https://
minifree.org/

This is the new HQ. I sell computers with Libreboot preinstalled, which replaces proprietary BIOS/UEFI. I run the project, and I use sales to fund it. This new lab is both Minifree and Libreboot HQ!

It's a *very* small space, so organising it efficiently has been a fun technical challenge. I have as much storage and workspace as I was actually *using* in the older, much bigger lab, but I'm now being ruthlessly efficient with space.

I'm only using 1/3 of the space. Those drawers are empty. A highly organised space.

Those black rubbish bags actually contain bubble-wrap, which I used to pack everything for the move. Waste not, want not; I'm using it for shipments next week.

I'm very happy with how this turned out. Thank you to all who were patient with me. I will start shipping Minifree orders now. I moved everything here to cut costs, because I was spending too much money keeping the other place.