@catsalad I'm shocked that you can make polls that only have one option, but I guess this one is proof that there are use cases for it! 🤷👍

#TIL about #CommonsDB;

"... a public registry for Public Domain and openly licensed works, to bring greater legal certainty to the reuse of digital content.

The registry uses content-derived, decentralized identifiers to ensure persistent recognition of digital content and rights information across formats, thereby providing greater legal certainty for reusing digital content."

https://www.commonsdb.org/

#commons #DigitalCommons #PublicDomain

@lxskllr @yjeanrenaud @daltux @manualdousuario Nope. It's well-estsblished that non-commercial licenses are not open-source, and F-Droid only accepts open-source.

https://opensource.org/faq

https://f-droid.org/en/docs/Inclusion_Policy/

On reflection, I think the worst part of Cory Doctorow’s argument in favor of LLM use is this:

« Doubtless some of you are affronted by my modest use of an LLM. You think that LLMs are "fruits of the poisoned tree" and must be eschewed because they are saturated with the sin of their origins. I think this is a very bad take, the kind of rathole that purity culture always ends up in.

Let's start with some context. If you don't want to use technology that was created under immoral circumstances or that sprang from an immoral mind, then _you are totally fucked._ »

This is a form of argument beloved by awful people. I can’t be pure and perfect, they say, so there’s no point my trying to make better or less damaging moral choices.

Stop buying from Amazon? Walmart and Target aren’t perfectly moral. Stop driving an SUV? Your car pollutes too, and so do buses. Stop using Twitter? Facebook and Bluesky are far from morally perfect, and mastodon.social has poor moderation. And so on.

I see this kind of excuse all the time online. It’s a cousin to both whataboutism and Mister Gotcha. It also rests on a false premise. The idea that anyone is expected to achieve complete purity is a straw man. You’re not having sainthood demanded of you, people are just hoping you’ll consider *reducing* the amount of immoral and damaging behavior you engage in *when there are perfectly viable alternatives*. Sure, we can argue about whether the alternatives are truly viable, but the idea that if you can’t be perfect you may as well not even try to be better? That’s moral bankruptcy.

Mocking the desire for people to behave more ethically as “purity culture” is like mocking it as “virtue signaling”. It says things about the person doing the mocking, none of them good. It’s also deeply hypocritical coming from someone who has gone out of his way to avoid using DRM. Isn’t that “purity culture”?

So, my early elementary kids have been excluded from or discriminated against in:
- swim team
- orchestra
- climbing gym
- ski pass
- soccer
- trampoline place

...because our family doesn't believe in stalkerware apps masquerading as free logistics. Orchestra, a "non-profit", has operated in our public schools since 1929 but apparently would cease to exist if they couldn't post every in-class moment on kid faces on "socials". No way to opt out oh unless I upload a photo of their faces (wait what?). Climb, swim, ski and trampoline all require unlimited lifetime license of any photos to modify or post anywhere, forever, by any future owner.

The latest death by a million apps is Little League. First we make an account on a registration app. The ability to opt out of unlimited photo licensing was the first I've seen...even as they gobble up my and my kid's pii just to get to tryouts. Now we're in! But wait, there's another app: "Many teams will use Game Changer this year to communicate. It’s very helpful for team-wide communications, RSVP functions so coaches know how to build teams, even live streaming and scoring! You can download the app here for iOS or Android." Y'all ever heard of email? Or a spreadsheet? Or a paper schedule? Why is it free again?

Opting entirely out of apps and photos is rare among sports and edtech companies, but it is cherished at less than a handful of quality local orgs. Usually, in practice though, volunteer coaches and fellow parents are the source of discrimination--because we're not in what amounts to yet another social media account; we're just excluded from comms, when not openly ridiculed for implying it's inapproprate to stream kindergarten girls live on the internet.

I end up mostly internally furious, shaking my head as I rip out an iot device for solace, and bury my head in plans for a family hike in the woods as far off the grid as possible.

@babe

@theorangetheme @davidgerard

I’ve never really believed in the 10x developer, but I was quite fortunate that I spent a long time in software development before I encountered a very real phenomenon (surprisingly common in big tech companies): the -1x developer. The person who creates so many problems that it is an entire other person’s job to clean up the results of the mistakes that they make.

In some rare cases, you may even encounter a -2x or -3x (or more) developer: someone who writes code very quickly and leaves a trail of devastation. They will do things like start a large-scale refactor that doesn’t solve any real problems and introduces some major design flaws, get half way through it, and then use the fact that they are leading this major transition to get promoted and transferred to a different part of the company. The team left behind has to deal with either finishing the refactoring and ending up in a worse place, or undoing all of their work. Both approaches delay new features and the team looks much less productive while they deal with this fallout. And the sudden drop in perceived productivity after they leave is used as evidence for how great they were (‘oh, yes, when I was in that team we were shipping new features and I was leading a transition to pay down a load of technical debt. As soon as I left, the whole thing fell apart. It’s a shame, but I had to move to a place where my skills could benefit the company more.’).

I can see LLMs allowing a -1x developer to easily become a -10x developer. And honestly believe that they are more productive because they never realised that their productivity was negative to start with. I would be entirely unsurprised to discover that industry is now littered with LLM-enabled -10x developers. Technical debt is too weak a term for their output. Companies are accumulating technical nuclear waste and it will be decades of work to fix all of the problems that they have caused.

Lmao.

Plasma Setup has had its first release, as part of KDE's Plasma 6.6 release! I'm so excited for people to start using it 🎉 😁

https://merritt.codes/blog/2026/02/17/2026/_plasma-setup-release

#kde #plasma #plasmasetup #foss

"Door ajar" versus $100 billion valuation.

Today I learned that you can DoS a Waymo by opening its door.

"The More You Know..."

Waymo, Google's autonomous vehicle company, and DoorDash, the delivery and gig work platform, have launched a pilot program that pays Dashers, at least in one case, around $10 to travel to a parked Waymo and close its door that the previous passenger left open.
https://jwz.org/b/yk3Z

@lowqualityfacts

Sharks are the only thing you can describe as "Great White" without sounding insanely racist.

Canada is occasionally called, "The Great White North" (the colour is a reference to snow).

@MLNow I always assumed that being called, "legal tender," automatically meant every business was required to accept it. This is fucked up.

"The root cause of the Spectre and Meltdown vulnerabilities was that processor architects were trying to build not just fast processors, but fast processors that expose the same abstract machine as a PDP-11."

C Is Not a Low-level Language: https://spawn-queue.acm.org/doi/pdf/10.1145/3212477.3212479

by @david_chisnall

@timb_machine I…wait…Is the "vulnerability" the fact that Markdown files can contain links? Because that's what it looks like to me.

@FirewallDragons I mean, recommendation algorithms that aren't fully manually crafted by the user should just be illegal, but this would be almost as good.

@gregkh

👉 "a handpicked group of non-commercial Open Source maintainers"

👉 looks inside

👉 "What is your company's full, legal name?"

Great job, guys. 🤦

@catsalad Wait, WTF is the black one supposed to be used for? 🤨

@fkamiah17 The sign should've read, "Blood Money." A blood bank is where donated blood is stored, and so the phrase has connotations of kindness and hope.

RE: https://ohai.social/@thatkatharine/115630488805636323

Is your ambitious plan to make more Long Covid and sabotage the economy by weakening your work force? Because that’s what you’re going to get.

https://www.canada.ca/en/public-services-procurement/news/2026/02/public-services-and-procurement-canada-statement-on-increased-office-presence.html

Here's a really good read by Cory Doctorov @pluralistic about the anatomy of the #AI bubble, why it is there, why and how it is harmful, and what we can potentially salvage from it once it pops.

Via @eosfpodcast

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/ng-interactive/2026/jan/18/tech-ai-bubble-burst-reverse-centaur