The internet was not supposed to suck. Here's what went wrong.
(Books by @pluralistic, Tim Berners-Lee, and Joanna Walsh.)
Here are some of my favorite cartoons from Cartoon Movement this week, by Zez Vaz from Portugal, Sinisa Pismestrovic from Austria, Monero Rapé from Mexico and Z from Tunisia.
Check out our platform for a daily dose of international political cartoons: https://www.cartoonmovement.com/
Or subscribe to our daily newsletter to get our editor's choice in your mail each morning: https://cmdailycartoon.substack.com/
Een feestelijk feit: op 28 januari 1981 werd in Straatsburg het Dataprotectieverdrag getekend door de Europese Unie.
Dit verdrag is de basis voor de Europese privacybescherming. Wil je meer weten over privacy en zoek je inspiratie om dit onderwerp binnen je organisatie op de kaart te krijgen?
as someone who is a bona fide expert in the underlying technology of LLMs, the amount these genai CEOs executives managers and boosters simply fail is mindblowing. I cannot explain the details but these fucks have only have one idea: prompting chatbot. If they have a second idea it's prompting chatbot more.
these fucks are intellectually vacant. they have all the innovation of a 3 day constipated turd. but you can't really expect more from the type of guy who allegedly raped his own kid sister
the fundamental ideas behind LLMs can in fact do things, but you have to dig below all the layers of coprolite fossilized anti wisdom like "buy more nVidia processors" (which btw has been the received wisdom ever since nVidia gave out a bunch of free GPUs 15 years ago)
I have to reiterate that my dog has more interesting and novel ideas than sam, dario, or whoever is at Google.
these Thought Leaders have only one thought. its "more chatbots more prompts"
so now we have chatbots that require illegal powerplants that poison your neighborhood to get enough electricity to help someone convince themselves to kill their own mother! 🆒
also yes all the people building the infrastructure are just cryptocurrency grifters trying for a better grift. including Musk and Altman. watch @davidgerard episode on gas town
Ce matin j'ai entendu ça : https://www.radiofrance.fr/franceculture/podcasts/un-monde-connecte/l-ice-ou-l-arsenal-technologique-en-action-6817567
C'est "'marrant", l'ICE utilise exactement toutes les technos qu'on dénonce depuis des années comme invasives et dangereuses pour la vie privée: traceurs publicitaires, lunettes connectées, reconnaissance faciale, même les caméras des serrures Amazon Ring... Peut être que maintenant on va envie arrêter de nous prendre pour des "anti progrès" et de nous dire "mais j'ai rien à cacher"... comme le dit la chronique, "c’est vrai jusqu'à ce qu'un pouvoir autoritaire pénalise un comportement banal."
La saison d’expositions « Echo Delay Reverb » du Palais de Tokyo touche bientôt à sa fin ⏳
Vous avez jusqu’au 15 février pour venir la découvrir !
📸 1 ; 2 Quentin Chevrier / 3 ; 4 Nicolas Fagot
@palaisdetokyo hâte de visiter l’exposition!
Et un énorme merci pour votre présence dans le fédivers 💖
With all the tiktok drama I have been telling people Mastodon is still here and kicking!! I love this app and I really think the decentralized model is the best for social media.
Still, people don’t want to join! What do you think Mastodon’s biggest barriers are to courting new users? What could be done to improve the product and grow the user base in a positive way?
@taylorlorenz I still like a centralized yellow or white pages sort of speak. People are still stuck with everyday store apps. I guess a start would be offline channels that skeb or misskey have for external yellowpages.
you've unlocked the secret gay parallel dimension!
whoa!!!! no wonder all the straights are jealous
@andrewnez Consider that gitea contains package registries, and forgejo is the FLOSS fork. It's perfectly possible to build a bunch of these things with a self-hosted forgejo instance.
Which really means that a bunch of things forgejo does should become de facto standards.
There are also things that can be standardized that help here. For example, there are a few competing solutions for platform/language independent package meta information, including dependencies.
Could focus on that, too.
@jens I’ve been working on that
@brianb I’m a software engineer, not a teacher, but have a lot of ed folks in the family so talk about it a lot. I think these “everyone needs to learn to code” pushes for mandatory CS classes are misguided. A lot of it seems to be fueled by tech jobs paying well, but that doesn’t justify curriculum decisions. I think the courses should be available for the students that want them, but the average student would be better off improving reasoning skills in math and other classes
@brokenintuition Yeah, Michigan is requiring a course offered, so we have a web dev elective students can take.
This is a wider push based on a grant we received. It's really just having teachers work vocab into lessons, which is silly, but doable. I'm just cranky and wish there was a little more of a targeted approach.
@aral @morrick @zbrando @angiebaby
IBM
UBM
WE BM’D ON
BY IBM
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🎓 Last week, Dr. @Juan_P_Bascur successfully defended his PhD thesis at Leiden University. Congratulations on this fantastic achievement! ✨
🔎 For his dissertation, Juan Pablo investigated how science maps can be designed, evaluated, and improved to support information retrieval in scientific literature. He was supervised by @LudoWaltman, Suzan Verberne and @neesjanvaneck.
💡 Read more about Juan's Pablo PhD research in our news item 👇 https://www.universiteitleiden.nl/en/news/2026/01/congratulations-dr.-juan-pablo-bascur
@stefan I also don't use "toots". Such a special slang is always a difficulty for newcomers, outsiders, and non-English speakers.
@NatureMC Yeah, I don't mind it not catching on too much.
🆕 blog! “Are there any open APIs left?”
One of the dreams of Web 2.0 was that website would speak unto website. An "Application Programming Interface" (API) would give programmatic access to structured data, allowing services to seamlessly integrate content from each other. Users would be able to quickly grab data from multiple sources and use them for their own purposes. No registration or …
👀 Read more: https://shkspr.mobi/blog/2026/01/are-there-any-open-apis-left/
⸻
#api #coding
@Edent Open Meteo, a weather API: https://open-meteo.com/en/docs
Another year has gone by in #opensource, marked by the start of the annual ritual of #FOSDEM...
The Cyber Resilience Act implementation is ongoing. While I've been involved in the development of the Vertical standard for Operating Systems for the past several months, I have also been contributing to CEN's Horizontal standard for vulnerability management -- a better use of my skills, perhaps, though a more frustrating experience overall.
Working within the strictures of CEN/CENELEC to develop a vulnerability handling standard that accurately reflects the modern realities of open source software's integral role in commercial products and the essential collaboration that must exist between corporations and communities, has been, frankly, very challenging. Many established participants seem to hold on to views of open source that are out of sync with the realities of the last decade. I've done what I could -- a speech to the ETSI SECURITY conference and several presentations inside ETSI and CEN meetings. For this iteration of #FOSDEM, I won't be talking about those standards ...
Instead of talking about standards, I will present on the topic of Voluntary Security Attestations -- CRA's little-discussed Article 25 -- which have the potential to fundamentally alter, for the better, the relationship between OSS maintainers and the companies that rely on OSS.
https://fosdem.org/2026/schedule/event/PTHENV-sustaining-foss-with-attestations/
Find me Sunday afternoon, 15:20 - 16:20 in the EU Policy track... Or at one of the many other events around BXL over the long weekend -- I'll be here Thursday-Tuesday!
@aeva have an awesome time!
