🦄Big Tech has repeatedly followed a familiar playbook: rush new technologies to market, normalise potentially harmful practices, and then fight regulation and slow-roll enforcement when policymakers try to catch up. Meta’s smart glasses should be seen in this context.
(See the video for parts of my intervention on Norwegian national TV and radio last Friday (english subtitles)) 1/
#privacy

Been thinking about three recent “to fork or not to fork” cases—the Linux kernel, the Rails fork @mosscap, and the recent no-AI hard fork of Firefox basebrowser (among many other forks).

Two happened, one didn’t. People are simmering over the corporate capture of the Linux Foundation, wondering whether the kernel is “too big to fork”. That can’t be good.

I tend to think that:
- More choice is better for users (the ultimate deciders)
- Creating something new isn’t the hard part; ongoing maintenance and community-building is.

Some people think “the project forked” is a bad thing or a “failure” to prevent, when it could create more choice *and* free unhappy contributors if intuited and managed correctly.

A fork *should* be the healthy outcome of a marriage-like “irreconcilable difference”, otherwise you end up with a hostage-like situation, which is what the Linux world feels like today. Hostages (in general) could become resentful and sabotage a project. Whether they succeed or not, it’s no good use of brain cycles.

There’s a lot in here we’re thinking about as we build #Rhizo and group management tools.

It should be easy to fork without (too much) resentment so no one is incentivized to sabotage, and the opposing side can’t steamroll a (sizable) minority without consequence.

Too easy to fork carelessly and groups can fall apart too easily if/wwhen minor disagreements hit; too hard and forking remains difficult, if not purely theoretical, and no one gains.

🛑 This is why we have argued for a temporary sales ban on these glasses in Norway, while giving policy and decision makers time to consider a tech-neutral approach to counter these challenges. I hope more countries and the EU will consider the same. The precautionary principle matters here: democratic red lines should be drawn before intrusive technologies become normalised, not afterwards. /end

The glasses themselves are highly problematic, even without that tech embedded, as the glasses allow for “frictionless” capture of photos, video and audio. Sadly, we are already hearing countless stories of people being filmed without their knowledge or consent, harassed and being outed online. Lives are ruined in the process, and we risk a massive chilling effect on the freedom of movement, freedom of expression and the right to privacy, as these devices are normalised in society. 3/

We had some issues with the ticket site yesterday, but it is back up and running now.

Please remember that T-shirts and hoodies must be ordered by this evening so that the print job can go ahead.

Ticket sales are still ongoing! There are also discounted tickets available, and you can still sign up as an ‘Angel’ or apply for press accreditation.

We’re looking forward to 2½ fantastic days at #FediDay with you all!

https://ctix.c-base.org/fediday/fediday26/

@dmandl Ironically, much like film, some of the older formulations (e.g., early Scotch) hold up better than some of the newer ones.

@GIFS_of_Puppets

I have no idea what's going on with Kermit there, but the alt text made me discover that there was a singer who used the stage name 'Jaye P. Morgan' and that's an amazing name.

the euclid infinite prime proof is fascinating for many reasons:

• the action of first collecting all the known primes q_1, ..., q_k together by commutative multiplication and then adding 1 to it to get the new prime p is a mirror image of the prime field F_p in which p - 1 decomposes into subgroup prime ideals over finite fields with orders corresponding to the prime divisors of p - 1

so at some level even though euclid presumably was not thinking in terms of bits and bytes i do feel that ancient greek geometers were probably thinking closer to the terms of a finite field (consider bisecting an angle!) than anything gauss had ever assumed

😰 Earlier this year, the New York Times exposed how Meta planned to roll out face recognition technology in a “dynamic political environment”, when they thought everyone would look the other way. Then WIRED exposed how Meta had made the tech "nearly ready to go" in the software of the app itself. Swedish news outlet Svenska Dagbladet (SvD) and Göteborgs-Posten exposed how employees had access and was exposed to sensitive videos by users. 2/

@tante I know very little about him or his funders. Omarchy is just another Linux distro to his personal taste, but not mine, and the repo has #AIrot 🤮

Why do we care?

"Il sistema vince solo quando l’uomo smette di pensare. La ribellione esiste sempre, anche quando sembra invisibile: è in chi ancora rifiuta di piegarsi, in chi legge, in chi non si accontenta di sopravvivere."

(Cit.)

Alt text is good for everyone

baloney levels are 52% and falling

(52%) ■■■■■□□□□□

I'm releasing my first serious fully agentically coded project. Call it vibe-coding or slop if you want; it's true that I haven't yet reviewed the code, and I mostly let Claude write the documentation. But I'm being transparent about LLM usage, including a full Claude Code transcript.

The project is called axum-marko, and it's an integration of the Axum server-side web framework for Rust and the Marko 6 frontend language/compiler, with a forum app as a demo. https://github.com/mwcampbell/axum-marko

@siracusa I heard the @RecDiffs where you talked about the Mida contract on Outpost (and I think the following where you had completed it), but that was a few months back and the meta has turned increasingly pessimistic about the future of the game. Playerbase is low, game's CD left Bungie, etc. etc.

I'm playing it with a couple friends and we love it but we're also getting more outgunned as the remaining players are hardcore "sweats." Hoping for a comeback story. 🤞

A bit of Italian wisdom:
Either you need a larger pot, or shorter pasta. Don't do this. Heck, maybe even cut them in half, I won't tell. Though that'd still be too much pasta for that pot, and you risk it sticking.

You should be able to put all of the pasta in the pot, under water. You can "press it" slowly if it sticks out so that the part underwater becomes soft and lets the rest in.