@AnarchoNinaWrites The problem with Nazis is that one magical day in 1945 they all went back to being Europeans and disappeared into the furniture. That's not reform. It was scattering seeds.

For people who miss the ol' hard drive spinning up and down when powering their #retrocomputing PC: my friend Peter found a solution for that. It's called a HDD Synth
https://brainbaking.com/post/2026/08/bring-back-the-noise-with-hdd-synth/

@randahl
I share your concern.
I think the only strategy that democratic parties are left with is to start reviewing and checking how the AfD is carrying out its promised policies from the first day. Not only the blatantly anti-democratic and anti-liberal ones, but also and specially all their "bread-and-butter" promises. Why?
AFAIK the AfD program makes policy commitments that would cost an added 900 mio. Euro yearly. No way S-A can finance that.
So keep demanding that the start delivering (+)

Zoe Williams gets it:

"Starmer, in short, was bad at politics in so many ways, and in ways that oughtn’t to coexist within the same politician. He wasn’t a communicator, but nor was he a meticulous or far-sighted planner. He had no backbone, and yet was incredibly rigid. He was extremely tribal in his determination to extinguish the left of his party, and yet he didn’t seem to have his own loyal tribe."

If anything, I think that she is too kind.

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2026/sep/02/farewell-keir-starmer-politician-u-turn-prime-minister-mp

“The boat strikes are, perhaps, the most stark testament to the lawlessness of the Trump administration.” https://theintercept.com/2026/09/02/military-boat-strikes-killings-year

So, hard pill to swallow, but I think there are a class of AI enthusiasts who got that way because computing fundamentally failed them, for whom getting a computer to do anything _for them_ not being a whole-ass bullshit ordeal still deserve our empathy and solidarity. We, computer-people we, can’t escape responsibility for abandoning user empowerment in favour of corporate consolidation and vending machine interfaces decades ago, now that we’re reaping the whirlwind of mechanized capitalism.

@bright_helpings re that last thing: I was a big Writers Almanac fan, and it sucks that I can no longer listen with a clear conscience

@heavyimage I think the problem is that they’re not deciding, just blindly drinking from the poisoned well of US government data

The pitch of "You know three chords now you're in a band" and "make a zine on a copier and staple it together" was about you being able to do what you want your way. To actually empower you to explore what you can, want to, have to say and change in the world. The "output" is an accidental side effect of the exploration of self and (very importantly!) community. LLMs are about isolated creation of artifacts without relation to the process and the self.

LLM usage is by definition _anti-punk_.

That blows my mind.

@ppk Yup, works great on Firefox 153.0.2 (Build #2016175759), Android version 12 on a Samsung Galaxy S10e. Here are screenshots.

I have one, simple, straight forward job that I was planning to do today. And my brain has decided it doesn't want to do it.

Ideally... I'll do the thing at some point. But the much bigger challenge is not trying to force it, which I know from #ADHD experience will just block me from doing everything else.

@WizardOfDocs @pfriedma COBOL is obviously one of the most successful programming languages of all time.

I am not qualified to comment off the cuff on whether its level of natural language-ness, compared to the more compact languages that followed, concretely helped its adoption by people who otherwise would have struggled with coding.

The canonical success in this area is SQL, which is both very "natural" and very manager friendly.