Well we now have a horrifying example on why you shouldn’t get involved in fashtech. Artist a former maintainer of Artix Linux spent considerable effort on getting Xlibre into a usable state and when fixing their numerous bugs became too much they recommended switching back to Xorg. That didn’t sit well with the developers of Xlibre and they started to harass the Artix maintainer until they quit the team.

I am personally deeply offended that an independent vegan restaurant in my town recently banned meat eaters from bringing in their burgers from next door and passively aggressively eating them in the restaurant whilst making eye contact with the other customers. Whilst I appreciate that there are a huge number of burger joints that cater to meat eaters, I am troubled by the idea that a young fledgling meat eater who accidentally stumbled into the vegan restaurant with a double quarter pounder and bacon meal under his arm could be berated and asked to leave. That might upset him and put him off eating burgers which would be a terrible outcome. I don’t think I’m being unreasonable here. I’m no carnivore. I don’t work for the beef industry. In fact, I am an omnivore and I have a friend who sometimes eats salads. I’m just saying that if little Timmy wants to enjoy a burger in the middle of a private space owned by people that hate burgers, that should be his god-given right.

*This post is about indie code forges banning slop

neovim is hearty fashtech now circumstances.run/@mawhrin/117167738907856218

Article on businessinsider with the nauseating title “The modern parenting throuple: Parents are at a breaking point — AI companies see an opportunity” because the age-old silicon valley product design technique of asking what your mother used to do for you, and how it could be sold back to you via a subscription is still very much in use.

businessinsider.com/parents-breaking-point-ai-com…

I confess I haven’t read the full article (which is why I haven’t given it a proper post) but hypervisible.blacksky.app has kindly pulled the highlights:

bsky.app/profile/…/3mtupdpfcjs2p

One of the best bits:

The most tech-savvy parents have built their own tools. Sarah Baldeo, a cognitive neuroscientist, spent the past year traveling for work, so she built a custom GPT of herself to chat with her 15-year-old son when she’s unavailable. Baldeo tells me she programmed the chatbot with her personality, uploading screenshots of texts between her and her son, along with documents about her values, the family rules, and challenges she felt in parenting.

Baldeo wanted her son to ask the chatbot advice, and he did prompt it with questions he may have fielded to her, like, How do I diplomatically tell my teacher I’m overloaded with assignments? But he also asked the mombot how to convince his human mom to let him hang out at a coffee shop in Chicago in the evening — something Baldeo had been hesitant to allow.

The bot told him, as Baldeo recounts, “Your mom very much values new experiences, being around people from different cultures, different socioeconomic backgrounds, and this is how you should frame it to her: that you’re exploring a part of Chicago that is more diverse.” Her son took this tact to Baldeo, and she said yes. It was only later that she saw the chat history that let her know he had gamed the bot to manipulate her.

🤮

Why the fuck do these people have children. Why the fuck does any functional human being think it is a good idea to outsource raising their children to sam altman and his chatbot.

Who on earth thinks that training a chatbot to wear their personality like a rubber mask and manipulate people is going to end well? Honestly, I think this is perhaps the bit that triggers the most revulsion in me. I cannot comprehend wanting to be complicit in my own replacement by this thing, but so many people seem excited by the prospect of doing this to themselves.

Buddhist Rationalist cult MAPLE wants the Internet to know that contrary to “a recent social media post” their guru Soryu Forall is authorized to teach by “by well-known teachers of the Vipassana and Zen traditions.” They mention a few whoopsies.

At another time, while Soryu was away traveling, the leadership team tried to convert the entire organization away from Buddhism. When Soryu returned, he saw this and told the leaders that if they wanted to go in this direction, they could, and that he would go do something else. They were unwilling to take on the financial responsibility of the organization and refused the offer.

They could be responding to The High Control Dynamics at MAPLE (2026) or perhaps Emerging: Making Sense of Soryu Forall (2026) or even My experience inside Soryu Forall’s AI-Centered Monastic Academy (2025)

Aella does her boundary-setting thing (those Zizians/MAPLE/Leverage/Brent Dill are bad and not us) xcancel.com/Aella_Girl/…/2091015022042595743#m I don’t think Ozy covered MAPLE although IIRC they had a Bay Area offshoot with offices nextdoor to Leverage. I would like to know who is funding Soryu.