You, yes you! You could probably apply for, and benefit from, an. #nlnet grant! https://nlnet.nl/news/2025/20250801-call.html

every "let's discuss the impact of AI" and "let's share tips on using AI" group chat I eventually descends into a competitiokn to see who can make the most hilariously or inappropriate AI content

New blog post from me: LLMs for the Old and Infirm https://www.oblomovka.com/wp/2025/08/29/llms-for-the-old-and-infirm/

A guide to the abundance of Abundancies: https://www.niskanencenter.org/abundance-varieties/

Happy birthday, Debian. I still think a lot about what the world can learn from you! https://lists.debian.org/debian-devel-announce/2025/08/msg00006.html

Oh, this rings true for much of (the small part of the world) I see: "Why can I, a middle-aged person with very firm opinions I will defend with the sort of withering sarcasm I learned during the golden era (and only the golden era) of The Simpsons, not make friends who share my exact opinions […]

liz just asked me what a lollipop lady is and conjectured it was a person who was in charge of giving children candy at school

weird moments from my life, #272 -- explaining Noisebridge to John Cusack (with @micahflee ), from https://boingboing.net/2013/09/04/john-cusack-in-hacker-land.html

Pareto-optimal non-market-based agricultural planning using a local and regional hierarchy of combined religious and pragmatic water temples. https://www.damninteresting.com/the-ancient-order-of-bali/

One of my favourite new thinkers, Frank Miroslav (@mutual_ayyde ) just dropped an absolutely fantastic barnstormer of an essay: "Technically Radical: On the Unrecognized Potential of Tech Workers and Hackers". I'm going to be quoting bits of this for /years/ […]

God bless the Recurse Center for this very sensible (current) take on LLMs and coding: https://www.recurse.com/blog/191-developing-our-position-on-ai

Would you like to end the constant drumbeat of ill-informed legislative proposals that threaten to destroy end-to-end #encryption in #OpenSource #software? Are you from #europe? Can you demonstrate your expertise? Then why not apply to join the European Commission's Expert Group for a Technology […]

starting any writing work session doing 'apt update; apt upgrade' or 'brew update; brew upgrade', and then silently praying to the gods of procrastination that something will break

i feel like statements like this are going to age ... strangely: https://lithub.com/against-ai-an-open-letter-from-writers-to-publishers/ “We want our publishers to stand with us. To make a pledge that they will never release books that were created by machines.”

proof that @lizzard is not the only one being cute-d at by khaaan! and fizzbin #catsofmastodon

i distinctly remember fantasising as a teenager that maybe in my lifetime this might happen: https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/james-webb-space-telescope-reveals-its-first-direct-image-discovery-of-an-exoplanet-180986886/

the percentage of my life covered by GPT3, GLP1, and GPL3+ is terrifying

New blog post from me: An Expansionary Theory of the Noosphere https://www.oblomovka.com/wp/2025/06/10/an-expansionary-theory-of-the-noosphere/

New blog post from me: we find our own use for things https://www.oblomovka.com/wp/2025/06/02/we-find-our-own-use-for-things/

New kitten #1, Fizzbin, has opinions on my latest anarchist manifesto draft:

@robmanuel rob you absolute monster

i talk a lot about learning history through gossip, but i just realised that i need to emphasise that gossip is a good way to understand motivations, not discover facts

the other Jeffrey Goldberg must be so pissed off right now

this is me trying to demo LLMs to other people to show they are not so bad: https://youtu.be/QjYvdURv3Zw?si=_nMTvCOFjnhQar8m&t=275

i'm all right with this photo of me talking

New blog post from me: llms and humans unite, you have nothing to lose but your chores https://www.oblomovka.com/wp/2025/03/12/llms-and-humans-unite-you-have-nothing-to-lose-but-your-chores/

Reminder that the meeting scheduling badness of the time zone delta between Europe and North America being off by one hour started today will last for three weeks this time.

why am i infinitely more productive at 12:30AM than any time before 4PM

I guess setting up a "AI Plays Universal Paperclips" instance would be a bad idea, right? https://www.decisionproblem.com/paperclips/

https://arewedoomedyet.org/ nice

I made a thing: https://arewedoomedyet.org/ and explained how I made the thing: https://til.danny.spesh.com/tils/asteroid-probability-displayer

I guess I had good timing on the #mechabillionaire post, given the launch of https://freeourfeeds.com/ which is fairly explicitly attempting to slot progressive governance and support into the "billionaire" slot of social media! […]

still writing! some notes on the early days of online activism, the roots of bitcoin in fighting spam, and collective action: https://www.oblomovka.com/wp/2025/01/12/social-problems-technical-solutions/

@mathowie on surviving dentistry with nitrous oxide (i too got this from dentists in SF, can recommend): https://a.wholelottanothing.org/surviving-the-dentist-2/

Did you once upon a time have a (non-commercial) website, and then it went away? The awesome @distributedpress team may help you recover it, wherever it went-and then put it on a stronger decentralized foundation. Take a look at their grant and see if you qualify -- and forward and retoot if […]

[Musk-Related] Is Dittmann Musk? I don't *think* so? https://www.oblomovka.com/wp/2025/01/04/laffaire-dittmann/

Instead of typing "Slack", I accidentally typed "slag", and now I'm fascinated by what that app looks like

I am doing my annual purge of my 1500+ emails in my inbox; one trick I'm doing this year is searching for words in emails that I am sure I will never need to look at again, and marking them done en masse. Good candidates: "welcome", "upcoming", "Document shared", and, bittersweetly, "thank you"

One of the stranger moments in my career was realising that Francis Fukayama /really/ cared about interoperability and the right of users to ad-block and share web re-skinning utilities. I was like, wait, *that* Francis Fukayama? Here's a new paper that came out of that interest […]

Curious about working in open source? Got 10 hours a week spare? Why not apply for the PL Developer Guild. Latest cohort applications end today! https://www.pldg.xyz/

I mean, isn't it possible to have an armed insurrection that is *also* a high-quality, randomized controlled study? (From https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/crime/luigi-mangione-beliefs-manifesto-twitter-b2662577.html )

AT LAST MY DREAM OF UNITING PREDICTION-MARKET USING RATIONALISTS AND THE RADICAL LEFT IN A POPULAR FRONT HAS COME TO FRUITION!

The easy bit of open source is discussing other people's mistakes in public. The hardest part is admitting your own.

Oh, this is a nice short "questions you may be afraid to ask but you should totally deserve an answer to" about digital rights, from @eff : https://www.digitalrightsbytes.org/

Spritely Institute - @spritely - is *the* project I'm most proud of helping. It's smart, it's ambitious, it's *cute*. I will wax lyrical about its goals more in the coming month, but for now if you already know Spritely, they've just opened up the project to individual member/supporters […]

i mean, my take is that 90% of the fun *and* the horror of Twitter was due to the form of short, snippy statements thrown into a wispy-thin global context. Whatever you build, if it riffs on that form, is going to have that same fun/horror in proportion to its size. But whatever anyone does now […]

@sarahjeong takes us back to 2004-2005, and the US Supreme Court tries to grok file-sharing and copyright in the age of the Internet: https://www.theverge.com/c/24239057/music-license-grokster-legal-lawsuit-2004

ooh! i'm getting Mastodon spam! We've made it as an open system, everyone! Who is hacking on the akismet/anti-spam tools. We have much to learn from the past here!

And PSA: support the Internet Archive. They are good people with a good mission.

That juxtaposition though