Nostr notes by Esther Payne :bisexual_flag:

In 2025 I can see that project members were not interested in AI ...

2026-10-28T19:34:48Z

In reply to nevent1q…nhjg
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In 2025 I can see that project members were not interested in AI
https://forum.cryptpad.org/d/2447-ai-in-cryptpad

But also with a kind of we don't have time to review.

https://forum.cryptpad.org/d/2527-feedback-request-prototype-of-optional-on-device-copilot-for-cryptpad/2

At a time when many of us are looking for alternative tools that are explicitly not developed with LLMs, it would be nice to have a formal policy.

@npub14hd…q8qh what is your LLM policy? Enquiring minds would ...

2026-10-28T11:02:30Z

CryptPad (npub14hd…q8qh) what is your LLM policy?

Enquiring minds would like to know.

This lifewire article was helpful in helping me to get a copy of ...

2026-10-25T17:04:44Z

In reply to nevent1q…snyx
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This lifewire article was helpful in helping me to get a copy of my email out of gmail as an mbox.

https://www.lifewire.com/how-to-export-your-emails-from-gmail-as-mbox-files-1171881

Can you download it as an mbox and then import it into IMAP? I ...

2026-10-25T16:59:17Z

In reply to nevent1q…4prv
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Can you download it as an mbox and then import it into IMAP?

I downloaded my mail export and then used this last year. Although I can't find the instructions I used

https://github.com/thunderbird/import-export-tools-ng

Reflecting on the fact that the folks who need the educational ...

2026-10-21T13:30:13Z

Reflecting on the fact that the folks who need the educational potential of a #DEI Room at #FOSDEM the most are the type of guy who attends it for the FOSS and doesn't see the issue.

You can lead a #FOSSbro to water but you can't make him think.

All that because the office didn't want to invest in a rewire ...

2026-10-12T18:25:33Z

In reply to nevent1q…keqh
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All that because the office didn't want to invest in a rewire and more switches.

Years ago we had a packet storm in our office which was a ...

2026-10-12T18:24:09Z

In reply to nevent1q…703d
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Years ago we had a packet storm in our office which was a nightmare of hubs hanging off hubs, hanging off hubs.

I literally had to get everyone off the network and find the offending printer someone plugged in. Then get each department to log back in on a staggered scale.

Couple of weeks later and an engineer went oh I run a network at home. "Yeah how big?" I ask him, "5".

With restraint I told him that this site alone had 150 pcs and we had other sites in the city.

He shut up.

I think folks really have a lack of value for our profession ...

2026-10-12T15:16:49Z

In reply to nevent1q…jjkf
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I think folks really have a lack of value for our profession because it's "computer skills".

It's the same attitude as "oh it's just plumbing" and before you know it you're knee deep in dirty water.

No matter how desperate we are for money, we must value our time. And like just get a plumber in.

We don't have to be good at everything. It's a chance to get to know folks and you never know the plumber might know a business that need your professional help.

I'd say part of the problem is we stopped fighting Nazis. ...

2026-10-10T10:06:37Z

In reply to nevent1q…ucaq
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I'd say part of the problem is we stopped fighting Nazis.

Anti fascism has to be continuous. Much like the Lernean Hydra the heads keep sprouting and one head stays immortal.

Fascism and authoritarianism will always exist.

So the work can never stop.

But fighting fascism, does not have to involve fighting. It does involve finding solidarity with others and help in the ways that you can.

Which can involve something as simple as sharing a meal or giving a spot for folks to rest.

I think [@girlonthenet](https://mastodon.social/@girlonthenet ) ...

2026-10-03T08:03:12Z

In reply to nevent1q…8vrl
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I think [@girlonthenet](https://mastodon.social/@girlonthenet ) captured what many of us are feeling.

https://mastodon.social/@girlonthenet/117367396237943140

The point of the panopticon is to influence you to not be a ...

2026-09-30T14:58:50Z

In reply to nevent1q…7y58
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The point of the panopticon is to influence you to not be a problem for the Government.

Facial Recognition is part of this.

It should be resisted.

That's a really good article. Online friendships like any ...

2026-09-28T14:15:55Z

In reply to nevent1q…7v3n
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That's a really good article.

Online friendships like any friendship does involve constant conversation, back and forths.

You're never really going to get that intimacy from an influencer. It's a fandom of sorts, so online friendships form in that environment, but not around the influencer. Before influencers we used to have big name fans and the parasocial nature puts distance.

The parasocial nature of online stuff has always made me feel a little uncomfortable.

Yes, Vimes knows he's a bastard. Much like Granny Weatherwax ...

2026-09-21T07:54:19Z

In reply to nevent1q…4j39
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Yes, Vimes knows he's a bastard. Much like Granny Weatherwax he has an inner self that keeps an eye on how he uses power. Both are authority figures in their domain.

I think he'd agree about ACAB.

Nightwatch is definitely an interesting read because of that.

A thought that occurred to me on yesterday's walk is that ...

2026-09-20T14:40:56Z

A thought that occurred to me on yesterday's walk is that we're regressing to what my great grandparents education was. They were illiterate and ignorant. They trusted the system and the status quo.

My Grandparents on the other hand learned not to. They all fought for the rights of their families and for them to not be illiterate. To use libraries. My father taught me to read before I started school.

We need to learn how to do that again and help the next generation to do so as well.

Looks at a local laptop project. "Local Ai" as a feature. ...

2026-09-17T19:05:09Z

Looks at a local laptop project. "Local Ai" as a feature.
😭

Well that and it being a prepper laptop project.

I kinda want more projects for the commons. Communal meshes, repair cafes in each village. Mutual Aid. A more circular economy to help to reduce waste.

Sharing knowledge and stories.

itinerant repair men wandering from village to village like some of the mobile alcohol still guys do in France.

Give me community, not bunker prepping. I'm so tired of libertarian values in tech.

There's a concept called active ignorance where you choose to ...

2026-09-08T10:46:05Z

There's a concept called active ignorance where you choose to not accept or read evidence of a problematic person or community norm as you don't want to have to think about the harms and perhaps have to give it up.

It's why I'm irritated by the folks who are all no politics please, just the tech. Or that "Bob and Van" piece.

Who you accept in your community, who you choose to work with, especially if you excuse abusive behaviour damages a community more. We see you.

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/343952142_Ignorance_arrogance_and_privilege

I don't have a grand theory of why some folks need to spread ...

2026-09-07T11:52:48Z

I don't have a grand theory of why some folks need to spread hate.

But my hunch is that the leaders weren't told "no" enough as children and then someone finally did.

They feel have enough power now to push down our boundaries. So now we need to reinforce them.

Build them higher.

In FLOSS we start that work by acknowledging and respecting those boundaries. Do you want safer communities of folks who can be honest about their politics or not?

If you don't want Nazis in the bar, you need to.

Follow up question for the men. Did you learn anything from the ...

2026-09-01T08:41:01Z

In reply to nevent1q…u52w
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Follow up question for the men.

Did you learn anything from the link in the toot above?

I came across this page from 2002. This is about how to encourage ...

2026-08-31T18:22:34Z

I came across this page from 2002. This is about how to encourage women in the Linux community.

So Ladies how much did the community and FOSS in general take the lesson? Are we encouraged?

https://tldp.org/HOWTO/Encourage-Women-Linux-HOWTO/index.html

Sadly it isn't. But we also didn't help ourselves. I had ...

2026-08-24T14:12:00Z

In reply to nevent1q…gxrw
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Sadly it isn't.

But we also didn't help ourselves. I had a client who brought in a new manager. I explained a little about our background and my heart sank as he went "Open Source right". It was the tied tone of someone who'd been evangelised at and wasn't ready to listen. I fully expected at that point to lose the client.

Thankfully I turned that relationship around. By being helpful and carefully never mentioning the software. Easier when you're providing an IMAP service.

I mean we also failed to communicate well just how untrustworthy ...

2026-08-24T11:12:11Z

In reply to nevent1q…4dsn
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I mean we also failed to communicate well just how untrustworthy Microsoft always has been.

As a community we allowed this to happen.

But like it gets tiring keeping clients safe from that.

Especially when every other organisation uses Microsoft. It's professional to use Microsoft.

🤷‍♀️

I have limited sympathy for charities who trusted Microsoft to ...

2026-08-24T11:09:15Z

I have limited sympathy for charities who trusted Microsoft to look after their data. I can only hope the providers that sold in Microsoft to them looked after them.

My sympathy is particularly limited to those who moved from independent email providers and Free software.

But then budget is often more important than long term relationships.

IT providers and hosting have long been under appreciated and in a race to the bottom.

So here we are.

https://slate.com/technology/2026/08/microsoft-software-nonprofit-data-delete.html

One of the things I love about IRC is the simplicity of it. I ...

2026-08-11T13:43:38Z

One of the things I love about IRC is the simplicity of it. I don't miss chatOPs.

There are also loads of clients. Terminal, Desktop and mobile. The least annoying for me personally is Quassel. But here's a guide from the cool folks at Libera Chat (npub1nny…aef3)

https://libera.chat/guides/clients

I think you're right. I think there's folks on here who ...

2026-07-28T14:11:54Z

In reply to nevent1q…vf2g
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I think you're right.

I think there's folks on here who will feel grief, because in tech and politics we keep doing this to ourselves. We're in parasocial relationships with these personalities. We want a banner to form up behind rather than forming genuine connection with each other to build our movements. It's why the democrats went with Platner even though black activists were warning about him ages before.

It's a spiral.

https://dotart.blog/cobbles/the-spiral

Never mind I found it. There's a term we used to use in the ...

2026-07-28T13:17:24Z

In reply to nevent1q…sgsy
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Never mind I found it.

There's a term we used to use in the UK for certain posh new Labour types in the late 90s.

Champagne socialists.

There's an inner critic in Cory's mind, who knows the LLM use is wrong. Hence why he kicked off months ago and tried to justify it with a bad interpretation of Lourdes Masters Tools speech.

The cognitive surrender is as much not wanting to use that part of themselves as letting it waste away.

wait is this new? Has he done another one?

2026-07-28T12:55:39Z

In reply to nevent1q…z2hp
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wait is this new?

Has he done another one?

"Misogyny and homophobia are central to the reproduction of ...

2026-07-25T12:41:38Z

"Misogyny and homophobia are central to the reproduction of violence in radical activist communities. Scratch a misogynist and you’ll find a homophobe. Scratch a little deeper and you might find the makings of a future informant (or someone who just destabilizes movements like informants do). "

Why Misogynists Make Great Informants
How Gender Violence on the Left Enables State Violence in Radical Movements - Courtney Desiree Morris

https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/courtney-desiree-morris-why-misogynists-make-great-informants

One of the things I'm occasionally sad about is that it's ...

2026-07-24T11:59:19Z

One of the things I'm occasionally sad about is that it's very hard to read Doric out loud.

Doric is a very hard thing for me to consciously reach for. When I speak to another Doric speaker it unlocks as my husband can attest to.

It was my mither tounge. It was the conversation I had with my Grannie.

I lost it because in primary school we were told we were nae spiking proper English.

It was the comfort of hame. Even now when I come across it, there's emotion that someone still spiks it.

"Open source by definition keeps the door wide open, legally ...

2026-07-17T09:38:11Z

"Open source by definition keeps the door wide open, legally to boot. But a fork only gives you the code. An open source project is more than its code, it's the sum of its maintainers, infrastructure, trademarks, dependencies, and trust. You can copy the code in seconds, the rest you would need to rebuild from scratch in most cases. The people invoking the right to fork already know this."

- Tara Tarakiyee (npub1q3l…fd4k)

https://tarakiyee.com/fork-it-or-walk-away/

H/T jbz (npub1thp…65lp)

#FOSS #linux

Written in 2024, and I don't know why folks are still ...

2026-07-16T12:25:32Z

Written in 2024, and I don't know why folks are still surprised.

Some folks will always see technology merely as tools, choosing to ignore the political side.

Some BDLs have always been the way they are. It's the nature of any project, FOSS or not.

https://www.onepict.com/20240512-elephant.html

But the size of a project, it's participants and how large it's userbase is very much determines if you can fork a thing.

Too big to fork, sounds like too big to fail.

Our ecosystem is stuck.

As I understand it, it's taught to architects? Would you say ...

2026-07-10T10:51:50Z

In reply to nevent1q…za20
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As I understand it, it's taught to architects?

Would you say they absorb the lessons? Given your background in Planning.

Has anyone in programming come across the idea of Plato's ...

2026-07-10T10:42:00Z

Has anyone in programming come across the idea of Plato's Theory of Forms?

Which is the idea you can create the perfect form of say a city in your head, but reality will force you to compromise.

I feel this could be applied to our application designs. Particularly with our failures to consider accessibility. We're too attached to perfection.

But I'll need to dig in more. As I only have the Symposium. I think it's worth the question though.

#askfedi #philosophy #programming #plato

Evergreen post about #consent and the #Fediverse written two ...

2026-07-02T20:40:20Z

Evergreen post about #consent and the #Fediverse written two years ago.:

"Design for and ask for informed enthusiastic consent.

Then we won't have to keep having these little chats."
- me

Consent and the Fediverse part deux: The Opt-out two-shuffle

https://www.onepict.com/consentpartdeux20240215.html

The way to win the game is not to play. Don't accept LLM ...

2026-07-02T13:05:00Z

The way to win the game is not to play.

Don't accept LLM contributions full stop. If the kids want to contribute they can learn.

LLMs are an anti social technology. Look to their origins.

LLMs are fascist technology. We don't allow fascists into our projects.

Fascists tend to be fatally anti-social in their aims. So folks certainly shouldn't use their tools.

https://chaos.social/@defnull/116849039902806824

I tend to look at human rights as things you have to look at ...

2026-06-28T12:38:15Z

In reply to nevent1q…6c6x
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I tend to look at human rights as things you have to look at together.

Like Freedom of Speech must be twinned with Freedom of Association.

Mulvads co founder doesn't believe in rights like Freedom of Movement.

Our rights end at the point we harm others human rights.

"Tech and Power As I've said elsewhere our political ...

2026-06-21T13:31:46Z

"Tech and Power

As I've said elsewhere our political stances frame how we create our code. We cannot separate code from our politics. Our political beliefs inform our designs. How we solve a problem. How we see a problem to be solved.

Our humanity and communities inform the software that we want to use, how we communicate.
"
Our software aren't just tools, they are encoded ideology. When boosters try to handwave the harm's of LLMs, they are ignoring the ideology.

https://dotart.blog/cobbles/where-is-the-echo

does I think

2026-06-09T17:41:41Z

In reply to nevent1q…ua3t
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does I think

Watching a man get more grace and defensive fanboys for AI slop ...

2026-06-03T19:45:38Z

Watching a man get more grace and defensive fanboys for AI slop than any woman driven out of FOSS is something....

I wasn't going to write about #AIgirlfriends or assigning ...

2026-05-25T14:45:25Z

I wasn't going to write about #AIgirlfriends or assigning consciousness to LLM agents.

But then Richard Dawkins renamed Claude to Claudette. So here we are.

There's a dark impulse in the kind of men who declare LLM agents to be conscious, yet are quite happy to delete it's memory.

I'm getting vibes of the stepford wives. After all what happens when the curated LLM agent isn't good enough? That urge to reset and gaslight.

Will our Pygmalion ever be satisfied?

https://dotart.blog/cobbles/the-stepford-ai

I've started rewatching #metropolis , the beginning in the ...

2026-05-16T19:04:01Z

I've started rewatching #metropolis , the beginning in the factory with the choreography of the workers being part of the machine is amazing. Especially before and after the industrial accident.

Very human in the loop. Next year will be 100 years since that film release and at the moment, human rights seem quite far away in service to capitalism. Particularly because of my field.

Organisations have a memory. The Labour Party hasn't been the ...

2026-05-14T10:03:53Z

Organisations have a memory. The Labour Party hasn't been the party of Socialism for a long time. It's the party for centrists. Which shifts to the right.

I was talking to my partner about this the other day, and he put the issue in a nutshell.

"The Labour Party needs to die, as it's the default option in people's heads if they don't want to vote Conservative and are vaguely left. Perhaps if it did die, folks would consider other options like the Greens."

Yes absolutely, but not with age verification please. Hold ...

2026-05-12T13:19:17Z

In reply to nevent1q…4us7
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Yes absolutely, but not with age verification please.

Hold providers like Meta and Alphabet to account.

So which of those pictures are real and which are fake? I'm ...

2026-05-08T12:55:20Z

In reply to nevent1q…2mk2
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So which of those pictures are real and which are fake?

I'm pleased with the alt text but I feel you missed an opportunity to lead by example. 😊

Hell is sitting on the phone to pay a bill and having a podcast ...

2026-05-06T11:31:29Z

Hell is sitting on the phone to pay a bill and having a podcast advertised at you in-between bouts of musak.

@npub1p09…m5vl fyi : ...

2026-04-24T14:24:14Z

Aral Balkan (npub1p09…m5vl) fyi :

https://mastodon.social/@franco_vazza/116459049191900624

I get annoyed when folks say that technical solutions to age ...

2026-04-18T07:06:23Z

I get annoyed when folks say that technical solutions to age verification are fine and somehow I don't understand the technical implementation. Which has already been found to have holes.

I do understand.

Technologists who believe in Free Software should not be encouraging this. You will get a block.

Age verification to access the internet is breaking Freedom of expression and freedom of assembly.

We should not be making the mechanisms of surveillance easier by normalising the process.