Mastodawn

If you don’t support alternative technology you won’t get alternative technology.

The people who build the alternatives have to afford a roof over their heads and food on the table too.

[Edit: Link to the private messaging app in question removed after learning about their cryptocurrency and alt-right associations. My original point, however, remains.]

(On a related matter, Small Technology Foundation gets under €400/month in donations – https://small-tech.org/fund-us. Thank you to everyone who contributes but I don’t think anyone believes this is in any way enough for us to survive. Instead I’ve had to sell two family homes we had in Turkey and now Laura contracts in the mainstream while I work on getting the Small Web ready for this year. This is how little support we have. It is, quite frankly, appalling when you think that the shittiest startup ideas regularly get $5M in VC and I wouldn’t recommend doing what we do to my worst enemy, much less to a recent graduate who wants to work in ethical tech.)

Small Technology Foundation: Fund Small Technology Foundation

Roz B May 20

h o ʍ l e t t May 20

→ Vulnérabilités systémiques dans le secteur du #numérique : Audition de M. Arthur #Mensch, cofondateur et directeur général de #Mistral #AI devant l'Assemblée Nationale
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kKWOkWv6pJM

Audition sous serment.

« [À horizon 3 ou 4 ans,] on parle de 10 % à 20 % des OPEX [dépenses d'exploitation] et de la masse salariale du monde. Un client achète une technologie si la technologie ne prend pas plus de 50 % de la valeur. Ça veut dire 20 % de gain de #productivité. »

Arthur Mensch, cofondateur de Mistral AI, est auditionné à l'Assemblée nationale - 12/05/2026

YouTube

Roz B May 19

Claire McNab May 19

I am staggered by the sheer hugeness of this.

The #WelshGovernment has a policy of bilingualism. All meetings include translators, so that speakers of English or Welsh can participate equally. But every member of the Welsh Cabinet is a native speaker of #Cymraeg, so the Cabinet meetings will be held in their native lsnguage.

#PlaidCymru #Wales

Imposing the #EnglishLanguage was a key component of the imperial project of Britishness. But the tide has turned. 💚 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁷󠁬󠁳󠁿

Roz B May 18

War and Peas 🧿May 18

Roz B May 17

Mitchell Hashimoto May 15

I strongly believe there are entire companies right now under heavy AI psychosis and its impossible to have rational conversations about it with them. I can't name any specific people because they include personal friends I deeply respect, but I worry about how this plays out.

I lived through the great MTBF vs MTTR (mean-time-between-failure vs. mean-time-to-recovery) reckoning of infrastructure during the transition to cloud and cloud automation. All those arguments are rearing their ugly heads again but now its... the whole software development industry (maybe the whole world, really).

It's frightening, because the psychosis folks operate under an almost absolute "MTTR is all you need" mentality: "its fine to ship bugs because the agents will fix them so quickly and at a scale humans can't do!" We learned in infrastructure that MTTR is great but you can't yeet resilient systems entirely.

The main issue is I don't even know how to bring this up to people I know personally, because bringing this topic up leads to immediately dismissals like "no no, it has full test coverage" or "bug reports are going down" or something, which just don't paint the whole picture.

We already learned this lesson once in infrastructure: you can automate yourself into a very resilient catastrophe machine. Systems can appear healthy by local metrics while globally becoming incomprehensible. Bug reports can go down while latent risk explodes. Test coverage can rise while semantic understanding falls. Changes happens so fast that nobody notices the underlying architecture decaying.

I worry.

Roz B May 15