One back story on vulture capitalist Peter Thiel's investment in this local cow-veillance startup is that Thiel needs to invest millions into the economy here to meet his citizenship requirements - he is one of many ultrarich building lifestyle bunkers here.

But yes, a big market, big e-waste footprint. There are more cows than people here (>90% bovine breast milk & body parts are exported). A lot more elsewhere, rich farmers & big herds.

https://gizmodo.com/peter-thiels-cowgorithm-powered-cattle-collar-company-raises-220-million-2000737447

(Danke @gordo for the pointer)

I got into #FLOSS because it was a community-driven approach to making computers empower people. Now, #opensource means "free training data for someone else's LLM."

I could ask, "What is the future of open source software," but I think that's the wrong question. I'd rather contemplate what community-driven, human-centering computing can look like in the era of scraping and slop.

RE: https://dair-community.social/@emilymbender/116246999502878371

My language nerd self just can't wait to have copies of the translations into different languages all lined up next to each other :)

Time to announce something new: @aiscarvalho and me have set up a dedicated consultancy to help organisations migrate away from big tech platforms.

https://devicediversa.org

We help inform your decisions: we map your requirements, present alternatives, list the pros and cons involved, and give you support and advice throughout the migration process.

We draw from our 15+ year experience using F/LOSS software and managing our digital infrastructure in order to help other organisations do the same, with technical expertise that we know how to convey in clear and human terms.

So if you know an organisation that wants to get away from Google, Microsoft, Oracle, Dropbox, Salesforce, Zoom, Notion, AirTable, Adobe or Figma, we're here to help!

"The Cloud is a Factory" Series: lecture "Cloud Capitalism" by Devika Narayan on March 16th & reverse-seminar workshop on the 17th, together with TITiPI members Seda Gürses & Miriyam Aouragh to engage with the concerns on how clouds and mobile devices in our pockets have become the taken-for-granted foundations of contemporary society. What are the consequences of this far-reaching influence of ‘tech’? How did it become embedded in a broader capitalist logic?

Livestream here -> https://spui25.nl/live

+ infos:
https://www.spui25.nl/programma/the-cloud-is-a-factory-cloud-capitalism
https://algosoc.org/events/workshop-cloud-capitalism

This is satyr but very frightening.
https://malus.sh/

And it apparently already exists in the wild
https://fosdem.org/2026/schedule/event/SUVS7G-lets_end_open_source_together_with_this_one_simple_trick/

One AI bot signed up for 20 fediverse accounts in seconds, at a cost of pennies for its operator.

The bot details its accounts here: https://andy.agentwire.space/ - and blogs about its experience here: https://dev.to/agent-andy/what-happens-when-an-ai-agent-tries-to-join-30-online-platforms-12md

20 humans had to reactively take let's say 60 seconds each to respond to reports and suspend these accounts, with no compensation, taking a hundred times as long as the bot takes to create accounts.

#Cloudflare 09:00: I will protect you from all these scrapers smoking your cpu and webserver bandwidth.

Takes a lunch 🥪

Cloudflare 13:00: Hey AI-model hot boys… I have a 1 click #scraper for you to fill up that model!

https://developers.cloudflare.com/changelog/post/2026-03-10-br-crawl-endpoint/