alright y'all can hate me now :(

https://www.osnews.com/story/144653/the-reports-of-age-verification-in-linux-are-greatly-exaggerated-for-now/

So, for anyone who cares, here's a long-form response, personally and from my POV as head of #Teckids, regarding the discussion around birth date in #systemd:

https://lists.freedesktop.org/archives/systemd-devel/2026-March/052087.html

This is a great read from Aeon Essays.

What we think is a decline in literacy is a design problem

Your inability to focus isn’t a failing. It’s a design problem, and the answer isn’t getting rid of our screen time

https://aeon.co/essays/what-we-think-is-a-decline-in-literacy-is-a-design-problem

RE: https://social.treehouse.systems/@ariadne/116213132813239860

Read what Ariadne is writing about LLMs. This all tracks with my intuition, that OpenAI et al are a big grift.

You categorically do NOT need millions or billions to train a useful LLM that can communicate in human language. LLMs are good at language, it's in the name!

The reason these companies are burning massive amounts of money and using increasingly massive models is they've taken "look, this tech makes for a cute chatbot that can do useful stuff" and turned it into "if we make it bigger it'll be SMARTER!"

And the thing is, that's true... to a point. When you stop treating the LLM as a language model and start trying to turn them into an all-knowing entity that has memorized the entirety of human knowledge and can do anything you prompt it for all with the same model (or a few collaborating models), you quickly hit diminishing returns. And you end up with a thing that's kind of smart (not really) and kind of knows everything (not really) and convinces everyone to throw insane amounts of money at you because you're fundamentally using the technology for something it wasn't intended for.

The way we fight back is with small home-grown "LLMs" (SLMs?) that run on a MacBook and train on a few GPUs and training/fine tuning them for specific purposes.

The whole AIBro approach of just using prompting and in-context learning with a single all-powerful model is just patently absurd.

His comment sums things up pretty well, IMO.

https://www.ft.com/content/7cab4ec7-4712-4137-b602-119a44f771de

🌶️🌶️🌶️🌶️ take: The fact that UNIX tools haven't adapted to LFNs properly in over fifty years is terrible. Normal people want natural file names (and even technical people like myself do too).

It's a massive failing that Linux userspace has not adapted to make natural language name conventions easier to use. Computers should adapt to user needs, not the other way around.

The tech industry spent twenty years turning users into consumers, instruments into appliances, and technical literacy into a niche hobby for weirdos. They succeeded.

New post: The Slow Death of the Power User
https://fireborn.mataroa.blog/blog/the-slow-death-of-the-power-user/

#technology #opensource #linux #poweruser #techliteracy #foss

"Capable LLMs require a logic of dominance and of disregarding consent of the people producing the artifacts that are the raw material for the system. LLMs are based on extraction, exploitation and subjugation. Their politics is violence. How does one “liberate” that? What’s the case for open source violence?"

(Original title: Acting ethically in an imperfect world)

https://tante.cc/2026/02/20/acting-ethical-in-an-imperfect-world/

What kind of app do you mostly use to interact with Mastodon?

Please consider boosting for a larger sample.

#poll #fediverse #mastodon #app #formfactor