So, I started to volunteer in our local community centre to help (mostly) elder people with their computer and smartphone problems.

It's fascinating. We have people there up to their 90s and they are all every open for change.

We remove ad ID's from phones, change default browsers, switch from MS Office to #Libreoffice.

And for next time I already have a date with an elder lady to switch her old Windows 10 laptop to Linux Mint.
And she is not the only one!

What a time to be alive.

All of that AI slop money could have gone to installing equipment for safe air in schools, hospitals, and public transit, powered by renewable energy with minerals mined by people receiving fair wages in a much safer workplace.

We could have avoided the high death toll of COVID and prepared for the next pandemic.

Instead we get even shittier code, abuse images, far-right bots, dodgy tech in healthcare, and even more precarious state of things for artists.

I wish we had spent the last 26 years teaching people that the reason the 2000 bug didn't destroy a significant amount of our infrastructure is because *we caught it* and *spent thousands of hours fixing it* BEFORE the year 2000

Because within that little perplexion - people thinking the problem was a hoax because it was fixed before it destroyed shit - is an encapsulation of the current era of Western politics, including COVID mitigation, lesser evil politics, fascism, and crime rate hyperbole

we've built our global economy on the premise that software has a certain bar of quality, which as it turns out was based only on the goodwill of early enthusiast programmers.

now that the market has caught up and erased the negotiation power software engineers once enjoyed, the world is careening head first into a harsh reality of bug-ridden, adversarial software at odds with everyday life.

free software is still our north star. it's more important than ever.

There is something truly magical about witnessing (and helping) your child learn to read and write. *Especially* in the age of AI.

Meanwhile, many humans only a decade older than my child already default to using LLM systems for any form of writing. For “convenience’s sake.” Not to mention grown adults (who should know better).

This is making me even more motivated to advocate for digital literacy… and make sure my child develops & nurtures critical thinking skills. For life.

Resist ✊

#NoAI

I read this article today and quite liked it

https://www.drewlyton.com/story/the-future-is-not-self-hosted/

An analogy came to mind when reading it: if the cloud is feudalism, self hosted is sustenance farming.

Sustenance farming… Well, it sucks, it’s brutal, it’s awful. No wonder people want centralized infrastructure! Groceries aren’t a concept in sustenance farming, neither is something like “food sensitivities”—you just die or accept the feudalism because you have no other choice.

Some people happen to like sustenance farming and the idea of living fully off the grid! But they’re not normal. That’s fine, but it’s not workable for most people and carries an enormous amount of unstated privilege. For example: the person in the article casually buying a server and dropping a few thousand dollars on it, setting up several complicated systems in it, and “only” spending a few weeks of free time doing so? Privileged. Fun hobby if you like that, though!

The bad part, in my opinion, is that our only choices are currently techno fascism… Or the sustenance farming that killed almost everyone who attempted it. That’s not a great set of choices and it doesn’t have to be like that.

I liked the reference to community clouds in the ending of the article. It reminded me very much of Common Pool Resources that Elinor Ostrom talks about, or the emergent strategy of adrienne marie brown. I need to read more Ursula Franklin, but I suspect her writing is right at home here too.

I’d like to live in a world where communities uplift and support each other and are able to do so. I’m doing my best to help make that a reality, even if I’ve had to spend the last year or two putting my own mask on first :)