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.