rustybikes 🐧

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"...It's called Social Narcotics..."
rustybikes 🐧11h ago
Cory Doctorow11h ago

Today's threads (a thread)

Inside: When Google's slop meets webslop, search stops; and more!

Archived at: https://pluralistic.net/2025/07/15/inhuman-gigapede/

#Pluralistic

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rustybikes 🐧11h ago
Smudge The Insult Cat 🐀13h ago
rustybikes 🐧11h ago
Cory Doctorow12h ago

It's been more than a year since I gave up on Google Search (I switched to Kagi.com and never looked back). I don't miss it. It had gotten terrible. It's gotten worse since, thanks to AI (of course):

https://pluralistic.net/2024/04/04/teach-me-how-to-shruggie/#kagi

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If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this thread to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/07/15/inhuman-gigapede/#coprophagic-ai

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rustybikes 🐧11h ago
SomaFM12h ago
We have some new merch in the SomaFM store: a new insulated water bottle, new hats, SomaFM XXV poster (framed and unframed)
https://store.somafm.com
rustybikes 🐧12h ago
𝐿𝒶𝓃𝒶 "not yet begun to fight"13h ago

Fuck congress. This is the full, unredacted Epstein List.

Provenance:
The PDF is a photocopy of Jeffrey Epstein's "Little Black Book", obtained with the help of a journalist in connection with an FBI sting investigation. The handwritten notes and circled names are made by Juan Alessi, who was Epstein's house manager from 1991 to 2002. He circled the names to show the FBI which people were known insiders in Epstein's child sex trafficking ring. Juan testified to this under oath during the trial of Ghislaine Maxwell, convicted of sex trafficking minors on Epstein's plane to his island.

Donald Trump's name appears on page 80 of the book (PDF page 85), and is circled.

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1pAmw8p8zddij3uKVTSL9NWYTkondQ_bO/view

Jeffrey_Epstein39s_Little_Black_Book_unredacted.pdf

Google Docs
rustybikes 🐧1d ago
Sean Heber4d ago

ChatGPT and other AI services are basically killing @Iconfactory and I'm not exaggerating or being hyperbolical.

First Twitter/Elon killed our main app revenue that kept the lights on around here, then generative AI exploded to land a final blow to design revenue.

rustybikes 🐧1d ago
Natasha Jay1d ago
The current breakaway leader in the Tour de Nap 🚴
rustybikes 🐧1d ago
“Just 5 more minutes, plz…” 💤
#cats #CatsOfMastodon #MondayMotivation #monday #cats #catstodon
rustybikes 🐧1d ago
Cory Doctorow1d ago

Today's threads (a thread)

Inside: Semantic drift versus ethical drift; and more!

Archived at: https://pluralistic.net/2025/07/14/pole-star/

#Pluralistic

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rustybikes 🐧1d ago
Cory Doctorow1d ago

More than a quarter-century ago, a group of hackers decided that, as a label, "free software" was a liability, and they set out to replace it with a different label, "open source," on the basis that "open source" was easier to understand and using it instead of "free software" would speed up adoption.

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If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this thread to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/07/14/pole-star/#gnus-not-utilitarian

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×
Cory Doctorow1d ago

More than a quarter-century ago, a group of hackers decided that, as a label, "free software" was a liability, and they set out to replace it with a different label, "open source," on the basis that "open source" was easier to understand and using it instead of "free software" would speed up adoption.

--

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this thread to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/07/14/pole-star/#gnus-not-utilitarian

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Show threadCory Doctorow1d ago

They were right. The switch from calling it "free software" to calling it "open source" sparked a massive, unbroken wave of adoption, to the point where today it's hard to find anyone who professes animus to "open source," not even Microsoft (who once called it "a cancer").

Two motives animated "open source" partisans: first, they didn't like the ambiguity of "free software." Famously, Richard Stallman (who coined "free software") viewed this ambiguity as a feature, not a bug.

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Show threadCory Doctorow1d ago

He liked that "free" had a double meaning: "free as in speech" (an ethical proposition) and "free as in beer" (without cost). Stallman viewed the ambiguity of "free software" as a koan/conversation-starter: a normie, hearing "free software," would inquire as to whether this meant that the software couldn't be sold commercially, which was an opening for free software advocates to explain the moral philosophy of software freedom.

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Show threadCory Doctorow1d ago

For "open source" partisans, this was a bug, not a feature. They wanted to enlist other hackers to develop freely licensed codes, and convince their bosses to adopt this code for internal and public-facing use. For the "open source" advocates, a term designed to confuse was a liability, a way to turn off potential collaborators ("if you're explaining, you're losing").

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Show threadCory Doctorow1d ago

But the "open source" side wasn't solely motivated by a desire to simplify things by jettisoning the requirement to conscript curious bystanders into a philosophical colloquy. Many of them also disagreed with the philosophy of free software. They weren't excited about building a "commons" or in preventing rent extraction by monopolistic firms. Some of them quite liked the idea of someday extracting their own rents.

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Show threadCory Doctorow1d ago

For these "open source" advocates, the advantage of free software methodologies - publishing code for peer review and third-party improvement - was purely instrumental: it produced better code. Publication, peer review, and unrestricted follow-on innovation are practices firmly rooted in the Enlightenment, and are the foundation of the scientific method.

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Show threadCory Doctorow1d ago

Allowing strangers to look at your code, critique it, and fix it is a form of epistemic humility, an admission that we are all forever at risk of fooling ourselves, and it's only through adversarial peer review that we can know whether we are right.

This is true! Publishing code makes it better, and prohibitions on code publication make code worse. That's the lesson of the ransomware epidemics of the past decade: these started with a series of leaks from the NSA and CIA.

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Show threadCory Doctorow1d ago

Both agencies have an official policy of researching widely used software in hopes of finding exploitable bugs and then keeping those bugs secret, so that they will be preserved in the wild and can be exploited when the agencies wish to attack their enemies.

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Show threadCory Doctorow1d ago

The name for this practice is NOBUS, which stands for "No One But US": we alone are smart enough to find these bugs, so if we discover them and keep them secret, no one else will find them and use them to attack our own people. This is a provably false proposition, and a very dangerous one.

The Vault 7, Vault 8, and NSA cyberweapon leaks blew a hole in NOBUS.

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Show threadCory Doctorow1d ago

Failures in the agencies' own security protocols resulted in the release of a long list of defects (mostly in versions of Windows, but other OSes and programs were affected). Malicious software authors used these as can openers to pry open millions of computers, enlisting them into botnets and/or shutting them down with ransomware.

These leaks also provided some "ground truth" for researchers who study malicious software.

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Show threadCory Doctorow1d ago

Once these researchers had a list of which defects the spy agencies had discovered and when, they were able to compare that list of defects that malicious software authors had discovered and exploited in the wild, and estimate the likelihood that a spy agency defect would be independently discovered and abused by the agency's enemies, who they were supposed to be protecting us from. It turns out that the rediscovery rate for spy agency bugs is about 20% per year.

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Show threadCory Doctorow1d ago

In other words, there's a one in five chance that a bug that the CIA or NSA is hoarding will be used to attack America and Americans within the year.

NOBUS is a form of software alchemy. Alchemy is the pre-Enlightenment version of scientific inquiry, and it resembles science in many respects: an alchemist observes phenomena in the natural world, hypothesizes a causal relationship to explain them, and performs an experiment to test their hypothesis.

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Show threadCory Doctorow1d ago

But here is where the resemblance ends: where the scientist must publish their results for them to count as science, the alchemist kept their findings to themselves. This meant that alchemists were able to trick themselves into thinking they were right, including about things they were *very* wrong about, like whether drinking mercury was a good idea. The failure to publish meant that every alchemist had to discover, for themself, that mercury was a deadly poison.

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Show threadCory Doctorow1d ago

Alchemists never figured out how to transform lead into gold, but they did convert the base metal of superstition into the precious metal of science by putting it through the crucible of disclosure and peer-review. Both open source and free software partisans claim transparency as a key virtue of their system, because transparency leads to improvement ("with enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow").

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Show threadCory Doctorow1d ago

At the outset, "open source" and "free software" were synonyms. All code that was open was also free, and vice-versa. But over the ensuing decades, that changed, as Benjamin "Mako" Hill explained in his 2018 Libreplanet keynote, "How markets coopted free software’s most powerful weapon":

https://mako.cc/copyrighteous/libreplanet-2018-keynote

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How markets coopted free software’s most powerful weapon (LibrePlanet 2018 Keynote)

Several months ago, I gave the closing keynote address at LibrePlanet 2018. The talk was about the thing that scares me most about the future of free culture, free software, and peer production. A …

copyrighteous
Show threadCory Doctorow1d ago

As Hill explains, the philosophical differences between "open" better code) and "free" (code to enhance human freedom) may not have mattered at the outset, but they each served as a kind of pole star for its own adherents, leading them down increasingly divergent paths. Each new technology and practice represented a decision-point for the movement: "Is this something we should embrace as compatible with our project, or should we reject it as antithetical to our goals?"

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Show threadCory Doctorow1d ago

If you were an "open source" person, the question you asked yourself at each juncture was, "Does this new thing increase code-quality?" If you were a "free software" person, the question you had to answer was, "Does this make people more free?"

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Show threadCory Doctorow1d ago

These value judgments carried enormous weight. They influenced whether hackers would work to improve a given package or pursue a use-case; they determined who would speak or exhibit at conferences, they created (or deflated) "buzz," and they influenced the direction that new license versionss would take, and whether those licenses would be permissible on influential software distribution channels.

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Show threadCory Doctorow1d ago

For a movement that runs on goodwill as much as on dollars, the social acceptability of a practice, a license, a technology or a person, mattered.

Hill describes how chasing openness without regard to its consequences for freedom created a strange situation, one in which giant tech monopolists have software freedom, while the rest of us have to make do with open source.

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Show threadCory Doctorow1d ago

All the software that powers the cloud systems of Facebook, Google, Apple, Microsoft, etc, is freely licensed. You can download it from Github. You can inspect it to your heart's content. You can even do volunteer work to improve it.

But only Google, Apple, Microsoft and Facebook get to decide whether to run it, and how to configure it.

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Show threadCory Doctorow1d ago

And since nearly all the code our users depend on takes a loop through a Big Tech cloud, the decisions made by these Big Tech firms set the outer boundaries of what our code can do. They have total freedom while we make do with the crumbs they drop from on high.

In other words, the freedom mattered, and when we forgot about it, we lost it.

Which is not to say that free software doesn't benefit from open source's popularity.

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Show threadJorge Candeias1d ago

@pluralistic The main problem of a word to describe what we're for is that it would be immediately distorted and destroyed by fascist propagandists.

Take social justice for a prime example. What's wrong with that as a concept? Who wouldn't want a bit of justice in society?

And yet, look at what they did to it. For many people, SJW is a slur. And it is intended as such by fascist propagandists.

Show threadMartin Vermeer FCD1d ago
@jorgecandeias @pluralistic Or 'woke'. Having your eyes open, seeing injustice, rather than sleepwalking past it. Good thing, right?
Show threadMidniteMikeWrites1d ago

@martinvermeer @jorgecandeias @pluralistic Language has always been a battleground of essentially contested concepts. I don't think that's a reason to avoid labels, even in a world eager to mislabel you.

Anyway, I think this movement is a huge tent of other existing ones. People working to expand democracy/dignity across economic, social, and political dimensions. Not sure one term is desirable for this, but maybe we should recognize we're addressing the same problem from different angles.

Show threadBeelbeebub1d ago
@jorgecandeias @pluralistic You'd think "anti-fascist" would be a fairly uncontroversial thing.
Show threadJorge Candeias1d ago

@Beelbeebub @pluralistic ... and yet, antifa, which is merely short for anti-fascist, is "a terrorist organization" now.

🤷‍♂️

Show threadmasyukun1d ago

@pluralistic This coalition seems based on human rights. The very phrase is racist (to Klingons, per Star Trek VI).

If something is Pro-Human, it's necessarily unified against non-human AI and corporate entities, enforcing a simple hierarchy when they're in conflict.

It could start by solidifying the sanctity of human lives: their right to privacy, their right to identity and expression, and their right to humane labor.