Laurent Bercot

@[email protected]
864 Followers
46 Following
8.1K Posts

Grumpy Frenchman, C/Unix addict, author of s6 and other software at skarnet.org.

Good tech (so, probably not the tech you're thinking about), energy transition and climate change, leftist politics, psychology and self-improvement, pillow philosophy, songwriting and production, mechanisms of storytelling, video games as an art medium, shitposting.

Personal websitehttps://skarnet.org
Business websitehttps://skarnet.com
Twitterhttps://twitter.com/laurentbercot
Githubhttps://github.com/skarnet
Laurent Bercot5m ago
jcoglan1h ago
you know you've been computering for too long when you can recognise what this is
Laurent Bercot3h ago
Luddicus Mus1d ago

A hard ban on LLM/"AI" use in a FLOSS project is the moderate stance. I am not a moderate person.

Giving space to these machines is throwing the millions of people whose work they stole, the millions of people who suffer under their crawlers' assault under the bus.

We do not throw each other under the bus in a civil society. I hope you understand this to be the bare minimum.

Laurent Bercot14h ago
Max Leibman5d ago

When AI boosters talk about universal basic income to excuse all of the jobs they claim they can eliminate, ask:

“Then why are you working on AI, and not on universal basic income?”

If you are a journalist in this space and you don’t ask this every time UBI comes up, you are not doing your job.

Laurent Bercot14h ago
Show threadGlyph20h ago
Thankfully my maintenance portfolio exists in a backwater of obscurity and irrelevance, so I am able to think about this from at least a *partial* remove from the immediacy of the catastrophe. But even I can see a plethora of evidence—like the above—where it really looks like the extruders turn people into aggressive, unrepentant assholes. At least, they create a constituency of unrepentant assholes who are also LLM users.
Laurent Bercot14h ago
Show threadGlyph20h ago
If you are an enthusiast yourself who is interested in a sustainable open source culture, you should consider maybe dedicating some time to help a no-AI project you like fend off such people. Allowing this kind of direct abuse to take place with no pushback from your faction kinda tars you all with the same brush.
Laurent Bercot17h ago
Izzy19h ago

Remember? "Sideloading" is here to stay, and won't go away, they said? Don't be afraid, they said? Something something "we heard you"? Suuuure! Who would ever doubt it!

Attached the copy of a mail developers with apps in the PlayStore CURRENTLY receive. Please, read the text in the red box carefully:

"Apps not registered by September 2026 WILL NO LONGER BE INSTALLABLE ON CERTIFIED ANDROID DEVICES in select countries."

See an exception there? I don't.

#Google #Android #DeveloperCertfication

Laurent Bercot17h ago
Show threadCassandra is only carbon now18h ago

One of the more obvious ironies of the whole thing is that someone *should* think of the children, and should do something *for* the children, like regulating advertising markets and recommendation engines that reward radicalization pipelines, or making sure that children aren't locked into transparent-backpack surveillance state models of computing for their entire lives.

Kids need safe places to be *private* with other kids, and that's exactly what age verification takes *away*.

Laurent Bercot17h ago
Cassandra is only carbon now18h ago

RE: https://mastodon.gamedev.place/@eniko/116408040807982777

Once fascists find a wedge, they generally don't give up on it until that wedge stops working.

Age verification is just such a wedge, and it's working really really well for the fascists, especially when it comes to wedging apart the "won't someone think of the children" wing of the center-right controlled opposition.

Laurent Bercot17h ago
Show threadmcc19h ago

P2P is a world where naturally the more people use it, the faster and more resilient the network becomes. Load gets distributed. Working nodes talk to each other and ignore nonworking nodes. That's how the primitive, BitTorrent era systems worked.

Bluesky somehow applied superfancy alien future technology to invent P2P traffic jams. When one node goes down, the others go down because they depended on it. Because it's a mesh of interoperating microservices by different providers, not federation.

Laurent Bercot17h ago

RE: https://dice.camp/@artemis/116416018120041363

My relationship with the IT industry. Funny how that translates.