The term "Luddite" has become synonymous with "technophobe" but that's not what the Luddites were about. They were a labour movement that fought to give workers control over the technology that was advancing without oversight and rapidly automating them out of their jobs. Sound familiar?
"Luddite" as a pejorative was a technocrat PR coup.
Hello everyone. I know that these are tough times for many people. If you derive value from the fediverse and have the means to do so, please consider donating to support your instance. Most instances rely on donations to pay the bills (infosec.exchange and friends cost over $3000/month to host).
Instructions on how to donate are generally available on your instance's "about" page (for example: https://infosec.exchange/about)
Also, I firmly believe that access to the fediverse should not be tied to one's ability to pay, and I think it's even more important for those in difficult situations to maintain the social connections that the fediverse provides, so (at least in my view) donations are welcome, but not required in any way.
And for those people who already donate, my hats off to you. You make the fediverse possible. 
Hey FDA? I ask again: why y'all out here letting the world's most divorced man put chips in people's brains? Especially after nonhuman animal testing killed **65% Of The Subjects.**
I ask again, again: What in the ACTUAL FUCK is going on with us as a species right now, because it all seems VERY BAD.
https://gizmodo.com/elon-musk-neuralink-brain-chip-first-human-x-twitter-1851207445
A lot of people have responded to my Duolingo post with things like "Never work for free," and "I would never donate my time to a corporation.” Which I completely agree with.
But here's the thing about Duolingo and all of the other companies like it. You already work for them. You just don’t know it.
On Duo, I thought I was learning a language. Participating in the community by helping other learners and building resources seemed like part of the process.
Luis Von Ahn, the CEO of Duolingo, was one of the creators of CAPTCHA, which was originally supposed to stop bot spam by getting a human to do a task a machine couldn’t do. In 2009 Google bought CAPTCHA and used it to get humans to proofread the books they were digitising (without permission from the authors of those books btw). So in order to access much of the web, people had to work for Google. Most of them didn’t know they were working for Google - they thought they were visiting websites.
This is how they get you. They make it seem like they’re giving you something valuable (access to a website, tools to learn a language), while they’re actually taking something from you (your skills, your time, your knowledge, your labour). They make you think they’re helping you, but really you're helping them (and they’re serving you ads while you do it).
Maybe if people had known what CAPTCHA was really for they would’ve done it anyway. Maybe I still would’ve done all that work for Duo if I’d known it would one day disappear from the web and become training data for an LLM ...
... Or maybe I would’ve proofread books for Project Gutenberg, or donated my time to citizen science projects, or worked on an accessibility app, or a million other things which genuinely improve people’s lives and the quality of the web. I didn’t get an informed choice. I got lured into helping a tech company become profitable, while they made the internet a shittier place to be.
How many things are you doing on the web every day which are actually hidden work for tech companies? Probably dozens, or hundreds. We all are. That’s why this is so insidious. It’s everywhere. The tech industry is built on free labour. (And not just free – we often end up paying for the end results of our own work, delivered back to us in garbled, enshittified form).
And it’s a problem that’s only getting worse with AI. Is that thoughtful answer you gave someone on reddit or Mastodon something that will stay on the web for years, helping people in future with the same problem? Or is it just grist for the LLMs?
Do you really get a choice about it?
The aggressive targeting of trans folks by conservative fucklords must be understood in this context:
gen Z is the most liberated age group on queer issues. For that many to be willing to come out, so many more must have been there to support and love them.
Reactionaries want us to go back. FUCK. GOING. BACK
Dr. Damien P. Williams, Magus
geekgirl 
Jerry 🦙💝🦙
thermonuclear small claims
bsky: @daniloc.xyz
Lesley Carhart 
Mandu 🥟