We love to see it--community-created harm reduction infrastructure in the face of the alarming integration of AI agents into the Windows operating system (which is currently the most reckless deployment environment) ❤
github.com/zoicware/RemoveWind…
Force Remove Copilot, Recall and More in Windows 11 - zoicware/RemoveWindowsAIGitHub
I wrote about a new MacOS accessibility library, pyax. It's a cool little tool you can use to inspect the accessibility API of apps. #a11y #macos #firefox #accessibility
blog.monotonous.org/2026/01/12…
In our work on Firefox MacOS accessibility we routinely run into highly nuanced bugs in our accessibility platform API. The tree structure, an object attribu...blog.monotonous.org
A few enterprising hackers have started projects to do counter surveillance against ICE, and hopefully protect their communities through clever use of technology.Electronic Frontier Foundation
Dear Fediverse,
I remember a while back there was a petition asking the Government of Canada to setup their own fediverse instance and the reply was really off topic. I have lost the link. Anyone remembers?
Perhaps the single most certain thing about generative AI is that developing "skill" with prompting AI has very little value as any sort of long term "investment".
* If the technology improves rapidly, any tricks you learn now will soon be irrelevant.
* If the technology stagnates, it just won't be nearly as useful or important as the people preaching about it claim. (If it's even useful at all for the things you might want to use it for.)
A fabulously gay blind author.sightlessscribbles.com
Library Extension lets you instantly see book and eBook availability from your local librarywww.libraryextension.com
Just wanted to install an #XMPP client to create an account to test something. I moved away to #Matrix years ago because I had no hope anymore for #XMPP, but now that I wanted to create an account, I am just shocked at how dead it is: #Fedora still has Gajim 1.7.3, when the last release is 2.4.1. #pkgsrc is a bit but noch much better with 2.1.1. #Tkabber is even worse: pkgsrc has 0.11.1, when 1.1.2 is the latest release that was released in 2015(!). It seems distributions keep XMPP clients around, but don’t update them because nobody is using them anymore. I had not expected for XMPP to be that dead. That’s shocking.
I also think if distributions cannot be bothered to update a package in over 10 years, they should just remove it…
Sent my feedback on public initiative for European commission and open source. Placed my name - I am proud and active on what I'm doing, talked as a blind european citizen.
Every european relying on accessibility should talk now.
ec.europa.eu/info/law/better-r…
#accessibility #a11y #blind # disability #eu #europe #inclusion #OpenSource
Paweł Masarczyk reshared this.
Nextcloud 📱☁️💻 - @nextcloud
Considering Nextcloud instead of Microsoft 365? 🔀
Join our live "Ask the Expert" Q&A for clear, practical answers. No sales pitch, just real-world insights.
🗓 Jan 15, 2026
⏰ 3 PM CET / 9 AM EST
Save your seat or register for the recording: 👉 go.nextcloud.com/r/kf6C
Ask your pressing questions live or in advance and get clear answers on adopting Nextcloud as a Microsoft 365 alternative, including demos and real-world migration insights.Nextcloud
Do you get this reference?
"Reelect Goldie Wilson, where progress is his middle name."
Anybody still shopping at Target? I haven't in a year.
Marc Fischer @marc-fischer.bsky.social
From a good friend in Minneapolis: "Target is allowing ICE to stage in their parking lots, use their restrooms, and abduct people from inside their stores - so if you weren’t boycotting already, now is the time." They were staging in Chicago as well.
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AMERICA’S LASTING GIFT TO GREENLAND!
While they promise new airports, here is the infrastructure they already gave us: 10,000+ rusting oil drums at Bluie East Two. Left for 80 years. Leaking into the soil. Who pays for the cleanup? NOT THE USA.
Promises are cheap. Cleanup is expensive.
Small hypothesis: I bet people like AI chat interfaces in some part because they are “clean” – simple text, easy to process, consistent visuals, no ads, no pop-ups, etc.
To use a cliche example: Even if it wasn’t in any way “smarter,” it’d still be nicer to ask ChatGPT for a recipe than go to a webpage to read that recipe. Its interface is a natural “reader mode.”
But… that’s not going to last.
I think it very well might, because of the difference in their nature.
Recipe webpages are strictly transactional. Their main purpose is to squeeze as much juice out of you *on this visit* as they can, and they compete in an extremely brutal, low-margin economy against other pages which have the same content and are attempting the same thing. There's 0 brand loyalty, there are no switching costs, if the page falls down in SEO rankings, they'll have 0 revenue after a week. This means that if they already have a customer "hooked", they need to shove as many ads in their face as they can. Next week, that customer won't remember whether the awful domain was online-recipes[.]com or recipesonline[.]us anyway.
Chatbots are different, as most people only use one. That means there's value in keeping the customer hooked, and giving them access to useful info when nobody else will is a great way to do this.
In an AI chatbot, the goals of squeezing as much money out of that customer and keeping that customer for themselves are at odds with eachother, and both of these goals are important.
I don't think they'll stay as pleasant to use as they are, but I also don't think they'll ever get anywhere near as bad as recipe websites.
Apple and Google have left X in their app stores, despite its AI-generated images that violate their own rules. There are no principles left in Silicon Valley.Elizabeth Lopatto (The Verge)
RE: tldr.nettime.org/@dk/115883067…
I like this, but I somehow fear someone will start a company called, like, Ptolemaic Systems or something.
I hereby coin the term "Ptolemaic Code" to refer to software that appears functional but is based on a fundamentally incorrect model of the problem domain. As more code is generated by AI, the prevalence of such code is likely to increase.
1/7
90% of the office either has Flu A or COVID. Guess who doesn’t, the people who have been masking regularly
huh weird.
Interesting chat with my wife's uncle this weekend who is a Vietnam vet.
I asked him if he felt like the south Vietnamese were supportive of their efforts to keep the north in check and he yes but they had a lot of issues with people sneaking across the lines and switching sides all the time to whoever they thought was going to win.
@polishdub what's interesting to me is that my mother in law and nearly all her siblings were in the Navy, but nobody seems to recognize the very special and dangerous unit he was in during Vietnam. Most of the others I think are a bit younger so they never really saw active duty like that, but still... they should know
my wife has never known what he went through. She just always thought of him as Santa Claus because of his white beard
god, I have needed a word like this!
Like - face generation. People either wear glasses or they don't, it's a binary operation. But generation via diffusion starts with a continuous feature space, and is acted upon by a continuous function.
This code will function in most cases but it is fundamentally incorrect.
If you take two faces, one with glasses and one without, interpolating between them will get you weird glasses melded with the face, and this is an artefact of that.
Dmytri reshared this.
When I started experimenting with #Linux again in 2024, I was very impressed at how mature everything had become since I last tried it in the mid-00s. The biggest surprise, though, was #GNOME. It had a level of intentionality and clarity of vision that far exceeded my expectations of a FLOSS project. It made me feel welcome and comfortable.
To the developers of @gnome : Thank you for having the audacity to strive for simplicity in the face of continued criticism from the community. It matters.
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RE: mastodon.social/@IHasWisdom/11…
I need a crayon to blot over what I just read 😭
Why do nurses carry around red crayons? Sometimes they need to draw blood.I Has Wisdom (Mastodon)
Meredith Whittaker
in reply to Meredith Whittaker • • •39C3 - AI Agent, AI Spy
YouTubeMeredith Whittaker
in reply to Meredith Whittaker • • •Secure Messaging and AI Don’t Mix
Daniel Kahn Gillmor (American Civil Liberties Union)