run('fr',['bonjour','vin','bon','un','sans','peur','bleu'])
run('it',['grande','primo','grazie','uomo','uovo','quasi','ieri','caro','gnocchi'])
run('de',['ich','Bach','rot','Götter','fühlen','über'])
run('es',['caza','ayer','pero','perro'])
run('es-la',['caza','ayer','pero','perro'])
run('pt-br',['filho','um'])
run('pl',['ryba'])
run('hu',['kártya'])

A thought that popped into my head when I woke up at 4 am and couldn’t get back to sleep…

Imagine that AI/LLM tools were being marketed to workers as a way to do the same work more quickly and work fewer hours without telling their employers.

“Use ChatGPT to write your TPS reports, go home at lunchtime. Spend more time with your kids!” “Use Claude to write your code, turn 60-hour weeks into four-day weekends!” “Collect two paychecks by using AI! You can hold two jobs without the boss knowing the difference!”

Imagine if AI/LLM tools were not shareholder catnip, but a grassroots movement of tooling that workers were sharing with each other to work less. Same quality of output, but instead of being pushed top-down, being adopted to empower people to work less and “cheat” employers.

Imagine if unions were arguing for the right of workers to use LLMs as labor saving devices, instead of trying to protect members from their damage.

CEOs would be screaming bloody murder. There’d be an overnight industry in AI-detection tools and immediate bans on AI in the workplace. Instead of Microsoft CoPilot 365, Satya would be out promoting Microsoft SlopGuard - add ons that detect LLM tools running on Windows and prevent AI scrapers from harvesting your company’s valuable content for training.

The media would be running horror stories about the terrible trend of workers getting the same pay for working less, and the awful quality of LLM output. Maybe they’d still call them “hallucinations,” but it’d be in the terrified tone of 80s anti-drug PSAs.

What I’m trying to say in my sleep-deprived state is that you shouldn’t ignore the intent and ill effects of these tools. If they were good for you, shareholders would hate them.

You should understand that they’re anti-worker and anti-human. TPTB would be fighting them tooth and nail if their benefits were reversed. It doesn’t matter how good they get, or how interesting they are: the ultimate purpose of the industry behind them is to create less demand for labor and aggregate more wealth in fewer hands.

Unless you happen to be in a very very small club of ultra-wealthy tech bros, they’re not for you, they’re against you. #AI #LLMs #claude #chatgpt

There was a small snafu with the Git repository of GTK which required rewriting the history of the main development branch to drop a large file that was committed by mistake; if you have a local clone, you may need to force an update. Nothing else should have changed, and the latest commit is: gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gtk/-/c…

Matrix... The modern IRC replacement. Working on phone, app, web browser...

Today greeted me with "your key store is not synchronized" (loose translation from Polish) which means BLABLABLAH to me.

And the only option is to continue with erasing whole history, reverifying all clients and contacts.

At same time FluffyChat on Android works fine, does not complain about anything.

WTH?

Fun fact: I routed Claude Code to a local model and captured its system prompt. It is about 16K tokens long, compared with 6.5K tokens for Codex and 5.5K tokens for Gemini CLI. Some of the length is due to tool call descriptions, but I didn't have any additional MCP. No wonder why you can't effectively use local models with it unless you have a crazy machine that can run a bigger model capable of following lengthy instructions and handle very big context window. #LLM #AI gist.githubusercontent.com/chi…
#AI #llm

Wellp, the Qwen2.5 LLM model has been useful in increasing the productivity rate of my annoying legacy PHP code refactoring and modernization project by at least 100%. Why 100%? Because before I started using the model, I was doing nothing on the project, LOL.

Don't worry, I'm not being radicalized. AI in its LLM format is everything that I've always gone on and griped about here, and elsewhere. It has no situational awareness or context. It is not intelligent. It halucinates. It will lie to your face, with a smile on its own.
So it has wasted my time with all of this. But all of that aside, it has been able to provide very accurate one-liners or very short code blocks. I purposefully keep any examples for ingestion short and to the point. I always ask for output that is concise, accurate, and to the point. However, I've been treating it like a robot, not a human. I don't waste frivilous words that pander to feelings. Just straight to the point. I am trying to optomize my words for tokens used in prompt analysis, but also having to be as absolutely as specific as possible, as to not waste tokens on having it do useless work.
So I'm trying to optomize for a tool, not an intelligence, personality, or chat buddy.
Its just like a real big knowledge pool, and a crude understanding engine. Instead of looking it up across thirty manuals, or sections of manual, then pieceing it together in your own head, the computer is doing all that in seconds. Sure, there's a comprehension barrier, a language barrier, now and again, but that's why you the human are still needed in the loop. So stead of fighting it, I'm trying to use it. Its pretty neat that way. Just don't trust it, ever. And anyone giving this thing a fair chance will very quicly come to realize that. Humans are still needed, and this thing will not permanently kill any jobs that won't be replaced in some other field, very quickly. Its just not that good or smart. Its a glorified tape recorder that can find and stitch humanity's knowledge together quite quickly, with just enough errors to make it useless without the human behind the keyboard looking after it. But that's what we want, eh? If it got any better than this, then it probably will well and truly wipe out jobs.

Ik kan gewoon niet meer - net gehoord dat een van de allergrootste verwerkers van privégegevens binnen de Nederlandse overheid druk bezig is met zijn totale migratie naar Microsoft Azure. En de mensen die het tegen zouden kunnen houden worden buitengesloten & hebben het opgegeven. Stukje: berthub.eu/articles/posts/nee-…

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in reply to Jiří Eischmann

Nějak se mi nechce věřit, že kdybychom se odstřihli od USA, tak všechny ty věci, co používáš, budou dál fungovat.

Servery jsou jedna věc, ale šlo mi spíš o to, že těch infrastrukturních věcí různě po cestě, které z USA přebíráme, je milion. A spoustu si ani neuvědomujeme.

Produkt může být ze 100 % v EU, ale vsadím se, že kdybych vypnul Google nebo Apple, tak se zaměstnanci té firmy ani nedostanou do práce a nepřihlásí k e-mailu. To je to, kam jsem původně svým komentářem mířil.

A aby bylo jasno, přijde mi dost hustý, o co se snažíš, a neuvěřitelný, že to zvládáš, ale je to možná asi jako když někdo jiný obdivuje, že nemám auto. Jako jo, nemám ho, ale kdyby někdo auta zrušil, tak se můj svět zhroutí, protože závisí na systému, ve kterém se všechno autama vozí.

This entry was edited (6 hours ago)
in reply to Honza Javorek

Nemusíme si vykládat, že se lze dnes 100% digitálně odstřihnout od USA. Nejde a není to ani mým cílem. Já mám dva cíle: aby na BigTech v USA bezprostředně nezávisely moje důležité nástroje, které používám, a abych tam neměl důležitá a hlavně osobní data.
Vím třeba, že Signal závisí na AWS, ale je to v mém případě jen jeden ze 4 IM, které používám, nemám s ním spojenou svoji digitální identitu. Mám Netflix, ale to je zbytná věc. Vedle něj mám české OnePlay a mraky obsahu na domácím NASu.
No a pak jsou ty kritické věci jako domény, email, osobní agenda (kontakty, kalendáře, úkoly, hesla...) a soubory, které mám v EU nebo kompletně v selfhostingu na Nextcloudu, jehož provoz není na USA nijak závislý. Ano, Nextcloud má vývojové repozitáře na Githubu, ale to je taková sekundární závislost. Nijak to neohrožuje přístup k mým nástrojům, maximálně by se na pár týdnů zastavil vývoj NC, než by to rozjeli třeba na Codebergu.
Ta závislost má mnoho vrstev od přímé provozní závislosti, kde může člověk o přístup přijít během pár sekund, až po nějaké terciární závislosti, které se projeví až v dlouhém horizontu. Troufám si ale tvrdit, že jsem dnes ve stavu, kdy kdyby USA Evropě zařízly přístup, pojedu zásadně nepostižený dál a ty dlouhodobé dopady by se mezitím vyřešily nebo bychom řešili úplně jiný druh problémů.
in reply to Jiří Eischmann

Nebo mobilní telefon: mám dnes Pixel 10 s GrapheneOS. Je to telefon od americké společnosti a GOS je Android, takže jeho dlouhodobý vývoj závisí opět na americké společnosti. Ale nemám tam žádnou bezprostřední závislost. Ten telefon není ani přihlášený ke Google účtu, jw na něm jediná (zbytná) aplikace od Googlu (Android Auto), závisí jen na Google Play. Žádná zahraniční firma k němu nemá root access. Není to úplná nezávislost, ale IMO v rámci možností akceptovatelná. A nejlepší na tom je, že se necítím jako nějaký digitální poustevník, že bych se musel nějak omezovat. Je to o nastavení priorit a pak výběru řešení podle těch priorit.
Pro mě jsou dlouhodobou prioritou soukromí, nezávislost a diverzifikace, původně jsem vůbec neřešil geopolitiku, ale když má člověk nastavené takové priority, tak zjistí, že je najednou velmi dobře připravený i na tu současnou geopolitickou situaci.

Open standards – like the Open Document Format used by #LibreOffice – are extremely beneficial to end users. They reduce vendor lock-in, improve compatibility between apps, and preserve your data for longer: blog.documentfoundation.org/bl… #foss #openSource

#UnifiedPush is on everybody's lips when it comes to #decentralization or #deGoogle or wanting to cut off #BigTech from your live.

But did you know how it was started? How many times its destiny intersected with #FDroid ?

Read here, straight from the creator: f-droid.org/2026/01/08/unified…

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in reply to Tom Grant

It doesn't take much to close things here. This place doesn't know how to deal.

In 2001, we got several inches over the morning period when school buses were picking kids up from school, but they hadn't canceled classes until everyone got to school. They then had to send all the buses back out and pick up the kids again.

Several buses crashed. Two students died. Some didn't get picked up and had to spend the night at school. There were lawsuits.
I was one of the lucky ones who were able to get out.
School was closed for a week after that, I think.

This entry was edited (9 hours ago)

Age verification is spreading like cancer.

First they came for adults site and social media; now they are already discussing about putting VPNs and app stores behind #AgeVerfication 🇬🇧🇦🇺

What’s sold as “online safety” means #surveillance via IDs checks or face scans.

Privacy & anonymity protect journalists, whistleblowers & activists.

We must fight against age verification - or the free web dies!

👉 More: tuta.com/blog/age-verification…

The way you install software updates on Galaxy Buds has always made very little sense to me. Why do I have to wear the earbuds to update the software? just connect and update and leave the audio routed to the phone speaker. Other companies, notably Apple, do this absolutely fine and it's seamless. This process is just annoying.
in reply to aaron

Well, that's a new way I guess. Apple just, makes it work, even google needed time here to allow payments, 15 days to be exact... Apple just does some things pretty well I guess, including currency changes and updates, except when the whole MACos thing gets bugged, then we yell at them like all the others. I hope the update for those samsung earbuds brings some cool stuff you can play around with. Do they sound better than airpods? I wonder.

You know that #Linux is becoming mainstream on #desktop computers when a Czech consumer magazine focused on product testing, #DTest, recommends switching to Linux.

"However, there is another solution. Fortunately, it is no longer true that only Microsoft operating systems are suitable for ordinary people and that only eccentric IT wizards with a silicon soul can use anything else. Now, a number of GNU/Linux operating systems offer a level of ease of use that is at least comparable to that of MS Windows."

in reply to Jiří Eischmann

The hard truth is that 'ordinary people' nowadays do not use computers; they use mobile devices. When they also need to use a keyboard, their usual choice is a tablet with a keyboard. A computer is generally a last-resort device, and most people find both Windows and Linux equally unfriendly because they are not designed for mobile-first people. I know tons of ordinary people who no longer own a computer or use it very rarely.
in reply to Francesco P Lovergine

@gisgeek Desktops are still used for any serious "computing" work and I have seen very few people who do it on mobile devices (happily). My sister works for a pharmaceutical company and major source of frustration in the company is that they only have an iPad with an external keyboard as their work device. Most of them have purchased their private laptops to do any serious work tasks.

That said, it's true that many people don't have to do any serious "computing" work or not frequently. Those are just fine with phones or tablets.

in reply to Francesco P Lovergine

@gisgeek her experience is recent. She joined the company last year and purchased the laptop one month after joining on advice from other colleagues. She is 35, so not a young generation, but also not old.
She says the tablet is OK for work on the go: quick replies, checking info etc. But once she gets home, she takes the laptop because any long writing or working with spreadsheets is just cumbersome on the tablet: the screen is small, the keyboard is not comfortable to write on... I'm pretty sure the youngest generation is more comfortable with it, but even among them it's hard to find someone who would want to write e.g. a thesis on it.

I'm doing bad, bad things. Have signed up for a Claude Pro account and installed Claude Code. I'm starting a project that may or may not go anywhere, and most here wouldn't care about it anyway, but it'll be cool if it works the way I want.

I've already hit my rate limit twice in three hours. The initial stuff used lots of tokens.

I am now prepared for all the hate that I will no doubt receive.

This entry was edited (9 hours ago)
in reply to Borris

The Discord server that does vibe-coded accessibility modding these days recommends no less than the $100/month subscription with Claude to get anywhere. IMO that basically moved the entry level from "having enough knowledge to do proper research and programming" to "having enough money to afford programming". Doesn't sound great to me yet really. Let's hope things like Claude will at some point run locally as well to get rid of that monitized entry level.

android copies from apple. apple copies from android. do you know what I would love to see apple copy from android? the ability to still get notificaitons, but not wake up my screen! I will wake my screen up when and if I want to look at them. you don't ened to do it every single time a notification comes in. I want my notifications, I just don't always want to look at them. s please apple, please copy this one from android. make it a setting you can turn on or off. then you would have the best of both worlds.

If you want to do a fun thing this weekend, maybe write a little webxdc app for your family or friends chats? There are many to fork from, see webxdc.org/apps and for development docs webxdc.org/docs
And for development tooling
GitHub.com/webxdc/webxdc-dev which simulates a multi member chat environment to run your app, before you post the zip file to a chat of yours. Everyone can start it. No app stores. No logins. No gafam. With built-in end-to-end encryption. Cheers.

„Leistung heißt für mich, dass jemand viel arbeitet, etwas aufbaut, ins Risiko geht. Leistung heißt nicht, dass jemand etwas geschenkt bekommt und sich dann noch weigert, Steuern zu bezahlen.“

Blinkist-Gründer @sebklein im ARD-Morgenmagazin zur #Erbschaftssteuer für Unternehmen.

For anyone who likes using new apps, give FastSM a try. It's a Mastodon and Bluesky client currently in alpha development, but it has progressed fast within the past few days.
The development of this client is a very clear demonstration of what can be achieved if someone puts their mind to it. For years there has been the need for a number of Mastodon features to be included in a specialist client such as this, but they've never really happened. This combines many of these with an excellent application design.
It includes the ability to quote posts, mute conversations, filtering, scheduling and so much more.
Moreover, the developer understands that an application does not need to be complex in its structure. For example, pressing Enter on a post allows you to read it in detail. That seems a basic feature but people unused to technology like a number of things: they like lists, to press Enter to open something and Escape to close it. It makes people feel more comfortable in their working.
As a final bonus, the app is the best I have seen working with JAWS. JAWS has some difficulty with reading the contents of edit controls in some other clients and that is not the case here.
In summary, the developer has already done a great job at this early stage.
I believe this is the latest link to it:
github.com/masonasons/FastSM/r…

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if you have or use Bluetooth accessories, or you know anyone who does, read and share:

Research & info: whisperpair.eu

^ has a "is my device vulnerable" link

Wired story: archive.is/pWKtT

#WhisperPair #bluetooth

2 years on Mastodon. According to my calendar, though I’m pretty sure that’s the date when I signed up for mastodon.social. In May 2024 I switched to dragonscave.space, and for 1 year and 1 day now, I’ve been on someplace.social and am still enjoying it.
Regarding clients, Tweesecake, Pachli, and Mona were my go-tos, with Tweesecake now being replaced by the awesome FastSM.
I’ve learned a lot on this platform, from getting to know Tailscale and Linux servers to many other great applications and much more.
It took a while to gain the engagement I have now. As I mentioned earlier, Mastodon often seems quite boring, but once conversations evolve, it’s actually quite fun to chat with all the different people.
At this point, I think I’ve found a solid base of users to interact with and enjoy communicating and discussing things here.
Thanks to everyone sticking around, reading my random tech rambles, boost spam, or complaints about all the other stuff life throws at me. And thanks to the developers of the clients and Mastodon itself. Looking forward to more good times here.
This entry was edited (12 hours ago)