Well, that’s not nothing.

From Geoffrey Bercarich (link)

Edit: this isn't even all the police cars; I've heard people estimate ~30.

#bikeTO #BikeTooter #Toronto

judge judy and jexecutioner

Thinking about the Shakers again today, the Shaking Quakers, for some reason.

Founded in 1749 and with around 4000 members at their peak, today there's only two or three members of that community left.

Sad, possibly, but: 280 years is a good run for a community whose tenets include _celibacy_.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shakers

All the demographics, all the basic math says the Shakers should be a one-generation-and-done sociocultural curiosity, a weird historical footnote.

But: 280 years. Somehow.

If a community is discoverable enough, and welcoming enough and kind enough and has a compelling story to tell then that community has a chance to not just survive but prosper through what should - by any measure or intuition - be _the_ flagship demographic nightmare scenario.

There might be a lesson in that somewhere.

Anthropic CEO Warns There's an LLM Under Your Bed While Holding Flashlight Beneath His Chin

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2026/oct/13/anthropic-ai-replicators-warning

Anyway, funny story but remember when the discussion was about The Cathedral and The Bazaar?

There's a second axis to that graph, and it's ends are labelled "A Community" and "A Cult".

And for Linux as a plausibly community-managed meaningfully open as in open project, that clock is definitely ticking.

The end of this road is some corporate-funded retirement home for understaffed and underfunded projects once enough of the current devs have aged out without anyone growing into those roles, with private forks at companies that relied on the kernel, also privately relieved there's no need or reason to deal with antediluvian developer processes or bother giving back anymore.

There are plenty of good alternatives to driving your community off a cliff like a gaggle of demographic lemmings, but if you're still convinced that mailing lists and insularity are the path to durability in this godforsaken year of our lord two thousand and twenty six then I'm not sure what words will convince you that there's nothing past the edge of that cliff but sharp rocks and seawater.

If your community isn't accessible and welcoming to new, learning participants, the clock's ticking.

@mhoye

re: "It's the talking about planning secession while simultaneously complaining that nobody new wants to learn"

There are three people identified as "she" in that piece, and one of them was the only person to say something like "[she] said that she can identify the people who will stick around fairly quickly, and some of the new folks who have come in are excellent. For this reason, she still spends a lot of time with people sending spelling fixes. "

It's gendered labor.

Today the number of people under 50 who'll reach for perl or raku or who cares what it's called as their first choice of tool for anything new is zero. In practice Perl is an esolang now.

Torvalds' position is that contributing to the kernel should be _more_ difficult for everyone else, but, through LLM usage, easier for existing kernel developers.

Ted Tso's adamant position that "you can't make us learn Rust" is the same insularity.

If the kernel was a country, we'd recognize this.

To explain what I mean by this: for a long time the Perl community took great pride in how difficult and terse the language was. The old joke that well-written perl was indistinguishable from line noise wasn't just a joke, it was a badge of honour.

That attitude was sustainable when the internet was small and alternatives were scarce. But the moment tools appeared that prioritized things like human ergonomics (python) and human interaction (ruby) the perl community started aging out and dying.

RE: https://woof.tech/@techokami/117439226690379216

The LLM part is bad news but it isn't the sign. It's the talking about planning succession while simultaneously complaining that nobody new wants to learn, that's the sign.

Y'all the kernel is in deep, deep trouble. We saw what happened to Perl and the kernel is in deep trouble.

Unhoused people, advocates, nonprofit workers, and researchers have said for years that bylaw officers trash perfectly good — even new — possessions.

But city officials have repeatedly denied that this happens to usable and life-sustaining items.

As part of an investigation into what happens to unhoused residents’ belongings, [De Facto Media] obtained consent from seven people to hide Apple AirTags into their possessions.

https://www.defactomedia.ca/bylaw-officers-unhoused-victoria-belongings/?ref=de-facto-newsletter

There are plenty of lessons to learn. Propaganda tactics on social media have become a lot more advanced over the past 10 years. But this shit - this shit is baby-brained. It is like people became aware of media literacy as a concept, but only on an extremely superficial level.

People pretend their political adversaries are fake. It is a convenient and self-reassuring story. That we can blow up a server farm somewhere on the other side of the world and all of our enemies will evaporate like the White Walkers after killing the Ice King. And then after that, everything will go back to the Obama years.

At the very least, we should be considering things in terms of The Propaganda Model described by Herman and Chomsky. That the main source of misinformation is not some Death Star we can send Luke Skywalker to blow up for us, but is actually the deeply embedded corporate interests which make up the skeleton and musculature of our entire system of government. The ones who pick our political candidates, who write our laws, write grants for our cops and counterinsurgency training centers, build our propaganda organs, and use them promote stories to justify them.

Trying to figure out what Apple announcements would look like if they'd leaned into the AI announcement style years ago.

Jobs on stage, announcing the aiPhone in 2007. "An autocomplete. And a virus. And a hypercapitalsm. An autocomplete! And a virus! And a hypercapitalism! An autocomplete, a virus, and a hypercapitalism! Do you get it now? This is one device. And we're calling it the aiPhone. Today, we're announcing our plan to fuck up the internet, the economy and the world in three weeks."

Loving the asymptotic approach to weapons-grade nonsense as these warnings get more and more dire.

By November 1st Anthropic will warn that AI is hours away from turning every beetle on the earth into a self-replicating LLM.

By November 30th, OpenAI warns that we are only days way from every digital watch being self aware.

On December 15th, Amodei warns that Anthropic's models are seconds away from converting every electron in the solar system into a data center.

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2026/oct/13/anthropic-ai-replicators-warning

"We can't do anything without an ocean of water and billions of dollars worth of GPUs. We put a strain on the network and the electrical grid just by existing. And soon, that might happen in.... your refrigerator! Your microwave! Your smart appliances!"

Man, if your shit can self-host itself on something smaller than a raspi wtf are you even doing and why does anyone need it.

Question that I'd like to answer without imposing on the thread that raised it:

Oldheads like myself remember that landline telephones ran on their own separate power supply - in a blackout, landlines still worked fine.

Now that we''ve moved to cellular, I know cellphones don't have the same quality even if the infrastructure - phones, towers, interlinks - is all still battery backed.

My question is - is the old phone-line nostalgia badly misplaced because of wireless handsets in the house?

A lot of people I know shared posts about the Yandex datacenter bombing resulting in a decrease in Russian misinformation/disinformation bot activity, sometimes with charts. Let this be a reminder every one of us could be fooled by a story that we really want to be true.