Check out this animation of 100 years of average September temperature anomalies over global land areas through 2026...
Data from NOAAGlobalTemp v6.1.0: https://www.ncei.noaa.gov/products/land-based-station/noaa-global-temp
Pretty much sums up entirely too much of the world around me these days (notably r/commandline, r/CLI, among the deluge)
For the past several months, I've been watching academics become righteously angry because AI allegedly solved a bunch of difficult math problems all on its own, only for it to be revealed that it was based on stolen work from human mathematicians all along because it can't reason.
It's like the comic of the grim reaper going from door to door massacring the room's occupants, except the reaper breaks in, steals everyone's shit, cuts them down, then leaves. It's happening now with all the game decomps, years of stolen work from human teams all wrapped up in a slop-coated bow.
Journalism is failing us so hard right now. Journalistic integrity is a perpetual struggle, but in this moment of need, it's failing utterly. I've seen article after breathless article declaring this is a turning point for games, like scrappy underdogs are stealing treasure from corporate dragons.
It's just... going over everyone's heads that this is a kind of settler-colonial violence, individuals imbued with the power of the State or of Company to spread out and destroy anything in their path so it can be claimed. These corporations need not raise armies; the people volunteer themselves.
It's why I believe the defining feature of this tech, the capacity to do harm, is *the feature* that excites these people the most. I'm convinced that if AI somehow hurt no one, they would not use it. That it might produce passable work is secondary to that harm. Harm is the true product being sold.
And media is complicit. Human decomp teams were illuminated with a suspicious light at best, if they were even noticed by outlets at all.
AI decomps now dominate the discussion in a "tee-hee, what is the Big Evil Game Corp gonna do now?" framing, deliberately obscuring what's actually happening.
The laziness of a thousand wannabe journalistic influencers repeats the message over and over again, lone hackers or creatives bucking the system and taking power back for the Little Guys.
Nah, man. They're just assholes, and their mandate is to move into a space and force humanity out of it.
Tech boss masks are off, and workers aren’t having it. We speak with Clarissa Redwine and JS Tan, co-authors of Against Tech Oligarchy: Worker Resistance in the World’s Most Powerful Industry. This clip is from Mystery AI Hype Theater 3000’s latest episode “My Tech Workers Have Unionized”!
(with @emilymbender)
⏲️ The Matrix Conference starts in three days
Meet the Matrix community for talks on the open protocol, encryption, digital sovereignty, deployments, and ecosystem projects.
📍 Malmö, Sweden + Online
📆 October 20–23, 2026
👉 https://conference.matrix.org/?ref=itsfoss.com
RT: @graceauta101_ Omg you guys, it's true. Ilhan Omar came here on a student visa, then quit school and just started working. Total immigration fraud, blatant.
Oh wait, that wasn't Ilhan, that was Elon.
Swedish developer Aaron Ardiri open-sourced a gigabyte of Palm OS SDKs, docs, and dev utilities after discovering an active preservation community still improving old Palm apps.
He also deliberately excluded proprietary ROMs and commercial software.
So thinking more about restarting the @osnews podcast - I don't want to be a single host. I'm not that interesting. I also don't want to interview someone every single week (but I would love to interview some of you, as you are all way more interesting than I'll ever be).
I'll only do this if I can find a co-host so it's a team effort.
A Saturday email that makes my chores easier. I want to extend this to my fellow maintainers in these testing times; I'm not doing curl by myself.
Hi Daniel,
With all the nonsense going on related to AI slop bug reporting and PRs, just looking in from the outside is exhausting, I imagine it must be even worse for you and the other contributors. I wanted to say thank you for all the time and energy you put into cURL, the tool really is a joy to use and never lets me down.
More than half of all internet users have installed an ad-blocker; Doc Searls calls it the largest consumer boycott in history.
--
If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this thread to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:
https://pluralistic.net/2026/10/17/mercenary-spyware/#discover-tech
1/
@popey my duckduckgo foo is failing me today. You wrote some social media/community publishing/tracking software you talked about on Linux Matters at some point. Could you point me that way please?
Many thanks
#afdverbotsverfahrenjetzt
#nazisraus
#fckafd
NEUE AfD-PARTEIZENTRALE?
The University of Minnesota develops a toolkit to help cities understand data centers.