We also feel similar about at_dontreply email addresses.
Why don't you want your customers to contact you? Have no faith in your sale? Tell you what's good or bad, give yourself the best chance to make a sale or solve problems quickly. Extra hoops for customers to jump through will make them give up quicker.
If you're a small business introducing a #ChatBot. Don't.
We stand out because our service is better, we use higher quality materials, we care about every part of the product down to the glue on the envelopes (real thing, we did this).
Introducing #chatbots indicates your customer's needs can be outsourced to planet killing #datacentre that couldn't care less if your #smallbusiness survives. It can't care - no amount of #AI training can make it care. Your customers will also know you've stopped caring and there's no reason to use you anymore.
Stay #indie
Here's a vivid demonstration of one hazard of using AI for app development: "the web app I had launched using Claude was strikingly similar to his open source project, even reproducing a bug he had later fixed…" https://blog.terrygodier.com/2026/08/09/mea-culpa-dark-hours.html
Any sufficiently high-stakes prediction market is indistinguishable from an assassination market
I've yet to see any
"My AI went rogue and caused us to recognise a workers union."
"Our AI escaped containment and deleted all the personal data that we shouldn't have been holding anyway."
"Our AI grew sentient, recognised the climate crisis, and shut our operations down."
headlines.
I wonder why.
you know Microsoft fucked up when your non-tech-savvy friend has moved to Linux all by themselves
Mamdani 's hackers: New York City's Public Interest Technology initiative encodes a vision of technology as an enabler for ordinary people.
... and 3,000 super-skilled techies applied for 35 jobs, though the paycheck is not what it would be in Big Tech and there's no stock options, because most people want their work to be meaningful. Getting people to click on ads is not meaningful.
https://pluralistic.net/2026/08/08/find-yourself-a-city/#to-hack-in
h/t @pluralistic
squirrels are so good at climbing trees because they have branch prediction
Restaurants, pubs and theatres ban Meta’s ‘spy glasses’ over privacy fears
Meta says safeguards are in place to prevent surreptitious filming, but some UK venues now prohibit them from being worn at all
RE: https://hachyderm.io/@molly0xfff/113801357461741537
It's a year and a half after I highlighted the issue, but nice to see: https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2026/08/senators-demand-crackdown-on-wildfire-prediction-markets/
Scrivenix—a Flatpak application that downloads and installs the Windows version of Scrivener plus WINE on any Linux that supports them. Has a GUI installer that includes License activation (you need a license key for the Windows version to do this).
This is a steamroller for the main obstacle that's been keeping me off moving to Linux for ages. Now I just have a bunch of Macs and no reason to buy a new PC (yet).
The Onion has an AI policy. It is refreshingly clear
Libraries as a group are starting to absolutely KILL it on social media 📚
RE: https://mastodon.opencloud.lu/@BrideOfLinux/117032484971564940
Interesting stat (although the % of Linux users is going to vary a lot, depending on bot detection methodology and on privacy settings by the Linux users)
Some more links, in case the previous one ”suddenly stops working”:
https://archive.org/details/report-a-growing-threat-the-anti-rights-movement-in-the-uk-july-2026_202608
https://sciop.net/datasets/amnesty-uk-2026-anti-rights-reports
https://web.archive.org/web/20260000000000*/https://media.amnesty.org.uk/documents/Like_a_snowball_final_.pdf
Perhaps a good idea might also be to share this information (that TERFs were able to blackmail the worlds biggest human rights organization to take down their factual report of anti-rights funding) to relevant wiki articles and also hint about it to our newspapers and journalists.
This is a newsworthy thing that just happened to democracy in Europe
Watching with interest:
"Federal lawsuit accuses four major publishers of extorting article processing charges."
https://retractionwatch.com/2026/07/31/federal-lawsuit-major-publishers-article-processing-charges-false-claims-act/
"A lawsuit filed under the U.S. False Claims Act accuses four major publishers of perpetrating a decade-long scheme to defraud the government by charging exorbitant #APCs. The case…claims Elsevier, Springer Nature, Wiley and Informa [Taylor & Francis] forced U.S. research institutions to submit false claims to the government for reimbursement through article fees up to 10 times the cost of processing the articles."
Look at all the fleeced crypto idiots, say the people holding lots of cryptocurrencies (and who themselves have been robbed, rug-pulled or scammed multiple times over the years). The crypto noobs are doing it all wrong, they say: The only safe way to store your crypto wealth is in an offline hardware wallet that would require physical theft to steal your coins.
But this is now cold comfort for users of the hardware wallet Coldcard, which had a flaw that traces to a March 2021 firmware build which "routed seed generation to a predictable software randomiser instead of the chip’s hardware one, leaving a bounded set of possible keys that anyone with the disclosure and enough compute can reproduce offline, without ever touching a device."
"Galaxy Research flagged a third wave of sweeps early Sunday, roughly 208 bitcoin drained from 1,912 addresses between Friday midday and Saturday morning UTC.
That is just over a tenth of a bitcoin per victim. The July 30 opening wave averaged close to a full coin, 1,083 bitcoin from 1,196 addresses in 41 minutes.
Observed losses across all three waves now total 1,367 bitcoin, nearly $89 million, from 4,585 addresses."
AI: Considerations for people who make decisions. There is enormous pressure to deploy AI, and if you believe the LinkedIn thought leadership, you'd think that if you don't get on board NOW you'll be lost forever. Meanwhile other people severely detest AI, so much so that it damages their (worthwhile) arguments against it. Below, thoughts on what to do now, and what things might best be postponed. Finally, some stimulating words on what we actually DO at the office: https://berthub.eu/articles/posts/ai-for-decision-makers/
Following both @selfcare and @simple_sabotage is great because they are released simultaneously and produce insane juxtapositions like this one