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Crucial Track for July 3, 2026: "Jurassic Park" by Stand Atlantic

Today's prompt: What's your favorite song to sing in the car? #CrucialTracks

View entry:
https://www.crucialtracks.org/profile/jwq/20260703

Whoops, overshot a bit. 🥵

Out for another 40ish mile ride since I have the day off.

⌚ And /now, this:

• Watched the first season of Big Mistakes.
• Started the fourth season of Resident Alien.

https://jwq.lol/now

📌 Just bookmarked:

neatnik/Splashdown

A simple Gemini protocol server written in PHP

https://source.tube/neatnik/Splashdown

#bookmarks

RE: https://social.lol/@neatnik/116848236575092752

Splashdown is a new Gemini protocol server that I just released like three minutes ago. It's written in PHP (of course), which means it can also execute PHP within a capsule. This will power omg.lol's upcoming Gemini capsule support, but I’m happy to share the source freely! https://source.tube/neatnik/Splashdown

📌 Just bookmarked:

Subvert - The Collectively Owned Music Marketplace

Subvert is a cooperative-owned music marketplace. Artists and labels sell digital music directly to listeners. Listeners buy and own what they pay for. The platform itself is owned by the people who use it.

https://www.subvert.fm/

#bookmarks

Sharing a post I read:

📑 Community Computing: The Future We Deserve?: Taggart Tech

Tech companies keep making us embarrassed to be their customers. Maybe we don't have to live like that.

https://taggart-tech.com/coop/

#postroll

Sharing a post I read:

📑 What happened to the fight for the Internet? -- Dustycloud Brainstorms

If the internet feels decreasingly like it's ours, then by god, let's make it ours.

https://dustycloud.org/blog/what-happened-to-the-fight-for-the-internet/

#postroll

Just shy of 1000 miles so far this year.

Sharing a post I read:

📑 The Last People Who Know How It Works · unix.foo

"To play a computer game in in the 1990s, you first had to understand how the computer worked."

https://unix.foo/posts/last-people-who-know-how-it-works/

#postroll

⌛ Time stretches to infinity while I wait anxiously to see if my music will resume playing through my earbuds or my phone's speaker.

periodic reminder about privacy services:

no one is going to go to prison for the privilege of being your mailserver admin/vpn host/etc.

All "privacy oriented" commercial VPNs are honeypots.

You can't change my mind on that.

Mullvad VPN has heavy marketing in Washington DC (their ads are plastered all across the metro stops frequented by government workers and foreign diplomats) for example.

The whole "you need to hide something? here we'll hide it for you! Everyone that wants to hide something should put is all in this one consolidated place!"

But they totally won't look at it.

They swear.

No logs, bro. I promise. I can look, but I won't. I could log, but I won't.

So while Mullvad the company is showing their ass, asking what other VPN to hop to begs the question: Why are you using a commercial VPN?

If it's to change your IP address to bypass porn restrictions in fundamentalist theocratic states, then cool. That's a solid use case.

If it's for a nebulous reason like "for privacy" or "for security". Then you might want to see if that tool actually meets your specific threat modeling.

#VPN #mullvad #mullvadVPN

Widow's Bay being 'excellent' may just be an understatement.

Hello sloth valuers! #GoToSocial could use your help!

TL;DR, please help us by donating to our OpenCollective page so we (Tobi and Kim) can pay ourselves a basic monthly wage.

Long explanation:

In order to keep work on the GtS codebase buzzing along, Tobi and Kim have to perform the increasingly expensive chore of maintaining their flesh temples by consuming calories, keeping warm and dry (or cool and wet, depending on the circumstances), doing routine bodily maintenance, and so on. Not to mention paying for electricity, internet, etc.

The money we need for all this has so far largely been provided to us by NLnet, the Dutch organization that funds a lot of fediverse projects (among other interesting things). NLnet's support has been of incredible value. Indeed, without it GoToSocial would not exist in its current form; we'd have long since had to get "real jobs" and GtS would have been relegated to being a side project.

However, due to the way that funding from NLnet works, we get paid only for delivering features that we scope out long in advance of when the funding period actually begins. In other words, we get paid every time we merge a big feature, details of which are agreed up to a year beforehand. However, this payout happens only intermittently, since big features take a large amount of time to write.

As everyone who works on code knows, there's more to a project than just writing headline features. We don't get paid for spending time doing things like maintenance, bugfixes, small bonus features, refactoring, triage, helping people in the Matrix chats, code review, and what have you. So, the intermittent way that we get paid means we have to juggle working on very important but unpaid "maintenance" stuff, alongside paid "feature" stuff when our bank accounts start to look worryingly moth-filled. This causes semi-regularly panics in the both of us, as neither of us are particularly resilient when it comes to dealing with financial pressures.

To make working on GoToSocial more sustainable, then, we want to be able to pay ourselves--the two most active devs--a basic monthly salary for all the work we do that isn't big headline features. This will allow us to commit time to unglamorous but vital maintenance chores, without the constant background worry that by doing so we're going to end up running out of money at a critical moment. To make this happen, we need your help!

Thanks to all our donors on OpenCollective and Liberapay, we'd accrued enough unspent money over the years to be able to pay ourselves 1,000 EUR each, each month for the months of February, March, April, and May 2026 (plus a little bit here and there from Liberapay). For transparency's sake, you can see those payouts here.

As you'll see from our OpenCollective budget, however, we don't make enough from donations to keep this up, and indeed at the time of writing we have only 2000 EUR left in our OpenCollective budget, which gives us ~3/4 of a month when accounting for ongoing hosting costs.

And so, we're asking you, dear sweet reader, sexy-ass cool reader, for a donation or two to our OpenCollective pot:

https://opencollective.com/gotosocial#category-CONTRIBUTE

With your help, we want to be able to raise about 2,500 EUR per month, so that we can continue to pay ourselves 1,000 EUR each per month, plus various other costs that are paid out of the OpenCollective.

Thank you for reading this absolute saga of a post, and for considering donating to us. We really appreciate it! :gtspat:

⌚ And /now, this:

• Finished watching Silo, which was phenomenal (and just in time for season 3 to drop soon, too!).
• Started watching Maximum Pleasure Guaranteed, which is... not great.

https://jwq.lol/now

I stopped my GoToSocial instance to fire off a quick database backup before bumping the sloth from the RC to the new 0.22.0 release. I immediately popped back over to my Phanpy tab to catch up on The Socials while the backup ran...

I am a professional computer toucher.

Sharing a post I read:

📑 Prompt Injection as Role Confusion

Project page for Prompt Injection as Role Confusion, accepted to ICML 2026. We show prompt injections are driven by a flaw in how LLMs perceive roles. This lets us create new attacks, explain mech interp results, and predict when attacks succeed. We then discuss what roles are and why they matter, and share research ideas for a science of roles.

https://role-confusion.github.io/

#postroll