I feel like a lot of Marxists get metaphysical when they talk about the working class as the revolutionary subject and so on.

Marx wasn't on about a metaphysical conceit. He was identifying that there were lots of people all gathered together in exactly the places where they could have enormous impact, if they organized themselves democratically.

I've felt leftists in general seem to talk as if somewhere, there are workers in massive numbers that they just need to reach somehow, and we're failing to do that. But there aren't many places like that anymore.

I don't have a working theory of change, just, I think we need to come up with strategies that recognize the world as it is.

Not long ago I had a thread in which I mentioned that in most towns I've seen, the biggest employers are the schools and the hospitals. Which reminded me that fairly consistently, if any labor unions show up in support of a left political cause, it's teachers' and nurses' unions.

There are a few reasons I no longer consider myself a Marxist, though Marx remains a considerable influence on my thinking. One reason is that I think that when he pointed to the working class as the agent of social change, he was thinking about patterns of working class employment that were true in his era and for decades afterwards, but have gradually ceased to be true. That is, specifically, workers were concentrated in massive numbers in the same place as concentrated capital.

That's a pattern that's broken down. There are more working class people than ever, but they're dispersed. Atomic workplaces with large numbers of workers in teams are the exception, not the rule.

https://mltshp.com/p/1RX3F “🎶”

'More men need to be standing up': Dan Levy calls out Shane Gillis monologue about women's clothing
https://www.cbc.ca/news/entertainment/dan-levy-shane-gillis-clothing-joke-snl-9.7377975

I got a call from someone I don't know.

"Hi. We have a FreeBSD server. It's been working perfectly for years, but it hasn't been updated since then. We asked AI to update it, but now it won't boot anymore. It didn't even make a backup before starting. The AI keeps trying things, everything is down, and we've already spent over €500 in tokens. Can you help us?"

"Sure. €500, plus the time it'll take me to try to fix it. Assuming it can still be fixed and nothing important has been deleted."

"That much?"

Some silence.

"Well, I hope AI takes your job away!" And he hung up.

Believing that autopilot automatically makes you an invulnerable professional pilot will ruin far more people than job losses will.

I don't know if AI will take my job away, but it's already cost them €500 and, probably, their server.

#IT #SysAdmin

Have you blocked Claude and other AI agents on GitHub? Have you seen the "an user you blocked contributed to this repo" banner? Have you seen the agent among the contributors? But when you try to look, neither you, nor GitHub finds the offending commits?

Chances are, the repo has been force-pushed to remove the attribution. But GitHub remembers! And even provides us an API to list the force pushes, including the previous commit the push overwrote. And, it also helpfully keeps those commits available for a long time!

So I wrote a small tool, affectionately named sloposcope that helps you find these commits. Give it an owner and a repository name on GitHub, and it will fetch the repo, the force pushes (at least the last 100), and will look through each history for AI assistance.

It's a yanky shell script, use at your own risk, yada yada.

https://nonfunctional.substack.com/p/passkeys-are-a-trap-do-not-use-them

TIL that passkeys have support for remote attestation built-in. Once enabled by a service, without a US-American phone running software signed by a US-American company, on which you need to be signed in with your legal identity (thus rendering you unable to use it if you're sanctioned by the US), there is a pretty good chance that you'll be unable to use your passkeys in the future. That seems pretty damn terrible.

Don't use passkeys.

if you use Forgejo and would like more CI resources than Codeberg provides (or just don't want to run your own CI): I would like to onboard a few more people/projects to https://felinebuildservices.org/

I think the "AI" bubble is starting to collapse, as it must, but we are unprepared for the consequences. We have been in fact actively prevented from preparing for the consequences.

Google demands every developer's identity in the name of security. Yet more than 50 Play Store apps hiding malware were installed 2.3 million times¹. Meanwhile, #FDroid, which builds every app from source and rejects black boxes, is under threat. This is not about security, it is about control. That is why I don't want to support this joke.

[1]https://cert.gov.az/en/news/novoice-malware-found-on-google-play-infected-2-dot-3-million-devices-9383

How a Defunct White Supremacist State Became a Cult Favorite on the Right – Mother Jones
https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2026/10/how-rhodesia-became-a-cult-favorite-on-the-right-again-bo-french-mike-collins-donald-trump-jr/

See that? (No, behind me.) That's something you don't see every day! That's...drum roll...the largest island in a lake on an island in a lake in the world. (You may have to read that a couple of times; it's that kind of thing.) Treasure Island, Mindemoya Lake, Manitoulin Island, Lake Huron, Ontario.

We're watching How to Get to Heaven from Belfast, and it's interesting how unstable it is about what kind of story it is.

hi, bit of an odd thing for this account

my father has vaguely come across A Guy who has a supply of decommissioned retired solar panels but nowhere to offload them

how do i get him and/or The Guy in contact with some community-scale projects that can make use of them (e.g. small-scale backyard/balcony/etc systems, not a scrapper)?

location: Silicon Valley, California, USA

🔁 appreciated

King for a Day - Thompson Twins https://tidal.com/track/491222023/u

Every so often it strikes me that I live on the edge of a continent and I want to see the ocean.

I guess that's the thing. I want a *simple* map, and these tools mostly make complex maps.

It's funny that I wanted to use as a model a map from OpenStreetMaps, and that map of a real place is much simpler than the maps produced by most TTRPG mapmaking tools.

Clarklewis statement about what happened in Portland this past weekend leaves out the part that matters most… I never claimed they knowingly booked a white nationalist event. I don’t think anyone who was there was.

But on top of everything, I recently received a message from someone who works at Clarklewis and was there that day.
They told me that several employees recognized the shirts as soon as the group came in.

They said they told Joe they were uncomfortable, and that Joe told them the group had a contract and couldn't be made to leave because of the event contract… that they just needed to get through it. They also told me Joe said the group could sue, or use their platforms to make the company look bad.

I was able to verify this person both works there, and was working that day.

So, at the very least, they were informed by their own employees before we even got there. So yes, they knowingly and willingly protected white nationalists.

Even if they didn’t know *before* they definitely knew once they were there. And it’s what they decided to do with that knowledge.

I watched what happened after I personally told the chef. I told him who these people were and his response was that the owners are gay.
He pointed to the Pride flag. And he told us they don't discriminate against religion.

instead of dealing with that information, we were threatened with arrest.
Three people were filming and asking questions and we were told the police could be called. We were told that if we wanted to film, we had to stand in the middle of the street, even though we were on public property. Meanwhile, the white nationalists were still inside.

Then the garage doors closed.
The blinds came down.
And the white nationalists were allowed to leave through the back.

So please please don’t tell us what you would’ve done had you known because I saw what you actually did when you found out

Talking of good memes, I don't know who created this, but I am stealing it...