Oct 17, 2026, 1:18 PManyone wondering what’s bad about FUTO funding netbsd and netbsd not turning down the money is welcome to explore FUTO’s YouTube channel, which platforms right-wing cranks and spreads disinformation, FUTO’s site, which is full of fascist dogwhistles and references to other fascist disinformation networks, and FUTO’s history in general
this is what I mean when I tell you switching to netbsd is a fragile solution
Oct 17, 2026, 1:27 PMnetbsd isn’t necessarily compromised, but they absolutely aren’t your friends. you don’t know them.
if we want the FOSS we all imagined, where the marginalized come together to share and contribute to a software ecosystem that can benefit humanity for many generations, it’ll involve rather more of a fight than politely switching to another OS. there isn’t a technical solution to what’s happening right now. I’m sorry.
Oct 17, 2026, 1:31 PMthe FOSS we imagined was real. otherwise we wouldn’t have all imagined it.
but the people who promised it to us have all failed to protect it. all of the systems and all of the protections we were told about were worthless.
all of them are currently trying to accomplish the switch portion of a bait and switch. but they don’t represent us or our labor unless we let them.
@zzt everything is a fragile solution. a non-fragile solution literally entails rewriting the world overnight, which clearly isn't going to work.
what remains to be seen is what FUTO get for their investment...
@zzt Drew Devault (@drew) wrote about them last year: https://drewdevault.com/blog/Whats-up-with-FUTO/
Edit: mentioned the wrong account
@MonKaiju thank you!
How about Redox and Haiku? Both of them also have anti-LLM policies:
https://gitlab.redox-os.org/redox-os/redox/-/blob/master/CONTRIBUTING.md#ai-policy
https://review.haiku-os.org/c/haiku/+/11180
@win8linux @zzt Haiku is sponsored by FUTO. (Among other projects like Signal, Tor, Blender, VLC, GIMP, PeerTube, CreativeCommons, and many others)
Also NetBSD, apparently. However, I can't find any other source for FUTO giving a grant to Haiku other than their own page:
Same with NetBSD, for that matter. Neither project seems to have made a post or announcement anywhere about receiving money from FUTO. I wouldn't use that page as a reliable source without corroboration from the actual projects being supposedly donated to.
Also a bit of a nitpick, but the usage of the Haiku logo in FUTO's page would be violating the project's trademark usage requirements and guidelines:
https://www.haiku-inc.org/trademarks/usage_requirements/
https://www.haiku-inc.org/trademarks/allowed_usage/
https://www.haiku-inc.org/trademarks/logo_design/
FUTO does link to the Haiku Project homepage with the logo (correct), but they also made it monochrome (wrong). Having nearly gotten in trouble myself regarding the usage of Haiku trademarks (resolved by revisions to usage guidelines), I very much doubt that the Haiku Project itself signed off on FUTO having their logo on there like that.
Actually y'know what? It might be worth checking the trademark guidelines and requirements of every project that FUTO allegedly gave grants to. If FUTO violated a project's trademark guidelines and requirements, it is more than likely that there was no actual relationship or even money exchanged between a project and FUTO.
Oct 19, 2026, 3:07 AM@linear @win8linux @neongod yep, I can’t find the link right now but there’s a few projects that were shocked to be listed on FUTO’s site and either didn’t know about the donation or refused it, and FUTO still insisted on showing their logos
they’re not an organization operating in good faith
Oct 19, 2026, 3:08 AM@linear @win8linux @neongod with that said, netbsd acknowledges that they voluntarily accepted FUTO’s donation under their current bureaucratic policy and put FUTO’s logo on their site. they also said their board is going to vote on changing their current policy, so fingers crossed.
Oct 19, 2026, 3:09 AM@linear @win8linux @neongod (their PR account then vacuously accused me of starting a harassment campaign against them, so maybe fingers uncrossed)
@zzt
do you know if openbsd is... less bad?
Oct 17, 2026, 5:43 PM@noiseician they’re going in on slop too, and Theo is a piece of work
@zzt@mas.to @noiseician@mastodon.world
OpenBSD only exists because the other NetBSD people found Theo de Raadt to be utterly insufferable and banished him which I find very funny.
Related: I wish DragonFlyBSD wasn't also being slopped up because it has some fascinating ideas and is very cool.
Oct 17, 2026, 5:52 PM@daemonspudguy @zzt @noiseician Yeah, Theo's ideologies on security are kind of bananas. As in, security is more important than convenience or functionality. Bluetooth is banned because it has THE POTENTIAL to open a hole. Bruh.
Oct 17, 2026, 6:09 PM@techokami @daemonspudguy @zzt @noiseician kinda glad I saw this, I was about to do something stupid. welp it's NetBSD or nothing, it seems, if I want a reasonable BSD that's not FreeBSD
@mxchara @techokami @daemonspudguy @zzt @noiseician i have to warn you that the user experience of NetBSD is exactly like linux in the late 1990s only with a better installer
@zzt@mas.to @noiseician@mastodon.world @mxchara@cyberpunk.lol @kyle_pegasus@scalie.club @techokami@woof.tech
I mean that'll probably be an improvement compared to when I last tried it where it just didn't fuckin boot at all (so mid-90s Linux?).
Oct 17, 2026, 6:29 PM@daemonspudguy @zzt @noiseician @mxchara @kyle_pegasus My first time using Linux was about... 2004? I got Red Hat in big box format at Staples, then upgraded to Fedora Core via the "For Dummies" book that came with install media
@techokami @daemonspudguy @zzt @noiseician @mxchara I got SuSE Linux 9.3 big boxed for free with a year's subscription to Linux User and Developer, most issues of which had serious print issues where text was obscured by the alphas of images
Oct 17, 2026, 6:35 PM@kyle_pegasus @daemonspudguy @zzt @noiseician @mxchara ffffffff whaaat
who the hell was the publisher
@techokami @daemonspudguy @zzt @noiseician @mxchara Future! one of the biggest UK magazine publishers!
Oct 17, 2026, 6:37 PM@kyle_pegasus @daemonspudguy @zzt @noiseician @mxchara well before it was Imagine Publishing, they got eaten by Future who had a rival magazine
@techokami @daemonspudguy @zzt @noiseician @mxchara oh right, yeah it would've been imagine. but still, they weren't small time either, i'm baffled they never proofread these things
@techokami @daemonspudguy @zzt @noiseician @mxchara but regardless, yesterday's netbsd adventure was trying to get audio working, because it thinks its working but no sound comes out. updating the kernel made my usb speakers work, but not the realtek chip that was in probably every computer of the entire 2000s
@techokami @daemonspudguy @zzt @noiseician @mxchara i discovered that theres a command (which I now forgot) thats supposed to reset an audio device can lock up such that ctrl-c and kill cannot kill it, and it also prevents shutdown or reboot. so you have to power cycle
Oct 17, 2026, 6:43 PM@kyle_pegasus @daemonspudguy @zzt @noiseician @mxchara :blobfox0_0:
Oct 17, 2026, 6:42 PM@kyle_pegasus @daemonspudguy @zzt @noiseician @mxchara do "audiocfg list" and see what it's using. For me, it was trying (and failing) to use my video card for audio, but when I switched it over manually everything suddenly worked
@techokami @daemonspudguy @zzt @noiseician @mxchara i have done that. i was working on this for 6 hours
Oct 17, 2026, 6:43 PM@kyle_pegasus @daemonspudguy @zzt @noiseician @mxchara ah, nevermind
@techokami @daemonspudguy @zzt @noiseician @mxchara also shoutout to aiomixer for being horrible. the mute switch gives no visual feedback. you just hear audio die. it wouldn't even let me unmute it, i had to reboot
Oct 17, 2026, 6:41 PM@kyle_pegasus @daemonspudguy @zzt @noiseician @mxchara from what I've heard from @shadsy doing gaming magazine preservation, I get the feeling the publishers didn't completely care and wanted to get something out for moneys
Oct 17, 2026, 6:36 PM@kyle_pegasus @daemonspudguy @zzt @noiseician @mxchara aight looked it up, some publisher in the UK that got vore'd by the competition
wow
@zzt@mas.to @noiseician@mastodon.world @mxchara@cyberpunk.lol @kyle_pegasus@scalie.club @techokami@woof.tech
My first time using Linux would have been early 2011 with Ubuntu 10.10, although that was very brief because Ubuntu 11.04 came out like a month later. I was 6 years old. I continued using Ubuntu until around 13.04 or so. Then I switched to a Mac for a bit. Then I built the first instance of my desktop and installed Ubuntu Studio 14.10 on it. Used that (and 15.04) for a bit and then switched to I think Mint Debian Edition. At some point I switched to Manjaro (my first experience with an Arch Linux family distribution), then moved again to ArchLabs (rip), have also used Fedora, OpenSUSE (used Tumbleweed for about a year), FreeBSD for a bit, Void (twice actually), pure Arch, PCLinuxOS, and before moving to Artix I was last using CachyOS. I've been a serial distro hopper for a while. I also maintain that Ubuntu 12.04 was around the last time I could make my system have a theme that was coherent across both GTK and Qt and that it's all been downhill ever since.
Oct 17, 2026, 6:44 PM@daemonspudguy @zzt @noiseician @mxchara @kyle_pegasus I remember trying Ubuntu when it first came out, and it was the crashiest and most unstable distro I have ever tried. At least it's not as fragile anymore, apparently
@techokami @daemonspudguy @zzt @noiseician @mxchara there was a brief window of "good ubuntu" between them fixing x11 only working from live cd and them getting rid of gnome 2 for that weird horrible thing they made themselves
@techokami @daemonspudguy @zzt @noiseician
That's not what happened with Bluetooth at all. The bluetooth code was crap for many years and nobody wanted to work on it, so they pulled it. Same with softupdates, same with the Linux compat subsystem, same with loadable kernel modules.
Oct 18, 2026, 11:26 PM@FritzAdalis @daemonspudguy @zzt @noiseician Oh it doesn't have the Linux compat subsystem? Welp that there is a full-stop dealbreaker for me
Oct 18, 2026, 10:29 PM@zzt Hey, just to clear this situation up:
We received the donation out of the blue with no knowledge of who these people are. We don't have any communication with them and don't know what (if anything) they want from us. Maybe they just want more traffic to their site, which is mostly about software.
Our rule is donations cannot come with restrictions/requirements/influence other than we add a logo to our site. They requested this. At the moment we have to follow our own bureaucratic rules.
Oct 18, 2026, 11:00 PM@netbsd this clears up a lot, thank you
netbsd’s hands are tied, by their own bureaucratic rules, into driving traffic to a fascist organization they didn’t vet
FUTO doesn’t really make a secret of who they are. they have consistently platformed fascists and bigots on their YouTube channel. their founder is affiliated with Curtis Yarvin, a name that’s infamous enough in 2026 that he needs no introduction. would a donation from Urbit prompt you to add their logo to your site? how about Truth Social? maybe Rumble, LBRY, or any of the other far-right disinformation networks that FUTO promotes?
maybe you think this is irrelevant. ok. if Omarchy offered a donation with “no strings attached”, given the context around DHH’s goals to make the hacker community hostile towards marginalized people and friendly to slop, do your bureaucratic rules state you must accept the donation and display their logo on your site?
@zzt you are not acting like someone genuinely interested in positive change
Oct 18, 2026, 11:07 PM@hipsterelectron thanks! I love doing bad things and having no interiority!
Oct 18, 2026, 11:05 PM@netbsd I’m not trying to do purity culture, whatever the fuck that is, or some gotcha shit with these questions
I’d like to know how your bureaucratic rules around donations respond to the precise type of threat that has made many other projects very hostile places for marginalized contributors, as someone who has had to leave several projects after bad actors with money made them hostile
Oct 18, 2026, 11:13 PM@zzt legitimately we haven't had to have this discussion before because nothing like this has ever happened before to us. such is life in these past few years.
someone's brought it to our board of directors now so a decision has to be made one way or another, just not over mastodon.
Oct 18, 2026, 11:21 PM
@netbsd I'm confused. You have never conceived of the possibility that someone might give you money that you wouldn't want to take?
I'm the head of a non-profit. We're always thinking about how to ask for money because we need it. But if someone who is fascist- or AI-adjacent made a donation, I would refuse it--especially if it meant I'd have to put their logo on our site. We don’t need money *that* badly.
@dnkboston @netbsd @zzt We're all AI-adjacent, and increasingly so. The devices & telecoms we're using to communicate include numerous levels of AI, and that's accelerating.
@dnkboston @netbsd @zzt Aircraft, motor vehicles, and household appliances including increasing amounts of AI.
@jonesmurphy Yes, the "smart" versions. I would turn them down, because if they support us, they get to green-wash.
@dnkboston @netbsd @zzt There's nothing to greenwash in many uses of AI. AI is not yet remotely comparable in threat to racism. All of the worst threats of AI today stem wholly from racism, the far bigger problem at least for the foreseeable future.
@jonesmurphy Was just listening to Naomi Klein talk about her latest book. AI as it has been embraced by Big Tech is part of a fascist, eugenicist project. Racist "thought leaders" love this stuff, in part as a convenient way to rewrite history.
It's not why younger generations are racist, but it's exacerbating the problem.
@dnkboston @netbsd @zzt Naomi Klein has huge blind spots because of her racism, just making her extremely reluctant to talk about racism and much more focused on problems which are consequences of racism and/or are far less threatening than racism. AI is much bigger and older than current Big Tech leadership. Western culture as a whole largely centers on rewriting history in racist ways. False, racist history is key to the self-esteem and happiness of the vast majority of Westerners.
@dnkboston @netbsd @zzt Younger generations are very divided. Most are less racist than older folk and thus are significantly better behaved. BUT the most racist youngsters join older racists in heavily causing the worst behaviors of Big Tech along with doing all kinds of horrible damage to themselves, the USA and the world.