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  @tog is domestic saw blade sharpening still a thing? Can you recommend anyone?

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  A huge THANK YOU to the protesters and activists responsible for causing Powerscourt Hotel to choose to cancel an upcoming conference due to be attended by "200 senior figures from the world of politics, technology and defence" organised by technofascist Peter Thiel's Dialog group. The event is a material source of annual revenue [for Stonebrick LLC, trading as Dialog] and it expects to face a refund liability as a result of the cancellation of some $2.2 million (€1.9 million). h...

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  @tschak@oldbytes.space they came out rather well! #Fujunet

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  @freedosproject@fosstodon.org these are all technical tasks which assume a well-functioning community. The students who are interested in the sociotechnical aspects of technical writing in a team setting may be interested in attempting to interact with the #Fujinet community. Everyone in the community understands the documentation is a shambles, but a handful of opinionated gatekeepers block actual progress.

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  @savetz@oldbytes.space that is super weird.

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  Radar is another technology which the British pioneered and shared with the US. That story is told in "The Invention That Changed the World: How a Small Group of Radar Pioneers Won the Second World War and Launched a Technical Revolution". Again, the Americans had the resources to develop and bring to production this electronic wonder. (I read that book long ago - time for a re-read in the context of these other books.) Finally, also in the 1940s, the British had a lead in the technol...

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  @davidgerard I really enjoyed a chance to hear you talking off the cuff in a longer format on https://share.transistor.fm/s/55b01c02, David!

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  @Kroc right, that's what the sociopaths driving the bubble want us to believe. Of course we don't negotiate with AI; it has no agency. We apply pressure (on an escalating scale) to the frail human beings who are attempting to create this dystopia.

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  This Guardian article https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2026/apr/29/claude-ai-deletes-firm-database suffers from the same trap of anthropomorphism as the original I read: https://oldbytes.space/@fluidlogic/116482496017786464 agent gone rogue These tools have no concept of what a job is. They don't go rogue, they produce plausible text. Now complete idiots have wired them to command lines (the old school but still powerful way for humans to interact with computers) and APIs (programmat...

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  This is fucking hilarious. @parismarx keeps the schtick going the whole way through. https://disconnect.blog/on-the-abdication-of-chief-prophet-tim-cook/ #TechWontSaveUs

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  @felimwhiteley I appreciated the vehemence of your position on AI coding tools as expressed on today's #LateNightLinux: https://latenightlinux.com/late-night-linux-episode-383/ Are you aware if @degville and Will (is he on the Fediverse?) have read any of Ed Zitron's exhaustive analysis¹ of the completely insane ways in which the leading LLM coding assistant companies are setting money on fire? For each dollar subscribers spend, the LLM companies are subsidising by up to $15. The busine...

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  The latest #PivotToAi episode by @davidgerard is just brilliant. Pivot to AI: 20260413 - AI doomsday cultist throws Molotov at Sam Altman’s house Episode webpage: http://pivottoai.libsyn.com/20260413-ai-doomsday-cultist-throws-molotov-at-sam-altmans-house Media file: https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/45fb8198-0759-425c-8e91-d25d321575a7/20260413.mp3?dest-id=5006510

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  You thought things were bad at #TheDocumentFoundation? I suggest re-reading ejected founder Michael Meeks' 1st April post. He's provided several updates. https://www.collaboraonline.com/blog/tdf-ejects-its-core-developers/ Follow the links in Meeks' post. The dysfunction he highlights at TDF is breathtaking. The evidence he brings to bear shows TDF is toxic to its core and is no longer fit to serve the purposes of #LibreOffice or its community. It solely exists now to perpetuate i...

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  Incidentally, I'm pleased to hear @savetz unambiguously express his dislike of slop code for retrocomputing projects: Have I stumbled into more slop-coded Atari stuff? 'Cause I don't like it. Thank you for taking this stand, Kay. Many of us agree that LLM slop code has no place in retrocomputing.

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  @scuttlebutt thanks - I wasn't aware.

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  Laine Nooney's"The Apple II Age" is packed full of superb, fresh insights into the character of the forces acting to shape how personal computing came to be defined during the pivotal years between 1977 and 1984. For example, here are a couple of pages on the compromises teacher and software author Tom Snyder had to make - sacrificing his goal of fostering collaboration and consensus-building among a group of students through exploration - to the neoliberal imperative of isolated...

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  The Commodore C64C I picked up a few weeks back cleaned up nicely and needed exactly zero electronic work! I had no Commodore-specific accessories, like keyboard springs, power supply or video lead, so I've been buying those bits piecemeal as the need arose and as my optimism increased that the machine was probably going to be fixable with my minimal electronic repair skills. Just a few days ago, I had the board out, powered up, but with no monitor attached. Between scoping CPU and memory...