Get left behind or you’ll embrace AI

Lord help me I'm writing my own plaintext accounting tooling in Guile

Okay bonny, I am gonna give you a scarf so that my friends in the office in Utrecht know where you are…. So like this!

Now you go find a place in 1st class until I get a phone call okay 💕🐰

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OV looking at a plushie bunny with ticket scanner

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OV Printing out a lost&found label

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Ov putting on sticker like a scarf

Geocoding fun: There's a bunch of trees in Budapest named after major European cities (and of course correctly mapped as such in #OSM), what could possibly go wrong...

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Transitous showing a 1min/68m walk from Belgrade to Rome, in Budapest.

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Photo of the tree named "Belgrád" in Budapest (https://www.openstreetmap.org/node/6032676306), taken by a Transitous contributor who debugged the problem on-site.

• Date: Saturday 16th May 2026


• Time: midday - 4pm (London time)


• Location: Canada Water Library Meeting Room 1 (OpenStreetMap)


• RSVP: Reply to this message, email me, or message me here on the fediverse, so we know rough numbers.

• LibreLocal wiki entry


• GLLUG post

#GLLUG #FreeSoftware #Meetup #London

[Fairbuds XL]> .quit
Invalid command in menu main: quit

beanquery> ,q
beanquery> 

scheme@(guile-user)> exit
$1 = #<procedure quit args>

matthew@matthew@fennell.dev-laptop:~$ quit
-bash: quit: command not found

I like that:

if [condition]:
	breakpoint()

In other languages, I slightly dread starting a debug session because I have to remember the flag to pass extra args, add all the breakpoints on startup etc. This leads to long sessions because I don't want to lose the investment I've put into my breakpoints.

But in Python, I have much shorter debug sessions and I can get right to a point of invocation really quickly, verify something, and close the debugger straight away.

I use the repl much more because I can end up in a repl right with the context and variables that I need.

Defining more breakpoints within the repl is really nice to unpack nested datastructures in the same way it would be done in the code:

>>> for key, some_list in some_dict.items():
... 	for value in some_list:
... 		breakpoint()

It's really thoughtfully designed - thank you to the people who made it so!

RE: https://chaos.social/@sleepyowl/116126002122086149

A must read thread from @sleepyowl, particularly for anyone laughing off the "oh they're trying to enforce age verification at an OS level, well I'll just change my open source operating system settings"

Y'all, this is the game where we get LOCKED OUT of having ANY real FOSS operating system we control AT ALL

The steps have been being put in place for this for over a decade now. And who controls the supply chain?

We have to fight this stuff tooth and nail.

@matthew and if you really must know:

1. Cache invalidation.

"Want transactions for the whole of Jan, without any transactions from 1 Feb?"

Bank 1: Export 1 Jan to 1 Feb 😎
Bank 2: Export 1 Jan to 31 Jan 🙂
Bank 3: Export 1 Jan to 30 Jan!! 🤦

How does that happen?! It must be inclusive on both ends, plus the 1 Feb transaction happens at midnight? All I know is, if you go to 31 Jan, it will pull 1 Feb into Jan's export!

Thank goodness for -maxdepth 1!

Baroness Kiddon has tabled an amendment that would require client-side scanning on every device. That would include all film cameras. https://bills.parliament.uk/publications/65150/documents/7938 #MassSurveilance #scanning

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Screen shot of amendment 239A to Crime and Policing bill

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Screen shot of amendment 239A to Crime and Policing bill

How spicy do I like my food? Well...

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Photo of a Pad Thai food order with 15 lines of Spicy food modifiers with *Spec Prep* notes: MAKE HIM REGRET BEING BORN

So you probably don't want to reject AI generated content not because "AI generated content Is incompatible with your license if it has no copyright" but because "whether or not AI generated content is subject to copyright is not a settled matter and ESPECIALLY NOT INTERNATIONALLY" (and not everywhere has a public domain). If you accept something, its status may not be the same internationally, and *legal decisions about AI output could change soon*, leading to an integration of something very hard to undo later.

And the OTHER reason to not integrate it is that most of AI generated output has subtle bugs and tends to result in an erosion of your community. So yeah, that too.

Can you run Signal with basically no iOS or Android devices right now and still do the (mandatory) prove-your-phone-id steps?

It feels like very near future I, and everyone else who cares about computing autotonomy, we're all gonna have to start runnin' the Linux phones, no matter how non-ideal that user experience is right now

@BBCNews This is about basic order and decency in government: which was the #Starmer prospectus. Boring but safe. Rather than corrosion of basic democratic norms.

I am stressed over online safety act shit extending to VPNs, and keep running through the rant in my head and not making the video because I'll sound insane.

The world is going mad in so many ways.

ICYMI: Finally blogged about an old paper (led by @groceryheist) that explains why people often engage in multiple groups with overlapping topic and membership, and which helps explain why competition between online groups seems to be rare. https://mako.cc/copyrighteous/why-do-people-participate-in-similar-online-communities

Thank you, #OnlineSafetyAct for failing to regulate #AgeVerification in any way at all. Now Discord users must hand their data to a Peter-Thiel-of-Palantir-linked system.

https://www.pcgamer.com/software/platforms/oh-good-discords-age-verification-rollout-has-ties-to-palantir-co-founder-and-panopticon-architect-peter-thiel/

“We will launch during a dynamic political environment where many civil society groups that we would expect to attack us would have their resources focused on other concerns,”

Wow!

We welcome today's UK High Court ruling on Palestine Action.

The proscription not only criminalised political #protest but had far-reaching consequences for free speech online and counter terrorism programmes like #Prevent.

The government must change the Terrorism Act so future ones don't make similar proscriptions with worse consequences.

With the ban still in place, we need to hear how Ofcom expects platforms to remove #PalestineAction content.

https://www.openrightsgroup.org/press-releases/human-rights-defenders-raise-concerns-that-online-safety-act-will-lead-to-censorship-of-palestine-protest/

#ukpolitics #ukpol

@bert_hubert And out the door before CI has finished!

@bureaucrhaj my friend the professor solved that problem a while ago! Even @rosahaj in her younger days liked bikes!

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Shak in back basket in backpack on bike

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Blahaj lying on bike

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Rosahaj in bag on bike sneaking our

RE: https://mastodon.social/@sovtechfund/116056808593765766

If you're a FOSS maintainer working on standards or following them, we would love to hear from you! Please share and boost in your circles.

Yeah! Feeling cuddly great!
Can you see I've new stuffing???
But now finally NOMPF!

#Blahaj #surgery #stuffingReplenishment

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A Blåhaj cuddly shark sitting on a table with a plate with two Dutch cheese sandwiches in front of them. A Smolhaj cuddly shark and a small black crotched octopus with colourful bead tentacles are watching. Glad everything went well! And the scar is neat. And it seems you are already recovered! Amazing!

@EUCommission @bendirgo I for one look forward to some of that EU harmonization towards ISO 8601

Wanted to see me speak at #FOSDEM but couldn't make it? Here's the two talks I gave!

How to Level Up the Fediverse
(co-presented with ActivityPub co-author @tsyesika !) https://fosdem.org/2026/schedule/event/HVJRNV-how_to_level_up_the_fediverse/

Lisp is Clay: the Power of Composable DSLs https://fosdem.org/2026/schedule/event/HDE7JZ-lisp-is-clay/

Can't get enough? Need more #spritely talks? We gave a bunch... 🧵

Another FOSDEM and hackathon are in the rear-view mirror, and it is hard to find words to describe how amazingly productive and fun the experience was! We met so many people at the postmarketOS stand, in the FOSS on Mobile devroom and at dinners in the evening. As always it is fun to put faces to nicknames and to talk about the Linux Mobile ecosystem, and figure out how to improve it in person.

Find photos and what we got done in the blog post:

https://postmarketos.org/blog/2026/02/10/fosdem-and-hackathon/

Thanks to all who came by or contributed towards making this possible!

#fosdem #linuxmobile #postmarketos

RE: https://mastodon.social/@verge/116041069446538092

Two things:
1. We are creating a two-tiered internet that will see people willing to give up their IDs having one experience while those who can’t, won’t, or don’t have them missing out on those experiences or being outright excluded from whole areas of the web

2. Why you would be willing to give up your ID to web services that have such poor security in a time when identity is being weaponized by state actors is beyond me

How Australia’s social media ban is having a negative impact on children with disabilities https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2026/feb/06/ive-lost-my-friends-advocacy-groups-warn-australias-social-media-ban-risks-isolating-kids-with-disabilities #exclusion #authortarianism #socialmedia

Loads of FOI requests going into Ofcom about how they are monitoring VPN use. They are refusing to answer most of them. We know they are paying Apptopia and the contract is here https://www.contractsfinder.service.gov.uk/notice/affd2903-bba4-42fa-a96a-f65e7ff23329

FOI responses can be read
https://www.ofcom.org.uk/about-ofcom/freedom-of-information/foi-responses

#VPN #Privacy #ofcom

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Screen grab of Ofcom’s FOI response page

The first step forward 👀

#librem5 #mobilelinux #linuxmobile #linux #shotonlibrem5

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A Librem 5 phone displaying a terminal app with the output of "uname -a" command showing that it's running a 6.12.68-based kernel tree.