I hope to be there once I finish with work, probably a couple of hours after it starts.
- Date: Saturday 8th August 2026
- Time: 1pm onwards
- Location: The Metropolitan Bar (OpenStreetMap)
- RSVP: not required.
It's not a reserved venue, so look for a table with lots of stickers, and Polarian wearing the EuroBSDCon 2024 (Dublin) tshirt (with artwork like this).
New on the blog. Codeberg's members voted to stop hosting mostly AI-generated projects. The freedom worth defending is not the freedom to be taken from, it is the freedom to refuse.
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@tarakiyee interesting thoughts in commons and copyleft in The age oft AI. E.g. ". A model trained on GPL code is not automatically a covered derivative work merely because that code was somewhere in the corpus. It's a defence built against one specific enemy hailing back to the 80s, the proprietary fork."
NEW: 20 civil society organisations have called for an investigation into the UK Information Commissioner's Office for failing to uphold data protection law in relation to eVisas.
This scheme has been plagued with breaches and accessibility issues.
And the ICO has done nothing to hold the UK Home Office to account.
Find out more ⬇️
#dataprotection #evisa #ico #gdpr #migrants #homeoffice #ukpolitics #ukpol
A drug is a chemical substance and object.
A social media platform is a complicated system of speech and communication.
Using anaology that conflate the two is at best lazy thinking, at worst prohibitionist propaganda from people with authoritarian personality types.
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
Utopia & Dystopia by Dylan Glynn
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A side-by-side crayon or oil pastel drawing split into two panels labeled "UTOPIA" and "DYSTOPIA." The left panel, titled "UTOPIA" in green text, shows a lush, green tree with a thick canopy standing on a patch of grass against a light, rain-streaked background. The right panel, titled "DYSTOPIA" in red text, shows a fiery red, orange, and yellow mushroom cloud erupting against a dark, black background, resembling a nuclear explosion.
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.
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We'll be here for a few hours and possibly heading to a pub afterwards.
Come join us if you're in London and fancy a casual chat about #FreeSoftware!
[Fairbuds XL]> .quit
Invalid command in menu main: quit
beanquery> ,q
beanquery>
scheme@(guile-user)> exit
$1 = #<procedure quit args>
matthew@matthew@fennell.dev-laptop:~$ quitIf only using
-bash: quit: command not found
C-d for everything didn't feel so wrong.pdb while writing some stuff in #Python, and it's really nice to interact with!I like that:
breakpoint() function, making conditional breakpoints very natural: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():I end up writing things in the repl first, but within the context that the code would be written in reality.
... 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.
"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!
silly free software joke [SENSITIVE CONTENT]
I'd just like to interject for a moment. What you're referring to as digital sovereignty, is in fact, software right to repair/digital sovereignty, or as I've been taken to calling it, software right to repair plus digital sovereignty. And what you're referring to as software right to repair/digital sovereignty, is in fact, free software/software right to repair/digital sovereignty, or as I've been taken to calling it, free software plus software right to repair plus digital sovereignty.reverse-i-searches: I wanted find Maildir -type f -mmin -10 | mthread | mseq -S, and I got find . -maxdepth 1 -type f -delete!!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.
These days mobile OSes obscure everything from the user, actively punishing them for rooting their devices or instaling custom builds.
Linux on the other hand feels like ~2008. You have apps for daily needs (like you did on PDAs back in the day), you can consume media (reading books, watching movies, listening to music).
But if you're a curious person... there's a terminal. You can see exactly what your device is doing and how it works. You want to know which GPS satellites can see you? No problem, just query the modem-manager or use simple GUI app that will tell you the name of a satellite and which system/country it belongs to (turns out my device supports GALILEO, neat!).
Im really enjoying it. Two years ago I would say it was still unusable, but now (despite WiFi, Audio and Cameras not working on my device yet) it's... neat.
(Post written from xiaomi-pyxis running postmarketOS with Plasma Mobile while walking back home from a supermaket btw)
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
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.
“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,”Quoted from an internal memo by Meta about their surveillance glasses.
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.
@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.
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! 