Christine Lemmer-Webber

@dustyweb.bsky.social is a partner who has a fedi/bsky presence. I have another partner who ~doesn't go to this school~ isn't active here, and, being a relationship anarchist, I also have some more loosely defined connections and am actively doing other dating!

I also wish ill on Sam Altman

DoD tweet saying the Iranian attacks are part of "Operation Epic Fury"

This war is so horrifying but giving it the most cringe millennial name possible is just salt in the wound

New poll: Democrats' real problem isn't being too liberal — it's being seen as too weak Americans, including swing voters, see the Republican Party as 20 points more extreme than Democrats — and the Democrats as weak and ineffective. So why would the *Democrats* moderate?

Full link here:

A poll showing the Democrats are viewed as elitist by 43% of people while Republicans are viewed as elitist by 60%. It also shows that only 31% of people view Dems as tough, and 56% view Republicans as tough. 60% of people view Republicans as extreme and only 42% view Dems as extreme.

A lot of obvious stuff in this poll (people want Dems to act with more conviction and stop tearing their ACLs trying to reach across the aisle), but the thing I learned is that Republicans are viewed as the elitist ones now! Run with that! Usain Bolt with that shit!

the party that wants to require ID to vote abruptly invalidating a thousand people’s IDs overnight seems like a pretty giant flashing red light

Can Canada find digital sovereignty in the Fediverse? | BetaKit At FediMTL, advocates say growing the social web is vital to combating Big Tech.

At the first FediMTL conference, @evan.cosocial.ca.ap.brid.gy, Cory Doctorow, Philippe Larose Cadieux, @dustyweb.bsky.social, and others spoke about the promises and challenges of a decentralized "social web" that's separate from mainstream social media platforms.

Invalidating driver's licenses and enacting a bounty-style bathroom ban are the latest escalation in politicians' radical anti-trans crusade.

Kansas, we'll see you in court.

Hoot 0.8.0 is a HUGE milestone! Being able to live develop browser applications in Hoot is a game changer! spritely.institute/news/hoot-0-...

A letter from 2016 to 2026 dustycloud.org/blog/a-lette...

Just imagine if you wrote a letter to yourself a decade ago! The tech world is full of possibility! AI is starting to make waves, but don't worry, we'll have minimum basic income! And more!

Just ordered three years worth of binders. Expensive, but at least I won't have to order binders again for a while, and if they become less available I'll be glad for a long runway.

Age verification vendor Persona left frontend exposed, researchers say Behind a basic age check, researchers say Persona’s system runs extensive identity, watchlist, and adverse-media screening.

Researchers discovered a publicly exposed frontend on a government-authorized server, containing 2,456 accessible files from the age verification vendor used by Discord.

Large Trump banner hung at justice department headquarters ‘Make America Safe Again’ banner put up in striking symbol of president’s control over top US law-enforcement agency

"Gradually, then suddenly" It isn't the 1st giant banner of Trump & it won't be the last.

"Large Trump banner hung at justice department HQ. ‘Make America Safe Again’ banner put up in striking symbol of president’s control over top US law-enforcement agency." www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026...

They incarcerated a white, retired British grandmother with a valid visa.

For 2 months.

I'm glad this article gets into what most don't: Even if you manage to get released, that's 2 months of not paying your bills. Her credit was wrecked.

She's retired - younger folks would have lost their jobs.

There were a lot of horrible things about the George W Bush administration which continue to impact us even today. But we learned one essential lesson from it we shouldn't ever forget

Don't put the comic relief character as the lead role

'Students Are Being Treated Like Guinea Pigs:' Inside an AI-Powered Private School Leaked documents reveal the inner workings of Alpha School, which both the press and the Trump administration have applauded. The documents show Alpha School's AI is generating faulty lessons that som...

This is an insane story start to finish. $65k a year "AI school" heavily surveils students, generates nonsensical questions that "does more harm than good," scrapes from competitors. Stores hours of video of children insecurely. Lots more:

www.404media.co/students-are...

turns out the discord situation is worse! the company that will be doing the age verifications with IDs is Persona, a peter thiel aligned company

we're going to try to wind down the Kill The Computer discord and try to get a subreddit for the podcasts community up and running

this same exact headline drops max three weeks after every platform integrates this shit. it all started being pushed at the same time too. i sort of just assumed this was already the case. i didn't know anyone needed to say it.

AI Agent Lands PRs in Major OSS Projects, Targets Maintainer... An AI agent is merging PRs into major OSS projects and cold-emailing maintainers to drum up more work.

The bots are already reputation farming though, and seem to be succeeding, so I'm not sure that works either unfortunately socket.dev/blog/ai-agen...

A lot of peoples' hope for these tools is that they can make becoming a developer and contributing to projects more feasible. And maybe in some cases they can. But in practice the opposite is happening: projects are so overwhelmed that they are being incentivized to close up the gates.

A lot of peoples' hope for these tools is that they can make becoming a developer and contributing to projects more feasible. And maybe in some cases they can. But in practice the opposite is happening: projects are so overwhelmed that they are being incentivized to close up the gates.

But this is the part that also makes me very sad. Back in the MediaGoblin / OpenHatch days, we took great efforts to make contributions for newcomers as welcoming as possible. The unfortunate consequence of this is that this is becoming less viable.

DOG AT THE OLYMPICS
FULL COMPETITION HIGHLIGHTS

Good thread from one of the Godot maintainers, who like many maintainers, are exhausted from slop PRs effectively DDoS'ing them.

Since GitHub / Microsoft's business incentives align with encouraging this stuff, using a non-GitHub forge is currently a better experience. (Maybe not for long.)

Godot prides itself in being welcoming to new contributors, letting any engine user have the possibility to make an impact on their engine of choice.

Maintainers spend a lot of time assisting new contributors to help them get PRs in a mergeable state.

I don't know how long we can keep it up.

- Is this code wrong because it was written by AI, or is it an honest mistake from an inexperienced human contributor?
- What do you do when you ask a PR author if they used AI because you're suspicious, and they all reply "yes I used it to write the PR description because I'm bad with English"?

We find ourselves having to second guess every PR from new contributors, multiple times per day:

- The description is verbose LLM output, is the code written at least partially by a human?
- Does the "author" understand the code they're sending?
- Did they test it? Are the test results made up?

Godot's GitHub has increasingly many pull requests generated by LLMs and it's a MASSIVE time waster for reviewers – especially if people don't disclose it. Changes often make no sense, descriptions are extremely verbose, users don't understand their own changes… It's a total shitshow. #godotengine

Honestly, AI slop PRs are becoming increasingly draining and demoralizing for #Godot maintainers.

If you want to help, more funding so we can pay more maintainers to deal with the slop (on top of everything we do already) is the only viable solution I can think of:

fund.godotengine.org

I spent so long anxiety'ing about this post thinking that people would mad at me assuming it's about things it isn't, when in reality I probably don't need to anxiety at all because it's so niche that almost nobody is gonna read it 😎