Deltachat and Jabber/XMPP are good decentralized/federated alternatives to Signal.

The UX changes in the release notes are welcome, but in the grand scheme, pretty minor. I actually find it much better than it was a decade ago, but still prefer Krita’s UI by a significant margin.

Gimp would really benefit from a total UI overhaul, honestly.

Unfortunately it is :/

If you have a VPN and use a US server you may be able to get around it (maybe Mozilla’s free VPN in Firefox would do the trick?)

Otherwise, there’s always yarr 🏴‍☠️ :)

Fantastic book. Archive.org has a good audio book version of it for free.

The creator of Babylon 5 has recently begun uploading every episode of the show to YouTube to watch for free, they release a new ep every 3 days

For anyone who wants to give it a try, here’s the season 1 playlist: https://m.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLGTv90eS-e4I

One of the owners of Mullvad donated a vast sum of money to a Swedish Nazi political party, accounting for 70% of their funding, which resulted in boosted popularity there.

This is the leader of that political party:

https://www.friatider.se/markus-allard-om-andra-generationens-invandrare-de-ska-ocksa-ut

Örebro Party leader Markus Allard goes to the election on expulsions. He opens to withdraw citizenship and also expel second generation of immigrants – even if they were born in Sweden.
“I’m prepared to cross corpses,” he said.

One suggestion that he has is that citizenship and permanent residence permits can be torn up – with reference to “Sweden is the country of Swedes”.

In a section of Yoshi’s Podcast, Allard develops his view on expulsions and explains that he prepared to “go over corpses” to bring home unwanted immigrants. The host notes that there will be no beautiful sight when, for example, immigrant mothers who have been on maternity leave for 15 years are to be deported together with their children. “It’s not going to be pretty to send these people home,” he said. Markus Allard agrees, but says: I think you can handle that optics. Even the children will need to be deported, he explains.

He further explains that many of the problems relate to second-generation immigrants. They are going out too. Even if they were born in Sweden, because they have no natural connection to Sweden. They are not Swedes. They have not become Swedes. It says Sweden in the passport, but they have not been interested in becoming part of Sweden. There’s a difference. It’s a qualitative difference," Allard said.

They are nationalist racists trying to cloak themselves with populist leftist ideas. This is the leader of that party:

https://www.friatider.se/markus-allard-om-andra-generationens-invandrare-de-ska-ocksa-ut

Örebro Party leader Markus Allard goes to the election on expulsions. He opens to withdraw citizenship and also expel second generation of immigrants – even if they were born in Sweden.
“I’m prepared to cross corpses,” he said.

One suggestion that he has is that citizenship and permanent residence permits can be torn up – with reference to “Sweden is the country of Swedes”.

In a section of Yoshi’s Podcast, Allard develops his view on expulsions and explains that he prepared to “go over corpses” to bring home unwanted immigrants. The host notes that there will be no beautiful sight when, for example, immigrant mothers who have been on maternity leave for 15 years are to be deported together with their children. “It’s not going to be pretty to send these people home,” he said. Markus Allard agrees, but says: I think you can handle that optics. Even the children will need to be deported, he explains.

He further explains that many of the problems relate to second-generation immigrants. They are going out too. Even if they were born in Sweden, because they have no natural connection to Sweden. They are not Swedes. They have not become Swedes. It says Sweden in the passport, but they have not been interested in becoming part of Sweden. There’s a difference. It’s a qualitative difference," Allard said

Remember; the Nazi’s did the same thing by strategically calling their party the National Socialist German Workers’ Party, despite them not being socialist nor a working class party. This was chosen because Socialism was gaining popularity, and thus the Nazi’s thought it would help their chances of getting votes and public support.

For anyone else scrolling by, you can read The Dispossessed here for free! :D

The Wing Commander movie by Chris Roberts (yeah, of Star Citizen scam artist fame).

It’s loosely based on his older Wing Commander games, and I think he funded it with some of the money Microsoft gave him to develop Freelancer.

It’s a deeply mediocre movie, but the soundtrack, in particular the main theme, was pretty darn good.

I have a pretty dim view of LLMs.

1. Simply using an AI that’s run on a corporate data centers encourages the construction of yet more data centers, with all of the environmental/climate negatives they bring, as well as local harms they induce on the people living near them, such as increased electricity rates.

2. Using corporate AI directly helps the financial situations of those giant corporations (by boosting usage/user numbers, they are able to attract more investment capital), most of which are ran by right-wing CEO’s who are more than willing to collaborate with and fund fascist governments to ensure that they are not regulated in search of both maximum profits. Some of these companies, such as Nvidia, Palantir and Oracle, genuinely appear to be seeking to use these tools for what would previously be considered crackpot conspiracy theory levels of public control and surveillance.

3. I’m wary of the potential effects of AI usage resulting in declining or stagnating critical thinking based on some preliminary studies (example 1, example 2).

4. I do not think LLM’s can be “just a tool” as many claim.

5. 99% of LLM’s (the ones virtually everyone use) are trained on copyrighted code that is incompatible with GPL licensed projects. LLM’s have a 3 to 10% chance to unknowingly reproduce the copyrighted code perfectly, introducing legal plagiarism into an open-source project, which could easily open up the developers to being sued in the future if companies scanned open source repos for copyright violations.

6. Many courts are ruling that LLM generated code cannot be copyrighted at all, meaning that it also cannot be legally made GPL, losing the protections from corporate exploration the GPL normally grants. https://fsfe.org/news/2026/news-20260825-01.html

I mean, I’m sure there’s a very common stitch pattern used in most people’s clothing, but I’m guessing most people wouldn’t be familiar with it. 🤷

I’ve never had cause to work with anything related to databases. I’m familiar with SQlite being a database software, but I haven’t ever had to open a .db file before, so I wouldn’t have known .db is specifically the SQLite format.

Virtually the entire industry is not profitable, but that current reality does not affect the massive investment money they continue to receive, as they are pitching the concept to investors that many of the free users will eventually become paying users, and that their overall userbase will continue to expand, with projections of huge profits a decade from now.

For investors, the lack of profits now is not a blaring alarm bell, because Amazon also operated without a profit for many years by undercutting their competition until the competition failed, then Amazon was able to be a monopoly and jack up their prices.

A similar thing is happening with AI companies, where the prices they are currently charging is putting them at a net loss, but each one is hoping to out survive the other so that some day they can be a semi or total monopoly, and jack the prices up on a userbase that has become totally dependent on them to do their jobs.

1. Simply using an AI that’s run on a corporate data centers encourages the construction of yet more data centers, with all of the environmental/climate negatives they bring, as well as local harms they induce on the people living near them, such as increased electricity rates.

2. Using corporate AI directly helps the financial situations of those giant corporations (by boosting usage/user numbers, they are able to attract more investment capital), most of which are ran by right-wing CEO’s who are more than willing to collaborate with and fund fascist governments to ensure that they are not regulated in search of both maximum profits. Some of these companies, such as Nvidia, Palantir and Oracle, genuinely appear to be seeking to use these tools for what would previously be considered crackpot conspiracy theory levels of public control and surveillance.

3. I’m wary of the potential effects of AI usage resulting in declining or stagnating critical thinking based on some preliminary studies (example 1, example 2).

4. I do not think LLM’s can be “just a tool” as many claim.

5. 99% of LLM’s (the ones virtually everyone use) are trained on copyrighted code that is incompatible with GPL licensed projects. LLM’s have a 3 to 10% chance to unknowingly reproduce the copyrighted code perfectly, introducing legal plagiarism into an open-source project, which could easily open up the developers to being sued in the future if companies scanned open source repos for copyright violations.

6. Many courts are ruling that LLM generated code cannot be copyrighted at all, meaning that it also cannot be legally made GPL, losing the protections from corporate exploration the GPL normally grants. https://fsfe.org/news/2026/news-20260825-01.html

Anarchism is the only ideology that says “Don’t give me power, instead spread all power out as much as possible to prevent dictatorships and any ability for corporations or a state to exploit others.”

From historical records, when it’s able to be tried, it works like it says on the tin.

The USSR were authoritarians cloaking themselves with leftist words, the non-authoritarians refer to them as red-fash, and we don’t consider them to be actually left, just power trippers who want to rule with an iron fist.

I’ve never interacted with database software directly before, I wouldn’t have the expertise to tell the difference between any database formats without doing some research.

1936 Catalonia during the Spanish Civil War organized an Anarchist society with over 3 million participants, and they documented much of how exactly they ran it, right down to how they kept the electric trams for public transport going (there is a fantastic book embedded at the bottom of that article, Collectives in the Spanish Revolution by Gaston Leval, which offers more details on other aspects of how they operated that society).

It’s a fantastic historical event we can learn from and build upon, and it bore out quite effectively that a decentralized society functions quite well.

Dammit :(

Gave it a try and I have to say I like it quite a bit, and I like that it exports everything in markdown files for backups.

Unfortunately Logseq also has a claude section in their github, so they are using LLM’s too, though I do not know to what extent (the cloude bot has few direct commits, but the devs could be using it for their own pull requests).