maxine 🇵🇸

no pronouns no genders no states

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npub15rj35t6m5sxwrc84up7jm46539x6pc77lvw9tjcm0s3qlsjj2e2qpl87v9

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maxine@hachyderm-io.mostr.pub

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nprofile1qqs2peg69ad6gr8pur67qlfd6a2gjndqu000k8z4evdhcgs0cff9v4qpz3mhxue69uhhyetvv9ujuerpd46hxtnfduqs6amnwvaz7tmwdaejumr0ds7asyu5

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relay.damus.io

nos.lol

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npub15rj35t6m5sxwrc84up7jm46539x6pc77lvw9tjcm0s3qlsjj2e2qpl87v9

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Last Notes

2026-10-26 14:16:15 UTC

Absurd request: could I buy a physical audiobook for someone in the UK to rip for me? I'm trying to get the unabridged Stephen Briggs recording of Terry Pratchett's Monstrous Regiment in its UK edition - something that is no longer available digitally for sale except in its awful US edition that alters the meaning of the book.
It's unsurprisingly difficult to buy a physical English language UK only audiobook that's >20 years old anywhere, but this one at least pops up in the UK once in a while, but I'm yet to ever see it on German sites or in second hand shops.
Boosts OK #discworld #bookstodon

2026-10-21 15:58:05 UTC

99% of wikis should have a static mode to drop to when this happens. please, i beg you, let me still read it

2026-10-08 11:31:35 UTC

First time in my life I have actively *purchased* a vaccine
https://media.hachyderm.io/media_attachments/files/117/405/063/069/870/170/original/5b806022bff9bde9.jpeg

2026-09-07 11:31:45 UTC

It's very neat to think the problem is the US, but no European governments have spoken out in defense of Autistici/Inventati. Much like when Germany accidentally publicly admitted that war with Iran is directly in their interest and thanked Israel for it, our states absolutely benefit from such repression and all mainstream parties see this as a crackdown without any risk of backlash against them. Maybe Merz will slip up again and thank the US tho, the man is particularly bad at this.

2026-08-30 11:00:17 UTC

There is no path back to a functioning society that allows for the continued existence of LLMs. It just isn’t viable to have a tool that can generate a large volume of plausible sounding text, often directly spitting out what is in its dataset, without eroding all public trust and desire to participate in the commons.
LLMs are going to fucking kill us. They’ve made mistrust the default and our world just cannot work like this. We’re basically speedrunning into the societal conditions of well established fascism where nothing and no one can be trusted anymore. I cannot fathom the people who are seeing this erosion of trust and erosion of communities and going “yeah, but progress” as a reason to not even mildly push back with their policies and stances.
I know we’ve lived under decades of effective rightist propaganda and governments successfully arresting and eliminating any and all resistance movements, but it’s unfathomable to me to see most people put up no resistance and just go along for the ride.

2026-07-08 22:45:59 UTC

Not saying that the entirety of the AI industry is the worst people on the planet… but no actually I am saying that, there is no aspect of working on this shit that doesn’t also directly contribute to the most vile outcomes. If you work on any of this stuff, you should feel bad, and you should do something to start making up for it
#nevent1q…haxs

2026-07-05 23:06:57 UTC

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@nprofile…s8xx are xmpp extensions for e2ee considered “good”? because yeah as someone who otherwise pushes signal i wish there were other options, especially ones that put group comms as a higher prio

2026-06-20 23:26:37 UTC

This made me look up what's available in Berlin libraries, and I can also indeed rent a sewing machine! This is genuinely amazing and I love it. I should have made use of my library card for more than just libby
#nevent1q…lrqm

2026-04-29 15:55:31 UTC

Open source continues to struggle because above all else it has persisted in the idea of corporate dependence. We moved to Sourceforge and it was a mess. We moved to Github which gave us even less individual control and it also became a mess. In between was also Launchpad but tbh that never really took off bc of bzr.
The alternative isn’t self-hosting though. Large projects provide code hosting for anything vaguely relevant. Umbrella hosting and cooperating on these services makes things more sustainable and makes anything less likely to disappear.
Over a decade ago I used to lend my time to various places to assist with hosting or just initial set up, and then everything started disappearing, wikis got swallowed by fandom and ign, every major project moved to github, and everyone else pretended you need a k8s cluster to run anything. We could just bring that back. We even learned a lot of important lessons from the likes of Freenode about how to avoid hostile takeovers.
#nevent1q…6sy4

2026-04-28 08:07:16 UTC

The degree to which github is down all the fucking time now and affects my work because no one knows what caching is (seriously tfc cache the providers, please) is not even funny anymore
Anyone got a job that involves not using github? Please?

2026-04-23 09:36:38 UTC

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Do not trust projects which incidentally end up replacing licenses that put minimal requirements on corporations with anti-labour licenses such as MIT/BSD type.

2026-04-23 09:34:36 UTC

Consider the following: rust rewrites of projects like coreutils exist purely to remove copyleft licensing. The supposed security and performance gains are irrelevant, and while memory safety is important, logic bugs don’t suddenly cease to exist just because it was written in Rust.
https://www.phoronix.com/news/Ubuntu-Rust-Coreutils-Audit

2026-04-20 21:25:04 UTC

If LLMs are a ddos on open source maintainers (which they are), then it’s also important to remember that security research that doesn’t contribute fixes such as Project Zero was/is a dos on maintainers. Corporations have always been extractive in their relationship here. Microsoft only contributed to Linux because you can’t offer a cloud that’s just Windows Server. AWS only does open source to undermine less permissively licensed projects. The relationships, contrary to what a lot of high profile people and the LF would say, were always extremely poisonous to any positive impact foss could have as a whole.

2026-04-17 10:07:31 UTC

I see absolutely no evidence of it working on “any device”: https://github.com/eu-digital-identity-wallet
More importantly, how does banning children from accessing the internet protect them? What 3rd spaces exist for tweens and teens? Where is the multibillion fund to provide something?
And what is the EU doing to actually protect children from their most likely abusers - the people they know, their parents, guardians, extended family? What protections are being offered to queer kids? Where is the mass funding for giving all children independence into seeing medical professionals even if their guardians disagree?
This fucking sucks, and the statement is pure lies.
#nevent1q…zu77

2026-04-11 16:19:54 UTC

@nprofile…6u3s hey, it's really cool that you've released a version of little snitch for linux! I noticed however that anything wrapped appears as the same software which makes it hard to differentiate what's what. Would it be possible to fix in a future version? Just seeing `bwrap` doesn't reveal much info sadly :)
https://media.hachyderm.io/media_attachments/files/116/386/980/446/805/763/original/624194a91cbc8ac7.png

2026-03-05 10:07:25 UTC

Well, there goes any reason to own a framework! Might consider replacing my laptop before RAM is 1000$/1GiB...
#nevent1q…z49d

2026-03-04 17:42:51 UTC

Using LLM backed codegen to falsely relicense from copyleft licensing like LGPL to anything resembling MIT/BSD style licensing isn't just laundering code - it's an active attack on the labour aspect of the free software movement. It is an attempt to undo forcing cooperation by using the existing copyright system, subverting the very commons which they plundered to create these tools.
This is why playing by the rules rarely gets you change.

2026-02-27 01:55:30 UTC

Hot take but the “open slopware” list was only problematic by painting a target on the backs of contributors to said list. Projects that accept contributions like that knowlingly need to be known. Active contributors who take pride in using LLMs should be named and shamed, because last time people felt bad about naming and shaming we got the fucking NFT fiasco from which nobody suffered career ending reputational damage.

2026-02-06 12:01:27 UTC

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@nprofile…zaxj I wish people understood that treating running your own instance without extremely proactive instance blocking as representative of fedi is like treating running your own email without any antispam as representative of the intended experience.

2026-01-20 15:16:22 UTC

On the off chance - can anyone recommend a #locksmith in #Berlin who specialises or at least works on replacing locks on old suitcases with modern, airline approved ones?
(boosts welcome)

2025-12-17 12:15:23 UTC

I don't understand why anyone dissatisfied with Firefox right now would switch to Vivaldi, a browser built on top of Blink (Chromium) that's "proprietary freeware" and not foss. That doesn't seem like a good trade-in no matter how much Firefox is fucking up at present, and they really are fucking up a lot.

2025-10-08 18:39:12 UTC

Good job @nprofile…8xaf - I now know that if I buy any upgrades or replacement parts for my fw13 I am directly contributing money to a bunch of loser transphobes and racists! This is exactly what I want from a niche laptop company.
Why are you destroying your reputation to throw money at bigots? What next, gonna announce an all-white laptop edition in partnership with dhh?

2025-06-07 12:20:18 UTC

Can anyone speak to a good repair cafe experience with fine solder work? I have a broken joycon and replacement ribbon clamp connectors, but I am absolutely unskilled when it comes to fine soldering.
East #Berlin preferred for my convenience, but I don’t mind a trip. Boosts welcome.

2025-05-29 21:32:27 UTC

This is really cool, and since it's being livestreamed, I am excited to watch it on the night! Got my tickets, I just hope whatever platform they use for streaming actually just works
https://www.attitude.co.uk/culture/sir-ian-mckellen-to-open-historic-all-trans-and-nonbinary-production-of-twelfth-night-484397/

2025-05-15 20:11:32 UTC

“I wrote this using an LLM” and “I dismiss anything that uses long words and emdashes because it was written by an LLM” are the two sides of the same antiintellectualism, and the people who now dismiss a rich vocabulary by claiming only LLMs would write like that would previously just call you a pretentious knob.

2025-05-01 10:54:54 UTC

When exactly did “democratise” begin to mean “remove need to learn”? GenAI democratised writing skills and art by not requiring any creativity, there’s Linux distros that democratise self-hosting by making it a one click process that will put you in a position of not knowing how to debug or make sure you’re following basic security practices in the long term.
Why is democratising access all about removing the need to learn and practise skills, rather than expanding access to educational materials and safe ways of experimenting and learning? I dislike this so much.

2025-04-30 22:23:04 UTC

Finally wiped and cleaned my old laptop. Looking to give it away ideally in exchange for a donation to a charity (MSF, MAP). Handover in Berlin.
It’s a Dell XPS 13 7390 (not the 2-in-1 model with the same number). It works fine, it had the battery replaced once (about due again) and has one of the rubber pads ungluing itself (definitely fixable but it was used nearly exclusively as a desktop for the last 18 months which is why I didn’t try). 4k screen, US keyboard layout, i7, 16GiB of RAM.
Boosts welcome.

2025-02-01 21:41:46 UTC

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@nprofile…xulc the legal concerns are about hosting a site. Regulation these days are actually more well defined, and operating something in Germany does require you list terms etc. including a physical address.
As to why not recommend pixelfed.social itself, I do not want to promote centralising things like this when the entire benefit would be prioritising and promoting things locally. “Go sign up for this thing hosted in Canada which is currently being threatened with being turned into another US state” is not much of a selling point

2025-02-01 15:24:53 UTC

I am looking for suggestions on either existing small business centric Fediverse sites (Mastodon/Pixelfed) that could be offered as Instagram alternatives, or any thoughts on the legal side of making one happen
I spoke to a friend who runs a coffee shop today and he finds it frustrating that Instagram is *the* place to be for letting your customers know about anything and there not being alternatives. He was intrigued by there actually being alternatives, and I would like to enable that exit for him - and hopefully others!
So, suggestions? The technical side of this isn’t scary, but the German legal side confuses and terrifies me. Boosts welcome.

2025-01-30 10:57:38 UTC

If you think about it, Germany is currently an incredible case study into just how successful girlboss feminism can be: 2 out of the 3 fascist parties have women leaders!

2025-01-20 15:03:44 UTC

The same people who say that Signal and Linux are usability nightmares would be shocked to discover that my mother who is nearing her 70s is perfectly happy using both Linux and Signal because actually it's not nearly as hard to deal with as the aggressive upselling everyone else is doing to steal your data

2025-01-17 18:47:43 UTC

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@nprofile…xg92 your position was clear, and that’s the source of disagreement. Protest that doesn’t meaningfully disrupt is at most a nuisance and easily worked around, and lecturing people about why protest shouldn’t be disruptive to other people who didn’t care enough to push back is not the most useful thing to do (and pretty sure why you got blocked)
Tis all, I will not seek to change your mind further.

2025-01-17 18:28:33 UTC

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@nprofile…xg92 and part of the pressure that makes that happen is the very threat of disruptive action - which is why the thought of the entirety of fosdem being affected over this talk is motivating.

2025-01-17 18:16:29 UTC

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@nprofile…xg92 those volunteers can have principles and threaten to pull their labour over this in the hopes or resolving this without further disruption, or they can abide by it, and hopefully the keynote ends up being disrupted by someone with a moral backbone. For that matter, so can any speakers if they wish to stand for anything other than vague handwaving about opensource.
If neither volunteers nor speakers look likely to make a stand and force the issue… well, they are ok with the possible disruption or are ok with jack being there, either way it perpetuates the single minded goal chasing that has led to FOSS being entirely meaningless as anything but free labour for corporations.

2025-01-17 18:03:20 UTC

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@nprofile…xg92 perhaps the fosdem organisers should not have jeopardised the event by accepting that talk as a keynote, risking their legitimacy just to platform a useless crypto bro who has nothing to do with foss

2024-12-29 02:17:53 UTC

I played around with a low profile 60% mechanical keyboard that also has a compatible folio style case that can hold up an iPad Mini and I think someone has solved my issue of the mini not having a decent keyboard option
Only issue is that it is horribly loud and I cannot imagine using it in a public space of any sort, and afaik low profile switches do not have dampening options like o-rings yet. Still, it is majorly tempting.

2024-07-17 16:51:55 UTC

Prime day is a great time to remember that alternatives to most of Amazon's services not only exist, but in cases like audiobooks are actively superior to their offering!
E.g. libro.fm, where you get to both own your audiobooks and support local book shops. Seems better than giving Bezos more cash
https://libro.fm/

2024-06-06 18:36:28 UTC

Victory day and d-day anniversaries are the most annoying reminders that nobody learned shit. Using the monumental efforts it took to defeat the most vile version of fascism to defend lesser fascists today is an abject failure of education.
The fact that states that fought against nazism did not spend a moment on self reflection about how the bigotry they promoted and perpetuated was rooted in the same hate that led to a genocide is why we are where we are today.

2024-04-21 20:05:07 UTC

The way people aligned with literal nazis during the nix communitty fuck up keep saying they're made to feel unsafe because of demands to exclude them is just an irritating example of how you cannot reason with a fascist, you cannot point out their hypocrisy, there's no "small steps" to take.
People who equate not permitting bigots with bigotry are actively a danger, as much as those bigots who are funding, campaigning, supporting the would be dictators that capitalist democracies create.