Benjamin Balder Bach

https://social.data.coop/@benjaoming

❤️ing computer reuse, repair and Open Source
🤜️ing tech solutionism and colonialism
🦫ing as an open source consultant/activist (currently on fulltime, so less activism)

Part of https://data.coop, https://django-denmark.org, https://fairdanmark.dk, co-organizer of Django Day Copenhagen 2018-2026, DjangoCon Europe 2019, Malawi Data Science Bootcamp 2021 (https://mwdata.science)

Works with Django and Python in https://tinytechbureau.com

Pronouns: he/him
Website: https://overtag.dk
GitHub: https://github.com/benjaoming/

Public Key

npub1vvjjcd5dt3awuk3qd4m4ds5hrxq8c0459zdsrcgp5gysyvapc2kqqwpuhp

NIP-05 Address

benjaoming_at_social.data.coop@momostr.pink

Profile Code

nprofile1qqsxxffvx6x4c7hwtgsx6a6kc2t3nqru866z3xcpuyq6yzgzxwsu9tqpz3mhxue69uhhyetvv9ujuerpd46hxtnfduqs6amnwvaz7tmwdaejumr0dsuzpfta

Publishing to

relay.snort.social

relay.damus.io

nos.lol

Author Public Key

npub1vvjjcd5dt3awuk3qd4m4ds5hrxq8c0459zdsrcgp5gysyvapc2kqqwpuhp

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Last Notes

2026-09-02 08:39:12 UTC

Thank you for the honor of interviewing me for "DSF Member of the Month", @npub1l0c…kt92 - it got a bit lengthy, but I enjoyed answering the questions and I hope other good people will equally enjoy reading it with their favorite beverage next to them ☕
https://www.djangoproject.com/weblog/2026/aug/31/dsf-member-of-the-month-benjamin-balder-bach/

2026-08-17 10:27:39 UTC

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doesn't look like public voting would work with a conventional Mastodon API: https://documentation.sig.gy/methods/statuses/polls/

2026-08-10 21:32:04 UTC

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it's pining for the fjords!

2026-05-28 11:56:39 UTC

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I have this belief that for tracking and analytics, "less is more" can become a prevailing strategy... rather than sinking into the pit of online engagement craze, organizations should prioritize primary efforts. Then rest assured that the outcome can be measured elsewhere in the real world.
I've often seen how analytics aren't used / just used wrongly / the meeting is about understanding analytics rather than actually talking about substance.
Dunno if many organizations will agree 🙈

2026-05-28 09:16:29 UTC

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there's also a point of quality over quantity... not just that growth should be organic, but there's no real quality in the number of users/followers alone. I'm pretty sure that the quality of engagement from 2 million Mastodon users is worth the same as 20 million X "users"... or more. I mean, in some way, X activity can be measured as a net negative. Back in the early Twitter days, journalists and decision makers didn't care about comparing the number of followers to Facebook.

2026-05-05 09:16:28 UTC

"Google Chrome silently installs a 4 GB AI model on your device without consent"
Recommended to read some of the details in this report... It's completely bonkers and immoral, whether because of privacy or climate. There is zero respect for the user nor planet left.
https://www.thatprivacyguy.com/blog/chrome-silent-nano-install/

2026-04-29 21:29:12 UTC

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what kind of a government rejects 3,000 travelers to their capital... a complete disaster, wow.... https://www.lusakatimes.com/2026/04/29/government-postpones-rightscon-2026-lusaka-summit/

2026-04-26 14:00:04 UTC

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wow my brain simply doesn't compute this newspeak craze
»This is a type of adblocking traffic known as dark traffic, because it flies under the radar unmonetized, immune to conventional adblock recovery solutions.«

2026-04-18 13:36:34 UTC

At #DjangoConEU2026, we had a community conversation about #Django and AI usage, hosted by @npub100a…cegl and Laura Gates: We had a tiny sub-group of esteemed people (@npub1hes…s7j5!), we talked about the "Who Gets Left Behind by AI". The framing isn't necessarily perfect (tempted to also argue "Who is free from AI"), but it's DEFINITELY a *necessary* perspective.. and one of the most critical ones.
With AI and current trends in mind, we noticed the following (thread)...
https://social.data.coop/system/media_attachments/files/116/425/974/933/447/192/original/e58a3f75acd383e4.jpeg

2026-04-13 16:34:48 UTC

I forgot to lock my screen and they've been making plans
#DjangoCon #Django #DjangoConEurope
https://social.data.coop/system/media_attachments/files/116/398/364/237/035/477/original/acab5efe66250f41.jpeg

2026-03-21 13:36:07 UTC

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...So many reasons to sign this EU Citizen's initiative: "Demand the full suspension of the EU-Israel Association Agreement in view of Israel’s violations of human rights"
562,853 signatures of 1 million needed: If you live in any of these countries (<100% representation), please spread:
Hungary, Czechia, Estonia, Latvia, Romania, Slovakia, Lithuania, Cyprus, Malta, Croatia, Austria, Bulgaria, Luxembourg, Greece, Germany, Slovenia, Portugal, Poland
https://citizens-initiative.europa.eu/initiatives/details/2025/000005_en#statements-table

2026-03-21 13:30:39 UTC

>1m people displaced in Libanon, war crimes, another illegal Israeli occupation... mass destruction of agricultural fields:
»In a joint statement, Lebanon’s ministries of agriculture and the environment said some samples showed glyphosate concentrations “20 and 30 times higher than normal [use]”. Its use would, they said, “damage vegetation in the targeted areas, with direct repercussions on agricultural production, soil fertility and ecological balance.«
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2026/feb/05/israel-accused-of-spraying-cancer-linked-herbicide-on-farms-in-southern-lebanon

2026-03-13 20:05:23 UTC

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the community did a KYC on Persona which they failed 😂

2026-03-13 11:37:28 UTC

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You should prob edit your post... it had the wrong profile handle: @npub1agu…z2l9
The right profile: @npub14h9…7ass

2026-03-06 13:04:07 UTC

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oh wait, this also covers their allies!? So the US president is allowed/obligated to take military action to free Netanyahu if he's detained by ICC?
Like WTF, how are rich and democratic countries in Europe in a military alliance with someone who so openly declared "we're going to commit war crimes and no will stop us" already 24 years ago.

2026-02-11 08:59:27 UTC

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I would dream of DSF community instances all in FOSS 😊
* Mastodon (w/ DSF's CoC - unlike other social media!!) - provided for Django/DSF itself, Djangonaut Space, Django News and all Django projects that want an account.
* Zulip (chat, highly structured) - possibility to ask questions and chat in real-time
* Discourse/Forums (same as now, but feeds and cross-references integrated with the other platforms)
* Events/Meetups (self-made) map and time-table of in-person and online events

2026-02-11 08:53:37 UTC

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There are some interesting projects that hold big potential for both DSF and PSF. I think that Discord's chat+voice+screenshare is too tough to start with.
However, providing sovereign, self-hosted and highly integrated and customized FOSS alternatives will definitely look attractive to community.

2026-02-02 11:02:34 UTC

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is there a post that happened to be reported and blocked you? Have they blocked anything else? Did it come more or less out of the blue? Or did you receive any messages from their admins?
As a start, I think you are right that support of genocides and genocide denial can be taken up as clear principles that would fit into existing server rules.

2026-01-29 07:23:40 UTC

Here is a blog post called »The UK paid £4.1 million for a bookmarks site«:
Of course, you see, the site was about AI. And the company that ran with the money was PwC -- experts in artificial intellig.. eh government procurement 🙃
https://mahadk.com/posts/ai-skills-hub

2026-01-22 10:42:19 UTC

EU citizens initiative to suspend the "EU-Israel association agreement"
330 000 signatures in 9 days:
https://eci.ec.europa.eu/055/public/#/screen/home

2026-01-21 10:34:00 UTC

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Given the current situation, it would honestly be GREAT if we can connect with developers from Greenland.
I was asking a Danish company back in September - they tried to hire Python developers living in Greenland and didn't manage to.
Me guessing: With a population of 50,000 and no software industry (other than research projects), people relocate.
Maybe put the word out there, and we try to boost it one more round? 💌

2026-01-20 21:22:25 UTC

1953: Force-fully removes local population to establish military base [1]
[?]: Probably has nuclear weapons, refuses to admit (Denmark consents btw)
1968: B52 crashes with nukes onboard [2]
1987+2000: ...reports that 1 nuke never found
2003: Refuses to pay damages to local people, loses in highest court
2018: Denmark decides to finally pay for the US' pollution [3]
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pituffik_Space_Base
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1968_Thule_Air_Base_B-52_crash
[3] https://ing.dk/artikel/oprydning-millioner-danmark-betaler-fjerne-amerikansk-forurening-i-groenland

2026-01-05 10:10:15 UTC

Soon!
https://social.data.coop/system/media_attachments/files/115/841/945/695/487/524/original/0a2a1e8baee169bf.png

2025-12-17 10:07:21 UTC

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Re:
> shared technical or governance approaches
We do need to start collecting these resources. Python.org has one:
https://devguide.python.org/getting-started/generative-ai/
It's definitely a more cautious approach, because it doesn't clearly spell out that AI-generated code is not allowed. I would guess that people are scratching their heads on how that would even be enforced.

2025-12-17 10:04:55 UTC

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Fully agree! It's more harmful on contributors and maintainers to let in AI contributions and take the discussion after on a per-contribution basis. We need the rules to be clear from the beginning.
Can people "cheat" and make AI contributions so precise, well-tested and minimal and *easy to maintain* that maintainers will think it's a genuine human contribution? I would worry about it when it happens. If people do this without declaration, they're on the wrong side of the line, anyway.

2025-12-17 09:16:10 UTC

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This comment by an OCaml maintainer has a number of striking points about why AI contributions are so problematic for open source projects:
https://github.com/ocaml/ocaml/pull/14369#issuecomment-3556593972

2025-12-17 09:04:53 UTC

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In my experience, people making contributions with AI have good intentions, which is very important. But as a popular saying goes:
The road to hell is paved with good intentions.
The first thing I don't like is when people come up with stuff without declaring that they used AI. That - to me - is unethical enough that we can require full disclosure up front.
Another example of AI contributions gone wrong: https://github.com/ocaml/ocaml/pull/14369#issuecomment-3556497947

2025-11-12 19:31:42 UTC

If you're curious about trying PyCharm for #Django, a way to test it, is to buy a license through the current campaign since the cost (€76) becomes a donation for the DSF! (excl VAT)
I like PyCharm a lot, but I'm not in love with any specific IDE, so I'm not trying to win anyone over... you could be a happy LiClipse/VIM/Emacs/Sublime etc user and simply consider it a donation and then just install PyCharm to try it out... nothing to lose (except some disk space) 😎
https://www.jetbrains.com/pycharm/promo/support-django/?utm_campaign=pycharm&utm_content=django25&utm_medium=referral&utm_source=mastodon

2025-11-12 13:53:40 UTC

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Adrian Holovaty's take on Django REST Framework hahaha 🤐
To address the point from the ending of the show... I think one way to get more (and younger) listeners would be to:
1. Invite a younger crowd on air
2. Edit the show - I think it's okay to edit out some parts, make it shorter, maybe faster-paced.
3. Ask Adrian to donate some jingles 💚
But don't listen to me, not an expert on podcast audiences, I love the show! I hope you get lots of love letters for doing it 💌

2025-11-05 09:10:54 UTC

In order to stop a WIkipedia article from clearly stating that Israel commits genocide in Gaza, Jimmy Wales has joined the debate with a lot of nonsense.
The community just finished a 2 month long RFC with evaluation of sources. They concluded there are no credible sources contradicting the genocide.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Gaza_genocide#Statement_from_Jimbo_Wales
If we applied his logic to all the "climate change" articles, they'd also just end up swimming around in relativity because some political nutjobs contest it.
https://social.data.coop/system/media_attachments/files/115/496/311/384/816/827/original/0941c9677194ab6b.png

2025-10-28 11:00:07 UTC

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found the full song on the artist's website: https://olifro.st/blog/the-vampire-conspiracy-iii

2025-10-20 08:08:39 UTC

Good morning selfhosters who are not on AWS ☀️

2025-08-12 09:50:27 UTC

If you need to convince someone about the importance of "Locality of Behavior" (LoB) in #Django, show them a large project that attempted to do "don't repeat yourself" (DRY) on a bunch of Django Rest Framework serializers 🍝
It's a pattern I've seen repeated with both models, forms and class-based views. Class-inheritance invites DRY'ing of loosely related objects that often turn out to diverge once the project has evolved.
Anyways good luck out there with the DRY'ing, LoB'ing and YAGNI'ing 🤹‍♂️

2025-07-13 14:22:03 UTC

Today is #Django's 20th birthday! And a project that's been in the making for a while can be revealed 🥳
https://birthday20.djangoproject.com/
Hoping lots of great birthday meetups will follow! We've added ours in Copenhagen.. October the 10th is in a while, but that's also how I like to think of this celebration: Not just Django's 20th birth*day* but Django's 20th birth*year* 🥰

2025-05-30 09:48:43 UTC

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Django's 20 year birthday was celebrated in style at #PyConIT: A cake with fireworks and two fantastic musicians playing Django Reinhardt covers.
Great Django community here, and possible to make a schedule from the program that's 100% relevant to a Django dev.
#django
https://social.data.coop/system/media_attachments/files/114/596/152/711/855/420/original/56de1c3c72c2dfd1.jpeg
https://social.data.coop/system/media_attachments/files/114/596/152/698/231/676/original/bd078994d998c841.jpeg
https://social.data.coop/system/media_attachments/files/114/596/152/704/802/366/original/726c5999594390c4.jpeg

2025-05-29 09:06:57 UTC

I'm at #PyConIT 🥳

2025-04-27 10:58:26 UTC

People in #malmö: Don't miss »Leaving Meta - A practical field guide« tomorrow (Monday) with @npub17qs…73yq 📝
https://dukop.dk/en/event/leaving-meta-a-practical-field-guide/7838/

2025-04-01 12:03:46 UTC

WOAH 🤩
»The Rockbox project is pleased to announce the immediate availability of
Rockbox 4.0. This marks our first release since November 2019, and since
then we've been busy adding features and fixing bugs to give you the
best Rockbox experience yet.«
https://www.rockbox.org/wiki/ReleaseNotes400
#rockbox

2025-04-01 10:56:05 UTC

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that sounds relatable 🫂

2025-03-15 15:58:53 UTC

Go Greenland 🇬🇱 👏 👏
https://social.data.coop/system/media_attachments/files/114/167/272/721/006/732/original/cf3e49df38173751.png

2024-12-18 21:52:17 UTC

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hehe, nothing is so bad it isn't good for anything https://social.anoxinon.de/@Codeberg/113676012209507491

2024-10-15 21:37:15 UTC

This could be you. Think about it. This is what our countries are supporting when they say "Israel has a right to defend itself": Killing innocent people who are seeking safety and treatment in a fucking hospital tent.
»A 20-year-old Palestinian man who was confined to a hospital bed and connected to an IV drip burned to death after an Israeli strike on a Gaza hospital courtyard where displaced people had been seeking shelter.«
We need to protest until this stops.
https://www.aljazeera.com/program/newsfeed/2024/10/15/palestinian-man-burned-alive-after-israeli-strike-on-hospital-courtyard
https://social.data.coop/system/media_attachments/files/113/313/594/335/341/077/original/5dad4b078e637b93.png

2024-10-10 10:06:01 UTC

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Oh interesting that it used to be open source and isn't anymore. I've seen other open source 1-person sideprojects developing their business side to a worrying degree. Of course, the person doing it needs an income... but changing the license and selling it is not it.

2024-10-10 09:30:35 UTC

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here's an alternative with an Open Source license: https://dgrm.net/ (I've tried it for a few small things and it's great)

2024-09-18 11:04:40 UTC

I'm still a fan of using Make as a universal developer's entrypoint for repositories and their complicated stacks.
Are there any fellow #Django devs with similar preferences that are using Just and can recommend it? (it's a tool that's inspired by the great parts of Make)
https://just.systems/man/en/

2024-08-27 12:52:04 UTC

Most user-friendly fruit/vegetable? (criteria: comes directly eatable from its plant)

2024-08-23 13:09:57 UTC

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yup, and I think that's also where people end up... it's not even a tabu, it's in the Tailwind docs. But to see it front and center as if it's innovating... that's where I feel a bit like too much "Ooh Eeh Ooh Ah Aah Ting Tang Walla Walla Bing Bang" is going on

2024-08-23 12:47:09 UTC

There is an addon CSS library for Tailwind called daisyUI that promotes itself for undoing the whole raison d'être of Tailwind CSS, i.e. replacing semantic CSS class names with CSS utility classnames (which is what arguably bring "locality of behavior" to CSS).
Is this "DaisyUI" just being deliberately disingenious in order to sell a perfectly well-known concept?
I feel like I've stepped into a world where people have gone a bit mad 🤪
https://daisyui.com/
https://social.data.coop/system/media_attachments/files/113/011/407/497/605/053/original/fefcd946d55d9cc7.mp4

2024-08-12 13:15:54 UTC

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I need a vacation after 5 weeks of daycare being closed 🫠 ⚰️ Or to put it in another way... the fact that it's open again makes everything easier... vacation-like even ❤️‍🩹