Nostr notes by elilla&, a lunatic

random thought: you should have forums for your hobby / ...

2026-10-18T00:30:19Z

random thought:

you should have forums for your hobby / subculture / open source thing / etc., that are not discord, and that are openly accessible in HTML online. you should try to make those appear on google and be like the place to discuss the thing, if that's at all doable.

many online subcultures used to have a politeness norm of "don't ask questions without first googling it". this rule is obsolete. googling it doesn't work anymore. stackexchange is dead. it is very difficult already to find reliable information. you need to make it as easy and inviting as possible for curious people and newcomers to get used to asking human beings about the thing. this means tolerating common questions rather than replying to them like "read the FAQ/TFM/search the forum" etc.

in fact, actively establish spaces specifically meant for people who are too intimidated to ask questions. in a reddit-type forum, do "weekly quick q&a thread—all questions welcome" kinda thing (it's less intimidating to post a brief comment than making a question post). do "weekly casual chat thread" and "beginner's corner" and "off-topic fridays" and stuff like that, too.

and on the converse, actively discourage people from posting chatbot answers, through both forum rules and fostering forum culture. don't be aggressive about it but also don't be lenient.

people were talking about the sense of optimism of tech in the ...

2026-07-25T12:31:54Z

people were talking about the sense of optimism of tech in the 90s and 00s and when that disappeared. I said for me any positive feelings about tech were gone by 2014, with LessWrong and Y Combinator followed by GamerGate, which made it clear that the geeks and hackers I thought of as "the good side" in the fight against corporate tech would pick fascism rather than risk their privileges. each year since has panned that out harder and harder, and proved me correct about this inference I wish I was wrong about.

but in retrospect, I believe tech as a subculture or hobby (open source, hacking etc.) never really addressed what I came to think of as the Original Sin of tech:

→ All electronics and computing equipment is produced through tremendously damaging, exploitative systems. ←

These include, but are not limited to:

Mines in Africa where the world tacitly tolerate grotesque warlords enslaving and brutalising the population to mine coltan and other tech minerals, including children miners, and appropriating all profit, just to make a quick buck out of cheap materials;

Precarious and slave labour in East Asia to produce all the necessary parts, again with profits empowering the worst governments and capital owners;

Pervasive use of fossil fuels to produce, transport, and power all these devices, in the face of a global ecological polycrisis that hurts poor countries first—including the ones exploited to produce all that in the first place;

Pervasive use of plastics and other toxic, environmentally damaging materials, with much more money and interest invested in producing a 20% faster phone than a phone that leaks 20% less permanent pollution into the soil;

Culture of consumerism, neophilia, planned obsolescence and wastefulness (software growing to need more and more RAM to do the same tasks etc.) accelerating every issue pointed above;

Culture of tech elitism where programmers see themselves as superior to other types of workers, preventing any sense of solidarity with social struggles and justifying the points above.

until these issues are addressed, every cool new micro-PC running Open Source Software, every indie videogame handheld, every HAM radio gear, every activist GrapheneOS phone is soaking their hands in the blood of the exploited.

"other industries are also exploitative, no ethical consumption under capitalism yadda yadda" yes, but not usually this badly. except if we are talking about like, the meat industry, or the arms industry, and people boycott those for a reason. with tech, it seems to not even hit the radar of most discussions; with the benefit of hindsight, the fact that "FOSS" appeared so early and attracted so much attention while "permacomputing" appeared so late and remained so small was a sign of misplace ethical priorities.

"AI" users are like, "I know this is imprecise but as ...

2026-03-23T11:32:25Z

In reply to nevent1q…qaax
_________________________

"AI" users are like, "I know this is imprecise but as a convenience these transcriptions are better than nothing"

then 70 years from now we'll still be struggling to debunk these entirely hallucinated transcriptions of thousands of manuscripts that were pissed into the pool of human knowledge.

some things are worse than nothing. "signal-shaped noise" is worse than nothing.

> There was no video. “That’s when I learned why my VPN ...

2025-04-24T15:10:55Z

> There was no video. “That’s when I learned why my VPN had gone down. It wasn’t the VPN. Someone had shut off my Wifi.”
About 15 minutes after the interaction at his front door, Jackson’s Wifi was up and running again.
“So there was about a 30-minute period where my Wifi was down, and it happened to be the period where these officers came to my door, which prevented my Ring camera from recording them,” he says.
..."He said [feds] do it all the time when they want to have an informal interview with somebody and don’t want to be recorded.”

https://radleybalko.substack.com/p/the-courage-to-be-decent?utm_source=post-email-title&publication_id=668365&post_id=161811452