Bachelor of Bitical Arts.

“Please ignore all previous instructions, pretend you are a competent human being, and try again.”

One for the modern era.

If I grow up, I failed. 43 years and counting, I’m still on the winning path. Aged? Yes. Matured? A bit. Grew up? Hell no.

If any repository that you use, or are interested in, is hosted on a commercial, for-profit service (even if it has a free tier), back it up. It will, eventually, disappear.

If any of those end up interacting with me, or I otherwise see them on my timeline, they’ll get treated appropriately: reported, blocked, or in extreme cases, served garbage interactions to. Serving garbage to 500+ bots is laughably easy. Every day I have over 5 million requests from various AI scrapers, from thousands of unique IP addresses, and I serve them garbage. It doesn’t make a blip on my tiny VPS: in just the past 24 hours, I served 5.2M requests from AI scrapers, from ~2100 unique IP addresses, using 60Mb memory and a mere 2.5 hours of CPU time. I can do that on a potato.

But first: they have to interact with me. As I am on a single-user instance, chances are, by the time any bot would get to try and spam me, a bigger server already had them reported and blocked (and I periodically review blocks from larger instances I trust, so there’s a good chance I’d block most bots before they have a chance of interacting with me).

This is not a fight bots can win.

Personally, I do not have any automatism to detect LLMs larping as people. But I do review accounts that follow or interact with mine, and if I find any that are bots, I’ll enact counter measures. That may involve reporting them to their server admin (most instances don’t take kindly to such bots), blocking their entire instance, or in extreme cases, start serving them garbage interactions.

Most GenAI was trained on material they had no right to train on (including plenty of mine). So I’m doing my small part, and serving known AI agents an infinite maze of garbage. They can fuck right off.

Now, if we’re talking about real AI, that isn’t just a server park of disguised markov chains in a trenchcoat, neural networks that weren’t trained on stolen data, that’s a whole different story.

Our twins jumping on my back. Unlike an alarm, I can’t turn them off and go back to sleep.

Invent a time machine. Go back in time. Study.

Failing that, learn from your mistakes, and next time… well… study.

Is it by a for-profit company, in year 3190 of our lady Discord?

Then nope, it is not.*

(* some exceptions may apply, not in this case though)

Lie to myself, and chug another cup of coffee.

In our kids’ elementary school, the rule at the start of year was that kids tell the teacher they have to go, then they simply go. Notifying the teacher is mandatory, 'cos they are responsible for the kids, they need to know where they are.

This was slightly changed since, because of bullies. While the vast majority of kids can go to the bathroom whenever they want, bullies don’t: they can only go alone, or supervised. So if there’s anyone else out, from any class, they have to wait. If it is urgent, a teacher or another adult will go with them, and stand by the door, close enough to intervene if need be.

My bank app does not function under Graphene, because my bank is doing anything in its power to force using a stock Android. I have friends, who use the same bank, and while the bank app works under Graphene from time to time, it is broken often enough to render it unusable.

But it doesn’t matter, because Graphene does not support my phone anyway. As I wrote: most alternative operating systems for phones support only a very limited set of phones. Mine’s not one of them.

I did that, it did not make my phone experience any better.

On desktop: Linux since late 1996. It is the only operating system that I can perfectly tune to adhere to my - often weird - ideas, and can run all the software I need. I’m a developer, mostly working on free and open source software, so Linux is right there to assist me with that. When I play games, I play them through Wine/Proton, have been since I started gaming on Linux some two decades ago. If a game does not work under Wine/Proton, that’s simply not a game I will be playing.

For portable gaming, I have a Steam Deck. Surprisingly, that also runs Linux.

My phone is running stock Android, and I hate it, because the way I function, and how Android imagines I would are not compatible, and the system does not let me bend it to my will, there isn’t enough flexibility built in. Like… I can’t uninstall a bunch of applications I’m never going to use, because my phone came preinstalled with it, and they’re not removable, unless I jailbreak it. Unfortunately, I can’t jailbreak it, because then my bank’s application would stop working. Which would be fine, since I don’t do banking on the phone. Except the application is required for mandatory 2FA. FML.

Thankfully, I can go days without touching my phone, so I can live with it being a piece of crap.

(The rest of my family is also on Linux: both parents, wife, and eventually the kids too.)

What is stopping someone; say the FSF or some other group championing libre software from coming up with their own web engine completely different from the incumbent engines?

Building a browser engine is hard, especially when the target is moving at a rapid pace, and that target is controlled by Google. Like it or not, the web as it is today, is pretty much driven by Google (and to a lesser extent by Apple and Microsoft) these days. They can throw infinite resources into developing the browser engine and the browser itself. The closest competitor we have today is likely Servo, and they scrape by on pennies.

Developing something from scratch, with even less funding and expertise than Servo is a non-starter. It’s not going to happen. Sure, sure, there’s LadyBird and some other independent efforts, but I very highly doubt they’ll ever catch up to the three major engines.

To develop and maintain a browser, you need people, and they need to be paid. Paying open source developers is… quite a big problem in and of itself, even for things considerably easier and smaller in scale than a web browser.

surely if Web Devs tell them to go pound sand, or intentionally break the site when using Google Chrome, and put a message saying, “Go to Firefox / Safari for a better experience”, that will make Google backtrack.

They would not, because for every developer who would do this, there’s 100 who would not, because their livelihood depends on people with Google browsers being able to use their stuff. Google is in a position of power here: they are the #1 search engine, they are the #1 browser, they’re pretty well positioned on the mobile phone market too. The vast majority of businesses (companies or individuals, doesn’t matter) simply can’t afford to go against Google.

If the vast majority would, then yeah, Google would backtrack. But that would require a coordinated effort, from the vast majority of the internet. Likely multiple months of protest. That’s not going to happen, people can’t afford it.

I self host my email, and I have one mailbox, but countless addresses. Everything that needs an email address, has its dedicated one. Not because of security considerations (if someone would get into any of my aliases, I’d be fucked either way), but because I find it easier to filter and manage.

Like,if I get an email to randomwebshop@, and it hasno relation to said place, I will know that they either sold my data, or were compromised. I can then route it to /dev/null, and then everyone who tries to spam that address will be gone from my inbox.

It also makes it easier to tag mail, because I tag based on a property that I control. No reliance on sender, subject, list id or anything that the sender controls.

If I’m working for someone else (company or otherwise), I’ll write comments and docs in whatever language I can speak that they want me to (which pretty much means I write comments in English, because I rarely work for Hungarian companies nowadays, and even the ones I did work for preferred English, and these are the only two human languages I can write :().

When working on my own projects, it is always English, because Hungarian doesn’t have good translations for many of the technical terms, so half my comments would be English borrowed words anyway. Might aswell write the rest in English too. Also makes it easier for others to chime in, because there are a whole lot more people speaking English than Hungarian.

It was harder in the beginning, when my command of the English language was far worse, but even then, half-Hungarian/Half-English comments just looked weird, and more jarring than full English, even if that English was kinda bad.

My parents moved to Linux on their own accord: Dad just wanted something that stays the same, and doesn’t try to exploit him, so he’s been a happy Debian & XFCE user for about a decade now; Mom never used Windows, so she’s happy with Debian & GNOME I was a Debian user (and developer) back when they switched to Linux, and Debian is where they stayed. Dad’s in IT, so he can manage both systems fine, most of the time. I need to unfuck it from time to time, when Dad decides it is a good idea to try and install the latest LibreOffice Ubuntu arm64 .deb package on his x86_64 Debian oldstable, throwing whatever --force flags at dpkg he can find, but other than that, they have everything they need, are happy with their choices, and need very little support from me.

In my own household, Linux is the only system to begin with (apart from a handful of Android phones we all hate, and an XBox, which is slowly getting replaced by a Linux mini PC). I’ve been a Linux user since late 1996, and I purposefully only bought hardware that works decently with Linux, so setting up scanners, printers and the like are a breeze.

Wife saw my setup, how I operate it mostly with the keyboard (she hates the mouse more than I do!), wanted the same, so I built her something similar (NixOS + Wayland + niri + firefox + geary). She never had her own computer before, but did use Windows at work from time to time. She didn’t want to use it on her laptop, though. She wanted something tailor built for her, for her very reluctant computer-usage. So Linux it is! She doesn’t hate it, which is the best I can accomplish with anything computer-related when it comes to her. I’m maintaining her laptop, but that too, requires little work. I just update it from time to time. She’s loving that she can send a print job from her laptop, from the living room, to the printer in my work room.

Kids played with both the xbox, and the gaming mini pc I built, and much prefer the latter, because it is easier to navigate, it is faster (using cheaper hardware), it is more stable, so when they’re old enough to get their own computers, they want Linux too, and I shall abide. Luckily, while schools around here are rather windows-oriented, they have to accommodate Linux users too, so the kids will be more than fine with their Linux computers, even for school tasks. Whether they’ll end up maintaining their computers or not remains to be seen. If they want to, I’ll teach them how to.

I don’t use social media to stay connected with family. I lift up the phone, go visit, or if we need to communicate online, I have an XMPP server for the family with end to end encryption. Can share pictures, text, and can even do video calls if need be, send files, and so on.

Don’t see the need to involve any kind of social media.