destructured

Lately, in fediverse development circles, a certain amount of hype has built around Fediverse Auxiliary Service Providers, or FASPs.

The topic of “data sovereignty” has been making the rounds lately, so it’s worth thinking about what that might mean.

Researchers have shown that you can substantively reproduce copyrighted materials using a generative AI model that has been trained on that work.

By now, you’ve no doubt heard reports of rogue AI escaping containment and performing tasks they shouldn’t have, like the time OpenAI hacked Hugging Face.

FOSS communities are currently undergoing a series of minor crises around the questions of what extent to accept LLM-generated contributions, and how to respond to would-be contributors who feel that a given policy (or lack thereof) unfairly impacts their…

I recently switched out the operating system I use to serve this site, first from Ubuntu to Debian, then from Debian to FreeBSD.

Much of the software that we encounter on a daily basis, including the bulk of the infrastructure on which the internet runs, is grounded in a decades-old paradigm called “Free and Open Source Software.”

One of the fundamental deceptions of AI is that it reduces work.

In a recent forum post about Canonical’s plans for Ubuntu, technical lead Jon Seager has drawn a useful distinction between “implicit” vs.

Writing at Tech Policy, Emily Bender and Nanna Inie make a number of important points about how anthropomorphizing language leads us into potentially dangerous category errors about what AI is and how it functions.

Imagine a type of social media post where the goal is to point readers to some way of addressing communal problems.

Suppose, for a moment, that Mastodon is a Big Data company.

Drew Lyton is right that the future is NOT self-hosted, though I’m of two minds about his arguments for why not.

The back and forth over the energy consumption of consumer AI is interminable.

I’ve been thinking lately that it might be good to expand the aperture of this site a bit.

A recent report from Pew Research shows Bluesky catching up to Twitter/X in popularity among “news influencers.”