"Cars replaced horses"

This is what people say about LLMs, but it's based on a myth.

Los Angeles used to have an excellent tram system, with its suburbs laid out along the tram line. It was bought by General Motors and scrapped to get people into cars. The Key System, which went from San Francisco to Fresno, was scrapped by a tyre company. Cars did not replace horses in cities. They replaced effective mass transit by leveraging capital to destroy a common good. If cars were actually better, this destruction would have been expensive and unnecessary.

In more rural areas, bicycles were extremely common. They were most associated with liberating women, who were more able to commute and meet with neighbours. Bicycles became a symbol of feminism - for sexists. When male students at Cambridge wanted to protest women's admission, the built an effigy of a woman student and burned it. The effigy was on a bicycle. https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-cambridgeshire-45096690

This notion of women cyclists overstepping their place in society and being a menace to the social order appears in the 'Wizard of Oz'. In Kansas, a woman neighbour demands that the family give up Toto because he's been causing extremely minor mischief. Auntie Em tells the neighbour that she wishes to say what what she thinks of her, but can't as she is "a Christian woman". This places her in binary opposition with the neighbour who leaves on a bicycle. Toto escapes and as Dorothy goes to Oz, the woman transforms into a witch and the bicycle into a broomstick.

Bicycles fell out of fashion in the US until mountain bikes, which are loaded with male gender baggage and unsuitable to riding while wearing a dress or for commuting.

Households switched to cars which are expensive, so they tended to only have one, which men took to work and women were placed back in the home.

Cars are a malign presence. Their use was not the advance of technology, but deliberate concerted efforts to harm the public sphere and especially to disempower women. They only became practical because of massive subsidies for highways and roads. They are an inherently wasteful technology, ill-suited to a majority of their current use cases.

Silly question for the #NoLLM #Linux users out there.

Allegedly, the last commit to the Linux kernel that was "clean" before slop started being introduced was made in January 2025.

https://codeberg.org/ethical-foss/open-slopware#kernels
https://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/torvalds/linux.git/commit/?id=d337f4524861f4e74c31ee575d60f2eaa1e82388

Now, dumping out all the patches between there and kernel 7.1-rc6 (where my local working tree stops), `git format-patch` produces 58437 patch files. Of these, there's ~294 that have the `Assisted-by` taint marker.

It'll take some re-work, but we might be able to re-factor those out in a new fork of the Linux kernel, a possible hard-fork.

If I wound a tree back to `d337f45`, and re-applied all the allegedly "clean" patches, leaving aside the 294 tainted ones, would people be willing to pitch in and help carry this project forward?

I just want to point out that the MAGANazi party tried the culture war bullshit with Zohran Mamdani. They tried, and it failed.

They tried the socialism thing. He waved it away by leaning harder into workers rights.

They tried the trans thing. He waved it away by leaning harder into trans rights.

They tried the immigration thing. He waved it away by leaning harder into immigrant rights.

The lesson here for Centrist Democrats is simple. You don't fight Nazis by giving up ground to the Nazis. You fight Nazis by leaning harder into the wind and standing up for individual rights.

Men, *please* go and read this blogpost by @girlonthenet:

https://www.girlonthenet.com/blog/cornell/

It discusses rape, rape culture and the recent news about Cornell University and, as usual, G lands her points clearly and compellingly. One. After. Another.

#Cornell

saw someone on HN say they will never contribute to Nura again since we ban LLM generated contributions (they had receipts too, they had contributed in the past)

their argument was that having done device porting manually before, doing it with an LLM was something like 10x faster

having seen the various LLM driven ports going around, we can't deny that LLMs are capable of doing kernel bringup, finding a functional implementation, and making many more attempts to trial and error than we humans are.

of course, this doesn't come without a cost, as with most technical advancements this cost is mostly offloaded onto those without the resources to prevent it -- the under educated working class and the global south, those who will be most affected by droughts and worsening climate change

this is reason enough to disengage from this technology, at least the implementations of it that cause most of this harm, but there is another more devious issue that i haven't seen mentioned a whole lot

in the same way that huge retail chains and global shipping extract wealth from small towns, LLMs extract knowledge from communities

the Nura wiki and other infrastructure was unusable for days at a time due to web scraping, and now imposes a proof of work on visitors (which also prevents access from old devices)

now that this data is in accessible models, people who aren't active in our community can use an LLM to port a device, to generate their own private documentation, they can enable devices in the mainline kernel or contribute to other upstreams if their LLM patches are accepted. People that may normally have become active members of the Nura community instead engage with a chatbot operated by big tech, which of course uses their chat history for training new models

As maintainers, for us to allow LLMs into our community would in my opinion be the beginning of the end, as our community knowledge base would be gutted, developers would become burnt out and disillusioned, and our culture would be erased.

This is the ethical point here: NOTHING is more important than combatting climate change. Nothing. Without a liveable planet nothing else works. I’ll have a debate about the numbers, and how to decarbonise. But I’ve no time for whataboutism, nimbyism or conspiracy theories. #StateOfEU

The AI Pascal’s Wager

Should you accept contributions generated by LLMs in your Open Source project?

https://ploum.net/2026-10-01-pascal_wager.html

drugs, ?????

Der Traum lässt mich nicht los. Was ist ein Mensch, wenn andere entscheiden, dass er keiner mehr ist? Die Nazis begannen nicht mit Gas. Sie begannen mit Worten. Mit „Last“, mit „Kosten“, mit „unwert“. Dann mit Akten, Stempeln, Zügen. Hannah Arendt nannte es die Banalität des Bösen. Primo Levi schrieb sinngemäß: Es ist geschehen, also kann es wieder geschehen. Ich werde blind. Vielleicht sehe ich die Dunkelheit nicht kommen. Aber ich höre sie. In Reden, die wieder Menschen sortieren. Mein größter Albtraum ist nicht die Vergangenheit. Es ist ein Land, das die Worte der NSDAP wieder für normal hält, gesprochen von Menschen aus der AfD und der CDU.

#NieWieder