Will Orr @worr@bsd.network

I worry that some people aren’t taking Omarchy seriously enough. It’s not just another Linux distro. It’s a well-orchestrated campaign to centralize power and influence within the Linux FOSS ecosystem. And it’s working.

Anyone paying attention to DHH and what he stands for can see what’s going on here. When the guy who thinks that brown people don’t belong in society hires the guy who thinks trans people shouldn’t exist, you can see where this is going.

I used to depend on text to speech and speech to text technology. AI took all of that away from me. It feels like all of these things are AI based now, they all depend on some horrible models that have been unethically trained on stolen data. I struggle to read long series of texts, I have to re-read things multiple times before my brain registers the information, I find reading exhausting and extremely energy intensive...

I don't know if it's the ADHD, the brain fog, having been exposed to so much video based content that my brain has turned to mush or maybe a form of undiagnosed dyslexia. I've been questioning myself about dyslexia for a long time now, but my list of disabilities is getting so ridiculously long that I'm too afraid to bring it up out of fear of being shamed.

But to cope with that, I sometimes asks my girlfriend to read things for me, because I process things a lot better when I hear them. And I used screen readers but they were often painfully unreliable and now, since the AI boom? I find them even more complicated to set up than before, you need to go get your own voice models and so on, and these are all horribly unethical. Getting one that sounds pleasant to listen to is very hard. When Mozilla shutdown #Pocket, I've lost the ability to listen to articles as podcast with a voice model that was really pleasant for me, and I've been missing it ever since, I feel like a core tool of my life was taken away from me.

These new voice models all became locked behind paywall, the ethics of how they were trained dubious at best, blatant stolen voices at worse. They get stuck on words, they fuck up in the strangest ways. Instead of sounding like a robot trying to sound like a human, they sound uncanny and genuinely freak me out. And the whole thing became a pain to set up. I gave up, being overwhelmed by options and the obtuse setups.

Same thing for speech to text. I used to depend on it because between the ADHD and the dystonia, typing is difficult. I often think way too fast and type too slowly to keep up, and I tend to get cramps from typing too long on a keyboard. Typing on glass on my phone sends me into spirals and sometimes full on anxiety attacks regularly because I'm just too hypersensitive and the feeling of typing on glass is absolutely horrible to me.

In some ways, speech to text was better for me before the whole AI boom. What both Apple and Google offered was actually fine, and on my Android phone, I'd use the Google Speech Synthesis thingy and cut off internet access to it, it was fine. Then, "AI" happened. And FUTO unveiled their keyboard, with great speech to text, it was powered by Whisper, but fully offline.

That worked really well but the cracks were already there and I feel like somehow, things have only gotten worse. I was still depending on this until around two months ago where I got fed up with it and stopped using it all together, on a whim. I was sick of it mutilating my sentences, changing words to things that made no sense after having written them correctly, just changing things last minute.

I would send the message without re-reading it no matter how much I tried to think about it, because again, ADHD. Then I would find myself rushing to edit what I wrote because none of it made any fucking sense because of how poorly dictation had botched it. Sometimes, it made so little sense that I couldn't even remember what I was trying to say in the first place and I was forced to improvise. It made it even more mentally intensive than typing, because I would have to painstakingly re-read everything. After multiple passes, I would still find sentences that made no sense whatsoever.

But the most frustrating part and the thing that kept creeping up on me to remind me of the origins of these models, is how it couldn't resist adding a "Thanks for watching!" at the end of all that I was saying. It was a constant problem, a constant thing that I had to delete. Later, it got worse, when it started adding stuff like: "(Subtitles by opensubtitles.org!)" that kind of things.

It frustrates me so much that I've had multiple heated arguements with people trying to defend AI, by explaining to me that "AI might be bad, but it has benefits for accessibility!" Using the very disabled people being thrown under the bus by AI as a shield, when my quality of life has substantially worsen ever since AI turned up everywhere, because I've lost access to all the good accessibility tools that I use to depend on, all of which were replaced with the most unethical and unreliable shit out there.

#AI #speechtotext #textospeech #accessibility #accessibilityissues #disability #disabled #FuckAI

RE: https://mastodon.social/@nixCraft/117241250895962141

Ok, genuinely, tech journalists need to investigate why so much money is being laundered into Omarchy. A bunch of slopware from a white supremacist does not deserve $18 million when real Linux projects have gone unfunded for years. There has to be something else going on here.

✨ new batch of weirdos ✨

I fleshed out some more of DHH's network, adding rails core team member and Shopify CEO Tobias Lütke. Next.js CEO Guillermo Rauch, now added to the list, was recently pictured with war criminal Benjamin Netanyahu. I also found some better sources to make the case for Louis Rossman's inclusion, so he made the cut, too. Spread the word!

https://drewdevault.com/weird-guys/

EDIT: Woah. This blew up.

Thank y'all so much! You've restored my faith in humanity. I will really do my best to help people as much as I can. Do note that I am asynchronous as Hell, but I can always answer questions as best I can. Or at least, I know how to find an answer.

The post below.

Actually standalone post:

Ever want to learn the lower part of the stack, but it's intimidating as fuck?

libc? Kernel? Compilers? Horrifying random library you wanna figure out how to dissect?

Need a mentor?

I've been doing it for 20 years. My methods are crude but effective. My second programming language was x86 assembly. We don't discuss my first which may have been QBASIC but I outgrew it fast.

I have taught people to code before and I've mentored others for hairy parts of the stack. You're not a guinea pig.

I've got time. I've got inclination.

Requirements:

• A belief you can do it
• A desire to learn Unix at the deeper levels
• You don't scream when you see a terminal prompt
• You can exit nano; exiting vim optional but encouraged
• You should at least know the rudiments of programming

What I will do:

• Help you understand the parts you don't understand
• Help you understand how things fit together
• I don't know everything, but we can find out shit together
• Teach you how to figure it out
• Help review your patches for obvious, glaring mistakes, so you don't look like a horse's ass (it's okay sometimes I too look like a horse's ass)

I charge:

• $0 (gratuities appreciated but not required)
• "Exposure"

This is, quite possibly, the most entertaining interview i have ever encountered. You simply *must * read it. It keeps getting better with every question.
https://www.cbc.ca/radio/asithappens/b-c-swimmer-crosses-strait-of-georgia-under-nine-hours-9.7316260

RE: https://digipres.club/@raffaele/116941288085870889

Fuck every YouTuber who interviews DHH, invites DHH, collaborates with DHH, makes tutorials for DHH's Omarchy, speaks at DHH's conference.

Lately I've been learning a lot about Linux and the terminal, so that I can move away from macOS and GUI apps, and regrettably that involved giving some of those YouTubers views.

There are a lot of such YouTubers for whom it's no problem whatsoever to associate with full-blown Nazis. For a start, search for the conference OMACON and who spoke there.

https://www.omacon.org/#speakers

Tech enthusiasts are way too tolerant of literal Nazis. Fuck these people.

#fascism

what the fuck
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2026/aug/10/harry-potter-fans-force-relocation-of-430m-undersea-cable-to-avoid-dobbys-grave

One of the open source projects I used to (many years ago, so I am not really affected anymore) has recently decided to allow AI contributions. One of their arguments is that they judge submissions on quality, not tools used.

Back when I was an active contributor (to the project and maintainer of some other parts of the surrounding ecosystem), I got a lot of submissions that were bad.

The thing is, I absolutely loved getting these because they always came from super-enthusiastic junior people. Reviewing them and giving feedback often too much longer than implementing the feature myself. The same was usually true for the next contribution too. But that shifted over time. After a few months, I started getting patches where I didn’t find anything beyond the cosmetic that I wanted to change.

Going back further, I was one of those people when I started contributing.

Measured as code contributions over the short term, maintainers working with submitters of poor-quality PRs is a waste of time. You’re taking time away from writing code to do something that produces code more slowly.

Measured over the long term, the results are very different. Far more code in that project and closely related parts of the ecosystem has been written by people who I mentored when they came along with some bad code than by me.

It’s never a waste of my time to turn an enthusiastic and incompetent contributor into an enthusiastic and competent contributor, it’s an absolutely critical part of building a healthy project. I wouldn’t have got nearly as much out of F/OSS on a personal level if I hadn’t encountered a lot of people with the same opinion when I was one of the enthusiastic and incompetent newcomers.

But LLMs are not like that. If I spend time reviewing LLM-generated code when it would have been faster to write it myself (which, to be clear, is the case on 100% of LLM-submitted PRs I’ve seen so far), then that’s just a time sink. It’s also taking away time I could be spending helping new contributors who want to actually improve, rather than just take the review comments, feed them into an opaque system, and give me back the results.

RE: https://hachyderm.io/@cczona/116913001598810757

Love that humans devise ever better ways to make ourselves extinct every day.

The Sun Dreamstation was Sun Microsystems' brief and deeply confusing attempt to answer the question: What if a Sparcstation was also really good at Crazy Taxi?

If you are in your late thirties to mid-forties right now, there is a good chance that you have spent most of your life in a cycle of making some sort of home on the internet only to have it crumble beneath you like chalk and having to start over.