I have been running a Git server for over a decade now (before that it was mercurial and before that versioning system I rocked SVN, dating back at least twenty years). It has hosted my private repositories and served as a mirror for my GitHub projects. More recently though I …

Housefresh - an independent publisher and reviewer of air purifiers for your home - recently published a well-researched and damning article about how big media companies game the system by flooding Google with useless listicles of 'best product for X' without actually testing and reviewing them; 'content' is mostly based on Amazon …

Here is how platforms die: first, they are good to their users; then they abuse their users to make things better for their business customers; finally, they abuse those business customers to claw back all the value for themselves. Then, they die. I call this enshittification, and it is a …

When I described the Responsible AI team’s work to other experts on AI ethics and human rights, they noted the incongruity between the problems it was tackling and those, like misinformation, for which Facebook is most notorious. “This seems to be so oddly removed from Facebook as a product …

I do not endorse piracy and stealing. On the other hand, I always found it odd to have so much scientific results locked away behind paywalls, that are even prohibitive even for 'wealthy' western students/scientists, let alone people from third-world countries and such that could benefit greatly from, and …

For years I've had Google Analytics and a self-hosted Piwik/Matomo instance to keep track of visitors. Fun fact: I barely ever looked at the stats. Other fun fact: my own presence did not even register, as my adblocker denied the requests to both. Yeah. It wasn't a really hard …

Today I came across the forum post Don’t report bugs, contribute to bugs hunting about more directly helping (open source) developers help you. Developers really try to write working solutions and like Aurélien Pierre notes: We are the developers. That means we can guarantee you that the software works …

Lately I've been making some changes in how I interact with social media, and also how I consume its news and blurps. I started using Mastodon and basically moved my interest there (I tend to double post to both Mastodon and Twitter, as Twitter is still where most of my …

"I have said that this new development has unbound possibilities for good and for evil. For one thing, it makes the metaphorical dominance of the machines, as imagined by Samual Butler, a most immediate and non-metaphorical problem. It gives the human race a new and most effective collection of mechanical …

"Whenever you find yourself on the side of the majority, it is time to pause and reflect." ~ Mark Twain