Big tech is not inevitable, there is no conveyor belt to enshitification. There is always a choice. Civil servants - politicians - just need to make the right one.

Civil servants like Torgeir Micaelsen, Norway’s minister of digital affairs:

"We do not want a society where people worry about being recorded without their knowledge, photographed or filmed in places and situations where they are accustomed to not being monitored"

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2026/oct/05/norway-temporary-ban-smart-glasses-public-places

#privacy

A lot of us in the free software space are stinging rn, watching slop worm its way into our communities, tools, perhaps even the philosophy itself. I'm seeing justifiably protectionist language like infiltration, infestation, infection. & while from a security standpoint, vibed code can oft be compared to digital asbestos, I find myself reaching more for organic vs inorganic (code), bc just as it's very hard to live without plastic, it's already very difficult to avoid slop in free software 1/n

Prompt injection shows us that AI agents are just malware waiting for a hit list

https://github.com/nukIeer/AI-Prompt-Injection-Cheatsheet

Perplexing piece from the author of a new book

Indeed shaming folk for using AI is unhelpful. Yet the author urges our choices are either to use this very harmful tech to keep up, & so reserving a "seat at the table" to demand control of it, or watch AGI end work & presumably us.

Perhaps my absolutism here, but this smacks of flying to climate change conferences, or nationalising oil giants.

To use big AI is always to support it. It does not matter for what. No 2 ways

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2026/sep/29/ai-replace-humans

Encouraging to see a mass walkout by delegates toward the right side of history as Netanyahu took stage at the UN.

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/sep/24/netanyahu-un-speech-mahmoud-abbas

'In solidarity with Autistici/Inventati'

https://solidaritywithautisticiinventati.net/

If you read it and it speaks to you, please boost. This is important. A lot is at stake.

The winner of the fiercely competitive Bird of the Year, here in Aotearoa New Zealand, is the Karure, or Black Robin. Weighing no more than an AA battery, they have also been known as "goth fluffballs" and "adorably fluffy bits of night".

https://www.rnz.co.nz/news/environment/1485423/black-robin-bucks-shy-tag-to-take-bird-of-the-year-2026

#birding #gothfluffballs #birds

Surprisingly little news about the fact that 128 countries have finally agreed on a text defining what autonomous weapons are, a necessary, if not significant, step toward a UN treaty on 'killer robots'.

https://www.europesays.com/3234969/

#war #ai

The horrific disaster in Nepal, the loss, a region suddenly both unlivable and unrecognisable, hints at the scale of what we are doing to the planet as a function of climate destruction.

A profound late-winter dawn hike, out to see if we could find an elusive giant Rata (fwiw my #1 native tree species) deep in the Akatarawa rainforest, & considered to be Aotearoa New Zealand's largest.

We had found her sister prior, but not this giant.

Today we had the privilege, & I'm still feeling it. Estimated by botanists to be between 1000 and 1500 years old, we measured her girth with paracord to be ~16m.

To stand at her base was to be at the foot of a living cliff face.

#trees

In less than 12hrs I'll be taking graduates of the Tunnel training into another edition of Fortress. 4x6hrs, followed by 2 weeks of supported service deployments and experimentation.

I'm excited about every part of it (esp to see what participants build up), except the 1am starts, in my, umm, challenging timezone.

It'll be coffee black as midnight for a bit.

https://courses.nikau.io/fortress/

#sysadmin #education #infrastructure #floss

Frantic leadership confidence votes months away from an election, without leadership change, is an especially bad look for National.

Can only imagine the claws out behind those doors. The party's clearly teetering, the coalition generally.

Bodes well for the opposition.