Mauve 👁💜 @mauve@mastodon.mauve.moe

A parallel universe where the concept of a "key board", be it a piano or a typewriter keyboard, never got popular. Most people are using fretted lute / guitar input with their computers; people who mastered chords can type faster than those who cannot. Some countries prefer violin/shamisen style of input, and thus in the 40 years of computerisation their spoken languages have changed to incorporate legatos and pitch changes. The biggest coder flame war of all times is not vim vs emacs but plectrum vs bow. A few historians uncover a long-forgotten prototype of a computer controlled by percussion.

I’ve just seen someone describe Windows 11 as a “sloperating system”.

My company, Operator Foundation, is a non-profit that provides bespoke technology for information access to some of the most oppressed and vulnerable people in the world. Due to the dissolution of the US infrastructure for grant-funding of this sort of work, we have now launched a grassroots campaign seeking individual donations from those that believe in international human rights, freedom of expression, and access to information. Please help me share this campaign.

https://gofund.me/eadff652

⛓️‍💥 This release is made possible by our community. Support our mission to FREE THE INTERNET - all donations matched by Power Up Privacy through December 31, 2025! ! 💜 https://donate.torproject.org/

Hey, Anthropic owes me $9000! They illegally used at least 3 of my books on LibGen to create Claude. Now they're paying a $1.5 billion settlement, at $3000 per book. See if *your* books are on the list:

https://www.anthropiccopyrightsettlement.com/

If so, you have until March 23, 2026 to file a claim. The above website lets you file a claim, but this one explains everything more clearly:

https://authorsguild.org/advocacy/artificial-intelligence/what-authors-need-to-know-about-the-anthropic-settlement/#next-steps

Actually I exaggerated: the payment will be split between authors and publishers, but I have to make the claim - so the settlement is making me do some work my publisher should be doing for me. My coauthors and I will just get half, $4500. One of these books has 2 coauthors, one has 3, and one is a book I edited, with essays by lots of authors. So $1000 is a more realistic estimate of what I get. Oh well.

Bizarrely, my most popular book, Gauge Fields, Knots and Gravity, is not on the list. But I guess it's not surprising:

"The settlement agreement discloses that approximately 500,000 titles out of the 7 million copies of books that Anthropic reportedly downloaded from LibGen and PiLiMi meet the definition required to be part of the class."

Only books whose copyright is registered with the US Library of Congress meet that defiinition!

If you have a book on the list, you can opt out of the current settlement and join future lawsuits. But you have to take action to do that!!! For more information on that, see item 40 here:

https://www.anthropiccopyrightsettlement.com/faq

“We will build the tools of genocide, but never a sex bot” is such a condemnation of American society lolsob
https://www.technologyreview.com/2025/10/28/1126781/we-will-never-build-a-sex-robot-says-mustafa-suleyman/

The PSF applied for a $1.5M grant from the US National Science Foundation (NSF) to make innovative improvements to packaging security—and we were recommended for funding! But as a condition of funding, we were asked to affirm that we wouldn’t undertake any diversity, equity, and inclusion work, whether or not we used the government funds to do so.