The important question about AI-assisted programming isn't who writes the code. It's who understands the system.

If you’re interested in retro computing, you may be happy to read that I’ve made a binary release of my **Mastodon** client for the **Apple 2**. It has been mostly tested on an **Apple //c** and **IIgs** , and works on any Apple II with 64kB of memory or more. The login screen **Features:** This Mastodon client features: * 2 factor authentication login * Home, local and global timelines view * Infinite scroll * Profile view * Thread view for toots with replies * Notifications view * Full media support (images, gif, audio, video1) * Favouriting, Retooting, Bookmarking * Toot writing (with images) and reediting * Replying * Quoting * Content Warning (both reading and sending) * (Un)following people * (Un)blocking and (un)masking people * Bookmarks * Polls Most obviously missing things: * Profile edition (bio, images etc) * Account creation To get a good idea of what you can do with this client, check the Mastodon for Apple II User guide. **What people say about it:** * _“I will never use this and yet I love that it exists.”_ * _“Absolutely pointless, beautiful work here”_ * _“All the good features are included, such as unfollow and block, and none of the bad features such as account creation and polls.”_ * _“I set this up as a lark, but I’m kind of falling in love with it. It’s a different and surprisingly lovely way to use Mastodon.”_ * _“Hilariously full-featured.”_ * _“This is an absurdly good client.”_ * In the news: AppleInsider, CallA.P.P.L.E, Golem.de, Retropolis, BoingBoing **Downloads:** * the Mastodon for Apple II floppy image * the manual * the surl-server proxy image **Screenshots:** (You will find installation instructions just below these) Replying to a toot Viewing a profile banner Reading the timeline Viewing a picture (photo credit Guillaume Laget) **Installing the surl-server proxy:** See the dedicated surl-server page or this video. I make hardware to integrate everything easy and clean if you’re interested. **Transferring the floppy** : Download the Mastodon floppy image from the Github Releases page. Transfer it to your Apple II using ADTPro (you may prefer the video format), or with your STP floppy if you have it setup, or just put the .po file on your modern Apple II storage device. Your Mastodon floppy is now ready. You can unplug the serial cable from your PC, plug it into the Raspberry, and boot the Raspberry. You can now reset the Apple II (either by turning it off and on, or via Ctrl-Open-Apple-Reset), and login into your Mastodon instance! **Final step: enjoy!** After this, everything should work. If not, log onto the Raspberry using ssh and the pi/raspberry login. You can investigate the logs in /var/log/syslog. Once in the Mastodon application on the Apple II, make sure to configure it (using the O key) if you have a french keyboard, for charset conversion to/from UTF-8 (and I’d be glad to add other layouts if you know their charsets!), and configure the image conversion algorithm for monochrome or color monitors. **Upgrading:** If you want to upgrade following a new release, you will have to re-transfer a floppy image using ADTPro. For the proxy part, you can either start fresh with a new Raspberry image, or ssh into your existing Pi to upgrade the package – see the dedicated surl-server page. **Troubleshooting:** If you have serial communication issues, you can try lowering the serial speed in the proxy’s `/etc/a2tools/tty.conf` file – although the default 115200bps should be completely safe. After changing this configuration file, restart the proxy service using sudo systemctl restart surl-server.service You can also try to change the serial port you use on your Apple II. The Mastodon client will suggest reconfiguring the default serial settings at startup, if it can not connect to the proxy. Note: The default serial speed has been upgraded from 9600bps to 19200bps at release **1.5.0** , and to 115200bps at release **1.14.0**. Make sure to update the surl-server settings in `/etc/a2tools/tty.conf`. If you have questions or suggestions, I’d be happy to hear from you, either by email or on Mastodon. 1. Video playback is not available on the IIgs ↩︎

A key feature is missing from most Personal Knowledge Management Systems (PKMSs): define a concept by pressing a keybinding on a word, and from then on all occu...

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Today's links No one wants to read your AI slop: If you must do this, for god's sake, do it privately. Hey look at this: Delights to delectate. Object permanence: AOL email tax; Ebook readers' bill of rights; Sanders media blackout. Upcoming appearances: Where to find me. Recent appearances: Where I've been. Latest books: You keep readin' em, I'll keep writin' 'em. Upcoming books: Like I said, I'll keep writin' 'em. Colophon: All the rest. No one wants to read your AI slop (permalink) Everyone knows (or should know) that as fascinating as your dreams are to you, they are eye-glazingly dull to everyone else. Perhaps you have a friend or two who will tolerate you recounting your dreams at them (treasure those friends), but you should never, ever presume that other people want to hear about your dreams. The same is true of your conversations with chatbots. Even if you find these conversations interesting, you should never assume that anyone else will be entertained by them. In the absence of an explicit reassurance to the contrary, you should presume that recounting your AI chatbot sessions to your friends is an imposition on the friendship, and forwarding the transcripts of those sessions doubly so (perhaps triply so, given the verbosity of chatbot responses). I will stipulate that there might be friend groups out there where pastebombs of AI chat transcripts are welcome, but even if you work in such a milieu, you should never, ever assume that a stranger wants to see or hear about your AI "conversations." Tagging a chatbot into a social media conversation with a stranger and typing, "Hey Grok‡, what do you think of that?" is like masturbating in front of a stranger. ‡ Ugh It's rude. It's an imposition. It's gross. There's an even worse circle of hell than the one you create when you nonconsensually add a chatbot to a dialog: the hell that comes from reading something a stranger wrote, and then asking a chatbot to generate "commentary" on it and emailing it to that stranger. Even the AI companies pitching their products claim that they need human oversight because they are prone to errors (including the errors that the companies dress up by calling them "hallucinations"). If you've read something you disagree with but don't understand well enough to rebut, and you ask an AI to generate a rebuttal for you, you still don't understand it well enough to rebut it. You haven't generated a rebuttal: you have generated a blob of plausible sentences that may or may not constitute a valid critique of the work you're upset with – but until a human being who understands the issue goes through the AI output line by line and verifies it, it's just stochastic word-salad. Once again: the act of prompting a sentence generator to create a rebuttal-shaped series of sentences does not impart understanding to the prompter. In the dialog between someone who's written something and someone who disagrees with it, but doesn't understand it well enough to rebut it, the only person qualified to evaluate the chatbot's output is the original author – that is, the stranger you've just emailed a chat transcript to. Emailing a stranger a blob of unverified AI output is not a form of dialogue – it's an attempt to coerce a stranger into unpaid labor on your behalf. Strangers are not your "human in the loop" whose expensive time is on offer to painstakingly work through the plausible sentences a chatbot made for you for free. Remember: even the AI companies will tell you that the work of overseeing an AI's output is valuable labor. The fact that you can costlessly (to you) generate infinite volumes of verbose, plausible-seeming topical sentences in no way implies that the people who actually think about things and then write them down have the time to mark your chatbot's homework. That is a fatal flaw in the idea that we will increase our productivity by asking chatbots to summarize things we don't understand: by definition, if we don't understand a subject, then we won't be qualified to evaluate the summary, either. There simply is no substitute for learning about a subject and coming to understand it well enough to advance the subject, whether by contributing your own additions or by critiquing its flaws. That's not to say that we shouldn't aspire to participate in discourse about areas that seem interesting or momentous – but asking a chatbot to contribute on your behalf does not impart insight to you, and it is a gross imposition on people who have taken the time to understand and participate using their own minds and experience. (Image: Cryteria, CC BY 3.0, modified) Hey look at this (permalink) The Enshittificator https://vimeo.com/1168468796 Digital products and services are getting worse – but the trend can be reversed https://www.forbrukerradet.no/news-in-english/digital-products-and-services-are-getting-worse-but-the-trend-can-be-reversed/ Distribution of Household Wealth in the U.S. since 1989 https://www.federalreserve.gov/releases/z1/dataviz/dfa/distribute/chart/#quarter:144;series:Corporate After decades of debating the “scientific publishing crisis”, the time has come to decide. https://bjoern.brembs.net/2026/02/after-decades-of-debating-the-scientific-publishing-crisis-the-time-as-come-to-decide/ History of Disney Theme Parks in Documents https://www.disneydocs.net/ Object permanence (permalink) #25yrsago Web loggers bare their souls https://web.archive.org/web/20010321183557/https://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/chronicle/archive/2001/02/28/DD27271.DTL #20yrsago Fight AOL/Yahoo’s email tax! https://web.archive.org/web/20060303152934/http://www.dearaol.com/ #20yrsago Long-lost Penn and Teller videogame for download https://waxy.org/2006/02/penn_tellers_sm/ #20yrsago Aussie gov’t report on DRM: Don’t let it override public rights! https://web.archive.org/web/20060813191613/https://www.michaelgeist.ca/component/option,com_content/task,view/id,1137/Itemid,85/nsub,/ #20yrsago BBC: “File sharing is not theft” http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/programmes/newsnight/4758636.stm #15yrsago Hollywood’s conservatism: why no one wants to make a “risky” movie https://web.archive.org/web/20110305083114/http://www.gq.com/entertainment/movies-and-tv/201102/the-day-the-movies-died-mark-harris?currentPage=all #15yrsago Eldritch Effulgence: HP Lovecraft’s favorite words https://arkhamarchivist.com/wordcount-lovecraft-favorite-words/ #15yrsago Exposing the Big Wisconsin Lie about “subsidized public pensions” https://web.archive.org/web/20110224201357/http://tax.com/taxcom/taxblog.nsf/Permalink/UBEN-8EDJYS?OpenDocument #15yrsago Taxonomy of social mechanics in multiplayer games https://www.raphkoster.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/02/Koster_Social_Social-mechanics_GDC2011.pdf #15yrsago San Francisco before the great fire: rare, public domain 1906 video https://archive.org/details/TripDownMarketStreetrBeforeTheFire #15yrsago Ebook readers’ bill of rights https://web.archive.org/web/20110308220609/https://librarianinblack.net/librarianinblack/2011/02/ebookrights.html #10yrsago 500,000 to 1M unemployed Americans will lose food aid next month https://web.archive.org/web/20160229021021/https://gawker.com/in-one-month-we-will-begin-intentionally-starving-poor-1761588216 #10yrsago FBI claims it has no records of its decision to delete its recommendation to encrypt your phone https://www.techdirt.com/2016/02/29/fbi-claims-it-has-no-record-why-it-deleted-recommendation-to-encrypt-phones/ #10yrsago A hand-carved wooden clock that scribes the time on a magnetic board https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WEbmYp5VVcw #10yrsago Press looks the other way as thousands march for Sanders in 45+ cities https://web.archive.org/web/20160314104804/http://usuncut.com/politics/media-blackout-as-thousands-of-bernie-supporters-march-in-45-cities/ #10yrsago Crapgadget apocalypse: the IoT devices that punch through your firewall and expose your network https://krebsonsecurity.com/2016/02/this-is-why-people-fear-the-internet-of-things/ #10yrsago Found debauchery: cavorting bros and a pyramid of beer on a found 1971 Super-8 reel https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xAobW4PtoMY #10yrsago Trump could make the press great again, all they have to do is their jobs https://www.zocalopublicsquare.org/donald-trump-could-make-the-media-great-again/ #10yrsago Federal judge rules US government can’t force Apple to make a security-breaking tool https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2016/02/government-cant-force-apple-unlock-drug-case-iphone-rules-new-york-judge #10yrsago Black students say Donald Trump had them removed before his speech https://web.archive.org/web/20160302092600/https://gawker.com/donald-trump-requested-that-a-group-of-black-students-b-1762064789 #10yrsago Red Queen’s Race: Disney parks are rolling out surge pricing with 20% premiums on busy days https://memex.craphound.com/2016/03/01/red-queens-race-disney-parks-are-rolling-out-surge-pricing-with-20-premiums-on-busy-days/ Upcoming appearances (permalink) Victoria: 28th Annual Victoria International Privacy & Security Summit, Mar 3-5 https://www.rebootcommunications.com/event/vipss2026/ Victoria: Enshittification at Russell Books, Mar 4 https://www.eventbrite.ca/e/cory-doctorow-is-coming-to-victoria-tickets-1982091125914 Barcelona: Enshittification with Simona Levi/Xnet (Llibreria Finestres), Mar 20 https://www.llibreriafinestres.com/evento/cory-doctorow/ Berkeley: Bioneers keynote, Mar 27 https://conference.bioneers.org/ Montreal: Bronfman Lecture (McGill) Apr 10 https://www.eventbrite.ca/e/artificial-intelligence-the-ultimate-disrupter-tickets-1982706623885 Berlin: Re:publica, May 18-20 https://re-publica.com/de/news/rp26-sprecher-cory-doctorow Berlin: Enshittification at Otherland Books, May 19 https://www.otherland-berlin.de/de/event-details/cory-doctorow.html Hay-on-Wye: HowTheLightGetsIn, May 22-25 https://howthelightgetsin.org/festivals/hay/big-ideas-2 Recent appearances (permalink) Should Democrats Make A Nuremberg Caucus? (Make It Make Sense) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MWxKrnNfrlo Making The Internet Suck Less (Thinking With Mitch Joel) https://www.sixpixels.com/podcast/archives/making-the-internet-suck-less-with-cory-doctorow-twmj-1024/ Panopticon :3 (Trashfuture) https://www.patreon.com/posts/panopticon-3-150395435 America's Enshittification is Canada's Opportunity (Do Not Pass Go) https://www.donotpassgo.ca/p/americas-enshittification-is-canadas Everything Wrong With the Internet and How to Fix It, with Tim Wu (Ezra Klein) https://www.nytimes.com/2026/02/06/opinion/ezra-klein-podcast-doctorow-wu.html Latest books (permalink) "Canny Valley": A limited edition collection of the collages I create for Pluralistic, self-published, September 2025 https://pluralistic.net/2025/09/04/illustrious/#chairman-bruce "Enshittification: Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It," Farrar, Straus, Giroux, October 7 2025 https://us.macmillan.com/books/9780374619329/enshittification/ "Picks and Shovels": a sequel to "Red Team Blues," about the heroic era of the PC, Tor Books (US), Head of Zeus (UK), February 2025 (https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250865908/picksandshovels). "The Bezzle": a sequel to "Red Team Blues," about prison-tech and other grifts, Tor Books (US), Head of Zeus (UK), February 2024 (thebezzle.org). "The Lost Cause:" a solarpunk novel of hope in the climate emergency, Tor Books (US), Head of Zeus (UK), November 2023 (http://lost-cause.org). "The Internet Con": A nonfiction book about interoperability and Big Tech (Verso) September 2023 (http://seizethemeansofcomputation.org). Signed copies at Book Soup (https://www.booksoup.com/book/9781804291245). "Red Team Blues": "A grabby, compulsive thriller that will leave you knowing more about how the world works than you did before." Tor Books http://redteamblues.com. "Chokepoint Capitalism: How to Beat Big Tech, Tame Big Content, and Get Artists Paid, with Rebecca Giblin", on how to unrig the markets for creative labor, Beacon Press/Scribe 2022 https://chokepointcapitalism.com Upcoming books (permalink) "The Reverse-Centaur's Guide to AI," a short book about being a better AI critic, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, June 2026 "Enshittification, Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It" (the graphic novel), Firstsecond, 2026 "The Post-American Internet," a geopolitical sequel of sorts to Enshittification, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2027 "Unauthorized Bread": a middle-grades graphic novel adapted from my novella about refugees, toasters and DRM, FirstSecond, 2027 "The Memex Method," Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 2027 Colophon (permalink) Today's top sources: Currently writing: "The Post-American Internet," a sequel to "Enshittification," about the better world the rest of us get to have now that Trump has torched America ( words today, total) "The Reverse Centaur's Guide to AI," a short book for Farrar, Straus and Giroux about being an effective AI critic. LEGAL REVIEW AND COPYEDIT COMPLETE. "The Post-American Internet," a short book about internet policy in the age of Trumpism. PLANNING. A Little Brother short story about DIY insulin PLANNING This work – excluding any serialized fiction – is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 license. That means you can use it any way you like, including commercially, provided that you attribute it to me, Cory Doctorow, and include a link to pluralistic.net. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ Quotations and images are not included in this license; they are included either under a limitation or exception to copyright, or on the basis of a separate license. Please exercise caution. How to get Pluralistic: Blog (no ads, tracking, or data-collection): Pluralistic.net Newsletter (no ads, tracking, or data-collection): https://pluralistic.net/plura-list Mastodon (no ads, tracking, or data-collection): https://mamot.fr/@pluralistic Medium (no ads, paywalled): https://doctorow.medium.com/ Twitter (mass-scale, unrestricted, third-party surveillance and advertising): https://twitter.com/doctorow Tumblr (mass-scale, unrestricted, third-party surveillance and advertising): https://mostlysignssomeportents.tumblr.com/tagged/pluralistic "When life gives you SARS, you make sarsaparilla" -Joey "Accordion Guy" DeVilla READ CAREFULLY: By reading this, you agree, on behalf of your employer, to release me from all obligations and waivers arising from any and all NON-NEGOTIATED agreements, licenses, terms-of-service, shrinkwrap, clickwrap, browsewrap, confidentiality, non-disclosure, non-compete and acceptable use policies ("BOGUS AGREEMENTS") that I have entered into with your employer, its partners, licensors, agents and assigns, in perpetuity, without prejudice to my ongoing rights and privileges. You further represent that you have the authority to release me from any BOGUS AGREEMENTS on behalf of your employer. ISSN: 3066-764X

An inspired tessellation artwork, with an animation showing its underlying symmetries.