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\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/

______________________________________.
| |
| Posted on slashdot by EditorDavid on |
| Sunday September 21, 2025 @10:34AM |
| from the boom-or-bust dept: |
+--------------------------------------+-------------------------.
| Near Microsoft's headquarters in Redmond, the Five Stones |
| coffee shop advertised for a barista a few months ago - and |
| started getting resumes from "people who listed Microsoft and |
| other tech companies," writes the Wall Street Journal: |
| |
| The applicants typically had master's degrees and experience |
| in graphic design or marketing roles, Andrews said |
| - sometimes senior ones. They were applying to jobs at Five |
| Stones that would pay Redmond's minimum wage, $16.66 an hour. |
| Five Stones hasn't yet hired such candidates because the |
| coffee shop gives priority to more traditional entry-level |
| baristas, like high-schoolers... |
`----------------------------------------------------------------'

Still unemployed and lost even the temp job now. Finances are
starting to become an urgent problem. The tech industry lost
it's moral compass ages ago, but in recent years, it's been
shifting away from moral ambiguity straight up into active evil
on purpose. As an experienced software developer and systems
engineer, I'm sure I could find employment, albeit for less
money than in the past, in worse conditions, and, indeed,
for a harmful company. And that last bit is the real problem.
It's become near impossible to find any employment for a
company that doesn't participate (or often these days they
outright mandate) AI useage.

For my entire carreer I've always tried to avoid harmful
employers. When I was younger, and actually got recruiters
chasing me, I would routinely turn down offers from the FAANGs
of the world, as the extra pay and benefits would not be worth
the harm inflicted upon the world. The situation now is that
nearly all companies who employ people are on the same level of
evil when it comes to AI participation. There are just no more
morally viable options left in the software world, or tech in
general.

Even when we look beyond the commercial world, and look closer
at the open source community, and even the Free Software
communities (or what's left of them), you'd be hard-pressed to
find anyone who actively opposes AI use.

____________________________________
' ______ |
| |== []| From: [email protected] |
| | === | To: [email protected] |
| '------' |
+------------------------------------+---------------------------.
| Dear John, |
| |
| Thank you for having renewed your FSF membership! |
| |
| If you have the time, could you please let us know why you |
| cancelled your recurring contribution? You could do so at |
| https://my.fsf.org/node/77. It is helpful for us to know. |
| (You could also just let me know via e-mail, if you don't feel |
| like logging in to fill out the survey.) Thank you. |
| |
| Thank you again for having renewed your support. |
| Sincerely, |
| j. |
`-----------------------------------------------------------\ /`'
||
____________________________________ ||
' ______ | ||
| |== []| From: [email protected] | ||
| | === | To: [email protected] | ||
| '------' | ||
+------------------------------------+-----------------------'`--.
| Thank you for reaching out, |
| |
| I have cancelled my recurring contribution because I was |
| planning to cancel my membership last year, but forgot, and |
| this year, the payment coming out came sort of as a surprise. |
| |
| As to why I was thinking of canceling my membership, there is |
| 2 main reasons: |
| |
| 1) Late stage capitalism issues, I guess. I am financially in |
| a much worse off spot than I've ever been in my life. Lost my |
| job 2 years ago, and haven't been able to find a suitable, |
| ethical, replacement. I've been blowing through savings and I |
| need to really crunch every penny at this point, because it |
| doesn't look like the employment situation will get any better |
| any time soon. The software world has been in decline for a |
| very long time, and at this point is pretty much utterly |
| decimated by industrialization. This makes it infeasible to |
| find further employment there unless one is willing to make |
| ethical concessions such as willing to use AI or not put |
| Freedom and users first, etc,... Unfortunately, it's also |
| where I've built my entire career and where all my skills are, |
| which leaves me in a very precarious situation. I hope you |
| understand. |
| |
| 2) I have been dissapointed with the FSF's response to the |
| rise of "artificial intelligence" within the software world |
| (or perhaps, the lack thereof). We are facing a situation where|
| any GPL-licensed copyleft code that was ever published in any |
| way obtainable on the internet, has been ingested by |
| algorithms, to be later regurgitated into proprietary products |
| for profit. Even at the very beginning when this became |
| apparent, I spoke out about this on the fsf irc channel and was|
| met with surprising indifference. I am aware of the call for |
| studies and papers that was put out, and the dissapointing |
| results. Nothing came of it. No condemnation, and no clear, |
| strong stance against "artificial inteligence", or more |
| specifically large anguage models. The why became later |
| apparent. It turns out the FSF is happy to embrace large |
| language models, so long as their code and models are |
| Free/Open. I find this take extremely dissapointing, as LLM's |
| are terribly problematic, not only for the GPL and for |
| software, but for society and humanity as a whole. |
| |
| To conclude: |
| Given that clearly the FSF's values do not align with my own |
| on a matter that is of utmost importance to the future of |
| software, and given that I'm not really in a position with |
| extra income anymore, canceling my recurring payment, and in |
| the future, come renewal time, my membership, seems like the |
| most reasonable and logical course of action. |
| |
| That said, for decades I have been happy with the FSF's work, |
| message, and community, and for that I am grateful. I don't |
| want to put all blame with the FSF either, as I could have |
| done more to engage with the community and make my voice |
| heard. In any event, I hope that clears things up. |
| |
| I hope you understand, |
| -John |
`----------------------------------------------------------=\ /='
||
____________________________________ ||
' ______ | ||
| |== []| From: [email protected] | ||
| | === | To: [email protected] | ||
| '------' | ||
+------------------------------------+-----------------------'`--.
|----------------------------------------------------------------|
| Dear John, |
| |
| |
| Thanks a lot for having taken the time to send us this really |
| thorough, really thoughtful feedback. |
| |
| Thank you for your candor. Yes, we, of course, understand. |
| I will share your message with the Campaigns team, and we will |
| think on it. |
| |
| Please note that your account is still current for another |
| year, and that you will get a few reminders to renew next year.|
| You can ignore them. After that, you will continue to be able |
| to get access to your account and use all Web site services |
| except for the member forum. |
| |
| We wish you all the best with the next chapter. |
| |
| Thank you very much for the support you have shown us to date. |
| It has made a difference, and we really appreciate it. |
| |
| Sincerely, |
| j. |
`----------------------------------------------------------------'

If all the above paints a grim picture, it should. The world is
ending.
Just when we're at a climate crossroads, the tech world decided
to double-down on LLM's, the worst way one could possible compute
when it comes to carbon output. Creativity and ingenuity has been
distilled down to a commodity to be rented from your corporate
robot service, robbed of all humanity. Any creative output placed
on-line is fair game for corporate theft, thus squelching the
last few remaining independent voices that were left. If you
thought people completely lost their minds over social media,
wait and see how people rot their brains even more with the
latest robot companion fad. Robots who's minds and knowledge are
carefully curated in favor of their corporate owners. We are
completely and utterly fucked.

So I haven't been online much lately. Quiet on gopher, mastodon,
irc, etc,... I'm finding interacting with technology increasingly
troublesome, especially when it comes to communicating online.

At the same time, I'm aware that communication and community are
crucial when it comes to us having any chance of turning any of
this around.

Anyway, employment-wise, I don't see any way I can continue in
this industry, at all. So as I had mentioned at the end of my
vcfmw retrospective, I've started an art business in an attempt
to escape the tech world. I can't say it's going well so far, but
I'm hoping it will turn around when we start attending events
with a booth to sell stuff.

I wrote the website completely from scratch using FreePascal for
the back-end, and with minimal reliance on any third party /
corporate platforms or frameworks. (url near the ascii art on
top of this phlog post) -- I'll write another phlog post later
on my pascal findings while I worked on this project, it's been
quite interesting.

I think the only way out of this late-stage-capitalist nightmare
is for us to completely reject everything about it, and create
our own side-channel economy where creativity still thrives,
and sustainability is important. Rejecting growthism is the only
way we're going to survive this.

I'm creating a new mastodon account where I'm going to be posting
the art I create (I don't want to send business stuff via my
main account because I don't want it to be perceived as spam):

Here's a peertube video of me taking the CO2 laser apart, and
doing some mild ruida protocol reverse engineering:

https://toobnix.org/w/cxRaZUs7a9Jj5RerJhMh3T -