@fionasboots@tech.lgbt

Fiona Bianchi @fionasboots@tech.lgbt · Jun 29, 2026

I read this from Ian Dunt https://open.substack.com/pub/iandunt/p/the-ehrc-trans-code-explained?utm_source=substack&utm_campaign=reaction&utm_medium=email&utm_content=post

It's actually fairly balanced but what I should NOT have done is read the comments as the anti-trans brigade are in full swing.

If anyone cab stomach it and has a substack account then maybe lend a hand

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Fiona Bianchi @fionasboots@tech.lgbt · Jun 10, 2026

Replying to @ketan@climatejustice.social

@ketan@climatejustice.social This is utterly insane. When I was taught about programming the whole point was to optimise algorithms to use as little resource as possible. The Art of Computer programming by Donald Knuth for example analyses algorithms in minute detail to see how efficient they are. We (well cleverer people than me) have developed extremely efficient and deterministic search algorithms over the years - we can access knowledge quickly and with precision. But no. Instead we have a bunch of morons with lots of money who want to ignore all that (mainly because they probably don't understand it) and instead want to cram vast amounts of information into hugely inefficient models and sell it back to everyone. It is a classic example of capitalism destorying people and the planet for the sake of greed.

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Fiona Bianchi @fionasboots@tech.lgbt · Jun 10, 2026

Replying to @dckim@mastodon.social

@dckim@mastodon.social Time to install Meshtastic, meshcore or Reticulum or all three on communicator devices - bypass mobile phones entirely @Em0nM4stodon@infosec.exchange

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Fiona Bianchi @fionasboots@tech.lgbt · May 29, 2026

Replying to @hailey@hails.org

@hailey@hails.org FFS can we fork rsync and have a non-AI coded version?! Why don't intelligent people get this: AI (LLM) coding takes vast amounts of power and resources and puts control in the hands of totally unethical mega-corps and billionaires. Not too mention the copyright infringement and lack of attribution that comes with LLM-coded slop.

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Fiona Bianchi @fionasboots@tech.lgbt · May 12, 2026

Replying to @fuchsiii@oxytodon.com

@fuchsiii@oxytodon.com @malwareminigun@infosec.exchange @nik@toot.teckids.org Well that just sucks big time ... so presumably you can't log IP addresses then ... I wonder how this works with govt requiring the collection of IP addresses and similar tracking? I think this is nonsense though ... but it seems to be legel nonsense ... alot of that around these days!

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Fiona Bianchi @fionasboots@tech.lgbt · May 12, 2026

Replying to @annaecook@mastodon.social

@annaecook@mastodon.social Completely agree! I worked on a project for DWP which was some massive sprawling event driven monstrosity which only had a requirement for relatively low TPS for incoming requests from citizens (big form to fill in) and then some slow and laborious manual steps. I think the internal bit could have been a monolith with a simple DB and run the lot on a laptop. But no, they had lots or teams and tech for a simple problem

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Fiona Bianchi @fionasboots@tech.lgbt · May 12, 2026

Replying to @tkissing@mastodon.social

@tkissing@mastodon.social @annaecook@mastodon.social I once set a simple coding test for some grads that I had already solved in a single line of shell. As I admitted to them I was effectively cheating as I obviously tweaked the scenario so it would work in one line ... But that is also a serious point: many problems either have really simple solutions or can be transformed a little to be equally straightforward.

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Fiona Bianchi @fionasboots@tech.lgbt · May 11, 2026

Replying to @fuchsiii@oxytodon.com

@fuchsiii@oxytodon.com @malwareminigun@infosec.exchange @nik@toot.teckids.org But IP addresses being PII makes no sense. For anything that is dynamnically annotated and NAT'ed the address itself will be used by thousands of people. The IP:port combination is only "you" for a brief time. Overall you could have multiple IP:port combinations over a day and someone else could be on these at other times. If your ISP has fixed IPv4 the home router is *still* going to do NAT so the IP address only identifies an ISP account, not even a home location (my ISP, like many others, don't show up my location as where I live but a city where the peering connection is). IPv6 without NAT would require you to know the MAC addresses of kit that an individual owns. In all cases you need data from the ISP to map an IP address to a household or a specific user. So it's only law enforcement or hackers that could get that.

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Fiona Bianchi @fionasboots@tech.lgbt · May 10, 2026

Replying to @fuchsiii@oxytodon.com

@fuchsiii@oxytodon.com @malwareminigun@infosec.exchange @nik@toot.teckids.org is an IP address PII if it's NAT'ed? Surely not since numerous individuals could have that IP:port pair over a period of time. Would IPv6 count if not-NAT'ed? While it certainly can be used to get to a specific machine an IP with MAC address embedded (from SLAAC) hardly identifies the person on it's own. IANAL so I'm trying to be sensible, I accept that legal garbage might not be!

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Fiona Bianchi @fionasboots@tech.lgbt · May 10, 2026

Replying to @itsfoss@mastodon.social

@itsfoss@mastodon.social I think this is awesome and hope more orgs (particularly public ones) follow the same path. I think GitHub et al are vastly over-priced and over complicated. Self-hosting and donating (time/effort/money/whatever) to an open source solution is more sustainable. Also I really think that the age of massive DCs needs to draw to an end. We have the technology for fast internet connectivity for the populace at large and certainly for companies/orgs - we don't need centralised we can manage federated systems. This will surely be better for the planet and for the economy as a whole (spread the market for hosting services over more/smaller companies rather than paying large corporates)

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Fiona Bianchi @fionasboots@tech.lgbt · May 09, 2026

Replying to @bms48@mastodon.social

@bms48@mastodon.social @ricmac@mastodon.social I don't think grep deserves to have some perverse AI failure named after it! That aside, having found out what that term means, it just lends more credibility to the idea that humans and real intelligence are just better at this. LLMs are just for corporations to make money without producing any of their own value. If you need an actual answer, as the person who wrote the code the LLM was trained on. Don't burn through tokens (in a way that isn't transparent) to come up with slop.

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Fiona Bianchi @fionasboots@tech.lgbt · May 09, 2026

Replying to @ricmac@mastodon.social

@ricmac@mastodon.social How much does handling 12000 (or 6000 for that matter) tokens cost? Do they need to submit the entire thing each time to get some sort of result: a fix, a change, extra code, reformatting, etc? What happens if you send an LLM just a tiny section of code without context? Does that work (I would assume either not at all or not very well) ... so does that mean that people using AI are burning through 1000's of tokens at time as they iterate through development? That sounds crazy expensive and wasteful!

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Fiona Bianchi @fionasboots@tech.lgbt · May 08, 2026

Replying to @llorenzin@infosec.exchange

@llorenzin@infosec.exchange yeah, I can totally understand that, it's a constant problem in IT where there are competing options and no time/money/effort available for either a standard or bridges. I've not looked into Meshcore at the moment and Meshtastic doesn't have huge coverage where I am (more rural). My plan is to host a Meshtastic router at home which, when mounted on the outside wall of the house will hopefully help increase coverage. I'm also actively investigating Reticulum because, while Mesh* are good they seem to be LoRa only (for obvious technical reasons). Reticulum on the other hand covers TCP, LoRa, KISS (radio) and some others so messages can hop all over the place. Ultimately I'm expecting to have Meshtastic + Reticulum setup which gives options/redundancy in comms and security etc. I notice a name I recognise with Meshcore, Liam Cottle who also seems to have done significant work on Reticulum and Meshtastic :) @eestileib@tech.lgbt

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