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Dass dieses Jahr eine liebe Freundin das erste Mal auf den Chaos Communication Congress fährt, nehme ich zum Anlass, hier einmal ein kleines Howto für den Congress zu geben. Falls irgendetwas Relevantes fehlt, gebt gern bescheid.

Zuerst eine kleine Linkliste zur Orientierung (diese und weitere Links finden sich auch auf dieser Übersichtsseite):

• die Infoseiten sind eine Sammlung von Informationen über die Infrastrukturen des Kongress. Was dort steht, kommt von offizieller Seite. Da gibt es auch einen Abschnitt für Erstbesuchies.
• Der Hub hingegen ist letztlich eine Art Wiki (also eine Informationssammlung, an der jeder alle mitarbeiten können, wenn sie sich einen Account machen). Dort finden sich selbstorganisierte Veranstaltungen, Assemblies, Projekte, ein schwarzes Brett und weiteres.
• Social Media: Es kann sein, dass auf Bluesky auch ein bisschen über den Congress geschrieben wird, aber das meiste wird auf Mastodon los sein, vor allem unter #39c3. Wenn Du Dich dort anmelden willst, hau mich gerne noch mal an.
• Die Chaospat*innen sind eine Gruppe explizit für Erstbesuchende, die haben sicher noch mehr Ressourcen.

Was tun?

• Besuche Self Organized Sessions oder Vorträge, die Dich interessieren.
• Gehe in einen Vortrag oder einen Workshop, von dessen Thema Du keine Ahnung hast.
• Freiwillig mitzuhelfen (“engeln”) würde ich erst ab dem zweiten Congress empfehlen. Falls Du Dich aber sehr verloren fühlst (passiert nicht selten, auch den ganz Erfahrenen), ist das vielleicht trotzdem ein sehr guter Einstieg: https://guide.c3heaven.de/index.en.html
• Sich mit Freunden treffen und über das Gelände stromern ist auf alle Fälle eine gute Idee.
• Wenn du jemanden mit einem interessanten Projekt triffst, frag ihn gerne dazu aus. Die allermeisten Leute haben Bock, über die Dinge zu reden, die sie auf dem Congress zeigen.
• Versuche überall mal gewesen zu sein, weil es wahnsinnig viel zu entdecken gibt.
• Versuche trotzdem nicht, alles zu erleben. Der Kongress ist viel zu groß, dass eine Person wirklich alles mitbekommen könnte. Du wirst notwendig irgendwas verpassen; das ist okay. Versuch, den Moment zu genießen.
• Aus dem selben Grund: Ruh auch mal aus.
• Eine wichtige Sache ist noch die Foto-Policy. Wenn Du Fotos von irgendwas machen möchtest, dann ist es üblich, alle Leute, die auf dem Foto drauf sein werden, vorher zu fragen, ob das für sie okay ist. Es ist oft sehr schade, dass man dann coole Sachen nicht so einfach festhalten kann, aber es ist eine wichtige Regel in der Community.

Begriffe

• Vorträge vs. Self organized sessions: Das Vortragsprogramm (“Fahrplan”) ist von der Congress-Orga kuratiert, wird größtenteils aufgenommen und gestreamt, und ist üblicherweise von sehr hohem Niveau. Die Self organized Sessions sind viel weniger kuratiert und oft Hands-on-Workshops. Dort lernt eins auch eher neue Leute kennen. Vorträge Du auch im Januar noch anschauen, deshalb würde ich eher Workshops priorisieren.
• Assemblies sind die Orte von teilnehmenden Gruppen. So hat der CCC Hamburg beispielsweise einen Tisch, an dem sie sich treffen und an dem man sie treffen kann. Aber es gibt auch größere Assemblies wie beispielsweise die der Haecksen mit eigenem Vortragssaal.
• DECT/Eventphone: wenn du noch ein altes Schnurlostelefon hast, kannst du das auf dem Congress verwenden. Dort gibt es ein eigenes Telefonnetz.
• Himmel: Organisation der freiwilligen Helfer*innen („Engel“)
• POC/VOC/NOC: Das -OC steht für “Operation Center”. Das sind Teams, die sich um Infrastruktur auf dem Congress kümmern, sie werden hier im Engel-Guide genauer erklärt.
• Hilfe: CERT für die physische Gesundheit, Awarenessteam für die psychische, Security für die Security.

Gutgemeinte Ratschläge

• Komm schon am 26.12. mal rum; das ist „Tag 0“. Da ist noch Aufbau, aber schon ganz gut zum Orientieren.
• Bring Deinen Laptop mit, vielleicht wollen Dir Leute Computerdinge beibringen...
• Such Dir ein „Zu Hause“, eventuell bei den Haecksen oder der Assembly eines Hackspaces, der nah an Deinem Wohnort ist. Da liegt dann Dein Ladekabel, Dein Essen und eventuell eingesammelter Bastelkram; und Du kannst da auch mal ein, zwei Stunden sitzen und den letzten Workshop verdauen.
• Wie schon erwähnt, mach auch mal Pause, versuch nicht, alles zu erleben.
• Nimm Dir Essen mit. Das Messe-Essen ist teuer.
• Wenn Du Dich irgendwann sehr erschlagen und klein fühlst, als wären alle um Dich rum krasse Hacker, nur Du nicht: Glaub mir, auch den krassen Hackern geht es so. „All creatures welcome“ ist ernst gemeint.

It's the zuzziest, it's the zazziest, it's Saturday Morning All Star Hi- uh, I mean #ArtABCs! This year we're arting the alphabet from A-Z. Letters like æ, ñ, anything with a diacritical mark, etc., can go anywhere you like.

Congrats on making it this far into the year! We've reached the letter Z Any art subject starting with that letter is fair game, no matter how abstract.

Z is for zzz

Let's make terrific art!

Each challenge lasts 2 weeks from the day this post was made. You can submit a new picture every day, work on one picture for 2 weeks, or post pics randomly. This is the most laid-back art challenge on the internet, & that means you have plenty of time to make your art however you want.

Use #ArtABCs & tag me @KarinWanderer so I see it!

Pick your social & post your art! Mastodon Bluesky

All art styles & skill levels are welcome- No AI, Yes alt text, CW as needed. Have a fantastic day, draw something for my art challenge, see you next week!

I'm not ok. I'm just waiting until Monday when I will contact AAA for a new battery. I don't know why I'm waiting until a weekday to use a 24/7 emergency service but it might require additional steps that would be easier/cheaper during business hours. That and I really don't want to do anything so waiting is easier than doing. At some point today I'll have to order food. I'm miserable and not talking to anyone. Getting help is too hard because it requires me to coordinate the help and I can't do anything right now. Somehow I think calling AAA and dealing with anonymous service providers is something that I might be able to do. And it opens up the freedom to get out of here on my own power. Coordinating help with others is far too many steps and decisions for me in my state. Cleaning and dressing and eating (and packing to move) are all difficult. I said it before & I'll say again, I'm miserable.

In tech we've always had evangelists, weither it's for FOSS, or Blockchain or now AI.

It's a natural thing to do. You have a tech you're excited about and of course you want everyone around you to use it. In time, you learn to read people and see they aren't interested and eventually they may consider trying it. But leave them, they will come in their own time.

When the blockchain was doing the rounds especially with NFTs, the tech was being crow barred into everything. It was in funding rounds, and the EU went on the bandwagon too.

We will always have tech hype.

A lack of Respect

AI however this seems to be worse. Not just because of the serious hardware shortages that LLM models are causing. It's what it's doing to people.

About six months ago we had a friend write a pitch to us to consider working with the AI company they just joined. It was proprietary and we do GPL but surely we'd work around that. It also had that AI vibe to it. It wasn't written in that friends voice, and it was just weird. In the uncanny valley.

We pushed back. We said no, and asked that friend not to use AI in communications with us. We've always been fine with understanding their own voice.

The response made us sad. “Surely we wanted our project to be used in the “Real World”, etc, etc.” There was negging. It made us sad. We'd just lost a little more respect for that friend, and other times that friend jumped on the latest bandwagon came to mind. But the lack of respect for the friendship was clear to us. Although at least this time it was in their own voice. Mistakes and all.

It was sad we had to push that. To put that boundary in place where we'd never had to have a boundary before. But the friend kept pushing against that No AI boundary. The manipulation stayed in the communication.

It is a lack of respect to use an AI to draft a response in communications to your friends and loved ones. It is manipulative and you are choosing to not use your voice, your true words, your true thoughts.

Which is devastating. Because it shows that somehow you think you are lacking, you need to use a voice of blandness, stripped of emotion, yet filled with emotionally manipulative language to get us to see your point of view.

The response put me in mind of various bar interactions I had on girls nights out with that guy at the bar. You know the one folks.

The Pickup

The pickup artist. The guy who plays the numbers game. He's not really interested in you as a person. He doesn't respect you enough as a person to get to know you, to be friends. He's not got time for that. He just wants to fuck you.

If you say no, he'll come up with counter arguments to keep pestering you until you give in.

Sometimes it's reasonable. He's so reasonable. He's a nice guy come on, just say yes.

Sometimes it's a “you won't do better, you're being unreasonable”. He'd be so good, such a gentleman, Just say yes. The negging goes hard.

My boundaries are ignored

It takes so much effort to keep saying no.

I just wanted a night out with my friends.

Adventures in FOSS

We're currently creating an AI policy for my project. It will boil down to please don't.

We won't accept LLM code contributions, we do know that some LLMs can be useful. For accessibility affordances. Now I'm going to leave aside the failure in community that means. Because when it comes to alt text, we should all be doing better.

Automated language translations can be a useful tool. Although it does come at the expense of qualified translators who'd like to eat sometime this month doing something they love.

When it comes to code commits though. I want you to know what you're submitting and why. So you need to be sure even the commit messages actually mean what you think they mean.

Take this example where a project had to deal with a 13000 line commit some guy decided to get an LLM to do “As an Experiment.” Even when the guy was asked to stop, he kept going to justify why he was doing it. Why it was such a good thing, and why the project should let him do it and accept the commit.

Oh.

There's that guy, We're not even in the bar.

Even with our own project, we had to say no to a contributor. Who when we told that contributor what our policy was going to be; sent us a long text detailing how AI helped them and why it was a good thing.

Our other contributors, who have used LLMs on occasion went “Cool, we can do that.”

There's the difference. Respect the boundary. When we say no, accept the no.

Don't assume that we don't understand. We do understand. I studied machine learning at university. This current incarnation is not that, the environmental cost of using AI isn't worth that.

The sheer existential crisis the slop is causing to our communications is not worth that. The exploitation of others to clean up AI, and the deliberate engineering of job losses is not worth that.

Even today, I was evangelised at by someone who thinks LLMs are useful. Who is completely ignoring the consent part. Why on earth would I say no to something so useful? See the community at the project is great. They will listen, honestly! Why would you switch off the AI?

Don't be that guy at the bar.

It doesn't matter my reasons for saying No.

I said no. Respect that.

Is there hope?

I read a beautiful piece by Robert Kingett about a writers group that had been infiltrated by a LLM chugging techbro. The violation of putting someone elses words into an LLM to “improve it.”

The piece hit me hard. It reminded me of when I shared a starting stub of an idea. I'd written a small paragraph, it felt raw. I've always liked writing about smells and how the body feels in a moment. I posted it online to our friend group, I asked for some feedback. Some of my friends gave me constructive useful feedback.

Then one day I came home and outside my door was a letter from another friend. He'd taken my work and rewritten it. I was so upset that he'd taken my words and rewritten them in his voice. To make it better. He thought he'd made it better. I was so angry.

It felt like such a violation. I'd not asked him to do that. I'd asked my friends for feedback. Decades later I can still feel that violation. It affected that friendship and broke my trust in him. It hurt, I couldn't forgive him. To be honest, I still haven't forgiven him for that.

So reading Robert's piece about the techbro doing that to another writer reminded me of the anger I felt at that time. How violated I felt. That's the thing about LLM evangelists. They feel it's so useful. More of the general public are evangelising for a technology they don't really understand. Even our technical press is trying for balance, with puff pieces for AI one day, and publishing pieces about the harm the next.

To the LLM bros, It doesn't matter about the violation to friendships, to artists, to Free Software Projects or ultimately the living biosphere. It's about what's useful to them. There's no space for emotion or beauty. Just bland status quo politeness. I want to tear it all down.

Beauty can be savage, unforgiving. It's not safe. It's not perfect. Beauty is not a bland lawn of astroturf with no weeds. Beauty is that piece of wild forest and meadow with wildflowers. There are no weeds. Don't let the LLM bros peddle that cold, lifeless ideal.

What Kingett did next is beautiful. It's rebellion built around community and the community grows. Go read it now.

We can choose to not give in to the LLM bro's idea of our bland polite future. We can choose to state and enforce our boundaries. Make them unequivocal. Then when someone chooses to not respect that boundary, you can show them the door and put them through it. Not for ever using the LLM, but for insisting they must use it and keep using it in their interactions with you.

They are violating your consent. You can kick them out.

They ignore the fact that No, means No.

They are being that pickup artist at the bar.

So give no quarter.

Editors Note: You can Support Robert's writing here:

https://sightlessscribbles.com/support/

Or, my letter to those who think “AI art” is better and “doesn't need so much meaningless work”.

“I'm sorry for your loss.

I'm sorry for your loss of the feeling of wonder, of excitement, of the feeling of something that did not exist before taking form because you created it with your mind and your hands.

I'm sorry for your loss of feeling frustrated, not quite there yet.

I'm sorry for your loss of the will to grow, to learn, to can, to do and be better.

I am really sorry for your loss.”

-

Originally a reply to this post

This year we're arting the alphabet from A-Z. Letters like æ, ñ, anything with a diacritical mark, etc., can go anywhere you like.

Congrats on making it this far into the year! We've reached the letter Y Any art subject starting with that letter is fair game, no matter how abstract.

Y is for Yojimbo

Let's make terrific art!

Each challenge lasts 2 weeks from the day this post was made. You can submit a new picture every day, work on one picture for 2 weeks, or post pics randomly. This is the most laid-back art challenge on the internet, & that means you have plenty of time to make your art however you want.

Use #ArtABCs & tag me @KarinWanderer so I see it!

Pick your social & post your art! Mastodon Bluesky

All art styles & skill levels are welcome- No AI, Yes alt text, CW as needed. Have a fantastic day, draw something for my art challenge, see you next week!

I couldn't decide which blog was the best home for my latest post so it's on humanissome with this link stub here:

“Thanks For Sharing”

I just read something I wrote in the 90s, ostensibly to a friend but I didn't send it. Oh no, I put it online instead! Though the color combination & text style I chose was, I believe, intended to discourage readers! See, it was many years before I came out to myself, and the unsent note is addressed to a straight guy friend. We were in our early twenties! I could say a lot more some day when I have time but the basic conundrum is that this guy was drawn to hanging out with me, because I'm one of the most interesting people to talk to 🙃 and at the same time I made him uncomfortable. I am emotionally open, nearly always as much as possible, going back decades. His interest/discomfort puzzled me. In the note I reference a then-recent interview I had seen, starting by saying that I was:

thankful... that we're even able to talk about any of this at all. When Mike Leigh was on Charlie Rose, Charlie made some comment how in “Career Girls” these two old roommates meet up and talk very intensely, about serious personal matters + how Charlie thinks this works cause they're women. Or, really he said: “Women talk about things like this, and men don't. ...I find when I'm with other guys I'm talking about sports or politics.” This made me want to retch — mostly because I don't like Charlie Rose. But anyway I think, before pondering making a similar film with male characters, Mike Leigh just said, “Some men do talk like that.”

So I'm glad to be among the “some” of Mike Leigh than the “all” of Charlie Rose. Of course, that doesn't mean I feel entirely comfortable.

There's a video on YouTube titled, “Terrible Interviewer, Great Interviews” & that's how I felt about Charlie Rose always. Truly I'm not speaking in hindsight. I always felt personal dislike for Charlie Rose while avidly consuming his interviews as a rare example of intelligent conversation on tv. The exchange that I quote above pretty well explains it. For the demographics of his audience Charlie would have on a Mike Leigh. But Charlie is going to talk as if “all men are like ____,” because (as the whole world now knows) Charlie Rose is demented. His conscience clearly wasn't adequately developed, though that did not prevent his ascendence to the heights of broadcasting. Such revelations should cause a thorough reexamination of our media culture, but instead the powers that be in US society will pantomime outrage at a small number of individual failings while ensuring that current systems endure. They will stoke rumblings that changes—any progressive changes ever—are “going too far” and that stability demands regression to the mean, a state in which the powers at be remain the powers that be, minus one Charlie Rose. Even those minor penalties, of individual scoundrels chased from polite society, are only temporary. America can abide no improvement at all, for improvement implies that we weren't already perfect. Exceptionalism!

This year we're arting the alphabet from A-Z. Letters like æ, ñ, anything with a diacritical mark, etc., can go anywhere you like.

Congrats on making it this far into the year! We've reached the letter X Any art subject starting with that letter is fair game, no matter how abstract.

*X is for Xeriscape *

Let's make terrific art!

Each challenge lasts 2 weeks from the day this post was made. You can submit a new picture every day, work on one picture for 2 weeks, or post pics randomly. This is the most laid-back art challenge on the internet, & that means you have plenty of time to make your art however you want.

Use #ArtABCs & tag me @KarinWanderer so I see it!

Pick your social & post your art! Mastodon Bluesky

All art styles & skill levels are welcome- No AI, Yes alt text, CW as needed. Have a fantastic day, draw something for my art challenge, see you next week!

I am the Final Word Moving through the universe From mouth to mouth Rumour speed Light has nothing on me

I am the Final Word On tips of every tongue Rolling easy Finding all who speak

I am the Final Word Tying all tongues The End of spoken world

I am the Final Word Cleansing the Universe

I am the Final Word

#Poetry

This year we're arting the alphabet from A-Z. Letters like æ, ñ, anything with a diacritical mark, etc., can go anywhere you like.

Congrats on making it this far into the year! We've reached the letter W Any art subject starting with that letter is fair game, no matter how abstract.

W is for Whale

Let's make terrific art!

Each challenge lasts 2 weeks from the day this post was made. You can submit a new picture every day, work on one picture for 2 weeks, or post pics randomly. This is the most laid-back art challenge on the internet, & that means you have plenty of time to make your art however you want.

Use #ArtABCs & tag me @KarinWanderer so I see it!

Pick your social & post your art! Mastodon Bluesky

All art styles & skill levels are welcome- No AI, Yes alt text, CW as needed. Have a fantastic day, draw something for my art challenge, see you next week!