Pluralistic: Six Years of Pluralistic (19 Feb 2026)

Blog posts, photos, and micro updates

A blog about many things, updated <s>weekly</s> whenever

In the controversy surrounding Cory Doctorow’s anniversary post, many people have engaged with the spirit of the thing, but I have yet to see any in-depth discussion of his choice to invoke the term purity culture. Purity culture is a term with very particular origins, and it’s not some general term for people being mean on the internet. It’s a term for a specific enculturation into a pattern of sexual abuse.

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Life is complicated. Regardless of what your beliefs or politics or ethics are, the way that we set up our society and economy will often force you to act against them: You might not want to fly somewhere but your employer will not accept another mode of transportation, you want to eat vegan but are […]

Large language models and their associated bots are bad for the indie web in at least three ways: 1) their logistical consequences are bad for bandwidth, 2) their social consequences are bad for guides, and 3) their citational consequences are bad for surfability.

Life is complicated. Regardless of what your beliefs or politics or ethics are, the way that we set up our society and economy will often force you to act against them: You might not want to fly somewhere but your employer will not accept another mode of transportation, you want to eat vegan but are […]

This morning (it is evening now in freezing Berlin) I wrote an article about a blog post Cory Doctorow had released the day before. In his post Cory made an argument about LLM usage that I criticized: I think his view on technology being neutral and it being possible to “liberate” any technology by making […]

Do we really want to throw out the useful machine-learning baby with the not-really-AI-but-hyped-as-such bathwater? Thoughts on purity culture as it relates to usage of ML, LLMs, ...

Ethics are difficult, and not using LLMs and objecting to their usage isn’t puritanism nor reducing ethics to a commercial choice.

This is a follow-up to last month's Histomat of F/OSS: We should reclaim LLMs, not reject them . Cory Doctorow celebrated the sixth anniversary of Pluralistic…

Of all the stupidest hills to die on …

Eight inches. In some contexts, eight inches can be enormous. Close your eyes and imagine it. Eight. Inches. Now imagine something completely different. You...

Kind of interesting critique of (part of) one of Cory Doctorow's posts as regards to LLM haters: Acting ethically in an imperfect…

A response to Cory Doctorow's defense of generative AI, examining the contradictions in supporting Ollama while championing open source principles, and an examination about what purity culture and hypocrisy really means.

I’m resigning from the discourse. Weekstarter is here with your usual and unusual updates, recommendations, and some notes about why “The street finds its own uses” should be our …