At the Bottom of the Box was Hope

Stories and Conversations

[elismor]

I thought about just tagging this 'nuff said, but it's not.

I want to say something to all of the women under 50 on this site. Ready? You do not have to be over 50 to start taking up space.

Can I make that blink? Is that a thing Tumblr can do? Because, seriously. The sooner you believe you are allowed to take up space, the better life will be.

[workingclasshistory]

On this day, 14 June 2017, a fire began in the Grenfell Tower block of flats in West London, which killed 72 people and destroyed 151 homes. The fire began due to an electrical fault in a freezer, but it then spread rapidly. The main reason for the fast spread of the fire was the fact that flammable cladding was installed all around the building during its refurbishment by Rydon Construction at the behest of the Conservative local council in 2016. Zinc, more fire-resistant cladding was originally proposed for the work, but instead, flammable aluminium cladding was used because it was £300,000 cheaper. For years, Grenfell’s residents, who were working-class social housing tenants, and mostly people of colour, had complained about inadequate fire safety measures in the building. Rather than blame the landlord, developers or the Conservative government responsible for fire regulations, right-wing media like the Daily Mail began a campaign attempting to demonise residents of the building, and firefighters, for the deaths. Conservative MP Jacob Rees-Mogg even blamed those killed for their own deaths, claiming that they lacked “common sense”. However, a government-commissioned inquiry later determined that the flammable cladding was the primary reason for the high death toll, and that residents had followed the advice of emergency services. After the fire, survivors of the disaster, as well as other local residents and supporters, began a campaign demanding justice for those killed, and working to ensure no such fire happens again in the UK. More information, sources and map: https://stories.workingclasshistory.com/article/14644/grenfell-tower-fire

[akaratna]

Help Palestinian refugees with a Click

Please help deliver support to Palestinian families; all you have to do is to click once a day for free, every day!

[sunshineface]

Wind Farm 12”x12” acrylic on canvas

[pirateprincessjess]

Google Chrome has been installing an AI model on users devices without their consent.

[onlytiktoks]

[nazmy01]

In every child's eyes lies a story waiting for someone to write its happy ending. Your donation today is not just money; it's a child's laughter, renewed hope, and a brighter future. Join us in wiping away their tears and drawing genuine smiles on their innocent faces. Your giving makes all the difference in their lives! (Short and direct format suitable for websites

🙏🙏😭 ✅️Vetted by @gazavetters, my number verified on the list is ( #380 )✅️💔

[nazmy03]

@nhlbruins-blog @bganglongway-blog @httpsifisomthembu @grave-dad @https-seishu @utane-uta-town @https-seishu @hitrecordjoe @hazystars @commander--salamander @catchymemes @vtopica @brbaltering @kibumkim @gdbot @hrvycreative @museeeuuuum @mangomogoi @mashthenews @many-alive-children @bakedhumor @bakeitinacake @vagoonabeach @virovac @vdubjd-68 @bjko30456

[nazmy27988]

This initiative is not simply a request for financial support; it's an invitation to join me in building the future and making a difference. To achieve this goal, I need your sincere support and encouragement. Your contribution—no matter how small it may seem to you—is the fuel that will propel me and shorten my path to success...

Every amount brings me one more step closer to the finish line...

Sharing this message with your family and friends may lead you to someone who will be the reason for its success. ..

https://www.gofundme.com/f/support-nazmy-fight-for-safety-and-health?utm_campaign=man_sharesheet_dash&utm_medium=customer&utm_source=copy_link&attribution_id=sl%3A6305ebc3-66b3-4068-bda2-43af8be87d57

Thank you for believing in my abilities, investing in my future, and for being an integral part of my upcoming success story. With deepest gratitude, [Nazmi

[siraj0]

Today I would like to share some news that brought me a small moment of joy.

The link to my campaign has been updated in the documentation file to number 219, thanks to my dear sister @fifthnormani 🩵 and close friend who reached out to @el-shab-Hussein and helped complete the update. I feel deeply grateful to her and to everyone who continues to stand by me and support this journey.

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/u/0/d/1yYkNp5U3ANwILl2MknJi9G7ArY4uVTEEQ1CVfzR8Ioo/htmlview

Despite this good news, the war in Gaza is still ongoing. We are still living under constant shelling, losing loved ones, while life becomes increasingly difficult due to the rising prices of essential goods.

Thank you to everyone who supported my campaign, shared it, or prayed for me. Your support gives me hope and reminds me that we are not alone in this hardship. We still need you to stand with us and share our story.

From the heart, thank you all. ❤️

[akaratna]

Siraj's campaign link: https://chuffed.org/project/121006-save-sirajs-family-from-the-threat-of-the-gaza-genocide-war

Vetting Link: Vetted Gaza Evacuation Fundraiser List #219

[90-ghost]

Life outside seems easier than the 'prison life' we endure in Gaza. I try to imagine other places where life is difficult, but I realize that even the harshest environments are open; at least there is a way out. Gaza is a closed prison. A rocket could kill you at any moment, food and water are rationed, and the heaviest burden is being besieged by memories, destruction, and graves. It is a constant cycle of physical and psychological torment.

Prices in Gaza have started to rise unusually, and goods have almost disappeared from the markets. Types of vegetables are scarce and expensive, and meats have vanished from the markets too. I mean, what's happening is the beginning of a new famine; food is expensive and scarce in the markets!

Every help is appreciated guys you can DONATE HERE

Go to paypal.me/bushrabo and type in the amount. Since it’s PayPal, it's easy and secure. Don’t have a PayPal account? No worries.

[90-ghost]

Today is A NEW MONTH WE NEED YOUR HELP & SUPPORT ❤️

[90-ghost]

Days are so fast we’re already 11 of June!

[beardedmrbean]

Scientists invented a fake disease. AI told people it was real: Nature.com

I'm a bit frightened for the time when someone less ethical than the person that did this decides to repeat the experiment but leave out the part where they come in later and announce that it was fake and people wind up diagnosed with the fake condition and all kinds of wacky hi jinks ensues.

[liberalsarecool]

The bubble is nigh.

[feluka]

When Amal surprised me by telling me she named her newborn after me, I felt like part of my heart had gone to Gaza and remained there ever since.

This part of my heart is now breaking. Amal, who's been on a poor diet because she can't afford better food, is unable to breastfeed baby Mina any longer, and is unable to afford enough formula to compensate, and now both mother and baby are weak and malnourished.

Amal is suffocating from the stress of having to provide for her daughters. Her husband Motasem is doing everything he can (recently, he was almost caught in a bombing while trying to get food) but they're both overwhelmed. I wish there was anything I can do for them.

I'm begging you to donate if you can and share if you can't. I want, more than anything in this world, for these kids to grow up healthy and for their parents to be able to rest.

Fundraiser Vetting info

[el-shab-hussein]

Amal Ashour's family is #175 on our list!

Help Amal's Family and the Shehab Family Leave Gaza To Safety

Hello friends, I'm Sahar! Lia & I are friends of the Ashours & Shehabs, and we'll be helping them run this campaign. Both families have had

[danashehab]

✅ Vetted ✅

Vetted! #175 on the verified fundraiser list vetted by el-shab-hussein and nabulsi

vetted by @bilal-sala7 line #46

[raygun631]

[darrelodin]

So this morning I found out that the RPG Maker forums will be shutting down this year, and it’s really just another depressing thing to see.

If you read the link the company does of course say they’re replacing the existing forums with new ones, and I’m sure no one would say the old ones didn’t perhaps need a lil bit of a glow up, some tech debt fixing… but there’s a few key notes in there:

They are NOT carrying over any history, data messages etc. from the old forums

They are NOT archiving, retaining or in any way saving the existing forums in any way

They have NOT provided any reasoning past ‘as part of continued efforts to support developers’

As an offhand, moderate read, this sounds to me like a desire for some change in the forums but deciding nuking everything is less expensive than rebuilding and carrying over info.

If I’m cynical, and likely realistic? Probably to increase sales of their latest GameMaker software by making it inherently more difficult for someone getting the older software for cheap pushing it to its limits. The amount of institutional knowledge on those forums is absurd.

And even if it is a benign reason, it’s still terrible because what do you mean you’re doing this with no recourse or potential for change? You sell software that runs on community goodwill? In an era where people are pulling away to open source software?? Crazy.

There are yeeeaaars of answers, plugins, suggestion, community built up on those forums - I’ve used the em to learn and grow my own skillet!!! And soon it won’t exist.

At the very least, they gave a ‘heads up’ - the deletion occurs mid December, so archiving by the community is possible from now. It’s just absurd that it needs to happen in the first place.

It’s just reflective of how the industry is right now - and why it’s so important for communities to grow and build up knowledge together, knowledge that is NOT reliant on a company that can pull the plug at any time in the very name of the very customers, users and supporters they are screwing over.

[eigwayne]

The good news is that other people are already starting external archival. Here's a couple posted on the r/RPGMaker subreddit:

https://web.archive.org/web/20260000000000*/https://forums.rpgmakerweb.com/

https://rpgmakerchat.com/

https://github.com/imraf/rpgmakerweb-archive/

https://wiki.archiveteam.org/

[max-out-of-ten]

Bless the archivists of our time

[bilal-sala7]

My brothers lost years of education because of the war in Gaza.

Now they finally have a chance to continue.

If you can’t donate, don’t worry.

Just reblog it.

It costs nothing, but it might reach someone who can actually change everything.

Donation link if anyone’s able to support

[sameergaza]

Hello, I hope everyone is well .

I'm here after a long break, due to many circumstances, it's been a very difficult period, guys.

I hope everyone is well and safe, I miss you, I am here now because I need you at this time, as you know, my family and I live in a house we have rented and at the beginning of every new month I collect the costs here with your help, so that I can pay the rent and maintain the shelter that shelters us all.

I've done it many times, and you guys haven't let me down, but honestly I don't get much attention lately, and that's why I'm not always active here, but I love you from the bottom of my heart. My family has always been fine thanks to you, please guys, we need you so much now.

I only need $700 so I can pay the rent and keep my family safe.

Any delay from the payment date will be kicked out on the street homeless, life is very, very difficult, I use you guys.

Payment date will be on 10/06/2026

Donate to Help Samir Survive A Genocide, organized by Adam M

Hello guys, this fundraiser was created with the help of my friend Adam. Our goal is to help … Adam M needs your support for Help Samir

I will not prolong much, this is the purpose of the publication, as for the circumstances I went through, I will not bother anyone here, whoever wanted that, I can write to him privately and reveal all the details, I was injured two days ago, and I hope to be fine in the coming days.

You can check us from here.

[mostlysignssomeportents]

AI and amateurism

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2026/06/15/vernacular/#hypercardian

Over the weekend, I did an interview about my forthcoming book The Reverse Centaur's Guide to Life After AI (a book about being a better AI critic), and the interviewer said she was surprised that I wasn't an AI booster, based on my demographics and work history:

https://us.macmillan.com/books/9780374621568/thereversecentaursguidetolifeafterai/

I could see where she was coming from. I encountered computers in the mid-seventies, as a small child. My first computer was a CARDIAC, a working, Turing-complete, mechanical computer made entirely of cardboard, that I spent endless hours with:

https://www.instructables.com/CARDIAC-CARDboard-Illustrative-Aid-to-Computation-/

Then I graduated to a teletype terminal and acoustic coupler connected to a minicomputer at the University of Toronto. My mom, a kindergarten teacher, used to smuggle home 1,000' rolls of paper towel from the kids' bathroom. I'd get 1,000' feet of computing up one side, then another 1,000' down the other side, then I'd carefully re-roll the paper towel so she could put it back in the bathroom for the kids to dry their hands on.

After that, I got an Apple ][+ in 1979, and shortly thereafter acquired a modem, and that was it: I was hooked for life. I became an amateur programmer, then a professional programmer. I hosted forums on dial-up BBSes where I distributed software and offered support to strangers who wanted to connect their computers to the internet. I got a job as a gopher developer, then a web developer, then a CIO-for-hire, helping wire up small businesses and connect them to the net. Eventually, I co-founded a free/open source software startup, before transitioning to 25 years as a digital rights activist with the Electronic Frontier Foundation. And for most of that time, I was energetically writing science fiction, eventually becoming associated with a school sometimes called "post-cyberpunk":

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rewired:_The_Post-Cyberpunk_Anthology

The force that energized all this work was a dialectical one, the contradiction that powered cyberpunk literature itself. For all that cyberpunk was undeniably enamored with the coolness and combustibility of new technology, it was also terrified of how technology could be a force for oppression, surveillance and control. As William Gibson says, "cyberpunk was a warning, not a suggestion."

Gibson's more famous quote, of course, is "the street finds its own use for things." In Gibson's novels (and in my own life in technology) all the most interesting things happen when users of technology (often without formal training or credentials) find ways to adapt the technology they use to suit their needs:

https://pluralistic.net/2026/03/17/technopolitics/#original-sin

This is why I remain an ardent fan of Hypercard, Scratch and other meta-tools that are designed to allow non-programmers to write software that exactly conforms to their desires. Whatever the apps produced by these tools lack in sophistication and efficiency is more than offset by the fact that they give everyday people the power to directly control the tools they rely upon.

If "epistemic humility" means anything, it means acknowledging that no amount of "requirements gathering" can capture the needs of people totally unlike yourself as faithfully as those users can capture their own needs. Giving people the tools to produce their own software is always going to make tools – vernacular, idiosyncratic, homespun – that are more suited to their own hands and minds than anything a technologist working on their behalf could make.

The ancient dictum of "nothing about us without us" – born in 16th century Poland and taken up by the modern disability rights movement – asserts the right of people to control their own living conditions, and also the unique capacity of people to understand their own needs. You know what's even better than being consulted on the design of the technology you use? Having direct control over that technology!

This is why I was so suspicious of the iPad. The iPad's much-lauded "ease of use" was entirely about how easy it was to use an iPad to consume technology. But the iPad remains the single most user-innovation-hostile technology in modern history, a device designed to make it impossible to produce technology without permission from a remorseless multinational corporation. This is cyberpunk as a demand, not a warning:

https://memex.craphound.com/2010/04/01/why-i-wont-buy-an-ipad-and-think-you-shouldnt-either/

The technology I've championed all my life is technology that gives more control to its users. One of my immutable precepts is that people who are different from me know things I can't know, and the only way I can get the benefit of their unique knowledge and perspective is if they are free to make and share things that matter to them. As Dan Gillmor said, back when he was inventing the study of citizen journalism, "My readers know more than I do":

https://www.oreilly.com/openbook/wemedia/book/ch00.pdf

And while I am broadly very skeptical of AI, and deeply alarmed by the proliferation of "vibe coded" software in production environments, vibe coding for personal projects is a useful and exciting addition to the lineage of tools that let computer users decide how their computers will work. For people making personal projects, vibe coding extends the power of shell scripting, cron jobs, Applescript, and other desktop automation tools to a wider audience.

One of the journalists I spoke to last week about my book described how he had vibe coded an app that showed him an alert every time a plane flew over his house, giving the tail number and other details of the flight. This is information that I have no need for, no interest in, and that I'm therefore excited to learn about, because its very existence affirms that the world is full of people who are delightfully, irreducibly, amazingly different from me, and moreover, that their unique needs can be directly met using their imaginations and their personal computers.

I recently sat down with my colleague Naomi Novik, a brilliant author who also co-founded Archive of Our Own. Naomi demoed her followup to AO3 for me: Wreccer, a system to help you find small groups of people with taste similar to your own, in order to facilitate media recommendations within that group – a kind of personal, relationship-driven alternative to massive, centralized, monolithic algorithmic recommendation systems:

https://github.com/wreccer

Naomi told me that Wreccer was being built using the same design ethos that the original Twitter embraced. When Twitter launched, it was an API first, and the official Twitter front end was built on that API – but anyone could build their own front end for Twitter that worked in the way they wanted it to. Now, the word "anyone" is doing a lot of work in that sentence, because most people don't even know what an API is, and of the people who do, most of them were not capable of writing their own software front end for Twitter.

But Wreccer is being designed for the age of vibe coding, and the API will really allow anyone who uses the service to design their own interface to the system, one that elevates and centers the features they find useful and tucks away the ones they're not interested in. Your personal, custom front end could also bring in other data-sources – pulling in your Mastodon messages, for example, or even showing you an alert with the tail-number of any plane flying over your home.

This is the part of vibe coding that I'm quite excited about, but it's not the part the industry focuses on. Instead of hearing about how personal, homemade software utilities can be an end unto themselves, we hear about vibe coded projects as prototypes for commercial production code. We hear about clueless bosses vibe coding software products and services that run fine for one user on a siloed desktop computer, and then demanding to know why it takes 50 engineers a year to make the same thing work for millions of users on the public internet. We hear about people who vibe code and submit patches to free/open-source software projects with millions of users, overwhelming project maintainers with slop code that is riddled with security vulnerabilities.

Of course, there's an obvious reason why the industry wants to focus on the potential for vibe coded software to replace production code. The AI bubble has burned up $1.4t to date, while bringing in mere tens of billions of dollars per year, even as its unit economics grow steadily worse:

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2026/06/04/ai-is-the-greatest-money-wasting-scheme-humanity-has-ever-i/

To keep the bubble inflated, AI hucksters must promise massive economic returns to the technology. They want investors to believe that vibe code is about to replace working programmers, who are skilled, high-waged, high-demand workers. Their pitch is that for every million dollars' worth of programmers that an AI salesman and a boss conspire to fire, half a million dollars will go to the AI company whose bots shit out that vibe code.

That's par for the course with the AI bubble, whose focus is entirely on how AI can centralize, control and homogenize our lives. Whereas early desktop publishing, web publishing and social media gave us a glorious higgledy-piggledy of chaotic, weird and transgressive hobbyist media and retina-searing designs, AI art and design are instantly recognizable at a thousand yards, and it all looks the same, boring, and washed:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/07/20/ransom-note-force-field/#antilibraries

AI companies have released open weight/open source models that can run on your own computer, but these are treated as side-shows and toys and demos. The real action, we're told, is in "frontier models," which is industry-speak for "a piece of software whose running costs exceed the GDP of most countries":

https://pluralistic.net/2026/02/19/now-we-are-six/#stock-buyback

Perhaps this is why the dynamics of AI are so different from the early dynamics of the web. Early web users were workers, who demanded that their bosses allow them to use the web and so devolve more power to people doing their jobs. By contrast, today's most ardent AI boosters are bosses, who threaten workers who don't use AI enough in the course of their duties:

https://pluralistic.net/2026/05/26/the-ai-will-continue/#until-morale-improves

Where we do see idiosyncrasy emerging from AI usage, it's often terrible. AI can help you create a folie-a-un in which you and a chatbot team up to reinforce your delusions and drive you deeper into a world of dangerous mirage:

https://pluralistic.net/2026/06/03/mission-space/#gsd

There's a (false) story that's told about people who championed the early internet: that we were blithely certain that technology could only be a force for good, and negligently disinterested in the possibility that technology could control, extract and harm. That's demonstrably untrue: recall cyberpunk's dualism of "the street finds its own use for things" and "cyberpunk is a warning, not a suggestion."

More true is to say that early internet champions were alive to the importance of the internet, and therefore both excited about the possibilities of the internet to deliver a world of connection, idiosyncrasy, love and solidarity; and about the danger of the internet as a dystopian system of surveillance and manipulation:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/02/13/digital-rights/#are-human-rights

History isn't finished. Long after the AI bubble pops, there will be local models and people vibe coding homemade software that respond directly to their needs. The stuff we make on our own computers, for ourselves, is deplatformed from its inception. It's part of the life we can build in technology's "shadowy corners" that we used to just call "technology." The fact that this stuff is utterly unsuited to be production code makes it inherently unmonetizable. It's how the street finds its own use for things:

https://pluralistic.net/2026/02/23/goodharts-lawbreaker/#no-metrics-no-targets

[dirtyriver]

For all that cyberpunk was undeniably enamored with the coolness and combustibility of new technology, it was also terrified of how technology could be a force for oppression, surveillance and control. As William Gibson says, "cyberpunk was a warning, not a suggestion."