What is Hackers' Pub?

Hackers' Pub is a place for software engineers to share their knowledge and experience with each other. It's also an ActivityPub-enabled social network, so you can follow your favorite hackers in the fediverse and get their latest posts in your feed.

Electronic Frontier Foundation @eff@mastodon.social
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Shared by Em :official_verified:

When lawmakers and advocacy groups frame queer existence itself as a threat to young people, age-verification laws become ideological enforcement instead of regulatory policy. eff.org/deeplinks/2026/03/rep-

Rep. Finke Was Right: Age-Gating Isn’t About Kids, It’s About Control

What’s at stake is whether “protecting children” becomes a legal pretext for embedding government control over the internet to enforce specific moral and religious judgments—judgments that deny marginalized people access to speech, community, history, and truth—into law.

www.eff.org · Electronic Frontier Foundation

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Greg Egan @gregeganSF@mathstodon.xyz
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Shared by Em :official_verified:

“AI-powered writing tools are increasingly integrated into our e-mails and phones. Now a new study finds biased AI suggestions can sway users’ beliefs”

“We told people before, and after, to be careful, that the AI is going to be (or was) biased, and nothing helped,” Naaman said. “Their attitudes about the issues still shifted.”

scientificamerican.com/article

AI and writing conceptual illustration of an old pen nib against a blue binary code

AI autocomplete doesn’t just change how you write. It changes how you think

AI-powered writing tools are increasingly integrated into our e-mails and phones. Now a new study finds biased AI suggestions can sway users’ beliefs

www.scientificamerican.com · Scientific American

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Frank 🇨🇦⚜️ @frank@fraxoweb.social
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Shared by wakest ⁂

A few months ago, a Canadian judge got her , , , credit cards accounts, etc. closed.

She was doing her job investigating war crimes made in Afghanistan, including by the

That offended Americans. They decided to close all her accounts, which they have control over.

I'm expecting this behavior to become more and more common.

This is why should work on

irishtimes.com/world/us/2025/1

International Criminal Court judge Kimberly Prost has been added to the United States' sanctions list. Illustration: Paul Scott

‘It’s surreal’: US sanctions lock International Criminal Court judge out of daily life

Canadian judge Kimberly Prost is unable to use credit cards, transfer money or book everyday services in what she calls an attack on the independence of the judiciary

www.irishtimes.com · The Irish Times

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洪 民憙 (Hong Minhee) :nonbinary: @hongminhee@hollo.social
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Shared by Onestacked

I'm writing this in English.

Not because English is my first language—it isn't. I'm writing this in English because if I wrote it in Korean, the people I'm addressing would run it through an outdated translator, misread it, and respond to something I never said. The responsibility for that mistranslation would fall on me. It always does.

This is the thing Eugen Rochko's post misses, despite its good intentions.

@GargronEugen Rochko argues that LLMs are no substitute for human translators, and that people who think otherwise don't actually rely on translation. He's right about some of this. A machine-translated novel is not the same as one rendered by a skilled human translator. But the argument rests on a premise that only makes sense from a certain position: that translation is primarily about quality, about the aesthetic experience of reading literature in another language.

For many of us, translation is first about access.

The professional translation market doesn't scale to cover everything. It never has. What gets translated—and into which languages—follows the logic of cultural hegemony. Works from dominant Western languages flow outward, translated into everything. Works from East Asian languages trickle in, selectively, slowly, on someone else's schedule. The asymmetry isn't incidental; it's structural.

@GargronEugen Rochko notes, fairly, that machine translation existed decades before LLMs. But this is only half the story, and which half matters depends entirely on which languages you're talking about. European language pairs were reasonably serviceable with older tools. Korean–English, Japanese–English, Chinese–English? Genuinely usable translation for these pairs arrived with the LLM era. Treating “machine translation” as a monolithic technology with a uniform history erases the experience of everyone whose language sits far from the Indo-European center.

There's also something uncomfortable in the framing of the button-press thought experiment: “I would erase LLMs even if it took machine translation with it.” For someone whose language has always been peripheral, that button looks very different. It's not an abstract philosophical position; it's a statement about whose access to information is expendable.

I want to be clear: none of this is an argument that LLMs are good, or that the harms @GargronEugen Rochko describes aren't real. They are. But a critique of AI doesn't become more universal by ignoring whose languages have always been on the margins. If anything, a serious critique of AI's political economy should be more attentive to those asymmetries, not less.

The fact that I'm writing this in English, carefully, so it won't be misread—that's not incidental to my argument. That is my argument.

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NewtonTalk @newtontalk@bitbang.social
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Shared by wakest ⁂

Thirty years ago today, Apple announced the 130, the first device to offer a transflective LCD display with electroluminescent backlighting.


web.archive.org/web/1998120507

Apple Announces the MessagePad 130 With Backlit Screen

Apple Announces the MessagePad 130 With Backlit Screen

web.archive.org

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Khaled Zeyada 🇵🇸 from Rafah @khaled@mastodon.tn
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Shared by wakest ⁂

Hello 🌘
How are you today?

There has been a very impressive sandstorm in Khan Yunis today. The photos are beautiful, but everyone is scared to go out, or to breathe unhealthy air. This is very rare, it only happens once every few years. I hope it doesn’t last for long.

With the war in Iran, Israel closed the Rafah crossing again, which caused panic buying in Gaza. Now markets have empty stalls.

Please help us 🫂💔🌙⭐️
👉 gofund.me/e4c7d56a4

With all my love for you.

Khaled Zeyada, 21 years old, from Rafah, Gaza Strip, PalestineKhan Yunis covered in a sand stormKhan Yunis covered in a sand storm
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NewtonTalk @newtontalk@bitbang.social
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Thirty years ago today, Apple announced the 130, the first device to offer a transflective LCD display with electroluminescent backlighting.


web.archive.org/web/1998120507

Apple Announces the MessagePad 130 With Backlit Screen

Apple Announces the MessagePad 130 With Backlit Screen

web.archive.org

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AskPippa🇨🇦 @AskPippa@c.im
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If you are a US citizen and plan to vote, now is the time to get a passport. A copy of your US birth certificate is a good idea too. Or, you might not be able to register and .

apnews.com/article/save-act-do

Customers stand in line to get birth and death certificates at the Columbus Public Health Department in Columbus, Ohio, on Tuesday, March, 10, 2026. (AP Photo/Julie Carr Smyth)

The biggest change to voting in Republican election bill could become a burden for many US voters

Congressional Republicans are pushing voting legislation that's backed by President Donald Trump and would require voters to produce documentary proof of citizenship in order to register for federal elections.

apnews.com · AP News

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wakest ⁂ @liaizon@social.wake.st
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Shared by wakest ⁂

RE: autonomous.zone/@twilight/1162

Hey lovely fediverse friends, as many of you might know, I help run some fediverse instances and I am currently paying way way too much money out of my own pocket because mastodon and mastohost have an awful habit of caching way too much and not giving good user accessible tools to prune away unneeded cruft. I could really use some community help supporting the instances I am currently paying for. Already in the process of figuring out how to move to a new server this month...

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Yudderick & Co. @yudderick@toot.cat
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Shared by Cat 🐈🥗 (D.Burch) :paw:⁠:paw:

Petunia is my neediest cat. During the day she likes to sit off somewhere nearby and just cry over and over until she gets whatever inexpressible thing that she wants. Does she want to play? Does she want to be tucked in? Does she want to be cuddled? Is she just generally discontent?

Lately she's been spending the nights with me, and while it's sweet when she wants to cuddle, she frequently decides that she needs something. Instead of just sitting on my desk and crying at me, during the night she scratches the blankets and pillow around me, and sometimes just scratches at my face. Too bad she's too adorable to get mad at :blobcatcry:

A photo of a brown tabby cat on her side on a grey blanket, with a black ribbon snared in her claws and her mouth wide open as she prepares to bite it.A photo of a brown tabby cat on her side on a grey blanket with her mouth open and a black ribbon caught on her lower teeth as she stares into the camera.
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José A. Alonso @Jose_A_Alonso@mathstodon.xyz
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A formalization of abstract rewriting in Agda. ~ Sam Arkle, Andrew Polonsky. arxiv.org/abs/2603.10936v1

arXiv logo

A Formalization of Abstract Rewriting in Agda

We present a constructive formalization of Abstract Rewriting Systems (ARS) in the Agda proof assistant, focusing on standard results in term rewriting. We define a taxonomy of concepts related to termination and confluence and investigate the relationships between them and their classical counterparts. We identify, and eliminate where possible, the use of classical logic in the proofs of standard ARS results. Our analysis leads to refinements and mild generalizations of classical termination and confluence criteria. We investigate logical relationships between several notions of termination, arising from different formulations of the concept of a well-founded relation. We illustrate general applicability of our ARS development with an example formalization of the lambda calculus.

arxiv.org · arXiv.org

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