Work in progress: a Meutch flyer! Me and other folks will be tabling at sustainability-themed events this month.
Remote
Gobi wan Kenobi
@samfirke@a2mi.social
mastodon 4.7.3Building meutch.com, an open-source anti-capitalist social platform for lending items to friends and neighbors.
biking on my #CargoBike
fighting oppression & #ClimateChange
I contribute to #ApacheSuperset (like Tableau or PowerBI but open-source and better)
#KidneyDonor
Jew for a #FreePalestine 🇵🇸
blog: https://samfirke.com/
If you want to follow me, have a bio + some toots
286 Followers
369 Following
43 Posts
Joined August 17, 2018
I builded a compost bin out of an old playset
Now that I realize the astounding variety of battery powered tools (DeWalt, Ryobi, etc) I realize how good these would be to get listed on Meutch! I'm gonna put my new drill on there now, it slaps but I'm still only gonna use it 0.001% of the time.
I am finding that I would rather review five 200-line pull requests than the same code in a 1,000 liner.
Malicious bots had started using Meutch signups to send unwanted emails to targets. I implemented a bunch of defenses Fri/Sat and it seems to be blocking all of them currently. Boo to internet jerks making more work for me but at least for now I'm winning 😤
Web search continues to struggle against AI slop. The first hit here is blatant 2024-level slop, it veers from talking about zippers to substitutions for chili peppers in recipes.
I reported it as slop with @kagihq@mastodon.social, my previous reports have been marked inconclusive but here I've found the smoking gun (as AI would put it).
This stuff crowding out iFixit even on a paid search engine is a grim state of affairs. And newer slop is much less obvious than what I flagged here.
I spent 18 months building Meutch, a non-commercial community lending site and it's live! Come check it out: https://samfirke.com/2026/05/12/meet-meutch/
Think a better version of Buy Nothing groups on Facebook, or a decentralized peer-to-peer Library of Things.
To be useful you need people to share with near you. This is the tricky part of networked products. I'm focused on growing it in Ann Arbor, MI where I live - but if you have a group that already shares stuff, it would work for that anywhere! #mutualaid
I have 99% switched from #rstats to #pydata as my job changed from analysis to data engineering. But I I was just analyzing survey results and trying to weave the result into a programmatically generated PDF. It was a struggle to get beautiful output in Python, the formatting of charts and text was endlessly finicky. I switched to #Quarto and gosh it's so much better 🤩
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There are many valid reasons to be annoyed by AI or wish it didn't exist. It should be criticized and put to work for people instead of corporations.
But wishing it was not valuable for coding does not make it so. And that's an impractical posture from which to resist.
The Fedi is full of posts dunking on AI-generated coding like it was 2023. These are as out of touch with reality as the Gas Town people.
Starting from a premise of, these tools are useless, undermines the rest of the argument.
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This thread brought to you by seeing another post sneering at "agentic engineering" as different than vibe coding.
We are at the point now where I'm not going to read every line of an internal script that makes an API call and writes the result to the data warehouse or blob storage. If it's working, I'll skim it and move on and do something else good with the couple of hours I would have spent reading the API docs and composing the code from scratch.
I'm goated at this game
RNGdle 🎲 777673
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@csalzman@a2mi.social @Vaguery@a2mi.social @george@a2mi.social what if I need to play Red Alert on CD ROM
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@csalzman@a2mi.social I got a rarer number than you, skill issue u noob
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Anyone is welcome to use this web app at any point, it's live at https://meutch.com/ and I would love feedback from anyone. But as I think harder about getting an adequate initial network for this to get traction, I will need to focus on specific atomic networks of people who will share with each other in the same locale. The magic comes from having people to share with.
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@Anneheathen@glammr.us aw thanks! I too had originallymade a spreadsheet for a friend group to list the board games they had available to share 😁
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@csalzman@a2mi.social then I peeked at the leaderboard (https://www.rngdle.com/leaderboard click "All-Time") and you can see that the top users have rolls with unique 1-in-a-million badges:
- 0
- 8
- 666
- 911
Brilliant idea
I liked this reflection on the psychic effects of AI coding from @mitsuhiko@hachyderm.io who uses AI plenty but looks askance at Gas Town etc. https://lucumr.pocoo.org/2026/1/18/agent-psychosis/
@mitsuhiko interesting times. Thanks for linking to Thorsten's post, here it is for other folks: https://x.com/thorstenball/status/2022310010391302259 I enjoyed the twist to the story.
Giveaway feature is mostly done, enough that I merged to production. I put a few items there (starting with a pair of kids' snowshoes that we've never used). Feels good!
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@peterhoneyman someone recently submitted an A2FixIt request to the city of Ann Arbor to please unclog a storm drain - in the form of a poem ruminating on how the grate covers gradually accumulate debris, unnoticed. I thought the poem was quite good, also expect it was written by an LLM.
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@hagen@mastodon.social and re: the ladders and tools I have a platform for sharing those that is just ready for usage so might as well plug it here: https://meutch.com/
Not renting or anything, actually sharing. Feedback welcome.
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@sidereal @SoftwareTheron @scrivenerapp ooh this is great to know! It is the last piece of software keeping me on Windows
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@miclgael nice! Wild to see the kingpin break.
Looks like a chill spot, is that under a highway?
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@csalzman@a2mi.social I will make a blog post and toot it properly to our instance. Soon! I think a2mi is conveniently a good use case for a sharing circle
@mitsuhiko same! Though I would add "for programming" after "dived into AI" - I get little such joy from using it for anything else. But it's exhilarating to build software with it.
Also I appreciate seeing this content on the Fediverse.
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@beep@follow.ethanmarcotte.com oh neat to see you on here! "You deserve a tech union" was very good, I was surprised at how straightforward and readable it was 🙏 https://bookwyrm.social/user/samfirke/review/7446482/s/good-read-for-anyone-in-techit#anchor-7446482
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@yschaeff@fosstodon.org neat. I overestimated the effect of having the laser slightly unfocused. The cuts look good!
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@kagihq@mastodon.social I used it today to spot check internationalization language additions on an open source project where no reviewer spoke the new languages being added. Kagi Translate is a nice product!
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@Anaphory@wandering.shop American-centrism: I plan to fix eventually. Should be pretty doable, stuff like km instead of miles. Translations would be harder but also doable.
Note that you can already enter latitude and longitude coordinates instead of an address.
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@Anaphory@wandering.shop I want to learn from (and team up with?) other such projects. I found https://www.cupofsugar.cloud they previously had cupofsugar.org whose domain name I coveted and that's how I found them.
My best guess is that it's easier to code a platform like this than it is to establish the critical mass for initial adoption. And that that's where such projects falter.
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@Anaphory@wandering.shop thanks so much for sharing Inventaire and giving your thoughts!
Taxonomy of items: agreed I have a ways to go here. I think I will need to learn from how e-commerce sites make items filterable. I like their wikidata approach but for book data I don't think there's something analogous for *all* kinds of items.
I hope to add embeddings-based search which I have used at work with success. I.e if you search for "Allen wrench" it would return "hex wrench" because of semantic similarity.
https://www.npr.org/2026/05/06/nx-s1-5811930/gaza-recovering-bodies
A slice-of-life article about recovering skeletons from the rubble in Gaza.
"The scale of the need is so high. One functioning excavator is simply not enough," said Pat Griffiths, a Red Cross spokesman. He said a second digging machine was recently repaired and will be put to use in the coming weeks."
