The Programmer's Fulcrum: 15 November, 2025
Here we feature the latest Symfony Station Communiqué and Battalion "Destroying Autocracy" Post along with their featured articles.
Symfony Station Communiqué - Stardate: ✦ 14 November 2025 ✦
Get the latest from the Symfony Universe and PHP development communities.
Featured Item
Anil Dash writes:
Even though AI has been the most-talked-about topic in tech for a few years now, we're in an unusual situation where the most common opinion about AI within the tech industry is barely ever mentioned.
Most people who actually have technical roles within the tech industry, like engineers, product managers, and others who actually make the technologies we all use, are fluent in the latest technologies like LLMs. They aren't the big, loud billionaires that usually get treated as the spokespeople for all of tech.
And what they all share is an extraordinary degree of consistency in their feelings about AI, which can be pretty succinctly summed up:
Technologies like LLMs have utility, but the absurd way they've been over-hyped, the fact they're being forced on everyone, and the insistence on ignoring the many valid critiques about them make it very difficult to focus on legitimate uses where they might add value.
Yep.
Destroying Autocracy – November 13, 2025
Welcome to this week's "Destroying Autocracy". It’s your source for curated news affecting democracy in the cyber arena with a focus on protecting it.
Featured Item
Wrekage/Salvage writes:
Once you’ve seized the tools of political life to build communal power, it’s hard to forget what a hammer feels like in your hand.
Bonfire Networks is a tiny software org that has spent the past couple of years building a framework for communities on the open social web. At the end of last week, they released Bonfire Social, a microblogging app.
Like Mastodon, Bonfire Social runs on ActivityPub, but it takes differently opinionated approach to sociability.
(It has) features I (and many others) have been advocating for in Fediverse software for years, often while people explained at length that such things simply could not be implemented.
Most exhilarating to me, though, is that they aren’t just building another microblogging app. They’re making a toolkit for internet community software that is healthy and good and designed around real human needs from the start.
As they put it in their crowdfunding campaign, they’re making building blocks for communities on the open social web.
Total awesomeness that needs to blow up. We will cover (and support) Bonfire extensively on The Programmer's Fulcrum.
