Old Fucking Punk @lwriemen@librem.one

Microsoft Azure's @medium page just published this guide on how to deploy Mastodon on Azure.

https://medium.com/microsoftazure/simple-mastodon-node-deployment-on-azure-f79f40114d74

Now the fellow who wrote this doesn't directly work for Microsoft.

But clearly, Microsoft wants to use Mastodon to sell Azure. Otherwise they wouldn't publish this article on their official Azure Medium page.

I've been predicting this for months.

In fact, Microsoft has been telegraphing more and more involvement with the Fediverse.

See also: @dotnet

@fediversenews

Quite a few people with whom I communicate frequently are folks I wouldn't recognise if I saw them in public, and I wouldn't have the foggiest of where they live. In many cases, I don't even know their gender. And it doesn't matter. We can still exchange ideas and respect one another as humans. So cool. Love the Fediverse.

This outrageous threat against librarians is just the latest evidence that the extremist right is on the attack everywhere we look.

https://www.bridgemi.com/michigan-government/michigan-prosecutor-mulls-charging-lapeer-library-over-lgbtq-book

The rational, tolerant center and left are mired on the defense -- and often, in this era of Republican-rigged elections and packed courts, losing.

But Big Journalism continues with business as usual, normalizing the extremists and refusing to take a stand to protect basic rights, and democracy. It's disheartening.

Cory @doctorow's incendiary piece today on the Silicon Valley Bro Bank Bailout will make you want to pick up a pitchfork: https://pluralistic.net/2023/03/15/mon-dieu-les-guillotines/

But don't just be angry. Get active. Help people vote, and have their votes counted, from your neighborhood on up.

It's time to demand #DigitalRightsForLibraries—sign the pledge, join the online rally by posting or changing your profile pic, and share why the #InternetArchive is important to you.

Take action and spread the word at http://BattleForLibraries.com

BREAKING: 🐦InternetArchive supporters are planning a digital rally 3/20 in support of the digital rights of libraries at https://www.battleforlibraries.com/

That's when a judge will hear oral arguments in big publishers' suit to end the ability of libraries to own+preserve digital books.

The problem is not that "AI" will replace coders.

The problem is that leadership *thinks* that "AI" can replace coders.

A “courtesy” request to not publicize a hearing is a gag order by another name. Lawyers won’t risk upsetting the judge deciding their case. We’re glad to see today's hearing getting plenty publicity despite the judge’s unconstitutional efforts. https://apnews.com/article/abortion-pill-mifepristone-transparency-fda-roe-wade-48c389dd3c892aa9bbc553e0b3de5360

What's the main difference (apart from scale) between the Saudi "gifts" to Brazil's Bolsonaro and the regime's "investments" in Trump family?

Bolsonaro's successor is going to investigate the corruption.

https://www.reuters.com/world/americas/bolsonaro-denies-illegal-acts-bringing-saudi-jewels-brazil-report-2023-03-04/

Docker Inc would like to thank the open source community for making registry successful.

As a token of appreciation open source organizations are invited to subscribe to the paid version in the next month, or their data will be deleted.

Welp here we fuckin go. GPT-4 is launched.

Back in the run-up to this release, four whole days ago, a bunch of people were talking over on the birdsite about their reactions to the pronouncements of those who'd gotten beta access, and MSFT's own discussions of what they believed it was going to be like.

Everybody in the gpt-4 trend was talking about how much faster it's reported to be, how many more things it can supposedly be applied to, all while blithely glossing over the fact that MSFT itself said that it is *Still Very Often Wrong* (https://www.rockingrobots.com/gpt-4-to-be-released-this-week/).

And that? That is the problem with our technoculture, in a nutshell.

And today, as seen in the image below, we have have these just… incredible scenes, live from OpenAI's GPT-4, where, when Chris Nicholson asked GPT-4 to give him a syllabus and mnemonics for learning Spanish pronunciation, not only did GPT-4 *Get Most Of The Pronunciations Wrong*, but— and I genuinely do not know which of these is worse— *the New York Times Reprinted The Exchange Without Calling This Out*.

I just… Holy shit y'all.

And then add to ALL of that the fact that MSFT just laid off their entire "Ethical A.I." team, in favour of their increasing the workload and making increasingly nebulous the remit of their "Office of Responsible A.I." And they did this right before this the GPT-4 release announcement went wide, specifically citing the pace of development as the reason they were laying their ethicists off (https://gizmodo.com/microsoft-ai-ethical-ai-bing-chatgpt-layoffs-1850223358).

Let me say that again:

Microsoft is laying off their whole "ethical A.I." team specifically BECAUSE they are increasing the range of integrations of their "A.I." tool throughout their *Widely-Used-By-The-U.S.-Government* product ecosystem.

…Which tells me they woefully misunderstand both "Ethics" and "A.I."

I mean this is damn near beyond parody at this point. If I were going to craft a list of shit to absolutely NOT DO in a time like this, it would look pretty much exactly like what OpenAI and MSFT are doing, right now.

Things are about to get real bad, real fast, and you can feel free to quote me on that.

Examples of these
thought-terminating cliches include the 'nothing to hide, nothing to fear' flex by which people avoid thinking about the growing surveillance nightmare, and 'the climate has always changed' as a way to avoid thinking about anthropogenic climate change.

Protect developer freedom. Abolish software patents. Learn why software patents are unjust by checking out the new design of our #endsoftwarepatents initiative. https://u.fsf.org/3f-

Another reason to hate #Microsoft. I took data from a colleague’s #Powerpoint slide to put into a #LaTeX document. When I processed my file I kept getting errors and I couldn’t see anything with #Emacs that was wrong with the file. It turns out that the original file contained a #zero-width #Unicode character which I couldn’t see! The solution was to us od -c | less to spot anything untoward in my #TeX source #TextFile.