Old Fucking Punk @lwriemen@librem.one

The publisher that I was on the verge of signing with told me that they have an immovable policy of "no swearing". Why would I work around arbitrary constraints?

They think I've just declined.

What they have actually done is begin an arc that begins with self-publishing and ends with me creating a publishing house that runs them out of business, just because I can sense the weakness in their organization.

🧛‍♂️

Watching the Olympics through binoculars while sitting on my couch and eating snacks. "These young athletes are too SINEWEY. Why don't they look like me? Must be some kind of conspiracy."

Codeberg is now upgraded to Forgejo v8, enjoy!

Read the #Forgejo blog post about the release: https://forgejo.org/2024-07-release-v8-0/

We are currently fixing an issue where the API version is not properly announced (human oversight during the deployment) which might cause issues with third-party clients. It will be fixed every moment.

We finally have the transcript of our chat with the editors of the Three Way Fight book, out from @kersplebedeb & @pmpress. Check it out alongside many more zines for download, printing & translating at https://tfsr.wtf/zines/#June2024

If Codeberg is trying to "compete" against GitHub and GitLab, why does it refuse to take a look at AI assistants? Apart from infringing on authors' rights and questionable output quality, we think that the current hype wave led by major companies will leave a climate disaster in its wake: https://disconnect.blog/generative-ai-is-a-climate-disaster/

Other _sustainable_ (and cheaper!) ways for increasing efficiency in software development exist: In-project communication, powerful automation pipelines and reducing boilerplate.

I think it's fair to say that much of the media coverage and public discourse surrounding Project 2025 has (rightfully) focused on the fact that it represents a blueprint for transforming America into an overtly (as opposed to covertly) fascist nation where virtually every aspect of political, social, and personal live is governed according to white supremacist, theocratic, Christian Nationalist principles. Given the broad coalition of billionaires and corporate actors working to make Project 2025 a reality however, would it really surprise you to learn that this same blueprint represents a massive financial gift to the rich at the expense of labor class Americans? According to a recent study conducted by Democrats on the Joint Economic Committee, that's precisely what Project 2025 will do:

https://www.commondreams.org/news/project-2025-taxes

Trump-Aligned Project 2025 Would Mean Higher Taxes for Workers, 'Corporate Welfare' for the Rich

"An economic analysis of the far-right Project 2025 agenda crafted by at least 140 former Trump administration officials shows that the plan would result in higher taxes on working-class Americans and "corporate welfare" for the rich and large businesses."

Like most right wing proposals that actively harm the labor class, the sausage is made by combining multiple regressive taxation policy decisions that ultimately rob American workers and their families of their hard-earned income:

"Together, these changes to tax rates would mean that a family of four earning $90,000 per year would have paid roughly $2,300 more in taxes last year," the JEC found. "If the Child Tax Credit was also eliminated, this family would have paid roughly $6,300 more. Meanwhile, millionaires would pay a lower top tax rate."

The analysis also points to Project 2025's push for a "national sales tax," a highly regressive proposal endorsed by dozens of Republican lawmakers in the House of Representatives.

A national sales tax would "force working families to pay more at the grocery store, gas pump, and any other place they buy goods or services," JEC said Thursday, noting that past GOP proposals "would have hiked the cost of essentials like groceries and housing—usually exempt from state and local sales taxes—by 30%."

This would then in turn be combined with significant tax cuts for American corporations, with more goodies for the rich likely on the way during a potential second Trump presidency:

"Meanwhile, Project 2025 calls for reducing the U.S. corporate tax rate from 21% to 18%. According to The Washington Post, GOP presidential nominee Donald Trump's advisers have discussed slashing the tax rate to as low as 15%, and the president himself has told leading executives and his wealthy campaign donors that he intends to push for additional tax cuts if he wins another four years in the White House."

Look folks, I don't think you need me to tell you that so-called "trickle down economics" has been demonstrably proven to be failed policy, and an utter disaster for Americans who don't happen to be billionaires and/or corporate CEOs. But the taxation changes being discussed here aren't even "trickle down" initiatives so much as directly robbing labor class families to fill corporate coffers. No reasonable person should need any more reasons to think Project 2025 is a nightmare that cannot be allowed to become reality, but even broke cracker fascists who think they'll somehow benefit from the installation of a permanent white supremacist, Christian Nationalist regime should realize that paying thousands of dollars more per year in various taxes to help corporate CEO's buy yet another yacht is a terrible deal for everyone but rich people who are already living high on the hog.

#USPol #Project2025 #ClassWar #CorporateWelfare

So far in 2024, journalists in the U.S. have faced numerous violations, including:

Assault: 55
Arrest/criminal charge: 39
Equipment damage: 18
Subpoena/legal order: 7
Other incident: 7
Chilling statement: 6
Prior restraint: 6
Denial of access: 5

https://pressfreedomtracker.us

Blocking everyone who posts AI art, starting now. I can't take it any more. I understand that I'm part of a species, a good portion of whom would gladly see their ecosystem burn to ash so long as they get to play with the new toy - and another which thinks they are great intellects for defending said stupidity - but I'm sick of having it shoved in my face all day.

I’ve been a weirdo all my life, and I really enjoy the fact that it makes me different, and I really hate the fact that they’re trying to make the term Weirdo into a bad thing.

I think instead of saying "voting for the President," we should say, "voting for who gets to take the bribes." You know, just for the sake of clarity.

A project of @freedomofpress, the Tracker has documented nearly 2,000 incidents across nearly a dozen categories, affecting more than 1,300 journalists and news organizations across the U.S.

We’ve also published more than 150 in-depth analyses.

https://pressfreedomtracker.us/blog/

Nick Estes, et al.: “All land is Native, and all settler towns and cities are bordertowns. There is no ‘rural’ or ‘urban’, no ‘Rez’ or ‘city’; there is only the bordertown. The border exists everywhere settler order confronts Native order. Everything in a settler world is a border.

Our persistent survival is the primary contradiction and the unresolvable crisis of settler colonialism. Settlers enforce the logic of border towns to overcome this contradiction. This is their primary job and the essence of their existence as settlers. They are born vigilantes in the making, taught to fear Native people and to see Native society as a threat. These are the conditions that give life to the violence of settler society.

The Indian must be eliminated for no other reason than that we represent an alternative political order, one that precedes settler society and that holds within it the destruction of settler reality.”

Read more in Red Nation Rising: From Bordertown Violence to Native Liberation, which Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz (author of An Indigenous Peoples' History of the United States) said "may be the most important organizing manual ever produced by a social movement in the United States." https://pmpress.org/index.php?l=product_detail&p=1143

#books #bookstodon #native #indigenous #liberation

LB (which y'all may or may not be able to see) is an important thread by the admin of Ursal.Zone explaining how that instance got onto a bunch of blocklists basically over a personal misunderstanding between her and the admin of another instance that could have been talked out and resolved. People are talking a lot about blocklists lately, and most of the instances on them probably deserve to be there, but there has to be some mechanism for instances to get off blocklists as well!

@petersuber @ronent @brembs
In defense of economists, the vast majority of us actually agree that a more socialized, cooperative society would be far better, not only for the average person's wellbeing, but in terms of overall productivity and progress. Pure market capitalism has a bunch of problems that are well understood, and talked about in textbooks and papers with zero hesitation, and yes, regulations and restructuring would definitely lead to better results. These are scientific facts that the majority of us agree on.

It is the same issue as with global warming: the majority of researchers, the real scientists making objective and reasonable conclusions, are all in agreement. It's a small minority with a politically convenient message, driven by ideology and not data, that is getting pushed to the forefront billionaires and politicians, to try and give their policies credibility.

I was wondering if I could auto translate my German Radio Irrtum! radio show manuscripts into English (not that I couldn't do this by myself – it just takes up far too much time).

But not by uploading these manuscripts to Google Translate, Deep Learning or whatever – no, I don't want to upload my own intellectual property to companies, who do whatever they like to do with it… basically to companies I can't trust, and furthermore using LLMs that were trained by dubious material or under cruel conditions. That trust wouldn't even come back, if I'd pay for their tools.
I mention the latter because all of those online services have a size limit about how many chars I can pour into it at once or other barriers when using the free version.

So I was looking for something, I could use…

- locally on my device even without internet access
- that is Open Source
- works on Linux

And yes! There are options! And the best one seems to be (as far as I am aware)...

translateLocally

This is a MIT licensed QT6 application with a very simplistic but very efficient user interface utilizing AI models from the Bergamot project that itself uses the Mozilla Public License 2.0 and is created by European universities and also funded by the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation program.

That sounds very solid and fair to me – I just hope, those 2 different Open Source licenses don't clash with each other (I'm no expert here).

But the main question remains: Hows the quality?

Amazingly good! Far better than LibreTranslate in terms of translation quality and grammar. More or less on paar with Google Translate, I'd say. At least for my use case (German → English). And also SUPER FAST. I use exclusively AMD Ryzen/Threadripper CPUs with Linux at my home (yes; this application only uses the CPU, no graphics unit necessary) – so I cannot provide much of a comparison. But a 23 KB (23.000 chars) manuscript (txt/md format) was translated in less than half a second on my 8 core Threadripper from 2019. So there shouldn't much of senseless energy consumption happen: My CPU fan didn't even flinch! Totally different than, lets say when using a PS3 emulator with a demanding game (the fan switches to vacuum cleaner acoustics then).

If you are interested: Here are the sources (I've compiled the AUR version for Arch Linux - basically upstream):

- translateLocally: https://github.com/XapaJIaMnu/translateLocally/tree/master
- Bergamot: https://browser.mt/

#translation #foss

Whatever went wrong at #CrowdStrike was just a spark. Last month it ignited the powder keg of digital monocultures. https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2024/07/crowdstrike-antitrust-and-digital-monoculture
#FTC #antitrust

Dear Forgejo #admins,

In case you missed it in the release notes, we invite you to our #UpgradeParty to upgrade, set up (and fix in worst-case) our instances together with other #Forgejo admins and contributors.

Join us this Friday at 18.00 CEST / 16.00 UTC. Find all details in the Codeberg Event Calendar: https://codeberg.codeberg.page/Events/events/2024/08-02-forgejo-upgrade-party/