Old Fucking Punk @lwriemen@librem.one

"Neil Young Trashes Amazon, Gives His Complete Musical Catalog to Greenland for Free
"Amazon is owned by Jeff Bezos, a billionaire backer of the president," Young writes to fans. "My music will never be available on Amazon, as long as it is owned by Bezos""

https://www.rollingstone.com/music/music-news/neil-young-trashes-amazon-greenland-free-music-1235505119/

This blogpost makes an astoundingly good case about LLMs I hadn't considered before. The collapse of public forums (like Stack Overflow) for programming answers coincides directly with the rise of programmers asking for answers from chatbots *directly*. Those debugging sessions become part of a training set that now *only private LLM corporations have access to*. This is something that "open models" seemingly can't easily fight. https://michiel.buddingh.eu/enclosure-feedback-loop

@lightweight wow, what a list!
That is a great manifest. I am impressed. I have a bunch of half finished projects or half started things, but that is great!
I am just purchased politicians.social in order to host my first mastodon instance for politicians to get off x - it will be au.politicians.social for Federal pollies here - then vic.au.politicans.social for Victorian (where I am I am) and others...
I would love to see nz.politicians.social for your ppl in NZ? Hosted in NZ...
@andreasio

I'm not saying the Trump administration is turning the US into a dystopian hellscape, but when the local newspaper needs to help you identify what toxic gas Federal agents are unleashing on citizens, I think it speaks for itself.

Okay, after joking around (five reboot is not good for one's hearth after midnight) that it might just be a bad kernel version (We use Debian which is known to be stable), we found a reference to https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=1125405 and this was exactly the kernel we booted into. We're now running a non-faulty kernel version and codeberg.org is up and running again.

We're still unsure about the cause of the first time the server crashed, all subsequent ones can be traced to this ceph regression.

> and an enterprise version of Firefox that treats the browser as critical infrastructure for modern work, not a data collection surface.

this implies the regular version *is* a data collection surface

AI is mentioned only in passing

https://blog.mozilla.org/en/mozilla-new-products/how-mozilla-builds-now/

One of our servers (the one that hosts Forgejo) (kernel) crashed and upon rebooting got into a similar state where we saw a lot of kernel panics. We're hoping that this is a temporary environmental issue; we are prepared to move the service to another server, the stored data is is still available for our two other servers via Ceph.

@manchicken exactly

Recursive pollution leads to model collapse. A majority of these "tech puff pieces" ignore both problems

https://berryvilleiml.com/2026/01/10/recursive-pollution-and-model-collapse-are-not-the-same/

Wondering how many people use an 'IP Geolocation' extension in their browser to tell them *where* websites they visit are actually hosted... I use "Country Flag & IP Whois" for (Fire|Water)Fox which, for example, shows me which Aotearoa NZ civil society organisations, gov't agencies, & political parties host their websites onshore... It's quite telling.

We knew this was coming, but now the clock is running. From Privacy International:

"Yesterday the Trump Administration announced a proposed change in policy for travellers to the U.S. It applies to the powers of data collection by the Customs and Border Police (CBP)."

"If the proposed changes are adopted after the 60-day consultation, then millions of travellers to the U.S. will be forced to use a U.S. government mobile phone app, submit their social media from the last five years and email addresses used in the last ten years, including of family members. They’re also proposing the collection of DNA."

PI linked to and summarized a Federal Register entry describing the proposed requirements:

-All visitors must submit ‘their social media from the last 5 years’

-ESTA (Electronic System for Travel Authorization) applications will include ‘high value data fields’, ‘when feasible’
‘telephone numbers used in the last five years’
-‘email addresses used in the last ten years’
-‘family number telephone numbers (sic) used in the last five years’
-biometrics – face, fingerprint, DNA, and iris
-business telephone numbers used in the last five years
-business email addresses used in the last ten years.

https://www.privacyinternational.org/news-analysis/5713/trump-administration-wants-your-dna-and-social-media

The Federal Register entry says comments are encouraged and
must be submitted (no later than
February 9, 2026) to be assured of
consideration

Federal Register entry: https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/FR-2025-12-10/pdf/2025-22461.pdf

𝐁𝐞𝐥𝐤î 𝐒𝐢𝐛ê - A Journey Through The Syrian War and Rojava Revolution already has subtitles in many languages.

-Human made/edited: English, Kurdish, Spanish, Greek, Slovakian and Polish.

-AI: Brazilian, Chinese, Czech, Danish, Dutch, Finish, French, German, Indonesian, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Norwegian, Portuguese, Russian and Swedish.

Someone is already editing the Turkish subs and I'm trying to figure out Arabic.
Any volunteers who might be interested in helping out in editing those files please contact me on any social media platform.

Please share for more reach.

The YT link to watch the film is in the comments 👇
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=haMGrjjOuFM&pp=0gcJCTMBo7VqN5tD&fbclid=IwVERTSAPksm1leHRuA2FlbQIxMABzcnRjBmFwcF9pZAwzNTA2ODU1MzE3MjgAAR64hM3fJ6taNVnvPndpoC1YjIJ_e8_18wIAKOI4dxyPn6iq0gX_w1-CRWz_7w_aem_RnlRqW9xoLZG7K099RACXA

Anarchists are calling for a month of agitation for Arturo Lugo Macías. Read the statement from his support committee below:

Sheveck (AKA for Arturo Lugo Macías), is an anarchist and vegan comrade. He was arrested just a couple of weeks ago, on January 8 2026. The Mexican state and the UNAM (National Autonomous University of Mexico) are fabricating charges of "property damage with a gang-related aggravating factor" against him. The script is well-known: when they cannot silence you, they will lock you up.

The events that they now intend to use to justify his imprisonment date back more than 5 years ago, at the FES Acatlán of National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM), located in Naucalpan. Around that time, students, including him were protesting against generalized sexual abuse cases within the university through the occupation of the building A6 and the classroom 906, known as El Kubo, among other spaces.
The response from power was brutal. On the night of April 5, 2020, a paramilitary group—made up of between 7 and 10 armed men, with tactical gear and gasoline cans—violently stormed the okupación on the building A6. There is no doubt it was a planned attack orchestrated from above. There were beatings, burns, physical, psychological, and sexual assaults, as well as serious injuries, and Arturo suffered third-degree burns.
Almost six years after the events, the aggressors remain free and unpunished. There are no serious investigations into the paramilitary attack or the violations of the students' integrity. UNAM remains silent and the State decided to punish those who survived and resisted. Those in power seek an exemplary punishment, to criminalize protest, cover up hired thug violence, and send the usual message: organizing has a cost and it is collected sooner or later.
In the hearing on January 13, 2026, precautionary measures of preventive detention were ordered, and Arturo was transferred to the Federal Social Readaptation Center Number 1 El Altiplano, known in Mexico as Almoloya, a maximum-security prison.
Full conditions for dignified treatment are not being guaranteed. As a result of the aggressions inflicted by these armed subjects, Arturo suffered serious injuries to his back. And, so far, he has not had access to blankets, underwear, or warm clothing that would allow him to protect himself from the cold and prevent his previous medical problems from worsening. Likewise, he is unable to eat properly due to the lack of adaptation of the prison food to a vegan diet.
Right now, there is an international solidarity campaign for Sheveck that we hope you could help propagating, with fundraisers and propaganda actions worldwide. We're publishing most of the information through our Instagram account @libertadsheveck

Our social media: https://www.instagram.com/libertadsheveck/
Media note: https://avispa.org/detienen-a-estudiante-de-la-unam-pero-no-investigan-ataque-paramilitar-a-quien-protege-la-justicia/

Insurers don’t want to cover AI

The true AI risk

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CBqY1FvQikE&list=UU9rJrMVgcXTfa8xuMnbhAEA - video
https://pivottoai.libsyn.com/20260126-insurers-dont-want-to-cover-ai - podcast

time: 4 min 58 sec

LLMs do not "think"

The LLM instantiation methodology* correlates patterns in the data that the developers provide to build a database** of linkages between collections of words and phrases*** that appear in that corpus.

The way in which this database is used is to inform a probabilistic selector process by seeding it with a set of probabilities**** associated with a given word or phrase; that set of probabilities has pointers to related words or phrases.

If a given word or phrase is found in close proximity in the original data consistently, then those probabilities will be higher.

When a query***** is made to this database, a randomization process is used to drop certain parts****** of the query being sent into the lookup process. The remainder is divided into segments† and passed into the database for query.

So.

With all this in mind, it should be -screamingly obvious- why this story, of how it's entirely feasable to get an LLM to rederive copyrighted works out of the database that was seeded with those works, happens: https://futurism.com/artificial-intelligence/ai-industry-recall-copyright-books

* I am deliberately not using the word 'training'. You can train dogs; you can train employees; you can train chimpanzees; what you do to an LLM is not training - it is building a database to feed into another process.

** I am deliberately not using the word "model" here, so as to restate the process in plain language absent the jargon these dipshits insist on using to obfuscate their techniques.

*** "Tokens" is another jargon word here.

**** "weights" is less objectionable as jargon, given it's used for a number of things with this approximate conceptual shape, but it's fucking annoying to me in this context.

***** "prompt" is their fucking bullshit term for a natural-language database query

****** "zero weighting" is jargon for "we drop it on the floor" - this is why I keep referring to people doing "prompt engineering" as playing games instead of doing actual security; if the fucking thing drops random parts of your shit on the ground, then inherently you have no way to enforce a policy that is subject to that process.

† "tokenized", see ***

Decorate your street today.
Designed to inspire resistance in both small towns and big cities. https://pmpress.org/index.php?l=product_detail&p=2168

Copyright laws give legacy gatekeepers more control, stifling grassroots innovation and emerging creators. We need a system that enables choice and new opportunities. https://eff.org/deeplinks/2026/01/copyright-kills-competition

Keep distracting him with fake awards. It can be the same one over and over again. The guy's brain is cooked. https://www.gocomics.com/brian-mcfadden/2026/01/26

OK, it turns out I do have one big gripe about Fedora. At least the KDE version of it, I have no idea if the Gnome version is the same way.

There are updates to Fedora almost every day. That's not my gripe. My gripe is that Fedora forces me to reboot every time those damn updates are downloaded before it will apply them. And because the updates are ALMOST EVERY DAY that means I'm rebooting my fucking desktop ALMOST EVERY DAY and it is a pain in the ass, because HEY I'M TRYING TO USE MY COMPUTER

Happy Monday dear Fedi friends!

I started writing the first draft of my article about #WSocial and I'm finding so many gems.

Needless to say, if you have any interesting tidbits, I'm all ears.

Hopefully I can publish it by Thursday.

Have a great week!