Old Fucking Punk @lwriemen@librem.one

@liaizon Anyone who wants. It's free software, it's literally for everyone even those you don't like. That's its power.

We are a lethally stupid species 🙄

To avoid being castigated for visibly burning off methane from fossil fuel production, Turkmenistan is simply invisibly venting it, creating far more damage: CH4 has 80 x the greenhouse impact of CO2 🤦

They thought no-one would notice. They were wrong 🛰️

#ClimateCrisis

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/may/09/mind-boggling-methane-emissions-from-turkmenistan-revealed

As a nation, long sitting on a branch high up the tree, enjoying the fine view, we seem entirely committed to sawing off the branch on which we're perched. This metaphor is happening on a bunch of different levels simultaneously.

Why are hardcore MAGA continuing to support Trump?

My theory (as I wrote over the weekend) is that rape is a means of achieving patriarchal power, so if you are hardcore MAGA, you're cool with a a guy grabbing women.

The problem for the GOP is that Trump is pushing his supporters to the logical conclusion of their views.

For decades, Republicans have had a hard time winning the popular vote in national elections (only 1988 & 2004).

This will make it harder.

https://terikanefield.com/rape-is-a-means-of-asserting-patriarchal-power/

With Big Tech speedrunning its own demise, we need more than rules to make platforms better - we need to look out for the users who want to escape social media hell:

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2023/04/platforms-decay-lets-put-users-first

Auckland Airport Rainfall, back to 1963. Thick line is 2023 (doh) Today's effort so far (55mm) in purple...

I'm one of the people Google conned when it pushed "AMP" as a mobile standard. My long article about it in Backchannel (now part of Wired) was, in retrospect, credulous.

Read the @verge piece on a corporate campaign that contributed to massive -- and reasonable -- mistrust of Google at news organizations: https://www.theverge.com/23711172/google-amp-accelerated-mobile-pages-search-publishers-lawsuit

A hearing aid app, offered to make it easy to change settings. The privacy policy says that sharing data with the following companies is "strictly necessary": Microsoft, Salesforce, Twilio, Google Analytics, Google Firebase, Momentive, Elasticsearch, Adobe Marketing Cloud.
It then claims it will explicitly ask for consent before sharing data with these companies.
But DDG app protection shows 12 tracking attempts by google: device, country, GPS location, full name, City, Gender & 28 other details

@Ruth_Mottram @becha as I said, gov'ts are demonstrating their lack of fitness-for-purpose by allowing *any* MS software anywhere their gov'ts. Here in NZ (similarly most places), we've lost our sovereignty, and that's not hyperbole - explanation: https://davelane.nz/mshostage - use BBB outside of work. Fwiw, I quit my last gov't job because they were going to make me us MS software: https://davelane.nz/my-open-history

I'm not saying LLMs are magic and can do all the things they promise to investors, I'm saying these companies don't care about whether the bots can think. they won't work and that's worse: what they certainly will do is deepen the logic of surveillance that drives their application in advertising and provide a lot of flimsy, bias ridden, nonfunctional LLMs as platforms to data consumers like governments, cops, and insurance companies to make use of surveillance data under the cloak of LLM datawashing.

The U.S. slipped to 45th in RSF's global press freedom rankings. One of the main reasons cited was Congress’s failure to pass the PRESS Act despite bipartisan support. It’s time to pass the Act and finally end gov surveillance of journalists. https://rsf.org/en/country/united-states

The Goethe Institute asked me for some thoughts on social media's impact and how we should deal with it. I responded: https://www.goethe.de/prj/zei/en/pdk/24687701.html

Modern society doesn't always match the conditions we evolved for.

On average, what do you think is the best way to respond to this?

(Boosts are welcome. Longer answers in comments are encouraged.)

There's been a lot of talk today about Henry Kissinger's upcoming 100th birthday, but I've yet to see Anthony Bourdain's quote about that war criminal scroll by, and it can't be shared enough.

New on Eviscerati.Org: The Points Between, Chapter 17

https://www.eviscerati.org/fiction/tpb/2023/05/the-points-between-chapter-17/