Old Fucking Punk @lwriemen@librem.one

"The dispute panel argues that Mexico’s provisions against GMO corn cannot "be applied as they are not based on an adequate risk assessment, scientific evidence or relevant international standards." This is despite the mountains of evidence from peer-reviewed literature the Mexican government provided showing ample cause for concern about the risks of consuming GM corn & the residues of the herbicide glyphosate — most commonly known as Roundup — that often come with it."
https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2024/12/with-help-of-usmca-biden-administration-strikes-decisive-blow-against-mexican-food-sovereignty-health-and-global-biodiversity.html

iio-sensor-proxy 3.6-RC1 is just released! Just in time before Christmas! 🥳🥳🥳
Me and @agx took over the maintenance from @hadessuk a while back and this is our first release.
This release is packed with many nice features and bugfixes! If all turns out well, we will tag a final 3.6 release soon.

https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/hadess/iio-sensor-proxy/-/releases/3.6-RC1

#sensors #Linux #linuxmobile

Something happened yesterday that I found quite interesting. A music festival posted an update on Instagram and Facebook, using an AI generated image.

The backlash was immediate and fierce, so much so that they subsequently deleted the post. What I find interesting is that I don't think people in the Gen AI bubble (just take a look around LinkedIn) have any idea just how deeply hated this stuff is, especially by people even vaguely aligned with any creative industries.

And it's not just the creators themselves (writers, artists, musicians) who strongly object to its use, but also, and in this case even more so, the people consuming that art and content, which is a fair size of the population.

Happy Xmas, and keep away from those AI image generators! 😁

"voters" are not a coherent agent, have radically diverse interests, no means of being held accountable in common. constituted as "voters" we are a phenomenon, not an agent, no more constructive to blame than a lightning strike. if our behavior should change, then our institutions must.

The positive side-effect is that we have plenty of storage now.

(The numbers are slightly blowed up, because we temporarily had to add more disks than strictly necessary for the migration to succeed. They will be repurposed afterwards.)

https://kolektiva.media/w/ccUP5A5W4uVrr2rYT9AK9z

Wishing you a happy holidays and a riotous 2025!

❤️ The Crew at subMedia

"Look people, the health insurance companies ripping everyone off and causing untold amounts of pain and death are not the problem here. The fact that a bunch of people don't share my political opinions is the real problem. Also, someone has to be in charge of rationing care, so quit your whining!" ~this guy, probably

Like wow, try reading the room before putting pen to paper 😬. This is a truly, truly terrible take.

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2024/12/luigi-mangione-manifesto-healthcare/680962/?

Joe #Biden commutes sentences of 37 out of 40 federal #deathrow inmates - https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2024/dec/23/joe-biden-death-row-inmate-sentences-commuted-clemency "The clemency action applies to all federal death row inmates except three convicted of terrorism or hate-motivated mass murder" should have commuted all of them, but at least he did something

Seeking help! No matter how many keywords/names u search related to this story the article doesn't appear on Google

This was a front page A1 story I wrote for WaPo on how smear campaigns and abuse women journalists endure are a press freedom issue. Can someone explain why the article does not appear on Google? https://www.washingtonpost.com/investigations/2023/02/14/women-journalists-global-violence/

The more I know about Spotify, the more glad I am that I don't have an account.

I still buy CDs and digital downloads (that are mine, not in someone else's control). To that end, I've supported several musicians via Patreon and Bandcamp but only when I can own what I pay for.

One reason this is easy for me is that I'm of an age where I am MUCH more fond of the music from <many> years ago than anything I'm hearing for the first time today...

"MatrixRTC isn’t just Element Call: Famedly showed off experimental interop with FluffyChat at FOSDEM back in Feb, and Element showed off experimental interop with BigBlueButton in August. Given more and more conferencing tools are converging on LiveKit as a best-in-class SFU, it’s an amazing opportunity to use Matrix and MatrixRTC to power the end-to-end-encryption and decentralisation and get standardised voip/video interop from the outset."

@matthew, Oct 2024

https://matrix.org/blog/2024/10/29/matrix-2.0-is-here/

Latest comic: How to get in the holiday spirit

I don't actually recommend slipping into unconsciousness for the next twelve years! Personally, I'm reading and trying to get around to that pie.

#comic #cartoon #holidays #authoritarianism

"Neoliberalism remains the best way to describe the political and economic order of post-1960s America. In fact, “neoliberalism” is more conceptually useful as a way to describe these conditions than it is as a definition of a coherent ideology."
https://lpeproject.org/blog/can-neoliberalism-explain-everything/

Pretty good point there about it being more a description of how things are than an ideology.
#neoliberalism

The year in unbelievable news: https://www.dailykos.com/story/2024/12/20/2292666/-Cartoon-Incredible-global-news-2024

"A study from UCSF’s Benioff Homelessness and Housing Initiative last year was one of the deepest dives into California’s crisis in decades. It found that drug use and mental health problems are not the driver behind people losing housing; the primary reason is the increasing precariousness of the working poor."

https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2024/12/the-us-embrace-of-incarceration-for-the-homeless-is-a-win-win-for-the-plutocrats.html

https://kolektiva.media/w/wfzLtwhG9nVeLHqawUFYRc

We invite you to join in organizing festivals of resistance on the weekend of January 18, immediately before Donald Trump takes office.
https://crimethinc.com/festivalsofresistance

By organizing ahead of Trump’s inauguration, we can seize the initiative and set our own timeline rather than being caught flat-footed and forced to react. We need to welcome new participants into these struggles and foster a revolutionary perspective that can orient us through the challenges ahead.

In collaboration with @CrimethInc

Taught this in a class on "ghosts in the machine" in Science Fiction, in order to supply some "real-world" ghosts and displace the hype-based idea of "AI" students are carrying around at present. Found this because one of the Internet's Great Sages, Cosma Shalizi, recommends Mitchell's writing on the subject. No surprise, I liked it; also (in hindsight) no surprise, Mitchell was Douglas R. Hofstadter's graduate student. She has a "fluid analogies" kind of perspective on intelligence, and writes well, in the popular-science mode, about developments in the field from the earliest days. Her examples of the failure modes of the various breakthrough neural nets are entertainingly compelling—and made a real impression on some of my initially AI-happy students. However, in the way of such things, some of her failure modes have since turned into (apparent) LLM successes, like Winograd schemas. She also maintains a level of calm in writing about "the Singularity" (while shredding the arguments about it) that I truly admire. Recommended for your students and/or your aggressive relations who want to tell you over the holiday table that the humanities are obsolete now.

(comment on Artificial Intelligence)