Old Fucking Punk @lwriemen@librem.one

Small acts when multiplied by millions of people, can transform the world! What do you think?🌎

Have you tried the FediFollows directory?

It's got loads of suggestions for accounts to follow on Mastodon and the Fediverse organised into dozens of different topics:

https://mastodon.online/@FediFollows/107547349637668904

If a category has lots of suggestions, you may need to click on "show older" at the bottom of the page to see more of that category's suggestions.

To see the latest suggestions as they are added, follow @FediFollows

#FediTips #MastoTips #Fediverse #Mastodon

It’s been clear for a long time that Spotify has double-standards for artists. This is just the latest example. https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2022/02/what-spotify-neil-young-and-joe-rogan-tell-us-about-content-moderation

R.I.P. Sven Guckes

Sven Guckes was a first generation Linux user and command line computing super-expert. The best-known online tutorials and documented setting files for tools such as vim and zsh were written by him. He was one of the people at the Berlin Linux User Group who introduced me to GNU/Linux in 1997.

He was an infinitely friendly, infinitely patient and infinitely helpful person who made freely sharing knowledge his life. As far as I know, he never had a regular job (and probably never completed his computer science degree), although with his technical expertise, he could have worked in well-paid positions.

Together, we taught a three-day terminal command line introductory workshop at bootlab Berlin. He also came to my PhD defense in 2006 where all the humanities professors in the committee were visibly relieved when he asked me a computer science question and implicitly confirmed that the CS-related parts of my thesis were solid.

With Sven, a part of the old West Berlin dies - the place that had something similar to a Western socialism, because life was relatively inexpensive, there was not much pressure to have regular employment, and people followed and shared their personal passions.

#svenguckes
#FLOSS

If cooperatives and mutuals are better than other firms, why are they so rare?

This article seeks to provide answers by looking into the amazing story of Vanguard: a customer owned mutual giant that dominates an industry dominated by capitalist firms.

https://www.getrevue.co/profile/coop_exchange/issues/if-cooperatives-and-mutuals-are-better-than-other-firms-why-are-they-so-rare-vanguard-and-the-mutualist-paradox-1042585

World spends $1.8tn a year on subsidies that harm environment, study finds

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2022/feb/17/world-spends-18tn-a-year-on-subsidies-that-harm-environment-study-finds-aoe?CMP=Share_iOSApp_Other #6thextinction #climatechange #leadonclimate

Ok, this is completely terrifying. https://invidious.snopyta.org/watch?v=AFMvB-clmOg or https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AFMvB-clmOg

If you think there's a lot of fraud and malfeasance in crypto (which there demonstrably is) but that the underlying blockchain tech is great, read this by a guy who wrote an award-winning paper on "decentralized consensus systems using Proof-of-Work" 5 years before Nakamoto created bitcoin. He knows whereof he speaks, and you probably won't like what he has to say.

https://blog.dshr.org/2022/02/ee380-talk.html

This is a thoughtful and even a little bit optimistic piece on addressing climate catastrophe for your Friday afternoon (from an NZ perspective): https://blog.planetaryecology.org/2022/01/26/we-do-all-need-to-change-our-ways-of-living-interview-with-david-hall-on-climate-change-and-democracy/

Just for the record, the US has anachronistic and wasteful practices with regard to passport renewal for minors. What a frickin' (expensive) hassle.

Want to get e-announcements & news digests about product launches and updates, new blog articles, open source community news, and special offers once in a while? Join our announce list here: https://announce.puri.sm/listinfo/announce

Child-care & Preschool in Cincinnati just converted to a #WorkerOwned #Cooperative! 👶

https://coopcincy.org/updates/2022/2/16/childcare-center-becomes-worker-owned

San Francisco Police used a rape survivor's own DNA—collected years earlier while investigating her sexual assault—to charge her for an unrelated property crime. They’re not the only agency searching innocent people’s DNA. https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2022/02/not-just-san-francisco-police-across-country-are-retaining-and-searching-dna

It wouldn't be a stretch to call this creeping incursion from the "Frightful Five" around the world a new digital colonialism, because it's not really competition. They can afford to loss-lead any indigenous competitors to death. This is about each of these mega corps trying to be winner-take-all with their own predatory, proprietary 'cloud' monoculture.

Tobias Bernard (@tbernard) gives a brief overview of adaptive apps on GNOME that work well on computers of all shapes and sizes. Full talk at https://fosdem.org/2022/schedule/event/mobile_adwaita/

Big changes are on the way for the GNOME Foundation! Hear from our Board of Directors President, Robert McQueen, about our accomplishments to date, our goals for the future, and how we'll be transitioning over the next few months.
https://foundation.gnome.org/2022/02/16/forward-the-foundation/

#GNOME

Very interesting read:

"Decentralization wasn't always a crypto buzzword, a blockchain is just a spicy database that enables decentralization but does not guarantee it. We need to understand how decisions are made and where power is prone to clustering."

https://untangled.substack.com/p/crypto-is-not-decentralized