Old Fucking Punk @lwriemen@librem.one

‘The Saint’ leaves Italian town after case opened into statue’s ‘tears of blood’ - https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/apr/11/the-saint-leaves-italian-town-after-case-opened-into-statues-tears-of-blood "blood stains on statue of Virgin Mary come from a pig". no, really? I shocked, shocked...

Let's be real: none of us authors could even get away with naming a shady billionaire "Harlan Crow," much less him tampering with elections, building a Garden of Evil, and owning Hitler's teapot.

Basically:

🔹 AI doesn't reliably give useful results, but even if it did
🔹 AI rampantly perpetuates existing harms, but even if it didn't
🔹 AI proponents are not being honest or acting in good faith, but even if they were
🔹 People don't understand the limits of LLMs or how they work, but even if they did
🔹 AI cannot maintain a complex system because it's fundamentally a task of understanding the system, but even if it could

Humans still need opportunity to learn how to make sense of those systems, and we do that by making them. Giving all the work that's most conducive to learning to a computer is selling out our futures. Even if there was some present benefit, which I'm not convinced there is.

https://jenniferplusplus.com/losing-the-imitation-game/

@xor The owners of Uline are massive funders of the right wing ideologues https://refuseuline.com/

Which best describes how you feel when a stranger "favorites" one of your toots?

(boosts welcome)

Now we're talking...

"#Tennessee House Speaker Cameron Sexton (R) said on Monday that he could not stop two expelled representatives from being reappointed.

In a statement, a spokesperson for Sexton said that the speaker would not stand in the way of the reappointment of Democratic Reps. Justin #Pearson and Justin #Jones. Both were expelled after they used a bullhorn on the House floor to call for gun safety laws." https://www.rawstory.com/cameron-sexton-justin-pearson-justin-jones/

The media, at least those that are even bothering to cover it, are truly missing the forest for the trees. The disaster of the bird site is not its garbage performance and functionality “clunkiness.” It’s that is a goddamned misinformation fascist propaganda engine. That’s it. That’s the story. I’ve been trying to get journalists to cover it. Guess I have to do it myself.

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/04/07/technology/elon-musk-twitter-changes.html?smid=nytcore-ios-share&referringSource=articleShare

A Facebook post announces "the completion of our groundbreaking book, written in just 24 hours by ChatGPT-4...this innovative collaboration has resulted in a comprehensive exploration of data privacy, security, and the future of technology."

Two questions (among many):

1) How much of this is drawn directly from other published works or slightly modified?

2) Since there's obviously no time for fact-checking, how much of it is wrong?

‘Headed off the charts’: world’s #ocean #SurfaceTemperature hits record high | Oceans | The Guardian

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2023/apr/08/headed-off-the-charts-worlds-ocean-surface-temperature-hits-record-high

#Environment #GlobalWarming #ClimateChange #Biodiversity #Ecology

Water firms threatened to hike bills if made to clean up sewage in rivers - https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/water-companies-sewage-pollution-rivers-customers-pay/ keeping rivers and seas clean is part of their job; if they can't do it without blackmail, they should be renationalised...

The kernel panic was introduced in an early version of Unix and demonstrated a major difference between the design philosophies of Unix and its predecessor Multics. Multics developer Tom van Vleck recalls a discussion of this change with Unix developer Dennis Ritchie:

"I remarked to Dennis that easily half the code I was writing in Multics was error recovery code. He said, 'We left all that stuff out. If there's an error, we have this routine called panic, and when it is called, the machine crashes, and you holler down the hall, `Hey, reboot it.`'"

(Text from Wikipedia)

Everybody wants this Environmental Law prof. from Harvard to leave her position on the board of ConocoPhillips (which pays $350,000/yr), but frankly, I'd rather she stay on the Conoco board and resign from academia.

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2023/apr/06/harvard-professor-jody-freeman-sec-conocophillips-emails

I'm sure there are plenty of other up-and-coming environmental scientists out there who would be more than happy to take her place at Harvard, and who wouldn't feel tempted by the filthy corporate lucre.

The CBC is practically drooling here, thinking about anarchists getting arrested for inspiring actions "in the next few weeks."

https://youtu.be/xd89y0sWiDw

This video is such a prime example of why to be extremely careful about when and how you talk to the #media. They might seem friendly, but then they start pressing you to confess to crimes and denounce your friends.

Solidarity to everyone involved in the struggle against the Coastal Gas Link pipeline on Wet'suwet'en territory, including the so-called outsiders.

The city would only need to offer land at the same low prices that politically connected real estate developers get.

LA's lawsuit is as frivolous as it gets. The Supreme Court has made clear that journalists can keep and publish documents the government gives them, even by accident. https://ktla.com/news/city-of-los-angeles-sues-reporter-police-watchdog-group-after-release-of-lapd-officer-info/

Tech industry, please hire more writers. I can happily read docs for 3h and get much more out of them than watching a video for 3h. And while I'm watching the video, I'm making copious notes so that I don't have to watch the video *again* later to refresh my memory. If it was written down in the first place with good indexing I wouldn't have to do that. Video is such a crap way to document things.

Do you think Tesla is the only car seller spying relentlessly on its customers (and everyone and everything they encounter in visual range of the cars)? I doubt it.

Needless to say, Congress and state governments are doing nothing whatever to protect our privacy from rampant abuse by these companies. They don't care.

Tennessee's Republicans are well on the way to banning public dissent from their retrograde, extremist policies. https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/tennessee-s-gop-led-house-votes-to-expel-democrat-justin-jones-from-legislature-for-his-role-in-gun-protest/ar-AA19z0Vn