Old Fucking Punk @lwriemen@librem.one

Watching my post (which never mentioned Steve Jobs) spread and mutate into straight disinformation, entirely via Google News search alerts for my name, has been *fascinating*.

I wonder how many tens/hundreds/thousands of $billions Microsoft has received in 'royalties' (another name for coercive junk-software-patent extortion protection rackets)? Last I heard, they were getting about USD15 per handset manufactured by every Android OEM.

I was on a podcast where kids asked two people questions to decide who was the fake and who was the real expert.

The host said that early on, the kids chose the fake every time because the actors answered every question confidently and the experts would hedge or even sometimes say, "I don't know."

They eventually told the fakes to be less confident so the kids would pick the expert sometimes.

It just occurred to me this is now real life with #chatGPT (but nobody is telling it to back off).

Here is a must-read post from children's author Maggie Tokuda-Hall on how Scholastic offered to publish her book — all she had to do was remove all mention of racism.

Sure, they're banning books in Tennessee and Texas. But it's not just the books that get published and then banned from the library. It's all the books that don't get published in the first place.

Those banning books know publishers like Scholastic pull this cowardly bullshit. It's their game plan.

https://www.prettyokmaggie.com/blog/2023/4/11/scholastic-and-a-faustian-bargain

Given all hype about #5G I wrote an explanation that (I hope) doesn't require getting into the technical weeds to see past the BS.
https://rmf.vc/5GHype

A tragedy catches our attention, we point to statistics to show it's an example of a distressingly common problem, and we propose laws to address the issue. Except the event is rarely representative of the larger problem, and so these policy changes won't help much with the issues reflected in the statistics. Instead, we should combine the anger and passion the tragedy evokes with a deeper interpretation of the statistics to identify what changes we most need. https://www.jefftk.com/p/outrage-and-statistics-into-policy

@waldoj @Npars01 @anildash I think part of the problem is thinking of it as "Mastodon" — you don't need a Mastodon server for announcements, you can bolt basic, one-way ActivityPub onto any simple server stack for a fraction of the price. That's enough for people to get updates on their Mastodon feed, wouldn't need any moderation, and there'd be very little point in even the most idealist instances defederating from a glorified RSS feed.

There are lots of nice, kind people at Microsoft (and Google, Apple, Facebook, and Amazon) - I have friends who work there. But what they're working towards is *all bad*. They work within a largely ethics-free machine (they just laid off their entire 'ethics team' as they were pointless): an autocracy ready to do anything to maximise shareholder value. They are not making the world better (nor will they 'improve it from within'). Their vision is clouded by their association & paycheque.

*chefkiss*

Nowadays it's a common belief in tech circles that copy-pasting an internet address of any kind is too difficult for non-technical users. How can this be true when most of us have typed website addresses, email addresses and phone numbers manually for decades?

My grandmother dialed phone numbers by hand, often from memory, on a rotary phone with no display. She wasn't technical in the slightest, but found phones very easy to use.

Why is the tech industry infantilising people like this?
Is this the aim of commercial tech companies now, to insert themselves unnecessarily into everyday life?

@onepict raised a similar point about the "what three words" location system, which is trying to replace the free open co-ordinate system the entire world has used for centuries with a closed copyrighted monetised system they control.

Why are people letting themselves be conned into thinking easy things they've done for years are suddenly too difficult for them?

Concentrations of capital and political influence like any massive corporation (especially big tech) - all of which are psychopathic autocracies, who will steamroller anything that stands in the way of their single directive - maximise shareholder value, i.e. profit - are inherently abhorrent.

They've nearly finished neutralising the sovereignty of democratic nations (#CPTPPA anyone?), but it'll take ages before most of us realise they're nearly done digitally subjugating our society.

💡 Good to see this #UN Development Programme #UNDP report out, sharing the knowledge we worked hard to seed.

🗨️ #DigitalPublicGoods #DPGs are becoming critical levers for advancing the Sustainable Development Goals #SDGs. This report discusses emerging insights related to their #sustainability, replicability and partnerships based on case studies of four digital solutions (three of which are accredited DPGs) and a digital government programme.

#FreeSoftware #OpenSource

https://www.undp.org/publications/digital-public-goods-sdgs

The "100k" trained people will be trained in MSFT's/AWS' *proprietary* tools which will, in effect, indenture them to those particular monocultures & make them effectively incapable of using anything else. It's part of big tech's anti-competitive practices, tantamount to digital imperialism/colonialism.

Some folks might be thinking, “Unlike the Fediverse, Substack gives writers an opportunity to get paid.”

Not so fast.

When @TexasObserver was nearly shut down because they lacked funding for operations, they turned to the Fediverse for help.

Within 48 hours, we helped them raise $250,000 in funding—and now that 70-year-old newspaper still lives.

As a result 17 journalists still have their jobs.

Substack is not a suitable alternative to Twitter.

If Elon Musk can buy Twitter, he can buy Substack.

However, Elon Musk cannot buy the Fediverse. No one company owns it. It is not for sale.

You do not need a billionaire or a VC fund to use social media.

They are just middlemen opportunists trying to insert themselves between you and your friends.

The Internet was built to make it easy for you to connect with others, and that is getting easier with protocols like ActivityPub.

You don’t need Elon Musk. You don’t need Mark Zuckerberg. You certainly don’t need any Silicon Valley tech bro to let you use social media.

Successive gov'ts have been bamboozled by Microsoft and AWS. https://www.rnz.co.nz/news/business/487836/microsoft-and-amazon-sign-memorandums-of-understanding-with-government What I can't work out is why these folks can't understand that big tech is *the enemy* not our ally. They are the problem, not the solution. And these MOUs are just 'TrickleDownEconomics', i.e. fundamentally flawed.

My email flow has dramatically improved ever since I created a macro and folder hook in mutt so that by default I only see new, unopened, or flagged messages. I don't move opened emails from my INBOX elsewhere so no INBOX 0.

Now I only see emails I need to take some sort of action on. I can filter messages other ways, then press '.o' whenever I want to resume this view.

If you are a mutt user, use these two options to your .muttrc:

macro index .o "l(~N|~O|~F)\n"
folder-hook . push '.o'

#mutt

UK still well off track on pledge to cut methane emissions, study says - https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2023/apr/12/uk-off-track-on-pledge-to-cut-methane-emissions-study-30-per-cent-2030 it's probably being emitted by all the sewage in our rivers and seas... #pollution #tories

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