Old Fucking Punk @lwriemen@librem.one

A SUPERVILLAIN EXAMINES AI - I test Sudowrite using my own prose to try and see exactly what the hell is going on.

Prologue - https://www.eviscerati.org/articles/2023/05/a-supervillain-examines-ai-prologue/

Sudowrite - https://www.eviscerati.org/articles/2023/05/a-supervillain-examines-ai-sudowrite/

The prose I tested with - https://www.eviscerati.org/fiction/2023/05/the-band-of-broken-blades-chapter-one/

A lot of it is stating the obvious, but evidently it isn't obvious to everyone, so here's @BuildSoil's rant in response to have been asked to write a letter of approval for a grant to use LLM AI to guide environmental policy.

https://kolektiva.social/@BuildSoil/110397101965881240

Reasons to defederate from Mastodon.social and Mastodon.online: Eugen would open registrations without consulting or preparing his mod team at the time, after agreeing to keep them closed (this went on over and over after he had promised not to do it again).

He would, in the early days, insist that Mastodon.social was not a flagship instance, and then open a second server, still owned and run by him. (second server is Mastodon.online)

He would promise no algorithms and then create the explore page without input. And the trending hashtags without establishing it with the community.

He surrounds himself with yes sayers, and if you want to stay in his good graces you need to take a fair amount of abuse if you disagree with him.

He would (I have not recent data points on this) throw a disabled partner's, as in business, disability back in their face when not wanting to work with them any more.

The community asked for years for a Mastodon Nonprofit, so we'd be responsible together. He eventually created one with himself as the sole founder, and no other members (as far as I've been able to find.)

All hail the Benevolent Dictator For Life.

(rewrote because some faulty info, but added some stuff I know got sure, as I do not want to give reason to be called a liar.)

What's a revelation you had in the last three years that seems obvious now?

For me: I should repair things even if it costs the same or more than buying a new one (as much as my budget allows), because prices of "new" things don't account for ecological damage in their manufacture and eventual disposal.

I feel like there's recently been another uptick in the number images I'm seeing on here without any alt-text.

Please friends, encourage your friends to use alt-text.

@Codeberg (relatively urgently) needs more people helping to run the association behind the project. (Codeberg e.V. registered in Germany)

If you are looking for a *non-technical* opportunity to help running Codeberg please get in touch with us.

Step 1. would be joining the association, if you haven't already (https://join.codeberg.org/), step 2. write an email to contact@codeberg.org

Yes, this is a "pay some money for the chance to do unpaid work" opportunity, isn't it great? 🙂

tfw you realize the entirety of yr political analysis has degraded into pulling your hair out & screaming "I'M SURROUNDED BY IDIOTS!" 😱 ......I mean, it's not wrong*, but still.

*Being surrounded by idiots is part & parcel of being a human existing in society with other humans; which is to say the statement is exactly as true for the people I'm surrounded by as it is for me. An equivalent statement is simply "humans are idiots," which I think we can all agree on.

#transrights #gender

The thing about this corruption and criminality—George Santos, Clarence Thomas, Rudy Giuliani, Trump—is that it’s so obvious. So brazen. As if there’s no need to hide it.

We're bringing the noise to Pouzza Fest in Montreal this weekend! To celebrate, get 40% off all #punk books this weekend with coupon code PUNK. See them all at https://pmpress.org/index.php?l=product_list&c=150&sortby=num_sold:desc

Sale ends Sunday night.

Sam Altman's Worldcoin project incentivizes a black market for biometric data taken from people in developing nations

May 18, 2023
https://web3isgoinggreat.com/?id=sam-altmans-worldcoin-project-incentivizes-a-black-market-for-biometric-data-taken-from-people-in-developing-nations

@lightweight @emc2 Women's suffrage took a lot of domestic terrorism, it's not a pretty way to change things.

@LovesTha Yeah, I'm not enthusiastic about massive democracies. I grew up as a Quaker, and Quaker-led communities work on a good-faith consensus basis... but that doesn't scale well. Quakers are also big on literacy and education in general, so not as good with communities that don't have strong educational traditions. I keep feeling like we need a new Enlightenment. An appreciation of literacy - on many levels, not just the written word - has fallen by the wayside.

Wow is it fast to format a book in LaTeX. I just finished the first draft yesterday, and I've already managed to format about half the book even though I spent part of the morning mowing the lawn!

#writing #LaTeX

Free AWS or Azure training... it's a trap. Don't fall for it. They want you to learn their non-transferable, proprietary interfaces so that you're trapped in their monoculture, and recommend their vastly overpriced services to your customers. Many people who work with these technologies as consultants can make a lot of $ because their fees seem low compared to the massive costs of those cloud services (compared to competing services). They're exploiting the broad ignorance of the market.

The biggest tech innovations of the last 10 years. 😁

Colleague: "Do you need to deal with a lot of *germs* while you're bicycling?"

Me: "It's actually for particulates."

#Sweden leads the way on #Cooperative #Housing. The US could learn a thing or two!

https://www.shareable.net/can-studying-cooperative-housing-in-sweden-teach-the-u-s-how-to-overcome-the-moderate-income-family-housing-crisis/

Care Work in a Wageless World.

Selma James’s work with the Wages for Housework movement shows that we ignore the labor of care at our own peril.

Read the feature by Emily Callaci for Boston Review and get Selma's recent book, Our Time Is Now. https://blog.pmpress.org/2023/05/16/care-work-in-a-wageless-world-2/

For the #selfHost #FediCurious: you could run a decent #Mastodon instance (or any of many other #Fediverse apps) on a fairly entry-level Virtual Private Server, e.g. 4GB RAM, 2 Virtual CPUs, & some extra disk space. The cost (if you use a hosting provider like https://hetzner.com, which I'm using for a bunch of Fedi instances) would be ~ €10/month (including extra disk space), or something like NZD 17.50 right now. So, you & friends could be self-sufficient #Fedizens for < NZD250/yr.