Old Fucking Punk @lwriemen@librem.one

Strange that Reuters fails to mention that the University was not shut down, but was actually just turned in a public institution with free tuition. Strange that...it's almost like they are just running anti-leftist propaganda.

https://www.reuters.com/world/americas/us-sanctions-100-nicaraguan-municipal-officials-over-rights-abuses-2023-08-19/

Seeing a lot of "doomer" posts about how #GenerativeAI is going to destroy the internet.

Where are the stories about how the current #AI revolution will prompt a turn away from the centralized corporate internet of Facebook and Google, and toward something more private, and more person-to-person.

If you've seen articles about this kind of scenario, I invite you to share them.

If you (yes you) have ideas for what we could build on the ashes, I encourage you to post them.

(boosts welcome)

BREAKING | TX Leaving American Library Association https://dallasexpress.com/state/breaking-tx-leaving-american-library-association/

#ALA #Libraries #Texas

The problems with our media in one headline

“Climate activist Tom Steyer.”

While Reuters doesn’t call Manchin or Koch or Uihlein or Wilks or Murdoch activists for fossil fuels.

Just endless headlines attacking people trying to do good, while coddling corrupt actors who do selfish things. It’s maddening.

https://www.reuters.com/world/us/bidens-staying-lake-tahoe-home-climate-activist-tom-steyer-2023-08-19/

Now the Washington lawyers want to destroy digital collections of scratchy 78rpm records, 70-120 year old, built by dedicated preservationists online since 2006.

Who benefits?

https://www.reuters.com/legal/music-labels-sue-internet-archive-over-digitized-record-collection-2023-08-12/

Some exciting news:

With the help of a tester (thanks kyeh!), #mobilelinux though vvmd/vvmplayer ( https://gitlab.com/kop316/vvmplayer ) finally supports Visual Voicemail on all major US carriers!

If you have an MVNO on any of the major carrier, you should be able to easily check if the parent settings work for you. If they do, *please* make an MR in https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/mobile-broadband-provider-info so we can officially support more carriers!

This is a weird request, but I figure the worst I can get for it is silence. I'm totally #blind and have very bad hearing. To set up a device through its inaccessible software, I'm in need of a sighted person for about an hour and a half to two hours who can access a computer remotely, speaks and reads English, and can describe images and graphs. The person needs to be quite patient with follow-up questions, needs to be willing to repeat if needed, as well as be able to click on items and describe what happens on the screen. The person needs to be fairly detail oriented because some of the images appear to have arrows and other ways to expand them, according to the manual. Though I'm happy to be reasonable, I have no clue how much to offer as payment, this is my first request of this kind. I'm posting it because I know we have some blind people here who may be able to point me towards someone who has done this before and may be willing to do it for such a short period. Boosts welcome, indeed, they're appreciated. #hearingimpaired #software #A11Y #accessibility #remote

Talking to my dad this morning about how my aunts and cousins are living together on the grand-parents old place, two of them in tiny-houses. He said he just read an AARP article that reported that apparently what the aunties are up to is something of a trend among older folks.

*screencaps from NYT opinion piece "Our Economy Thrives on Bad Feelings"

https://archive.li/YUuWv

And here I though I already knew the (considerable) dark side of #crypto, but oh no...it gets much, much worse. But I'm sure a little slavery won't be enough to put off the true believers, smh.

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/newsletters/2023-08-17/crypto-text-message-scams-lead-back-to-cambodia-slave-labor

Our research team at Northeastern University is conducting a survey to better understand how Mastodon administrators craft, select, modify, and maintain privacy policies and codes of conduct. If you administer an instance and are 18 or older, we'd love to hear from you! We expect it to take under 20 minutes to complete.

Survey link: https://neu.co1.qualtrics.com/jfe/form/SV_elLw6HR35WCvKjc

(more info to follow...)

The thing everyone talks about when Windows 11 comes up is telemetry. But, as someone who uses Windows 11 as a secondary device, what I really notice is the inundation of right wing news that most non-technical users don't even know how to get away from.

You can just click the little weather icon and it immediately wants to tell you about "wokeness in the military" or the latest thing Trump said. It's on their personal device, it's on their work device, it's all opt out, and most folks don't know how to.

It's social media rage farming built straight into your OS.

I think, if we want a shot at dealing with all the problems in our world & society, we need an unapologetically anti-corporate political movement. One that actively calls out and shuns anything that is implicitly 'trickle-down economics"-based, because it's not a thing.

People think that "It's OK for people to just want technology to work" (which it is) is like saying "It's OK for people to not know things" (which it is). But to the extent that they're saying it to argue against technologists advocating for open technology, it's humanity-defeating and just a fucking strawman.

The technologists are complaining about abusive designs that manipulate people by making the path of least resistance the one that, for example, destroys the concept of privacy.

When you respond to that with "well not everybody needs to understand everything," What you're actually saying is "It's OK for people to be MANIPULATED into maintaining their ignorance."

These companies have worked very hard to create a culture where computers are magic boxes to most people, so the vast majority of users remain vulnerable. You're not countercultural for thinking that's a good thing. You're a fucking mark.

Not all new businesses are startups!

"Startup" only refers to new businesses that depend on investment and hyper-growth to eventually sell out to someone with even deeper pockets. In a startup, the company itself is the product. Customers are just part of the sale.

I like a term I heard from @aral for the other kind of small business though: stayup.

https://mastodon.ar.al/@aral/110916819655456408

A stayup isn't looking for an exit and may not even need investors. The product is the product, and a stayup just wants to keep existing so the product can keep existing for its customers too.

Latest comic: Self-parodic Sages

#gender #racism #transgender #media #feminism #patriarchy

@kathhayhoe I'm a little ethically wary of assignments that say "you *must* use AI to generate something and then evaluate it". If I were a student, I might be worried about the environmental impact of AI services, and/or the theft of intellectual property that went into creating them (opinions may vary on whether using them makes one complicit in this). Do you think there's a way to navigate this, or is Bartleby the Scrivener rare enough that he's not worth considering?

Yesterday, the best news which has ever come out during my lifetime, did. There's going to finally be an HIV cure. It's a ways down the road, but this all but guarantees it.

https://medicalxpress.com/news/2023-08-treatment-based-gene-safely-effectively.html

Here's the original paper explaining what was done in detail. Again, it's going to be a few more years before this is on the shelf, but there's finally hope for the end of HIV.

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41434-023-00410-4

Here's one of the two papers where the technology germinated about a decade ago. Note that the last paper was SIV instead of HIV, but it's such a good model, it almost always translates to humans.

https://www.nature.com/articles/nbt.2647

Here's the other one. If you don't like reading original source materials like this, or want to read the first announcement with the details on the good news, I'll sum up...

https://www.nature.com/articles/nbt.2623

This is a gene therapy which inactivates HIV/SIV by entering the virus itself and editing the genome. This is cool in and of itself, but it is meaningful because it does a thing called "draining the viral reservoir". This is what makes it a cure and not just a treatment.

The reason why you can only suppress, and not eradicate viruses, is because they will go into a dormant state and hang out for years and then re-deploy, and you're back where you started.

This is why, as amazing as antivirals are, you're generally stuck taking them forever.

This is also why Sovaldi is such a big deal: it actually *cures* Hepatitis C, which previously was only treatable. You take it (along with other things) for twelve weeks, and at the end you are free of the virus. This is a first. No other cures for viruses exist.

And now there's a method to drain the viral reservoir and inactivate HIV. And this isn't just the best news of my lifetime, but it also paves the way for therapies to cure Hep B, and any number of others.

I am so excited, so happy, so hopeful.

✨💖✨