Old Fucking Punk @lwriemen@librem.one

Finally finished Chapterhouse: Dune. Damn my brain for being a completionist, but at least I'm not sick enough to read the Brian Herbert books.

Nobody can say Joe Biden doesn't understand that supplying weapons to a country makes you complicit in their crimes.
#tower22

"My guy ardently supports genocide, but he's no fascist" is a hell of an argument.

“These towers aren’t checking people’s papers,” EFF’s Dave Maass told @CalMatters. “Just being somebody who lives on the border, whose family are on both sides of the border, doesn’t make you a criminal and shouldn’t put you under suspicion.”
https://calmatters.org/california-divide/2024/01/border-patrol-california/

The Texas Border standoff is not some isolated incident. It has to be seen in the broader context of the country falling apart.

Echoes of nullification crises and Civil War, as Republican governors are endorsing precisely the argument slave states used to justify secession.

New piece:

🧵1/

https://thomaszimmer.substack.com/p/the-texas-border-standoff-is-an-acute

One of the things a jury pool can actually do is say “no, this is too fucked up and I absolutely won’t find a Food Not Bombs volunteer ‘guilty’ of feeding people.” Pool of 15, not a single person even willing to consider it.

https://www.houstonchronicle.com/news/houston-texas/housing/article/food-not-bombs-trial-busted-jury-panel-homeless-18617041.php

How do we improve the adoption of digital security practices?

Tell a good story.

Read about our latest research ⬇️
https://freedom.press/training/blog/security-narrative-research/

This post apparently got Gary Girod banned from Xitter. He doesn’t seem to be on Mastodon yet.

More about his background — https://www.thefrenchhistorypodcast.com/about/

I visited a store with random household items the other day.

Here are the digital cables! HDMI, lightning, lots of USB-mini, -C...
but not a single one with #USB 3.0.

Wild guess: the general public only needs high speeds between the TV and receiver box. The phone never gets connected to anything but a power supply, and laptops barely exit any longer.

How wrong am I? Do laptops still exist outside of work/school? Do they do anything but browse the web?

#mobile #smartphone #web #young #tv

US: attention, Trader Joe’s shoppers, the TJ’s union wants to know how many people will support a strike of this union busting food chain.

They are *not* calling for a boycott at this time. Random boycotts only make things harder for workers (low sales can lead to layoffs). They’re asking for solidarity.

You can add your name here: https://actionnetwork.org/forms/stand-with-trader-joes-united-sign-on-in-solidarity/

#TraderJoes #union #solidarity

We Found That #Landlords Could Be Using Algorithms to Fix #Rent Prices. Now Lawmakers Want to Make the Practice Illegal.
==

After a ProPublica investigation, U.S. senators introduced a bill to curb “price fixing” linked to rent-setting software.

“Setting prices with an algorithm is no different from doing it over cigars and whiskey in a private club,” said one sponsor.

#News #Housing #Homes #Apartments #Houses

https://www.propublica.org/article/senators-introduce-legislation-stop-landlords-algorithm-price-fixing?utm_medium=social&utm_source=mastodon&utm_campaign=mastodon-post

How design fails the elderly

https://www.fastcompany.com/90338379/i-wrote-the-book-on-user-friendly-design-what-i-see-today-horrifies-me

#ux #ageism

Listen to Terry Bisson reading the entirety of The Left Left Behind, the first release in the award-winning Outspoken Authors Series he edited, recorded by Sasha Lilley at the KPFA studios.

Listen here https://blog.pmpress.org/2024/01/29/terry-bisson-reading-the-left-left-behind/

See all 30+ Outspoken Authors books https://pmpress.org/index.php?l=product_list&c=77&sortby=id:desc

@carnage4life
Save two hours writing boilerplate, spend ten hours debugging incredibly subtle bugs in production, sounds like a win!

Yea, the fact that LLMs just inherently produce "plausible" results rather than "correct" results means producing bugs that are just that much harder to spot.

We have conditioned ourselves to believe that artists, musicians, writers, inventors and creators must orient themselves as entrepreneurial go-getters - monetising their work into startups, small businesses or branded products.

The myth of the creator-entrepreneur radically narrows the complex motivations of creativity and pressures creators to view financial success as the highest marker of their worth.

https://joanwestenberg.com/blog/the-dangerous-myth-of-the-creator-entrepreneur

Inside Igalia: Scaling a Co-op Beyond 100 Members

Igalia is a tech co-op with 140 members living all over the world. Everyone makes an equal wage, no one is a boss or manager, and the goal is for everyone to be a partner. Also they've been in business for 22 years. How do they do it? Find out in this great talk by Valerie Young. [video with transcript]

https://geo.coop/articles/scaling-co-op-beyond-100-members

Microsoft is trying to get all email users, including governments, to migrate to their cloud-based solutions. This makes their email cloud _THE_ prime target for nation-state/state sponsored hackers. Yet Microsoft appears to be leaving gaping security holes in the setup of their email services: https://arstechnica.com/security/2024/01/in-major-gaffe-hacked-microsoft-test-account-was-assigned-admin-privileges/

There’s a new abolitionist Kickstarter campaign…

The Warehouse from @pmpress by James Kilgore and Victor Lu:

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/ww3/thewarehouse

#abolition #bookstodon #books

The biggest mistake venture capital funded startups make is accepting venture capital funding