Old Fucking Punk @lwriemen@librem.one

@ct_bergstrom when my boss talks about using AI for things like writing help desk articles or training documentation, he caveats "of course it has to be reviewed." & what I don't say back (because it would hurt my credibility) is 'but we WON'T review it.'

Because I know we won't. It just won't happen. We'll create the help desk articles & they'll go up & people will get wrong info from them & we'll never know because they'll either just work around the errors or fail & never tell us.

I knew @FreeScholar had been in a punk band, but much to my shame I never bothered to look them up. Thankfully, that oversight has now been rectified.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4i7dlmxasyo

[The Black Punk Pioneer Boston Forgot]
https://disappearingmedia.substack.com/p/the-black-punk-pioneer-boston-forgot

The idea of human beings as rational utility-maximizing particles with insatiable hedonic desires is very much the product of an ideological project to justify capitalism as “natural” and has virtually no relationship to how actual human beings live but a lot of people have genuinely internalized it.

Trying to derive “human nature” by observing people under capitalist modernity is like looking at a bored, depressed wolf obsessively pacing a circle in a tiny zoo enclosure and concluding that this is “wolf nature.”

I'm using Google podcasts until the last possible second. Will I learn and stop using their always abandoned apps? Of course not. I'm stupid.

The Flea Marketplace of Ideas, where the dustbins of history are some neonazi's treasure. https://www.dailykos.com/story/2024/3/22/2230862/-Cartoon-Flea-marketplace-of-ideas

#Coffee drinkers have much lower risk of bowel #cancer recurrence, study finds - https://www.theguardian.com/society/2024/mar/23/coffee-drinkers-much-lower-risk-bowel-cancer-recurrence-study "those who drank at least two cups daily had a lower risk of dying compared with those who did not. " fab news, but more research needed

We just had our first “go-around and report on your grad worker” session. I declined to report. #BUGradWorkerStrike

A newly discovered vulnerability baked into Apple’s M-series of chips allows attackers to extract secret keys from Macs when they perform widely used cryptographic operations, academic researchers have revealed in a paper published Thursday.

The flaw—a side channel allowing end-to-end key extractions when Apple chips run implementations of widely used cryptographic protocols—can’t be patched directly because it stems from the microarchitectural design of the silicon itself. Instead, it can only be mitigated by building defenses into third-party cryptographic software that could drastically degrade M-series performance when executing cryptographic operations, particularly on the earlier M1 and M2 generations. The vulnerability can be exploited when the targeted cryptographic operation and the malicious application with normal user system privileges run on the same CPU cluster.

https://arstechnica.com/security/2024/03/hackers-can-extract-secret-encryption-keys-from-apples-mac-chips/

In which @joshtpm reminds us why Letitia James isn’t going to seize Trump Tower.

Trump doesn’t own it.

https://talkingpointsmemo.com/edblog/we-have-met-the-enemy-and-he-owns-the-valet-booth-at-trump-tower/sharetoken/3jTLuWi6kWgZ

While responding to a ShotSpotter alert, a Chicago police officer opened fire on an unarmed child in his backyard lighting fireworks. https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2024/03/responding-shotspotter-police-shoot-child-lighting-fireworks

“If House members were really concerned about privacy, there wouldn’t be much of an obstacle to… having a (comprehensive data privacy) bill on the floor, being debated, being worked on," EFF’s @davidgreene told The National Desk. But that's not happening. https://thenationaldesk.com/news/americas-news-now/congress-is-focusing-on-the-wrong-problem-with-tiktok-bill-experts-warn-data-collection-bytedance-privacy-expert-data-bought-sold-corporations-freedon-of-expression-ccp-china-foreign-adversaries-third-party-brokers

📩 ‘National security’ claims don’t trump First Amendment https://freedom.press/newsletter/national-security-claims-dont-trump-first-amendment/

... because Wayland is a LOT better after a clean install. (well... semi-clean. Like I said, I keep my /home directory).

There is still some flickering, but it's a lot less. A lot. Which means I may need to flip over to x11 if I want to play a few games on my laptop but for the most part I think I do my work in Wayland with few issues.

OK, an important addendum to above, always remember until further notice that upgrading KDE Neon is never smooth and it's always better to just do clean installs when moving from one version to the next. That's why I have /home on a separate partition - it keeps my individual app configurations untouched, so when I reinstall applications I just pick up where I left off.

It looks like _most_ of my Wayland issues had to do with KDE Neon not upgrading smoothly from KDE 5.27 to 6.x...

Obvious Firefox is the answer, but if you need a different engine at times, at least use a Debian-based Chromium...

From the latest upload to sid:
"disable/screen-ai-blob.patch: add patch to not register the ScreenAI component. Previously, if you opened a PDF and clicked "open in reader mode", it would download a binary blob to ~/.config/chromium/screen_ai/, and do OCR stuff (and who knows what else) in that opaque blob without warning you. We, uh, don't want that."

https://tracker.debian.org/news/1514077/accepted-chromium-1230631258-1-source-into-unstable/

General Motors has stopped sharing details about how people drive its cars with data brokers that created risk profiles for the insurance industry.

The decision followed a New York Times report this month that G.M. had, for years, been sharing data about drivers’ mileage, braking, acceleration and speed with the insurance industry. The drivers were enrolled — some unknowingly, they said — in OnStar Smart Driver, a feature in G.M.’s internet-connected cars that collected data about how the car had been driven and promised feedback and digital badges for good driving.

Some drivers said their insurance rates had increased as a result of the captured data, which G.M. shared with two brokers, LexisNexis Risk Solutions and Verisk. The firms then sold the data to insurance companies.

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/03/22/technology/gm-onstar-driver-data.html

@kashhill doing the lord's work.

Unsafe at any speed, even if you're on lots of speed yourself. https://brianmcfadden.org/2024/03/15/the-tesla-death-trap/

“For 30 years, they’ve been complaining about problems at the border, and for 30 years, surveillance has been touted as the answer,” EFF’s Dave Maass told @themarkup “It’s been 30 years of nobody saying that it’s had any impact.” https://themarkup.org/news/2024/03/22/the-future-of-border-patrol-ai-is-always-watching

The Guillotine is fun to joke about, but we really don't want to bring that kind of thinking back.

"Those who take their own powerlessness for granted assume that they can promote gruesome revenge fantasies without consequences. But if we are serious about changing the world, we owe it to ourselves to make sure that our proposals are not equally gruesome."

https://crimethinc.com/2019/04/08/against-the-logic-of-the-guillotine-why-the-paris-commune-burned-the-guillotine-and-we-should-too

Any #California public employees out there? You'll want to be paying attention to this, as #CalPERS is trying to hand your retirement savings over to Private Equity (even more than they have already).

https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2024/03/financial-times-tells-calpers-not-to-go-further-into-the-private-equity-haunted-house.html