Old Fucking Punk @lwriemen@librem.one

So far in 2024, journalists in the U.S. have faced numerous violations, including:

Assault: 55
Arrest/criminal charge: 39
Equipment damage: 18
Subpoena/legal order: 7
Other incident: 7
Chilling statement: 6
Prior restraint: 6
Denial of access: 5

https://pressfreedomtracker.us

Blocking everyone who posts AI art, starting now. I can't take it any more. I understand that I'm part of a species, a good portion of whom would gladly see their ecosystem burn to ash so long as they get to play with the new toy - and another which thinks they are great intellects for defending said stupidity - but I'm sick of having it shoved in my face all day.

I’ve been a weirdo all my life, and I really enjoy the fact that it makes me different, and I really hate the fact that they’re trying to make the term Weirdo into a bad thing.

I think instead of saying "voting for the President," we should say, "voting for who gets to take the bribes." You know, just for the sake of clarity.

A project of @freedomofpress, the Tracker has documented nearly 2,000 incidents across nearly a dozen categories, affecting more than 1,300 journalists and news organizations across the U.S.

We’ve also published more than 150 in-depth analyses.

https://pressfreedomtracker.us/blog/

Nick Estes, et al.: “All land is Native, and all settler towns and cities are bordertowns. There is no ‘rural’ or ‘urban’, no ‘Rez’ or ‘city’; there is only the bordertown. The border exists everywhere settler order confronts Native order. Everything in a settler world is a border.

Our persistent survival is the primary contradiction and the unresolvable crisis of settler colonialism. Settlers enforce the logic of border towns to overcome this contradiction. This is their primary job and the essence of their existence as settlers. They are born vigilantes in the making, taught to fear Native people and to see Native society as a threat. These are the conditions that give life to the violence of settler society.

The Indian must be eliminated for no other reason than that we represent an alternative political order, one that precedes settler society and that holds within it the destruction of settler reality.”

Read more in Red Nation Rising: From Bordertown Violence to Native Liberation, which Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz (author of An Indigenous Peoples' History of the United States) said "may be the most important organizing manual ever produced by a social movement in the United States." https://pmpress.org/index.php?l=product_detail&p=1143

#books #bookstodon #native #indigenous #liberation

LB (which y'all may or may not be able to see) is an important thread by the admin of Ursal.Zone explaining how that instance got onto a bunch of blocklists basically over a personal misunderstanding between her and the admin of another instance that could have been talked out and resolved. People are talking a lot about blocklists lately, and most of the instances on them probably deserve to be there, but there has to be some mechanism for instances to get off blocklists as well!

@petersuber @ronent @brembs
In defense of economists, the vast majority of us actually agree that a more socialized, cooperative society would be far better, not only for the average person's wellbeing, but in terms of overall productivity and progress. Pure market capitalism has a bunch of problems that are well understood, and talked about in textbooks and papers with zero hesitation, and yes, regulations and restructuring would definitely lead to better results. These are scientific facts that the majority of us agree on.

It is the same issue as with global warming: the majority of researchers, the real scientists making objective and reasonable conclusions, are all in agreement. It's a small minority with a politically convenient message, driven by ideology and not data, that is getting pushed to the forefront billionaires and politicians, to try and give their policies credibility.

I was wondering if I could auto translate my German Radio Irrtum! radio show manuscripts into English (not that I couldn't do this by myself – it just takes up far too much time).

But not by uploading these manuscripts to Google Translate, Deep Learning or whatever – no, I don't want to upload my own intellectual property to companies, who do whatever they like to do with it… basically to companies I can't trust, and furthermore using LLMs that were trained by dubious material or under cruel conditions. That trust wouldn't even come back, if I'd pay for their tools.
I mention the latter because all of those online services have a size limit about how many chars I can pour into it at once or other barriers when using the free version.

So I was looking for something, I could use…

- locally on my device even without internet access
- that is Open Source
- works on Linux

And yes! There are options! And the best one seems to be (as far as I am aware)...

translateLocally

This is a MIT licensed QT6 application with a very simplistic but very efficient user interface utilizing AI models from the Bergamot project that itself uses the Mozilla Public License 2.0 and is created by European universities and also funded by the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation program.

That sounds very solid and fair to me – I just hope, those 2 different Open Source licenses don't clash with each other (I'm no expert here).

But the main question remains: Hows the quality?

Amazingly good! Far better than LibreTranslate in terms of translation quality and grammar. More or less on paar with Google Translate, I'd say. At least for my use case (German → English). And also SUPER FAST. I use exclusively AMD Ryzen/Threadripper CPUs with Linux at my home (yes; this application only uses the CPU, no graphics unit necessary) – so I cannot provide much of a comparison. But a 23 KB (23.000 chars) manuscript (txt/md format) was translated in less than half a second on my 8 core Threadripper from 2019. So there shouldn't much of senseless energy consumption happen: My CPU fan didn't even flinch! Totally different than, lets say when using a PS3 emulator with a demanding game (the fan switches to vacuum cleaner acoustics then).

If you are interested: Here are the sources (I've compiled the AUR version for Arch Linux - basically upstream):

- translateLocally: https://github.com/XapaJIaMnu/translateLocally/tree/master
- Bergamot: https://browser.mt/

#translation #foss

Whatever went wrong at #CrowdStrike was just a spark. Last month it ignited the powder keg of digital monocultures. https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2024/07/crowdstrike-antitrust-and-digital-monoculture
#FTC #antitrust

Dear Forgejo #admins,

In case you missed it in the release notes, we invite you to our #UpgradeParty to upgrade, set up (and fix in worst-case) our instances together with other #Forgejo admins and contributors.

Join us this Friday at 18.00 CEST / 16.00 UTC. Find all details in the Codeberg Event Calendar: https://codeberg.codeberg.page/Events/events/2024/08-02-forgejo-upgrade-party/

If you have events from your communities to share, feel free to also send them to the Codeberg Event Calendar (see https://codeberg.codeberg.page/Events/events/2024/ for examples like the #Forgejo #UpgradeParty tomorrow).

Just propose a patch to https://codeberg.org/Codeberg/Events/

A tribe once declared ‘extinct’ helps reintroduce salmon to the Columbia River

https://news.mongabay.com/2024/07/a-tribe-once-declared-extinct-help-reintroduce-salmon-to-the-columbia-river/

liberals hate poor people more than fascists and then wonder why poor people don’t vote

(Reminder that teeth are luxury bones in the US and no one has dental health issues by choice)

We all agree that the SEC's “gag rule” is an egregious violation of the First Amendment, writes Seth Stern.

https://thehill.com/opinion/4801358-sec-gag-rule-free-speech/

I'm old school, I judge politicians based on their voting records, not their insults.

https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2024/08/how-kamala-harris-sold-out-struggling-homeowners-to-save-banks-in-2012-and-then-lied-about-it.html

To #EU citizens, please sign the petition to forbid intellectual property owners from destroying sold items. The foot in the door here is always-online #games which stop working:

https://www.stopkillinggames.com/eci

https://citizens-initiative.europa.eu/initiatives/details/2024/000007

#righttorepair #ReverseEngineering

And this in the same week the Senate votes near unanimously for an anti-LGBT bill, and right after we had a genocidal maniac give a speech to Congress.

It's fucking clown shoes. Disgraceful.

When I talk about capitalism collapsing under the weight of the climate catastrophe, I mean things like this:

“Insurers providing policies to homeowners were hit with a $15.2 billion net underwriting loss last year, according to figures from rating agency AM Best, saying that the figure was the worst since at least 2000 and more than double the losses since the previous year.”

https://www.reuters.com/business/finance/us-home-insurers-suffer-biggest-loss-century-2023-ft-says-2024-07-28/

Iris Meredith is a reader that reached out months ago about how job negotiations mysteriously break down the moment employers realize she is trans.

She's now choosing violence, has started a consultancy that does software/DEI work, and just dropped this bomb that will probably get her banned from LinkedIn.

https://deadsimpletech.com/blog/dei_original_sin

I suspect many here will appreciate it or find it thought-provoking. I've never had a trans colleague despite all my employers paying lip service 24/7.