Old Fucking Punk @lwriemen@librem.one

Today is the release of JUSTICE WARRIORS: VOTE HARDER, an election thriller for our deranged times.

I'm very proud of it, but do not listen to the blurbs below—Please do your own research by purchasing wherever books are sold!

Democrats have embraced the neocons and Republicans are denouncing the military-industrial complex. This is not good territory for a left that binds itself to party politics.

https://www.theamericanconservative.com/the-real-realignment-2/

Quick reminder that Immigrants Are Good, Actually.
By pretty much every metric.

Call out the xenophobic bullshit.

Harris won, no doubt. T is an incompetent narcissist.

But the 'Democrat' platform is anything but progressive, except for abortion, it could have been pulled out of a (pre Trump) Republican campaign. (No wonder Cheney likes it)

Nothing on universal healthcare or education, denial on covid and public health, plenty of jingoistic imperial militarism, bragging about fracking and More Oil Than Ever, and of course, the Genocide thing.

America continues the rightward drift. ➡️

This morning, I took my wife to the hospital for routine blood tests that had been scheduled for some time. Everything was going smoothly: check-in, number, waiting room. Suddenly, everything came to a halt and shut down. I was connected to the hospital’s public Wi-Fi and noticed that my connection also went down.

Having managed a couple of similar facilities, I immediately understood what had happened. I saw the staff panicking and calling the technicians, but they quickly reorganized within 10 minutes. They managed to process everyone who already had a number and then proceeded with the others in the order of their arrival. Despite the ten-minute delay (even though people started complaining right away), they were extremely efficient.

I later confirmed that the entire booking, check-in, and queue system is “in the cloud.” The hospital experienced a connectivity interruption, and all related services stopped. The staff no longer had access to anything, so a technician sent the lists to a manager via another channel, and everything resumed manually.

For years, I’ve insisted that certain things MUST be local. The healthcare facilities I manage have all the necessary systems for the operation of the facility internally, including patient records. External services like websites, emails, etc., are secondary.

Everything essential must always be accessible locally and, in special cases, it should be possible to physically access the servers and connect directly to them, bypassing any network/switch failures.

There has been only one interruption in the past, due to human error. Today, we have redundant servers (not HA on virtualizers, but two machines running the same software with replicated databases - on separate power lines) so such an issue shouldn’t happen anymore.

Not everything can be anticipated, but history is a great teacher. The Internet connection will eventually be interrupted :-)

When it comes to the health and survival of people, there are no compromises.

#IT #Internet #Networking #Outage #Health #HA #Cloud #CloudComputing #OwnYourData

Ford wins the award for most obtuse corporation with its patent filing "for tech that listens to driver conversations to serve ads" -- and no, that was not satire.

https://therecord.media/ford-patent-application-in-vehicle-listening-advertising

Mexico enshrines right to 'adequate' food
Mexico’s new “General Law on Adequate and Sustainable Nutrition” prioritises the right to nutritious, safe, sufficient, quality, and culturally appropriate food. It also guarantees elementary school students have access to free or affordable meals at school and aims to reduce food waste. Food Politics https://buff.ly/3ZgcpW2

#ShareGoodNewsToo

Voter ID laws may restrict 210,000 trans people from voting in November - LGBTQ Nation
https://www.lgbtqnation.com/2024/09/voter-id-laws-may-restrict-210000-trans-people-from-voting-in-november/?utm_source=flipboard&utm_medium=activitypub

Posted into LGBTQ Nation @lgbtq-nation-LGBTQNation

I must say that I revile this anti-China rhetoric, painting it as the boogey-man, that Harris is also bought into. That's a huge worry.

#NeverForget the Chilean September 11th.

It was the start of the neoliberal takeover of every bit of our society, including our imaginations.

As usual, it was sponsored by the US, who wouldn't tolerate any alternative to its economic model.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1973_Chilean_coup_d%27%C3%A9tat

#allende #chile #anticapitalism

A pre-debate fundraising text made it through the filter already. Guess I'm putting my phone in the microwave early tonight.

Actually, now that I've reread the bulletin, I think Microsoft is saying that a bug caused previously installed patches to roll back. These rollbacks have already occurred, Microsoft seems to be saying, and that opens up customers to vulnerabilities that were already under active exploitation. Does this make sense, or am I crazy (or both)?

Google's AI tooling for deciding unemployment cases is a RAG that hooks into a knowledge base that includes personal history and Nevada law: https://gizmodo.com/googles-ai-will-help-decide-whether-unemployed-workers-get-benefits-2000496215

This is exactly the kind of hybrid LLM-KG model that I wrote #SurveillanceGraphs about. The threat was never just the LLMs alone, but their integration into the broader logic of surveillance capitalism. The fact that humans will review recommendations from the model is not a safeguard, but a means of generating opaque discretionary decisions under the guise of objectivity. The fact that the tools don't work is irrelevant - they respond to the needs of efficiency and plausible deniability of agency, the brokenness of the models is a feature not a bug

https://jon-e.net/surveillance-graphs/#nsf-open-knowledge-network
https://jon-e.net/surveillance-graphs/#play-this-pattern-out-across-algorithmic-governance-predictive-p

🤣 https://consequence.net/2024/09/spinal-tap-donald-trump-sex-farm/

"But you can't make local infra as resilient as the cloud!"

Pfft, I think we have a decade of proof that statement is false. Local's also faster, and cheaper, if you invest anywhere near the same resources and don't just have a revolving door of contractors.
https://mastodon.bsd.cafe/@stefano/113114055690172677

New comics section at In These Times for Midwest issue.

Kirk Anderson on "Milwaukee's Sewer Socialists" and Nate Powell on maintaining community in bleak times.

https://inthesetimes.com/article/sewer-socialists-comics-midwest

The House may again advance legislation that includes this awful bill as soon as tomorrow.

Tell your representative to oppose HR 9495 as long as it includes Section 4.

https://waysandmeans.house.gov/wp-content/uploads/2024/09/H.R.-9495-Bill-Text.pdf

Busy week for America's wettest, special boy. https://brianmcfadden.org/2024/09/06/trump-campaign-events/

Whenever I'm confronted by a Microsoftie who doesn't like me denigrating their employer... I simply point them at this: https://web.archive.org/web/20051013062449/http://www.vanwensveen.nl/rants/microsoft/IhateMS.html It's a comprehensive catalogue of (merely) their first decade of ethical and technical failures, superbly written. I salute F.W van Wensveen, whoever that is, and the ire which inspired them. Documenting their subsequent failures is let as an exercise for a team of suitably enraged younger technologies with a flair for making routine failure literary.