Old Fucking Punk @lwriemen@librem.one

The Republicans denied and continued to deny climate change for decades. Two weeks ago, 82 of them refused to vote new money for FEMA. DeSantis refused to take calls from the White House about emergency aid for Florida. And GOP leader Mike Johnson refuses to call Congress back into session to vote for more disaster aid.
The GOP will do anything to make it look like the government doesn't work, including sabotaging it.
Vote Blue.

I’m looking for a software engineer to join my team at the Internet Archive. We work mostly Pacific hours but are fully and forever remote (we do have a lovely SF HQ if you're in the neighborhood). Our department uses Python, Django, Temporal.io, Postgres, and some in-house database technologies to build web archiving and other digital preservation services for over 1000 partner cultural heritage and memory institutions.

https://app.trinethire.com/companies/32967-internet-archive/jobs/99996-software-engineer-archiving-data-services-remote

NBC News demonstrates standard Big Journalism timidity when it says it "appears" that Musk's mother encouraged voting fraud (by Republicans, of course).

Here's what she posted at the deadbird site:

"You don’t have to register to vote. On Election Day, have 10 fake names, go to 10 polling booths and vote 10 times. That’s 100 votes, and it’s not illegal. Maybe we should work the system too."

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/elon-musks-mom-hit-with-blunt-community-note-on-x-after-encouraging-voter-fraud/ar-AA1rP1Zm

Congrats to @molly0xfff who is now impossible to find on Meta Threads.

Ecovacs robot vacuums, which have been found to suffer from critical #cybersecurity flaws, are collecting photos, videos and voice recordings – taken inside customers' houses – to train the company's #ai models.

#technology #privacy

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2024-10-05/robot-vacuum-deebot-ecovacs-photos-ai/104416632?utm_campaign=abc_news_web&utm_content=link&utm_medium=content_shared&utm_source=abc_news_web

In today's Help Desk, Mark is being petty:

https://www.eviscerati.org/comics/hd/2024/10/mysterious-phone-call/

If human civilization survives the climate crisis, historians will look back at a facility that throws away 300MW of energy as heat, 24/7, by burning fossil fuels (which also generates waste heat) in order to participate in a tulip craze, and be unable to fathom what we were thinking.
https://mastodon.social/@arstechnica/113266437383175019

I just got a call from the "Consumer Theft Agency" letting me know that they just got a report about me from TransUnion and they wanted to let me know about their debt consolidation options. 😄

Looks like scammers are putting my "liberated" SSN to good use...

"When Donald Trump started telling conspicuous lies about the federal response to Hurricane Helene, all of MAGA understood the assignment.

His supporters understood they should spread rumors or fabricate anecdotes consistent with Trump’s claims. They should portray their own confusion as government malice or incompetence."

~ Brian Beutler

#Trump #lies #disinformation #hurricane #Helene #fascism
/8

https://www.offmessage.net/p/maga-hurricane-helene-lies-trial-run-election

Among other things, Firestorm has been operating as a distribution hub for relief supplies. With roads impassable, these supplies initially came from our homes and the refrigerators or garages of neighbors. On Sunday, the first deliveries—water, food, sanitary products, and baby supplies—arrived in cars and vans driven by folks from South Carolina. No one called ahead (they couldn’t), but somehow we weren’t surprised.

Within a day, our distro was widely known. Elders evacuating with pets brought dog food and a farmer dropped off crates of fresh veggies. Folks living on our street—some of whom we were meeting for the first time—filled bags and offered one another support. The size of deliveries grew from sedans to U-Hauls and individuals from Deaverview and Pisgah View Apartments, public housing close to our co-op, began running loops to acquire necessities for neighbors. Unlike official distribution sites, no one was limiting what people could take, allowing folks to organically extend the supply lines from Firestorm into communities that were otherwise being overlooked.

Running a distro site requires a lot of human power: folks to unload trucks, to organize inventory, to portion and repackage supplies, to restock tables and manage trash, bilingual folks to answer questions and assist with specific needs, and “runners” to fill requests. We’re fortunate to have an incredible group that’s come back day after day; and each day, our systems have gotten a little better.

After some initial confusion (one person asked if *we* were FEMA!), participants clearly understood the idea of a mutual aid hub. Two women who had picked up food and water the day before returned with big boxes of sándwiches de carne, explaining that they wanted to give back. This pattern has repeated, over and over, with individuals taking what they need and contributing what they can. At the same time, we also rely on the distro to meet our own needs for food, water, and other essentials, subverting the binary of aid recipient and provider.

In the words of Mutual Aid Disaster Relief, we’ve found ourselves and our community co-creating “solidarity, not charity.”

Here is a tool to annotate PO translation files using LibreTranslate, so that project maintainers can make sure the human-provided translations look plausible, even when they don't speak the target languages.

https://codeberg.org/a-j-wood/po-translation-auto-assistant

I developed this to be able to vet submitted translations for Pipe Viewer and other projects, to have some confidence that the submitter understood each string they translated in the context I'd intended, and to limit the likelihood of malicious mistranslations or vandalism.

It relies on LibreTranslate, but the project README outlines how to quickly install that on your local machine.

The project is hosted on the @Codeberg platform and was developed with their Translathon (https://codeberg.org/codeberg/translathon-2024) in mind.

#FOSS #FLOSS #Translation #i18n

California Gov. Newsom is definitely not the progressive he claims to be.

This is disappointingly clear in his rejection of a law that would have -- very modestly -- restrained some of the worst behavior of the "private equity" and "hedge fund" financial manipulators who are looting so many industries and communities.

Biden has been vastly better on this all recent presidents. Where does Harris stand?

https://prospect.org/health/2024-10-04-democrats-serious-about-stopping-private-equity/

@mattblaze Let me guess: "You say voting machines are insecure and a bad idea. Swivel eyed loons on the far right say voting machines are insecure and a bad idea. Therefore, you are giving aid and comfort to the swivel eyed loons. If Fox News says voting machines are bad, then our duty, as their enemy, is to insist that voting machines are *awesome*."

Sociologists call this "schismogenesis" - the reactionary definition of a group's ethos as "the opposite of that other group's ethos."

Latest comic on Big Tech's climate hypocrisy

#climate #climatechange #climatecrisis #tech #technology #ai #energy #cartoon

Oh yeah, the other glasses-related thing I did today was download the Brazilian voter registration app to check that my polling place for tomorrow hadn't changed, and it required a biometric face scan, which, fine, and asked me to take my glasses off, which...fine...and then gave further instructions on the screen.........???

DO YOU PEOPLE NOT UNDERSTAND THE PROBLEM HERE?!

Every fucking face recognition thing does this. WHY?! 😡🤦‍♀️💀 #a11y

Topics in the latest edition of my "Cornerstone of democracy" newsletter -- a compendium of the best of political reporting/commentary (and more) -- include:

-- A (legally) rigged system
-- Trump world sleaze, exhibit 11,330:
-- All lies, all the time
-- Optimism from Michael Moore

I curate to save you time. Please subscribe (it's free), and let other folks know about it.

https://cornerstone.ghost.io/essentials-october-4-2024/

@kotaro
Well, apparently the non-profit OpenAI has a for-profit subsidiary, which is what gets the investors. But if the for-profit is an asset of the OpenAI non-profit, then ownership of the for-profit entity would need to transfer to some other non-profit when the OpenAI non-profit "converts" to a for-profit, in order to keep with what I understand to be basic non-profit rules. The IRS has forseen this strategy and barred it, was my understanding.

Can someone please explain to me how a non-profit entity (like OpenAI) can convert to a for-profit company. Usually when a non-profit ceases to exist, its assets must be donated to another mission-aligned non-profit. So how are they getting around this fundamental aspect of (US) non-profit regulation? Anyone?

Copyrightus Infringio! Public library ends Harry Potter-themed child literacy program after legal threat from Warner Brothers - https://boingboing.net/2024/10/05/public-library-ends-harry-potter-themed-child-literacy-program-after-legal-threat-from-warner-brothers.html gotta get your priorities right... #copyrightmadness