Old Fucking Punk @lwriemen@librem.one

Grotesque abuse of power by a Georgia sheriff who arrests a woman because her 10-year-old son walked unsupervised from home into a small town.

https://reason.com/2024/11/11/mom-jailed-for-letting-10-year-old-walk-alone-to-town/

A friend of mine with a vision impairment can't drive and relies on cycling & bussing (with her bike) to get kids to school & to get to work. This blanket nationwide ban on 'bikes-on-busses' seems like a major overreaction.https://www.rnz.co.nz/news/national/533273/blame-bandied-about-in-bike-rack-bus-ban-blow-up Anyone know what we can do to overturn it urgently?! It has essentially ruined my friend's family life and employment policies.

#CycleAdvocacy

Sorry, it's pretty damn clear that #RocketLab is not an honourable actor here. https://www.rnz.co.nz/news/national/533616/rocket-lab-us-headquarters-threatens-nz-academic-with-defamation-action
The people of Mahia granted them access to their launch site on the basis of a promise not to aid US military activities. They almost immediately betrayed that trust: https://northandsouth.co.nz/2021/03/14/rocket-lab-military/ We need to stop celebrating RocketLab - they're not even an NZ company any more.

So apparently come November 15 Twitter/X has decided that it will use your tweets to train AI, no opt-out. I am in the process of deleting my entire twitter history, after which I guess I'll finally be closing out my account.

#libobscura is going through the final crunch... I mean, touches, before release.

I just realized the project page and the #readme are like continuous announcement posts. For some people, it's going to be the first contact with your work, so tell them;

- are they the intended audience?
- how do they benefit from this?
- where is the project going?
- how far along is it?
- how to try it out?

/me goes back to rewriting

#project #marketing #opensource

Beginning to believe that @Gargron doesn't want me contributing to #mastodon — he's now partially recreated three of my pull requests that I've worked on.

My PRs didn't ship because I needed feedback from the team who were busy.

Like, I'm happy to spend the time and money to contribute to Mastodon, but it's horrifically rude to just redo someone's work when they've put a tonne of work into doing something.

He's also done this to me in the past in 2018 with the report management tools.

We are looking for #hardwareDonations:

If anyone has old servers, drives and equipment and shipping to/in Germany is not a problem, we appreciate your offers.

If you work for a company, we could eventually figure out donation receipts, too.

(Target location is Berlin, pickup in vicinity is not a problem)

Specifically, we could currently make use of SFF-8643 or SFF-8087 cables, if you have some spare 😉

#server #hardware

Great news everyone! I've outright threaten vehicular violence against some of the consultancies I've worked alongside!

https://ludic.mataroa.blog/blog/why-i-will-always-be-angry-about-software-engineering/

I have been trying to disentangle myself from Google services as much as possible, but there are two use cases I am having trouble with: Maps to quickly find business opening hours and contact info & Translate, especially for Catalan and just long texts in general. I'd appreciate some input!

I love #OpenStreetMaps, and it does increasingly include the names of businesses. But that quick click to see whether they are open, link to their website, check if the menu has vegetarian options is missing. Suggestions?

I know there are some alternatives to Google translate. DeepL does great with Spanish, but doesn't have Catalan. [I don't rely on these for communication but there are scenarios in which I like to double check that I didn't miss something or that I am using an adequately colloquial phrase]. I also don't know if the alternatives’s data policies and such are much better. Does anyone have any insight?

Down the line I might like to build up the courage to switch to LineageOS or similar. If anyone wants to talk to me about that I'd be open to it as well.

(I also feel like there must be some hashtags for folks trying to dump Google, but I have no idea what they might be.)

Research into the effects of social media is being skewed by social media itself.

https://theconversation.com/is-big-tech-harming-society-to-find-out-we-need-research-but-its-being-manipulated-by-big-tech-itself-240110

The research I referred to. The technical term is "automation bias".

https://www.brainfacts.org/neuroscience-in-society/tech-and-the-brain/2024/why-ai-can-push-you-to-make-the-wrong-decision-at-work-090324

in an op-ed the New York Times declined to publish, Sanders sets forth a vision:

"While Democrats will be in the minority in the Senate and (probably) the House in the new Congress, they will still have the opportunity to bring forth a strong legislative agenda that addresses the needs of working families.

If Republicans choose to vote those bills down, the American working class will learn quickly enough as to which party represents them, and which party represents corporate greed."

#EPA staff fear #Trump will destroy how it protects Americans from pollution - https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2024/nov/11/environmental-protection-agency-staff-react-trump-second-term "Workers face being targets in what could be Environmental Protection Agency’s biggest upheaval since its founding" guaranteed, I would have thought...

I heard this term mentioned by one of the hosts of the excellent "If Books Could Kill" podcast (when talking about Sam Bankman-Fried, who's like the quintessential case of this), and my god does it clearly define something I've been needing a term for since forever. This phenomenon explains like half of what's wrong with the world today.

If you write an article whose title starts "I asked an AI..." you are a terrible writer and should just hang it up now. You're out of ideas. We get it. We're not judging, but please, for the love of all that is holey, just stop.

The long shadow of the Great Financial Crisis is still darkening people's lives. I have undying enmity for everyone who played a part in that travesty.

https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2024/11/bank-servicers-whittling-away-at-hard-won-protections-against-foreclosure-abuses-the-maine-example.html

We often hear a familiar refrain: “you don’t have an expectation of privacy in public.” This is not true. In the United States, you do have some expectation of privacy—even in public—and it’s important to stand up and protect that right. https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2024/09/you-really-do-have-some-expectation-privacy-public

The life of posts “Social posts die with the passage of time, whereas blog posts gain life from it!” https://blog.jim-nielsen.com/2024/blog-vs-social-posts/

@cogdog This is probably true because blog posts are found (after the initial rush of subscriptions) by search, while social media posts are found via the algorithm.

The danger, of course, is that eventually search will be completely replaced by the algorithm. This has already happened for a lot of people who live their lives in Facebook, Twitter or LinkedIn.

I'm not exactly sure why, but Hubzilla doesn't seem to (consistently?) notify me when people "like" my posts, or perhaps when people "like" the comments I leave on other people's posts.

Hubzilla *does* notify me when people leave new comments on "conversations" (that's "threads" to Mastodon users) that I've interacted with previously.  Like, when I've commented on someone else's post and then a third person also comments on the same post.

The resulting experience is.... kind of pleasant actually.