Old Fucking Punk @lwriemen@librem.one

"Look people, the health insurance companies ripping everyone off and causing untold amounts of pain and death are not the problem here. The fact that a bunch of people don't share my political opinions is the real problem. Also, someone has to be in charge of rationing care, so quit your whining!" ~this guy, probably

Like wow, try reading the room before putting pen to paper 😬. This is a truly, truly terrible take.

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2024/12/luigi-mangione-manifesto-healthcare/680962/?

Joe #Biden commutes sentences of 37 out of 40 federal #deathrow inmates - https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2024/dec/23/joe-biden-death-row-inmate-sentences-commuted-clemency "The clemency action applies to all federal death row inmates except three convicted of terrorism or hate-motivated mass murder" should have commuted all of them, but at least he did something

Seeking help! No matter how many keywords/names u search related to this story the article doesn't appear on Google

This was a front page A1 story I wrote for WaPo on how smear campaigns and abuse women journalists endure are a press freedom issue. Can someone explain why the article does not appear on Google? https://www.washingtonpost.com/investigations/2023/02/14/women-journalists-global-violence/

The more I know about Spotify, the more glad I am that I don't have an account.

I still buy CDs and digital downloads (that are mine, not in someone else's control). To that end, I've supported several musicians via Patreon and Bandcamp but only when I can own what I pay for.

One reason this is easy for me is that I'm of an age where I am MUCH more fond of the music from <many> years ago than anything I'm hearing for the first time today...

"MatrixRTC isn’t just Element Call: Famedly showed off experimental interop with FluffyChat at FOSDEM back in Feb, and Element showed off experimental interop with BigBlueButton in August. Given more and more conferencing tools are converging on LiveKit as a best-in-class SFU, it’s an amazing opportunity to use Matrix and MatrixRTC to power the end-to-end-encryption and decentralisation and get standardised voip/video interop from the outset."

@matthew, Oct 2024

https://matrix.org/blog/2024/10/29/matrix-2.0-is-here/

Latest comic: How to get in the holiday spirit

I don't actually recommend slipping into unconsciousness for the next twelve years! Personally, I'm reading and trying to get around to that pie.

#comic #cartoon #holidays #authoritarianism

"Neoliberalism remains the best way to describe the political and economic order of post-1960s America. In fact, “neoliberalism” is more conceptually useful as a way to describe these conditions than it is as a definition of a coherent ideology."
https://lpeproject.org/blog/can-neoliberalism-explain-everything/

Pretty good point there about it being more a description of how things are than an ideology.
#neoliberalism

The year in unbelievable news: https://www.dailykos.com/story/2024/12/20/2292666/-Cartoon-Incredible-global-news-2024

"A study from UCSF’s Benioff Homelessness and Housing Initiative last year was one of the deepest dives into California’s crisis in decades. It found that drug use and mental health problems are not the driver behind people losing housing; the primary reason is the increasing precariousness of the working poor."

https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2024/12/the-us-embrace-of-incarceration-for-the-homeless-is-a-win-win-for-the-plutocrats.html

https://kolektiva.media/w/wfzLtwhG9nVeLHqawUFYRc

We invite you to join in organizing festivals of resistance on the weekend of January 18, immediately before Donald Trump takes office.
https://crimethinc.com/festivalsofresistance

By organizing ahead of Trump’s inauguration, we can seize the initiative and set our own timeline rather than being caught flat-footed and forced to react. We need to welcome new participants into these struggles and foster a revolutionary perspective that can orient us through the challenges ahead.

In collaboration with @CrimethInc

Taught this in a class on "ghosts in the machine" in Science Fiction, in order to supply some "real-world" ghosts and displace the hype-based idea of "AI" students are carrying around at present. Found this because one of the Internet's Great Sages, Cosma Shalizi, recommends Mitchell's writing on the subject. No surprise, I liked it; also (in hindsight) no surprise, Mitchell was Douglas R. Hofstadter's graduate student. She has a "fluid analogies" kind of perspective on intelligence, and writes well, in the popular-science mode, about developments in the field from the earliest days. Her examples of the failure modes of the various breakthrough neural nets are entertainingly compelling—and made a real impression on some of my initially AI-happy students. However, in the way of such things, some of her failure modes have since turned into (apparent) LLM successes, like Winograd schemas. She also maintains a level of calm in writing about "the Singularity" (while shredding the arguments about it) that I truly admire. Recommended for your students and/or your aggressive relations who want to tell you over the holiday table that the humanities are obsolete now.

(comment on Artificial Intelligence)

In response to a thread by @flancian, I just wrote a long rant about the value technoskepticism as applied to generative AI:
https://hub.netzgemeinde.eu/item/e3e54544-956e-4ca8-99a3-21fa999a0331

I think it might be more digestible in thread form, so I'm also transcribing it as a thread here.

(1/?)

Happy Winter Solstice to all who celebrate.

Sovereign Tech Fund Invests in OpenStreetMap

Sovereign Tech Agency (@sovtechfund) has decided to invest €384k over two years to ensure the stability, growth and modernization of OpenStreetMap’s core software.

read more: https://blog.openstreetmap.org/2024/12/20/sovereign-tech-fund-invests-in-openstreetmap/
#OpenStreetMap #OSM #Funding

Huh, looks like Google's made another attempt to ratchet up their war against ad blockers on YoutTube... now Firefox isn't playing vids with uMatrix installed, giving a 'turn off your ad blockers'... but Brave still is playing them. Interesting. Sorry Google, but I'm not gonna play along.

“We are thrilled to announce that the @openstreetmap Foundation has been selected by the @sovtechfund for a service agreement in the amount of 384,000 EUR over two years to ensure the stability, growth and modernization of OpenStreetMap’s core software.”

https://blog.openstreetmap.org/2024/12/20/sovereign-tech-fund-invests-in-openstreetmap/

#OpenSource #FreeSoftware #FOSS

🔔 Heads-up: There is currently a #phishing campaign targeting #Codeberg users.

If you receive a notification that insults you and your project for poor code quality, combined with an offer to "fix" the problems when you send some money, please ignore and report to us: Mention "@moderation" in response to the issue or forward the email to abuse@codeberg.org.

We are trying to stay ahead of the noise before the notifications are sent.

I stopped listening to the news, and instead, started listening to the Collapse of Civilizations podcast. I can barely tell the difference.

Have been reading some of Yevgenia Belorusets' work since the start of the war. Always moving, always on the edge of my own reality. This piece is about what happens when water is used as a weapon.

"this demonstration of the capacity to destroy life seeks to be a worldwide spectacle and a media phenomenon."

https://www.isolarii.com/yevgenia-belorusets/mykolaiv-in-autumn-2024