Old Fucking Punk @lwriemen@librem.one

As David Graeber explains, the Neo-Liberal myth that Free-Market policies will end bureaucracy, is well a Myth!

This winter break I've been putting in a bit more work on Cavern, my social journaling protocol. It's time to make the journal structure less helpful to an attacker, and turn the publishing algorithm from a slightly goofy proof-of-concept into something streamlined and efficient. Also I've just been getting the protocol docs into better shape for anyone who will review them.

https://www.brainonfire.net/blog/2024/12/27/cavern-devlog-dec-2024/

"A week ago, It’s Going Down published a statement announcing that we were putting this project on hiatus after ten years. Tired and burned out, we were gambling our absence wouldn’t be missed. In short, the response from readers, friends, and long time collaborators was overwhelming and clear: many feel this project is important and should continue. We appreciate all of the incredibly kind words and those who took the time to reach out to us.

With this encouragement in mind, we have decided to continue publishing at It’s Going Down and operating the platform for the near future. Going forward, we want to focus on quality over quantity and also attempt to cultivate again a culture of report-backs and movement journalism as we go into the second Trump period. We also realize that this isn’t 2017 anymore; the site may be updated less as it has been in the past.

Life, finds a way. So will we. See you soon."

https://itsgoingdown.org/going-forward-an-update-from-the-editors/

Planes, boats, political parties, economies, societies -- the front is falling off all of it.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3m5qxZm_JqM

#LLMs are a fucking scourge. Perceiving their training infrastructure as anything but a horrific all-consuming parasite destroying the internet (and wasting real-life resources at a grand scale) is delusional.

#ChatGPT isn't a fun toy or a useful tool, it's a _someone else's_ utility built with complete disregard for human creativity and craft, mixed with malicious intent masquerading as "progress", and should be treated as such.

https://pod.geraspora.de/posts/17342163

#luigimangione

Can we have many more Luigi moments, without death?

https://eu.usatoday.com/story/money/2016/09/21/mylan-ceo-heather-bresch-epipen-congress-house-testimony/90773250/

Mylan CEO Heather Bresch, the drug dealer that sells the EpiPen allergy-reaction injector defended the company's six-fold price increases in congressional testimony, painting the lifesaving treatment as less profitable than it might appear.

Well, I got downsized today

Anyone got leads for a trans girl with 10+ years at one shop (rare these days!) as a programmer/systems analyst with xp in ssrs, cognos, Crystal business reporting, database design, ERP software, WordPress, webdev, "wearing many hats" as my old boss liked to say

Near IA/IL but very willing to work remote. Prev salary ~$100k/yr

I'll have to set up a new LinkedIn with my new name

#work #programmer #trans

#Bumblebee population increases 116 times over in remarkable #Scotland #rewilding project https://www.scotsman.com/hays-way/bumblebee-population-increases-116-times-over-in-remarkable-scotland-project-4882622

"in 2021, when some of the fields managed by the project were still barley monoculture, only 35 #bumblebees were counted. But by 2023, after just two years of #NatureRestoration work in the same fields, the population increased to 4,056. The diversity of bumblebee also doubled from five to ten different species."

@lightweight @os_sci @strypey @element governments should go further and have a long term vision that require all their software to be free/libre to invest directly in development, customization, and support—not in marketing, business expansion, or dividends for investors

Plus this would retain the freedom to move to a different service provider if the current one no longer fits their needs.

And of course software obsolescence, sovereignty, security, education...

ProPublica are good people doing important work. They're looking for a data integration engineer: https://boards.greenhouse.io/propublica/jobs/4428186006

I've railed against this issue for decades... good thing that it's finally being investigated. https://www.propublica.org/article/ftc-investigating-microsoft-antitrust-cloud-computing #Microsoft #Unethical

 Mike Macgirvin 🖥️ wrote the following post Wed, 25 Dec 2024 13:22:39 -0800 @Streams

Happy December 25th to folks on the far side of the international date line.

A new setting is available on your Display Settings page.  What this optional setting does is remove all comments from your channel home page, so that your channel appears to be "just a single-user blog" to outsiders. What it doesn't look like is a "social network" which might be subject to new overly-restrictive UK laws.

Insiders will note that it is still a fully functional consent-based fediverse node with nomadic identity, permissions, and fine-grained conversation restrictions (media access, post audience, and replies).

The streams repository does not encourage breaking laws. It does provide a number of online safety tools so that you have a wide range of options; should you find some day that you require them.

@Mike Macgirvin 🖥️

Slavery has a new format: "convict leasing" -- https://apnews.com/article/prison-to-plate-inmate-labor-investigation-alabama-3b2c7e414c681ba545dc1d0ad30bfaf5

If you've never donated to Wikipedia, now's the time. Elon Musk is attacking it because it's one of the only sources of honest, curated information that he can't control.

https://www.newsweek.com/elon-musk-takes-aim-wikipedia-fund-raising-editing-political-woke-2005742

"The dispute panel argues that Mexico’s provisions against GMO corn cannot "be applied as they are not based on an adequate risk assessment, scientific evidence or relevant international standards." This is despite the mountains of evidence from peer-reviewed literature the Mexican government provided showing ample cause for concern about the risks of consuming GM corn & the residues of the herbicide glyphosate — most commonly known as Roundup — that often come with it."
https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2024/12/with-help-of-usmca-biden-administration-strikes-decisive-blow-against-mexican-food-sovereignty-health-and-global-biodiversity.html

iio-sensor-proxy 3.6-RC1 is just released! Just in time before Christmas! 🥳🥳🥳
Me and @agx took over the maintenance from @hadessuk a while back and this is our first release.
This release is packed with many nice features and bugfixes! If all turns out well, we will tag a final 3.6 release soon.

https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/hadess/iio-sensor-proxy/-/releases/3.6-RC1

#sensors #Linux #linuxmobile

Something happened yesterday that I found quite interesting. A music festival posted an update on Instagram and Facebook, using an AI generated image.

The backlash was immediate and fierce, so much so that they subsequently deleted the post. What I find interesting is that I don't think people in the Gen AI bubble (just take a look around LinkedIn) have any idea just how deeply hated this stuff is, especially by people even vaguely aligned with any creative industries.

And it's not just the creators themselves (writers, artists, musicians) who strongly object to its use, but also, and in this case even more so, the people consuming that art and content, which is a fair size of the population.

Happy Xmas, and keep away from those AI image generators! 😁

"voters" are not a coherent agent, have radically diverse interests, no means of being held accountable in common. constituted as "voters" we are a phenomenon, not an agent, no more constructive to blame than a lightning strike. if our behavior should change, then our institutions must.

The positive side-effect is that we have plenty of storage now.

(The numbers are slightly blowed up, because we temporarily had to add more disks than strictly necessary for the migration to succeed. They will be repurposed afterwards.)

https://kolektiva.media/w/ccUP5A5W4uVrr2rYT9AK9z

Wishing you a happy holidays and a riotous 2025!

❤️ The Crew at subMedia