Old Fucking Punk @lwriemen@librem.one

Version 2.8.0 of Geoclue, the freedesktop.org location service was just released! The release highlights are #beacondb support and a separate GeoIP source with new backends. Coming to a #linux computer near you.

https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/geoclue/geoclue/-/releases/2.8.0

#geoclue #freedesktop #geolocation

If you want to lose to a mostly dead guy, these folks will lead the way. https://www.gocomics.com/brian-mcfadden/2025/09/01

"...scientists at the University of Illinois who discovered that when children with ADHD spent time in green outdoor settings, they showed fewer attention-related symptoms afterward compared to others who spent time in human-made spaces. In one study, children with ADHD showed attention performance improvements after a walk in a park that were comparable to the effects from a dose of Ritalin."

https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2025/09/book-review-this-is-your-brain-on-nature.html

I spent this afternoon touring the "Red Zone" of Ōtautahi-Christchurch city, NZ, with two friends. One of them works for Corrections and with his "clients" they've so far planted more than 90,000(!) native trees in this area of the city. Many more are to come. They're still baby trees now but a whole forest is on it's way!

For non-locals, the Red Zone was created after the disastrous Christchurch earthquakes of 2010 and 2011 wrecked the housing in this eastern area of the city. Most of it was reclaimed wetland and the ground didn't hold up to a serious quake. The city decided not to re-house it.

The houses have since been removed although many of the home garden trees were retained. The area is now being re-landscaped for nature, recreation, and floodwater retention.

#Christchurch #Ōtautahi #NZ #restoration #nature

3/3

…“But they did so with fierce gladness in their hearts, because what their chosen one had done was open Pandora’s box. Yes, the old one, filled with the ancient calamities of race hatred and rage and cruelty and bloodlust and infinite greed, and tell them that these things were the remedy for all their grievances. That all their anger was justified.

And most important of all, none of what ailed them was their their own fault or ever had been.”

Don't use ChatGPT, if for no other reason than because ChatGPT will literally kill you.

https://njms.ca/wiki/chatgpt-will-literally-kill-you.html

69% of you are slacking off.

[31% of employees ‘sabotaging’ corporate AI strategy]
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Abx6iekuN18

As far as I can find, only one major journalism organization -- the Guardian -- published an accurate and contextual headline describing Trump's illegal executive order on voting.

What made the difference? The Guardian added the word "unconstitutional".

Come on, journos, do your damn jobs.

New releases of my Grav CMS #Markdown projects Open Course Hub and its 'evil' twin Open MultiCourse Hub are almost ready, just in time for the new school term 🎉

Included refreshed theme includes:
✅ Better typography with refined heading hierarchy and 18px body font
✅ Cleaner aesthetics with rounded corners and shadows
✅ Optional dark mode support with system preference detection

These will be available at:
https://getgrav.org/downloads/skeletons

Oh, and here is a Open Course Hub demo! https://demo.hibbittsdesign.org/grav-open-matter-course-hub/

What's a good term for the concept of "friends of friends" but broader, including casual acquaintances?

Thinking about how to describe this set of people in a social media context. "Friend" is a convenient lie, but "acquaintance" and "contact" are sterile. "Show this post to: Contacts of contacts" is just 🤮.

Or maybe there are other ways to describe the local part of someone's social graph?

#SocialMediaDesign

#Forgejo 12.0.2 and 11.0.4 were just released! They are security releases.

We recommend that all installations are upgraded to the latest version as soon as possible.

Check out the release notes and download it at https://forgejo.org/releases/. If you experience any issues with this release, please report to https://codeberg.org/forgejo/forgejo/issues.

#forgejorelease

And just a reminder that when Robert Reich was Labor Secretary under Clinton, he sided vocally WITH THE BILLIONAIRES and AGAINST THE WORKERS, so pretty rich to see him trying to be a progressive now. Still haven't gotten an apology out of that d-bag, and never will as he's still claiming that it was the Mexicans forcing the billionaire friendly version on them.

https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1993-09-01-mn-30114-story.html

https://www.ontheissues.org/House/Bob_Reich_Free_Trade.htm

“We’re activating 10 million workers.”

Okay for what?

“Create multiple pathways to action.”

Okay, like what?

“Guiding them through a ladder of engagement that builds confidence and power.”

A “ladder of engagement”? Leading where?

“Take bold, visible actions at scale.”

Okay, for example?

“Demands for a government that puts workers over billionaires are impossible to dismiss.”

And if those demands are ignored—as they have been for decades?

https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2025/08/nearly-1000-workers-over-billionaires-protests-planned-across-us-for-labor-day.html

@davidgerard

I made the mistake of reading the comments on LinkedIn when the paper that showed LLM-assisted coding made you less productive (but estimate your productivity higher) was published.

One of the justifications from the promptfondlers was to attack the methodology because, although the participants all had experience using LLM coding tools, they didn’t have experience with the precise one that they used in the study.

This suggests that the problem is far worse than the linked post suggests. It isn’t just that these people are useless without their chatbot tools, it’s that their skills with the, are not transferable. We saw this with the GPT-5 release as well: a load of patterns people had developed for working with GPT-4o stopped working and there was uproar.

I think you might have written about this before, but it’s a problem with nondeterministic tools. You don’t learn things that work, you learn things that have a high probability of working, but they are not based on a theory of the underlying system. So any small change to how the system works can make your techniques useless. So time spent learning to prompt an LLM is time spent both having your real skills atrophy and, in exchange, learning a skill that will be obsolete soon. No AI winter required.

Your August edition of the FOSSphones News Roundup is here! It is also available on our #Gemini capsule.

https://fossphones.com/08-31-2025.html

#Doonesbury by #GarryTrudeau on GoComics

https://www.gocomics.com/doonesbury/2025/08/31

#Humour #Cartoon

And here’s the same person openly calling for mastodon.social @staff to ban accounts from Palestine like Bluesky is doing.

Translation: “The #Fake Accounts from Gaza, with which anyone collects donations, are becoming more and more dubious. Either "journalists" or young women. Donation account never in Gaza, but always middlemen abroad. After Bluesky consistently blocks the accounts, they now come to #Fediverse. / @staff @diessoli”

Are there fake accounts? Yes. Are they all fake accounts? Not by a long shot.

Some of us are taking the time to help verify the accounts of Palestinians who rely on the fediverse to survive. I’ve personally had video conversations with several people in Gaza on Signal and will be holding more.

Do not listen to these heartless bastards who are trying to cut off what is the last lifeline for Palestinians trying to survive a genocide.

Tell the world that #PalestiniansAreWelcome on the #fediverse.

https://skeptics.social/@Derisor/115121577156334330

Taco Bell rethinks AI order bots — because they don’t work

18,000 waters, please

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KSD6-Nf1fg0&list=UU9rJrMVgcXTfa8xuMnbhAEA - video
https://pivottoai.libsyn.com/20250830-taco-bell-rethinks-ai-order-bots-because-they-dont-work - podcast

text coming shortly!

This week's comic, inspired by a study showing that AI summaries on top of search results are dramatically cutting traffic to websites.

#internet #technology #tech #journalism #disinformation #socialmedia #oligarchy

OpenAI Says It’s Scanning Users’ ChatGPT Conversations and Reporting Content to the Police

https://futurism.com/openai-scanning-conversations-police