Old Fucking Punk @lwriemen@librem.one

Unpopular opinion: the silver lining in server outages is that they pull the curtain & reveal some hard truths about who is really behind some services we use... especially stuff we think are alternatives to Big Tech (spoiler: maybe they aren't).

Case in point: last year's #Microsoft outage took out #DuckDuckGo (https://mashable.com/article/microsoft-outage-affects-bing-copilot-duckduckgo-chatgpt).

Today's Amazon's AWS outage took out #Signal in some areas: https://mastodon.world/@Mer__edith/115405436746725236

Oh my, is this time to convince my family & friends to move to Matrix? 🥲

@_elena @stefano you can selfhost Matrix on @yunohost just install Synapse from catalog, and Element-call there is even WhatsApp and Signal bridge that allows communiction between those networks! It's worth to try: https://apps.yunohost.org/catalog?search=matrix

As someone who studied Mass Communication in college, I am absolutely shocked by the little media coverage of the AI slop video published on social media by the U.S. president... where he puts on a crown, gets on a jet & proceeds to drop massive quantities of fecal matter on protestors of the No Kings day.

Had this happened 10 years ago it would have been front page news everywhere.

Are we so desensitized by his undignified behavior + AI slop that nothing shocks people anymore?

I want tech that helps humans.
Not tech that exploits humans.

#Tech

Hello Mastodon I have a question

YouTube has these "suggested reply fill-ins" for responding to comments. I assume they're LLM-generated, & haven't been using them for the usual reasons.

So uh..... anyone know what training data they're using for these?

It's tempting to go "Wow YouTube, your LLM is super sexist!" But this in fact how a lot of women in agriculture talk about themselves so.... yeah.

Bluesky has just started officially hosting and verifying dozens of accounts from Trump's regime including the Whitehouse, Homeland Security / ICE, the Department of War etc (https://cyberplace.social/@GossiTheDog/115393404732174116).

*All* of these accounts are spreading bigotry, hatred and dangerous lies about vulnerable groups.

It is NOT enough to just "block and forget", here's why: https://social.chinwag.org/@FediThing/112581263140051643

This is a 1930s moment, and #Bluesky is choosing to host vile hatred. It is going down the same path as Twitter/X.

"Trunk or Treat" sounds like a horror movie about 1980s stranger danger panic, not the suburban reaction to it.

When Indiana U's cowardly administrators shut down the student newspaper and fired its advisor, students from (big rival) Purdue published an edition with the disappeared material and distributed it on the IU campus.

Heartening resistance to gutless bullies.

https://archive.ph/4ee7Phttps://archive.ph/4ee7P

Again a reminder that the Trump regime lies about everything. You should assume that anything coming from the liar-in-chief and his apparatchiks is bullshit.

They know what they're doing. They are working to make reality irrelevant, and impose their ugly fantasies on us.

https://factcheck.afp.com/doc.afp.com.78MJ663

This week's post is up!

I did a lot of manual labor jobs that most men in the US won't do. Back when I was a schoolgirl.

So let's talk about well-off people who talk about how much they respect manual labor... because talk is cheaper than paying people right.

https://youtu.be/v4XM-mQgRO0

9. So to recap, Trump does a stupid thing with the entirely predictable result of shifting wealth from US farmers to Brazilian and Argentinian farmers. He then did a second stupid thing that will have the predictable result of shifting wealth from US taxpayers to Argentinians.

Telecom companies are profiting from this crime. Are the authorities going after them? https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/security/europol-dismantles-sim-box-operation-renting-numbers-for-cybercrime/

Meet some "young" Republicans. https://www.dailykos.com/story/2025/10/17/2349054/-Cartoon-Young-Republicans-trading-cards

Another day, another false claim by AI hypesters:

https://the-decoder.com/leading-openai-researcher-announced-a-gpt-5-math-breakthrough-that-never-happened/

#GenerativeAI #hype #OpenAI

#Doonesbury by #GarryTrudeau on GoComics

https://www.gocomics.com/doonesbury/2025/10/19

#Humour #Cartoon

@coopcloud @laboratoriodemedios Hello my friends, I am Ibrahim from Gaza,🇵🇸 I am 22 years old. I apologize for this way of asking for your help, but my financial situation is below zero, and my sister Shaimaa has a heart condition and needs health care, and she needs your support. Who can support via the link https://gofund.me/44ee9092 🇵🇸🫂

Karrot (@karrot) is a free and open source tool for grassroots initiatives and groups of people that want to coordinate face-to-face activities on a local, autonomous and voluntary basis. @kim caught up with Karrot team member @nicksellen for the lowdown.

https://gfsc.community/karrot-community-spotlight/

Tom Toles
#comics

I'm sure many of you have heard by now that earlier this week, IU k*lled the print edition of its student paper, the IDS. The issue that was supposed to print this week contained criticism of the Whitten regime and IUs further slide into Fscist control, and they couldn't allow that to happen during Homecoming, when all the rich alumni are in town.

Enter Purdue! The Purdue student paper, The Exponent, owns its own presses. Yesterday, in an act of tremendous solidarity with their biggest rival school, they printed the forbidden issue of the IDS. They then drove it to Bloomington overnight and stocked all of the IDS boxes on campus, just in time for Homecoming.

Solidarity is what makes us stronger, and solidarity will be what ultimately allows us to triumph, if we can ever truly get it together. I hope everyone has a fun, safe day if they're going out today, and I hope we can think about what acts of solidarity we can begin taking to really make this movement MOVE - beyond a permitted expression of upset into more active resistance.

-Sara Whitmer

If you couldn’t attend a No Kings event but want to do something to resist and help an ICE target… sign the petition for Rodney Taylor.

He’s a disabled double amputee who’s been held for months in ICE custody.

He was days away from receiving
new legs when he was taken.

He’s been placed in solitary confinement. Denied reasonable accommodations. Facing deportation to Liberia.

He’s been in the US since he was two years old:

https://www.change.org/p/demand-the-release-of-rodney-taylor-from-ice-detention

#uspol #abolishice #nokings #fascism #disability #ableism #eugenics