Old Fucking Punk @lwriemen@librem.one

Schleswig-Holstein will save more than €15 million a year by swapping Microsoft licenses for open source.

https://www.heise.de/en/news/Goodbye-Microsoft-Schleswig-Holstein-relies-on-Open-Source-and-saves-millions-11105459.html

'The Green state parliament member Jan Kürschner also admitted in an interview with heise online that such a comprehensive conversion would not go without friction. But he emphasized the long-term nature of the project and the necessity of fundamentally rethinking administrative processes: "With the change, there is an opportunity to truly rethink the administration and free ourselves from old burdens. That is the great added value." If only a one-to-one conversion is made, it might certainly "stumble at one point or another." But those who truly optimize administrative processes will likely find in the end: "Open source is the better way."'

There is so much censorship in the EU that 7 of the 8 countries with the most freedom of the press are EU member states.

#EUpol

Poland’s Deputy Prime Minister Radoslaw Sikorski has issued a sharp response to Elon Musk’s call to dismantle the EU.

In a follow up statement, Sikorski added: "If anyone still had doubts about who all this anti-EU talk about sovereignty serves. Those who want to profit from sowing hatred and those who want to conquer Europe."

Over at https://lores.tech we've been building a stack to deploy apps that we're going to run on our local nodes, and we've chosen docker swarm as the underlying approach based on it being a mid-ground of complexity (ie, less complex than helm/kubernetes).

We recently came across the @coopcloud project which made very similar tech choices, and is much further along.

To determine whether it'd meet our needs to move across, we run a series of quick experiments in a "technical spike" of using Co-op Cloud. If you're also evaluating it, you might find our results useful:

https://ops.wiki.merri-bek.tech/project/coopcloud_spike

The result. We're really pleased with what co-op cloud offers, and how the project and federation is organised. We're moving our code across at the moment.

Plenty of people is blaming "AI" in the abstract for the recent RAM price spikes, but I haven't seen anybody around here point to the actual and direct culprit of it all: Sam Altman secretly bought 40% of silicon wafers (not even produced RAM, just the silicon wafers) from two of the biggest RAM manufacturers, at the same time. Not even with specific plans for what kind of RAM do with them. This is just to mess up with competitors.

Seriously, you can't hate OpenAI enough.

https://www.mooreslawisdead.com/post/sam-altman-s-dirty-dram-deal

The CEO of The Onion set the publication's goal for 2026 to have more subscribers than The Washington Post. At the rate the latter is going, that won't take long.

"For reasons we don't like or understand, our work has become increasingly important."

"Look, we're an independent company, we don't use AI to write headlines and make art, and we're one of roughly three publications who are up for the fight. Unlike other places, The Onion is quadrupling down on being a pain in the ass, politically. Are you?

https://www.linkedin.com/posts/ben-collins-28263a52_its-been-a-big-year-for-us-at-the-onion-ugcPost-7400218696058810368-7nVB?utm_source=share&utm_medium=member_desktop&rcm=ACoAAAAliaMB3BQO-WOS-eUh-XU4HAd5h8pTzkI

Donald Trump’s birthday will now be a free entry day at national parks while Martin Luther King Jr Day and Juneteenth will no longer be.

Day 321 of racism and personal aggrandizement as government policy.

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cr7l4n89lr1o

Here's a peek at Trump's "perfect" MRIs. https://www.dailykos.com/story/2025/12/5/2356938/-Cartoon-Leaked-MRIs

@AMS@infosec.exchange I've said this to two other people now:

Introducing AI features into a software project with limited developer resources means that limited developer resources will be spent developing and maintaining those AI features when they could be spent on all the other, (imo) better things that could or should be done. It's a poor decision from the standpoint of managing resources, and that by itself reflects poorly on the decisionmaker regardless of what was at stake. This is a valid concern regardless of whether the features are opt-in or opt-out.

and I stand by it. Sure, less is at stake than with KeePassXC, say. Still, I think it signals the beginning of the end of the project as I knew it, and I think it's important to pay attention to such signals. Whether you act on them or not is a function of your personal risk tolerance and threat model and whatnot. But writing them off or calling them "ok"? To me that feels like cope.

@xgranade@wandering.shop @Kiloku@burnthis.town @davidgerard@circumstances.run

Comic inspired by this article from @ProPublica https://www.propublica.org/article/foreign-food-safety-inspections-historic-low-fda

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This week's comic: The Listeria League

#food #foodsafety #health #fda #publichealth #consumers #cartoon #comic

People who pay U.S. income taxes: have you ever itemized deductions on your tax return?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Itemized_deduction

#IRS #taxes #US

The Jewish religion and its attitude to non-Jews, by Israel Shahak (published in Matzpen, July 10 1981)

https://matzpen.org/english/1981-07-10/the-jewish-religion-and-its-attitude-to-non-jews-part-1-israel-shahak

The Roberts court unilaterally edited the Constitution when it ruled that Trump was immune from accountability when he breaks the law, no matter how egregious the crime. These corrupt judges could just as easily rewrite the Constitution to ban birthright citizenship.

https://www.cnn.com/2025/12/05/politics/supreme-court-agrees-to-hear-bi

This fall, Hawaii's supreme court rejected an argument that recording interrogations is burdensome for police: “If children can record everyday events with ease, law enforcement cannot claim hardship to record perhaps its most consequential investigative act.”
https://boltsmag.org/hawaii-supreme-court-police-interrogations/

Cory Doctorow summarises his forthcoming book "The Reverse Centaur’s Guide to Life After AI" in a speech to the University of Washington.

https://pluralistic.net/2025/12/05/pop-that-bubble/#u-washington

'AI is the asbestos in the walls of our technological society, stuffed there with wild abandon by a finance sector and tech monopolists run amok. We will be excavating it for a generation or more.'

The secretive cabal of US polluters that is rewriting the EU’s human rights and climate law.

https://www.somo.nl/the-secretive-cabal-of-us-polluters-that-is-rewriting-the-eus-human-rights-and-climate-law/

'While Europeans were told that their governments were negotiating a landmark law to hold corporations accountable for human rights abuses and climate damage, a secretive alliance of US fossil fuel giants was working behind the scenes to destroy it. Collaborating under the innocent-sounding name ‘Competitiveness Roundtable’, eleven multinational enterprises have worked closely to eviscerate several EU sustainability laws, including the Corporate Sustainability Due Diligence Directive (CSDDD) and the Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive (CSRD). This Competitiveness Roundtable may be unknown, but its members are a who’s-who of polluting, mainly US, multinationals, including Chevron, ExxonMobil, and Dow. The group seems to have run rings around all branches of the EU and the Trump administration to get what they want: scrapping, or at least hugely diluting, the CSDDD.'

Join PM Press authors, PM tables, and much more at the Howard Zinn Book Fair on Sunday, December 7th in San Francisco! Several sessions feature PM authors, learn more below!

https://www.zinnbookfair.org/