Old Fucking Punk @lwriemen@librem.one

When the House and Senate marked up stablecoin legislation, we raised all of these concerns - their anonymity, their nearly perfect design for money laundering. All the barn doors were left wide open. It’s used for crime because that is its purpose. https://www.nytimes.com/2025/12/07/technology/how-a-cryptocurrency-helps-criminals-launder-money-and-evade-sanctions.html?smid=nytcore-ios-share&referringSource=articleShare

If I had the attention span to write fiction longer than a page I'd write a near-future story where for RFK reasons it has become easier to get illegal recreational meth than ADHD drugs so the coop in Portland that makes the black market estrogen has a side gig buying street meth and converting it backward into Adderall

DoD buried this news by releasing it right before a holiday weekend: the U.S. Navy has canceled the planned Constellation-class frigate.

This is a big deal. The Navy has spent the last 25 years failing to deliver new ships on time and on budget. People are worried that they don't really know how to do it anymore.

The Constellation class was supposed to solve that problem by using an existing ship design, the European FREMM frigate. But it ran over schedule and budget anyway. The Navy screwed with the design of this "off-the-shelf ship" so much the first one was already three years behind schedule.

https://www.twz.com/sea/navy-sinks-the-constellation-class-frigate-program

It's that time again! Tomorrow evening, 20:00 NZST is our monthly FOSS/Libre catch up. Find us at https://meeting.iridescent.nz - all welcome! We'll be discussing relevant current events, sharing case studies, looking at new technologies, and how to make a living doing this stuff! Our meetings are directed by questions people bring, projects they want to spruik, or discussions they'd like to have! You can dip in and out as the mood strikes you.

Resale values of Teslas are in the depths for all kinds of reasons, but the central one -- apart from the taint of Musk -- is that the cars are ridiculously crappy and unreliable as they age. https://futurism.com/advanced-transport/old-teslas-falling-apart

Just one more reason to avoid this toxic brand at all costs.

We need more folks who understand POSSE and why it's crucial to a) personal sovereignty, b) functional open (democratic) societies, and c) a free and open Internet: Publish on your Own Site, Syndicate Elsewhere. https://www.theverge.com/2023/10/23/23928550/posse-posting-activitypub-standard-twitter-tumblr-mastodon

The more I hear about deliberative democracy, the more I think it's a better way of sounding out the popular will, as it stands *after* considering all the relevant information and ideas. Significantly better than either horse race elections or proportional representation elections.

So how do we make introducing more deliberative decision-making a vote-winner? So that political parties will make it policy to use it more, and embed it in our political institutions.

(3/3)

#DeliberativeDemocracy

Two browser extensions that work quietly in the background to find Mastodon accounts and blog posts that may appeal to you.

https://alexsci.com/blog/calm-tech-discover/

'I reject the dead Internet theory: I see a vibrant Internet full of humans sharing their experiences and seeking connection. Degradation of the engagement-driven web is well underway, accelerated by AI slop. But the independent web works on a different incentive structure and is resistant to this effect. Humans inherently create, connect, and share: we always have and we always will. If you choose software that works in your interest you’ll find that it’s possible to make meaningful online connections without mental hazard.'

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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