Old Fucking Punk @lwriemen@librem.one

I'll take decentralized and janky over simple and evil.

Medical data of 500k #Biobank volunteers listed for sale on Alibaba, UK minister reveals - https://www.theregister.com/2026/04/23/500k_biobank_volunteers_data_listed/ oh look: just as we warned would happen... easy to deanonymise too...

On May 5th, join a TechSoup Connect webinar with @michael for a session on our Apps for Change programme!

We'll be exploring how Apps for Change can provide an escape from Big Tech and unlock deeper connection to community.

RSVP now to ensure you get in: https://events.techsoup.org/events/details/techsoup-techsoup-connect-canada-chapter-presents-apps-for-change-building-community-owned-spaces-in-a-big-tech-world/

#TechForGood #SocialWeb #AppsForChange #Newsmast #Fediverse #TechSoup

There is a way to stop ICE, and we all know what it is... it's just not pretty, polite, or legal, so I can't mention it.

Taxpayers in the US have paid something like 60% of federal taxes to the US military and associated contractors for the last several decades. We have the largest military budget on Earth.

Afghanistan is a mess. Iraq is wobbly. Iran is straight up winning. Ukraine has flipped the script and now they're teaching us how to fight.

WTF was all that money for? Why the hell aren't we shifting any of that, very clearly wasted, investment?

#USPolitics #waste #fraud #abuse

I liked this parenthetical aside by @pluralistic as much as the main piece.
https://pluralistic.net/2026/04/22/uber-for-nurses

"Voting with your wallet" is an absurd notion not just for the reason Doctorow gives here: it also makes individualist consumption (and the display of your consumption on social media) the primary vehicle of political action, rather than organization.

It's the same as when they told us our consumer choices and individual behavior would "Save the Planet," all while ignoring the actual problem.

Slop machines are the antithesis to consent.

Our information is used to build them - without our consent.

They are pushed into our lives - mostly without our consent.

People use them on each other - without consent.

Boosters, try and convince me that your favorite tech hype isn't just a violation of people's right to self-determination!
--
#LLMs #StopTheSlop #Slopposition

“President Trump has his own way of calculating,” Kennedy replied. “There’s two ways of calculating percentages. If you have a $600 drug, and you reduce it to $10, that’s a 600% reduction.”

https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2026/04/defending-trumprx-scam-rfk-jr-absurdly-claims-trump-has-his-own-way-of-calculating-percentages.html

The worst thing about AI right now is that I can't go to a coffee shop without having two tech bro dipshits on either side of me discussing their AI-first startups.

Their startups all seem to be having the same difficulties: the two engineers they do have are stupid, and their target customers just don't "get it." Surely the problem isn't them, their lazy-ass business plan, and their unwillingness to do more than just buy tokens.

It's exhausting.

The Jewish Labor Bund opposed Zionism not because it rejected Jewish identity but because the organization saw in it the same ethnonationalist impulse that underpinned antisemitism and destroyed Europe: http://jacobin.com/2026/04/jewish-labor-bund-crabapple-review

It's not, of course, generative AI that's deceiving people. It's the humans using AI to generate fake images and the humans who pass the fake images off as their own photos who are deceiving other humans.

Oh, turns out that the European "sovereign" payment platform intended to replace Paypal, Wero, uses AWS 🤡 🤡 🤡

#DigitalIndependence #digitalsovereignty #DigitalAutonomy #EuropeanTormentNexus #BigTech #EU #Wero

I used to know a mathematician who would buy lottery tickets despite knowing the odds of winning, because the fun and anticipation was worth the money to him.

I guess it is the same with people who know how to code, but end up wasting more time fixing an LLM's output than it would take to code the damn thing themselves. The thrill and anticipation of that intermittent reinforcement must be worth the time wasted to them.

#LLM #LLMs #AI #noAI

“We hired a junior dev to save on tokens for simple tasks”

My congressman, Brian Fitzpatrick, takes money from Peter Thiel. 🤮

This is the worst possible time for presidential records to be hidden from the public.

Use our action center to tell Congress: Presidential records are vital parts of the American story, and the Justice Department’s efforts to say otherwise are wrong.

https://freedom.press/action/keep-presidential-records-public/

Incarcerated people stopped believing they deserved soap and toilet paper when the government controlled the news they could watch, writes Jeremy Busby.

People on the outside may stop believing they deserve democracy.

https://freedom.press/issues/a-lesson-on-media-consolidation-and-censorship-from-a-texas-prison/

#World #food systems ‘pushed to the brink’ by extreme heat, #UN warns | #GlobalFoodCrisis | The Guardian

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2026/apr/22/world-food-systems-extreme-heat-farming-un-report

#Environment #GlobalWarming #ClimateChange #Agriculture #FoodSecurity

If you're catering the White House Correspondents' Dinner, don't forget to not wash your hands. https://patreon.com/BrianMcFadden