Old Fucking Punk @lwriemen@librem.one

🎉 BREAKING NEWS: #Hackers discover GitHub's secret Easter egg, allowing anyone with a pulse to play "Command & Conquer" on their backend servers! 😂 A riveting tale of how to hack into the Matrix using nothing but a 'git' command — surely, Neo is quaking in his boots. 🕶️
https://www.wiz.io/blog/github-rce-vulnerability-cve-2026-3854 #GitHub #EasterEgg #CommandAndConquer #HackingIntoTheMatrix #NeoQuaking #HackerNews #ngated

"Top open source PyPI package with over 1 million downloads each month hacked to send out malware"

"This was not a case of stolen credentials, but rather of vulnerability exploitation."

https://www.techradar.com/pro/security/top-open-source-pypi-package-with-over-1-million-downloads-each-month-hacked-to-send-out-malware

#OpenSource

Us leftie technologists have been talking about decentralization for a very long time. But it's obvious from a lot of experiments in decentralization that decentralization requires coordination, otherwise it turns into a nightmare of libertarian sovereign citizen.

See Lebanon's waste management problem across its 1000+ municipalities, for a glowing example of how decentralization without coordination fails miserably.

Of course, countless thinkers from Abdullah Öcalan to Murray Bookchin to Stafford Beer talked about levels of coordination among decentralized actors, giving it various names.

But could we make sure that every time we talk about decentralization, we always include coordination?

Could coordinated decentralization become our new term for decentralization?

#Ocalan #Bookchin #cybernetics #SocialEcology

Happy birthday to Mariarosa Dalla Costa, coauthor of the classic feminist text, The Power of Women and the Subversion of the Community, with Selma James. This text launched the domestic labor debate in the early 1970s by redefining housework as reproductive labor necessary to the functioning of capitalism and as work that has been rendered invisible by its removal from the wage-relation.
Explore Dalla Costa’s work: https://www.pmpress.org/index.php?l=product_detail&p=972

The CEO of Norway’s $2.2T sovereign wealth fund warns companies not to simply use AI as a rationale to cut jobs.

He notes that as workers realize adoption of AI tools leads to layoffs, they’ll stop adopting them. He points out “because people are not ​stupid.”

Weakening demand as AI token prices rise would be a double whammy for the industry.

https://www.reuters.com/business/retail-consumer/norway-wealth-fund-ceo-warns-just-using-ai-job-cuts-risks-backlash-2026-04-28/

Hot take: improving C code to be secure is possible and worthwhile; no Rust rewrite is needed.

We've got the same problem in the Montana Legislature. Our laws are being made by drunks. Explains a lot.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Osk0u1reZi4

"Take a moment to think before you dive in. That’s the best advice for Google Photos users, as the company confirms its latest update can scan all your photos to “use actual images of you and your loved ones” in AI image generation. That means Gemini seeing who you know and what you do. You likely have tens or hundreds of thousands of photos. They’re all exposed if you update.

We’re talking Personal Intelligence, Google’s latest AI upgrade path which lets users opt-in to connecting Google apps to Gemini. Why search for a doctor’s appointment when Google has access to all your calendar events. Why search for a party invite when it reads all your emails. And why search for a specific photo of you and your loved ones to create an image, when it sees all your photos.

This is the latest iteration in the ongoing battle between convenience and privacy playing out on our phones and computers. “Previously, to get a result that felt truly personal, you had to write long, detailed descriptions and manually upload a reference photo just to give Gemini the right context.” Not any more, Google says. Its AI can scan everything to form its own views of you and everyone you know."

https://www.forbes.com/sites/zakdoffman/2026/04/20/google-starts-scanning-all-your-photos-as-new-update-goes-live/

#AI #GenerativeAI #Google #Gemini #Privacy #DataProtection

#FossilFuels - Our World in Data

This is a metric often missed in the west’s attempt to blame #China and other #AsianCountires for having he temerity to want to develop. #Australia is often overlooked as being the second biggest culprit behind the #US. #Europe isn’t innocent either.

https://ourworldindata.org/fossil-fuel

#Environment #GlobalWarming #ClimateChange #GreenhouseGases

California lawmakers are fast-tracking AB 1709—a sweeping bill that would ban anyone under 16 from using social media and force every user, regardless of age, to verify their identity before accessing social platforms. https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2026/04/act-now-stop-californias-paternalistic-and-privacy-destroying-social-media-ban

please don't tell me to read that great essay on why AI is so bad, when it features:

> I use AI tools sparingly for assistance while refactoring code in languages I understand. I occasionally use it to help compose command line arguments for tools like ffmpeg.

straight after why not to use it

YOU CAN LITERALLY NOT DO ANY OF THAT AND NOT MISS A THING

and directly before

> The explosion of AI has played a significant role in my own burnout.

i mean,

#GitHub going for that 67% uptime.

Nukes, CCS, AI for climate, as hollow false promises designed to excuse a carbon bomb of fossil fuelled data centres exploding in our faces.

FRIENDS - please sign up for this panel that'll be held tomorrow at the same time this post has been published

Registration link: https://us06web.zoom.us/meeting/register/6lThDwnaQdWPAqOfdrFHVQ#/registration

Become a Friend of PM, and support independent radical publishing. We’ll send you books monthly, and you'll get 50% off of everything on our website year-round. You’ll also receive a PM Press Sockin' Suckas 20th Anniversary mug free. Offer ends 5/1. https://pmpress.org/index.php?l=product_list&c=139

RE: https://mastodon.social/@arstechnica/116477287131520646

I love how it’s the disclosure that’s the problem, not the reality.

RE: https://masto.ai/@phoronix/116476120066302561

Okay gotta migrate off to stock Debian then I guess.
Microsoft kills its OS with all the copilot garbage users do not want and Canonical has to go: "Yeah, that's where we need to go."

Strategic genius.

Please don't describe the boot on your neck with heated rhetoric. It's divisive.

I wonder how much productivity is being lost by people using LLMs to write long things where the meaningful content remains very small in comparison.

I've noticed that looking up how to do $THING with a command-line $TOOL now almost always gives me an LLM-generated page with pages of boilerplate nonsense (what is $TOOL? How to install $TOOL on Ubuntu, how to install $TOOL on macOS, and so on), with the actual two sentences of content right at the end. These are obviously generated to provide more space for ads, but there's a lot of this cropping up in other contexts.

Saving a few seconds of writing time in exchange for wasting a few minutes of reading time for each of your readers is a staggering drop in overall efficiency.

Tech Bros on A.I.'s Artificial Inevitability. https://www.gocomics.com/brian-mcfadden/2026/04/27

“In this work, we conduct a large-scale simulation of how users might delegate work to LLMs across 52 professional domains. We find that current LLMs are unreliable delegates: even frontier models corrupt an average of 25% of document content over long workflows, with sparse but severe errors that silently compound over time.”

Good to see the issue addressed explicitly, even though the results aren’t surprising—why would anyone expect LLMs to be reliable!?

https://arxiv.org/abs/2604.15597