Old Fucking Punk @lwriemen@librem.one

The Netherlands blocks the takeover of key IT infrastructure by a US company.

https://www.politico.eu/article/netherlands-blocks-us-takeover-vital-digital-supplier/

'In a letter to the national parliament published on Tuesday, State Secretary for Digital Economy Willemijn Aerdts said the national authority charged with screening investments had advised the government to block the acquisition. The purchase was seen as posing "a possible risk to the public interest."

The government on Monday decided to adopt the advice and block the acquisition, Aerdts said.'

Trying to force the entire federal government to adopt the Trump organization’s aggressive use of NDAs won’t make anybody safer and won’t improve agency processes.

Its sole intent would be to protect the administration from the leak of embarrassing, politically damaging, or unlawful information.

https://freedom.press/the-classifieds/trumps-government-wide-nda-seeks-to-silence-whistleblowers/

The U.S. is striking Iran again, even as officials call it “self-defense.”

Phyllis Bennis writes that what’s at issue here is not just escalation, but the collapse of any serious commitment to the rule of law.

https://inthesetimes.com/article/iran-war-united-states-israel-trump-illegal

South-Western France went over 40 degrees ....

... in May

A woman in Toulouse has died from heatstroke

.... in May

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Staggering dip in #US #tourism is a troubling sign for the future - https://edition.cnn.com/2026/05/25/travel/analysis-tourism-fewer-international-visitors-2025-vis oh dear, how sad etc etc

Everyone was wondering what Stephen Colbert would do after his Late Show on CBS ended.
I wrote on Boing Boing about the answer:
He hosted a local cable access TV show in Monroe, Michigan, "Only in Monroe."
https://boingboing.net/2026/05/25/stephen-colbert-follows-up-late-show-finale-by-hosting-michigan-public-access-program.html

California and Colorado legislated that Linux distributions, being free and open-source, are exempt from the age verification in operating systems, unless they are proprietary like SteamOS (and Windows).

Too bad the systemd developers already complied with fascism in advance before the bills were even finalized.

Will Lennart Poettering and his followers now please remove the birthDate field from systemd?

P.S.: If you reply with any variation of "You need to calm down," I will block you.

https://www.gamingonlinux.com/2026/05/colorado-and-california-age-verification-bills-exempt-open-source-operating-systems/

#fascism #surveillance #Linux #systemd

Good friends and neighbors stand up for working people, their organizations, and their interests.

"Every city in the Midwest has a half-finished canal in it."

I love canals, so this makes me want to do a tour of midwest US cities and its half-finished canals - and a boat tour of its *finished* canals. But I'm in Scotland so... let me do it online.

First up: Indianapolis!

(1/n)

[image from https://mathstodon.xyz/@susankayequinn@wandering.shop/116635972190246192]

You know your product is bad if you need to send lobbyists to the #Pope.

#AI #Vatican #BigTech #lobbying

A virtual museum runs 570 operating systems in your browser - https://boingboing.net/2026/05/20/a-virtual-museum-runs-570-operating-systems-in-your-browser.html

@Su_G
Conclusion: we, the working people of the world, have failed the ultra-rich by failing in our duty to act as a necessary check on their behavior. We must remedy this failure immediately.

RE: https://mastodon.social/@violetblue/116637798162504941

This resonated: “Decades of research in developmental psychology have shown that moral reasoning develops through consequences—not punishment, necessarily, but experiencing the effects of your actions on others, receiving honest feedback, having to accommodate reality as it actually is rather than as you wish it to be. It’s not that the wealthy become evil; it’s that their environment stops teaching them the things that nonwealthy people are forced to learn simply by living in a world that pushes back.”
Because I’m a big fan of reconnecting consequences to causes, also called join the dots.

#reconnectingConsequencesToCauses #joinTheDots #billionaires #UglyRichAmericans #Bozo

Heatwaves are becoming the norm. This is what Britain will look like in the year 2052 - https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2026/may/26/heatwaves-britain-2052-sleep-hot-houses-water-climate "top of any to-do list is the critical importance of properly insulating our entire housing stock, so that homes can become refuges from the heat rather than potential death traps"

When praising the pope, please do not forget that discrimination is his job description.

#AI #noAI #LLM #LLMs #catholicism

Am I going to read this Anthropic + Vatican document?

No I'm not. All I know is that the Vatican is doing Vatican washing, just like green washing. Perhaps we shouldn't be surprised as they have a venture capital arm that invests in Silicon Valley companies 🤷🏼

AI can now generate anything you can imagine.

Except profits.

I think the thing I feel worst about with the LLM and agentic coding craze is that it makes me trust other people in my open source communities less.

It’s one thing to have my own coworkers stop speaking normal human language with me (which they are, and it is maddening!). It is another thing entirely to feel like I have to view every pull request with suspicion. I dread getting e-mails about PRs now. ☹️

Sad to see mathematicians succumb to the "AI" empire.

It's one thing to have a computer system find a proof, but quite another to laud this as an "AI" victory just because some joker used "LLM" for part of the task.

Who do you think this boosterism will benefit. Your department? lol.