Old Fucking Punk @lwriemen@librem.one

Observe, my friends, the reality of this country of ours, these so-called United States.

The head of our central bank is worried sick because so many people have jobs. This is a big problem. He vows to do everything in his power to stop people from getting jobs.

This is not a joke, not parody. This is the literal truth of our society.

https://www.ft.com/content/10b6d4f2-d48f-401f-8407-8d5688d1e226

The next week of action to defend Weelaunee Forest has just been announced for March 4-11 in Atlanta, Georgia. Save the date!

More details to come soon:

https://defendtheatlantaforest.org/

Guy Venables on the sentencing of #DavidCarrick #Police - political cartoon gallery in London original-political-cartoon.com

OpenStreetMap is in trouble https://www.openstreetmap.org/user/Pieter%20Vander%20Vennet/diary/400909 Bing Map Builder, licenses, and community. Worth reading!

I confess myself a bit baffled by people who act like "how to interact with ChatGPT" is a useful classroom skill. It's not a word processor or a spreadsheet; it doesn't have documented, well-defined, reproducible behaviors. No, it's not remotely analogous to a calculator. Calculators are built to be *right*, not to sound convincing. It's a bullshit fountain. Stop acting like you're a waterbender making emotive shapes by expressing your will in the medium of liquid bullshit. The lesson one needs about a bullshit fountain is *not to swim in it*.

The Fediverse has its own Twitch-style livestreaming platform called OwnCast:

➡️ https://owncast.online
➡️ @owncast

Because they're both on the Fediverse, you can follow OwnCast accounts from Mastodon, and they will post in your home timeline when they go live.

For example @rstv is an OwnCast account that shows weird old films and television 24/7. You can watch the stream right now at https://live.retrostrange.com

There are more OwnCast accounts featured at https://directory.owncast.online

REI in Cleveland being forced into doing the right thing. Good on the workers.

https://www.bicycleretailer.com/industry-news/2023/02/03/reis-cleveland-area-workers-walk-job-unfair-practices-hearing-begins

I've been spending a lot of time thinking about #ChatGPT and academic assessment and why I am not so concerned about it (at the college level). It's not that ChatGPT is bad for education. It's that our education system is built upon a basis wherein we do assessment wrong.

What @hoffman writes in his blog below comes close to how I think of things (thanks for saving me a lot of time writing my thoughts down!)

http://write.guyhoffman.com/why-i-dont-care-if-students-use-gpt

This Washington Post story demonstrates how completely routine it has become for journalists to use the word "conservative" to describe right-wing extremist.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2023/02/05/abortion-pills-texas-lawsuit/

The fact that right-wing extremism is now the the center of the Republican Party doesn't make it "conservative," but Big Journalism can't be bothered to explain any of this.

Our media's normalization of extremism accelerates.

Leaked video footage of ocean pollution shines light on deep-sea mining - https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2023/feb/06/leaked-video-footage-of-ocean-pollution-shines-light-on-deep-sea-mining deep-sea mining is clearly going to be the next mega environmental disaster... #extractives

Big Journalism grossly downplayed the accomplishments of the Biden administration and Democratic-controlled Congress in 2021-22.

Now, Big Journalism is puzzled that the public isn't aware of those accomplishments.

(Not a hint of this in the Post story, of course...)

(begin quote)

"Let's get something straight. Growing old doesn't make people #conservative. In fact the more marginalized identity statuses a person has, the LESS conservative they grow over time.
The reason we equate "old" with "conservative" is that #marginalization kills people off younger.

Some of the most radical people you know are old.

It's just a lot of others died before they could get there, so there's a diminishing proportion. (2/5)

Plastics produced from plants are often considered less environmentally damaging than plastics made from petrochemicals. But scientists are warning that we should be careful making such assumptions.

Written by Michael Allan

https://hakaimagazine.com/news/dont-overestimate-bioplastics-benefits/

#plastic #plasticpollution #oceans #sustainability #waste #garbage #recycling

Fixed an index corruption bug in Debian Code Search 😱

https://github.com/Debian/dcs/commit/5065495e59011fa66d8ae0e9b5d8e9ad7119fba7

The impact was that some queries might have lacked results within a fraction of packages (estimate: ≈2000 out of ≈35342).

If you are relying on any Debian Code Search queries for an important analysis since November 2022, you should re-run them just to be sure!

#debian

An abolitionist designed the statue. A group of abolitionists paid for the statue. There's a plaque at the feet telling everyone what it's for. They named it the Statue of Liberty. It's arguably the largest anti-racism monument in the US, and the most recognizable anti-racism monument in the world...

Except people don't even know it's an anti-racism monument. They think it celebrates the huge influx of white immigrants from Europe that came to the US.

Reminder: A few top editors at Big Journalism companies claimed outrage that their reporters had been targeted for suspensions -- some still in force -- by Musk and minions. In fact, they demonstrated a pathetic weakness because their companies kept posting on Twitter, and kept advertising on the site.

It goes without saying, of course, that Big Journalism is not interested in covering the implications of this mercantile cowardice.