Old Fucking Punk @lwriemen@librem.one

Auckland Airport Rainfall, back to 1963. Thick line is 2023 (doh) Today's effort so far (55mm) in purple...

I'm one of the people Google conned when it pushed "AMP" as a mobile standard. My long article about it in Backchannel (now part of Wired) was, in retrospect, credulous.

Read the @verge piece on a corporate campaign that contributed to massive -- and reasonable -- mistrust of Google at news organizations: https://www.theverge.com/23711172/google-amp-accelerated-mobile-pages-search-publishers-lawsuit

A hearing aid app, offered to make it easy to change settings. The privacy policy says that sharing data with the following companies is "strictly necessary": Microsoft, Salesforce, Twilio, Google Analytics, Google Firebase, Momentive, Elasticsearch, Adobe Marketing Cloud.
It then claims it will explicitly ask for consent before sharing data with these companies.
But DDG app protection shows 12 tracking attempts by google: device, country, GPS location, full name, City, Gender & 28 other details

@Ruth_Mottram @becha as I said, gov'ts are demonstrating their lack of fitness-for-purpose by allowing *any* MS software anywhere their gov'ts. Here in NZ (similarly most places), we've lost our sovereignty, and that's not hyperbole - explanation: https://davelane.nz/mshostage - use BBB outside of work. Fwiw, I quit my last gov't job because they were going to make me us MS software: https://davelane.nz/my-open-history

I'm not saying LLMs are magic and can do all the things they promise to investors, I'm saying these companies don't care about whether the bots can think. they won't work and that's worse: what they certainly will do is deepen the logic of surveillance that drives their application in advertising and provide a lot of flimsy, bias ridden, nonfunctional LLMs as platforms to data consumers like governments, cops, and insurance companies to make use of surveillance data under the cloak of LLM datawashing.

The U.S. slipped to 45th in RSF's global press freedom rankings. One of the main reasons cited was Congress’s failure to pass the PRESS Act despite bipartisan support. It’s time to pass the Act and finally end gov surveillance of journalists. https://rsf.org/en/country/united-states

The Goethe Institute asked me for some thoughts on social media's impact and how we should deal with it. I responded: https://www.goethe.de/prj/zei/en/pdk/24687701.html

Modern society doesn't always match the conditions we evolved for.

On average, what do you think is the best way to respond to this?

(Boosts are welcome. Longer answers in comments are encouraged.)

There's been a lot of talk today about Henry Kissinger's upcoming 100th birthday, but I've yet to see Anthony Bourdain's quote about that war criminal scroll by, and it can't be shared enough.

New on Eviscerati.Org: The Points Between, Chapter 17

https://www.eviscerati.org/fiction/tpb/2023/05/the-points-between-chapter-17/

#AI #machines aren’t ‘hallucinating’. But their makers are | #NaomiKlein | The Guardian

Interesting article and a counterpoint to much of the hype.

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2023/may/08/ai-machines-hallucinating-naomi-klein

#LLM

"More than 40 leading scientists have resigned en masse from the editorial board of a top science journal in protest at what they describe as the “greed” of publishing giant Elsevier."

Elsevier's profit margin is around 40%. Claiming that academic publishers prey on researchers, more than forty leading scientists are setting up "a nonprofit open-access journal".

Publicly-funded knowledge should be free.

https://www.theguardian.com/science/2023/may/07/too-greedy-mass-walkout-at-global-science-journal-over-unethical-fees

#Research #Publishing

Never trust a motherfucker who's afraid to drop the f-bomb.

BREAKING: Starbucks to shut down *all* Ithaca locations as a part of its union busting efforts.

This means that over 30 people will lose their jobs, as a result of Starbucks' illegal anti-union efforts.
Ithaca was the first city that had 100% of its Starbucks stores unionized & now it will the first city to have all of its Starbucks stores shuttered.

The story hasn't broken locally yet (SB did a news dump last night); message me if you want to cover this

#Labor #Union #Unions #Unionization

The essential elements are to include \usepackage{multimedia} in the preamble and then to put a clip in you use
\movie{\includegraphics{still_image.jpg}{moviefile.mp4}}

REI workers in my town - and elsewhere - are on strike.

I’m an REI member. REI is a co-op, owned by members and not by Wall Street. We should respect the employees who serve us, pay them well, treat them fairly.

https://actionnetwork.org/forms/respect-rei-workers-let-durham-vote

At last, there seems to be a tool for embedding #MovieClips into #Beamer #presentations (i.e. #PDF files) for #GNU plus #Linux systems. It’s a previewer called #pdfpc which recognizes the movie and you can start it, pause it, etc with your mouse. If your machine is attached to a second screen, it automatically displays the presentation #Fullscreen on it.

https://pdfpc.github.io/

#LaTeX

@anedroid @LynnC Thank you for asking! Wayland is closer to a "new version" of X than a competitor. In fact, some long-time X11 developers are now Wayland developers. It's a clean break to the protocol, but the end goal remains delivering the best FOSS desktop possible.

At a technical level, Wayland has some architectural advantages over X11. Although thanks to projects like Xwayland, many users rely on both!

...and as long as you're using one of them, we're good 😉

Yup. Ditch MS Office. It's a good idea if you like privacy, sovereignty, and value. The EU is way ahead of the rest of us. But what else to use? I can vouch for OnlyOffice's worthiness as a successor to MSFT's lock-in (or Google Docs'). https://invidious.snopyta.org/watch?v=IXcRLcpUtbY or https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IXcRLcpUtbY