Old Fucking Punk @lwriemen@librem.one

Hey Aotearoa Fedi - I'm trying to remember who owns Trademe these days... can anyone remind me off the top of their heads?

So... Nick @thelinuxEXP points out that EU group that's been handing out well deserved fines to US BigTech for breaching EU regulations has, itself, been using it *MSO 365* in breach of those privacy regulations. The remedy is to *stop using MSO 365*. Sounds like a good idea... that should be heeded by *every single gov't department* on the planet.

This really drives home something about LLM systems. They’re very expensive to run, both to train and per-query, and hard to make cheaper. I expect them to get more expensive to run. They’re currently sold at a big loss to establish monopoly power and then raise prices dramatically. That’s the *stated* business plan.

If you’re building your business to rely on LLM, you need to factor in what you‘ll do when they pivot to making money, or they pull back because they can’t.
https://geeknews.chat/@theregister/112116266764229145

‘The stigma has returned’: #abortion access in turmoil in Javier #Milei’s #Argentina - https://www.theguardian.com/global-development/2024/mar/18/argentina-abortion-javier-milei "Health workers fear the return of unsafe abortions as recent statements lead to a spike in doctors refusing to provide care"

For anyone wanting to read more about Hubzilla, this post is a great resource: https://medium.com/p/692204177d4e#eebc

@dynamic just posted a great deepdive into #Hubzilla and how it differers from other #fediverse software here:
https://social.coop/@dynamic/112116628610243658

On Hubzilla, a channel is an identity. Your user account doesn't have relationships with other users. Your channels do. And each channel can have different sets of relationships.

So you can have one channel for personal updates, one channel for professional updates (with a different visible name), one channel for your business, one channel for a club's announcements, and so on.

11/?

Very happy to announce that we are migrating the #GNUHealth development resources to @Codeberg ❤️ 😎

🚧 During the process, some resources (ike the translation service @weblate ) will experience some downtime, so please stay tuned 🤗

Every week - literally - the gap in funding the “trickle down” tax cuts grows.

More and more valuable services will have to be reduced or terminated to fund these stupid, barely noticeable tax cuts.

For many thousands of NZers any cuts in taxes will be wiped out by huge Council rates increases anyway.

Luxon, Willis & co have well and truly painted themselves into a corner… #nzpol #taxcuts

There is one thing that annoys me about #Codeberg, but I was too lazy to tell …

… until today! Please let us know in the comments.

Fuck you, Amazon. Take 70% off “damaged” titles all month long.

Use coupon code “Dinged” to take 70% off damaged books all month long -- and learn more about how Bezos screws the entire book trade. https://pmpress.org/index.php?l=product_list&c=186&show=50

#books #FuckAmazon

You might or might not have noticed that functionality for both Google and DuckDuckGo has changed recently. What I'm specifically noticing is that in the past year or so I'm increasingly seeing "no matching pages" results, whereas this virtually never happened two or three years ago.

I don't know what's going on under the hood, but I think others have noticed it too, and some friends of mine have suggested this is a result of ChatGPT (and friends).

Latest comic: Electric vehicles gone wrong

I'm fine with the soft, whirring spaceship sounds that some EVs emit as a safety feature to alert people that they're moving. The new Dodge Charger EV comes with a deafening 126 dB roar, which is just plain obnoxious.

#cars #ev #evs #transportation #gender #marketing

Paying a subscription fee to bag your own groceries and act as a cashier is some Tom Sawyer level fuckery.

It appears that Atlas Network are targeting New Zealand because we rate highly on their ‘freedom index’. That means that they assess us as both more susceptible to libertarian ideas and the neoliberal reforms to NZ have left us more openly to the type of business they prefer. It means the bootstraps and welfare queen type messaging are effective here. Both which are now being directed at Māori who supposedly get ‘special treatment’. It’s grim. #nzpol

The auto industry has almost completely abandoned the idea of selling affordable cars in the U.S. https://www.motor1.com/features/710453/cheap-cars-dead/

China is plainly planning to fill the gap, as Japan did some decades ago.

This will -- guaranteed -- lead to a furious response, but that won't include US carmakers actually competing. The response will be protectionism, because one thing history has shown us is that American companies facing foreign competition are terrified of actual competition.

Everyone said get a Brother printer so I bought a 3-in-1 scanner and printer. There seems to be something wrong with it though. I plugged it into a Linux laptop, opened a document, pressed print, selected the printer, and it printed. Then I opened simple-scan, pressed scan, and it scanned.

This isn't how printers and scanners are supposed to work. Where do install the drivers that don't work properly etc? This was no fun. I demand a refund.

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2024/mar/15/canada-moves-to-protect-coral-reef-that-scientists-say-shouldnt-exist

The ugly details are here.

https://cepr.net/report/pocketing-money-meant-for-kids-private-equity-in-autism-services/

These #PE goons have been trying to weasel their way into the #WorkerCoop space, and I think we should reject them all with extreme prejudice. Why? Because you don't invite vampires into your house. Anybody who thinks they can play nice with PE d-bags and not get taken to the cleaners has a credulity problem, imnsho. The people who do this kind of thing do not care about workers, no matter what they say or how much money they throw at "worker empowerment".

https://www.nbcnews.com/health/health-care/card-blackstone-kids-autism-private-equity-bankruptcy-rcna118544