Old Fucking Punk @lwriemen@librem.one

Peer review is broken. Unfortunately, the rule for reading journal articles is now caveat lector.

"...two days after publication a firestorm erupted & the publication was withdrawn by the publisher soon after. It turned out the paper was...written using ChatGPT or equivalent Algorithmic Intelligence (AI). It was nothing but twelve pages of nonsense, with reasonable-sounding text at first glance but figures undoubtedly drawn by AI that were nothing but pure gibberish."

https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2024/08/peer-review-what-does-it-really-mean-today.html

"We live in a time of irreconcilable truths: Donald Trump is a putrid psychopath with no more internal complexity than a bullet in a chamber. Kamala Harris can mimic human emotions, but I am not convinced that she feels real pain.

"Maybe the choice is whether or not to admit that we have no choice. Welcome to America."

"In the physically impossible dreamscape of DNC fantasy, Kamala Harris can say in a single paragraph that she will feed the military industrial complex as if she were a zoo keeper with a bucket of meat entering a cage of famished tigers, and at the same time, fight climate change."

https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2024/08/on-the-distortions-and-distractions-of-the-democratic-national-circus.html

Texas' anti-voting (if you are suspected of favoring Democrats) law is working as designed, with massive deletions from voting rolls and intimidation of, among others, Latino pro-voting organizations.

https://www.democracydocket.com/news-alerts/texas-removes-over-1-million-voters-from-rolls-since-passage-of-anti-voting-law/

https://www.nbcnews.com/news/latino/house-raids-texas-democrats-ken-paxton-voting-rights-lulac-rcna168216

We've got "first amendment auditors" noodling around in Vermont. These are people who come into public spaces such as the public library and film with (often) a pretense of being citizen journalists but often just being provocative and playing "gotcha" games with people who don't know/understand rules for filming in public places.

The ALA Office for Intellectual Freedom (I helped!) created this helpful guide. Get your library policies in place before they show up!

https://www.oif.ala.org/auditing-the-first-amendment-at-your-public-library/

No one should have to worry about warrantless police drones spying on their backyard sunbathing.
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2024/08/backyard-privacy-age-drones
#drones #privacy

https://donorbox.org/support-land-defenders

If you've got some extra cash laying around maybe you could help cover travel costs and life expenses for Indigenous Land Defenders facing repression by the Canadian state.

#Wayland #inputmethod team GO!

I assembled a team to continue work I started for #mobilelinux with #phosh , #squeekboard and #librem5 .

We're going to finish the mobile side of screen-based input, and also try to properly bring traditional input methods (like for Chinese) to Wayland.

Thanks @nlnet for providing the motivation.

Watch this account!

#cjk #touchscreen #osk

#ServiceToot: Codeberg's uptime is about 99.92% (two weeks average). Not perfect, but surely good enough for a donation-driven non-profit.

What do you think? ~f

#computers applied to a social #process fossilize it.
A computer-free social process can be modified by every participant.

Without computers, the lady at the gov't office could fill out the form for you, or ignore the requirement, or demand a bribe.

With a computer, any deviance needs a special process, and only a handful people have the skill or permission from above to implement one.

Computers centralize #power in #bureaucracy and expand it (because they can buraucrat faster).

Signal founder, Moxie Marlinspike, on why describing Telegram as an "encrypted" messaging app is misleading:

"The reality is the opposite-TG is by default a cloud database w/ a plaintext copy of every msg everyone has ever sent/recvd."

https://www.fastcompany.com/90725423/signals-founder-warns-ukrainians-about-using-telegram-heres-why

highly recommend this overview of #degrowth by @jasonhickel in conversation with the great @parismarx! https://techwontsave.us/episode/226_how_degrowth_will_reshape_technology_w_jason_hickel

"right now, all our engineers are deployed by capital to do things like develop new algorithms for advertising... [this labor] could be remobilized for other purposes: to innovate more efficient public transit, or more ecological building materials"

Just got a couple 8GB DDR4 SIMs via Aliexpress for ~ $20 which have boosted my old home server from 8GB->24GB meaning I can host a bunch more cool stuff on it! It's worth spending a little on existing hardware to give it more utility rather than replacing them. It's also a great thing about Linux that you can run it on *anything* - there's no profit-motivated planned obsolescence as there is with proprietary computer systems.

That was similar to the summary I gave our local MP. He was bemoaning the high numbers of people on Jobseeker and I pointed out that his government was firing public services and not continuing funding for various programmes that employ a lot of people.

The money is going to go into one bucket or the other. Which would he prefer? The government that spend a billion on “the dole” or the billion on “job creation”

And as Thiel demonstrated with Xero, they take the money and run.

@airshipper

The NSA has finally come around to what everyone else already knew, old file formats can’t be used as an excuse to ignore FOIA requirements, especially when another department might still have the equipment.

Now, we just have to wonder how many other valid FOIA requests they’ve rejected using this bogus rationale?

https://www.muckrock.com/news/archives/2024/aug/26/with-a-little-help-from-the-national-archives-nsa-finally-releases-grace-hopper-lecture-watch-it-here/

https://newsie.social/@freedomofpress/112769871287068613

Employers should let workers opt in or out of wearing health monitoring devices, only process strictly necessary data, and delete the information within 24 hours, EFF’s @Adam_D_Schwartz told @AP. https://apnews.com/article/wearable-tech-extreme-heat-worker-safety-9948cbdb608e1716f554d8263c81b2cf

@cstross Agreed. I've never seen it well defined, it's always just "does it fool you personally for 15 minutes". Eliza did that to people in the 1970s. The Sims did it here:

https://aliceandkev.wordpress.com/

People assume there are professional Turing testers, a man with a clipboard somewhere who's an expert at testing turings and you can phone them up to make an appointment. Meanwhile, humans see faces in clouds, put googly eyes on the roomba, ask their car out loud to start on cold mornings...

The fawning celebrity worship of our so-called politics in this country is just disgusting. Really feels like I'm living here along with a bunch of 5 year olds. That's about where the level of political discourse is stuck. "My mommy's the best mommy! My daddy can beat up your daddy!" Shameful.

Bacteria helping to extract rare metals from old batteries in boost for green tech - https://www.theguardian.com/environment/article/2024/aug/25/bacteria-helping-to-extract-rare-metals-from-old-batteries-in-boost-for-green-tech "Team at University of Edinburgh using microbes to recycle lithium, cobalt and other expensive minerals"

Retoot if you agree the US needs to stop arming Netanyahu to bomb Palestinian civilians.

I want to follow as many people as I can who share this belief in basic human decency and international rule of law. We must stand united for justice and on the right side of history.

I wrote about this issue here: https://www.qasimrashid.com/p/breaking-biden-sent-netanyahu-35b