Old Fucking Punk @lwriemen@librem.one

"The public deserves to know how dysfunctional, destructive, and deceptive all of this has been and continues to be," an FDA employee told Politico.

https://www.politico.com/news/2025/03/21/musk-leakers-government-trump-doge-00243208

Before 23andMe is sold to an even worse company, you can (allegedly) order your data deleted. Here's how:

https://www.theverge.com/news/634680/23andme-genetic-data-account-deletion-how-to

I probably shouldn't be surprised by the blatant nature of the theft at this point. Brazenness does seem to be the order of the day.

https://finance.yahoo.com/news/white-house-says-gold-reserves-213421472.html

Send this to your conservative uncle (maybe along with the phone number of his local congress people).

https://www.dropsitenews.com/p/dr-oz-trump-plot-medicare-advantage-plans

moar proof that #CoopCloud isn't vaporware

KolliCloud is built on top of our config commons, making use of abra and alakazam (command-line tools) to provision and manage free software stacks for associations 🎉

https://vereinscloud-sh.de
which is a rebrand of https://kollicloud.de
initiated by https://local-it.org (CC fedi member)

yes, a regional fire department in germany was using a software running on the co-op cloud stack: https://kollicloud.de/ueber/

(i'm nagging people involved to do a blogpost and share more about what is going on cus it's just wildly inspirational shit imho)

How the AI hype is pushing up emissions -- even if it never delivers.

https://wimvanderbauwhede.codeberg.page/articles/the-real-problem-with-AI/

#frugalcomputing

#ai #generativeAI
#DataCenters

Next time someone asks me "why don't we just have the AI write the software" I will ask them "why don't we just have the AI do the management?" or "why don't we have the AI do product management?" or "why can't the AI be the CEO?"

Just had an invitation email to a genuine, legitimate, important conference with these in its header image, and seriously people if you can't afford to pay artists stock photos exist. You don't need to burn through a small lake to generate the bastard bodyhorror lovechildren of Geiger and HP Lovecraft.

yeah making students pay for product they want them to use later down the line is utter bullshit. Even with a "Student Discount".

I have used Scribus for the local car club newsletters and it was great.



CC: @lightweight@mastodon.nzoss.nz @lightshow@mastodon.nz

Substack has made it much less obvious how to read a free newsletter without creating an account. The popup used to say something like "Continue reading without subscribing" but now the only way to do that is click the X in the upper right hand corner.

The SOLE beneficiary of this is Substack.

Join us to hear from journalists at the frontlines of attacks on press freedom, featuring the Marion County Record (raided in 2023), Atmore News (arrested later that year), and Clarksdale Press Register (censored last month).

🗓️ March 26, 2 pm ET/1 pm CT:

https://us06web.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_RkM-u7ChROeXjqhEtlYN3Q#/registration

Journalists are civilians and targeting them is absolutely illegal and inexcusable.

Everyone involved in these assassinations should be held accountable, including U.S. officials who continue to bankroll Israeli war crimes of which they have full knowledge.

https://www.aljazeera.com/video/newsfeed/2025/3/24/israeli-strike-kills-al-jazeera-journalist-hossam-shabat-in-gaza

Here comes the second release candidate for the 0.10.x series of `abra` 📢

Upgrade docs 🆙
https://docs.coopcloud.tech/abra/upgrade/

Migration guide 🚧
https://docs.coopcloud.tech/abra/upgrade/#09x-beta-010x-beta

Changelog 📖
https://git.coopcloud.tech/toolshed/abra/releases/tag/0.10.0-rc2-beta

The goal is to make a final release within 2 weeks pending any critical bugs that we find. Thanks in advance to those who help testing this release candidate 💓

#Abra #CoopCloud

Dear fediverse , what kind of a connector is this?

40 pin, 0.5mm pitch, motherboard side, going to an eDP display panel.

I'd like to buy the socket, but nothing I've seen quite matches the shape.

#laptop #repair #lvds #electronics #askfedi

To all who’re criticizing itself the mounting criticism of LLMs and who'd rather like to emphasize these models can also be used for good:

POSIWID (aka The Purpose Of a System Is What It Does) is very much applicable here, i.e. there is “no point in claiming that the purpose of a system is to do what it constantly fails to do”.[1]

For the moment (and I don’t detect _any_ signs of this changing), LLMs conceptually and the way they’re handled technologically/politically, are harmful, more than anything, regardless of other potential/actual use cases. In a non-capitalist, solarpunk timeline this all might look very different, but we’re _absolutely not_ in that world. It’s simply ignorant and impossible to only consider LLM benefits anecdotally or abstractly, detached from their implementation, their infrastructure required for training, the greed, the abuse, the waste of resources (and resulting conflicts), the inflation, disinformation, and tangible threats (with already real impacts) to climate, energy, rights, democracy, society, life etc. These aren't hypotheticals — not anymore!

A basic cost-benefit analysis:

In your eyes, are the benefits of LLMs worth these above costs?
Could these benefits & time savings have been achieved in other ways?
Do you truly believe a “democratization of skills” is achievable via the hyper-centralization of resources, whilst actively harvesting and then removing the livelihood and rights of entire demographics?
You’re feeling so very productive with your copilot subscription, how about funding FLOSS projects instead and help building sustainable/supportive communities?
How about investing $500 billions into education/science/arts?

Cybernetics was all about feedback loops, recursion, considering the effects of a system and studying their influence on subsequent actions/iterations. Technologists (incl. my younger self) have made the mistake/choice ignoring tech’s impact in the world for far too long. For this field to truly move forward and become more holistic, empathetic and ethical, it _must_ stop treating the above aspects as distracting inconvenient truths and start addressing them head on, start considering secondary and tertiary effects of our actions, and use those to guide us! Neglecting or actively denying their importance and the more-than-fair criticism without ever being able to produce equally important counter examples/reasons just make us look ignorant of the larger picture... Same goes for education/educators in related disciplines!

Nothing about LLMs is inevitable per se. There’s always a decision and for each decision we have to ask who’s behind it, for what purposes, who stands to benefit and where do we stand with these. Sure, like any other tech, LLMs are “just a tool”, unbiased in theory, usable for both positive and negative purposes. But, we’ve got to ask ourselves at which point a “tool” has attracted & absorbed a primary purpose/form as a weapon (incl. usage in a class war), and any other humanist aspects have become mere nice-to-have side effects, great for greenwashing, and — for some — surfing the hype curve, while it lasts. We’ve got to ask at which point LLMs currently are on this spectrum and in which direction they’re actively accelerating (are being accelerated)...

(Ps. Like many others, for many years I’ve been fascinated by, building and using AI/ML techniques in many projects. I started losing interest shortly after the introduction of GANs and the non-stop demand for exponentially increasing hardware resources and obvious ways how this tech will be used in ever more damaging ways... So my criticism isn’t against AI as general field of research, but about what is currently sold as AI and how it’s being pushed onto us, for reasons which actually have not much to do with AI itself, other than being a powerful excuse/lever for enabling empire building efforts and possible societal upheavals...)

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_purpose_of_a_system_is_what_it_does

#AI #LLM #Cybernetics #NoteToSelf

So I've been using my laptop with the wrong date for a while and #certificate errors meant I could only see #websites when the stars aligned.

This was the most productive I've been for a while.

So I decided to make this a #browser extension:

**Block selected websites, 90% of the time**

https://codeberg.org/dcz/webBlocker

No more mindless scrolling! No more constant Wikipedia binges! Just occasional ones. It's fine to have fun once in a while.

$ ssh-add ~/.ssh/id_ecdsa.dcz

Warning: Program '/bin/bash' crashed.

Wow, this is new.

#bash

#DeutscheBahn : personal data or 3x the price!

Me: not going to #conferences until further notice.

It doesn't seem right that a government-subsidized #monopoly is allowed to fleece customers :(

https://www.vzbv.de/pressemitteilungen/deutsche-bahn-ticketkauf-am-automaten-muss-weiterhin-moeglich-sein

#db #trains #privacy

When I asked researchers if they have started planning what to do if the US gov't decides to restrict access to GitHub or other bits of US-hosted digital infra, I was hoping some people would say that they are forming federated multi-institution/multi-national collaborations because any single site in any single country is just another single point of failure. It's not "can my university spin up a self-hosted version of [thing]" but "let's figure out how to federate this stuff."

Starmer is warned against ‘appeasing’ Trump with tax cut for US tech firms - https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2025/mar/23/starmer-is-warned-against-appeasing-trump-with-tax-cut-for-us-tech-firms the more #starmer concedes, the more #trump will demand; the time to say no is now....