Old Fucking Punk @lwriemen@librem.one

Congress is pushing website-blocking bills that would let private companies erase sites from the internet—based on nothing but a hollow promise not to abuse this new power. https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2025/04/congress-reviving-site-blocking-and-its-just-dangerous-ever

I heard Trabant, the crown jewel of nationalist economic protectionism, is planning to start heavily subsidised automotive manufacturing again, but this time, in the US. I look forward to a time when USians eagerly await, sometimes for years, the delivery of their 'legendary' Trabant, the storied pinnacle of 80s eastern European automotive technology.

“For more than two decades, surveillance towers at the border have proven to be a boondoggle, and adding AI isn’t going to make it any less of a boondoggle — it will just be an AI-powered boondoggle,” EFF’s Dave Maass told @theintercept. https://theintercept.com/2025/04/03/google-cbp-ai-border-surveillance-ibm-equitus/

From the U.S. Press Freedom Tracker:

Rep. Ronny Jackson of Texas introduced a bill March 27 that would strip all government funding for NPR and PBS, a move that the public broadcasters say would lead to the closure of hundreds of local radio and television stations nationwide:

https://pressfreedomtracker.us/all-incidents/rep-ronny-jackson-targets-press-as-member-of-congress/#March%2027

Get 20% off the new title with code APRIL thru 5/1: https://pmpress.org/index.php?l=product_detail&p=1769

VICTORY: Judge Rejects Government’s Attempt to Dismiss EFF Lawsuit Against OPM, DOGE, and Musk https://www.eff.org/press/releases/judge-rejects-governments-attempt-dismiss-eff-lawsuit-against-opm-doge-and-musk

Climate crisis on track to destroy capitalism, warns top #insurer - https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2025/apr/03/climate-crisis-on-track-to-destroy-capitalism-warns-allianz-insurer "The world is fast approaching temperature levels where insurers will no longer be able to offer cover for many climate risks" #ClimateCrisis

Now that the Repubs are in charge of the intelligence agencies, maybe people will finally start taking Yasha seriously.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L1US6sxgKrc

EFF has been documenting DMCA takedown abuse for decades, EFF’s Corynne McSherry told Callan Quinn’s Scamurai. “A DMCA claim is one of the few and far too easy ways to use U.S. law to get material taken down quickly, with no prior judicial review." https://www.scamurai.io/p/the-dmca-censorship-tactic-scrubbing

Mike and Ramsey from PM recently did an interview with IWW Ypsilanti on radical publishing and the IWW. Listen at the link in our bio!

🔔 Heads up: There will be scheduled hardware maintenance today starting around 19.00 CEST / 17.00 UTC.

We expect no significant impact on service availability (in fact we already simulated the maintenance without issues by rebooting the affected machines today), but please keep in mind that there could be a period of degraded performance or short outage during this time (e.g. try to avoid long-running migrations today and postpone if you can).

If your criticism of "big tech" is merely a result of the unhappiness about the fact that Meta, Google and Microsoft aren't EU-corporations you are missing the point.

There is nothing that indicates that SAP or Deutsche Telekom would hesitate a second at the chance of becoming the same violent and exploitive forces.

The solution to Big Tech isn't EU Big Tech. It's de-commercialisation and democratization of tech.

Guess where they got their weird trade deficit math from?

@not2b @dangillmor so, the 6 trillion is expected over 10 years. Still an incredibly high tax of 1800 per person on average...

https://edition.cnn.com/2025/03/31/economy/tariffs-largest-tax-hike/index.html

These Columbia University students understand history better -- and have infinitely more courage -- than the people who run the place: https://www.commondreams.org/news/columbia-student-protests?utm_source=Common+Dreams&utm_campaign=8ccf2383e7-Top+News:+Wed.+4/2/25&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_-c56d0ea580-600813801

"LLM did something bad, then I asked it to clarify/explain itself" is not critical analysis but just an illustration of magic thinking.

Those systems generate tokens. That is all. They don't "know" or "understand" or can "explain" anything. There is no cognitive system at work that could respond meaningfully.

That's the same dumb shit as what was found in Apple Intelligence's system prompt: "Do not hallucinate" does nothing. All the tokens you give it as input just change the part of the word space that was stored in the network. "Explain your work" just leads the network to lean towards training data that has those kinds of phrases in it (like tests and solutions). It points the system at a different part but the system does not understand the command. It can't.

Americans' taxes just went up by $6 trillion. That is a million dollars multiplied by 6 million.

Don't tell me Trump is trying to save anything. This guy is a economy destroyer -- and not just ours.

Glad to see CNN telling the simple truth in this headline:

My word. They are dumber than I thought. And I thought they were really, really dumb.

It'll be funny if, on the eve of the 50th anniversary of Microsoft's founding (not something to celebrate in my opinion, of course), Trump's tariffs could cause people to choose non-US-owned technologies, i.e. Linux. I'd be ok with that.