Old Fucking Punk @lwriemen@librem.one

What do recent prior restraints on a book author in Texas and a newspaper in Mississippi have in common?

Both were entered without hearing from the author or newspaper first.

Judges must do a better job protecting the First Amendment.

https://freedom.press/issues/free-speech-suffers-when-courts-rush-to-impose-prior-restraints/

@so_treu the TERFs in the UK already have the xenophobic posters printed!!

Huh: https://www.rnz.co.nz/news/national/558813/kiwis-feeling-panicked-over-phone-notifications Free tip: turn off all notifications except maybe phone ringing and your alarm. No one needs you to respond right away - instead, pick when it suits you. Yes, if you're, say, a medical professional, then maybe you want to check your phone fairly often, but still, only when it's safe for you (and those around you) to do so. And, whatever you do, don't be like Wayne: https://www.rnz.co.nz/news/national/558808/auckland-mayor-wayne-brown-cops-fine-demerit-points-for-using-phone-while-driving 🤦

Border officials are so twitchy and paranoid that they detained and imprisoned two German teenagers ...

... even though they'd applied for -- and received -- their electronic approval for a five-week visit

Why were they detained? Because they hadn't booked accommodations for their full five weeks

they'd figured they'd travel around a bit and make decisions on the fly ... *like tourists do all the time, in most normal and free countries*

https://www.the-independent.com/news/world/americas/us-politics/german-tourists-deported-hawaii-cbp-b2736655.html

Under Trump, moral and intellectual cowards run the U.S. Naval Academy:

https://www.cnn.com/2025/04/19/politics/us-naval-academy-canceled-authors-lecture-book-bans/index.html

There's only one reason for this massive deletion, discontinuation, and modification of national US climate, weather, ocean, and environmental data sets. And that is to silence and turn a blind eye to evidence of major threats to the country, to protect the fossil fuel industry. This is modern book burnings.

https://www.nesdis.noaa.gov/about/documents-reports/notice-of-changes

Don’t work at Palantir.

📢 abra v0.10 is finally here 📢

TLDR; "abra upgrade" 👍

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

`0.9.x-beta` 👉 `0.10.x-beta` **migration guide**:
https://docs.coopcloud.tech/abra/upgrade/#09x-beta-010x-beta

A huge thanks to everyone who helped get this release done ❤️‍🔥 Happy Hacking 🫂

-- d1

May Day reminds us: the working class has always fought back. In a time of rising repression, worker solidarity isn’t nostalgia—it’s survival. Now through 6/1, get a free e-book copy of The Incomplete, True, Authentic, and Wonderful History of May Day with code MAYDAY at the link in our bio.

A trillion dollars disappeared in a day because someone made a garbage generator that uses fewer irreplaceable natural resources than the current garbage generators, and that makes me think about cobblestones.

Remember cobblestones? You could hook your computer up to a big distributed science project, there were tons to choose from, you could fold human proteomes, you could search for extraterrestrial intelligence, you could map cancer markers, develop better solar cell materials, all sorts of stuff. It took the form of a screensaver - whenever you weren't using your computer your CPU fans would spin up and you'd be folding. Move your mouse and it pauses. Great stuff. Something useful for your computer to do when you step away for a minute.

Anyway, you'd get credit for the work your computer had done. Cobblestones, they were called. They were never used as currency, they were just to show off. A cobblestone was a kind of receipt to show that your computer had done something useful.

We never used cobblestones as currency, but we could've. Instead we got bitcoin, which is a receipt that shows that your computer made a bitcoin. What's the bitcoin for? Being a receipt that your computer made a bitcoin.

It served as proof that you'd wasted some electricity.

Proof of waste.

There's other cryptocurrencies as well, some of which work differently to the proof of waste system, and those are worthless, because they're not proof of waste.

The waste is the point.

Now we get this market crash today, money disappeared, because the new AI thing is roughly as pointless as the old one but nowhere near as wasteful.

The waste, is the point. We saw it with cryptocurrencies and we saw it with NFTs and we see it with AI.

The waste has to be the point, because to some people, waste equals scarcity equals wealth equals power. The waste has to be the point because the machines that process the pointlessness have to be expensive, have to be owned by someone, have to be inaccessible to the average person, have to be manufactured and sold and rented out, the means of production of the pointlessness has to be in the right hands. The waste has to be the point, because otherwise we would've decided years ago that a cobblestone was worth a twentieth of a nice sandwich.

The waste is the point.

People like to think Asimov predicted the current technology known as "artificial intelligence". They are wrong. It was Douglas Adams when a computer spent untold resources just to return an answer which is both irrelevant and poses further questions.

NEWS! Pope loses will to live after meeting JD Vance https://newsthump.com/2025/04/21/pope-loses-will-to-live-after-meeting-jd-vance/

"In Trump's first full six weeks in office, the administration removed 27,772 immigrants from the U.S...That's a daily average of 661 removals — an 11% decrease from the daily average of 742 under President Biden last fiscal year. From Jan. 26 to Feb. 8, the Trump administration removed an average of 693 immigrants daily, a 6.5% decline from Biden's last days in office."

https://www.axios.com/2025/04/01/immigrant-removals-deportations-trump

I see that I'm in for another week of explaining that end-to-end encryption will not fix stupid.

@dangillmor I spent years trying to get my business de-listed from Yelp. That is not a service they offer. Sounds like the same scam.

A writer I admire, Benedict Evans, publishes a fine newsletter. I'm glad to say it's not on Substack.

But he's discovered that the company is pulling a fast one on him simply because he subscribes to several newsletter on that site.

Substack, he writes, "has created a public profile in my name and encouraged hundreds of people to follow me there, without my permission or consent. There’s no way for me to control this or turn it off."

Sleazy. Why am I not surprised?

https://www.linkedin.com/posts/benedictevans_i-dont-use-substack-to-publish-my-newsletter-activity-7319323633888227328-YjFy/