Old Fucking Punk @lwriemen@librem.one

🔴 Brand new Tom the Dancing Bug now up on Boing Boing
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THEY WALK AMONG US.
TRUST NO ONE.
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https://boingboing.net/2026/06/10/tom-the-dancing-bug-they-walk-among-us-trust-no-one.html

You can do it bubble!

Get 20% off this new title thru 7/1 with code: JUNE
https://pmpress.org/index.php?l=product_detail&p=1957

“Checking in on queer books this Pride month — Malinda Lo”

https://www.malindalo.com/blog/2026/6/5/checking-in-on-queer-books-this-pride-month

> So even though things are tough right now, don't forget that there are a lot of us out there who love queer books. We need to show publishers, libraries, and our communities that we're here. We can do that by continuing to read and buy queer books, and by talking about them on social media and in the real world.

I've got some good news and some bad news...

https://www.404media.co/cops-keep-getting-arrested-for-using-flock-to-stalk-people/

A court in Munich declared that Google is liable for their "AI summaries" and all its hallucinations. This is an important step to bring "AI" slop in line with all other products on the market: "AI" products are basically the only ones where a provider can just deliver unchecked garbage and put all the liability on the consumer. I hope to see aggressive change here.

https://the-decoder.com/landmark-german-ruling-declares-googles-ai-overviews-are-googles-own-words-and-makes-it-liable-for-false-answers/

Think it through: the US gov't buys into the big AI companies; now when people are protesting a new data center, they will be fighting not only big capital, but also the US government. And if you think the US gov't would use it's ownership stake to stop data center construction, I have a lovely bridge to sell you at a very reasonable price!

Why Bernie why?? Dr. Nathalie Maréchal joins me and @alex to observe and contextualize Sen Sanders’ descent into AI Doomerism:

https://www.buzzsprout.com/2126417/episodes/19314168-bernie-goes-down-the-x-risk-rabbithole-with-dr-nathalie-marechal-2026-05-04

Bernie Sanders has read the room and determined that what people want is for the gov't to give "AI" companies a shit ton of money...Man, fuck that guy.

https://oligarchwatch.substack.com/p/an-ai-trojan-horse

"His discussions included an hour-long meeting with Sen. Bernie Sanders, who has called for AI companies to be 50% state-owned."

For those coming in late, that's just a stealth bail-out. Scam Altman says "OpenAI has a one trillion valuation," and so we hand them $500 Billion. Great idea, Bernie! Much socialism (for the rich)!

"OpenAI...loses a lot of money...But if Trump forces the public into “a partnership” with the company, it immediately becomes more plausible that the federal government could use taxpayer dollars to cover OpenAI’s costs."

And if you don't understand what's going on here, I kinda think you just don't want to understand. Bernie and Trump singing from the same hymnal, both trying to hand money to billionaires. Do you get what's going on here yet? Well, do ya?

Anthropic’s new privacy policy explicitly states that they can deny your legal rights to delete personal data if it’s hard for them because it was used in training data. Can’t wait to see that shit tested in a court.

Elon Musk looks like some creature the Jim Henson studio cooked up for one of their shows that was too scary and serious for kids.

Apparently, this isn't because of "AI" or privacy regulations but because German courts decided that third party liability shields don't apply to "AI" summaries published by Google itself

This should not come as a surprise, I and others warned about this

I wrote this (see image) in The Intelligence Illusion back in 2023 (https://illusion.baldurbjarnason.com/)

"Landmark German ruling declares Google's AI Overviews are Google's own words and makes it liable for false answers"

https://the-decoder.com/landmark-german-ruling-declares-googles-ai-overviews-are-googles-own-words-and-makes-it-liable-for-false-answers/

Today I learned that there is an AI data center being built in the Indian city of Raipur, where I used to live.

Raipur is very hot (Wikipidia says the record high is 47.9C), and I'm pretty sure that doesn't take the effect of humidity into account. It wasn't always this hot, but it gets a little worse each year and that has added up.

The majority of the city's electricity is sourced from coal power plants, and for a variety of reasons its grid is not especially stable, with particularly frequent blackouts during the rainy season. That often means that there's no AC during the most humid and second-hottest time of the year.

It is dry year-round except for those few months of monsoons, when the local groundwater reserves are replenished. Despite the intensity of those storms, there have been progressively worse water shortages every year. I've done a lot of rooftop gardening there to reduce the urban heat island effect, and I've watched all but the most heat and drought-resistant plants wither and die. At times water was being brought in by tanker trucks and there just wasn't enough for both human use and the whole garden.

I find it difficult to imagine a worse place to build an AI data center, and yet here we are. They are going to burn coal to power the AI chips and cooling rigs during heat waves and water shortages that are already literally deadly to the people living there.

This is the sort of thing people are justifying when they talk about how much more productive they are thanks to their spicy corporate autocomplete. The anger that I feel is not some abstract moral high ground, but a visceral reaction to having gone outside in deadly climate conditions to spread an insufficient amount of water on my dying plants.

When they say that AI is the future, this is what that actually means.

So here's the other thing that bothers me about all this. Regardless of the eventual results, this thing they're doing is *incredibly* resource intensive. They routinely spend billions of dollars on training these models, and billions more on operating them. It's not simple to parse out what fraction of that is directly attributable to the massive scale vuln finder/fabricator. But for the sake of argument lets just pick a plausible number, and call it 50-100 million dollars.

What could we have gotten for 50-100 million dollars of sponsorship for security audits? Prior to this, the largest single investment into FOSS security I'm aware of was the 2015 audit of openssl, after the heartbleed incident. It's hard to find precise costs for that, but I found a few sources estimating 1.2 million dollars, and that is arguably the most security critical piece of software in the world.

But suddenly there's 100x more resources available to do this work, now that producing the artifact can be done with stolen labor? Now that they can externalize the cost of false positives onto the already mostly unpaid maintainers of these projects? Even if their claims are true, which we have no reason to believe and very good reason not to, it's still a travesty

My side of the jqwik anti AI logging drama: https://blog.johanneslink.net/2026/06/09/the-jqwik-anti-ai-affair/

World Cup players are being denied entry to the US.

Some are being detained, searched and treated like criminals.

They have one thing in common…. They’re not white.

The US has no business hosting the World Cup when it’s hostile to those from other parts of the world.

#uspol #worldcup #fifa #fascism

Absolutely wild to see this and the reactions to it, we must be entering the stage where everyone pretends they never thought it would speed things up in the first place

https://mastodon.social/@nixCraft/116724214815495661

A bit of a milestone in #Neighbourhood-first software folks - we have a way to connect any web app to the #P2P network run by #LoRes Node.

You can read about it, and try it out here:
https://lores.tech/blog/example-chat-app/

This example chat app allows real-time communication between web users connected to any web server in the regional network. It does that by connecting to an API that we now supply to all #coopcloud apps.

The communications goes over #P2Panda, so it's delay tolerant and ready for post internet approaches. We don't yet have an example of it working over #LoRa or anything though, but the end of the article touches on next steps for that.

Long time no post, very busy times. And although I would have dearly loved to talk about ecology, in the current flux of news and articles I’m reading I feel obliged to make a post about *drumrolls* AI *crash cymbal* in research, and astrophysics. Oh wait. So this IS inevitably going to be, to some extent, about ecology and research. Read on.

Avant-propos. First, most of this post is not going […]

#Forgejo 15.0.3 and 11.0.15 were just released! They are security releases.

We recommend that all installations are upgraded to the latest version as soon as possible.

Check out the release notes and download it at https://forgejo.org/releases/. If you experience any issues with this release, please report to https://codeberg.org/forgejo/forgejo/issues.

#forgejorelease