Old Fucking Punk @lwriemen@librem.one

Election Interference is Fine For Me But Not For Thee - https://emptywheel.net/2026/07/17/election-interference-is-fine-for-me-but-not-for-thee/

The report oil companies are worried about: Climate attribution science - https://arstechnica.com/science/2026/07/national-academies-climate-attribution-is-maturing-but-still-has-limits/ "could make it easier to hold companies liable for damages."

Piledrivers.

Kathunk. Kathunk. Kathunk.

https://www.osnews.com/story/145548/follow-the-money-especially-in-open-source/

Small reminder that there's now less than 2 weeks left to hand in your proposals for the postmarketOS and Alpine Linux conference :)

https://postmarketos.org/conference/

I have, after two years, allowed myself to talk about my experiences with AI madness again, this time with the benefit of speaking to people all around the world, including Fortune 500 executives. This one is on my regular blog for casual readers, and cross-posted to the company blog if you need to share this with someone and have it look official.

https://ludic.mataroa.blog/blog/ai-mania-is-eviscerating-global-decision-making/

https://hermit-tech.com/blog/ai-mania-is-eviscerating-global-decisionmaking

We live in a society that blames the poor for their poverty while tolerating the existence of leeches who become billionaires (and trillionaires) by stealing the wages of others. We are expected to believe this is fair and the result of choices made by individuals.

It is all wrong.

AI companies and Amazon are inviting bogus "authors" to publish bogus books about real people.

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/07/16/technology/ai-slop-books-biography-amazon.html

Madison Square Garden is suing @WIRED over stories relating to surveillance at the venue. Wired stands by its reporting and has lifted the paywall on two of the stories so you can read them for yourself. Here they are:

https://flip.it/CmOGtT
https://flip.it/2n8E4_

#Technology #MadisonSquareGarden #JimDolan

Kids need to explore the world and that includes social media

A prominent psychologist argues that children should be free to explore the world they are going to have to live in, and that includes the internet and social media, which means no age-gating laws

https://mathewingram.com/work/2026/07/16/kids-need-to-explore-the-world-and-that-includes-social-media/?utm_source=mastodon&utm_medium=jetpack_social

ICE thugs tackled and tried to handcuff a man at Las Vegas airport. When they realized they were being filmed, they simply walked away, leaving the man on the ground with a handcuff attached to one arm. The Las Vegas Police found no outstanding warrants for the man and removed his handcuffs.

https://apnews.com/article/las-vegas-ice-airport-arrest-553273b1f51c5e999396c147de8729fe?link_source=ta_bluesky_link&taid=6a59ef2b41d4be0001a14c2e&utm_campaign=TrueAnthem&utm_medium=AP&utm_source=Bluesky

Huh, I wonder why Linus Torvalds has suddenly become such a sloppusher.

Anyway entirely unrelated, but here's the top sponsors of the Linux Foundation, which employs Torvalds.

WATCH: EFF’s Matthew Guariglia joined @taylorlorenz to discuss how AI is automating mass surveillance at an unprecedented scale, and what you can do to protect your privacy. https://youtu.be/qCunDUJKYeQ?si=hb7gvrF6H9czB-Wx

Trump wants Americans to distrust ballots whenever he dislikes the result.

Workers live with the consequences: a $7.25 federal minimum wage, broken labor law and a PRO Act backed by 70% of voters and going nowhere in the Republican-controlled Congress.

https://inthesetimes.com/article/labor-unions-pro-act-fight-for-15-filibuster-election-2024

Hotter than Death Valley...😬

https://montanafreepress.org/2026/07/16/eastern-montana-shatters-heat-records/

Baltimore City Budget Advances Worker Cooperative Conversion
#WorkerCoops #Baltimore

https://baltimoreroundtable.org/2026/06/press-release-baltimore-city-budget-advances-worker-cooperative-conversion-as-strategy-to-preserve-legacy-businesses-and-build-community-wealth/

News you can use!

The Heat Stupids and How to Prevent Them
#HeatStroke #HeatExhaustion

https://geo.coop/gleanings/heat-stupids-and-how-prevent-them

RE: https://mastodon.acm.org/@ACM/116929782094395296

My short (submitted) feedback on this:

I have stopped reviewing for all ACM publications because of the overwhelming number of plausible-looking papers generated by LLMs where I cannot trust that the results are actually related to having run an experiment. LLMs are destroying the integrity of science conducted by ACM members. The ACM should in no way be encouraging this behaviour.

All of my ACM publications (and I am the author of one of the eight most-downloaded papers in the ACM digital library) are released with a license that requires attribution. LLMs are incapable of guaranteeing attribution with their output. As a result, I regard any training of LLMs on my papers as copyright infringement.

@ACM Interesting move considering the recent opinion piece: Wither ACM? Publish or Perish?

https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3815435

I guess the author of that article is right in suggesting that ACM really is just a publishing house now and doesn't really represent a society of professionals.

@mhoye 20 years ago what got me to finally really try linux was Ubuntu billing itself as "Linux for human beings" and ever since then it's been me cautiously picking my way towards whichever distro / ecosystem currently seems to be the least hostile to that basic premise.

The thing that saddens me about so many developments in Linux, at every level - from SystemD and the Wayland permission model up to snaps and flatpak and now apparently the kernel - is that these priorities are, obviously to me at least, not being spelled out explicitly because saying so out loud would be too obviously repulsive. Because today the primary constituencies of Linux are cloud fleet rentiers first, their developers second and human computer owners a distant third at best.