Old Fucking Punk @lwriemen@librem.one

Another day, another Trump public attack on a female journalist.

Also another day when the rest of the White House press corps -- not just the right-wing propagandists but also the "reputable" journos -- pretends it didn't happen. What a bunch of cowards these people are.

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/aug/17/white-house-personal-attack-cnn-reporter-trump

Scientists cave in to the Trump regime's war on a human-livable climate: https://www.nytimes.com/2026/08/10/climate/national-academies-climate-chapter-judges.html

The continuing cowardice of major institutions in our society is a key reason we're in so much trouble.

It's difficult to imagine that Linux Foundation, which has a branch called "Agentic AI foundation", platinum-sponsored by Anthropic, Google and OpenAI, would not be acting in the interests of the said platinum members.

Anyone know of a good way of visualizing dense hypergraphs?

(Hypergraphs are graphs where an edge can connect more than 2 nodes.)

If you have a lot of edges, things get tangled very quickly. And if an edge connects a lot of nodes, even a single edge can be hard to understand!

Carlitos Ricardo Parias is approaching 300 days behind bars, the longest known time a journalist has spent in US custody.

Authorities say he's undocumented, but their account doesn't explain a growing mountain of evidence, FPF's Adam Rose writes in The Intercept.

Read more:

https://theintercept.com/2026/08/16/ricardo-parias-ice-detention-journalist-los-angeles/

“Invasive searches like ALPR database queries must require a judicial warrant,” EFF’s @cooperq told @FastCompany. “Policymakers must seize this moment—when even the leading ALPR vendor has admitted they have done too little to prevent abuse—to, at minimum, codify real protections into law.” https://www.fastcompany.com/91590083/why-we-love-to-hate-flock

Amazon's Book Woodchipper Facility has a cartoonishly evil logo because of course it does.

We placed a tracking device in a shipment of rare books to see which AI company was buying it, and found an Amazon facility where Amazon scans and destroys...
https://jwz.org/b/yk-v

"Claude watermarks your code now."

Dude. It's not yours, you didn't write it.

Did you know that @purism has pretty extensive documentation regarding their hardware, software, and services?

Browse the #documentation here to learn more about #Purism products:

https://docs.puri.sm/

#Linux #FOSS #opensource #Librem5 #Librem16

San Francisco artists are replacing AI and big tech ads with guerrilla signs like this.

Here's a handy web tool 👍

A new website lets drivers see if their vehicle has been looked up using Flock’s surveillance camera system — amidst growing backlash over the company’s sprawling network of automated cameras.

The “Have I Been Flocked” site compiles Flock Safety’s audit logs, allowing drivers to look up their license plate number to see if authorities — or someone else — has run their information through the system.

https://www.the-independent.com/tech/flock-surveillance-cameras-online-search-b3033917.html

So yesterday at my #HOPE26, I mentioned the #Fediverse and various parts of it that can help people get off Big Social Media, but there was one I hadn't mentioned, and that was because I didn't think about it.

If you want a TikTok replacement, check out Loops, a Fediverse replacement in the similar sense!

https://loops.video/

Shout out to fellow Townie @manchicken for pointing it out to me! Thanks, Choom!

#GetFederated #HackThePlanet

When the book-burning by GenAI/LLM companies was revealed, the defences of this were "oh the books aren't rare" and "oh they're only buying books from pulping companies that will be destroyed anyway".

Neither of these is true. The AI companies are buying bulk orders of obscure titles from ordinary booksellers:

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2026/aug/15/uk-ireland-booksellers-suspect-ai-companies-bulk-orders-data-acquisition

None of these are bestsellers, and none of them are checked to see if they are archived anywhere. But they *will* be physically destroyed by the AI companies after sucking out all the info from them.

#GenAI #LLM #AI

This week's comic on the oversized luxury truck fad

#comics #cartoons #transportation #cars

May Day has more than a century of history in Chicago, from the fight for the eight-hour day and the Haymarket martyrs to generations of workers who kept the tradition alive.

On Aug. 23, Isaac Silver of Buttons of the Left will bring some of that history to the In These Times offices through the buttons, flyers and other artifacts people carried with them.

Bagels and brunch included. Kids welcome.

https://www.allyoufascistsboundtolose.com/calendar/buttons-bagels-and-brunch

look, it's quite normal for execs to jump ship from a large company *just before* it tries to do a huge IPO

https://www.ft.com/content/53082739-7714-4aae-9816-e55ab423cbee
archive: https://archive.is/2gNyj

How might things have been different if so many of us weren't convinced that devaluing our own labor was essential to our careers, let alone betraying labor solidarity!

AI is only possible, I'll posit, because so fucking many of us never saw ourselves as laborers in the first place, and actively resisted any kind of identification with labor (to wit, "uber but for" is antagonistic towards labor, not a cutesy way of marketing an app).

More on the Attala County case here. https://www.wjtv.com/news/education/federal-lawsuit-accuses-attala-county-school-resource-officer-of-strip-searching-high-school-boys/

Schools in Omaha are giving shock gloves to resource officers to use on students.

These are effectively torture devices that will be used on minors.

They will be disabling. There’s a risk of physical disabilities as well as PTSD.

Students shouldn’t be given electric shocks in schools.

Let’s not forget a resource officer in Attala County has been accused of sexually assaulting 7 Black students by strip searching them.

They were forced to strip, bend over and squat during a vape search.

Don’t give weapons to resource officers.

This must be stopped:

https://www.3newsnow.com/central-omaha/opd-says-its-school-resource-officers-have-shock-gloves-at-29-schools-and-theyve-been-used-twice-on-students

#uspol #education #disability #ableism #shockgloves #ice

@altk3y @lambdacalculus
I call his platform by its current name for one very simple reason. If you know any white supremacist code, then you'd know why he'd call his buggy corpo silo after the capital "X" based on its ASCII numerical code.