Old Fucking Punk @lwriemen@librem.one

Scabby the Rat is a famous inflatable champion of the working class, yet there is no Scabby the Rat inflatable costume? Big Halloween is afraid of what a Scabby Army can do.

In a solidarity event, WikiProject Organized Labor is wrapping up tomorrow. It was a monthlong community editing event to improve coverage of union-related topics on all the wiki-properties. I started out just moving union/strike/organizer images from Flickr Commons to Wikimedia Commons but then I realized I could make an article for You Deserve a Tech Union, a very good book about a very important topic. Just a stub, but I'm pleased with it.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/You_Deserve_a_Tech_Union

All we can expect when trying to scale up AI systems is diminishing returns and devastating environmental damage.

Calls for `slowing down’ can conveniently hide the diminishing returns, while still convincing people that the tech is “all powerful”.

Box 1, from: van Rooij, I., @olivia Guest, O., et al. (2024). Reclaiming AI as a Theoretical Tool for Cognitive Science. Comput Brain Behav 7, 616–636. https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s42113-024-00217-5

"When I first saw the lead concentrations, they were so high I thought our instrument was broken" 😬

Disposable vapes are also horrible for the environment, throwing away so much plastic, batteries, and electronics.

https://www.ucdavis.edu/news/disposable-e-cigarettes-more-toxic-traditional-cigarettes

Indeed. As @olivia often says, guardrails are a scam. Model providers can play catch-up with stopgap measures but fundamentally these systems are open, and just as water seeks its own level, prompts find their way

Perhaps of interest, I go into some detail about guardrails and preference tuning (RLHF) in a recent paper of mine
https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.19452871

RE: https://infosec.exchange/@david_chisnall/117358990093685067

100%. The whole "terrorists can use an LLM to build a bomb" is a dumb movie plot threat. If you want to hurt people, lack of knowledge is not your problem. And nobody needs to develop a new chemical to do terrorism. All you need is readily available.

This is just "AI" labs creating imaginary issues to distract us from the real harm they cause.

I made some minor design and content structure tweaks to the Practical Accessibility course website (ahead of its third anniversary). https://practical-accessibility.today

One of the changes I made was creating a dedicated page for the many many reviews & testimonials that the course has received over the past 3+ years.

A heartfelt thank you to each & every one who has shared their experience & recommended the course. I’m forever grateful to you all. 🫶🏻

More to come!

“In response to “The death of web development education” - Andy Bell”

https://bell.bz/in-response-to-the-death-of-web-development-education/

> The most effective way I can contribute, in my opinion, is a crude sketch I just did of Piccalilli‘s Stripe chart for all time sales:

That graph is eye-opening.

RE: https://mastodon.social/@campuscodi/117353868814624656

meta being evil as usual

RE: https://mastodon.social/@UnicornRiot/117356196405647815

words fail at the sheer evil of #israel's actions here

Forgive me for posting a link to this site, it is important because some of you do not hate effective altruists enough!

Effective altruism is a dangerous cult: https://www.realtimetechpocalypse.com/p/effective-altruism-is-a-dangerous

#AI #noAI #technofascism #technooptimsm

Recently saw someone talk about their prestigious AI specialisation to a group of veterinarians, who then walked out thinking that the guy was an expert in Artificial Insemination and asked me "So what's ChatGPT?"

I keep getting the feeling that integrity is a luxury the obscenely wealthy cannot afford.

Filled out an online form, and to get a copy of my answers I am required to sign into Microsoft. Hell, no. One more reason I despise the greedy control freaks who run Big Tech at this point.

“The Tech Industry: An Autopsy | Computational Impacts”

https://monroelab.com/2026/09/29/the-tech-industry-an-autopsy/

> The ‘AI’ scourge, is more than a propaganda campaign, it has mutated (as all things do) into a sort of religion. Unsurprisingly, considering the combination of capitalist mania, resurrected eugenics, and hatred for workers that spins, like a molten core, at its center, the scourge is relentless, deforming everything it touches.

Look out in the coming weeks for a trailer and official release date for the 2nd film of our full-length documentary series, InterRebellium.

Hey #selfhosting adjacent people, reminder that with two commands on #Debian you can have a self-hosted #Tor Onion service running:

sudo apt-get install --install-suggests python-txtorcon
twistd web --port "onion:80" --path ~/public_html

The above will make your "~/public_html" (yes that's how old I am) available on a brand-new Onion domain.

More details:

https://txtorcon.readthedocs.io/en/latest/introduction.html#introduction