Matt Panhans @mpanhans@librem.one

My LLM assistant will polish my text to a high pitch of professionalism so that your LLM assistant can then summarize it down to a short paragraph; this is all very sensible

📣Official statement: the new EU chat controls proposal for mass scanning is the same old surveillance with new branding.

Whether you call it a backdoor, a front door, or “upload moderation” it undermines encryption & creates significant vulnerabilities

https://signal.org/blog/pdfs/upload-moderation.pdf

Hi Fediverse, we are NLnet. We support people and organizations who contribute to a free and open internet. We offer small and medium grants to projects that help fix the internet through open hardware, open software, open standards, open science and open data.
We're the lead of @NGIZero a coalition which runs several funding programmes for people who build free and open source technologies for the Next Generation Internet. (Made possible with financial support from the European Commission).
We've been stealthily present in the Fediverse behind the NGIZero handle but have now finally set up our NLnet instance. With special thanks to @nlnetlabs for their patience :).
Another way we've been involved is we've funded many fantastic ActivityPub related projects. See the image for a visual overview.

Happy to be here and looking forward to meet you in this pleasant space.


#introduction

FTC sues Adobe over hefty hidden fees, “manipulative” sign-ups

Adobe knowingly "trapped" customers into annual subscriptions, the FTC alleged.

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2024/06/ftc-sues-adobe-over-hefty-hidden-fees-manipulative-sign-ups/?utm_brand=arstechnica&utm_social-type=owned&utm_source=mastodon&utm_medium=social

Finally. The US has sued Adobe over early termination fees and making subscriptions hard to cancel: The FTC took action after receiving numerous complaints from consumers across the country. https://ca.movies.yahoo.com/movies/the-us-has-sued-adobe-for-early-termination-fees-and-making-subscriptions-hard-to-cancel-165808358.html

Penzeys Spices is a politically-active Milwaukee brand. This is the billboard it put up just outside the Milwaukee airport. Arriving GOP RNC attendees will see this as they make their way to the RNC site. Welcome to #Milwaukee! #VoteBlue

Also from the “He's right you know" department, “We trained it on the public web" is just such bullshit. I have more than 20 years of stuff on the “public web” that I've been happy to share publicly for people to _read_. Every page (not that it legally needs to!) says © 1995–2004. It wasn't meant to be raw material for your Bot, and as Joe says it really is galling to have Apple of all entities—inventors of the “Look and Feel” lawsuit!—joining in the fun. https://duck.haus/@joesteel/112600387827475622

The state of search in 2024:

Google: "We threw away decades of search knowledge and Internet indexing and just made an answer up "

Bing: "Here's 100 tangentially related pages from 2010 that I only included because your query appears in a tag cloud in the website's footer"

DuckDuckGo: "Here are the Bing results, only with ✨privacy✨"

Reddit: (this user has deleted their entire post history using PowerDeleteMyShit. Fuck /u/Spez)

Yahoo: "Oh thank god, someone's actually using our search engine! No, we're not just Bing!" *frantically trying to cover up the giant Bing sticker* "NO DON'T GO TO GOOGLE!!!!"

Yandex: "Here are all of the Russian-owned resources on this topic. Only Russian sources are trustworthy. Everything else is fake ne—I MEAN, misinformation"

Kagi: "We'll give you what Google used to give you for free, for the low low price of $10/month!"

Ask.com: [hoarse screaming and clawing noises can be heard from the ground beneath a headstone that says "Here lies Jeeves: 1996-2006"]

🚀 New Jellyfin Server/Web release: 10.9.5 🚀

See the release post on our forums for more details: https://forum.jellyfin.org/t-new-jellyfin-server-web-release-10-9-5

Or go right to the server and web release notes:
https://github.com/jellyfin/jellyfin/releases/tag/v10.9.5
https://github.com/jellyfin/jellyfin-web/releases/tag/v10.9.5

Check out my video essay on how Google RUINED the Internet, out now on YouTube: https://youtu.be/P7NHABs76mg

Google promised a better search experience — now it’s telling us to put glue on our pizza https://www.theverge.com/2024/5/23/24162896/google-ai-overview-hallucinations-glue-in-pizza

Imagine how hard the authors of this paper had to work to call it “Social Media and Job Market Success" and not "Tweetment Effects”

"Paste as Mark Twain" is a neat demo of Microsoft's new Advanced Paste AI, but how about using AI to decide when I want to paste as plain text. (Which is 'always.')

The only thing that cures homelessness is housing.

So I mentioned last night that my open-source work on the fediverse (mastodon, pixelfed, etc) was funded for 10-13 hours per month, in my head I had a figure of €1000/month that I was using as the donation income I receive.

I just checked and it's actually closer to €700/month.

Your support for my work is greatly appreciated & helps enable work that quietly affects about a million people.

https://support.thisismissem.social

How Major League Teams Use R to Analyze Baseball Data - video presentation by Keith Woolner, principal data scientist for the Cleveland Guardians, at the Cleveland R User Group
https://youtu.be/1SR9C4td3TI?si=Ic7osZnMgb8vQd44

#RStats #SportsAnalytics @rstats

I wrote about Reddit, Stack Overflow, and how this new more extractive era of the internet has changed the bargain between platforms and users https://www.platformer.news/ai-data-licensing-reddit-stack-overflow-protest-openai/

U. Chicago’s President thinks the protest encampment is reminiscent of an illegitimate military operation, so I assume he’ll be encouraging his Econ department to provide them with policy advice.

(Also, maybe someone with a high school education can tell him about the origins of the word “Campus”.)

❇️ Artist: #DavidZinn in City: #AnnArbor USA 🇺🇸 04/2024 - Title:
🔴 "Yet another bath night cut short by
Brian's free-spirited tailbone" 🦕
🟡 "Eine weitere Badenacht, die durch
Brians freies Steißbein
unterbrochen wurde." 🛁
#StreetArt #Art #Chalkart #Artist #SidewalkChalk #Dinosaur #BathNight #PullingThePlug #GoodMorning !☕🥐

As a former director for civic integrity at Twitter, I’ve been disturbed for some time about what Elon Musk is doing with his private global platform.

Today, I took the step of leaving Twitter, completely.

Why?
Here’s my last tweet:
https://mem.ai/p/e83QTrTPntGEmmZYQUEc