Old Fucking Punk @lwriemen@librem.one

@not2b @dangillmor so, the 6 trillion is expected over 10 years. Still an incredibly high tax of 1800 per person on average...

https://edition.cnn.com/2025/03/31/economy/tariffs-largest-tax-hike/index.html

These Columbia University students understand history better -- and have infinitely more courage -- than the people who run the place: https://www.commondreams.org/news/columbia-student-protests?utm_source=Common+Dreams&utm_campaign=8ccf2383e7-Top+News:+Wed.+4/2/25&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_-c56d0ea580-600813801

"LLM did something bad, then I asked it to clarify/explain itself" is not critical analysis but just an illustration of magic thinking.

Those systems generate tokens. That is all. They don't "know" or "understand" or can "explain" anything. There is no cognitive system at work that could respond meaningfully.

That's the same dumb shit as what was found in Apple Intelligence's system prompt: "Do not hallucinate" does nothing. All the tokens you give it as input just change the part of the word space that was stored in the network. "Explain your work" just leads the network to lean towards training data that has those kinds of phrases in it (like tests and solutions). It points the system at a different part but the system does not understand the command. It can't.

Americans' taxes just went up by $6 trillion. That is a million dollars multiplied by 6 million.

Don't tell me Trump is trying to save anything. This guy is a economy destroyer -- and not just ours.

Glad to see CNN telling the simple truth in this headline:

My word. They are dumber than I thought. And I thought they were really, really dumb.

It'll be funny if, on the eve of the 50th anniversary of Microsoft's founding (not something to celebrate in my opinion, of course), Trump's tariffs could cause people to choose non-US-owned technologies, i.e. Linux. I'd be ok with that.

new security milestone reached: #chatmail relay servers are hardened to only transfer end-to-end encrypted e-mail with metadata minimization. No cleartext message can enter or leave the secure chatmail network anymore.

We now talk about "chatmail relays" rather than servers as they only ephemerally store messages until delivery. Dirt cheap to run.

We opened up our #rust "chatmail core" infrastructure library and set up an overview of the community driven ecosystem ...

https://chatmail.at

"Donald #Trump says the #tariffs he has announced will generate “$6tn in investments” but experts explain that tariffs are actually paid for by American businesses and consumers. That would make it the largest “#tax hike” in US history." - https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/live/2025/apr/02/donald-trump-tariffs-trade-latest-live-us-politics-news?page=with%3Ablock-67eda0f38f0800d4cb06c411#block-67eda0f38f0800d4cb06c411 what a moron #whoops

"Recreational 4WDing" is a hobby no one should have. There. I said it.

Read about how legal risks created by the Biden administration's ill-advised journalist prosecutions might be why Jeffrey Goldberg would voluntarily exit a Signal chat with Trump officials that could've generated countless important stories.

https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2025/03/signalgate-group-chat-atlantic-editor-jeffrey-goldberg-trump-bondi.html

“Unless you are using GPG (GNU Privacy Guard), email is not end-to-end encrypted, and the contents of a message can be intercepted and read at many points, including on Google’s email servers,” EFF’s @evacide told @washingtonpost. https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/2025/04/01/waltz-national-security-council-signal-gmail/

Fully in favour of banning recreational driving on beaches in NZ. And *enforcing* the hell out of it. https://www.rnz.co.nz/national/programmes/afternoons/audio/2018981523/no-cars-on-the-beach

Worker-Owned News Outlets Are Changing the Media Industry

"Many employee-owned media companies also take little or no money from advertisers. For instance, in 2023, Morning Brew reported that Defector got 95 percent of its revenue from subscribers during its first year..."
#WorkerCoops #WorkerOwned #Media

https://geo.coop/articles/worker-owned-news-outlets-are-changing-media-industry

So the Dems stood against discrimination in mortgage lending - but not *for* the minimum wage that would have lifted the lowest paid workers out of poverty so the could afford a mortgage. They stood for abortion rights, but *against* Medicare For All, which meant all women had the right to an abortion, but the poorest women couldn't afford one.

3/

It’s time to get ready for May Day! This month get 40% off all labor titles and 25% off all labor merch. Check out these best-sellers, and shop the sale via the link in our bio.

How about all the credit unions in the US fund a fork of GnuCash that can compete with QuickBooks, Quicken, etc.? Good free financial software would benefit the credit unions' membership.

One mod's opinion: mastodon.social remains the source of most reported content... Really, if they're not going to screen registrations, or are too big to moderate effectively, they should just close registrations and point people to other instances.

Praise for THE AI CON from across the pond.

UK release date: May 22
US release date: May 13

Want to read at the first possible moment and help me and @alex make a splash?

Pre-order at your favorite local bookseller or via the links at https://thecon.ai

Wisconsin supreme court race: liberal Susan Crawford beats Musk-backed candidate - https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/apr/02/wisconsin-supreme-court-election-result-race fab slap in the face for #musk

US embassies to contractors worldwide: Cancel any diversity programs or risk going unpaid - https://www.cnn.com/2025/04/01/business/us-embassies-european-suppliers-dei-intl/index.html as others have pointed out, the solution is simple: don't provide cleaning services etc., let #muricans stew in their own filth, real and metaphorical