Old Fucking Punk @lwriemen@librem.one

“We are constantly told that universal programs are unrealistic while enormous subsidies, tax breaks and giveaways to corporations are treated as the natural order of things.”

Francesca Hong talks democratic socialism, worker power and governing with Rep. Shaun Scott.

https://inthesetimes.com/article/francesca-hong-democratic-socialism-wisconsin

Hello Fediverse - I'm looking for libre/FOSS/open source Sysadmim, DevOps, & Dev contract work while our (with @isaac) new project, Magnificent.nz, is ramping up...
Capabilities https://davelane.nz/abilities
CV https://davelane.nz/CV
Repo https://forge.davelane.nz
Refs on request!
Any libre leads, worldwide, gratefully accepted!
#GetFediContracted #GetFediHired

@glyph I'm Danish. In my culture, if someone praises you like an LLM chatbot does, that means they're either 1. lying through their teeth and actually despise you, 2. trying to sell you something you both know you don't want, or 3. a tourist.

Put out of the cartoon business by actual photographs of our decaying mess of a President.

AI promises so much, but one of the things it truly delivers is fraud at scale. Example: https://www.404media.co/company-offering-100-human-written-never-ai-peer-review-is-entirely-ai/?ref=daily-stories-newsletter

I get the strong impression that there's broad disillusionment across the 'conventional' (i.e. proprietary) side of our industry - the feeling among practitioners that they've sold out, and are mercenary and largely uninvested in what they're doing. They're biggest wins appear to be 'making things slightly less bad', e.g. the move from IBM (obscenely expensive) to Microsoft (extortionately overpriced), as opposed to doing 'good'. Here's hoping https://magnificent.nz can help turn that around.

An appeals court just denied President Joe Biden’s attempt to block the release of his interviews with his ghostwriter.

This ruling is a victory for transparency — and establishes a powerful precedent.

If Biden’s interviews must be released in the public interest, that same standard must apply to Jack Smith’s findings on Donald Trump.

You cannot have one standard of secrecy for your political allies and another for your opponents.

Our friends at The Border Chronicle have launched Wall Watch, an interactive map documenting the growing infrastructure at the US-Mexico border, featuring surveillance data compiled by EFF. https://wallwatch.theborderchronicle.com

FL Attorney General James Uthmeier has been accused of corruption, including by a member of his own party.

Maybe he should open his books, instead of attacking the New York Times over its reporting.

https://www.politico.com/news/2026/08/10/florida-new-york-times-shareholder-01031142

A federal judge just killed DOE’s blanket “still interested” FOIA policy.

It’s diabolical for an agency to ignore FOIA requests for years, then close them if the requesters don't remind the agency that they still want the records.

Government delay shouldn’t be allowed to be transformed into a weapon against transparency.

https://federalnewsnetwork.com/litigation/2026/08/judge-throws-out-does-blanket-still-interested-foia-policy/

As Michigan moves toward the general election, Branko Marcetic says to expect two things: predictions of doom for the Left and enormous spending from AIPAC and other big-money groups to try to make those predictions come true.

https://inthesetimes.com/article/abdul-el-sayed-donovan-mckinney-michigan-bernie-sanders-left-aipac

FEMA obligated $11.1 billion to completely overhaul Puerto Rico’s electrical grid. Less than 25% has been distributed.

Coenia Sanchez reports on how federal restrictions have stalled the rebuilding of infrastructure people depend on to survive.

https://inthesetimes.com/article/puerto-rico-water-crisis-trump-congress

I work in #infosec and consider myself pretty well educated on what’s happening with #AI.

But I’m about 33% of the way through @emilymbender and Alex Hanna’s book, “The AI Con”, and I’ve really learned a lot more.

If you’re skeptical or curious about AI, this is a must-read. I’m recommending it to everyone I know.

#books #bookstodon #reading #AI #technology #nonfiction

I framed my book on generative models in terms of risks for a reason. Whatever you can say about their "productive value", their nondeterminism, manipulative UI, statistical mediocrity, and tendency towards unpredictable errors mean the risks—even if you're an asshole who disregards societal risks—outweigh the still largely hypothetical benefits

when 1000 faceless github accounts crowd into your PR queue all at once, slinging slop, desperate (for what reasons I cannot quite understand) for some shred of clout that comes from an accepted commit on a high-profile open source project, even if every single one of them is a Real Human Being and they are all still doing their best to pay enough attention, but they are also all staring directly into the Not Paying Enough Attention beam, you can't just give it a pass because it's worked before

So, even if we were to accept that LLMs are extremely useful and their utility overwhelms all possible concerns about externalities[1], we would absolutely need to *replace* the load-bearing presumption of good faith that the code we are consuming isn't *trying* to harm us, because now it's not *trying* to do anything, it's just whatever gets through the filters we have put in place. We have to replace it with a sandbox.

[1]: they aren't and it doesn't

> Our lab has agreed on a blanket ban on the use of generative AI for writing.

reason:

> Using generative AI inherently exposes you to the risk of career-ending accusations of plagiarism.

https://www.carlsonlab.bio/thoughts/the-only-reason-youll-ever-need-not-to-write-with-ai

Many organizations are intrigued by the idea of self-management because they hope to have better decision making while creating a power-with culture and structure. Sociocracy is one of the central governance methods to achieve exactly that.

However, it can be intimidating to implement those methods – it’s a lot at once! You’ll have to do research, train everyone, implement — months or even years of transition time. And regular work needs to get done as well! I always compare changes in governance to beating heart surgery. Tricky — at the very least.

Is there an easier way? Most of all, is there a safer way?

Continue reading
https://www.sociocracyforall.org/3-tools-from-sociocracy/

@glyph Yesterday somebody honestly told me “we obviously have to read every single line that is produced.”

Dude you sent two 7000-line PRs in the morning.

you know, if you’re considering rolling back your anti-AI policy because a bunch of people are crybullying each other over “AI witch hunts” and getting caught trying to pass off slop as their own work, your development community might have deeper problems that taking a centrist position on AI will almost definitely make much worse