Kai 'wusel' Siering @wusel@uu.org

Musk threatens to sue researchers who documented the rise in hateful tweets

Free speech absolutist Elon Musk, reporting for duty. https://apnews.com/article/elon-musk-lawsuit-cchd-twitter-x-hate-speech-extremism-434a80631f9e76833ee30387c04dd290

Die Union testet weiter, wie weit man die Werte der Demokratie im Schulterschluss mit den Nazis demontieren kann. Ramsauer spielt dabei eine perfide Variante des Spiels von Söder, Merz, etc.-er wurde nicht missverstanden, seine Äusserung war „nicht zur Veröffentlichung gedacht“

Maybe it's just that their system for managing referrals is completely broken, in which case, I guess that's a different failure.

But like, I still send people their way to buy bikes, they do, and they never pay the referral bonuses. Silly.

It amuses me that RadPower has just decided to stop paying me referral bonuses, even for bikes purchased by friends at full price.

What petty bullshit.

I hope this becomes a wake-up call to all #artists, to all creative people out there — a wake-up call not just about #AI and automatically generated content, but also, and more importantly, about how urgently we need solid #copyright reform.

We had been needing it for decades, in fact.

#Art is not supposed to be hoarded by Disneys or Sonys, not supposed to be locked in corporate vaults. Art is more than just means of "maximizaing shareholder value".

Courtney Love hit the nail on the head years and years ago:
https://www.gerryhemingway.com/piracy

> Today I want to talk about piracy and music. What is piracy? Piracy is the act of stealing an artist's work without any intention of paying for it. I'm not talking about Napster-type software. I'm talking about major label recording contracts.

Now the same companies that had cried "protect the artists!" to extend copyright over and over again are salivating at the thought of replacing artists with software.

I think it’s difficult for us in North America to appreciate how contrary, rebellious, and frankly prophetic Sinéad O’Connor was in an Irish context. I lived there briefly in 1985, and so saw a bit of the place and time she was from.

It was a bit of a culture shock. I was 19 and not in school. I got a work permit and flew over to Dublin. I only spoke English at the time so it was kind of a toss up between London and Dublin. I didn’t think there’d be much of a difference it was all “Western Europe” as far as I was concerned — Denmark, France, Ireland, … all pretty similar right? Hahahaha.

Unlike today, Ireland in 1985 was a poor country. Deprivation had forced generations of people to emigrate to seek a better life. There were 4 million people in the Republic, but in 1845 there had been 8 million. The only country in Europe whose population declined over that period. 1995 was the first time in 300 years Ireland did not have negative net migration.

And it was pious. Sinéad called it “a theocracy”. There were no state schools. All education was in the hands of religious schools — overwhelmingly Catholic. Two years before, in 1983, the Republic had put a ban on abortion into their constitution. Condoms were illegal when I got there. In 1980 Bob Geldof had summed up his home town as “police and priests”.

It seemed a bit more patriarchal than the US in the Reagan years. But I didn’t know the half of it. It wasn’t until years later that I learned about the Magdalene Laundries where “troubled” girls were imprisoned in workhouses operated by orders of nuns, the Mother and Baby homes where women who were pregnant out of wedlock were kept out of sight to have their babies in secret, who were then taken from them and sold to American Catholic couples — and underneath it all the decades-long, quietly suppressed crime of the clergy sexually abusing boys and girls.

This stuff was not talked about in 1980s Ireland. But Sinéad did. She would not shut up. She would not stay in her place. She made original, passionate music. But if you think she caused an uproar in the US when she tore up a photo of the Pope on SNL … well, in Ireland in 1992 it was incendiary.

It was only later, in the late 1990 and 2000s that the scandals broke, and everyone could see that the crazy woman who would not shut up was right. She had been right all along.

The 2022 biographical film Nothing Compares is good. If you want to get the flavor of what she means to people in Ireland, go scroll through the expressions of grief pouring out on mastodon.ie

The woman was a giant.

#Sinead #SineadOConnor

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The engineers who designed the #Voyager probes half a century ago even thought of the possibility that a wrong sequence of commands may point the antenna dish away from earth (like someone did a couple of days ago).

And they implemented a self-adjusting mechanism that a few times a year scans the positions of a few known stars to infer the position of the earth, and point back the antenna in the right direction.

50 years later, these wonderful machines are still working, tens of billions of km away from earth, with only 69 KB of RAM, and even a wrong sequence of commands won't put them out of use, while nowadays 4 GB of RAM aren't even enough to start VsCode or IntelliJ.

The more I understand how they were designed, the more I feel like an early Medieval engineer looking at the Pantheon or other marvels of Roman architecture. Some amazing skills, knowledge and attention to details have been lost from that generation to ours.

Ein Weidel O-Ton bellt in den Nachrichten man müsse sich Deutschland zurückholen. Ach, Alice: ein AfD-Deutschland verspricht für Homosexuelle, vor allem solche wie Dir, also die in migrantischen „Mischehen“ die schlimmste aller wählbaren Regierungen zu sein.
Ich sag es mal in #Bleisatz.

#Letterpress

hello land dog, i am water dog

Tolles Vorher/Nachher Bild. 1972 war Nijmegen eine klassische Autostadt. Breite Straßen und überall Parkplätze. In den Jahrzehnten danach dann die Wende. Der öffentliche Raum wurde umverteilt, entsiegelt & begrünt. So entstand eine wunderbar lebenswerte Stadt. Das sieht man♥️

Found this yesterday and I likes it, I does. #repair #repaircafe #fix #fixer

a lot of you here need this sticker. def not me though.

Every government’s real policy for the climate crisis

The inevitable, dangerous X factor. 1/...🧵in part, via David Frum:

NYT reports that Elon #Musk personally thwarted a #Ukraine military operation he disapproved of.

At this point, Musk's interference to thwart Ukraine battle plans is not any kind of economic action. It is an assertion of a personal foreign policy, in defiance of the United States, whose citizenship he sought and to which he swore loyalty in 2002.

https://t.co/7hWGMBKo5j

Wer kennt sie nicht, die vermögenden "Leistungsträger" mit Schaufel in der Hand. 🤡

Bitte einmal Grundkurs Marx oder meinetwegen BWL für den Herrn. Der Kapitalist automatisiert nicht aufgrund von Fachkräftemangel sondern um Kosten zu reduzieren und den Profit zu erhöhen. #Aiwanger