I do think that the same level of deregulation that Nixon and Reagan pushed for allowed for the heavy proliferation of abusive services (yes, generative AI is abusive since it doesn't have a concept of consent and one of the prevailing issues of networked services and vulnerable people is consent) like big pharma, telecommunications and food was the natural result of AI like this.

Holding my breath, but this is a decent first step. https://www.ftc.gov/business-guidance/blog/2023/03/chatbots-deepfakes-voice-clones-ai-deception-sale. Noticed by https://dair-community.social/@emilymbender/110061676148297098. If this is something that's actionable, Microsoft would have been issued some sort of reprimand (or at least, the CEO of OpenAI). But again, nothing.

Self maintainence of products is something we keep losing. I agree with this https://fosstodon.org/@JoeRess/110061708352534067. I want more "new" devices (and more "old" things) to be more open to repair. So we can stop feeding mega-companies what they want from us: money and excuse to maintain these systems.

Another reason to unionize is to give workers more autonomy not only over how work is done, but what kind of work is being done. Workers at Alphabet demonstrated this with their protests (see https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/tech-news/more-100-google-employees-call-company-end-its-work-censored-n940671. Unionization and being able to bargain over what kind of work gets done, especially when it has political ramifications (and the larger the influence of the company, the more political their offerings become, thanks to globalization).

Start (or join) the union at your job.

Hm. There's some rumbling from the Ford Foundation that reminds me of a private version of the NLNet grant situation that I'm curious about.

Molly White knows how to start a week. https://newsletter.mollywhite.net/p/the-venture-capitalists-dilemma

Bumping this, I've opted to stick to references to remain spec-compliant in the Rust Microformats parser (and can update the Elixir to align).

Because I wanted something simple to do, I'm implementing https://www.w3.org/TR/jf2/ as an extension to the Rust Microformats2 library (which could use some love in its docs). A very naughty thing I'm realizing is that I could make another extension that converts with values in https://docs.rs/activitystreams-kinds/latest/activitystreams_kinds/index.html; that'd be one part of enabling hand-crafted pages being more interoperable with ActivityPub with little effort (only on the parser).

55 years ago, one of the worst ideas of American capitalism, to move away from the gold standard, happened under one of the worst presidents to exist (and equally bad House).

I want to get a portable keyboard and mouse as I'm really working from a dining table most of my days.I got a kickstand coming for my laptop to prop it up but I'm considering getting Logitech ERGO M575 and MX Mechanical Mini, Tactile Quiet for use. I'm also considering the MNT Reform USB Keyboard but it's a USB keyboard and I wanted a wireless one for ease of use (though I'm using a Framework, I have a port and I really like the idea of a open hackable keyboard - especially with that little display window, although I was talking so much shit about Apple's Touchbar being weird, but this doesn't take keys away).

Ugh.

Signed up to attend https://www.causalislands.com/. This looks a bit more of a technical event, but there's people speaking that I respect and the thesis and events look relevant to me. Can't say I'm recommending it, but it does look interesting enough to peek at.

This should be the last book I get this month (and for the next two, I hope). https://openlibrary.org/works/OL28060653W/Guilty_of_Journalism?edition=key%3A/books/OL38404689M. Understanding Assange's case is something I've put on the back burner for some time — knowing that he mainly got the weight of the federal government of the US and its extended apparatus against him.

One book that jumps out at me is this one https://bookshop.org/p/books/the-war-against-the-commons-dispossession-and-resistance-in-the-making-of-capitalism/18909811?ean=9781685900168. The commons as a concept (and how I understand it) has changed from solely being a physical, central space to something that could be defined as a library, school and even a church but now spread out since people don't need to give "one authority" the truth of what a "commons" should (or could) hold. This fights heavily against platform capitalism (i.e.: Amazon, Apple, et al) because they can't define what's worthy to be held or promoted — communities get to dictate that (to varying degrees).

Frankly, I think that's reason enough for you and folks in similar ranges to not do anything. Like I've definitely jumped in front of police but only in environments where I knew I had support (like at a protest and my comrades are on my 6). But to your point, police are more prejudicial the less like them that you are.

Also from that site is this zine about taking action instead of standing by and recording. https://www.anarchistfederation.net/zine-dont-film-act-a-call-for-confrontation/

The zine's at https://jerseycounterinfo.noblogs.org/files/2023/02/Act.pdf

It looks like 2023 is my year of moving deeper into reading because despite my want to not buy another book, I managed to acquire ten and looking at this list, that might increase even more, lol. https://www.anarchistfederation.net/ecosocialist-bookshelf-march-2023/

Wow — workers at Bandcamp are organizing! https://www.bandcampunited.org/

I haven't checked, but their use of GitHub is where all of that information lies. By "upgrading in place", do you mean running the installation from the ISO and re-installing on top of the existing installation? I don't know if that's possible.

If you want to suggest a GNOME-centric, Debian-based (recent) distro for me to try out, I'm open to it.