Lunatech @Lunatech@social.cleverlibre.org

Apple sells "activation lock" as an anti-theft tool, and it does work for that.

It's also an environmental nightmare, a deterrent to legitimate reselling of used enterprise machine -- and, no doubt most important (to Apple), a way of boosting sales of new units.

https://9to5mac.com/2023/01/27/2020-macs-landfill/

Bloomberg's deep dive into how Musk and his minions -- one quisling in particular in this article -- have amplified extremists' reach is a must-read. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2023-01-27/elon-musk-s-twitter-trust-safety-head-ella-irwin-breaks-rules-for-him?leadSource=uverify%20wall

Again, I ask journalists, and all people who believe in common decency in our public discourse, who still use the birdsite: Why are you letting a sociopath leverage your integrity? Please think it over.

For years, tech giants like Google and Facebook have been developing the underlying tech behind tools like ChatGPT and Stable Diffusion--but had been cautious about releasing them due to concerns over safety, bias, and misinfo.

Now, with tech stocks tumbling and ChatGPT hype soaring, insiders say there's growing pressure to stop listening to the ethicists and cassandras and charge ahead despite the risks. New from @nitashatiku, Gerrit De Vynck and me: https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2023/01/27/chatgpt-google-meta/

Elon Musk personally banned Chad Loder from Twitter. Reported first by WaPo, now Bloomberg has confirmed with the screenshots. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2023-01-27/elon-musk-s-twitter-trust-safety-head-ella-irwin-breaks-rules-for-him?leadSource=uverify%20wall

Neat! https://macosbin.com #macOS #macadmin

AI getting even weirder: "MusicLM: Generating Music From Text" from a team at Google research

Generates audio clips from promote like "A fusion of reggaeton and electronic dance music, with a spacey, otherworldly sound. Induces the experience of being lost in space, and the music would be designed to evoke a sense of wonder and awe, while being danceable."

No interactive demo, but this link has a huge number of examples to listen to:

https://google-research.github.io/seanet/musiclm/examples/

Paper: https://arxiv.org/abs/2301.11325

Religions encourage the poor to accept their poverty by promising rewards in the afterlife & reassuring them that God “sees” their suffering. This prevents the poor from demanding their fair share & absolves the wealthy from making equitable change in society. Religion is no friend to the poor. #ReligiousTrauma #patriarchy #colonialism #poverty #racism #corruption #criticalthinking #education

Elon #Musk said he met with House Speaker #KevinMcCarthy and House Minority Leader #HakeemJeffries to discuss ensuring #Twitter “is fair to both parties.”

> it wasn’t. Based on my own past projects with new user accounts. On new unprofiled accounts they opened up pushing #rightwing #conservative stuff primarily

https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2023/01/27/elon-musk-twitter-mccarthy-capitol/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=referral&utm_campaign=wp_homepage

I love the thread style in #Woolly by @mttvll. A.W.E.S.O.M.E! 🤩

The Ticketmaster hearing in Congress was a sham. The people Ticketmaster abuses with monopoly practices are telling the simple truth.

But the core truth is that Congress passed laws allowing this rogue company -- and countless other rogue companies in other industries -- to create and abuse monopolies and cartels.

And Congress has refused to lift a finger to fix any of what it enabled.

Will it now?

@natasha514b @almostheretical

👋 Natasha, thanks for responding! There are plenty of more liberal religious left protestant denominations that are doing great work, IMO. #Exvangelical would be someone who has left the more conservative right wing #evangelical denominations. Some become much more progressive #Christians, me included. Some become intense athiests and everything between.

There's even a group https://www.christiansagainstchristiannationalism.org/

There are newly coined phrases and podcasts that naturally popped up because so many people have and/or are going through the same thing. I imagine that the rise in #ChristianNationalism has caused other people to leave their churches to avoid it as well. It has been very polarizing in some evangelical churches and denominations.

The only thing to fear isn't fear itself.
It's idiots.
You should definitely fear idiots.

“This is the U.S. adopting a Chinese attitude toward the internet: We’re going to block things we don’t want you to see because everything’s a national security threat,” said Milton Mueller, a Georgia Institute of Technology professor and co-founder of the Internet Governance Project. “It’s really a dangerous attitude — not just for American values of free expression but for this whole idea of an open and interconnected internet.” https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2023/01/20/tiktok-bans-states-colleges/

"We’d like to tell you that our new 'undesirable' status doesn’t worry us," Meduza said in a statement. "But that would be untrue. We are afraid. We fear for our readers and for those who have collaborated with Meduza over many years. We fear for our loved ones and our friends." https://meduza.io/en/feature/2023/01/26/if-it-s-a-fight-they-want-it-s-a-fight-they-ll-get

TIL there's an open source prosthetic leg initiative by the University of Michigan.

Awesome.

https://opensourceleg.com/

#OSL #OpenSourceLeg #OpenSource #Prosthetic #Michigan #UMich

I have been writing that #elonmusk's #Twitter has become anti-#science and anti-#democracy months ago.

Slowly, the #mainstream media is catching up.

Here is a #bloomberg article painting a pretty clear picture of an #autocrat in power trying to subvert whatever #democratic #safeguards were left at Twitter:

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2023-01-27/elon-musk-s-twitter-trust-safety-head-ella-irwin-breaks-rules-for-him

Best for Twitter to be regulated out of existence. Need #DSA and #EU to do so.