⊥ᵒᵚ Cᵸᵎᶺᵋᶫ∸ᵒᵘ ☑️ @falken@social.cleverlibre.org

#Germany is testing a four day workweek in an effort to address its labor shortage problem. People might be more willing to work if they are able to conduct personal business and spend less on childcare. #1u https://www.dw.com/en/germany-tests-four-day-workweek-amid-labor-shortage/a-68125506?ref=futurecrunch.com

daily demotivator

Today I got a LLM running locally.

With #vulkan acceleration and a four gigabyte modal, the response time is as good or better as I'd get from #chatgpt stealing all my data - around ten tokens / sec on a @frameworkcomputer AMD 13"

https://github.com/ggerganov/llama.cpp?tab=readme-ov-file#vulkan

#geek #ai #linux

@neil @ianbetteridge yeah, it kind of feels like the real story here was something like "grammarly hires hundreds of people for no particular reason to make investors think it's growing" and none of us noticed

companies always say "see, we need to do these layoffs because it's been a hard year and whatever" but they never explain why they put themselves in a position where one hard year means mass layoffs in the first place

Another week has passed, and you are wasting your life over frivolous things like "work" and "education". These things won't enrich you.

What's stopping you from striving to really achieve? How many hours have you put into the life affirming skill of:

Standing across the road mysteriously staring at a random person, only to completely disappear as a bus passes.

Perhaps there is a market for electric toothbrush shaped flipper zeros in Canada

Just because the rest of you have given up on this old sci fi aesthetic, doesn't mean I have to. I need it into my veins through intravenous drip please.

I've been on #Mastodon for only a few days and I already feel less anxiety/stress over here than on twitter/X. I love the fact that both Mastodon and #Bluesky are overall leftist/left-wing. I'm so glad the future of social media is decentralized (e.g. #ActivityPub, ATProto, Nostr, etc.).

Twitter was never a healthy place with all its silly algorithms and encouragement of confrontations. I don't know which platform US society mostly resembles, but I hope it eventually resembles Mastodon, etc.

@cstross @jredlund
I really appreciate that I read this statement on mastodon, where I'm reasonably sure it's intended as horror, whereas if I read it on tumblr, I'd be more worried it's erotic

Walked 9 miles. Earned my delicious victory pint 👍Massively missing my walking buddy and wise pal Peanuts but we’re catching up next week and aiming for 40 miles in a weekend.

Fresh basic income pilot results, this time from Arlington, Virginia where 200 people got $500 a month for 2 years. The findings:

Employment INCREASED by 16%, and their incomes from paid work INCREASED by 37%. The control group saw no such gains.

Nearly three-quarters of the treatment group also reported improved mental and physical well-being and an increased sense of control, compared to the control group.

https://www.arlnow.com/2024/02/06/report-arlingtons-first-guaranteed-income-pilot-boosted-quality-of-life-for-poorest-residents/ #BasicIncome

UBI - the basics

This was first mooted in the UK at least 40 years ago. I am describing it in a UK context because I know the tax system but most of the criteria can be applied to any country. I was in favour then, and still am.

In the UK you get a tax allowance - an amount you are permitted to earn before income tax kicks in. Much of that is standard but there are addons based on your particular situation. You are then taxed on the remainder of your income.

So the proposal was that instead of a tax allowance everyone would be paid an equivalent amount, irrespective of whether or not they were working. They would then be taxed on all income. From an administration point of view, this is actually simpler. The overall cost is small once you remove tax allowances you would have given anyway, welfare payments you would have made and reduced admin costs (including much of the not insignificant overhead of investigating fraudulent welfare claims).

It has a number of advantages:

1. Because everyone gets it, there is no stigma attached; no "us and them", "sponges", lazy people".

2. Previously if you were claiming benefit and you had the chance of a part-time job paying, say, £100 per week, there was no incentive to take it because that amount would simply be deducted from your benefit (or you had to break the law and risk prosecution by not declaring it). Under UBI you legitimately keep that money, less (probably 20%) tax.

3. There is less incentive to conceal income (if you are even able to get "cash-in-hand"). Paying tax will generally be worth it for staying legitimate and the peace of mind that brings.

From the start, these proposals had support from across the political spectrum (though for different reasons, depending on political perspective). It's unclear to me why it has taken so long even to get round to pilot schemes and small scale implementation.

I am now living on a pension so, in effect, I have UBI.

I open sourced a thing for monitoring HP printers from #checkmk

https://codeberg.org/falken/checkmk-hp-officejet/

#geek #linux

Microsoft Philanthropy

Microsoft donates Windows licenses to schools.

Windows has already been made, so donating licenses costs almost nothing.

Microsoft gets:

1. tax breaks for the full market price of the licenses.

2. good publicity for its generous donation.

3. mindshare, by locking in a whole generation of students into Windows.

4. to fend off FOSS by positioning itself as the de facto standard.
#freesoftware #linux #microsoft #business #businessstrategy #tech #education #philanthropy

You can read more about today's announcement here ⬇️ https://blog.mozilla.org/en/mozilla/a-new-chapter-for-mozilla-laura-chambers-expanded-role/