Mauve 👁💜 @mauve@mastodon.mauve.moe

This petition wants contributing to Free Software to be legally and officially recognized as volunteering in Germany on the same level as youth work or ambulance service:

https://www.openpetition.de/petition/online/recognition-of-work-on-open-source-as-volunteering-in-germany#petition-main

This would bring fiscal and funding advantages for FLOSS organizations and the volunteers themselves.

If you are a German citizen, please sign the petition and let's get our volunteers the recognition they deserve!

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Photo credit: FSFE.

There have been exactly two innovations in web browsers in the last 16 years:

1. "Show Reader Automatically" in 2010;
2. "Hide Distracting Items" in 2024.

Everything else has either been a waste of goddamned time, or actively malicious. Mostly the latter.

https://jwz.org/b/yk21

If you think of universal basic income as just "more money," you aren't understanding it and what makes it so different and effective. The fact it comes at a regular frequency is a key factor. When you know that whatever happens next month, you can still buy food, that's a huge deal.

It's STABILITY

Life is a rich tapestry (I say to myself smashing the block button)

i will say, the most alarming thing i’ve come across in the AI space is this:

i’ve spoken with various, quite large, financial institutions about their plans to integrate AI into member account management self service workflows. check my balance, make a transfer, that kinda stuff.

the area i always drill in on is “how is the AI tooling able to authenticate the customer?”

the answer is usually something along the lines of “well it has access to information in the member database that it can use to ask questions that verify identity.”

so then i ask, “so lets say it verifies the identity of the customer and connects to your core banking systems - is it connecting as that customer would - or with some sort of super user access, like an employee for example?”

the answer is nearly always: “oh its got a service account that can connect to everything”

so then i say, “well, what stops the customer from using the AI’s privileged access to access information belonging to other customers?”

and then the answer is usually: “well…the AI just knows.”

and then you let them sit with that answer and often times it dawns on them.