Mauve 👁💜 @mauve@mastodon.mauve.moe

This might just shake things up

"Switzerland Now Requires All Government Software To Be Open Source"

Not trusting or relying on the Microsofts of the world anymore.

Sturmer believes everyone will benefit from this regulation, as it reduces vendor lock-in for the public sector, allows companies to expand their digital business solutions, and potentially leads to reduced IT costs and improved services for taxpayers.

https://news.slashdot.org/story/24/07/23/2025220/switzerland-now-requires-all-government-software-to-be-open-source

Crowdstrike situation is putting a very firm pressure on another round of removing software agents without mandatory need, especially kernel-mode or that inject DLLs. This is real, I'm in the middle of it. It's a good argument to slim things down where there is overlap.

There are 20,000+ Mastodon servers alone. Thousands of WordPress and Pixelfed servers.

The idea that the Fediverse is about connecting 5-6 servers, one for each kind of data posted, is really misleading.

Basically, a good way to never trust "it's okay, the data is anonymized" again is simply knowing what the "Hemisphere Program" is.

https://www.eff.org/cases/hemisphere

In short, the US government got access to number from, number to, datetime, length and sometimes location information for every call passing through AT&T's network from 1987 to today.

Then they ran an algorithm to de-anonymize every burner phone based on behavior. They did this because maybe some of those burners were used by drug dealers.

Alright, now we're getting close to usable AR. 🎉
Xreal shipped a sub-$1k package (Ultra + Beam Pro) for light weight, see-through AR glasses with 6dof tracking and flat display mirroring of Android apps. From reviews it sounds like the driver slab suffers from perf and heat issues but it might be a good devkit to prep apps for the more polished models in development.
It's amazing to me that usable and cheap AR glasses could ship next year.
https://youtu.be/HRdK2nmS3OU

As an archivist, let me say clearly:

Modern copyright law is actively harmful to the preservation and study of our culture.

It harms artists by giving undue power to publishers. It harms artists by limiting remixes. It harms preservation and research efforts.

It's broken. It's bad. It should be massively reformed.

I would like to use websites and apps without "AI". Both for not appropriating my data, nor for "helpful" suggestions when I'm writing for example. I'm happy to pay the premium fee for this. Recommendations welcome!

“Despite 96% of C-suite leaders expressing high expectations that AI will enhance productivity, 77% of employees using AI say these tools have added to their workload, and nearly half (47%) of employees using AI report they do not know how to achieve the expected productivity gains.”

The only real winners of this whole AI productivity snake oil scam are the companies selling subscriptions. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Losers: everyone else – and the climate.

https://investors.upwork.com/news-releases/news-release-details/upwork-study-finds-employee-workloads-rising-despite-increased-c

Oh gods it's true it's so fucking true

eventually computer touchers reach a point in which all computers around them will display weird characteristics that are specific to them and they just end up with super specific issues only they encounter

#ai #generativeAI
Edit: went back and found my friend that originated the quote from Facebook.

https://www.facebook.com/share/p/sQGLoN9wumXfgqHU/

Already had to try to explain Crowdstrike to a curious family member.

Situations like this remind me that us tech folks have a working understanding that demystifies things like this outage. The reasons may not be exciting or good, but we do at least *understand* fundamentals like auto updates, reboot loops and manual fixes. We also understand root causes like compliance pressure.

To innocent bystanders the checkout screen went blue and now they can't buy groceries, and it doesn't make sense.

It's only a denial of service attack if it comes from an adversarial region. Otherwise it's a sparkling traumatic misconfiguration.