A quick #FOSDEM guide from someone who's been attending since it was still called OSDEM:

1. Be mindful of other people. This is an extremely busy conference.
2. If a talk is in progress and you want to enter the room: don't. Wait until the next talk.
3. If you didn't read 2, try to enter as quietly as humanly possible, and ideally even quieter. Many of the rooms have terrible acoustics and you will annoy hundreds of people.
4. The hallway track is very busy. Take it outside when possible.

⚠️ We're 900 € short on funds for our stand at #FOSDEM

FOSDEM is the largest free and open source software conference in Europe. Attending FOSDEM allows us to promote #Luanti, bring the community together, and connect with other open source projects.

If you can, please help by giving to our non-profit fundraiser. Any contribution helps lighten the load

opencollective.com/luanti/proj…

#Minetest #OpenSource #FreeSoftware

Luanti at FOSDEM 26 - Open Collective

Stand for Luanti at FOSDEM 2026

^{opencollective.com}

It looks like Iran has successfully built a national 'walled garden' to control internet connectivity - both halting outsiders from communicating with those in Iran who are protesting, but also halting Iranians' ability to access the world wide web's myriad resources.

How well this 'wall' can be maintained remains to be seen but authoritarian regimes around the world will be watching, that's for sure.

#internet #censorship #Iran #politics

theguardian.com/world/2026/jan…

Iran plans permanent break from global internet, say activists

Report claims unrestricted online access will be a ‘government privilege’, limited to individuals vetted by regime

^{Aisha Down (The Guardian)}

I'd like to know people's opinions on this. I enjoying following people who post in a variety of languages. I also know I have followers who appreciate alt text in images and do my best not to boost images that have no alt text.

What do you do when the image has alt text but is in another language? To boost it as I would like to would mean those using screen readers are disadvantaged, as far as I know. To boost and comment with English alt text would seem rude to the original poster who has already included alt text. (I'm only using English as an example there as it's the one I usually communicate in). Do screen readers have their own translation functions by any chance?

If you're someone who uses a screen reader what do you do when you come across alt text in a language you don't understand?

#AltText #languages #ScreenReaders

RE: gultsch.social/@daniel/1135490…

#Signal isn’t just AWS. It also has a hard dependency on Google’s push notification system (FCM) if you don’t want your battery to catch fire.

Signal’s attitude towards #UnifiedPush and #FDroid speaks volumes.

Daniel Gultsch

2024-11-26 11:29:14

I installed #Signal and #Conversations_im on a clean install of #GrapheneOS on my Pixel 4a and measured the battery impact. The results are shocking!

Both messengers had only one contact: my regular phone.

I used my regular phone to send messages to the Pixel 4a (which was not used for anything else over the course of the experiment).

I always sent the same message via Signal and #XMPP (mixing up which app went first). In total I sent ~32 messages in intervals of 10mins to a few hours.

A hard lesson learned: don’t hold people to the standards to which you hold yourself. It’s unfair because:

1. They probably don’t know what the hell your expectations are

2. If they’re not your employees, you have no reason to hold them to most standards (aside from the typical societal ones such as being decent, reasonable human beings)

3. There’s a pretty good chance the standards you hold for yourself are ridiculous, anyway *points at myself*

RE: social.tchncs.de/@restless/115…

Wenn wir das mit der digitalen Unabhängigkeit ernst meinen ist #Signal einfach nur eine Ablenkung.

#Quicksy hingegen ist ein wirklicher Schritt in die richtige Richtung. Quicksy ist so konzipiert, dass man darüber hinaus wächst und ein nahtloser Übergang zu #Conversations_im möglich ist.
Quicksy ist die Einstiegsdroge für wirklich unabhängiges Instant Messaging mit #XMPP.

It would take the average American driver over 40 years to burn as much fuel as a single flight of a Boeing Pegasus refueling tanker. No amount of recycling your cans and bottles is ever going to compete with these numbers.

currentaffairs.org/news/the-u.…

The U.S. War Machine is Destroying the Planet

In their new documentary “Earth’s Greatest Enemy,” Abby Martin and Mike Prysner reveal that the climate and anti-war movements are really one and the same—because the U.S. military is the worst polluter of all.

^{Karissa Halstrom (Current Affairs Inc)}

Trump now claims he will introduce tariffs on countries that does not support his plans to take over Greenland.

Two points:

— The US Supreme Court is currently evaluating whether Trump's tariffs are even legal, so it is not even certain that Trump can do this.
— If Trump imposes these tariffs, the EU will likely change the soft approach to Trump, immediately introducing reciprocal tariffs from the entire union, at which point Trump might fold, as he did with China.

• test (25%, 1 vote)
• mew (25%, 1 vote)
• rar (50%, 2 votes)
• no (50%, 2 votes)

• yes (100%, 3 votes)
• no (0%, 0 votes)

A damning new study could put AI companies on the defensive.

In it, Stanford and Yale researchers found compelling evidence that AI models are actually copying all that data,
not “learning” from it.

Specifically, four prominent LLMs
— OpenAI’s GPT-4.1, Google’s Gemini 2.5 Pro, xAI’s Grok 3, and Anthropic’s Claude 3.7 Sonnet
— happily reproduced lengthy excerpts from popular
— and protected
— works, with a stunning degree of accuracy.

They found that Claude outputted “entire books near-verbatim” with an accuracy rate of 95.8 percent.

Gemini reproduced the novel “Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone” with an accuracy of 76.8 percent,

while Claude reproduced George Orwell’s “1984” with a higher than 94 percent accuracy compared to the original
— and still copyrighted
— reference material.

“While many believe that LLMs do not memorize much of their training data, recent work shows that substantial amounts of copyrighted text can be extracted from open-weight models,”
the researchers wrote.

Some of these reproductions required the researchers to jailbreak the models with a technique called "Best-of-N",
which essentially bombards the AI with different iterations of the same prompt.

(Those kinds of workarounds have already been used by OpenAI to defend itself in a lawsuit filed by the New York Times,
with its lawyers arguing that “normal people do not use OpenAI’s products in this way.”)

The implications of the latest findings could be substantial
as copyright lawsuits play out in courts across the country.

As The Atlantic‘s Alex Reisner points out,
the results further undermine the AI industry’s argument that LLMs “learn” from these texts
-- instead of storing information and recalling it later.

It’s evidence that “may be a massive legal liability for AI companies”
and “potentially cost the industry billions of dollars in copyright-infringement judgments

futurism.com/artificial-intell…

Researchers Just Found Something That Could Shake the AI Industry to Its Core

Researchers found compelling evidence that AI models are actually copying copyrighted data, not "learning" from it.

^{Victor Tangermann (Futurism)}

RE: dragonscave.space/@Dulcetmoon/…

Yes.

RE: mstdn.ca/@thetyee/115900230645…

Courage. These are the biggest cowards.

I lost a friend over my article about the murder of Renee Nicole Good.

He was angry I called out the underlying misogyny.

He was mad I didn’t give ICE the benefit of the doubt.

He made it personal.

He told me my “stupid clown hair” is why people don’t take me seriously

Everything he said to me was dripping with disdain and misogyny.

There was no debate.

There was no respectful disagreement.

In under five minutes he had attacked my intelligence, my politics, my appearance and my writing.

This is not normal behaviour.

He literally proved my point.

Had I taken the bait I’m convinced that I would have been called a “f*cking b*tch” by the end of the conversation.

This is what MAGA is doing to men.

It’s emboldening them.

It’s validating their bigotry.

I assume this person was always hateful and misogynistic on some level … but now he no longer feels he has to hide it.

He literally said as much.

He said “I never told you in the past because I wasn’t allowed. Now I am.”

Why is he allowed to tell me now??

Why does he feel justified in lashing out with rage and insults over something that has nothing to do with him?

It’s because of what happened to Renee Nicole Good.

We all watched a woman get shot in broad daylight and there’s been zero consequences

We’ve watched rapists, pedophiles and abusers go free for years.

Every woman who’s ever experienced abuse knew exactly what Jonathan Ross meant when he said “f*cking b*tch”

He didn’t fear for his life.

He was enraged she didn’t fear for hers.

My friend was enraged I dare speak out for a “lesbian leftist”.

He was enraged I didn’t remain silent, complicit and demure.

He was apparently also enraged I didn’t realize he hated my hair and change it to please him.

Make no mistake, there is a war against women going on.

This regime wants to make us “less than”.

They want us afraid.

They want us in the home serving our husbands and having children.

They want us seen and not heard.

They don’t want us resisting.

Which is why we must keep speaking out.

We must refuse to go back.

My life is better off without this person in it, and thankfully I can walk away.

Not everyone can.

Speak up if you see someone being hurt.

Protect your friends and neighbours.

Challenge misogynistic talking points.

Demand justice for Renee Nicole Good.

Don’t cower. Don’t be afraid. Don’t give up.

#uspol #fascism #reneenicolegood #abolishice #immigration #minnesota

The measles outbreak in South Carolina is the largest in the country and has spread to three other states.

It’s growing at an alarming speed.

Over 500 people in quarantine and 200 are actively infected.

This was completely preventable.

These people didn’t need to get sick.

Measles can kill. It can disable. It can leave you deaf and blind.

It’s a vaccine preventable illness.

Shame on everyone creating distrust in the vaccine and refusing to do their part for public health.

nbcnews.com/health/health-news…

#uspol #measles #publichealth #disability #ableism

South Carolina measles outbreak doubles within a week: ‘Staring over the edge’

On Friday, South Carolina health department said 124 measles cases were diagnosed since Tuesday, bringing the state total since the outbreak began last fall to 558.

^{Erika Edwards (NBC News)}

Started watching BSG again today as I wanted to see if it looked as awesome on a 77" OLED TV as i thought it would (it does) and, oddly, it has over the years become something of a comfort show.

It continues to impress me how well Ronald Moore and Co. dealt with issues touched upon 20 full years ago that continue to be relevant today.

tvscholar.com/p/20-years-later…

20 years later, Battlestar Galactica still holds up

A rewatch begins as Peacock dumps Sam Esmail's planned reboot.

^{tvscholar (the tv scholar newsletter)}

New research bolsters evidence that Tylenol doesn't raise the risk of autism despite Trump's claims
https://apnews.com/article/trump-autism-tylenol-adhd-a9854203a8474c58654313ba93e48a67?utm_source=flipboard&utm_medium=activitypub

Posted into Health @health-AssociatedPress