mastodon - Link to source

RE: mastodon.social/@karlgroves/11…

PS: Also, make phone calls with help from the "5 calls" app. 5calls.org/

Karl Groves (@karlgroves@mastodon.social)

The absolute *minimum* you can do right now is email your representatives in the Senate and Congress to tell them how you feel about what's going on right now. It'll take only 5-10 minutes of your time. Do it now.
Karl Groves (Mastodon)
This entry was edited (3 hours ago)

mastodon - Link to source

I know a guy who used to be a conservative, until he went to college. It wasn't "woke professors" that change him to a liberal, it was being in an actual city instead of the small town he grew up in.

Meeting more diverse people made him realize he was fed lies about others while growing up.

So yeah, if you ever wondered why the right wants to shut down education and universities, that's one reason.

reshared this

mastodon - Link to source

😡

Siemens has signed a partnership with NEWAG in Poland
railwaygazette.com/business/si…

And we still have not got to the bottom of NEWAG's GPS location sabotage jonworth.eu/newags-digital-sab…


Siemens and Newag to co-operate in Polish high speed train market

POLAND: Siemens Mobility and Newag have signed a memorandum of understanding to strengthen their co-operation in the Polish rail market and expand their previous joint work on metro trains into the high speed rail segment.
Railway Gazette International

mastodon - Link to source

LLM boys pivoting to ads. EVERYTHING IS ADVERTISING!

youtube.com/watch?v=tOtcHKKPoY…

#weeklybeats #orangedrink


One Song A Week - WeeklyBeats 2026: Everything Is Advertising (screamo, hardcore, punk, grunge) 🏳️‍🌈

I played all the instruments, composed, mixed, mastered the song, and filmed and edited the video in 4 days.happy new year 🥳
YouTube
#weeklybeats #orangedrink
in reply to Jakub Steiner ⭐

mastodon - Link to source

Hubert Figuière

It is The Law™

> Every piece of software will evolve beyond its intended purpose to sell you something.

mapledice.ca/posts/2024/04/14/…

The Law

In the context of enshittification, there is one law that seems to be a constant. I mentionned it here and here: Every piece of software will evolve beyond its intended purpose to sell you something.
Maple Dice

mastodon - Link to source

We knew this was coming, but now the clock is running. From Privacy International:

"Yesterday the Trump Administration announced a proposed change in policy for travellers to the U.S. It applies to the powers of data collection by the Customs and Border Police (CBP)."

"If the proposed changes are adopted after the 60-day consultation, then millions of travellers to the U.S. will be forced to use a U.S. government mobile phone app, submit their social media from the last five years and email addresses used in the last ten years, including of family members. They’re also proposing the collection of DNA."

PI linked to and summarized a Federal Register entry describing the proposed requirements:

-All visitors must submit ‘their social media from the last 5 years’

-ESTA (Electronic System for Travel Authorization) applications will include ‘high value data fields’, ‘when feasible’
‘telephone numbers used in the last five years’
-‘email addresses used in the last ten years’
-‘family number telephone numbers (sic) used in the last five years’
-biometrics – face, fingerprint, DNA, and iris
-business telephone numbers used in the last five years
-business email addresses used in the last ten years.

privacyinternational.org/news-…

The Federal Register entry says comments are encouraged and
must be submitted (no later than February 9, 2026) to be assured of consideration.

Federal Register entry: govinfo.gov/content/pkg/FR-202…


The Trump Administration wants your DNA and social media

Privacy International
This entry was edited (4 hours ago)

reshared this

in reply to BrianKrebs

mastodon - Link to source

BrianKrebs

I feel for anyone in the travel, tourism and hospitality industries, which make up ~ 10M jobs and ~ 3 percent of the nation's GDP. From the U.S. International Trade Administration (trade.gov)

"Inbound international travel to the United States plays a vital role in the Nation’s economy and promotes cultural exchange and understanding. Travel and tourism is the largest single services export for the United States, accounting for 22 percent of the country’s services exports and 7 percent of all exports in 2023. The travel and tourism industry contributed $2.3 trillion to the U.S. economy in 2022 (2.97 percent of the country’s GDP), supporting 9.5 million jobs."

mastodon - Link to source
I need a new Apple Watch. I think I'm going to go for the SE 3, since it's cheaper, and see what happens this fall. If I really want the Series 12, I have a trade-in. If not, I have an SE 3 I can keep for a while. It only lacks ECG, blood oxygen, and hypertension detection, none of which I need or regularly use. The Series 11 is thinner, but I'm used to the Series 9, so I'm not losing anything there either.

mastodon - Link to source

If you are looking for a messenger that doesn't depend on US infrastructure (or any other country actually) take a look at #DeltaChat, an #European alternative messenger, it is #anonymous, #decentralized, end-to-end #encrypted, #openSource and free!

it is multi-platform, get it for your system at get.delta.chat

#sovereignty #Europe #sovereign #diday

#opensource #anonymous #decentralized #europe #european #encrypted #deltachat #sovereignty #sovereign #diday
This entry was edited (3 hours ago)

mastodon - Link to source

“An insane encapsulation:🚨”The same day Trump’s agents kill a VA ICU nurse in broad daylight, the CEOs of Apple & Amazon join Trump to watch a private screening of a film about his wife directed by an alleged sexual abuser *was seen shirtless in the Epstein Files.”
-P Thakker

“If you’re a CEO🚨willing to sit in the co of this regime, your “shareholder value” excuse feels pretty🩸blood-soaked tonight.”
-R Wilson
#NoMoralCompass #Murder #AlexPretti #TimCook #Jassy #USPol
thedailybeast.com/billionaire-…


Billionaire CEOs Party With Trump and Melania After His Goons Kill Nurse

Apple CEO Tim Cook traveled to the White House on the same day a Border Patrol agent shot a Veterans Affairs nurse dead in Minneapolis.
Josh Fiallo (The Daily Beast)
#uspol #murder #timcook #alexpretti #nomoralcompass #jassy

mastodon - Link to source

🔎 Wie schreibt man eigentlich eine gute, barrierefreie Bildbeschreibung?

Barrierefreie Bildbeschreibungen helfen Menschen mit Sehbehinderungen, Inhalte gleichberechtigt wahrzunehmen.
Stelle dir Fragen wie: Wer/was ist zu sehen, was passiert, wo passiert es und welche Details sind für den Inhalt des Posts wirklich relevant. Wertungen („schön“, „hässlich“) sind weniger wichtig als neutrale Infos.

#THWS #fachuebersetzen #translation #barrierefreiheit

(Foto von Pauline Schubert)

Das Bild zeigt eine Person in einer bunten Fleecejacke, die in einem hellen Café an einem runden Tisch vor einem aufgeklappten Laptop sitzt, während oben rechts in einem orangefarbenen Kasten der Titel „Alt-Texte und Bildbeschreibungen“.
#translation #barrierefreiheit #thws #fachuebersetzen

mastodon - Link to source
Local AI friends: I want to get a good GPU for running local AI models. This custom-built tower currently has an NVIDIA GTX 1050 Ti with 4 gigs of RAM, which is hardly enough to do anything. I'd like 12-16 GB of VRAM, whatever would be better for running things like Whisper and coding models locally. My price range is about $350-$450, but I'm willing to push it up to about $500 for a good GPU that'll last me a while. Suggestions appreciated!

reshared this

mastodon - Link to source
Overall, the snow probably made me more depressed than happy though. Goalball tournament got canceled, youth group which would've been the alternative, canceled. Just sitting here and at this point... I would have projects to work on, but at this point I feel, misplaced? I'm not yet really at the point that I could express or understand my current emotions, but I feel like I have to move on somehow, I'm still thinking about stuff that's just, in the past or no longer meant to be while I have not the slightest idea about my future. All I know is that I'm not satisfied with it.
in reply to Aryan

mastodon - Link to source

Jonathan

@Aryan The main concept is that you have Brawlers, basically characters with different abilities, attacks, health etc. These Brawlers do also have gadgets, super powers, super attacks, ranks etc. You collect trophies by fighting with these brawlers, in various modes, either showdown (solo or duos) but also 3vs3 in modes like brawlball (football) or basketbrawl (basketball), gem grab, where the teams have to collect more gems than the other team while fighting each other of course, and when a player dies, they drop all the collected gems, hot zone, and a bunch more. Of course you have all the shit you'd expect around it: friends you can invite to play and form teams, clubs with rewards, quests which give you coins which unlock rewards on a reward track, brawler upgrades, brawler skins etc.
@Aryan
in reply to Jonathan

mastodon - Link to source

Jonathan

@Aryan To name a few abilities, you either have generic brawlers which just shoot bullets, but there are quite exotic ones as well like the projectile jumping from brawler to brawler, poisoning enemies while healing allies with the projectile, some that fly/jump, stun you etc etc. Of course some are slower, faster, so it's also a part to be strategic, for example a brawler with a wide range won't make a lot of sense when you play on a map with a bunch of walls since it makes more damage the farer it's away.
@Aryan

gotosocial - Link to source

Went to fill out a W-9 this morning and realized Firefox's PDF form filling was...somewhat less than accessible. An hour or so later and I now have a Claude skill to do this for me. It finds and downloads forms, fills out details from natural language plus clarifying questions, applies image signatures using handwriting fonts, and does a visual verification pass on each page to make sure everything looks OK. I'm of course not confident enough yet to let this fill forms without human verification, and it doesn't yet handle non-fillable forms, but just being able to say "Help me fill out this form and sign/date it for me, then give me a basic sanity check" is a gamechanger even if I still have a sighted human in the loop. Reduces the process from lots of hand-holding and inaccessible editing, to a final and much quicker visual pass.

I've wanted an app to do this for over a decade, but wasn't super thrilled about writing something whose only value add was that it was the accessible version of something sighted folks take for granted. Now I have it, and it's less than 200 lines of markdown.

Jonathan reshared this.

in reply to Mike Gorse

gotosocial - Link to source

Nolan Darilek

Heard, I spend a lot of time watching mine. It almost never runs unsupervised unless I have it in a container, and I generally only leave it alone if it's working through a longer implementation plan which I've read, or if it's doing something like research. Even so, the fact that it works much faster than me is good, even if it does mean I spend more time checking its work later.
in reply to Nolan Darilek

mastodon - Link to source

Mike Gorse

After I saw your post, I was asked to sign a form that had a canvas for me to draw a signature with the mouse, and now I'm wondering if Claude could help me with that. Despite what I said in my last comment, this is probably a case where I don't really care if the AI messes it up somehow. In this case, I pointed out that I can't sign the form without a sighted person helping me (I think I have an easier time advocating when I know that several other blind people are going to be affected, somehow), and they made the signature box optional, so it doesn't matter for now, but I've run into these things from time to time and don't know of a way to handle them and end up asking my roommate to help me.
in reply to Mike Gorse

gotosocial - Link to source

Nolan Darilek

Possibly. For that you want to look into MCP servers--specifically probably something called the Playwright MCP. This lets you use something like Claude Code to control a browser. It can either control your actual browser, or a sandboxed/headless browser. Sometimes I'll use this for a high-level sanity-check--have Claude implement something then ask it to use the code via browser and make sure it works.

mastodon - Link to source
Mal etwas zu #Inclusion: Ich werde belehrend kritisiert, weil ich - wie 70 % aller im Fediverse - #AltTexte nicht oder verkürzt schreibe. Ich teile ausdrücklich die Position, dass wir inclusiv agieren sollten. Aber manche Bilder dienen nur als Blickfang für Sehende, um Aufmerksamkeit für den Text zu generieren. Für eine Bildbeschreibung wie früher in der Schule fehlt mir meist die Zeit. Und vor allem: Es wäre möglich, dass Mastodon diese Bildbeschreibungen per Klick und KI generiert.
#inclusion #alttexte
in reply to Wurzelmann

mastodon - Link to source

Mab_813

Hab gestern hier irgendwo gelesen, dass die Rate an Alttext im Fediverse auf 28% (oder so ungefähr?) gesunken ist, weiß aber die Quelle nicht mehr und ob das eine gute Quelle war.

Außerdem ist das eine schlechte Nachricht!!
Die Heuchelei von wegen "Ich bin für inklusiveres Agieren, aber ich mach's selber nicht" find ich echt nicht ok.

Und wer selber sieht und ein gutes Internet hat, kann beurteilen, ob ein Bild "nur ein Blickfang" ist oder nicht. Wer blind/sehbehindert ist, kann aber nicht wissen, welche wichtigen oder unwichtigen Infos das Bild enthält und welche Infos damit diesen Personen vorenthalten werden!! Darauf wurde Herr Polenz auch schon hingewiesen, aber das Argument ignoriert er natürlich.

Die Betroffenen dermaßen auszuschließen und Bildbeschreibungen mit "wie früher in der Schule" zu verunglimpfen, ist echt niveaulos. Aber dann immer schön "Ich bin für Inklusion" behaupten...

#Barrierefreiheit

#barrierefreiheit

mastodon - Link to source

NORAD pact would change if Canada pulls back from F-35 order, warns U.S. ambassador

cbc.ca/news/politics/norad-can…

Remember all this shit american software that nag you with question and never have a "No" answer? It seems that Americans can't take no for an answer, and like a bully threaten when shown resistance.

And I expect David "Chamberlain" Carney to bend backwards to spend more of this austerity budget to buy these flying bricks.

mastodon - Link to source

The US is threatening #Canada (again) if we don't but their F-35s. Here's what Denmark said about the ones they bought, and regret buying:

"They're in for repairs about half the time or even more," he said, "so the Americans have all the power of actually destroying our air force just by shutting down [parts] supplies."

#F35 #cdnpoli

cbc.ca/news/politics/norad-can…

#canada #f35 #cdnpoli
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