OpenAI defines their mission as creating "highly autonomous systems that outperform humans at most economically valuable work."
We need to flip this framing.
The economy is best understood as the way humans divide up the work, and distribute the results.
1/4
Unless the supply of that product can be somehow constrained by way of legal or economic restrictions, this means the price will drop.
What makes work economically valuable is that it is performed by humans.
3/4
AI captions do not conform to #WCAG they usually require a lot of work to make them usable
The highest-risk areas for real harm are: (1) named entities/numbers, (2) multi-speaker attribution, (3) timing/readability, and (4) hallucinated “corrections.”
#deaf #multimedia #justsayin #a11y
In testimony from a CBP official obtained by 404 Media, the official described how Mobile Fortify returned two different names after scanning a woman's face during an immigration raid. ICE has said the app's results are a “definitive” determination of someone's immigration status.
404media.co/ices-facial-recogn…
In testimony from a CBP official obtained by 404 Media, the official described how Mobile Fortify returned two different names after scanning a woman's face during an immigration raid.Joseph Cox (404 Media)
The Digital Domain returns tonight!
How did you spend the first few weeks of the year?
Bob has stoned AI fun, but are there places where it's not as smart as he thinks it should be?
Bob finally got his speaker!
7 PM EST!
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A US Marine, traveling home after a tour of Iraq just before Thanksgiving, boarded an extremely overcrowded Amtrak train heading west from Penn Station. He searched up and down the carriages for a seat, but the only one available was being occupied by a fancy French woman’s poodle.
The Marine coughed politely and said,
“Ma’am, would you please place your dog on the floor so I can sit down?”
Without even looking up, she sniffed and muttered,
“You Americans are so very rude. Can’t you see my little girl Trixy-Woo is using that seat?”
Exhausted, the Marine walked the length of the train again - still no seat. He returned and asked once more,
“Please, ma’am. I’m really tired. Could you move your dog so I can sit?”
She laughed and said loudly,
“Not only are you Americans rude, but also pig-headed and arrogant as well!”
That was it.
As the train had not yet left the station, the Marine picked up the poodle, dropped it out the window onto the platform, and sat down.
The woman shrieked, “Is there any man here who will defend my honor? This American thug must be put in his place!”
A well-dressed, refined Englishman sitting nearby calmly looked up and said to the Marine,
“Sir, I find you Americans do many things the wrong way. You prefer coffee over tea, drive on the wrong side of the road… and now it seems -
You’ve thrown the wrong bitch out the window.”
The U.S. Department of Justice said Sunday it is investigating a group of protesters in Minnesota who disrupted services at a church where a local official with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement apparently serves as a pastor.
A livestreamed video posted on the Facebook page of Black Lives Matter Minnesota -- one of the protest’s organizers -- shows a group of people interrupting services at the Cities Church in St. Paul by chanting
“ICE out” and “Justice for Renee Good.”
The 37-year-old mother of three was fatally shot by an ICE agent in Minneapolis earlier this month amid a surge in federal immigration enforcement activities.
The protesters allege that one of the church’s pastors
— David Easterwood
— also leads the local ICE field office overseeing the operations that have involved violent tacticsand illegal arrests.
Nekima Levy Armstrong,
who participated in the protest and leads the local grassroots civil rights organization
"Racial Justice Network",
dismissed the potential DOJ investigation as a sham and a distraction from federal agents’ actions in Minneapolis-St. Paul.
“When you think about the federal government unleashing barbaric ICE agents upon our community
and all the harm that they have caused,
to have someone serving as a pastor who oversees these ICE agents, is almost unfathomable to me,”
said Armstrong,
who added she is an ordained reverend.
“If people are more concerned about someone coming to a church on a Sunday and disrupting business as usual than they are about the atrocities that we are experiencing in our community,
then they need to check their theology and they need to check their hearts.”
apnews.com/article/minnesota-i…
Happy Martin Luther King Jr day. He said so many profound things and taught us so many valuable lessons, but this is the quote that resonates strongest with me. To me, it’s even more important than ever when we all have the potential to be keyboard warriors and spread global disharmony with a few key presses. But in any aspect of life, they are words to keep in mind when we feel we have been wronged and the poison of vengeance is pulsing through our veins.
"Returning hate for hate multiplies hate, adding deeper darkness to a night already devoid of stars. Darkness cannot drive out darkness; only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate; only love can do that. Hate multiplies hate, violence multiplies violence, and toughness multiplies toughness in a descending spiral of destruction."
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It's the year 2046.
The only two remaining political parties are Accept and Ask Me Later.
Everyone is losing.
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Si he solicitado [el alta de] asistencia sanitaria a une cónyugue, alrededor de cuantos días laborales se puede demorar [en aparecer como beneficiarie]?
Pregunto esto para españa.
Compartid porfi. Si me dais cifras de 2025 o cercanas me sirve, para hacerme una idea de como está el panorama.
me refiero a lo siguiente:
doy de alta a une cónyugue como beneficiarie, y quiero saber cuanto se demora en el le den el alta para que me aparezca en la lista de beneficiaries
I watched the first two episodes of Starfleet Academy, after consciously trying to stay out of the Star Trek fandom's catastrophising about it, as well as avoiding the obvious attempts at pre-emptively shit on it by the chuds, and I have some thoughts about the series.
I don't know if this effort will pan out, and we're going to get a long running series with a rotating cast going farther into the future, like the showrunners seem to indicate. At this point, just like with Discovery, I value a lot more a valiant effort even if that may ultimately fall short, than a safe bet on whatever grimdark slop they'll give us next if things don't change.
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This is the latest development at the start of the year: Mia and Mil, two new voices to reproduce texts in Luxembourgish as faithfully as possible. Come and see how you can help us get to grips with them.Digital accessibility portal of the Grand Duchy of Luxembourg
RE: mas.to/@AccessibilityLU/115921…
Here's one of the projects that has kept us really busy these past six months: developing a Luxembourgish text-to-speech system for screen readers used by blind people.
We hope you like the result!
Many thanks to our partners Ministry for Digitalisation, Zenter fir d'Lëtzebuerger Sprooch, Centre pour le développement des compétences relatives à la vue, LouderPages and to all the contributors of the RHvoice project.
Attached: 1 image 🗣️ Welcome Mia and Mil, two new voices designed to read texts in Luxembourgish using screen readers. They are making progress, but sometimes still struggle a little with Dicks' language.Accessibility Luxembourg (mas.to)
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Dear everybody:
Everything is so much easier to understand, once you realize that the Gold-foil-King is a Mafioso, who only know mafioso methods, and only use mafioso methods.
The letter to the .no PM is classical mafia:
"Nice country you have there, pity if something happened to it. Better think careful about who gets those peace-prices, capisce ?"
EU needs to stop pussying around, and go full in and stand up to the bully.
If not now, when ?
11yo Little Miss DJ has written by hand (no AI) a little script on her old laptop to do a rotating digital picture frame
Guess which bit of her tech stack has worked consistenly, right from the first experiments with the command to the finished product?
Debian? ❌
X11? ❌
feh? ❌
curl? ✅
Thank you to you and all the contributors for the only technology my daughter now trusts!
The flood of #enshittification that #Broadcom unleashed upon #VMware and its customers after acquiring it, and its seismic waves in the whole IT supply chain, are a testament of how bad managers who seek for short-term revenue hikes without thinking of the long-term are a cancer, and walking ticking bombs for the tech industry.
theregister.com/2026/01/15/del…
We all know what Broadcom did to VMware after acquiring it. VMware was turned overnight into Broadcom’s cash cow, they hiked prices by 3x in some cases, scrapped perpetual licenses, forced all customers into more expensive subscriptions, said that they only wanted to focus on the most profitable customers and fuck everyone else, all while worsening customer support and providing literally zero added value and features to the product.
Basically a parasitic acquisition solely focused on sucking all the vital lymph out of another product - pure Oracle textbook.
When you play such stunts with individual customers, unfortunately, it works most of the times. Individuals don’t have much leverage, nor choice if there is too much concentration in a certain market. They may complain, but often they swallow the bitter bite.
Things are different when you play them in huge corporate products that are an integral part of the IT infrastructure we all use.
It turns out that among the businesses who were disgruntled when Broadcom suddenly cancelled their VMware perpetual licenses there was Tesco.
But Tesco didn’t acquire VMware licenses directly from Broadcom, of course. They acquired them through a reseller of hardware and software licenses - Computacenter. So Tesco sued them instead for failing to provide them the licenses that they were contractually bound to provide.
Computacenter, on its hand, didn’t acquire VMware licenses directly either. They were provided with the Dell servers they sold, as Dell was an authorized VMware reseller. So Computacenter sued Dell.
Dell, on its hand, says that it has no fault if Broadcom has suddenly changed VMware’s pricing model, and that they are the ones who broke contracts with the whole downstream supply chain. So Dell sued Broadcom.
And there we go. A chain of 3 lawsuits between 4 giants across the whole IT supply chain in order to call a parasitic company accountable.
What a mess. But I guess that the manager who proposed to squeeze annual recurring revenue got his/her fat quarterly bonus home after things seemed to work for the first year.
This is also your daily reminder that as a sysadmin you must use only FOSS products supported by the community and by strong foundations - and contribute back to them once their success becomes your success too.
Enough with the “but stability - but support - but licenses - but my manager” corporate bullshit.
The cost of writing your own little qemu CI/CD pipeline to spin up your virtual machines is much lower than the risk of your corporate subscription getting suddenly enshittified by chains of wrong financial incentives at any place in your upstream supply chain, and having to spend years of tears on expensive long-chain lawsuits.
And, even if things go bad, the cost of migrating out of proprietary and non-standard implementations is usually much higher than the cost of migrating to a compatible fork.
Exclusive: Retail giant's disty, reseller, and vendor all say they can't and won't sellSimon Sharwood (The Register)
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A frontend to search and browse the Wayback Machine from old browserswayback-classic.net
A decentralized peer-to-peer messaging application that operates over Bluetooth: bitchat.free/
Discussion: news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4…
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Today is the ten year anniversary for one of the best email series I ever received. The "Instagram and Spotify hacking ring" one.
daniel.haxx.se/blog/2016/01/19…
Back in December I got a desperate email from this person. A woman who said her Instagram had been hacked and since she found my contact info in the app she mailed me and asked for help.daniel.haxx.se
Alan
in reply to Tamas G • • •