Notices by Aral Balkan (aral@mastodon.ar.al), page 57

@chpietsch Yep and don’t look too closely at Siemens, Volkswagen, or IBM either if you don’t want to be disappointed…

You can have democracy or you can have trillion-dollar corporations and billionaires.

(And if you don’t understand why, you either don’t understand what democracy is or you don’t understand what trillion-dollar corporations and billionaires are or both.)

“Your harm is at category 1, which means extreme harm to society … The action you took was … criminally idiotic given the risks involved…”

– Judge Christopher Hehir, Southwark Crown Court, while sentencing the heads of Shell and ExxonMobil to 2 years in prison on Friday for their role in exacerbating the climate crisis.

Oh, I’m sorry, I meant while sentencing two climate activists for throwing soup on a painting to draw attention to the climate crisis.

https://juststopoil.org/2024/09/27/sent-down-for-throwing-soup-judge-hehir-turns-state-repression-into-an-art-form/

#climateCrisis

It’s almost like sending climate activists to prison isn’t fixing the climate crisis or something.

@peter Yay, congrats on the move. Looking great :)

@d @rek @neauoire @zens What a coincidence, my dad was just showing Laura and me one of his and taught us how to use it this week when we were over for his 80th. Lovely devices :)

and a similar framing of Benjamin Netanyahu, the genocidal war criminal president of Israel, in front of framed maps of Gaza and Lebananon drenched in blood, holding a tiny Israeli flag in his hand and wearing a Just Try Stop Me t-shirt, captioned “at large!” (2/2)

@CableSt Alt text: comic: juxtapositioning of illustration of iconic photo of Phoebe Plummer and Anna Holland, two Just Stop Oil activists, after they threw tomato soup at Vincent van Gogh’s Sunflowers at the National Gallery in London, with the caption “arrested!” (1/2)

“Our leaders are acting illegally, they know they are acting illegally, and they don’t care that they are acting illegally. History is watching and we must stop these fascists.”

https://www.normalisland.co.uk/p/today-is-not-a-day-for-satire-its

#israel #gaza #lebanon #genocide #settlerColonialism #ethnicCleansing #apartheid #warCrimes #internationalLaw

“Devs gaining little (if anything) from AI coding assistants | CIO”

https://www.cio.com/article/3540579/devs-gaining-little-if-anything-from-ai-coding-assistants.html?amp=1

> Many developers say AI coding assistants make them more productive, but a recent study set forth to measure their output and found no significant gains. Use of GitHub Copilot also introduced 41% more bugs, according to the study from Uplevel, a company providing insights from coding and collaboration data.

Like I've been saying for a while, feeling productive is not the same as being productive

@FediThing @paintedsky Here’s another, very recent one, for your list:

https://newrepublic.com/post/185306/project-2025-dustin-carmack-meta

#Meta #Project2025 #farRight #fascism #SocialWebFoundation #SWF #mastodon #pixelfed #etc #theCompanyYouKeep

Don’t blame the rich for perpetuating inequality. They need it to carry out their important philanthropic work.

@eniko While I’m trying to build a bridge from the web of today to a peer web (https://ar.al/2024/06/24/small-web-computer-science-colloquium-at-university-of-groningen/), I’d highly welcome this. The more (non bullshit/not open to being co-opted) attempts at creating alternatives, the better.

That said, my gut feeling is that any such protocol has to have a bit more functionality that Gemini (which is great) does if it’s to be an alternative for the sorts of social interactions/functionality people are used to having on the web.

Not partnering with trillion-dollar people-farming, human-rights-eroding, and democracy destroying surveillance capitalists like Meta should be the lowest of low bars when it comes to organisations that purport to work on ethical technology but, clearly, even that bar is just too fucking high for some.

#SocialWebFoundation #SWF #fediverse #mastodon #pixelfed #vivaldi #writeAs #iftas #ghost #mammoth #meta #automattic #medium #flipboard #fordFoundation #fastly #institutionalCorruption #BigTech

@andytiedye @benroyce I fail to see how that follows from the point being made here but both of those things can be readily implemented as part of ActivityPub or, at worst, extensions to it or in a federated protocol in general (in fact, it already does: Mobilezon is a federated events app with invitations: https://joinmobilizon.org/en/)

@mray Indeed, and as you should: as they’re partnered with Meta.

"The sky above the port was the color of a television, tuned to the tv manufacturer's programmatic ad screensaver platform."

https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2024/09/lg-tvs-continue-down-advertising-rabbit-hole-with-new-screensaver-ads/

@arichtman @mhoye https://www.thedrum.com/news/2019/11/19/gender-equality-ad-calls-time-playboy-model-lena-image-led-jpeg-invention

@TyrionTargaryen @benroyce They need to own and control it all. In their worldview, it’s a zero-sum game. Any threat, however small, to their dominance must be controlled. Especially if it has legitimacy. The one thing they can’t buy is legitimacy. That’s what grassroots fediverse projects are affording them by “partnering”. The astronomic power differential in any such “partnership” is what enables embrace, extend, extinguish. It’s sad to see, over and over again.

@benroyce This.