Liberty has an off button, for now

Ongoing legal challenges, decisions, and reversals highlight one thing very clearly: lack of direction, lack of a comprehensive solution and simply put, legislative dysfunction.

While important questions about the implementation of the law in France are still being considered, we maintain that French citizens deserve regulation that will prevent children from accessing adult content and that can be effectively enforced. They also deserve that their privacy and sensitive data be protected. Again, we believe the current approach faces significant challenges in achieving these important goals.

Your government is proposing we verify your age every single time you visit our site. The harsh reality: This does not protect minors — it endangers everyone's privacy and puts children in danger by driving traffic to thousands of sites that deliberately circumvent regulations, don't verify the age of performers in content, and actively encourage users to bypass the law. Unlike us, they don't monitor content or prioritize safety—making everyone more vulnerable, not less...

Data breaches happen daily. Forcing you to enter sensitive personal information repeatedly creates an unacceptable security risk we refuse to impose on our users. We refuse to compromise your privacy with measures that, ironically, fail to effectively protect children.

A path forward requires law makers to understand and address with a clear enforcement plan the fact that adult content exists on hundreds of thousands of platforms, not simply the 17 sites designated in the ministerial order.

To the French government and Arcom we ask, how many minors have been protected in the six weeks since this law came into effect? Provide the data on how this reduced access to age-inappropriate content.

Hi everyone,

I’d like to share an idea I refined together with ChatGPT, combining AI’s strengths with human expertise to create something truly impactful.

🌿 Proposal Summary

“ChatGPT Mental Health Plan” – a new subscription tier or add-on offering hybrid mental health support:
1. AI-powered emotional support and journaling tools
2. Guided pattern-recognition for stress, anxiety, and burnout
3. Optional upgrade to connect with licensed counselors or therapists (e.g. 1–2 virtual sessions/month)
4. Collaboration with trained psychology professionals
5. Privacy-first design with full user consent

🧩 Why this matters:

• Mental health is a growing global crisis, especially among teens and young adults
• Traditional therapy often has access barriers (cost, time, stigma)
• ChatGPT already provides comfort, but combining it with real counselors could offer life-changing support

💡 Benefits:

• AI scales emotional support affordably
• Human professionals provide clinical depth when needed
• Potentially life-saving early intervention for those who otherwise wouldn’t seek help

This post was drafted with assistance from ChatGPT — proof that AI-human collaboration can fuel real-world ideas.

I’d love to hear your thoughts, feedback, or suggestions on how to make this proposal even stronger or more feasible.

Thanks for reading!

https://www.boomlive.in/decode/when-a-face-scan-decides-who-eats-and-who-keeps-their-job-29048

We all know that AI is expensive, but a new set of algorithms developed by researchers at the Weizmann Institute of Science, Intel Labs, and d-Matrix could significantly reduce the cost of serving up your favorite large language model (LLM) with just a few lines of code.

Presented at the International Conference on Machine Learning this week and detailed in this paper, the algorithms offer a new spin on speculative decoding that they say can boost token generation rates by as much as 2.8x while also eliminating the need for specialized draft models.

Speculative decoding, if you're not familiar, isn't a new concept. It works by using a small "draft" model ("drafter" for short) to predict the outputs of larger, slower, but higher quality "target" models.

If the draft model can successfully predict, say, the next four tokens in the sequence, that's four tokens the bigger model doesn't have to generate, and so we get a speed-up. If it's wrong, the larger model discards the draft tokens and generates new ones itself. That last bit is important as it means the entire process is lossless — there's no trade-off in quality required to get that speed-up.

Boffins detail new algorithms to losslessly boost AI perf by up to 2.8x

: New spin on speculative decoding works with any model - now built into Transformers

^{Tobias Mann (The Register)}

I believe that the time has come for a new Social Media Bill of Digital Rights. Just as the original Bill of Rights protected individual freedoms from government overreach, we need fundamental protections for our digital communities from corporate control and surveillance capitalism.

So what could such a Social Media Bill of Rights include?

• The right to privacy & security: The ability to communicate and organize without fear of surveillance or exploitation.
• The right to own and control your identity: People and their communities must own their digital identities, connections and data. And, as the owner of an account, you can exercise the right to be forgotten.
• The right to choose and understand algorithms (transparency): Choosing the algorithms that shape your interactions: no more black box systems optimizing for engagement at the expense of community well-being.
  The right to community self-governance: Crucially, communities of users need the right to self govern, setting their own rules for behavior which are contextually relevant to their community. (Note: this does not preclude developer governance.)
• The right to full portability – the right to exit: The freedom to port your community in its entirety, to another app without losing your connections and content.

ActivityPub is of course mentioned.

We Deserve Better: A New Social Media Bill of Rights

Earlier this year, I was a part of a CNN documentary, Twitter: Breaking the Bird, which gave memuch pause for reflection about the state of social media and how we got here. This year alonewe’…

^Techdirt

For the first time ever, Linux has clawed its way past the five per cent desktop market share barrier in the United States so maybe 2025 is finally the much predicted year of Linux on the desktop.

StatCounter’s latest figures for June 2025 show Linux holding 5.03 per cent of the US desktop market. That might sound modest, but it is a massive milestone for the open-source faithful who have been banging on for decades that Linux would one day break through. Even more satisfying, Linux has now overtaken the “Unknown” category in the stats, a small but symbolic victory that shows the growth is no longer being ignored or misattributed.

It took a grinding eight years for Linux to crawl from one to two per cent by April 2021. Another 2.2 years were needed to hit three per cent in June 2023. From there it snowballed, taking only 0.7 years to cross four per cent in February 2024 and just four months later Linux is through five per cent.

Analysts say AI workloads, the backlash against surveillance-heavy proprietary platforms, and the never-ending trainwrecks of Apple have made Linux a more attractive option for ordinary users. Microsoft’s increasingly locked-down Windows 11, with its forced online accounts and hardware restrictions, has not helped either.

I guess Apple and MS are finally finding out.

Linux smashes through five per cent desktop share in the US

2025 really is the year of Linux on the desktop For the first time ever, Linux has clawed its way past the five per cent desktop market share barrier in the United States so maybe 2025 is finally the much predicted year of Linux on the desktop.

^{Nick Farrell (Fudzilla)}

The recent violence in Suwayda began after Bedouin armed groups kidnapped a Druze trader on the road to Damascus on July 11, according to the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, a United Kingdom-based monitor.

The abduction quickly turned into more widespread violence between the two communities – which have a longstanding rivalry due to land disputes – eventually dragging in Syrian government forces.

Syria’s new government has been attempting to impose its authority after a 14-year civil war and the end of half a century of al-Assad family rule. However, it has found it difficult to do so in Suwayda, partly because of Israel’s repeated threats against the presence of any government forces in the province, which borders the Israeli-occupied Golan Heights.

Sectarian tension, Israeli intervention: What led to the violence in Syria?

Israel continues to bomb Syria, ostensibly to support Druze forces in the southwest, even after ceasefire is declared.

^{Mat Nashed (Al Jazeera)}