A Miami activist alleges that city officials violated Florida’s open government law when they gifted a sizable plot of prime downtown real estate to the state, which then transferred it to the foundation for Donald Trump’s future presidential library.

The nearly 3-acre (1.2-hectare) property is a developer’s dream and is valued at more than $67 million, according to a 2025 assessment by the Miami-Dade County property appraiser. One of the last undeveloped lots on an iconic stretch of palm tree-lined Biscayne Boulevard, one real estate expert wagered that the parcel could sell for hundreds of millions of dollars more.

Marvin Dunn, an activist and chronicler of local Black history, filed a lawsuit Monday in a Miami-Dade County court against the Board of Trustees for Miami Dade College, a state-run school that previously owned the property. He alleges that the board violated Florida’s Government in the Sunshine law by not providing sufficient notice for its special meeting on Sept. 23, when it voted to give up the land, and he’s seeking to block the land transfer.

https://apnews.com/article/trump-presidential-library-lawsuit-miami-e5f6d8662e39b280cd17b5552b21f7e7

archive.is link

As dawn spread over San Antonio on September 9, 2021, almond-colored smoke began to fill the sky above the city’s Far West Side. The plumes were whorling off the top of a 132-foot-tall cell tower that overshadows an office park just north of SeaWorld. At a hotel a mile away, a paramedic snapped a photo of the spectacle and posted it to the r/sanantonio subreddit. “Cell tower on fire around 1604 and Culebra,” he wrote.

In typical Reddit fashion, the comments section piled up with corny jokes. “Blazing 5G speeds,” quipped one user.

“I hope no one inhales those fumes, the Covid transmission via 5G will be a lot more potent that way,” wrote another, in a swipe at the conspiracy theorists who claim that radiation from 5G towers caused the Covid-19 pandemic.

The wisecracks went on: “Can you hear me now?”

“Free hotspot!”

“Great, some hero trying to save us from 5G.”

That self-styled hero was actually lurking in the comments. As he followed the thread on his phone, Sean Aaron Smith delighted in the sheer volume of attention the tower fire was receiving, even if most of it dripped with sarcasm. A lean, tattooed—and until recently, entirely apolitical—27-year-old, Smith had come to view 5G as the linchpin of a globalist plot to zombify humanity. To resist that supposed scheme, he’d spent the past five months setting Texas cell towers ablaze.

Smith’s crude and quixotic campaign against 5G was precisely the sort of security threat that was fast becoming one of the US government’s top concerns in 2021. Just two weeks after Smith’s fire popped up on Reddit, then FBI director Christopher Wray discussed the latest trends in political violence in a speech marking the 20th anniversary of the 9/11 attacks. “Today, the greatest terrorist threat we face here in the US is from what are, in effect, lone actors,” he said, describing these people as moving “quickly from radicalization to action, often using easily obtainable weapons against soft targets.” And an increasing number of these individuals, Wray stressed, were turning violent after marinating in bizarre conspiracy theories.

https://www.wired.com/story/22-cell-towers-one-vigilante-world-of-conspiracies/

The EU built a system called CounterR that essentially performs pre-crime thought surveillance. The TLDR is that an AI company, with direct input from half a dozen European police forces, built a tool that scrapes social media, forums, and other sources to assign citizens a score based on what they think as opposed to what they've actually done. The EC also has not released details of the project..

The report itself acknowledges that this sort of automated system "can trigger new fundamental rights risks that affect rights different than the protection of personal data and privacy."

The European Commission's White Paper on Al observes that Al-related processing of personal data can trigger new fundamental rights risks that affect rights different than the protection of personal data and privacy, such as the right to freedom of expression, and political freedoms - in particular when Al is used by online intermediaries to prioritise information and for content moderation.

The police were active co-developers, sitting in meetings to define the criteria and feeding real, anonymized data from their investigations to train the LLM. So now you have a feedback loop where police define the threat, the LLM learns it, and the police validate the results, with zero external oversight.

And of course, it's all shrouded in secrecy. The whole thing is confidential, the source code is proprietary so even partners can't audit it, and the ethics board is made up of the same people building the thing. There's no clear requirement to track false positives, so you could be flagged as a potential radical and never know why.

Regarding transparency of funded research, it must be noted that generally research proposals foresee
Confidentiality of some results is often necessary, especially in the realm of security.

The cherry on top? The core technology, developed with public funds, was recently acquired by a private company, Logically, who can now sell this dystopian scoring system to whoever they want.

The citizens of the EU literally paid to build our own panopticon. The whole project is about normalizing the idea that the state gets to algorithmically monitor and judge your political beliefs before you ever commit a crime.

Privacy-First Situational Awareness Platform for Violent Terrorism and Crime Prediction, Counter Radicalisation and Citizen Protection

Project from EU research framework programmes

^{CORDIS, cordis.europa.eu (CORDIS | European Commission)}

i run debian 13 on my laptop. it runs on a 5200rpm hard disk, so some bootup slowdown is to be expected, but it got really bad for some reason. booting up could take up to 3 minutes just to get to the display manager

after running systemd-analyze blame i found the two main culprits: docker and snapd. i had snapd and flatpak installed so that i could have access to as many applications as i could, but it seems that snaps have a huge amount of overhead. i knew about the one million mountpoints caused by snaps, but the amount of services they have to start on boot surprised me. snapd alone took 30 seconds to start and then there were its dependencies

my boot time is now down to 1min 50s. i recommend anyone who still has snapd installed on a non-ubuntu distro to uninstall it

EINDHOVEN, The Netherlands — The European Union’s rules on artificial intelligence are driving tech workers and companies to Silicon Valley, a top executive from the Dutch chipmaking giant ASML has said.

“Why is it so difficult to get AI done in Europe? Simply because we started with regulating, to keep AI under the thumb,” ASML’s Chief Financial Officer Roger Dassen told an event in Eindhoven on Monday evening.

“Someone who has a talent for artificial intelligence, the first thing they do with their hard-earned money … is buying a ticket to Silicon Valley,” Dassen said.

The comments — made during a campaign event for Dutch center-right party Christian Democratic Appeal ahead of national elections Oct. 29 — are another shot across the bow of the EU’s embattled artificial intelligence law.

...

With friends who work in AI, I can tell you not all are motivated by money alone, some of them actually do want the scary potential (aka Flock, etc) regulated and are working from Europe.

Dutch chips star exec slams EU for overregulating AI

EU policies mean top artificial intelligence talent is ‘buying a ticket to Silicon Valley,’ says ASML chief financial officer.

^{Pieter Haeck (POLITICO)}

A new poll from NPR, PBS, and Marist College published on Wednesday, Oct. 2, shows a “striking change in Americans’ views on political violence.” We have grown much more violent as a country over the last year, NPR reports, with the share of U.S. adults who agree with the statement “Americans may have to resort to violence to get the country back on track” growing from 20 to 30% over the last 18 months.

This is scary data indeed. In NPR’s coverage of the poll, Cynthia Miller-Idriss, a professor at American University, says the data is “horrific”: “It’s just a horrific moment to see that people believe, honestly believe that there’s no other alternative at this point than to resort to political violence.” Where does America go from here?

But here’s the thing: The NPR/PBS/Marist poll did not ask people if they believed “there’s no other alternative at this point than to resort to political violence.” The survey asks adults whether or not they agree with the statement that people “may have to resort to violence in order to get the country back on track.” This is comparatively a much weaker statement and comes with a potentially heavy dose of measurement error. Respondents are asked to imagine a hypothetical scenario in which they’d have to commit acts of violence against a vague, unspecified victim. Maybe that means taking up arms against the government or their neighbors, or perhaps it just means throwing a rock at a cop or through a shop door.

The problem with polls and reports like this, in other words, is that they are not asking about the “political violence” we are imagining in our heads: An insurrection at the Capitol; driving a car through a crowd of protestors; shooting an activist you don’t like with a sniper rifle. The unfortunate reality (especially for those of us who care about democracy and what the people think) is that this survey does not ask whether Americans support certain acts of violence against their neighbors, even though that’s what the poll is being used as evidence for.

This disconnect between what is being polled and what is being talked about is part of a broader pattern I’ve pointed out in my recent coverage of political violence: Most polls overestimate mass support for political violence. I explain why this is the case, and why this is important for everyone from pollsters to elite journalists to casual news consumers to reckon with.

Why most polls overstate support for political violence

Misperceptions about the popularity of violence increase public support for it — but you can help change that.

^{G. Elliott Morris (Strength In Numbers)}

The Democratic representative-elect won her Arizona seat overwhelmingly. But so far, the Republican speaker will not swear her in.

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/10/06/us/politics/adelita-grijalva-house-epstein.html?unlocked_article_code=1.rk8.ZfgL.SOMeunMNeiMZ

Two years on, complicit governments back a US plan to safeguard Jewish supremacy and mute global outrage, while Israel revives Nazi torture methods to force Palestinian surrender

Trump’s plan for Gaza rewards Israel’s genocide and punishes its victims

^{Middle East Eye}

cross-posted from: lemmy.world/post/37022550

Today we’re sharing some truly exciting news: Arduino has entered into an agreement to join the Qualcomm Technologies, Inc. family! This is a huge step in our journey – one that allows us to keep growing, thriving, and making technology accessible to everyone, while bringing our values of openness, simplicity, and community spirit to an […]

A new chapter for Arduino – with Qualcomm, UNO Q, and you!  | Arduino Blog

^{Arduino Team (Arduino)}

(I’m not actually in Denver anymore, I’m back home in Cascadia, but this was shot out that way a few days ago, and I’m trying to post only one work a day or less, so I don’t flood the community, and to give each of my works, and each of yours, greater appreciation. Thank you for understanding.)

This was shot in Union Station; I was completely new to Denver, having been there for less than thirty seconds, drinking in new architecture and taking the culture in. I think I took 120 exposures in this train station alone, and I think this is the one I liked the best. It’s such a simple image, and yet the color in it is delicious, almost food-like.

Thank you for seeing my work!