As someone who has been a union member since I was a Marine with the American Servicemen's Union until I retired last year as a Teamster as well as a member of the Industrial Workers of the World,...
Nice little fun fact in the extras on the Star Trek Enterprise Blurays I just got:
At Paramount's studios they have exterior sets on the campus, including a "New York backlot" with a few brownstones and other buildings and streets. It shows up multiple times in Star Trek, including, "A Piece of the Action" (TOS), "Time's Arrow" (TNG), "Past Tense" (DS9), "11:59" (VOY). "The Expanse" (ENT), and "Storm Front" (ENT).
When I extract the content from Blurays for streaming to my TV, I always make sure to keep all the extras.
I've been going through and setting the labels on the commentary tracks for the Star Trek Enterprise episodes that have them.
In this box set there are also text commentary tracks by Mike & Denise Okuda, which are full of nerdy information and trivia. They get less in the way of watching the show than audio commentary, so I look forward to reading them! 😁
🌹🇱🇧 The Rose House is a 19th-century palace in Lebanon, built with Ottoman and Western influences. Its pink façade once matched roses in the gardens. Damaged in the Civil War, it is now abandoned.
Profitez des vidéos et de la musique que vous aimez, mettez en ligne des contenus originaux, et partagez-les avec vos amis, vos proches et le monde entier.
Copying an archive.is link of this OregonLive.com story because it probably deserves more attention and is behind a paywall:
"A former University of Oregon undergraduate who says he discovered a significant security flaw in the college’s computer network and twice reported it to university officials faced a disciplinary hearing as a result."
"Physics major Owen Mitchem said he was able to inadvertently access confidential information, including the Social Security numbers of more than 3,500 public university employees around the state, last fall, including of the university’s president and its football coach, the highest-paid public employee in the state. He says the breach should have been a wake-up call for the university to tighten its online security."
"But according to an email the university provided to The Oregonian/OregonLive in response to a public records request, the university’s associate dean of students, Dianne Tanjuaquio, concluded that Mitchem’s actions violated the school’s policies on “acceptable use of computing resources.” She required him to write a 750-word essay reflecting on the situation; if not completed, he could face a suspension of his student account, preventing him from registering for classes or changing his course schedule."
"Mitchem says he was just searching in Microsoft Teams for some budget figures for the physics club he ran when he stumbled across a spectrum of university financial documents, visible via files on SharePoint, a Microsoft tool that can be integrated with Teams. They seemed harmless at first glance, he told The Oregonian/OregonLive, but not something his student email permissions should have allowed him to view."
"Mitchem alerted a physics department grants technician and assumed the wide access would be quickly corrected. He later found out that the technician hadn’t alerted the university’s information department, meaning that unbeknownst to him, the IT department remained unaware of the security lapse, Mitchem said via email."
Perhaps Mr. Mitchem might want to include in his essay a summary of Oregon's data breach notification statute, which quite possibly applies in this situation, and which could create some nontrivial obligations and liabilities for the university.
OBS Studio 32.0 beta 2 is now available for public testing with a bunch of crash and bug fixes. It also removes the ability on #Linux to load plugins built for older major versions of OBS Studio github.com/obsproject/obs-stud…
Beta 2 Changes
Fixed a crash in Beta 1 when loading an invalid config file in the Plugin Manager [FiniteSingularity]
Fixed a crash in Beta 1 when streaming to an invalid SRT URL [gxalpha]
Fixed a ...
Questa settimana è stata estremamente impegnativa, sia dal lato fisico che psicologico. Ne sto pagando le conseguenze, e la prossima si preannuncia simile. Ma va bene così. 👍
Doppio intervento Geal: possibili disagi a San Vito e a Monte San Quirico I lavori alla rete idrica sono in programma rispettivamente lunedì (8 settembre) e martedì 9 fra interruzioni e cali di pressione
"it fits a tech industry playbook to grow a business first and later pay a relatively small fine...for breaking the rules... Anthropic (is valued) at $183 billion."
It's what I suspected: Anthropic did the maths on how many authors have registered copyright (only 500k out of the 7M titles stolen, $3k not $150k). Better than $750 per title(statue min)but...
It's a fine for "rule breaking" not "you stole books, erase your model and start over with non-stolen goods"
Not entirely clear, but it also appears to be a set fine? So authors in the pool get to fight over the total? Rather than "you will pay each author X amount" — it says $3000 but that assumes 500k authors file claims. Could be less. Anthropic doesn't care, they'll pay their fine and be free to steal.
I'm really mixed on this but part of me is like "well at least creative folks will get a pittance out of this bonfire of VC funds before it all goes horribly broke."
But I think the judged boxed them in by saying it was only copyright registered works and at that point, there was no way to make them pay *enough* to bankrupt.
IDK I wasn't privy but it makes me RAGE regardless.
@dalias I honestly don't think opting out of the class helps anything... this case is settled, I'd rather see them pay as much of that settlement money as possible.
There's always other class actions that can be filed. There are *so many* companies that have stolen these books. So the question will be... what will happen with those? IDK but opting out of the class would change nothing. Might as well get authors some money.
And the judge *really* screwed authors by saying it was "fair use".
The only real remedy would have been to take it to trial and try to bankrupt Anthropic and IDK why they didn't but probably registration # s did it.
I think the judge boxed them (the suing authors) in with that. They're just not inclined to actually *make the company pay* for stealing, not when it's Silicon Valley I guess
If you don't accept being in the class you still have grounds (whether you use it or not) to make a case against them yourself, and even if not, you don't grant that their wrongdoing against you has been compensated and is a closed deal.
If the amount were going to be substantial, I guess it's a matter of how much of a difference it makes to an individual author's life and whether that's worth it. But as expected it's really low.
My understanding (not a lawyer) is that the *particular suit* being ruined by the "fair use" thing is reason to opt out of the class and have another chance at it. With a lawyer who's actually been told to prioritize making the case that it's not fair use, and given leads to expert witnesses (e.g. mathematicians who actually understand what the model is) qualified to convince a court of that.
Is it possible to be in the class collecting damages from the piracy that took place downloading corpus from libgen, without that putting you in a class where it's been ruled that the incorporation of all your books into their model was non-infringing? These seem like two separate allegations of infringement.
I'm not a lawyer and I don't know. I hope someone who is a lawyer can help advise on this, tho.
@dalias it's a fair question and I don't actually know the answer.
I would say I'll have a better idea when I can see the form I have to actually sign when I join the class action (I have 91 titles in the pirated database).
I need to look at the other suits that are already ongoing too — and I have smart friends I expect will be weighing in on this 😀
"Judge Alsup certified the class only for piracy, not the act of AI training, and as such the fair use ruling on training applies only with respect to the three named plaintiffs, not the certified class authors and publishers. "
Today, Anthropic agreed to pay $1.5 billion to settle claims that it downloaded pirated books to train its AI systems—the largest U.S. copyright settlement in history.
@Sue is Writing Solarpunk 🌞🌱 Isn't it neat how when AI companies do it, it's "training" with a $ slap on the wrist by a class action brough by individuals, but when average ppl do it with Napster or Limewire it's "piracy" and the literal govt comes to seize their property? 🙃🤡🤖 God I can't wait for this AI bubbble to bbburst and bbbankrupt some robbber bbbarons.
@growfediverse the only real remedy would have been to take them to trial and make them pay for every one of those 7M instances at $150k and just bankrupt the company.
As soon as I saw that they settled, I knew it was just a slap on the wrist.
Today, Anthropic agreed to pay $1.5 billion to settle claims that it downloaded pirated books to train its AI systems—the largest U.S. copyright settlement in history.
With read speeds up to 900MB/s and write speeds up to 600MB/s, level up your handheld gaming experience with next-gen Lexar Play PRO 1TB microSD Express Card.
A group called Return to the Land has established two "whites-only communities" in Arkansas, with plans for four more sites in the Ozarks and Appalachia. The creation of white ‘ethnostates’ is the ultimate goal of some white nationalists, a scholar of right-wing extremism explains: buff.ly/R8loWop
Mi rattrista sempre un po’ la mancanza di fantasia di certe persone, quell’incapacità di lasciarsi andare e uscire dagli schemi, quella paura di vivere l’attimo, di realizzare un sogno realizzabile, di bucare un desiderio …
All the liberal media critics have disowned all the major media outlets and none of us trust anyone’s stupid blog, so where exactly are we supposed to get our news from? I suppose none of us believe anything anymore. What are we even doing? #Media
If you have a spare buck, throw it towards @Sbarry8520 whos been working to build a house for his family in The Gambia. He is probably the first person to fund building an entire house from fediverse donations which is pretty damn cool if you ask me. mstdn.social/@Sbarry8520/11515…
#MatrixDown: So, is the main issue of #Matrix too many users using the main instance, a condition actively pushed by #Vector, creating half-centralized ecosystem?
Is it the issue that #Matrix servers are a overly complex and resource hungry systems, which are hard to administrate and even harder to troubleshoot? 🤔
No - running your own server is not really hard. I started using Matrix just a few days ago and from day two on I had my own server as soon as I found element-hq.github.io/synapse/l…
You can either use Docker or run it native in Debian/Ubuntu. Using PostgreSQL instead of SQLite is recommened. Migrating after the initial setup is also possible but maybe a bit tricky.
I decided against Conduit as it is still beta and I did not want to deal with beta issues before even knowing how it should be with a stable server. Maybe I will give it try later. The server here has 32 GB RAM and 6 cores, so the additional load by Synapse is not a big deal so far.
Looks like it's good we're having different systems to test and use.
I'm testing @delta now and apart from privacy concerns I heard about in the past, it looks like a good, pretty much decentralized option to me, with low hosting and Admin efforts which also seems important to me for wide adoption.
Also try XMPP, that's very low effort, reliable, has been around for a while and is an IETF standard for instant messaging communication. Clients like Conversations by @daniel are simple and reliable and @dino works really well.
It even is a protocol exactly for that use-case. It's technology that makes me happy, as it just works well.
Well, I used #XMPP for 2 years or so, with #Jabber and #Dino on Windows. Very often messages were not delivered or not e2e encrypted, especially with the Dino clients.
It was hosted by a friend for a few people. The troubleshooting caused a lot of work for him. So we stopped it and moved to #Deltachat.
“There’s a reason you separate the military and the police. One fights the enemies of the state, the other serves and protects the people. When the military becomes both, the enemies of the state tend to become the people.”
-William Adama, Battlestar Galactica (2004)
With Trump sending the military into more and more cities, the line feels more relevant than ever. So I turned it into a sticker. If you’d like the design, it’s free to use. As a subtle nod to Battlestar Galactica, I recommend clipping the corners.
Profitez des vidéos et de la musique que vous aimez, mettez en ligne des contenus originaux, et partagez-les avec vos amis, vos proches et le monde entier.
Here’s a scarlet tanager (Piranga olivacea)—female, I believe. I captured this image years ago while she lingered in an oak tree just beyond my fence. It was the first time I’d photographed one, and I remember thinking: maybe I’ll see a male someday. Who knows.
If you’re captivated by indigo buntings and other members of the Cardinalidae family—better known as the cardinal family—step into my photo gallery for a visual feast. Come take a look:
What if the real flouride conspiracy is that Alex Jones is trying to give people that listen to his show cavities and most people should increase flouride intake and brush their teeth with flouride toothoaste more often and only a small percent would have better health if they reduced intake
But flouride water can still pose health problems for infants because it is easier for them to accidentally have too much flourude
anecdotal refutation: I have not used fluoridated toothpaste for over 20 years. I have had zero tooth cavities. My mouth feels healthy and teeth are strong.
Tooth health is mostly due to diet, not what you brush your teeth with.
Angela Rayner, already disgraced and forced to resign, is now being lined up for a payout funded by the very taxpayers she betrayed. The TaxPayers’ Alliance has called her out for what she is: a complete hypocrite.
Ordinary Britons are being hammered with record taxes, mortgages, and bills. Families are counting pennies, pensioners are choosing between heating and eating, and veterans are sleeping on the streets. Yet somehow, when it comes to failed politicians, there’s always money to spare. Always a cushy parachute. Always one rule for them, another for us.
Rayner’s scandals should have ended her career. Instead, she might walk away with a reward, paid out of the pockets of people who have been crushed by the very government she was part of. That’s not just wrong, it’s insulting.
If Labour cared about integrity, they’d block this payout immediately. If Keir Starmer had a backbone, he’d demand she refuse a penny. But we all know how this goes, excuses, spin, and silence while the public is fleeced yet again.
🇬🇧 Enough is enough. No golden handshakes for hypocrites. No taxpayer bailouts for failed politicians. Sack them, strip them, and make them live by the same rules as the rest of us.
Angela Rayner has been branded a "complete hypocrite" by William Yarwood as he demanded that the ex-Deputy Prime Minister does not receive a Government payout, following her resignation.
On a rainy day in 2025, I found poetry in a single drop. Where water meets life, stillness becomes wonder. This piece is my tribute to the beauty of the ordinary — to the quiet moments that speak louder than words. linktr.ee/M.ALK
Discover the world through my lens and brush: from wild primates in deep contemplation to delicate watercolor cacti kissed by dew. Original art for nature lovers. Prints available.
I must say I'm surprised at how closely my own developed opinion and vision for solarpunk is to @eruditelijah
There's only one thing I would like to emphasize just because I think it's really important, and that is that solarpunk is, or at least should be, activist fiction. The writing of it is activist, the choices of topic are activist, the characters have activist tendencies that offer us role models. This aspect of solarpunk fiction is what makes it valuable in the now, imo
@amici @eruditelijah I wrote a piece on nonbinariness awhile back for @solarpunkgnome 's excellent series on Solarpunk & Spirituality. Applies here (imho) re: solarpunk writing have overt activism. Yes! And we need more!
We also need the aspirational writing that gets us to dream bigger and seeds inspiration. So we need the present, the far future, and ways to get there. We need it all in the generative engine of #solarpunk. @SolarpunkPrompts has some great ideas about missing pieces.
Personally I don't like the far-future, it gets escapist very quickly because it requires too much of a leap of imagination to get there. It becomes sort-of like a nice dream, but not an actionable dream.
However, if we can find a path to get there that works in writing, all the better.
Maybe a version of the saga-format could work? Sagas, a literally style from my own country of Norway and developed in the viking age, tackle generational events.
For instance, Snorre's King Sagas, written after the viking age, outlines the biographies of every king of Norway across hundreds of years
Instead of kings, you can have community sagas, biographies of communities with the focus on a few representative characters, detailing their contributions to community change from birth to old age. Over several books you have the full evolution of a community from, for instance, early 21st century to 23rd century
@amici I actually really like that saga idea! I enjoy far future stuff too, but I do think most solarpunk does focus on near future or even alt history.
I've been thinking about creating a story of sorts that focuses on how the world can change from today on into the far future, so I may check out that story you suggested to get an idea on how to go about that.
Focusing on community rather than a few 'main characters' is the key to this I think too.
@eruditelijah I must admit I just mentioned Snorre's King Sagas because I'm a history buff, it's more like an early work of history writing and has a very simple style, though it does focuses on changes in the Kingdom through time, but for an example of modern saga you have "Sagaen om Isfolket", transl. to English as "The Legend of the Ice People" en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Le…, a friend of mine really likes that series.
@eruditelijah One might take inspiration from the historical style to make a history of the future, but one could also simply just write a series of texts, where in each text you follow some community members as their community changes from a young age until they're old, then in the next text, you shift focus to new young characters in the community while the previous ones are old people and background characters. This way there's a slight bit of chronological overlap of texts.
@eruditelijah I'm not a solarpunk novel writer because I'm already committed to my own fantasy book series, so anyone please take this idea and try to realize it, otherwise it might just be forgotten
@eruditelijah @amici actually, the mosaic novel (linked story collection) that I'm pitching works something like this as it spirals through about 200 years to the future I've dreamed.
@amici Yes I think that activism piece is a huge and important part! Sad I didn't mention that explicitly, but I felt it was implied via the ideas of punk itself.
However it's becoming more apparent to me that some people don't realize the inherent activist stance of punk as a genre across art forms.
That's so interesting to read. Thanks for posting!
From where i am sitting in Europe/Denmark it feels like a lot of the critical confusion is very US culture centric. #Solarpunk began in South America and southern Europe, and I think that matters to its valence.
In Europe, I experience renewable energy, inc. community green energy, as normal and large scale, getting community benefits from corporate renewable energy is normal (although massively problematic) etc.
I just wrote a definition of #solarpunk for an academic glossary of terms, but I refused to define it, instead wrote a solarounk short story... because, for me, solarpunk is something you _do_. It's more verb than noun...
@laurawatts This jibes with a solarpunk narrative arc I've been offering. Each point on the spiral (not linear) is purposely a verb. "How to solarpunk." Susan, that's also how you titled one of your mini zines, yes?
@laurawatts Your writing and contribution to solarpunk is wonderful! Quoting you: "...solarpunk is known for its age-of-sail aesthetic, for its science-fiction-as-activism, for its sunlit exuberance, and for kicking over the anthills (Flynn 2019). Solarpunk is not for defining. Writing a theoretical definition of solarpunk in a typical passive, academic writing style would not be solarpunk. You have to do it. Solarpunk is more verb than noun."
I hope Elijah comes to Fediverse, it's "very punk": Strangers making and sharing tech to communicate, with no expected ROI, just human connection. (yeah there's misery profiteers in the wider Fedi, but nowhere near the level of the silo corporate platforms like Bluesky, Tiktok, Meta, etc). Just the idea that there's all these independent admins pro bono running instances for total strangers is hella Solarpunk to me.
I sometimes wonder if ppl misunderstand Solarpunk because people think that the only way to rebel against oppression is fugly physical combat? Totally missing the innumerous times other strategies have succeeded too. The idea that rebellion can ONLY be direct violence seems like a fairy tale oppressive people tell to keep folks from trying other perfectly effective methods. Cuz violent oppressors already intuit how to deal with violent resistence. They don't know how to perceive of the impacts of concepts like malicious compliance, weaponized hope, undaunted kindness, or contageous self respect.
@growfediverse Totally agree. The write-up was a great read, and it made me realize something: people don’t understand why depicting a better future is itself an act of resistance. The reason is because the capitalists’ most effective method of self-preservation, the whole reason they are winning, is by convincing people that no other desirable system is possible.
One of capitalism’s greatest victories of the 20th century was the use of the Cold War to thoroughly entrench the idea in the West that there are only two possible modern political-economic systems: 1) capitalism and 2) authoritarian single-party centrally-planned “communism” (in quotes since I think it’s not what most communists think the word means, but it’s the only thing that most non-communists think it means).
Capitalists argue that if you don’t want the latter, you have to accept the former, there is no other way.
@growfediverse I’ve never thought of truly hopeful futures as utopian (though cynical bate-and-switch utopias appear all the time in dystopias). The point of hopeful future stories, to me, is to depict something radically different from what we have today that actually works, at least as well as our current system seems to work for many still-comfortable people in it, and most likely at least a little better for the many who are not ok today.
The point is not to just make us feel good about the future, whatever that might bring. And the point is also not to tell a story about some characters who are resisting, like the characters are inspiration for our own resistance (though those stories can be useful too). When stories show specific models of non-capitalist, non-authoritarian political/economic/social systems, the telling of that story is itself the real-world act of resistance.
@growfediverse Those in power weaponized doomerism to convince people that, even if our reality sucks, it’s the only thing possible. They argue that getting rid of any elements of capitalism means no functioning economy whatsoever. Criticize all you want, you still have to live with it.
Showing feasible alternatives is the counter-tactic. Showing what it means for workers to own businesses, for local communities to use other methods of public safety and justice, for representation by e.g. sortition beyond the control of money and influence, for collective decision-making by positive-sum consensus-building, etc.
Get people interested enough to look up the ideas, then they can see these things are already being done, that can be done now. Teaching people how to make the transition is important too. But they have to believe there are alternatives that can actually work. That breaks the stranglehold of the capitalist narrative. Then, people will build them.
"I sometimes wonder if ppl misunderstand #Solarpunk because people think that the only way to rebel against oppression is fugly physical combat? Totally missing the innumerous times other strategies have succeeded too. The idea that rebellion can ONLY be direct violence seems like a fairy tale oppressive people tell to keep folks from trying other perfectly effective methods. Cuz violent oppressors already intuit how to deal with violent resistence. They don't know how to perceive of the impacts of concepts like malicious compliance, weaponized hope, undaunted kindness, or contageous self respect." Exactly, @bluespruce!
![Courtney Milan @courtneymilan.com - 1h
People are asking if they have to delete the model. The answer is no:
that was never going to be on the table in this suit, because the district
judge found (non-binding precedent) that while pirating the books to
train the model was NOT fair use, training the model on the books WAS
fair use.
[mE] =8 Q 60 a e.
Courtney Milan @courtneymilan.com - Th
That being said, they do not have a right to re-download libgen to train
future versions of the model. So... interesting.
02 23 Q 65 a cee](https://poliverso.org/photo/preview/640/58197090 "Courtney Milan @courtneymilan.com - 1h
People are asking if they have to delete the model. The answer is no:
that was never going to be on the table in this suit, because the district
judge found (non-binding precedent) that while pirating the books to
train the model was NOT fair use, training the model on the books WAS
fair use.
[mE] =8 Q 60 a e.
Courtney Milan @courtneymilan.com - Th
That being said, they do not have a right to re-download libgen to train
future versions of the model. So... interesting.
02 23 Q 65 a cee")
Altbot
in reply to Luigi.🇵🇸🇱🇧🇮🇷🇵🇷🇻🇪 • • •