Under 5 CFR § 2635.202(b), "an emplovee may not, directly or indirectly, accept a gift given because of the emplovee's official position." This fundraiser directly violates that federal statute as it is raising funds explicitly because of the beneficiary's actions while on duty as an ICE agent, which makes him an emplovee of the Executive Branch Disbursement of these funds to the named beneficiary would violate federal law.
After ICE agents shot people in Minneapolis tonight, a crowd faced them down and eventually chased them away, despite federal mercenaries and police shooting a tremendous amount of tear gas.
ICE agents abandoned their vehicles in the area, containing IDs, paperwork, license plates, gear, and operational plans.
Demonstrators apparently retrieved these "challenge coins" that ICE mercenaries receive when they kidnap people.
This "coin" is decorated with a skull wearing a crown.
ICE mercenaries serve king death. They are evil incarnate.
For those what don't know, @SoFurry is back, and the new site is very nice looking... But I can't figure out how to see uploads from those that I follow nor see who I'm following. I would think my feed would do that, but there's a single post there despite my alerts showing uploads from someone else I'm following.
Meh, why do art galleries have to be this hard? Why don't we just Federate them, #pixelfed looks like it could do the job with some tweaks.
Also add your testimony on the bill. You don't have to sign up to speak (though, please do if you can), you can simply register your "con" on the legislative record: app.leg.wa.gov/csi/House?selec…
Fuck this shit. It's bad enough that we gotta deal with actual literal nazis fucking up the country, but our own elected Democrat shitheads are trying to fuck us from the other end at the same time.
Washington state trying to pass age verification (cynical reply)
Sensitive content
Anything to prevent parents having to actually be parents for their children, right?
Shit drives me up a wall. It's also a stark reminder how the median adult is both clueless about privacy and data security concerns *and* doesn't give a fuck regardless. Flying across the country twice was a reminder that not using Meta, Xitter, and Gxxgle accounts (or even just a few services/products) places you in an insignificant minority. People can't even hold their phones to obscure what you're doing or show all the accounts you have.
When I talked with the many younger people at my old job, the vast majority were resigned to the fact that "they know everything about me, why try, lol." Exactly what they want. And it just continues to enable age verification garbage and everything associated with it.
I've never been more motivated to primary nearly every sitting politician out of existence, but until the youngest voters understand that primaries can be much more important than actual elections, good fucking luck. I'm not holding my breath.
for my US train gremlin friends: Amtrak USA Rail Passes are currently 50% off. $250 for 10 legs (ie get on at one stop, off at another stop, changing trains means you use another leg) within 30 days; buy by Jan 20, start your 30 day window within 120 days of purchase (so the latest you could travel is June 20). coach only, so no beds and no Acela
it’s no eurail/interrail but a decent deal nonetheless
@tully my hot take is that Amtrak coach on long distance is basically fine - the seats are really nice! I did Seattle to NYC in Coach and would gladly do it again.
Thirty years ago I took an Amtrak trip from Denver to Houston. The most direct route had a layover in, wait for it... Springfield, IL.
What a way to design a rail network. Anyway, it was a nice trip and the trains themselves were very nice. It just took too long for the actual distance traveled.
I made a map of all the public transit in Vermont! It's the map I always wish I had when I plan travel there. My goal is that someone sees this map, learns about a bus near them, and then takes the bus because of it.
I'd like to remark on this personally- a lot of things with regard to Sharkey have been stalled due to my limited availability resulting from my breakup with my ex- which entailed me finding new housing, among other things. Lifes been chaotic as hell- but it's finally starting to settle, and I'm hoping that _now_ I can properly fulfill my role as the lead maintainer. Additionally, I'll be looking into taking on our financials myself (under an LLC)- as circumstances with our previous fiscal host (which is required by OpenCollective) have become a little complicated. The paperwork for that should be settled sometime in Febuary and I'll make a proper announcement with more details. I'm excited for what 2026 holds for Sharkey- I plan to be a lot more active, contribution wise! Thank you all for bearing with us, genuinely, I appreciate it a _lot_.
No other changes this time, our current priority is to stabilize a mass of fixes and improvements we've made on top of Misskey 2025.5.0, which has been stalled due to life things getting in the way for several of our contributors. That said, the hope is to get things back in motion through the coming months- and contributions are always welcome. Thanks for bearing with us in the meantime!
i'm probably going to be told tomorrow that i'm being laid off, so if anyone has a lead on a decent remote embedded software engineering or unix/linux systems job, i've got a resume to send you.
i don't like discussing the specifics of who my past clients have been in public. however, my most recent position was contracting with the kernel team of a major CDN and cloud services provider that i know many people on fedi are also current or former employees of, maintaining their internal linux distribution (an customized Ubuntu downstream) for their custom server platforms, porting forward and cleaning up patchsets to newer versions of the distribution, fixing issues in toolchains and libraries, etc.
i've also done embedded software work for a large variety of devices including medical, cellular technology, and industrial control equipment, in addition to some consumer products. i've done board bringup and BSP development with Yocto/Openembedded, Buildroot, FreeRTOS, etc, on most major SoC and microcontroller families. when doing business logic, I am most comfortable in C and Lua, but fine working with C++ codebases, and can learn to work with other languages if a project needs it.
Oh no. Trump has been given (as if he needed it) permission to continue war acts in Venezuela. I want him to keep in mind, If Iranians aren't to be killed then neither are Venezuelans.
@lazy Hey Tina, don't worry; she is not Pepper, she is the Gothic Sorceress of my mini series about Avian Intelligence. I like to call her "Cepper" (for "Cepper&Parrot" 😅).
Official homepage of Pepper&Carrot, a free(libre) and open-source webcomic about Pepper, a young witch and her cat, Carrot. They live in a fantasy universe of potions, magic, and creatures.
@lazy Being somewhat of a new follower, I'm not certain... but I don't think this is Pepper. Pretty sure her hair is brown and she's got more of a whimsical bearing.
Plus Carrot probably would have chewed it to pieces by now.
@solitha Welcome around! Yes, it's another character, a gothic sorceress, more adult (probably over 300 years old, a parody of The Witcher's Yennefer in a way), resident at a university of Magic. This mini series about AI has its own tag here: peppercarrot.com/en/webcomics/…
I'm continuing Pepper&Carrot in background, I'm right now finalizing the dialog for episode 40 scenario. If the production continues to progress around this script, it will be an adventure with Shichimi and Torreya.
Official homepage of Pepper&Carrot, a free(libre) and open-source webcomic about Pepper, a young witch and her cat, Carrot. They live in a fantasy universe of potions, magic, and creatures.
@RandomDamage @Sobex In my vision, I wanted to make her more like a resident or researcher at the University of Magic, a role where she could study, teach, access the library, speak directly to the headmaster, and get invited to the New Year party, etc... But it's hard to build a more complete lore with just 4 panels at a time.
Note: I tried out of curiosity and research via a local install of flathub.org/en/apps/com.jeffse… and it was really bad: 'open source' AI LLMs model I tried can't make a punchline, or an ending twist. Every story they output can't surprise the audience: they are statistically tropes, story slop, and the ending is always super cringe. But this test was super educational about CPU usage: super slow despite having a powerful computer. Uninstalled.
"statistically" is probably the operative word there, since that's more or less what they are... statistical word generators.
They'll never twist or surprise because they're going for the most likely output from the millions of artists they've been fed (and increasingly, re-ingesting slop).
(Edit: I probably didn't need to say all that, did I? Derp.)
Gotta say the Avian Intelligence mini has been spot-on and a delight.
Though, re-checking all the story, the goth witch looks too young for a post-doc, and also her relation to the info provided by the parrot is really what you might expect from a bachelor or master student, but not someone with a PhD under her belt. A fortiori a permanent researcher would have the ability to check a good chunk of the parrot nonsense, and avoid incinerating herself.
So my personal take, given what we have now could be a witch at the beginning of her PhD, or in her Master's (since she's getting a bit more assertive). A PhD student is a lot closer to faculties and could well be invited for the new year party she's in.
@Sobex For sure, having her in her late years of study could be an advantage if I decide to show other students, and their relation with their Avian Intelligence later. So, I'm not closing this door. I'll see, writing is difficult, and sometime I have to take direction for a good 4 panels and... the lore will follow later :) Thank you for the feedback!
@dereisenhofer Yes, it looks like I'm inspired to continue the weekly comics stories around this two characters. The AI industry pissed me off with the training of 20 years of my artwork without my consent and many other reason, and I find therapeutic to write these little stories to cope with that. 🤣
This comic is perfect to present the problems with LLMs. And the parrot already is my favourite picture to explain LLMs. Like, would we say a parrot is intelligent because it learned to say "Who's there" if someone said "knock knock"?
@dereisenhofer Thank you! But I have no merit for that analogy: the en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stochast… paper from Emily M. Bender & co was really the starting point. I met the concept after brainstorming with Framasoft for a mechanical Parrot mascot illustration on one of their campaign peppercarrot.com/en/viewer/fra… . Later, I felt the idea of a cyber AI Parrot character would be a powerful concept and character, like in books of some of my favorite authors ( A. Douglas , T. Pratchett ). And here we are ☺️ .
Official homepage of Pepper&Carrot, a free(libre) and open-source webcomic about Pepper, a young witch and her cat, Carrot. They live in a fantasy universe of potions, magic, and creatures.
@voxel Hehe, yes. I needed to find a sort of 'bridge' in my scenario to let her explore the world of data center later, and connect this series to the large Amphora of Intelligence ( peppercarrot.com/en/miniFantas… ). This episode is an attempt to motivate her to find the 'server'.
Official homepage of Pepper&Carrot, a free(libre) and open-source webcomic about Pepper, a young witch and her cat, Carrot. They live in a fantasy universe of potions, magic, and creatures.
@tiredbun @voxel I hope I'll can draw enough episodes in this mini series to explore many issues (addiction/psychosis/and more) on user side and be able to land a conclusion aligned with something that was really well expressed on this toot: lgbtqia.space/@alice/115845072… , something nuanced. I hope by the end, the Gothic Sorceress will have a responsible usage of it, and maybe her own 'local' one. Maybe even themed like a crow. I'll see, so many things to draw to reach this point! I'm working on it.
I should state for the record that I think LLMs and other forms of AI have some valid and worthwhile uses, and that *none* of them should be tied to big tech or capitalism.
See things like: - accessibility - some types of research - spell-check and predictive keyboards - spam/scam filtering
@tiredbun @voxel I've seen enough blatantly wrong LLM-generated alt text and spell check results that I don't think the technology is fit for purpose. Any purpose. AI "hallucination" is not a solvable problem: It's the exact thing LLMs are designed to do. So, with all due respect to the person being quoted here, I don't trust anyone who would entrust something as important as accessibility to AI.
@Linebyline I totally agree, this is a good point. For sure, I think LLM-generated alt text should only be used as, eg. , a quick placeholder text to fill up an editing text-area, requiring a human to post-fix it. I strongly wish the output of any LLM should never go into public or production unsupervised. A human should always be required in the last chain of the process with a strong expertise on the task to critic, rewrite, adapt and make it better.
@elzen Yes! Well guessed: this episode is my 'bridge' to link back the Amphora as the data-center/server of the Avian Intelligence. A future opportunity to speak about shortage of device, price hiking, and ecology.
@hairylarry Yes, totally. And especially in the context of this comic. Clearly a violation of the Avian Intelligence "content and usage policy". I'll see how I can exploit this later, and maybe introduce the OpenMagic company.
Never mind the bathroom chats, * this young disruptor needs a name.
* to quote from Milne: "God bless Mummy. I know that's right. Wasn't it fun in the bath to-night? The cold's so cold, and the hot's so hot. Oh! God bless Daddy - I quite forgot."
@papush_ For the weekly, yes. In background I'm still in the production of a Pepper&Carrot episode that has nothing to do with AI. I understand that this theme feels annoying for those who wants to just stop this topic. But understand that for me, with all the last 20 years of my artworks they trained without my consent, my art style, and all, I feel powerless. Making comic to mock it is my way to cope with that, it's therapeutic. I promise I'll do something else once I'm done with it.
FBI executes search warrant at Washington Post reporter’s home
The search came as part of an investigation into a government contractor accused of illegally retaining classified government materials.
By Perry Stein
The FBI executed a search warrant Wednesday morning at a Washington Post reporter’s home as part of an investigation into a government contractor accused of illegally retaining classified government materials. The reporter, Hannah Natanson, was at her home in Virginia at the time of the search. Federal agents searched her home and her devices, seizing her phone, two laptops and a Garmin watch. One of the laptops was her personal computer, the other a Washington Post-issued laptop. Investigators told Natanson that she is not the focus of the probe. The warrant said that law enforcement was investigating Aurelio Perez-Lugones, a system administrator in Maryland who has a top-secret security clearance and has been accused of accessing and taking home classified intelligence reports that were found in his lunchbox and his basement, according to an FBI affidavit. Natanson covers the federal workforce and has been a part of The Washington Post’s most high-profile and sensitive coverage during the first year of the second Trump administration. In December, Natanson wrote a first-person account about her experience covering the workforce as President Donald Trump’s administration created upheaval across the federal government. She detailed how she posted her secure phone number to an online forum for government workers and amassed more than 1,000 sources, with federal workers frequently reaching out to her to share frustrations and accounts from their offices. While it is not unusual for FBI agents to conduct leak investigations of reporters who publish sensitive government information, it is highly unusual and aggressive for law enforcement to conduct a search on a reporter’s home. The FBI did not immediately respond to a request for comment. In April, Attorney General Pam Bondi rescinded a Biden-era policy that prevented officials from searching reporters’ phone records when trying to identify government personnel who have provided sensitive information to news organizations. Bondi said in an internal memo at the time that the media should not be afforded such protections, noting leaks of government information during the Trump administration. “This conduct is illegal and wrong and it must stop,” she wrote in the memo, a copy of which was obtained by The Washington Post. But Bondi said that the Justice Department would search reporters’ communication records only when other investigative methods had been exhausted. The search warrant and seizures appeared to be Natanson’s first interaction with investigators. Archive link to WaPo article
#IndigenousThoughts 1/12 John Trudell Santee Dakota/Mexican-American Born: February 15, 1946, Omaha, NE Died: December 8, 2015 (age 69 years), Santa Clara County, CA #INDIGENOUS #TAIRP
Mastodon.social has no advantages over any other Mastodon server. It has no special status or privileges, it uses exactly the same software as other Mastodon servers.
In fact I'd strongly advise people *NOT* to sign up on mastodon.social, here are the reasons why: fedi.tips/its-a-really-bad-ide…
TL:DR - It's far far too big, it's putting the entire decentralised nature of the Fediverse in danger.
If you want help choosing a good reliable server, have a look at fedi.garden
p.s. Posting this because new people on other servers were asking if they needed to open an account on mastodon.social or move to mastodon.social. Answer to both is no 🙂
Since you kindly offer to answer any questions: I chose to open my account on openbiblio.social. They have been offline since 26 December. I have since learned that was caused by their provider netcup who did not help to get anything fixed (paraphrasing the information here).
So how does one choose a server without knowing what kind of infrastructure they rely on? I'd never consiously chosen a US infrastructure.
OpenBiblio.social seems to be working here when I tried it just now, is it still not working at your end?
About choosing a server, I've got a site for non-technical people at fedi.garden where all the servers have promised to be compatible with the points at fedi.garden/about-this-site
For more technical people who want a longer non-curated list, try fedidb.com/servers (but there are no promises made on that site).
Thank you. I just checked, they have been back within the past hour but could only bring back content up to 19 November. This is exactly the kind of thing that makes despair with all technical infrastructure big and small 😭
What was the process by which you chose OpenBiblio by the way? I'm wondering if there's some way to improve the listing site. I don't think I've listed them on Fedi.Garden, were they on JoinMastodon? If they were listed on either site, they should have had daily backups to avoid this scenario.
First I love libraries a lot and implicity trust them, and different from other organisations I know them and how they are governed. Secondly I always thought they would self host. Never checked this assumpion until now. Feel a bit stupid now as I could k ow better about German IT infrastructure.
I want to stay as far away from big tech and US tech aus humanly possible. So even some European servers are not exactly desirable.
Being a massive believer in tech redundancy and secure storage of data and documentation this does rock my trust (as a non-tech person myself I rely on experts). I mean, if *libraries* lose data, what is safe in this world?
Of course in my case it is "only" social Media banter. Just after losing 90% of my Twitter mutuals that either stayed or chose Jack's Next Promise I feel strangely vulnarable for losing a community in a time of need. Again.
@LappenjammerDieZweite It's possible to avoid it on ATproto, but it takes some extra steps. Mainly adding a rotation key for adversarial migration. Non-Bluesky platforms, relays, and PDSes would need to move to one of the major PLC mirrors if the collapse was big enough.
AP might become the same if the recent initiative to advance ActivityPods and C2S takes off.
A mention of Bluesky exists but my comment isn't _about_ Bluesky. If you bothered you read instead of go off on a weird ideological rant based on a single word you would know that. _You_ made it about Bluesky.
ha! Guilty as charged :) Thanks re: tips for finding another server. I’m interested in hosting my own (along with my website), but need a host: might you have a blog post with further info/recommendations?
I really appreciate your tips! I picked mastodon.social because it was the largest but now I'm thinking I should find a happy medium between #TooBigToFail and #TooSmallToSucceed
Short answer: I wouldn't worry about size on here 🙂
Longer answer:
I know most online things are run by corporations, but things are different on here as most servers are run by volunteers and supported by members' donations.
Being a big server can make life more difficult for the person running it because their costs go up. There are plenty of servers that have been going since the beginning of Mastodon which are still small, and the people running them like it that way.
Last year, I also created accounts on mastodon.world and hachyderm.io and left them empty. It would be a good exercise to try the import/export functions and move to one of those. I've been curious to see how the move process works.
I think mastodon.social is "ok" for people to start using. It's like starting high school without knowing anyone or where to find your group. Gradually, you'll discover where the like-minded people are. Then you'll move closer to them. Choosing an instance is not easy, at least not if you want to do it thoughtfully. The quality of the infrastructure and moderation varies, so you need to compare options - it demands effort.
I tell people who get worried when they see people criticising the largest instances to take their time to find their place. Keep posting and following people, and you'll gradually see new instances appear in your feed. There's no need to feel guilty; just observe and be ready to move when you find one that suits you. You can choose based on your language (especially if it's not English, it's very useful to be in an instance where people speak your language), your country or city, or a thematic instance where it'll be easier to find people who like the same things as you, such as games, technology, veganism, art, science etc. There are instances with different features; you can choose one based on trust in a specific admin. There are so many things to consider!
is there any way to migrate accounts from one instance to the other? Because I created an account in mastodon server but I don't know if I can move my account now that is has already been created
you can transfer your posts if you choose a Sharkey instance. You can import your posts if you want from Mastodon, misskey, akkoma, Twitter even facebook
Yes, Mastodon.nl is an instance (also known as a server).
Sharkey is a very different kind of platform, it's got a very different interface. I'd recommend beginners starting on Mastodon as it's a bit easier and currently better supported, as you can move to a Sharkey server later if you want to.
And if new users want to follow people on Meta's Threads then mastodon.social has the advantage that it is open to that. Unlike the many instances which block it. fedipact.online Though I imagine few new users would reason like that.
This was the reason I originally joined Mastodon.world when I first started on Mastodon about 5 years ago. Social was to big even then and there was guidance not to join it. Since then (because of frequent 'outages' on .world) I moved to a local server (Mastodon.scot) - best move and easy enough to do!
I am on mastodon.social but also on two other Mastodons and another #Fedi site. I seldom post on the big one. Does #FediTips want me to change anything?
I was deciding between mastodon.social and mastodon.plus. ended up choosing mastodon social. I'm happy with my decision, although I am still relatively new here. I will say having all those different servers is confusing for new people. I remember when Mastodon first started, I didn't join because it was so confusing. That's definitely off-putting for new people. Fediverse and the concept of it is still confusing for me but I am trying to learn it.
I've made a sign-up site at fedi.garden which hopefully avoids this confusion. If there's anything I can do to make it even less confusing, feedback welcome there too.
I know it is confusing but there are really important reasons why there are so many servers: fedi.tips/why-is-the-fediverse…
Though you can't easily move to another instance if that instance has 'suspend' on mastodon.social ... and not all instances seem to publish their suspend/silence lists ...
Most instances don't suspend mastodon.social, but if they do the workaround is to move to a third server that federates with both, then from the third server to the one you want.
Thanks, I think I found that further down your move tips page, but I was a bit surprised by this stumbling block ! While I could do A->[C]->B I suspect it will be easier just to find an instance C that I like and do A->C ... and there are some accounts on mastodon.social that I follow and wouldn't be able to see on B ...
2016: "You're overreacting!" 2017: "You're overreacting!" 2018: "You're overreacting!" 2019: "You're overreacting!" 2020: "You're overreacting!" 2021: "You're overreacting!" 2024: "You're overreacting!" 2025: "You're overreacting!" 2026: "Well there was no way of knowing it would get this bad..."
@PerryM I've said it many time but the I believe the biggest mistake was Nixon's pardon.
His pardon did nothing but tell the world, "You can do whatever you want as long as you get a presidential pardon". Regan took that and did what he wanted, leaving Bush to pardon everyone that was convicted.
Nixon NEEDED to be convicted and because of that damn pardon, we are where we are today.
@Karma_J Nixon was an infection that has plagued the Republican Party since! His criminality simply emboldened others. He should have been imprisoned as an example to Reagan, W and Trump.
and it doesn’t help when prominent journalists like Tom Nichols published pieces accusing us of “romanticizing” the act of fighting fascism. Patronizing bullshit that encouraged normies to feel like we have been overreacting. Journalists have been complicit in this.
Does anyone remember the times we made jokes about #fckDumb ? How FAR we've come. How DIFFERENT everything is now. Back then we couldn't even imagine to what fascistic reality the US would change into, so FAST, with being even a danger for the global political construct. Just wondering what Jim Jefferies would say about his routine from 9 years ago. youtube.com/watch?v=L-98RjrmqO…
in French we say "QUI AURAIT PU PRÉDIRE" and I think it's beautiful
Refers to an outrageous declaration from president Emmanuel Macron saying in his December 2022 new year speech: "qui aurait pu prédire la crise climatique?" ("Who could have foreseen climate change crisis?"). In a prepared, rehearsed speech broadcasted across all the country. He said *that*.
yep ... feels exactly like the "I told you so!" reaction, which frequently bubbles up from some corners of my mind, usually reserved for repressing unpleasant memories and ignored traumatic experiences...
TIL that Coca-Cola hasn't actually patented their recipe, because doing so would require them to reveal it. If someone could reverse engineer the ingredients, Coca-Cola has little of anything in the way of legal grounds to stop them.
are there any cheap usb fingerprint scanners that support linux and windows?
most listings only specify that they support windows hello, which i do want, but I also use linux so getting something that only supports windows seems like a waste of money lol
Puncha Not See
in reply to Puncha Not See • • •Under 5 CFR § 2635.202(b), "an emplovee may not, directly or indirectly, accept a gift given because of the emplovee's official position." This fundraiser directly violates that federal statute as it is raising funds explicitly because of the beneficiary's actions while on duty as an ICE agent, which makes him an emplovee of the Executive Branch Disbursement of these funds to the named beneficiary would violate federal law.
H/t Leeja Miller 🌸