Week 36

"@brembs@mastodon.social

Here are two easy things YOU can do:

#1 Every academic supporting #openscience and #openaccess should consider ORE as their primary publishing venue and ask colleague/co-authors to do the same.

#2 Point your librarian, institutional leaders, funding agencies towards the documents linked above and ask them to support ORE, too.

#3 Make everyone and every institution aware that they now have a choice: support parasitic corporations or the public good. By their actions you shall know them!"

"@brembs@mastodon.social

1. [ORE] essentially entails that all authors in the participating countries now have a venue where they can publish #openaccess without any fees.

2. The vision is to develop [ORE] 'as a collective non-profit open access publishing service for the public good'.

3. As we outline in our article, such a decentralized public infrastructure can be highly resilient against not only natural or political disasters, but also 'against corporate capture and surveillance technologies':

4. If/when funding agencies realize that maintaining funding for legacy journals directly counteracts the goals they signed onto with their support of ORE, the legacy journals stand to suffer massive drops in revenue"

Publications Office of the European Union: "Towards a collective open access publishing service.. This report puts forward a vision for Open Research Europe as a collective non-profit open access publishing service for the public good. This vision comes in the midst of important policy developments towards more equitable, transparent and sustainable costs for publishing and access to content, as well as accelerated activities for reforming research assessment. The report includes a rationale for the vision, the EU policy and political context, a value proposition and principles for the operation of a collective ORE."

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"@GeofCox@climatejustice.social

Worth adding, perhaps, that Labour's choice to serve the interests of corporations and billionaires was originally a different choice: not to trust it's own membership, to move away from the Corbyn mass-membership and broader labour movement funding model.

In the UK (unlike many of its neighbouring countries, which have state-funded political parties and strict limits on donations) there are only two party funding models available: hundreds of thousands of volunteers, small donations and memberships, or wealthy corporations and individuals.

You have to choose - and this applies to the Green party too if it is to build the electoral machinery for a viable fight in every constituency"

Monbiot: "A poll by the research group Persuasion UK, testing various messages, found that by far the most effective line of attack [on Nigel Farage] is highlighting his complicity with corporate interests...

But this is a string Labour cannot yank, as it would pull its own roof down. If there is a defining mark of Keir Starmer’s administration, it is immediate capitulation to powerful lobby groups, especially corporations and billionaires"

"@GeofCox@climatejustice.social

Belgium has announced 12 sanctions on Israel, incuding a ban on importing products from its settlements, a review of public procurement policies with Israeli companies, and banning 'extremist' Israeli ministers."

BBC: "Taco Bell is rethinking its use of artificial intelligence (AI) to power drive-through restaurants in the US after comical videos of the tech making mistakes were viewed millions of times. In one clip, a customer seemingly crashed the system by ordering 18,000 water cups, while in another a person got increasingly angry as the AI repeatedly asked him to add more drinks to his order."

"Kazeta is.. a Linux-based gaming operating system that throws away almost everything about modern game delivery in favor of simplicity and physicality. It’s named after the Czech word for “cassette,” and the concept is as bold as it is nostalgic: you just load a DRM-free game onto a cartridge (an SD card), you slot it in, power on, and you’re playing. No menus, no logins, no software setup. Just you, your game, and a kind of cart in your hand...

[The founder:] 'In the last decade I have been gaming almost exclusively on SteamOS-like systems and have not kept up with modern console gaming and what that is like,' he explained. 'In recent years I started playing retro games on original hardware. Over time I started adding more and more consoles and eventually got to playing some modern ones. Consoles such as the Wii U, PS4, and Xbox One. These were just awful experiences compared to the older consoles. You needed accounts and online connections and you had to install games that took forever. I had just assumed modern consoles were a good experience, but they were barely any better than the PC gaming experience. Sometimes worse.'.

That realization, that even dedicated gaming hardware had lost the immediacy of its predecessors, planted the first seed. 'I thought, why can’t we have the immediacy and simplicity of the older consoles?'"

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Tobias Ellwood: "Our Army [UK] Will Last Six Days In Ukraine-Style Environment”

#Libertard

Link

"Libertarianism – in a coarse telling – is political philosophy that places primacy on individual freedom over all other values.. It’s not the most popular political orientation; a 2006 PEW study found only 9% of Americans polled fell in to the libertarian category.. However, libertarianism appears to be particularly popular amongst those who are wealthy and well educated...

It’s also popular amongst economists, for libertarianism is quite compatible with some of the key assumptions that underlie modern day free market economics: such as that behaviour is driven by self-interested rational agents. For these agents, interference in their behaviour restricts their ability to pursue their own preferences...

However, there’s a chink in libertarianism’s armour.. [it] is the assumptions it makes about human psychology – such as that we are capable of understanding and articulating our preferences and that we’re able to act upon them rationally.. [But o]ften our decisions cause us – and others – harm. And in retrospect, we often regret many of our decisions and wish someone had encouraged us to do otherwise. Or our decisions are manipulated, either by other individuals, or by the environment at large. Or, most sinisterly, by those with vested interests, such as politicians or companies trying to encourage you to buy their product, whether you need it or not."

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There is no reason two Mediterrenian neighbors cannot be good friends. Culture is similar. The guinea is homie.

Expanding reach to Italy.. That deal would not be confirmed unless the current Italian gov did not find some strategic interest in it.. Could be noteworthy..

"Italy's Ministry of Enterprises and Made in Italy has approved the sale of Piaggio Aerospace, the country's aviation giant, to Baykar."

The CEO of the company that produces those drones is the brother of TR president's son-in-law.

TASS: "Bayraktar Turkish drone factory 'seriously damaged' in overnight strikes on Kiev"

If the AI stagnation started last fall, then all those 'visionary" CEO numbnuts knew they ran out of rope, but they encouraged the US government to put even more money behind this stagnant tech anyway via that new program. That is just grand theft...

#UKR 08/24 - 09/01

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Reuters: "Senator Bernie Sanders.. threw his support behind President Donald Trump's plan to convert U.S. grants to chipmakers, including $10.9 billion for Intel, into government stakes in the companies. 'If microchip companies make a profit from the generous grants they receive from the federal government, the taxpayers of America have a right to a reasonable return on that investment,' Sanders.. said in a statement"

That's a good ad

"Graham Platner for U.S. Senate"

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#Dems #AlJazeera

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Is Max Casella Stallone's Joe Pesci?

Tulsa King, not bad.. A mix between The Sopranos and Silicon Valley.

"GPT-5: Have We Finally Hit The AI Scaling Wall? "

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Agree except the migrant part. Countries need to kick out illegal / excessive migrants for a strong left movement.

"Millenials Have Lived Through Enough" #MiasBrain #Tiktok

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"@Tutanota@mastodon.social

Microsoft just pulled a classic bait-and-switch tactic by ending free #Office licenses for NPOs. 😡

Don't let Big Tech lure you into their platforms with their "free" offerings. Open source alternatives like Linux + Tuta put YOU in control. ✊

Because you deserve better. ❤️

Read more: 👉 URL"

"Why Did ChatGPT Hit a Wall? w/ Prof. Cal Newport | The Rob Montz Show"

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"@grote@chaos.social

Google asks what we think of their plans to block Android app installs outside of Google Play (unless the developers let Google verify their identity and pay a fee).

Want to tell them your opinion, just submit this form:"

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This stuff is glorified search. Nothing more.

Chollet: "When a model gives you the right answer to a reasoning question, you can't tell whether it was via memorization or via reasoning.

A simple way to tell between the two is to tweak your question in a way that 1. changes the answer, 2. requires some reasoning to adapt to the change. If you still get the same answer as before... it was memorization."

Somehow lowering corporate taxes is not extremism but arguing against cutting government services is.. Bizarre

"@GeofCox@climatejustice.social

It's interesting - and dangerous - that centrists (ie. believers in the status-quo) habitually characterise their political opponents as 'irresponsible' (as Macron has just said of those thinking of voting against his government's budget), or not 'grown-up' (as the bank 'troika' said of the Syriza government in Greece), or 'student politics' (current UK Labour leadership of its left-wing membership).

This is centrist-extremism, because it exhibits, and propagates, the view that different political views are not just different, or wrong, but illegitimate.

There are of course illegitimate politics - for example that incite violence - but there is no view of a government budget that should be not just disagreed with, but ruled out of order.

There's a desperation in centrism now, isn't there ? Not just a considered preference for the status-quo, but a stubborn refusal to even look outside of it."

"@molly0xfff@hachyderm.io

I’ve spent the better part of two decades dealing with people trying to dox and harass the volunteers who make Wikipedia the incredible resource it is today.

I liked it better when they weren’t in Congress."

"@Gargron@mastodon.social

'Sideloading' is the rentseeker word for 'being able to run software of your choosing on a computing device you purchased'. There is no reasonable case for an operating system developer having a say over what programs you run on your hardware."

"@eniko@mastodon.gamedev.place

So Google is doing the 'everyone has to be a registered developer with us' thing because of stuff like the Digital Markets Act and the outcome of Epic vs Apple, right? Since they can't monopolize the platform through Google Play they'll do it this way instead. Oh what's that? You make something we don't approve of? Woopsie doodle gosh the information on your developer registration isn't good so it's revoked now. What's that? Oh we would never charge a yearly fee for this service!"

Anatolian culture encompasses all religions and sects in Anatolia. People in it are more similar to each other than different. By the same token I believe Muslims in India are more similar to Indian Hindus than they are to Muslims anywhere else. Such is the mechanics of culture and geography.

I did talk about "Sunnis in Syria and TR relating to them better", but in essence, I don't care. I only cared to the extent Syrians did, if we were being left out of partnerships because of some secterian difference, Sunnis in Syria could surely be better.

The current gov btw, whatever its faults, tried a partnership with Syria during Assad admin ignoring secterian differences.. In fact Assad was quite enthusiastic on the relationship and its prospects, he even floated a Schengen like agreement himself both countries.. Then the civil war blew up, TR started to work to topple Assad (which was a mistake), and everything went to hell.

Palestine Chronicle: "US Lifeline Masks Israel’s Economic Freefall as Global Divestment Grows.. Now that Israel has become a bad brand, affiliated with unethical investments due to the genocide in Gaza and growing illegal settlement expansion in the West Bank, the US, as Israel’s main benefactor, has stepped in to fill the gaps.

The US emergency supplemental appropriations act of April 2024 allocated a total of $26.4 billion for Israel. While much of the money was earmarked for defense expenditures, in reality, most of it will percolate into the Israeli economy. This amount, in addition to the annual military aid, allows the Israeli government to minimize spending on defense and allocate more money to keep the economy from shrinking at an even faster rate."

Jonathan Cook: "Israel's intent to annihilate Gaza would have been clear much sooner had we listened to Palestinian journalists, rather than the evasions and equivocations of the BBC..

Israel’s justification for the mass slaughter of Gaza’s people and their starvation – now officially confirmed as a famine engineered by Israel – was built on a parade of easily discredited lies from the start: of beheaded infants, of babies in ovens, of mass rape...

It should surprise no one that Israel continued advancing similarly outrageous lies.."