I somehow missed the news that Nvidia joined the list of trillion dollar companies last year.

It is now the most "valuable" company in the world by market capitalization.

Crazy times.

https://www.bankrate.com/investing/trillion-dollar-companies/

9 - Berkshire Hathaway. A company that does nothing but buy shares in other companies.

8 - Tesla, a company that makes wildly unsafe electric cars, and who's current owner fought a court case to be able to say he was a "founder" because narcissists have needs.

7 - A company that actually makes stuff!

6 - Facebook. A company that has only caused harm in the world, including undermining democracy, supporting genocide and other human rights violations.

Cleaning out a shed today, I noticed an old roll of felt leaning up against the wall. It was in the way, so I was about to kick it to one side.

It's nice to take a moment now and then to be thankful. Right now I'm thankful that I did not, in fact, kick it as I'd probably have broken my foot. It was not felt, but a roll of lead sheeting. I'd estimate it weighs about 40kg. I'd tell you the density, but my wife won't let me put it in the bath 🤷♂️ 🛁 👑

Left: lead.
Right: not lead.

@Jeremiah @w3c The W3C is only interested in large corporations as members. This is clear from their fees, which deliberately exclude small businesses from participating.

My company has been a member of Nominet and RIPE for years (memberships that come with real benefits in terms of Internet resources), but there's no way in hell we could justify a membership of W3C. Why would we want to subsidise Google?

@Jeremiah @w3c

Let's compare:
Nominet: £500 join, £100/yr
RIPE: 1000€ join, ~1400€/yr
W3C: 7800€/yr

Nominet essentially costs us nothing, as we get a discount on .uk domains.

RIPE gives us an ASN number and IP addresses we can route.

Both these orgs give us voting rights and a chance to shape Internet policy.

W3C membership benefits (from the website):

- Participate in any group
- Shape web technology
- Propose new technology
- Standardize your ideas
- Meet, interact with leaders

Heard the story of the girl throwing starfish into the ocean? A man watching her says "don't you know there are miles of beach and you can't make a difference?"

The girl bends down and scoops up another starfish and gently throws it into the ocean, turns to the man and says "it made a difference to that one".

I often think of this story when world events make me feel powerless. I can't help everyone, but I can help *someone*.

So... if anyone needs me to throw them into the sea, I'm here.

@onepict @report_press @fsf

The continued presence of Stallman in the FSF is why @librecast signed the open letter, and dropped "or any later version" from our code.

The lack of action from FSF to remove Stallman makes it clear that they cannot tell wrong from right and are not responsible stewards for our community.

@MediaActivist @quinze @katzenberger It's the best we've got, but with the present Mozilla governance and funding model, it's inevitable that it will continue to get worse.

@MediaActivist @quinze @katzenberger Oddly enough I was looking at it earlier today. Sadly Vivaldi isn't Open Source, so not an ethical alternative to Firefox.

@Rezard Careful.
dd if=/dev/random of of=/dev/null
will cause the entropy in the universe to reduce, causing time to go backwards.

@neil @decodedlegal I wonder when web design companies will start to pay attention. Most have probably never considered themselves in the software business, but so many will deploy WordPress or Drupal with a pretty theme and then provide no maintenance. Many seem to have no plan except to wait until the site gets inevitably cracked.

@MediaActivist There are two people I hold responsible for Brexit more than any others: David Cameron and Jeremy Corbyn.

Cameron gambled the nation to try and quell an internal divide in his party, and lost.

However, the one I blame most is the one who 3-line-whipped his supposed opposition party MPs to vote with the govt to trigger Article 50 before any plan had been tabled. There was no attempt to stand up for the 45% of the nation that opposed Brexit. For that, he can get in the sea.

Is God on GitHub? I have some bugs to report.

All Your Base Are Belong to LLM

"The output from an LLM is a derivative work of the data used to train the LLM.

If we fail to recognise this, or are unable to uphold this in law, copyright (and copyleft on which it depends) is dead. Copyright will still be used against us by corporations, but its utility to FOSS to preserve freedom is gone."

https://blog.brettsheffield.com/all-your-base-are-belong-to-llm

#FOSS #OpenSource #FreeSoftware #LLM #AI

@mishari "We show an adversary can extract gigabytes of training data from open-source language models like Pythia or GPT-Neo, semi-open models like LLaMA or Falcon, and closed models like ChatGPT"

https://arxiv.org/abs/2311.17035

@aral I'm not involved with #Fedora, but presumably there's a release process that is written somewhere.

This sounds like a bug in not just the software, but also the release process. Perhaps the way to tackle the software bug is to fix the release process so that alarm bells ring *before* next release.

Grabbing prerelease images and testing and raising bugs in the run up to release might provoke some action - if you have the time to do that. *someone* clearly needs to!

#accessibility

@C19LAP Promoting Facebook as a safe environment to discuss personal health is *deeply* irresponsible.

FB's real name policy, combined with their long history of abusing and selling personal data (including to health insurers) puts people at risk.

FB may be an easy place to set up a group, but it is the wrong place.

Today is #LongCovidAwarenessDay and marks one year since I started talking openly about my personal health.

I've never been comfortable with sharing my personal information, but I hoped by talking about what it's like living with #LongCovid (for nearly 4 years now) folks may reconsider their YOLO approach to #covid and actually #WearAMask

This past year has been the worst of my life. It was the year hope died. Hope that I might get better, and hope that ppl might take #Covid seriously.

Is anyone else here old enough to remember back in the 2020s when NFTs were a thing?

#retrocomputing

Whenever I see network software with IPv4-only documentation and examples, or an IPv4-only website it doesn't inspire my confidence in the rest of their code. Anything released in (at least) the last ten years should have support for IPv6 enabled by default.