Notices by Erik Moeller (eloquence@social.coop)

Keir Starmer is keeping Britain safe from encyclopedias.

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c62j2gr8866o

As someone mainly working in open source land, I can't tell you how under-appreciated it is to be able to _look at what some piece of code does_ to shortcut troubleshooting.

So much corporate "software as a service" stuff is poorly and incorrectly documented, and you have to take wild guesses at what any of it actually does.

(I'm mostly griping again about Mailchimp today, which is terrible no-good awful software, but it applies to so many things.)

Thank you to the journalists who are continuing to investigate the monstrous treatment of the hundreds of human beings who were sent by the US government to El Salvador's #CECOT concentration camp.

404 Media has examined flight manifests and identified dozens of previously unknown deportees:

https://www.404media.co/flight-manifests-reveal-dozens-of-previously-unknown-people-on-three-deportation-flights-to-el-salvador/

ProPublica documents how people who entered the country legally, with no criminal records, were torn away from their families:

https://www.propublica.org/article/venezuelan-deportees-trump-immigration-asylum-el-salvador

All of Trump's "America First" nonsense, including galaxy brain shit like "tariffs on Taiwan", will accelerate China's rise. The dumb logic of nationalism -- the rejection of the very alliances that made America powerful, for good and for ill -- means "America Second", then "America Third", and so on.

But when failing authoritarian governments run out of scapegoats, they often go to war.

https://www.newsweek.com/donald-trump-taiwan-semiconductor-tariff-impact-china-tech-2022564

Pretty good breakdown of OpenAI o3's (quite good) performance at guessing locations based on photos, by way of the "GeoGuessr" game (metadata stripped). It scored better than a very highly ranked human.

A tendency of some AI critiques is to treat _all_ such evidence as "smoke and mirrors". That is unhelpful; it occludes awareness of capabilities that are actually improving (and can present real #opsec and surveillance risks in this case).

https://sampatt.com/blog/2025-04-28-can-o3-beat-a-geoguessr-master

Fox News is now calling Garcia, a dude who was harassed by gangs before fleeing to the US, only to be kidnapped and sent into a concentration camp _by_ the US, an "MS-13 leader".

This is the sort of unadulterated lying that gets pushed into #MAGA people's brains every day -- America's version of "Der Stürmer" or the "Völkischer Beobachter".

If you want to have any hope for people in the fascist MAGA cult, you gotta get them off those feeds first. (And that includes X, of course.)

Pay close attention to the SAVE Act, which attempts to reinstate large scale voter suppression measures across the United States.

Trump's allies will do everything they can to manufacture new claims about "voter fraud" prior to bringing this to a vote, and plenty of Senate Democrats are fickle and stupid enough to consider voting for it.

Don't take for granted that it will die in the Senate.

https://act.aclu.org/a/save-act

As a German, I've been careful to avoid the term "concentration camp" for El Salvador's #CECOT rent-a-gulag, because the term directly connotes genocide.

But when you threaten to put people in camps under horrific conditions forever, with no due process of recourse (often, as we've seen, on the basis of hearsay or tattoos), those camps become concentration camps. This is nazi talk; this is concentration camp talk. No other term does it justice.

https://www.axios.com/2025/04/09/kristi-noem-migrants-trump-ice-prison

One weird thing that happens with authoritarian leaders is that they make stupid decisions that make no sense, and nobody can tell them no.

I understand why people want to read some big master plan into Trump's tariffs, but IMO it's as simple that it's a fixed set of dumb beliefs in protectionism that nobody can talk him out of. He's been saying the same nonsense since the 1980s.

All authoritarian leaders do stupid shit like this. That's why you don't want to end up with authoritarian leaders.

Feels like we're back in 2020 when it comes to travel to the US, but for entirely different self-inflicted reasons - and with no end in sight.

With the latest #AI image generators, it is now trivially possible not only to generate realistic photos, but to also have consistent _sequences_ of photos, e.g., of an alleged drug transaction.

Unlike past faking techniques, this requires only seconds of effort.

Trust in images is utterly misplaced at this point. And actually legitimate photographic evidence of wrongdoing will be challenged as fake.

Trust in sources matters more than ever.

Reporting that's based on public records shouldn't then be put behind a paywall.

This also makes sense from a revenue perspective for many paywalled publications. It's a great way to establish an area of freely available reporting that can draw people into buying subscriptions.

Really proud of my colleagues' advocacy here, and glad to see WIRED taking the lead on implementing this recommendation.

https://freedom.press/issues/wired-is-dropping-paywalls-for-foia-based-reporting-others-should-follow/

Good to see @itchio still host these massive charity bundles, in this case for California fire relief (I hope they'll do another Ukraine bundle soon).

This one includes Tunic, which was a 2022 GOTY contender.

(I see this as a great way to chip in to a cause together and sampling games you'd otherwise probably never see, but please don't skip supporting indie devs of titles you enjoy.)

https://itch.io/b/2863/california-fire-relief-bundle

I find Trump as repulsive as most people here, but as a German, one thing I want to push back on is focusing only on one man.

Hitler's rise was possible because he was able to exploit the racial hatred and conspiratorial thinking that already existed.

It's MAGA acolytes that see Trump as an extraordinary figure. He was a reality show grifter with a crumbling business; Hitler was an undisciplined drifter with delusions of grandeur.

It's the soil that matters, not just the rotten harvest.

Elon Musk says the journalists at CBS 60 Minutes "deserve a long prison sentence".

The reporting that has him so upset includes this line: "The world's richest man had cut off assistance to the world's poorest families."

You can view it in full here (first ~15 minutes):

https://www.cbs.com/shows/video/w_Zoxuc1ZnjigRqeKhYpum3ZFHIf2Rbs/

Nowhere is the new reality of X as a state media platform more obvious than on https://doge.gov/ -- the main page is a feed of posts from their X account.

Expect more of this as Musk worms himself into the government, including "DM us on X" and similar nonsense (of course it won't be a human that responds, but a state AI bot based on Grok).

This is why viewing X as a tool for persuading anyone of anything makes no sense. It's not a tool for you. It's a tool for them.

> As before, all cases are in unvaccinated people or people with unknown vaccination status.

The RFK Jr. appointment will put the pedal to the metal for future outbreaks.

We are all witnesses to the decline of a nation. Whether we will be witnesses to its fall remains up to us.

https://arstechnica.com/health/2025/02/texas-measles-outbreak-climbs-to-48-cases-almost-all-kids-13-hospitalized/?utm_brand=arstechnica&utm_social-type=owned&utm_source=mastodon&utm_medium=social

It'll take a while for organizations that remain active on X to fully internalize that being on the platform is no different from being in Russia Today's comments section.

So we have to keep saying it.

X is state media.

I cannot say this enough: Follow @ProPublica for real journalism about the authoritarian takeover.

Do you want to introduce the fediverse and/or Bluesky to your org -- in addition to X & Meta, or to #SwitchForGood?

Through Feb, Mar and Apr, I'll be offering free one-hour sessions on Fridays to talk to your org. For-profit, non-profit, gov, edu, etc. This is not a consultancy; this is volunteer advocacy and support for building our collective independence from X & Meta.

If you are interested, book a slot through this link (starting Feb 7). Time is not movable. :)

https://calendar.google.com/calendar/u/0/appointments/schedules/AcZssZ1moWG0f_wJqMz-rO0OkD27MBJpj1LR4W9SJQnIYIEe8lvb1UbbTXTYQw7cBbc4SuybqByqTjqh