It worked! Made it successfully to Vienna, and only ~5 hours later than originally planned! 😃

"It is not the case that “AI gathers data from the Web and learns from it.” The reality is that AI companies gather data and then optimize models to reproduce representations of that data for profit."

"The productivity myth suggests that anything we spend time on is up for automation — that any time we spend can and should be freed up for the sake of having even more time for other activities or pursuits — which can also be automated."

https://www.techpolicy.press/challenging-the-myths-of-generative-ai/

Read the whole thing!

The Elbe definitely shows the aftermath of the rains - good thing the railway is a few metres above it! Very pretty morning here, though! 🤩

@vbabka
Thanks!

Ohh, seems this may actually work out! 😃🤞🚂

Darth Vader in a kilt, on a unicycle, playing bagpipes.

It's good to be alive.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LdjY6oy4Y2c

@wagi
Right, I did look at flights from Copenhagen this morning, despaired at how cheap they were, and then decided to stubbornly carry on with the trains. We'll see how well that turns out...

@jpelckolsen
Thanks! It's the weather: All trains between Vienna and Linz are cancelled due to the flooding, and the trains from Germany are either cancelled completely, or terminate in Passau. And since it's been raining all day today as well, I don't really trust that this will clear up during day tomorrow. So now I'm trying to go the other way around, since the Czech railways say their trains are still going in the west of the country...

Looks like the eastern route through the Czech Republic has the highest chance of success tomorrow, so decided to continue on to Berlin and spend the night there, then get an early train tomorrow morning. Fingers crossed that said train will actually be going... 😅

Started the first leg of the journey to #LinuxPlumbers2024 with the train to Hamburg. The night train I was supposed to catch from there tonight has been cancelled, so I'll be spending the night and taking a day train tomorrow morning. Which may end up stranding me in Passau, but at least that's only a few hours from Vienna for when the tracks clear. Exciting!

@anarqueer

Alt-texted version:

(Alt text is edited for character length.)

"Humans think they are smarter than dolphins because we build cars and buildings and start wars etc... and all that dolphins do is swim in the water, eat fish and play around. Dolphins believe that they are smarter for exactly the same reasons."
~ Douglas Adams

@kernellogger
Thanks! I'm not a fancy enough maintainer to go to summits about it, so I have a whole day of slack to paddle through masses of water should the need arise 😅

But yeah, did do a double take when I got an email from DB advising against traveling during the weekend. Feel like I got lucky with the timing in that sense!

In any case, have a nice trip and see you in Vienna (🤞)

@kernellogger
Haha, I'm booked on the night train from Hamburg to Vienna tomorrow evening. Will let you know how it goes! 😅

I love this article about the US debate.

If you're American or British and it rubs you the wrong way, please note that this is how your press writes about us.

H/T to @meena for bringing it to my attention.

#USPol

https://www.aljazeera.com/opinions/2024/9/11/debate-in-nuclear-armed-former-colony-fails-to-reassure-global-community

If you want to keep using @signalapp in the EU, say no to #ChatControl

https://www.patrick-breyer.de/en/take-action-to-stop-chat-control-now/

#Signal #ChatControl #EU #surveillance

Calling for the help of the fediverse!
Help spread the word of our browser extension Consent-O-Matic that helps automate answering those ever-present cookie consent pop-ups.

It's developed by researchers at Aarhus University in Denmark and free to use for Chrome/Edge, Firefox and Safari including for iOS.

Also, it's open source, so if you have a bit of technical skill, you can help us improve the rule set for greater coverage.

https://consentomatic.au.dk

I've been running mail servers and writing email software since the dialup days of 1995. I guess by today's trends, that could brand me a holdout.

But we're still hosting mail for hundreds of company domains across dozens of mail servers, all in a nicely packaged system that's always just an "apt install" away.

The landscape has changed over time, and, yes, it is annoying dealing with the imbalance that the behemoth mail providers represent these days.

But there's a lot to be said for not bargaining away your digital autonomy.

I saw @mwl selling his "Run Your Own Mail Server" book and jumped to pick up a copy. Not so much because I had a need for it (though it'll be interesting to compare notes!), but because I strongly support the idea that email is still a shared ecosystem and love that Michael is sharing the knowledge to encourage folks to continue to participate.

Long live the open Internet.

#ryoms

@michaelgemar @svgeesus i’m generally (and increasingly) of the opinion that copyright is an extremely poor tool to protect the public good

Seen a couple takes about the Hachette case along the lines of “the Internet Archive should’ve stuck to just archiving the Internet and not testing new theories of copyright” and uhhh... I’m not sure what it is you think the Internet Archive does, outside of testing new theories of copyright.

#InternetArchive