When men go to pee in a public toilet they spend a minute gazing at the wall in front of them, in what many advertisers have seized upon as an opportunity to display posters of their products above the stinking urinals.

But in terms of framing, you'd better ask yourself: Is this really what I want my brand to be associated with?

You might well think twice if you were selling ice cream or toothpaste, so what if your poster was Ursula von der Leyen's face selling EU values?

Because that's the kind of environment in which the European Commission president, other top EU officials, and national EU leaders are posting their images and comments every day when they use X to communicate with press and the EU public.

Even the toilet analogy is too kind.

The core Plasma team remains deep in bug-fixing mode until Plasma 6.2.1, with lots of bugs fixed this week! This is the second-to-last week of development before the repos are frozen, and we’re cranking away like mad to get 6.2 in great shape. And it is indeed in very good shape so far. The worst issues we’re still seeing are related to notifications freezing and being mis-rendered, caused by recent changes made to fix another significantly less severe issue. So in the worst-case scenario, we can simply revert the changes before the final 6.2 release if we don’t manage to fix the regressions in time.

Arch Linux is entering into a direct collaboration with Valve. Valve is generously providing backing for two critical projects that will have a huge impact on the distribution: a build service infrastructure and a secure signing enclave. By supporting work on a freelance basis for these topics, Valve enables them to work on them without being limited solely by the free time of our volunteers.

Elon Musk's X is blocking links to the JD Vance "dossier" containing the Trump campaign's research on the vice presidential nominee. X also suspended Ken Klippenstein, the journalist who published the dossier that apparently comes from an Iranian hack of the Trump campaign.

The Israeli Defense Tech Conference, aimed at tech companies working with the Israeli military, was scheduled for November at the Google for Startups campus in Tel Aviv.

The event, according to a listing posted on the event RSVP app Luma, was pitched at “founders, investors and innovators” looking to network and learn more about the defense tech space. It was co-sponsored by Google, Fusion Venture Capital, Genesis, a startup accelerator, and the Israeli military’s research and development arm, known as the Directorate of Defense Research and Development (DDR&D, or Ma’fat).

When The Intercept contacted Google, the event page disappeared.

Google was not only listed as the physical host of the event and one of its sponsors, but the event listing also included a notice that attendees “approve of sharing [their] details with the organizers (Fusion & Google)” as part of signing up.

When The Intercept contacted Google, as well as the other companies and venture capital firms on the event page, the event page disappeared.

Vulkan 1.3.296 is out as the first spec update in nearly one month. Given the time that has passed there are more bug fixes than usual but there is also a prominent new extension: VK_EXT_device_generated_commands. It has been worked on by Valve's Linux graphics driver developers along with engineers from Intel, AMD, NVIDIA, Collabora, and others. This new extension allows for the GPU device to generate a number of commands for command buffers.

A new project launching today aims to capitalize on the momentum seen within the fediverse, also known as the open social web, which describes interconnected social networking services powered by the ActivityPub protocol. Co-founded by the co-author and current editor of ActivityPub, Evan Prodromou, a new nonprofit organization called the Social Web Foundation will focus on expanding the fediverse, improving ActivityPub and the user experience, informing policymakers, and educating people about the fediverse and how they can participate.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/20503641

> Detailed post about FSFE's goals and main topics in 2024. > > Table of contents: > > - Device Neutrality: the Free Software community “shows its teeth” > - Next Generation Internet and the lack of long-term sustainable funding for Free Software > - Reaching Generation Alpha: Youth Hacking 4 Freedom and Ada & Zangemann > - Policy work: Advocating for Free Sotware > - Legal Support: giving advise to projects and individuals > Our work on public awareness > - Join the movement

AMD today made public their RDNA 3.5 instruction set architecture (ISA) programming guide for these updated RDNA3 graphics found within new Ryzen AI 300 "Strix Point" APUs thus far.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/20289663

> A report from Morgan Stanley suggests the datacenter industry is on track to emit 2.5 billion tons by 2030, which is three times higher than the predictions if generative AI had not come into play. > > The extra demand from GenAI will reportedly lead to a rise in emissions from 200 million tons this year to 600 million tons by 2030, thanks largely to the construction of more data centers to keep up with the demand for cloud services.

Linus has released the 6.11 kernel. ""I'm once again on the road and not in my normal timezone, but it's Sunday afternoon here in Vienna, and 6.11 is out."" Significant changes in this release include new io_uring operations for bind() and listen(), the nested bottom-half locking patches, the ability to write to busy executable files, support for writing block drivers in Rust, support for atomic write operations in the block layer, the dedicated bucket slab allocator, the vDSO implementation of getrandom(), and more. See the LWN merge-window summaries (part 1, part 2) for more information.

Two-dimensional vector graphics has been quite prevalent in recent Qt release notes, and it is something we have plans to continue exploring in the releases to come. This blog takes a look at some of the options you have, as a Qt developer.

In Qt 6.6 we added support for a new renderer in Qt Quick Shapes, making it possible to render smooth, anti-aliased curves without enabling multisampling. The renderer was generalized to also support text rendering in Qt 6.7, and, in the same release, Qt SVG was expanded to support a bunch of new features.

And there is no end in sight yet: In Qt 6.8 we are bringing even more vector graphics goodies to the Qt APIs. In this blog, I will share some details on the different ways vector graphics can be used in Qt, as well as the benefits and drawbacks of each.

A report from Morgan Stanley suggests the datacenter industry is on track to emit 2.5 billion tons by 2030, which is three times higher than the predictions if generative AI had not come into play.

The extra demand from GenAI will reportedly lead to a rise in emissions from 200 million tons this year to 600 million tons by 2030, thanks largely to the construction of more data centers to keep up with the demand for cloud services.

The KDE community has charted its course for the coming years, focusing on three interconnected paths that converge on a single point: community. These paths aim to improve user experience, support developers, and foster community growth.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/19683130

> The ideologues of Silicon Valley are in model collapse. > > To train an AI model, you need to give it a ton of data, and the quality of output from the model depends upon whether that data is any good. A risk AI models face, especially as AI-generated output makes up a larger share of what’s published online, is “model collapse”: the rapid degradation that results from AI models being trained on the output of AI models. Essentially, the AI is primarily talking to, and learning from, itself, and this creates a self-reinforcing cascade of bad thinking. > > We’ve been watching something similar happen, in real time, with the Elon Musks, Marc Andreessens, Peter Thiels, and other chronically online Silicon Valley representatives of far-right ideology. It’s not just that they have bad values that are leading to bad politics. They also seem to be talking themselves into believing nonsense at an increasing rate. The world they seem to believe exists, and which they’re reacting and warning against, bears less and less resemblance to the actual world, and instead represents an imagined lore they’ve gotten themselves lost in.

There's been a couple of mentions of Rust4Linux in the past week or two, one from Linus on the speed of engagement and one about Wedson departing the project due to non-technical concerns. This got me thinking about project phases and developer types.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/19709648

> Paris Marx is joined by Mohammad Khatami and Gabi Schubiner to discuss the complicity of Google, Amazon, and Microsoft in Israel’s ongoing genocide in Gaza and how tech workers are organizing to stop it. > > Mohammad Khatami and Gabi Schubiner are former Google software engineers and organizers with No Tech for Apartheid.

Paris Marx is joined by Mohammad Khatami and Gabi Schubiner to discuss the complicity of Google, Amazon, and Microsoft in Israel’s ongoing genocide in Gaza and how tech workers are organizing to stop it.

Mohammad Khatami and Gabi Schubiner are former Google software engineers and organizers with No Tech for Apartheid.

Hundreds of millions of people now interact with language models, with uses ranging from help with writing1,2 to informing hiring decisions3. However, these language models are known to perpetuate systematic racial prejudices, making their judgements biased in problematic ways about groups such as African Americans4,5,6,7. Although previous research has focused on overt racism in language models, social scientists have argued that racism with a more subtle character has developed over time, particularly in the United States after the civil rights movement8,9. It is unknown whether this covert racism manifests in language models. Here, we demonstrate that language models embody covert racism in the form of dialect prejudice, exhibiting raciolinguistic stereotypes about speakers of African American English (AAE) that are more negative than any human stereotypes about African Americans ever experimentally recorded. By contrast, the language models’ overt stereotypes about African Americans are more positive. Dialect prejudice has the potential for harmful consequences: language models are more likely to suggest that speakers of AAE be assigned less-prestigious jobs, be convicted of crimes and be sentenced to death. Finally, we show that current practices of alleviating racial bias in language models, such as human preference alignment, exacerbate the discrepancy between covert and overt stereotypes, by superficially obscuring the racism that language models maintain on a deeper level. Our findings have far-reaching implications for the fair and safe use of language technology.