Thanks a lot to everybody who has boosted my call-for-help post (linked below) for OpenPrinting!
I got 1082 boosts within somewhat more than one week!
I had posted because Canonical had laid me off and I want to continue OpenPrinting, and need appropriate sponsorship or employment.
Any help is welcome and please continue boosting!
Urgent help for OpenPrinting needed!
As many here know, I am co-founder and lead of OpenPrinting since 2001, known as the print guru for Linux and free software by many. I also got one of the 8 fellows of the Linux Foundation for this.
Up to now I was working at Canonical, hired back in 2006 just to run OpenPrinting and also to maintain printing-related Ubuntu packages.
... 🧵
Please boost.
#OpenPrinting #LinuxFoundation #getfedihired
🚨 Today, noyb has filed a lawsuit against the German DPAs of North Rhine-Westphalia and Hesse!
👉 After almost 4 years of investigations into Pay or OK cases, the DPAs still haven’t managed to issue a decision on the merits.
All details here 👇
https://noyb.eu/en/years-inactivity-pay-or-ok-cases-noyb-sues-german-dpas
🚨 Meta announced today that it will introduce ads on WhatsApp, which will be based on personal data from Facebook and Instagram. This move further consolidates Meta's social networking monopoly. EU law was actually supposed to prevent this.
https://noyb.eu/en/whatsapp-getting-ads-using-personal-data-instagram-and-facebook
🚨 Today, noyb has sent a cease and desist letter to Meta regarding its AI training plans in Europe.
👉 If Meta doesn't comply with the request, noyb could file an injunction – or launch an EU class action in the future.
All the details 👇
https://noyb.eu/en/noyb-sends-meta-cease-and-desist-letter-over-ai-training-european-class-action-potential-next-step
When I was a PhD student, I attended a talk by the late Robin Milner where he said two things that have stuck with me.
The first, I repeat quite often. He argued that credit for an invention did not belong to the first person to invent something but to the first person to explain it well enough that no one needed to invent it again. His first historical example was Leibniz publishing calculus and then Newton claiming he invented it first: it didn’t matter if he did or not, he failed to explain it to anyone and so the fact that Leibniz needed to independently invent it was Newton’s failure.
The second thing, which is a lot more relevant now than at the time, was that AI should stand for Augmented Intelligence not Artificial Intelligence if you want to build things that are actually useful. Striving to replace human intelligence is not a useful pursuit because there is an abundant supply of humans and you can improve the supply of intelligent humans by removing food poverty, improving access to education, and eliminating other barriers that prevent vast numbers of intelligent humans from being able to devote time to using their intelligence. The valuable tools are ones that do things humans are bad at. Pocket calculators changed the world because being able to add ten-digit numbers together orders of magnitude faster allowed humans to use their intelligence for things that were not the tedious, repetitive, tasks (and get higher accuracy for those tasks). If you want to change the world, build tools that allow humans to do more by offloading things humans are bad at and allowing them to spend more time on things humans are good at.
How far can a toot travel in the fediverse?
I chatted recently with someone who complained that the fediverse lacked "reach".
So I'm curious: if you are up for it, could you please reply to this toot (which started life on single user instance on a tiny computer in a garage in the United Kingdom) saying which country you are in?
Edit: 12 hours, 74 countries: https://neilzone.co.uk/2025/04/a-toot-travelled-to-fediverse-users-in-53-countries-in-12-hours/
📰 Netzpolitik.org zu unserer Kritik der aktuellen EU-Verhandlungen über eine DSGVO-Verfahrensverordnung (Procedural Regulation) 👇
Das große Datenschutz-Gesetz der EU soll praktikabler werden, besonders, wenn Fälle mehrere Staaten involvieren. Fast alle Beteiligten sind sich einig, dass das ein gutes Ziel ist. Die EU-Institutionen verhandeln gerade über einen Entwurf – aber der Aktivist Max Schrems ist vom aktuellem Stand entsetzt.
Till Kamppeter
👩‍🦯The Blind Fraggle
noyb.eu
tveskov
David Chisnall (*Now with 50% more sarcasm!*)
Neil Brown