

Yeah, totally agree with you there.
Do think the Coalition are still going to go with the “Dutton will have the exact attitude of Trump” campaign?
Yeah, totally agree with you there.
Do think the Coalition are still going to go with the “Dutton will have the exact attitude of Trump” campaign?
The US president simply saying these words puts huge numbers of people in the middle east at risk. Even many of his own voters are shocked, because he promised America First. Just because there is a lot of shit happening, doesn’t make this any less fucked.
In Australia, we even just had Pauline Hanson say this is a bad idea.
For context, she is a white non-Muslim politician who once wore a burqa into parliament to make a point. Even she is against Trump on this one.
I mean, a huge number of his own supporters are questioning this. I wouldn’t call this a viable strategy.
"Europe’s leading AI companies and research institutions combine their forces and expertise to develop next-generation open-source language models in an unprecedented collaboration to advance European AI capabilities, the OpenEuroLLM project.
A consortium of 20 leading European research institutions, companies and EuroHPC centres coordinated by Jan Hajič (Charles University, Czechia) and co-led by Peter Sarlin (AMD Silo AI, Finland) will build a family of performant, multilingual, large language foundation models for commercial, industrial and public services. The transparent and compliant open-source models will democratize access to high-quality AI technologies and strengthen the ability of European companies to compete on a global market and public organizations to produce impactful public services.
The OpenEuroLLM project is aligned with the imperative to improve Europe’s competitiveness and digital sovereignty. The project is a prime example of the type of technology infrastructure needed to lower thresholds for European AI product development and refinement, demonstrating the strength of transparency, openness and community involvement, values largely recognized across the European tech ecosystem.
The models will be developed within Europe’s robust regulatory framework, ensuring alignment with European values while maintaining technological excellence. Cooperating with open-source and open science communities like LAION, open-sci and OpenML, and additional experts in the field assembled in the project’s Open Strategic Partnership Board, OpenEuroLLM will ensure that the models, software, data and evaluation will be fully open and can be fine-tuned and instruction-tuned for specific industry and public sector needs. These performant multilingual models preserve both linguistic and cultural diversity, enabling European companies to develop high-quality products and services in the era of AI.
The project, which has been awarded the STEP (Strategic Technologies for Europe Platform) seal, leverages support from previous European projects and the experience of the partners and their results, including large repositories of high-quality data and pilot LLMs developed previously. The consortium commences its work on February 1st, 2025, with funding from the European Commission under the Digital Europe Programme."
I mean, even many US TikTok users jumped straight onto Red Note. I’m not saying I trust China, but living in a US-allied country, I most definitely don’t trust the US right now.
Calling on everyone else in the West and the global economy: keep your eyes open for opportunities to support the Canadian and Mexican people.
They are standing up to this corruption and fighting it where it stands. This is going to hit them hardest first, and they deserve our support.
I’m not in the US (thinking of you guys everyday), but when I found myself feeling depressed by the direction of big tech, I realized that open-source and the Fediverse was the healthy and exciting way forwards. It was the one thing that felt like I remember the internet feeling like in the late 90s. I think you are spot on. It is the only way that democracy can survive in tech.
They actually can’t. Being open-source, it’s already proliferated. Apparently there are already over 500 derivatives of it on HuggingFace. The only thing that could be done is that each country in the West outlaws having a copy of it, like with other illegal materials. Even by that point, it will already be deep within business ecosystems across the globe.
Nup. OpenAI can be shut down, but it is almost impossible for R1 to go away at this point.
and it’s open-source!
I’ve also recently switched to Linux Mint as my daily driver. Linux + Open-Source is finally in a really good spot. I tell people that switching OSes always takes new learning, but a step-by-step approach is a sustainable one.
Whenever I go back to Windows and see news and ads popping up in my Start Menu, etc, I realize how much shit we were putting up with even pre-Copilot. That’s not even including Microsoft Edge forcing itself back as a default program with each major update. It’s like the word “consent” doesn’t exist to those people.
At least (to my knowledge) the Signal messages are decrypted on the client end, so buying the company doesn’t give them automatic access to messages.
Having said that, I’m sure a hostile new owner could update the app to decrypt and then send the messages as plaintext to the servers if they wanted…