I'm reminded of the viral Tweet after Brexit that suggested we were now in the "factors leading to" part of the history text book

https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2026/jul/04/uk-ireland-leaders-fear-union-future-nigel-farage-led-government

Crossposted with @openvibe

Google quietly removes the on-device AI privacy assurance from Chrome's Settings UI

Google has quietly removed the privacy assurance from Chrome's on-device AI Settings UI. The sentence promising that the model runs locally without sending data to Google's servers has been deleted, and the toggle moved out of the System block to reduce the chance the change is noticed. There are three plausible reasons for tha…

https://www.thatprivacyguy.com/blog/google-quietly-removes-on-device-ai-privacy-claim

#ai #chrome #consent #compliance #eprivacy #gdpr #google

RE: https://hachyderm.io/@mike_bowler/116856446192240775

Have we all been lowkey giving ourselves mild CO2 poisoning this whole time. Is that what the fucking problem is

@DenisCOVIDinfoguy they claim there’s “exorbitant levels of sick leave in companies following the pandemic”

The pandemic isn’t over.

The pandemic isn’t being mitigated.

The sick leave is because we’re in a mass disabling event that most people are choosing to ignore.

It will only get worse.

Hey, what's your favorite "walks into a bar" joke?

Please be aware that I have the most comprehensive collection of jokes of this formation, so you cannot stump me, that's not what I'm asking. I have 100% heard your joke before. I just want to hear your best formation. Bring it.

https://jwz.org/b/yk8_

Another day, another Farage crypto scandal.

https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2026/jul/02/nigel-farage-reported-standards-watchdog-alleged-crypto-lobbying

“Google’s power consumption rose by 7 TWh between 2023 and 2024. That was bad. But it rose by a whopping 12 TWh between 2024 and 2025, almost double last year’s increase. Google’s power consumption isn’t just growing – the rate at which it is growing is growing. We have a word for this: exponential growth.

Every time I look at this chart I have to go and double check every single Google number, because it just looks so ridiculous

The power grids that Google’s data centres are plugged into have to increase generation to match this new demand – and that includes rising use of coal and gas, and as a consequence, worse climate disasters like deadly heatwaves. Google’s consumption is rising way faster than the grids are being cleaned up with renewables, and that means their emissions number is going up fast, too. It’s the steepest rise on record:”

https://ketanjoshi.co/2026/07/01/googles-exponential-path-to-climate-wrecking-digital-bloat/

#Google #AI #DataCenters #Energy #ClimateChange

https://variety.com/2026/biz/news/weird-al-yankovic-rejected-ai-commercial-money-offer-1236800794/

Yay! All I hear is he's a good dude. love it.

Today is the last day to comment on the Legislation (Definitions of Woman and Man) Amendment Bill. Bringing foreign culture wars that will endanger both cisgender women and non-binary people, making their participation in social activities more difficult.

https://www3.parliament.nz/en/pb/sc/committees-press-releases/have-your-say-on-the-legislation-definitions-of-woman-and-man-amendment-bill/

#nzpol

DOOM REPORT: 7.1.26

The news today came crawling out of the wire like a diseased circus animal: Europe is roasting while hospitals beg the ice machine for mercy.

Hormuz is still a loaded pistol pressed against the oil market’s sweating skull. Russia keeps feeding Ukraine into the grinder one drone, fuel station, transformer, and civilian nerve at a time.

AI has burst into the official doom ledger wearing a cheap suit and selling industrial fraud.

Old plagues are back on tour because trust is dead and public health was last seen bleeding behind the dumpsters, and America’s government is choking on its own necktie while the markets grin like drunk gamblers under a cracked chandelier.

No asteroid.
No trumpet.
No clean final act.

Just blinking alarms, hot wires and bad men with better funding... And the terrible sense that nobody sober is driving the bus.

We doomed, smoke em if you got em, kids.

This iconic Fabian Todorovic cartoon is still one of the best I’ve seen at illustrating the remarkable amount of space we surrender to cars, leaving little space left for everyone and everything else. The text added later makes the bonus point that many drivers still manage to complain about it.

I have to go down to the workroom specifically to make a wallet and a lampshade, so if anyone was thinking about ordering one of those things, now works be a really great time, because then I can production line them!
www.thesewphist.com

So Fediverse, last week I was laid off by my employer, Elastic, as part of a wider reorg that made my position redundant. 7% of the global workforce was impacted, so I'm not alone in this 😢

I would appreciate boosts as I'm now looking for my next job. Preferably in community open source, but with the crazy market, a mortage and a baby I appreciate any lead.
I'm a backend engineer with strong #cloudinfrastructure , #devops and #observability skills. I spent the last 5 years working with Golang, but have previous experience with Ruby, Python, PHP and JavaScript (that shows how old I am I guess).
I'm searching remotely from Italy.

Thank you!

#FediHire #fedihire_europe #fedihire_it

The Free Speech Union have condemed the police and the firearms safety authority revoking Brian Tamaki's firearms license

Calling this a "back door" attack on his free speech rights

Tamaki can still say what he likes, he just can't back it up with arms anymore

Crossposted with @openvibe

RE: https://mastodon.nz/@Niall/116837530394468066

Not surprising, the way the US is going tbh

kew 4.1, has been released.

kew is an offline terminal music player, with gapless playback, a library explorer, search, privacy and a bunch of other things. Free, open source and written in C, so it's ultra fast.

kew is popular on Linux and now for the first time it's available for Windows.

kew 4.1 adds:

Cross-fade (both on-demand and automatic).
More cool visualizer modes (press v).
Auto-resume.
Custom layouts.

More info here:
https://github.com/ravachol/kew
https://codeberg.org/ravachol/kew

Windows installer here:
https://github.com/ravachol/kew/releases/tag/v4.1.4

kew is for local music files like .flac and .mp3.

I also get a chance to show you my cover for Jenova 7 a little bit better.

#Music #software #freesoftware #opensource

PapersPast has a fresh addition of several smaller provincial newspapers in June. These include publications such as the Hawera Star (1936-1950), Hutt News (1949-1960), and the Matamata County Mail (1953-1965), but there are a number of others as well. Happy researching!

#genealogy #PapersPast

https://paperspast.natlib.govt.nz

You know this, I know this, it's still nice to have a comic about it.

#AI