My staff just shared with me that the Supreme Court of Canada is closing down its X account. #X #Canada #cdnpoli #SupremeCourtofCanada #SCC

what bothers me about corporate owned social media instead of community ran spaces like this one is the fact that a corporation at a whim can just remove you from all your friends, erase your entire presence and there's nothing you can do about it. I've watched discord become increasingly hostile and overzealous with bans, taking action on all accounts that have interacted with a particular discord message (there was this huge thing with the Marvel Rivals discord one of the announcements got falsely marked as child exploitation, everyone who even so much as reacted got terminated). It's just the thought of a platform having so much control over you like that, the ability to just erase years of your presence without a second thought. there's nobody to hold accountable either, at least on here there's actual humans for you to talk to.

The top story on WaPo right now deserves its spot: "Elon Musk’s business empire is built on $38 billion in government funding."

"Government infusions at key moments helped Tesla and SpaceX flourish, boosting Musk’s wealth"

https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/interactive/2025/elon-musk-business-government-contracts-funding/?itid=hp-top-table-main_p001_f001

That's more than half of what the DOGE website says it has "saved" through layoffs, firings, contract terminations and funding freezes.

BTW the NYT had a story yesterday that talked about how DOGE quietly removed many billions from its "wall of receipts" after a slew of media outlets called total BS on their math.

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/02/25/upshot/doge-spending-cuts-changed.html

"These were the original five largest savings on its list:

An $8 billion cut at Immigration and Customs Enforcement. The actual contract in question was worth $8 million. The mistake seemed to stem from an earlier, erroneous entry in a federal contracting database. But contracting experts said that the service should have known better: ICE’s entire budget is about $8 billion, making it implausible that one contract could be so large. The U.S. DOGE Service adjusted the figure on the site after The Times wrote about it, and said in a post on Mr. Musk’s X platform that it had “always used the correct $8M in its calculations.”

Three $655 million cuts at the U.S. Agency for International Development. This was actually a single cut that was erroneously counted three times, as first reported by CBS News. That mistake also seemed to reflect a misunderstanding of the way government contracts work; they sometimes have “ceiling values” far in excess of what will be spent. Experts said this cancellation was unlikely to produce anything close to $655 million in savings even once. Now, the site lists a much smaller savings for these three cancellations: $18 million in total.

A $232 million cut at the Social Security Administration. Here, Mr. Musk’s organization appeared to have mistakenly believed that the agency had canceled a huge information technology contract with the defense contracting giant Leidos. Instead, as reported by The Intercept, it had canceled only a tiny piece of it: a $560,000 project to let users mark their gender as “X.” The DOGE site now shows that small cut instead.

Some of the new canceled contracts added this week appear to make some of the same types of errors.

The largest savings on the latest version of its list is a $1.9 billion cut at the Treasury Department. But The Times reported last week that this contract was canceled last fall, when Joseph R. Biden Jr. was president — and when DOGE did not yet exist."

Other than the fact that Brendan Eich uses his money to support anti-queer legislation, here’s a nice resource listing a few reasons why Brave sucks and only uses "privacy" as a shitty marketing argument https://www.reddit.com/user/lo________________ol/comments/1iya14j/brave_of_them/

Spotted at Oxford Circus #london yesterday evening. Naturally, the link to the #metropolitianpolice site on #facialrecognition doesn't work for me.

#lfr #livefacialrecognition

Finding out your Klan rally is populated exclusively by redneck dumbfucks and the music is only shit redneck dumbfucks like.

Hot tip: If you hear someone talking about the "Smart revolution" (smart cars, smart homes, smart cities) they're talking about surveillance.

Surveillance revolution. Surveillance cars. Surveillance homes. Surveillance cities.

And it's all done by private companies with no oversight.

A change in maintenance for the kernel's DMA-mapping layer

https://lwn.net/Articles/1011819/ #LWN