Yesterday, Game Designer Octavian joined CardiaDarkhill, Jousis and Balormage to talk about his role at Grinding Gear Games. If you missed seeing it live, you can check it out in the video below.

Video: The Laboratory: Ft Octavian (GGG Game Designer), Jousis and Balormage!

We hope you enjoyed Octavian's unique insights.

3.26.0c Hotfix 6

• Temporarily lowered the damage from Apparition Shrine Buffs until a more definitive fix can be done to ensure the non-player version isn't dealing more damage than intended.
• Fixed a bug where the chance to apply additional Poison modifier on Betrayal's Sting Unique Ring was not scaling correctly with Noxious Catalysts. The client display for this will be updated in a later patch.
• Fixed the vendor search filter being cleared when rerolling Expedition vendors.
• Fixed 2 client crashes.
• Fixed an instance crash.

You will need to restart your client to receive the client changes in this hotfix.

Patch Notes - 3.26.0c Hotfix 6 - Forum - Path of Exile

Path of Exile is a free online-only action RPG under development by Grinding Gear Games in New Zealand.

^{Path of Exile}

The Mercenaries of Trarthus edition of Kirac's Vault Pass has an exclusive cosmetic armour set as a reward from the premium track, themed around Path of Exile's first ever Pinnacle Boss - the Shaper. Check out some concept art for this set below!

For full details about the Mercenaries edition of Kirac's Vault, check out the Vault Pass page here. You can also see how it looks in-game in the video below!

3.26.0c Hotfix 5

• Fixed a bug where the Crafting Bench option "Reroll the rarity of a non-Unique item" could be used on Synthesised items.

Patch Notes - 3.26.0c Hotfix 5 - Forum - Path of Exile

Path of Exile is a free online-only action RPG under development by Grinding Gear Games in New Zealand.

^{Path of Exile}

3.26.0c Hotfix 4

• Mercenaries now have the same Damage Reduction as with release when at Level 83 and 84, and higher Damage Reduction at the vast majority of levels.
• Overall we've put Mercenaries back to the position where they have equal, or better Damage Reduction at almost all levels, notably in Early-game where they are significantly more durable, especially from level 40+.

In Endgame, they had a level threshold where their Damage Reduction doubled, this caused an issue where Mercenaries within that threshold felt immortal (up to a point) whereas Mercenaries one below that threshold were dying constantly. We've smoothened this progression so that each level of Mercenary matters more, this has resulted in a few levels where they are taking more damage but not a significant amount.

This is all on top of the change to make them even more resilient to Damage over Time.

Patch Notes - 3.26.0c Hotfix 4 - Forum - Path of Exile

Path of Exile is a free online-only action RPG under development by Grinding Gear Games in New Zealand.

^{Path of Exile}

We are ecstatic to announce that we have released the third experimental version of Pidgin 3.0!!! This is a pre alpha release with an official version number of 2.92.1. We will continue releasing in this fashion until we are ready for 3.0.0 which will be the release we consider ready for end users.

The release can be found on SourceForge and should show up on Flathub Beta shortly.

If you don't want to use the Flathub Beta method, there are build instructions in the README for building a flatpak locally or installing into a meson devenv. Both methods avoid installing directly to your OS installation which is preferred as there is no easy way to uninstall.

About

Just like Experimental 1 and 2, this is a milestone release. It is something we think other tinkerers and developers may want to start playing with, but it is not meant for end users.

Most things are not implemented, the user interface has not been polished at all, and there are so many bugs. As such we are asking that packagers please do not package this for your users yet as the potential support requests will be too much for us to handle at this time.

This release isn’t quite what we wanted as things just didn't align well this cycle, but there’s still a lot of good progress.

Looking forward, Experimental 4 is scheduled for 2025-09-30 and will have a version number of 2.93.0.

We have a bunch of tickets entered for Experimental 4, and you can keep an eye on the Burndown Chart for Experimental 4 to stay informed. As always, priorities and possibilities can and will change, so even if something is listed for this release that doesn't mean it will be in the release until it's actually completed.

Highlights

The main highlights for this release are preferences! We've finally added some much need new sections named Appearance, Privacy, and Development. There's not a whole lot in these three yet, but there's a bunch we want to drop in here in the future.

Appearance Preferences

Right now the appearance preference just lets you toggle formatting of message which affects all messages and can be easily restored. We have a number of things to add here in the future, but if there's something you'd like to see, let us know in the comments below!

Privacy Preferences

Just like appearance the privacy preferences page is meant to help you keep your personal information personal. In the future we'll be adding options for how Pidgin should identify itself when queried and a few other things.

Development Preferences

The development preferences are meant to make the development of Pidgin and plugins easier. Developer mode itself does a number of things right now including showing the Bonjour and XMPP protocols which are not yet functional. This way developers can work on them easily and end users won't get confused by something that's not implemented.

ChangeLog

In the past we've tried to filter the ChangeLog to just the bits that might be interesting, but going forward we're just going to include everything that was done for the release.

General

• Add a native file for macos on arm (RR 3956) (Gary Kramlich)
• Run scour over all of the svgs (RR 3990) (Gary Kramlich)
• Add discrete options for protocol plugins (RR 3994) (Gary Kramlich)
• Fix a typo in POTFILES.in for the privacy preferences (RR 3998) (Gary Kramlich)
• Add an in-development tag to all protocols that are still early in development (RR 4007) (Gary Kramlich)
• Update the flatpak to gnome 48 and to the matching birb version (RR 4038) (Gary Kramlich)

libpurple:

• Add GListModel versions of purple_account_manager_get_{disabled,enabled (PIDGIN-18067) (RR 3952) (Elliott Sales de Andrade)
• Remove GList versions of purple_account_manager_get_{disabled,enabled} (RR 3955) (Elliott Sales de Andrade)
• Update the convey plans (RR 3975) (Gary Kramlich)
• Add Purple.ContactInfo:external for tracking external contacts (PIDGIN-18090) (RR 3973) (Gary Kramlich)
• Add Purple.Conversation:url (PIDGIN-18091) (RR 3974) (Gary Kramlich)
• Make Purple.ProtocolConversation.join_channel_finish return a conversation (RR 3982) (Gary Kramlich)
• Move the connection-state implementation to Purple.Account (PIDGIN-17988) (RR 3964) (Gary Kramlich)
• Add a Purple.Account::connection-state-changed signal (PIDGIN-18087) (RR 3965) (Gary Kramlich)
• Add Purple.Presence.primitive-changed signal (PIDGIN-18025) (RR 3966) (Gary Kramlich)
• Add Purple.Contact.is_own_account (RR 3985) (Gary Kramlich)
• Create purple_core_new_settings (RR 4000) (Gary Kramlich)
• Add Purple.Protocol:tags and add unit tests for protocol properties (RR 4006) (Gary Kramlich)
• Update to birb 0.4 and use the testing helpers in libpurple (RR 4014) (Gary Kramlich)
• Remove some unused markup functions (RR 4029) (Gary Kramlich)

Pidgin

• Port PidginApplication to purple_account_manager_get_enabled_model (PIDGIN-18067) (RR 3952) (Elliott Sales de Andrade)
• Convert PidginAccountsDisabledMenu to the list model (PIDGIN-18067) (RR 3952) (Elliott Sales de Andrade)
• Convert PidginAccountsEnabledMenu to the list model (PIDGIN-18066) (RR 3954) (Elliott Sales de Andrade)
• Remove a dead assignment in Pidgin.ConversationMember (RR 3962) (Gary Kramlich)
• Fix Pidgin.Application.get_active_window to only return Pidgin.DisplayWindows (RR 3972) (Gary Kramlich)
• Add keybinding support to the channel join dialog (RR 3971) (Gary Kramlich)
• Add a preference for toggling whether or not to show formatting (PIDGIN-18081) (RR 3970) (Gary Kramlich)
• Start of the appearance preferences (PIDGIN-18082) (RR 3996) (Gary Kramlich)
• Remove the conversation preferences (RR 3995) (Gary Kramlich)
• Create a Privacy preference page with the send typing notification preference (PIDGIN-17450) (RR 3999) (Gary Kramlich)
• Add a Pidgin.PresenceIcon to Pidgin.ConversationMember (RR 4004) (Gary Kramlich)
• Add a Developer Settings preference pane (RR 4005) (Gary Kramlich)
• Update Pidgin.ProtocolChooser to hide in-development protocols (RR 4008) (Gary Kramlich)
• Add the operating system to the runtime information (PIDGIN-18005) (RR 4015) (Gary Kramlich)

Demo

• Use EionRobb's typical handle (RR 3967) (Gary Kramlich)
• Fix EionRobb's avatar (RR 3976) (Gary Kramlich)
• Fix some unbalanced G_BEGIN_DECLS (RR 3989) (Gary Kramlich)

IRCv3

• Fix privmsg going to the status window before registration is complete (RR 3963) (Gary Kramlich)
• Set the presence to offline when we receive a quit message (PIDGIN-18089) (RR 3969) (Gary Kramlich)
• Add support for away-notify (PIDGIN-18088) (RR 3968) (Gary Kramlich)
• Do a who after joining a channel (PIDGIN-17936) (RR 3981) (Gary Kramlich)
• Handle the WHOTOPIC and CHANNEL_URL messages (RR 3983) (Gary Kramlich)
• Check if a member is in a conversation before adding them (RR 3987) (Gary Kramlich)
• Handle formatting in server messages (RR 3991) (Gary Kramlich)
• Handle RPL_NOWAWAY and RPL_UNAWAY messages (RR 4003) (Gary Kramlich)
• Remove versioned API (RR 4030) (Gary Kramlich)

SIP

• A stubbed out SIP protocol plugin (RR 3988) (Gary Kramlich)
• Disable SIP by default and update the protocol summaries to reflect what will be built (RR 4028) (Gary Kramlich)

Thank You!

Thank you everyone for your continued support of Pidgin, it means a lot to us!

If you’re interested in contributing, you can check out our Contributing Guide to get started.

Also be sure to check out our merch store as well as our sticker store!

And if you’re feeling generous, you can learn how to donate to the project on our Donation Page.

Discuss this on our forum.

Session is pretty neat considering that it doesn’t require a cell phone number, unlike Signal messenger, which beats the purpose of anonymity.

I just purchased $20 in tokens. Perhaps one day in the future more people will start using it and nodes will start springing up all over, making the service much faster.

Has anyone else used or still uses Session? What are your thoughts? I think it has potential if more people have it a go.

https://www.jacoporanieri.com/blog/?p=42614

Can't we just ship Cruz off to Cancun permanently at this point?

Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) has a plan for spectrum auctions that could take frequencies away from Wi-Fi and reallocate them for the exclusive use of wireless carriers. The plan would benefit AT&T, which is based in Cruz's home state, along with Verizon and T-Mobile.

Cruz's proposal revives a years-old controversy over whether the entire 6 GHz band should be devoted to Wi-Fi, which can use the large spectrum band for faster speeds than networks that rely solely on the 2.4 and 5 GHz bands. Congress is on the verge of passing legislation that would require spectrum to be auctioned off for full-power, commercially licensed use, and the question is where that spectrum will come from.

When the House of Representatives passed its so-called "One Big Beautiful Bill," it excluded all of the frequencies between 5.925 and 7.125 gigahertz from the planned spectrum auctions. But Cruz's version of the budget reconciliation bill, which is moving quickly toward a final vote, removed the 6 GHz band's protection from spectrum auctions. The Cruz bill is also controversial because it would penalize states that regulate artificial intelligence.

Instead of excluding the 6 GHz band from auctions, Cruz's bill would instead exclude the 7.4–8.4 GHz band used by the military. Under conditions set by the bill, it could be hard for the Commerce Department and Federal Communications Commission to fulfill the Congressional mandate without taking some spectrum away from Wi-Fi.

Senate GOP budget bill has little-noticed provision that could hurt your Wi-Fi

Cruz bill could take 6 GHz spectrum away from Wi-Fi, give it to mobile carriers.

^{Jon Brodkin (Ars Technica)}

https://peoplesdispatch.org/2025/06/30/the-north-atlantic-treaty-organizations-hallucinations/

Easy to moderate
7 mi out and back or short walk to falls only
1,496 ft elevation gain
Hiked 6/1/25

Located in the Thompson Falls recreation area not too far from Golden BC this is a great waterfall with an ok trail that could be shortened to maybe half a mile or so of a mild slope. Falls were way overfull at time of hike, but appear to be a worthwhile stop, perhaps while camping in the area.

Another view of Thompson falls from a little further away, which better shows the shelf under the rushing river.

The uppermost section of falls along the trail, looks like it would have been a small cascade on the far side with a rapid on the near. Currently very blown out, the downed trees on the farside are stuck.

A jumble of fallen trees suspended in the forest. (Marge voice: I just think they're neat!)

Bluesky link to post with Videos of the falls

https://www.top.org.nz/citizens-voice

https://neuters.de/sustainability/boards-policy-regulation/apple-loses-bid-dismiss-us-smartphone-monopoly-case-2025-06-30/

Israel's Knesset House Committee voted to advance the impeachment of prominent lawmaker Ayman Odeh, a Palestinian citizen of Israel, on Monday, over comments he made earlier this year, which were perceived as being pro-Palestinian and against the war in Gaza.

Lawmakers from both the ruling coalition and opposition Yesh Atid and National Unity parties voted 14-2 in favour of impeachment, while two Knesset members from the Palestinian Ra'am and Ta'al parties opposed the move.

Odeh had earned the scorn of several Israeli lawmakers earlier this year when he welcomed a long-awaited ceasefire deal between Israel and Hamas.

"I am happy about the release of the hostages and prisoners. From here, both peoples must be freed from the yoke of the occupation. We were all born free," Odeh wrote on 19 January after Hamas released three Israeli women after 471 days in captivity.

Israel's Knesset votes to impeach Palestinian lawmaker Ayman Odeh

^{Middle East Eye}

https://thehill.com/homenews/campaign/5371548-hog-dnc-young-progressives-democrats-future/

Hello! How are folks self-hosting online storage, similar to Google Drive?

Some options I've found:
- filebrowser.org/ (maintenance-only mode)
- seafile.com/en/home/ (weird disk layout scares me)
- tinyfilemanager.github.io/ (i like simple!)
- github.com/mickael-kerjean/fil…

A bunch more: github.com/awesome-selfhosted/…

I mainly just need basic file management features. I don't plan to share files outside of my tailscale VPN. I do need to support multiple users though.

I'm not considering Nextcloud because that seems too big. I'm also not considering syncthing for this project because I don't want copies on multiple devices.

I'm currently just using ssh+nautilus and that's worked great for just me, but something similar to Google Drive would be easier to onboard my family.

GitHub - mickael-kerjean/filestash: :file_folder: A file manager / web client for SFTP, S3, FTP, WebDAV, Git, Minio, LDAP, CalDAV, CardDAV, Mysql, Backblaze, ...

:file_folder: A file manager / web client for SFTP, S3, FTP, WebDAV, Git, Minio, LDAP, CalDAV, CardDAV, Mysql, Backblaze, ... - mickael-kerjean/filestash

^GitHub

cross-posted from: rss.ponder.cat/post/219242

From Al Jazeera – Breaking News, World News and Video from Al Jazeera via this RSS feed

Dutch memorial honours Palestinian children killed in Gaza

Thousands of shoes were laid out in the Dutch city of Almere to commemorate Palestinian children killed in Gaza.

^{Al Jazeera}

cross-posted from: lemmy.world/post/32194427

GodlessCommie

2025-06-29 02:17:31

Capitalism ends poverty

U.S. officials said they would stop providing the satellite data online on July 31 rather at the end of June.

Data from this instrument also reveals sea ice extent, and that can't be allowed.

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/06/30/climate/noaa-hurricane-data-offline.html?unlocked_article_code=1.S08.kqbU.j0qTfurfIEkT

On the wall of the League of Social Democrats office, the Chinese characters for freedom are spelt out with court admission slips.

Members of the party take turns speaking into a microphone connected to a loudspeaker. They stand in front of a banner that reads "rather be ashes than dust", written in Chinese. Founded close to 20 years ago, the party is known as the last protest group in Hong Kong.

"The red lines are now everywhere," Chan Po Ying, the chair of the party, tells the BBC. "Our decision to disband was because we were facing a lot of pressure."

One of Hong Kong's last major pro-democracy parties disbands

It is the third major opposition party to disband this year, ahead of the fifth anniversary of the Beijing-imposed national security law.

^{Danny Vincent (BBC News)}

Dimitri Masin, CEO of Gradient Labs, argues that companies using AI agents for customer support should only pay when the bot does its job.

"If you look at Salesforce, they price the automation per conversation," he told The Register in a phone interview. "So essentially, if you have a conversation with AI, no matter what it leads to, you pay $2."

According to Salesforce's own researchers, leading LLM-based agents tested on the CRMArena-Pro benchmark successfully complete single-turn (prompt and reply) tasks about 58 percent of the time and only about 35 percent of the time for multi-turn (back-and-forth conversation) requests.

That's both bad for customers and bad for the progress of AI agents overall. Paying regardless of results, said Masin, "doesn't create any incentive for Salesforce to actually make their agent better."

Salesforce did not respond to a request for comment. But the stats it touts in its marketing copy are, unsurprisingly, a lot better.

Don't pay for AI support failures, says Gradient Labs CEO

interview: Paying for successful problem resolution is a better business model, argues Dimitri Masin

^{Thomas Claburn (The Register)}

The Supreme Court on Friday ruled that a group of Maryland parents have a right to opt their elementary-school-aged children out of instruction that includes LGBTQ+ themes. By a vote of 6-3, the justices agreed with the parents – who are Muslim, Catholic, and Ukrainian Orthodox – that the Montgomery County school board’s refusal to provide them with that option violates their constitutional right to freely exercise their religion.

Writing for the majority, Justice Samuel Alito acknowledged that “courts are not school boards or legislatures, and are ill-equipped to determine the ‘necessity’ of discrete aspects of a State’s program of compulsory education.” But he emphasized that “what the parents seek here is not the right to micromanage the public school curriculum, but rather to have their children opt out of a particular educational requirement that burdens their well-established right ‘to direct ‘the religious upbringing’ of their children’” under the free exercise clause of the First Amendment.

Court allows parents to opt their children out of school lessons involving LGBTQ+ themes

The Supreme Court on Friday ruled that a group of Maryland parents have a right to opt their elementary-school-aged children out of instruction that includes LGBTQ+ themes. By a vote […]

^{Amy Howe (SCOTUSblog)}

The US Supreme Court on Friday upheld a key provision of the Affordable Care Act that requires health plans to fully cover many preventive health care services recommended by a federal panel.

The ruling means that tens of millions of Americans can continue getting a variety of preventive services for free under their plans. Those cost-free services include an array of screenings, such as cancer screenings like mammograms and colonoscopies, as well as screens for obesity, lead exposure in children, high blood pressure, diabetes, and some sexually transmitted diseases, to name a few. The free services also include recommended vaccines for children and adults, well-baby and well-child doctor visits, birth control, statins, PrEP HIV prevention drugs, and fluoride supplements and varnishes for children's teeth.

SCOTUS upholds part of ACA that makes preventive care fully covered

Cancer screenings, statins, vaccines, PrEP, will continue to be covered in full.

^{Beth Mole (Ars Technica)}

In 2023, while Kristi Noem was governor of South Dakota, she supplemented her income by secretly accepting a cut of the money she raised for a nonprofit that promotes her political career, tax records show.

In what experts described as a highly unusual arrangement, the nonprofit routed funds to a personal company of Noem’s that had recently been established in Delaware. The payment totaled $80,000 that year, a significant boost to her roughly $130,000 government salary. Since the nonprofit is a so-called dark money group — one that’s not required to disclose the names of its donors — the original source of the money remains unknown.

Kristi Noem Secretly Took Personal Cut of Political Donations

A dark money group paid $80,000 to Noem’s personal company when she was governor of South Dakota. She did not include this income on her federal disclosure forms, a likely violation of ethics requirements, experts say.

^ProPublica