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Rare Sowerby's Beaked Whale washes up in Norfolk


A Sowerby's Beaked Whale, a poorly known deep sea species, has perished after washing up on a beach in Norfolk.

The animal was found in The Wash near Holme-next-the-Sea on Wednesday 6 August by a member of the public, who alerted it to British Divers Marine Life Rescue. By the time a BDMLR representative arrived at the scene, the whale had died, according to Wild Ken Hill on Facebook.

The whale was found to be a female. At this time of year females move south from Arctic breeding grounds – and it may be that this individual was with a young animal.




Google will now let you pick your top sources for news search results


Google is making it easier to see news from your favorite outlets. A new feature, called “preferred sources,” will let you choose the outlets you want to see featured the most in Search’s “top stories” section.

Google’s top stories hub appears when you search for something related to a current event, and displays a bunch of relevant articles from around the web. Along with prominently featuring articles from your preferred outlets in the top stories list, Google may also include them in a new “from your sources” section. Google first started testing the preferred sources feature in June, and now it’s rolling out to users in the US and India.

Technology reshared this.

in reply to Dr. Moose

This used to be a thing iirc. Then too many advertisers were getting "don't show results from this source" and Google nixed it.
in reply to Dr. Moose

further enabling media bubbles. i’d rather see an approach that leverages something like ground.news that ranks the bias in articles.
in reply to acosmichippo

Well, yes and no. If you can choose your media sources, then you avoid accidental drifting (trust me, I’ve accidentally drifted before, almost ended badly)
in reply to acosmichippo

Nah the people affected by these bubbles are too dumb to use these tools anyway lmao


Who said you can move furniture with a bike?


I saw this bike made by an independent bike shop for himself.

It's an electric longtail and can carry a 300kg europallet, plus the toolbox on the front, plus an extra person or material on the bike rack!

Here is the link to the shop website: cycles-penet.fr/





Can't connect to QNAP web interface


My stupid QNAP TS-251A--I hate this thing!--just started beeping at me out of the blue, for no reason, and I now I can't access it on its web interface to see what it's complaining about. Turning off VPN and firewall had no effect. Also, can't even ping it. Tried restarting it once, without effect. Would be much obliged for any help troubleshooting this.



New Uvalde Records Reveal Details About School Safety Concerns and Shooter’s Behavioral Issues


The release is part of a settlement agreement in a lawsuit that news organizations brought against state and local governments. The fight continues to get the Texas Department of Public Safety to release its own records.
#USA



Brazilian Court Allows Boeing to Continue Hiring Local Engineers


A Brazilian court has ruled that Boeing can continue hiring engineers, rejecting a lawsuit that sought to limit the US planemaker's recruitment practices.



US | Trump administration to review 19 Smithsonian museums to ensure exhibits are ‘patriotic’


White House letter orders review as part of a broader push to assert oversight over cultural institutions


Archived version: archive.is/20250812215326/theg…


Disclaimer: The article linked is from a single source with a single perspective. Make sure to cross-check information against multiple sources to get a comprehensive view on the situation.



Can't Log in to User on Linux Mint Cinnamon (Loops Back to Login Window)


cross-posted from: lemmy.world/post/34365607

Hi fediverse,

I'm hoping someone can give me some advice on an issue that means I can't access the main user account on my Linux Mint (Cinnamon) operating system.

Context:

I'm using a dual boot setup of windows and mint on my laptop.
I use mint (or used to, when I could access my user) for pretty much anything that doesn't require things* only my windows instance has. (*things such as support for video games that support windows but not linux, for example)

When creating my main user account, I made a mistake in the username. It was irritating enough for me to want to change it, and as doing so seemed like it should have been fine, I settled upon three guides and ended up (mostly?) just following this one:

linuxuprising.com/2019/04/how-…


I cant remember all of what happened anymore, but I have the following screenshots, along with the stuff I do remember.

(note: red blocks represent the new username, blue blocks represent the old username)




At the used-by-process error, I first tried following the guide precisely, then hoped that "PID" was Process ID, and that the guide expected me to put the ID that usermod stated after "PID", and tried doing that.

Idk if that fvcked something up...

Then I guess I fixed that somehow, idk if I did so by restarting and logging in only as tempuser, or if I had already done that and fixed it some other way.

Anyway I meant to run each line of the command separately to avoid stuff going wrong, but accidentally did both at once. I hoped it'd be fine anyway.

Then stuff happened I guess.

Anyway,

I cant remember much more but I know that I tried to log back in as my main user account and I found out that:

  1. The username had been successfully changed.
  2. I could not log into my main user account.

Imputing the correct username and password was successful, and acted like it was logging me in as usual. Then after the usual black screen, it just throws me back to the login window.

This still happens.

I went through a fair bit of internet searching, followed some advice. All that most people were saying was to check how much disk space you have left - and to not keep timeshift snapshots on the same drive as your OS.

(this is one such post, and (I think) the only one I found that I definitely recognise from the previous searching: reddit.com/r/linuxmint/comment…)

I did ctrl-alt-f1 and ran df -h, and deleted most of the timeshift snapshots I had (I think I had maybe 6 and deleted 4 or 5).

Here's the output of df -h that I think is from after I deleted the timeshifts:

Idk what to do, hope someone can advise.

(TL;DR: tried to change username on mint, now whenever I try to log in to the user it throws me back to the login window after the usual black screen. Hope this suffices for a summary...)

in reply to DuckyLoco404

Check permissions on your home folder. Make sure everything is owned by your new username.

I had a separate partition mounted on /home on my old system. I remounted the same partition at /home on the new system, and got the same bootloop issue. The problem was that the old permissions were for 1001:1001, not (newuser):(newuser). Had to log into a TTY and chown (newuser):(newuser) -R /home/(newuser) to get everything working.

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in reply to DuckyLoco404

I tried logging in with tempuser and remembered that I have no idea how to access the files on my main user. In the file manager the home folder for said user isn’t accessible, and I assume that’s because I set it to be encrypted when setting it up. Thus I can’t access the files to copy them over to a new user or anything. Also, I assume I wouldn’t be able to rename the homedir as such, and don’t know where to start checking or changing user settings and permissions and such.
in reply to DuckyLoco404

First, check if you can login, with your new user, on the Linux console (i.e. Ctrl-Alt-F1 through F7). If you can, the username change probably went through correctly. Report back if you cannot login via console or you get warnings/errors.

Your login session does automatically terminate if the session process for Cinnamon exits, booting you back to GDM (or whatever login manager you have). So probably the Cinnamon session process, started by GDM, craps out for some reason. The reason is probably, I suspect, that it cannot access or cannot find some file it wants to open.

Check ~/.xsession-errors, it might tell you what went wrong.

Also check the permissions of your home folder, the files in your home folder, and check if you correctly set up the symbolic link from /home/olduser to /home/newuser as the guide suggests.



A proposito delle meduse che hanno bloccato la maggiore centrale nucleare di Francia - Il blog di Jacopo Ranieri




in reply to Gsus4

My kid is 3 but this has been a big issue on my mind lately. I’ve read The Anxious Generation, The Screentime Solution, and The Art of Screentime over the past 9 months (with some other tech-adjacent books). My husband has also recently had a turn-around on tech for kids. I think our big thing is no personal devices for the little one for a long time. Family computer in a common area. Family cellphone that can be used when she’s not with us. Family tv in the living room. Family iPad that is used for specific tasks.

in reply to Sleepless One

Hot take: The US has ZERO right to "mourn" 9/11 or call it a tragedy because they have done 9/11 hundreds of times over in the Middle East. You don't get to "never forget" when you've forgotten what you did afterward. To be clear, the friends and families of 9/11 victims have every right to mourn, but not the US government.
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in reply to HiddenLayer555

Pure narcissism

it's only evil when it happens to them as retaliation, when they do that for decades it's cute.

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Israeli regime embassy in Netherlands attacked


in reply to Avatar of Vengeance

Is this a repeat of a story from a week or two ago or is this a new "attack" / vandalism? I know I saw similar photos somewhere not that long ago.

In either case, I support the cause. Israel is committing genocide.

in reply to some_guy

This happened on the 12^th^ of August. You may be thinking of the French story in which the El Al airline headquarters had paint on it.


International Trade Union Condemns Nigerian Government’s Move to Criminalise Right to Strike




GE-Proton10-12 Released


Hotfix:

  • Fixed video playback in Ghostwire Tokyo
  • Fixed video playback in Castlevania Dominus Collection
  • Possibly other games fixed that use webm/vp8/vp9 video

in reply to RedditEnjoyer

Hilariously, all of those issues could be resolved if those same developers that are complaining donated some of their skills and expertise into contributing to the fixes and features they need.

This reads very much like an "Old man yells at cloud" moment.



Please don't promote Wayland


don't like this



in reply to NightOwl

It's been more or less a scandal here in Norway that we even bought into these companies. We do have an ethics committee that designate what are off limits for the unscrupulous stock managers.
in reply to positiveWHAT

i hope the safe guards in place for the members of the ethics committee guard against (a) leader(s) who get to decide on future members of the ethics committee.

i say this because the united states also has such committees but both our president and our congresspeople sabotage it by either refusing to certify new members or appoint members with conflicts of interest (eg fossil fuels executives in charge of the environment protection agency).



The Math Hack You Didn’t Know Was in Your Credit Card


I've been familiar with the concept, but this is by far the best behind-the-scenes explanation I've seen.


Is it worth paying a direct download website?


Is it worth paying for a direct download website? When downloading for free it takes 6-8 hours (and for some reason it got interrupted and failed, so I have to attempt again) but if I paid for it I could download it in 3 minutes. I'm worried that the free version just doesn't support having a download take that long, so it will be impossible to obtain.

I'm not sure if it is safe, nor stupid to do so though. Specifically, I'm talking about torbobit (dot) net

Would you consider torrenting (from non-private torrents) safer than ddl? I can either pay the ddl or a vpn and use a torrent. Idk.

Thank you.

in reply to Yourname942

If you're only interested in a single file, ProtonVPN has a free tier. The speed should be plenty for a single ~600mb file.
in reply to Yourname942

it honestly depends on how much you use the service.

i had an account for a while to a site that shut down. while i had it i was downloading a bunch of different files, not necessarily pirated stuff.

i'd say if torrents isn't a viable option and you would be using that site downloading at least 500 mb worth of data a day, it might be worth it. if something you want is available only on one of these sites, it depends on how bad you want it and how soon you want it.




Butter made from carbon tastes like the real thing, gets backing from Bill Gates


cross-posted from: lemmy.world/post/34272214

A California-based biotechnology startup has officially launched the world's first commercially available butter made entirely from carbon dioxide, hydrogen, and oxygen, eliminating the need for traditional agriculture or animal farming. Savor, backed by Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates through his Breakthrough Energy Ventures fund, announced the commercial release of its animal- and plant-free butter after three years of development.

The revolutionary product uses a proprietary thermochemical process that transforms carbon dioxide captured from the air, hydrogen from water, and methane into fat molecules chemically identical to those found in dairy butter. According to the company, the process creates fatty acids by heating these gases under controlled temperature and pressure conditions, then combining them with glycerol to form triglycerides.

in reply to Gsus4

Why not just make a fuel that can power cars if you're gonna go this far.
in reply to MuskyMelon

cost :/ and low energy conversion efficiency. Whereas expensive novelty edibles may have a high price, fuels, not so much.
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in reply to Gsus4

We focus too much on efficiency and cost sometimes. Sometimes efficiency is only a "nice to have" while being outweighed by practicality, convenience, safety, and any of the other factors we choose to make a priority.

It is expensive and inefficient for an airplane to have two engines instead of just one. We do it anyway because it's required for safety and redundancy. We made that the priority, and that was an active choice. We need to start making more active choices about what the priority is when it comes to our energy futures. All priorities have tradeoffs. Cost and efficiency have their own tradeoffs. Question it when people tell you that things can't be done because of "cost" or "efficiency". When they do that they're presupposing what the priority is, but often it's billionaires trying to cut corners to make themselves richer at our expense, our safety, our futures. We can do inefficient things. Sometimes it's even the right choice.

in reply to cecilkorik

I think you're missing that there are better ways to produce fuels for cars than to chemically synthesize petroleum. It's all about cost and efficiency if you're just looking for portable energy. Or we could burn more coal so we can generate the energy needed for synthetic gasoline....
in reply to AmidFuror

Or we could burn more coal so we can generate the energy needed for synthetic gasoline…


The problem is, people can, do, and will use that exact same argument to say we don't need any more solar panels or wind turbines, because we don't need and can't use or store the excess power for anything and that's why we need to keep thermal plants as backup for base load generation. Look, when we produce too much electricity, the electricity cost goes to zero and negative! It's "wasteful and inefficient"! But these two problems can solve each other. Synthetic fuels (doesn't have to be gasoline, hydrogen is step 1, methane/LNG is a bit more manageable as a chemical fuel. As long as the carbon source is atmospheric, then it and other synthetic hydrocarbons are carbon neutral to burn) provide an on-demand energy sink/storage method that can support and drive more electrification and renewable power, it just has to be part of a consistent and systemic approach with strict regulation and a clear view of the big picture (something sorely lacking these days).

in reply to cecilkorik

Nailed it.

We need a solar grid that can meet our demand during a 9-hour, overcast, low-angle winter day. That same grid will be producing more than 4 times as much power as we need during a 15-hour, high-angle summer day, even after we include air conditioning loads.

We need massive, seasonal loads to soak up that excess power and keep solar profitable.

Fake butter isn't going to do it, but things like desalination, hydrogen electrolysis, and Fischer-Tropsch hydrocarbon production are all likely candidates.




Drug Enforcement Administration agent used Illinois cop’s Flock license plate reader password for immigration enforcement searches


in reply to Pro

A Palos Heights police officer has been disciplined and retrained


That is automatic fired in any place I've worked IT.

The detective stated it was “common” to allow others in the group to use his login for drug investigations


That's an investigation in any place I've worked IT.

State legislation prohibits Illinois license plate reader data from being used for immigration enforcement purposes.


Like that matters.

Meh, read the damned article. It's more damning than I can post about.

As usual, I'll sign off by saying, get strapped, learn gun safety and local laws, practice, be ready to fucking die in a firefight. Human rights will never come cheap to defend. But in no case lie down for this shit. Don't have a "brown people" pic, but they're as important as any of us.

If your life is more important than your liberty, you do you, I will not judge. But I've made my own decision on the matter.

in reply to shalafi

I wish more people who believe in justice had your attitude. We wouldn't be degrading into Orwellian 1984 standards if the powers that be received just 2% pushback with the same magnitude of force they employ.

Democracy dies because Americans, the gun-toting, freedom-fighting, liberty-loving citizens they are, are in fact giant. fucking. cowards. In general.

in reply to guyincognito

Can you imagine how bad it would be if the fascists felt free to kick in any door in an unarmed society? The mind boggles.
in reply to shalafi

They do feel pretty free to do that, and they also heavily signal that if you’re of a darker complexion, even if they barge in unannounced, that they’re going to fill your house full of holes but if you’re white, even if you knew what was going on, they’ll detain you alive. It happens all the time, and in “unarmed” societies that aren’t massively shit people don’t need to worry about it anyway.

“Greatest country on earth” but everyone needs to be constantly afraid of their neighbours and government.

in reply to Pro

A bit of missing context - the officer with the access to the FLOCK system shared his account details with many other officers including the DEA agent because he thought that’s just what was done since he was the only one with an account.

Also on this:

State legislation prohibits Illinois license plate reader data from being used for immigration enforcement purposes.


Why?! Why is immigration enforcement being stifled so much? Imagine if there was a police database that could help find murderers whenever they drove their car in public and legislators said “no you’re not allowed to use that to help find wanted murderers”. It makes no sense.

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in reply to FreedomAdvocate

A bit of missing context - the officer with the access to the FLOCK system shared his account details with many other officers including the DEA agent because he thought that’s just what was done since he was the only one with an account.


LOLLLLLLLL

And I suppose any arrests or convictions based on that were not legal or overturned, right??

in reply to jaybone

Well you would assume that some people might be able to appeal based on this.
in reply to FreedomAdvocate

Because immigration enforcement is a civil violation, not a criminal one. Imagine if the government said that license plate readers could be used to enforce copyright violations, or defamation. Say a bad word about the President and they will use the system to find your car and wait for you to send you to Alligator Auschwitz without a trial.
in reply to dhork

Entering the country illegally is a crime under federal law, not civil. Remaining in the country after your legal immigration status is up is a civil issue, but deportation is a lawful response.

Why do you think people should get to stay in a country illegally? I’m genuinely curious.

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in reply to FreedomAdvocate

Do you think a person should be seperated from thier families, put into prison, subjected to violence, and sent to a country they've never been to for a misdemeanor?

Because thats a criminal misdemeanor, not civil like immigration. But you dont care do you? You got yours..

Ghoul

in reply to FreedomAdvocate

Why?! Why is immigration enforcement being stifled so much? Imagine if there was a police database that could help find murderers


It could be because immigrants are not as bad as murderers.

in reply to FauxLiving

That’s completely irrelevant. If you can identify someone as being in the country illegally it makes no sense to not be allowed to act on it.
in reply to FreedomAdvocate

You need to shut up. You're spreading ignorance and blatantly ignoring the situation.

Again. You need yo knock it off and go somewhere magats hang out.

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in reply to FreedomAdvocate

This isn't a good argument.

If law enforcement had access to all of your social media, e-mails and live video feeds from inside your house then they would be able to catch criminals more effectively.

We have laws specifically limiting police powers because we recognize that there are more things to consider than simply maximizing arrests.

Protection against unreasonable search is written into the constitution, after all

in reply to FreedomAdvocate

It does make sense. Police are not perfect saint-like beings, and the government is not composed of perfect beings either. I'm not sure what kind of person you are, but I'm sure there are some things you enjoy and partake in which some other social group really despises. If you're religious, it may be militant atheists who despise you going to church. If you're not religious, it may be militant theists who despise you not going to church. The point is, there's probably some social cultures out there that hate you for the things that you love. Those people may not be in charge right now, but they might be one day. Those people can end up in police departments, as developers for these camera companies, as administrators for the database that collects information on where you drive and when. Those people, being imperfect as they are, may not always resist the temptation to use this system in a way to track down and identify people like you for doing whatever it is that you love and they hate. Now you end up on a list for that.

There's no denying that sophisticated surveillance technology does make it easier to catch criminals and does legitimately protect from the threats those criminals pose. But surveillance technology, by it's very nature, cannot surveil only the criminals - it has to surveil everyone to find the criminals. And the notion of what is criminal may change. If your favorite hobby becomes criminalized, or if the government criminalizes your identity itself, these beautifully effective tools are suddenly turned against you.

There is a happy medium to be found between giving your society tools to enforce the will of constituents, vs. giving your society tools that be too easily abused. Given that this tool is already being abused, it probably isn't worth the benefits.

in reply to mfed1122

But if they did criminalise my favourite hobby, and they had evidence that I’m continuing to do that hobby in plain sight, they see me doing it every day……I’d expect them to come get me. That makes sense. It makes no sense to have that technology there to be used to find some crimes but not others.
in reply to FreedomAdvocate

I see what you're saying. You're not talking about "making sense" in an ethical or social well-being sense, you mean it's literally confusing why the technology wouldn't be used for all kinds of crimes, given that it already exists - irrespective of whether the technology should be used. Is that right? I think you're getting downvoted because it kinda sounds like you're saying this is all a good idea when you say it "makes sense". Unfortunate English ambiguities. But you're saying, like, sure it's dystopian and creepy and wrong, but why wouldn't the creepy dystopia use the tech for all cases then rather than just some? That's a good question. I think because there is legitimately some understanding of the dangers of using these powerful tools willy-nilly. While people aren't perfect angels, they also aren't perfect devils either. Another factor is that there is some pressure to appear not to be overly heavy-handed with these tools - as we see in those chats, they knew it made them look bad for this to get out.

And the final most pessimistic factor is that this Flock company almost certainly charges per seat, so giving direct usernames and logins to every officer or even every department is probably absurdly expensive. Companies (in this case the police) will often try to limit their license seats to as few people as possible and then just funnel as much different people's work through that one person's license as they can.

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in reply to FreedomAdvocate

I'm not responding to you're entire verbal vomit. am going to say this.

What youve written at the end is not what's happening.

in reply to FreedomAdvocate

Despite all the downvotes, I think it's a reasonable enough question. It happens to have a very reasonable answer though.

First of all, your concern is largely addressed, since immigration control can still access law enforcement databases if they have a warrant.

As for why this law exists at all, well it's actually to the benefit of law enforcement: the idea is that immigrant communities are more likely to cooperate with law enforcement if they aren't scared that they will be the target of immigration control. This is all the more practical now, when ICE has degraded into a largely lawless and authoritarian organization, since you can imagine most immigrants wouldn't want to say a word to any police officer unless they at least have the protections of the 2017 TRUST act in place.

Now, what I'm a bit confused about is why you are so up-in-arms about the existence of this law instead of the violation of this law. Surely if you are so law-abiding as you make out to be in your comments, you should be shouting for legal action against the police officers involved in breaking the law.





What Happened When I Tried to Replace Myself with ChatGPT in My English Classroom


Like many teachers at every level of education, I have spent the past two years trying to wrap my head around the question of generative AI in my English classroom. To my thinking, this is a question that ought to concern all people who like to read and write, not just teachers and their students. Today’s English students are tomorrow’s writers and readers of literature. If you enjoy thoughtful, consequential, human-generated writing—or hope for your own human writing to be read by a wide human audience—you should want young people to learn to read and write. College is not the only place where this can happen, of course, but large public universities like UVA, where I teach, are institutions that reliably turn tax dollars into new readers and writers, among other public services. I see it happen all the time.

There are valid reasons why college students in particular might prefer that AI do their writing for them: most students are overcommitted; college is expensive, so they need good grades for a good return on their investment; and AI is everywhere, including the post-college workforce. There are also reasons I consider less valid (detailed in a despairing essay that went viral recently), which amount to opportunistic laziness: if you can get away with using AI, why not?

It was this line of thinking that led me to conduct an experiment in my English classroom. I attempted the experiment in four sections of my class during the 2024-2025 academic year, with a total of 72 student writers. Rather than taking an “abstinence-only” approach to AI, I decided to put the central, existential question to them directly: was it still necessary or valuable to learn to write? The choice would be theirs. We would look at the evidence, and at the end of the semester, they would decide by vote whether A.I. could replace me.

What could go wrong?


In the weeks that followed, I had my students complete a series of writing assignments with and without AI, so that we could compare the results.

My students liked to hate on AI, and tended toward food-based metaphors in their critiques: AI prose was generally “flavorless” or “bland” compared to human writing. They began to notice its tendency to hallucinate quotes and sources, as well as its telltale signs, such as the weird prevalence of em-dashes, which my students never use, and sentences that always include exactly three examples. These tics quickly became running jokes, which made class fun: flexing their powers of discernment proved to be a form of entertainment. Without realizing it, my students had become close readers.

During these conversations, my students expressed views that reaffirmed their initial survey choices, finding that AI wasn’t great for first drafts, but potentially useful in the pre- or post-writing stages of brainstorming and editing. I don’t want to overplay the significance of an experiment with only 72 subjects, but my sense of the current AI discourse is that my students’ views reflect broader assumptions about when AI is and isn’t ethical or effective.

It’s increasingly uncontroversial to use AI to brainstorm, and to affirm that you are doing so: just last week, the hosts of the New York Times’s tech podcast spoke enthusiastically about using AI to brainstorm for the podcast itself, including coming up with interview questions and summarizing and analyzing long documents, though of course you have to double-check AI’s work. One host compares AI chatbots to “a very smart assistant who has a dozen Ph.D.s but is also high on ketamine like 30 percent of the time.”



Wplace Is Exploding Online Amid a New Era of Youth Protest


WPlace is a desktop app that takes its cue from Reddit’s r/place, a sporadic experiment where users placed pixels on a small blank canvas every few minutes. On Wplace, anyone can sign up to add coloured pixels to a world map – each user able to place one every 30 seconds. By internet standards one pixel every 30 seconds is glacial, and that is part of what makes it so powerful. In just a few weeks since its launch tens, if not, hundreds of thousands of drawings have appeared.

Scrolling to my corner of Scotland, I found portraits of beloved pets, anime favourites, pride flags, football crests. In Kyiv, a giant Hatsune Miku dominates the sprawl alongside a remembrance garden where a user asked others to leave hand drawn flowers. Some pixels started movements. At one point there was just a single wooden ship flying a Brazilian flag off Portugal. Soon, a fleet appeared, a tongue-in-cheek invasion.

Across the diversity and chaos of the Wplace world map, nothing else feels like Gaza. In most cities, the art is made by those who live there. Palestinians do not have this opportunity: physical infrastructure is destroyed while people are murdered. Their voices, culture, and experiences are erased in real time. So, others show up for them, transforming the space on the map into a living mosaic of grief and care.

No algorithm, no leaders, but on Wplace, collective actions emerge organically. A movement stays visible only because people choose to maintain it, adding pixels, repairing any damage caused by others drawing over it. In that sense it works like any protest camp or memorial in the physical world: it survives only if people tend it. And here, those people are scattered across continents, bound not by geography but by a shared refusal to let what they care about disappear from view.



Open Lemmy comment threads in Mastodon?


Since both lemmy and Mastodon use the fediverse, is it possible to view comment threads under posts from lemmy in Mastodon? How to find a link that works in both/ is it related to the posts id?

Would these work with #hashtags ?

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in reply to scratsearcher 🔍🔮📊🎲

For example here is a Lemmy thread: discuss.tchncs.de/post/4196495…

Here is the same thread on Mastodon: floss.social/@kde/114960515064…

So it is possible if it has been federated to both. There are different reasons why that might happen, in this case it is because that thread's OP posted it on Mastodon but mentioned a Lemmy community.

Another reason why it might happen is that a Mastodon user is following a Lemmy community or user.


"This Week in Plasma" brings the news that Plasma 6.5 will have automatic day/night theme switching, that you can choose which Global Themes to show on the Quick Settings page, and that you can set dynamic wallpaper coloration to be based on the background color scheme or the time of day, or always light, or always dark.

blogs.kde.org/2025/08/02/this-…

@kde@lemmy.kde.social

#Plasma6 #OpenSource #FreeSoftware #desktop


in reply to scratsearcher 🔍🔮📊🎲

I see this post on Akkoma by #Fediverse and answered it. Another person from dot social on Mastodon also commented it. It's weird that those comments can't be readed here in the post. I've tried to comment from there before and seems to work. So I'm not sure what happens when you interact outside of Lemmy.

Links to comments fe.disroot.org/notice/Ax6QMkVf…
mastodon.social/@ambuj/1150218…

Questa voce è stata modificata (4 settimane fa)



UK Asks People to Delete Emails In Order to Save Water During Drought




UK Asks People to Delete Emails In Order to Save Water During Drought


It’s a brutally hot August across the world, but especially in Europe where high temperatures have caused wildfires and droughts. In the UK, the water shortage is so bad that the government is urging citizens to help save water by deleting old emails. It really helps lighten the load on water hungry datacenters, you see.

The suggestion came in a press release posted on the British government’s website Tuesday after a meeting of its National Drought Group. The release gave an update on the status of the drought, which is bad. The Wye and Ely Ouse rivers are at their lowest ever recorded height and “five areas are officially in drought, with six more experiencing prolonged dry weather following the driest six months to July since 1976,” according to the release. It also listed a few tips to help people save on water.
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The tips included installing a rain butt to collect rainwater for gardening, fixing leaks the moment they happen, taking shorter showers, and getting rid of old data. “Delete old emails and pictures as data centres require vast amounts of water to cool their systems,” the press release suggested.

Datacenters suck up an incredible amount of water to keep their delicate equipment cool. The hotter it is, the more water it uses and a heatwave spikes the costs of doing business. But old emails lingering in cloud servers are a drop in the bucket for a data center compared to processing generative AI requests.

A U.S. A Government Accountability Office report from earlier this year estimated that 60 queries of an AI system consumed about a liter of water, or roughly 1.67 Olympic sized swimming pools for the 250,000,000 queries generated in the U.S. every day. The World Economic Forum has estimated that AI datacenters will consume up to 1.7 trillion gallons of water every year by 2027. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman has disputed these estimates, saying that an average ChatGPT query uses “roughly one fifteenth of a teaspoon” of water.

Downing Street announced plans in January to “turbocharge AI” in the U.K. The plan includes billions of pounds earmarked for the construction of massive water-hungry datacenters, including a series of centers in Wales that will cost about $16 billion. The announcement about the AI push said it will create tens of thousands of jobs. It doesn’t say anything about where the water will come from.

In America, people are learning that living next to these massive AI data centers is a nightmare that can destroy their air and water quality. People who live next to massive Meta-owned datacenters in Georgia have complained of a lack of water pressure and diminished quality since the data centers moved in. In Colorado, local government and activists are fighting tech companies attempting to build massive data centers in a state that struggled with drought before the water-hungry machines moved in.

Like so many other systemic issues linked to climate change and how people live in the 21st century, small-scale personal solutions like “delete your old emails” won’t solve the problem. The individual water bill for a person’s old photos is nothing compared to the gallons of water required by large corporate clients running massive computers.

“We are grateful to the public for following the restrictions, where in place, to conserve water in these dry conditions,” Helen Wakeham, the UK Environment Agency’s Director of Water, said in the press release. “Simple, everyday choices—such as turning off a tap or deleting old emails—also really helps the collective effort to reduce demand and help preserve the health of our rivers and wildlife.”

Representatives from the UK Government did not immediately return 404 Media’s request for comment.




Is Astute Graphics plugin 40MB or 678MB?


Edit: It seems that it may be 40MB and that the other 629 MB is from the Texturino plugin that generally gets bundled with it. I believe it is just two separated direct downloads. Not sure why there would be inconsistencies in the file size though (669MB vs 678MB)

Note: I am not requesting for a link nor a source, but rather I just want to know if I am direct downloading the correct file. Specifically, is the bundle supposed to be 40MB or 678MB?

I found torrented versions are 678MB, but direct downloaded versions are only 40MB. motka (dot) net (from the megathread) had one for 678MB, but the download is a 404 sadly.

Also, is the latest version 3.9.1? I see direct download ones showing up as 4.1.0, and 4.2.0 (which doesn't seem right to me)

Thank you.

Questa voce è stata modificata (1 mese fa)
in reply to Yourname942

40MB can't be it. Check rsload. I gave some details in your other post.
Questa voce è stata modificata (1 mese fa)


Your CV is not fit for the 21st century


The job market is queasy and since you're reading this, you need to upgrade your CV. It's going to require some work to game the poorly trained AIs now doing so much of the heavy lifting. I know you don't want to, but it's best to think of this as dealing with a buggy lump of undocumented code, because frankly that's what is between you and your next job.

A big reason for that bias in so many AIs is they are trained on the way things are, not as diverse as we'd like them to be. So being just expensively trained statistics, your new CV needs to give them the words most commonly associated with the job you want, not merely the correct ones.

That's going to take some research and a rewrite to get it looking like those it was trained to match. You need to be adding synonyms and dependencies because the AIs lack any model of how we actually do IT, they only see correlations between words. One would hope a network engineer knows how to configure routers, but if you just say Cisco, the AI won't give it as much weight as when you say both, nor can you assume it will work out that you actually did anything to the router, database or code, so you need to explicitly say what you did.

Fortunately your CV does not have to be easy to read out loud, so there is mileage in including the longer versions of the names of the more relevant tools you've mastered, so awful phrases like "configured Fortinet FortiGate firewall" are helpful if you say it once, as does using all three F words elsewhere. This works well for the old fashioned simple buzzword matching still widely used.


This is all so fucked.


in reply to cyborganism

I spent about a decade as a KDE developer.

KDE has this mindset where if someone wants to implement something they think is cool, and the code is clean and mostly bug free, well -- have at it! Ever wonder why there's 300 options for everything?

Usually (because there's a bunch of people trying to optimize the core for speed and load times and such) this also means that the unused code-paths are required to not contribute negatively to things like load times. So a plugin like this that doesn't get loaded by default unless enabled, and thus doesn't harm everyone else's performance. It also means that if it stops working in the future and starts to bitrot, it can be dropped without affecting the core code.

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