Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 5th October 2025 - awful.systems
Want to wade into the sandy surf of the abyss? Have a sneer percolating in your system but not enough time/energy to make a whole post about it? Go forth and be mid: Welcome to the Stubsack, your first port of call for learning fresh Awful you’ll near-instantly regret.
Any awful.systems sub may be subsneered in this subthread, techtakes or no.
If your sneer seems higher quality than you thought, feel free to cut’n’paste it into its own post — there’s no quota for posting and the bar really isn’t that high.
The post Xitter web has spawned soo many “esoteric” right wing freaks, but there’s no appropriate sneer-space for them. I’m talking redscare-ish, reality challenged “culture critics” who write about everything but understand nothing. I’m talking about reply-guys who make the same 6 tweets about the same 3 subjects. They’re inescapable at this point, yet I don’t see them mocked (as much as they should be)Like, there was one dude a while back who insisted that women couldn’t be surgeons because they didn’t believe in the moon or in stars? I think each and every one of these guys is uniquely fucked up and if I can’t escape them, I would love to sneer at them.
(Credit and/or blame to David Gerard for starting this.)
Google is blocking AI searches for Trump and dementia
Google is blocking AI searches for Trump and dementia
Google does not show AI search results for the query “does trump show signs of dementia” even though it will show AI search results for similar searches about other presidents.Jay Peters (The Verge)
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Forget the spokesperson, just ask Google AI directly:
AI on Google Search, including the AI Overviews in search, does not provide summaries on topics involving Donald Trump and dementia. This is due to risk aversion, sensitivity to political topics, and recent legal challenges. Instead, these searches return a list of traditional web links.Reasons for the lack of response
- Risk of misinformation: AI-generated conclusions about a public figure's health could spread misinformation. The mental acuity of Donald Trump and President Joe Biden, the oldest presidents in U.S. history, is a topic of public discussion.
- Avoiding political sensitivity: AI models often have restrictions on sensitive or controversial topics to avoid biased responses. Google and other tech companies are cautious about how their AI products respond to election-related or partisan queries.
- Legal history with Trump: Google's handling of Trump-related content may be influenced by recent legal and political issues. In 2025, Google paid a $24.5 million settlement in a lawsuit related to the suspension of Trump's YouTube account.
- Inconsistent application of AI summaries: Some users report that searches about other politicians, like Barack Obama or Joe Biden, may return an AI-generated response, though this varies. This inconsistency has led to criticism that the AI applies selective censorship.
Google's statement
A Google spokesperson stated that AI Overview and AI Mode do not always show answers to all queries, especially sensitive or complex ones. The company suggests that users rely on traditional search results in such cases.
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Instead, these searches return a list of traditional web links.
"Oh...oh okay. So you know what that is. Why are unable to provide traditional web links for ALL my searches? Because, I'm gonna be honest with you Google. I never asked for you to 'summarize' my web results and the fact that you can turn it off at your discretion tells me that you could turn it off for everyone."
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We need to concern ourselves with what the corporations do.
Who gives a shit how they explain themselves?
Once the corps do something egregiously bad, we should not ask for an explanation. We should insist they change how they behave. Period.
So you're saying that we should do more AI searches for "Trump Dementia"
... and use variations of it like ... "Trump old losing his mind", "Trump old senile", "Trump dementia don", "Donny Dementia", "Ding Dong Dementia Donny Trump"
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"what does dementia look like in 47th presidents"
Works good, search gets the wink and nudge.
also works if you replace "trump" with "the president of the usa" in your search:
edit: it seems like it's inserting Biden into the prompt in the background now...
Wtf, confirmed. Ask about any person, any president on if they have dementia or not and it'll answer
Ask about trump and it refused to interact, just dumps a search results window with funnily enough the first result being a page about how Google is censoring this
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The incentives don't allow for this shit in an organization like Google. They can only respond to stock price and earnings.
Very likely someone back channeled a demand and they folded like a deck of cards.
So the team responsible for that AI box added Trump dementia to the list of things it won't respond to.
The team responsible for the news bits didn't get the request so that just shows up in its place.
True for the organization as a whole, but a pissed off engineer or two could have done it, and the people above them are just leaning on "it's the algorithm" since they don't agree with the censorship either.
I'm sure the C Suite will step in and make them change it but it takes time for them to address the issue.
I'm not saying that's what is going on, but I've witnessed my own department head pull similar tricks, albeit his tricks weren't as high stakes as this would be.
For fucks sake! Who really cares what Google’s shitty AI does? You can still search articles written by actual human beings. Has AI become so fundamental to our daily routine that we’re going to upset ourselves over what info the sleazeballs that created it allow it to produce?
Maybe try reading real information?
Oh so youre saying that AI companies can control what the AI says?
So meta letting their AI sext with children was intentional then...
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Kagi uses Bing as its primary search index AFAIK, so no Google search API there.
That said, it does run entirely on Google Cloud Services, which I personally find ironic.
So what your saying is it doesn't rely on just one but two massive corps to actually deliver it's product which is ment to be an alterative to those very products?
Kek
Kagi's summaries are great.
They're hidden by default, requiring you to click the button first. They don't extrapolate too much. And their sources will be the exact same links you got from the search.
The post is likely referring to a long-standing controversy around Brendan Eich, the founder and CEO of Brave (the browser and search engine company). In 2008, Eich donated $1,000 to support California's Proposition 8, a ballot measure that banned same-sex marriage (later overturned by courts). This came to light in 2014 when he was briefly appointed CEO of Mozilla, leading to widespread backlash from employees, users, and activists who viewed it as anti-LGBTQ+. Eich resigned from Mozilla after just 11 days amid the outcry, expressing regret for causing pain but not fully recanting his views.
Some people, including in the LGBTQ+ community and allies, continue to avoid or criticize Brave on these grounds, seeing it as support for leadership with historically discriminatory stances. This isn't a "new" issue in 2025—it's tied to events from over a decade ago—but it persists in discussions about ethical tech choices. Brave has faced other unrelated controversies (e.g., ad practices), but this one specifically relates to anti-LGBT perceptions.
For more details:
- [Wikipedia on Brendan Eich](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brendan_Eich)
- [Article on the Mozilla controversy](https://www.osnews.com/story/27646/the-new-mozilla-ceos-political-past-is-imperiling-his-present/)
- [Recent discussion on Brave controversies](https://www.reddit.com/r/browsers/comments/1j1pq7b/list_of_brave_browser_controversies/)
- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43300333well fuck! brave is the one browser that fits all my needs.
i disagree. Google's results went to shit for me years ago. the first page was literally just ads, sponsored links that had nothing to do with my search or looked like what i was looking for but were phishing/malware sites, regular results that were less about what i searched and more about what google found more appropriate for me.
i started to use duckduckgo despite its incredibly stupid name and it's just like old times for me. except now it has AI assist which you can turn off or set how often you want to see it.
two things that helped sell me DDG was bangs and DDG browser. i got used to using DDG browser as default on mobile except for things i wanted to have persistent sessions on, which are very rare it turns out. bangs also help you directly search specific sites or even google in the unlikely event i would want to try to search that monstrosity instead. if you search for something and you don't find what you want and want to try Google instead, just add !g to the search and it directs you to Google search instead. !gi for Google images.
there are tons of other bangs, like !w for Wikipedia and !imdb for... you'll never guess but i use it sometimes.
Kagi.
The downside is that it costs $10 per month.
The upside is:
- Privacy first
- You can pin websites to the top of results, promote them so they appear higher, demote them so they appear lower, or have them completely removed
- Lenses - quickly tell Kagi what type of results you want (News sources, academic articles, forum posts, programming sites, small web, etc.)
- Snaps - search shortcuts kinda like bangs. Eg, typing
@wis the same as typingsite:wikipedia.com - An actual good AI summary. Completely unobtrusive - only activated when you press the button, doesn't overextrapolate your request, and will only source the same results that you get from the search
- Direct image results
When I first migrated a couple years ago, it was a bit worse than Google but pretty close. Nowadays, I find it to be much much better. It's honestly close to how Google was back in 2015 before they made it garbage.
TIL there are extensions to automatically expand abbreviations in Firefox
https://www.perplexity.ai/search/extension-that-automatically-e-Yxr0E2NcSgyyssLO6O4hwg
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Sulfur Hexafluoride: The Nightmare Greenhouse Gas That’s Just Too Useful To Stop Using
Sulfur hexafluoride (SF6) is not nearly as infamous as CO2, with the latter getting most of the blame for anthropogenic climate change. Yet while measures are being implemented to curb the release …Hackaday
In electrical distribution, there are plenty of alternatives, I've worked with electrical utilities for a little. In that city, most residential transformers and some legacy switchgear (some up to 80 years old) use mineral oil. In the 90s SF6 switchgear was common to be installed, but the current models of medium-voltage switchgear have neither. And some modern commercial alternatives are appearing for transformer winding isolation and coolant.
The issue comes with higher-voltage switching, such as at substations. If you want to use air separation there, then you'll need lots and lots of space between to prevent arcing. Since that is not always achievable, that's where vacuums or agents like SF6 are used instead.
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For unauthorized scrapers? Definitely
For paid API usage? That tends to not be public for obvious reasons but, allegedly, people have, allegedly, done tests and found "deleted" content in the results.
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Version control mother fucker, do you speak it?
But, in all seriousness: That is what they use for the comments. It is why a lot of the mass delete tools were "accidentally" undone during The Exodus. Because it was literally just rolling back. Theoretically there might be a limited number of revisions available but if you believe that I have a bridge to sell you. Because imagine if A Brown Person wrote a message then edited it five times so that Chloe couldn't alert Jack Bauer to who to torture
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Ive heard the same but I haven't seen real evidence anywhere, so im skeptical. But yes I agree, if they CAN get that data, it means the training data is better-ish....
But we are still on this site for a reason 😀
I mean... if the reason you left is because you didn't want your data scraped then... the fediverse is one of the worst places to go? Because anyone can run a modified lemmy instance to pull everything through the tools specifically designed to do that.
Let alone just scraping websites that don't have teams of big corporate lawyers.
Huh.
Does anyone else think that ChatGPT is still using the data, they’re just not referencing Reddit directly?
This is how you can tell Reddit’s $200+/share price is insane. Over 10% of its value dropped based on a different unprofitable company’s references to ingested content.
Yikes!!
While I don't agree with the reddit valuation to begin with...
that is actually how the stock market "should" work? Reddit is a company that, at its core, produces data to sell to other companies. If other companies choose to (say they are not going to) use that data, then the value of reddit drops. That is literally supply and demand.
If Stanley's Sprockets' sprockets are a vital part of iphones then Stanley's Sprockets is going to be a very valuable company. If Apple changes to the other dude's product, Stanley's Sprockets has now lost a lot of value.
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The ads/manipulation does a thing that helps you attain profit or power. You want to manipulate what people see and pay for... so you pay reddit to allow you to mass deploy bots bypassing moderator levers. They have the community, you have the objective, you pay for the help of doing this and they probably have their own bot farms included.
They can even internally flag these entries as bots and use their AI partnerships to analyze what works on users and what doesn't to trigger a specific response, and to avoid using techniques that get called out as bots.
They have their public 'sponsored' content, but I promise for big spenders they have a program that has no sponsorship callout. They probably brand it with nice fancy marketing terminology that makes it sound like you're an angel doing god's work by driving conversions or some stupid shit.
no actual path to profitablity
You don't think reddit can make money from advertising?
The people in power don’t care about people with a few shares. You can sell all your shares right now and nobody would notice.
Reddit’s power benefits whomever wants to push an agenda and a narrative while minimizing any info that could counter that.
Companies pay for API access so profits go up and stock value go up.
I assume the reddit stock doesn't pay dividends based on profits. But if you bought for 10 dollars and now it is 500 dollars? You can sell some of that stuck to people hoping it will go up to 1000 dollars for a solid profit. And so forth.
And if it DOES pay dividends (some kinds of stocks do) then a percentage of those profits are directly sent to the share holders based on how many shares they have.
see any return in their investment short of managing to sell the stock for more than they bought it
So... it is a stock that doesn't pay dividends? Like... that is what stocks are.
Homie? I assume you are just looking to hear "reddit bad" and... it is.
But if you are actually attempting to discuss things in good faith? You are just describing stocks and you should REALLY educate yourself on the subject if you ever intend to invest beyond retirement and mutual funds... which most people shouldn't in the first place but that is an even bigger tangent.
I am looking at it froma purely financial standpoint. The inky thing Reddit really produces is semi-anonymous data that is tied to an email address. The quality of that data is iffy at best, while they have massive expenses just to keep the site operating. They can charge for their API calls, but they will never be able to use that to generate actual profit since no one will ever pay for it at that price point.
Something like Reddit or twitter are useful if they are owned by powerful individuals or corporations that wish to influence the public. It is worthless as a strictly financial vehicle because it produces no profit and has assets that are not not equal to the cost of maintain them. You would only buy stock in reddit in the hopes that some billionaire thinks they can do a better job running it than Elon Musk did with twitter. Otherwise reddit stock is just a volatile place to park your cash in the hope that you can sell it for more later.
Which takes me back to my original comment about the kitten stomping factory. It gives value to a select group of people with a specific aim, but it is worthless as an investment vehicle because it owns little, produces nothing, and has massive liabilities. If you want to exert power and influence, it's useful. If you only care about making money, it's useless. People who buy and sell stock are mostly only interested in making money.
I am looking at it froma purely financial standpoint.
Then let's do that.
Reddit has three official and one implied revenue streams.
Of the official, we have:
Ad sales. This is where most "user data" actually comes into play and is the idea of building a profile of each user that can be used to put them into categories for targeted ads. That might be a simple as "likes video games, hates women, curious about learning to pee while sitting down". Or it might be "doesn't realize that guy at the bar took off the condom and is now pregnant". This is demonstrably profitable and doesn't seem to be effected.
The next is people buying reddit premium because they are idiots.
The last official oneis the actual topic of this thread. Reddit sells API access to, among others, companies training LLMs. ChatGPT has, allegedly, stopped using them. Thus, one of their major sources of revenue dried up and their stock dropped as a result.
As for the rest:
Otherwise reddit stock is just a volatile place to park your cash in the hope that you can sell it for more later.
Ah, so you DO know what the definition of a stock is. You just refuse to accept it because the word "reddit" is involved.
The vast majority of stocks are horrible to even consider purchasing as an individual. A general rule of thumb is the only ones you should even consider buying are those with dividends where you just buy a few shares and every couple years check your investment account and transfer the excess to your savings.
The rest you rely entirely on mutual funds (and similar). Where the idea is that an investment group has a large pool of money and they try to stay ahead of minor fluctuations and often outright bet against themselves. So you might have some funds earmarked at assuming reddit will go up and other funds that take the Oracle announcement as a hint that OpenAI spending on Reddit might decrease and sell the stocks ahead of time to buy shares in coca cola instead or whatever.
But the thing to understand is that that is happening to basically every single stock. Because the fundamental idea of the stock market is about leaving others holding the bag.
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Which is also generally very detectable (if you actually care) and is generally used to push (monetized) social media and not the answer to "what is the difference between normal and merino wool?" and so forth.
The vast majority of the "user" interaction and memes is not the product (at play. it IS useful for societal manipulation but there are better platforms for that). It is all those useful questions and answers that people get pissy about folk deleting the answers to.
Because people, generally, weren't searching for team edward or jacob reddit but instead the fuck is a renesme reddit or LED versus fluourescent bulbs reddit and so forth. And the community labeling of the latter is generally REALLY good.
Things DO get messy when the question becomes best synthetic boxer briefs reddit but... it is incredibly rare for an astro turfing campaign to be strong enough to get a genuinely bad product "on top". You tend to just get an overly expensive branded white label in the top slot which may actually be identical to the "real" best one anyway. But considering you are relying on human opinion regardless, that isn't far off of what you were gonna get without said astroturfing.
There are absolutely vote manipulation campaigns still happening.
See this from 12 days ago: old.reddit.com/r/privacy/comme…
12 days ago almost every top-level comment was below -50 and responses were untouched.
As a user of the website for many years it's entirely obvious that a majority of the website is gamed (besides its niche corners). Reddit's bot prevention mechanisms just fuck VPN users - they are wholly inadequate.
That thread is evidence of a organized bot campaign that they had 12 days to clean up (and didn't). It's naive to believe that the rest of the website isn't similarly (and less obviously) affected by bots - with vote manipulation still standing.
Are you somebody invested financially in Reddit? Genuine question.
Those niche subreddits can also have their moments, too. Maybe it's not bots, but there are plenty of shills that have been caught in various niche subreddits I've frequented over the years (thanks to unpaid moderators).
No, I'm not. I don't care at all if they're successful or go under.
Sure, but again it's not likely to be most. You don't seem to realize how hard it is to get data that is already classified. That stuff is gold to people developing AI. Most of the work in data science is cleaning data and getting it into a usable form.
It's noise, a very large part of it. Reddit is financially motivated to make the data appear as if it is signal. It isn't - they have taken extremely minimal steps to ensure actual human participation.
This doesn't matter to AI companies, but it only warps that technology more and more. AI is a sinking ship with current methodologies. Reddit will die when the AI bubble bursts and those involved with Reddit already cashed out enough to be filthy rich.
If you can land me a gig engaging with back end data from Reddit in a neutral capacity, it'd likely be pretty easy for a layman like me to confirm that it's largely noise. The AI companies buying data are getting scammed and you are free to remain neutral or plainly disagree with my assessment in the absence of concrete data that is publicly obtainable.
No company is immune to bots and inorganic engagement, least of all Reddit with the strategies employed.
Reddit is presumably the only party with the ability to determine which data/interaction is truly legitimate or isn't.
I have a mostly neutral opinion on AI/LLMs, but I have a negative assessment of the companies driving it unsustainably. They are able to pay big money because AI is where money is flowing. When these actors crash the economy with their hubris, please write back to me - maybe I won't seem so weird at that point.
Meta/OpenAI openly pirating everything they can to train their LLMs is a good example of how data hungry these AI/etc. companies are.
Is it plausible that companies request that Reddit narrows down data e.g. by demographic, geographic location, or likelihood of being a real person and request that data for purchase? Sure, but the LLMs seemingly require all data that exists that these companies can get their hands on - I highly doubt with the scale of data being consumed (and data theft being committed) that the big players care too much about Reddit data being tainted. If anything, it might even be desirable to them.
Yes, but Oracle's stock skyrocketed based on the unprofitable OpenAI promising to buy >100B worth of AI data center space from Oracle. Nvidia stock also surged on the news, since Oracle builds those data centers with Nvidia chips
Obviously OpenAI doesn't have the money to pay Oracle themselves, so Nvidia has helpfully given them the money
So now we have an incredibly large cyclic corporate dependency of money from Nvidia -> OpenAI -> Oracle, then back to Nvidia. Definitely not a financial disaster waiting to happen
They haven't even spent the fucking money yet. It's just announcements of intentions, with a fraction of that $100B in outlays. Nobody seems to want to say who gets to be the one holding the $100B at the end of it, either.
Presumably they'll all just do a stock swap and tell their vendors "We're good for it, check's in the mail"?
This is how you can tell Reddit’s $200+/share price is insane.
Well, that and the P/E is 180. Typical target P/E on a stock is 15-20, depending on your anticipation of its growth. But we're expected to believe Reddit's earnings will be 9x their current income in... some nebulous amount of time?
Like, its silly to get excited about a company this hyperinflated seeing a tiny slide off its new peak. But also, you can't help be bearish on a firm this flimsy.
The entire stock market has become a meme stock pyramid scheme. No price makes sense; it's all glorified gambling making life on this planet worse for most living things.
⚜︎ arscyni.cc: modernity ∝ nature.
⚜︎ arsCynic: modernity ∝ nature | Angelino Desmet
A sentient stack of stardust's thoughts on nothing and everything, influenced by Cynicism, pursuing modernity in proportion to nature.www.arscyni.cc
Oh no!
Anyways what's everyone having for lunch? I'm having bean burritos.
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What other kinds of burrito would you recommend besides bean burrito?
Try chorizo, potato and scrambled eggs sometime.
Absolutely kickass breakfast burrito, get real chorizo tho
Try chorizo, potato and scrambled eggs sometime.
That's awful greasy for someone who has the flu.
Well, I said "try ... sometime", but also... greasy foods are to be particularly avoided when one has a flu?
I... its not that I don't believe that is a thing that does or could make sense, I've just never heard of that before.
Also, you can prepare chorizo, potatoes and scrambled eggs in ways that are not as greasy, sure they are still greasier than many other things, but you don't have to do it in maybe, typical street vendor or highly rapid restaurant fashion, with grease dripping out like a cheap pizza slice at a bar.
Well, I said “try … sometime”, but also… greasy foods are to be particularly avoided when one has a flu?
health.osu.edu/wellness/exerci…
Foods to avoid when you have the flu
Oddly enough, some foods may make your flu symptoms worse – or better – without you ever realizing it. Learn what to eat and avoid when you have the flu from an Ohio State expert.Kacie Vavrek MS, RD, CSSD (The Ohio State University)
Oh my god I somehow forgot that Reddit IPO8ng means I get to read stories like this.
Oh no, the world's most poorly managed and funded corporate social media website's with a publically traded stock is tanking, oh nooooo!
Ahahahah!
Reddit banned me today for making a joke that the patch title for Guild Wars 2 could match real life events.
What is the patch name?
The Mad King and his Lunatic Court.
Permanently banned for what?
Harassment.
That's what pandering to the bigger techbros spez gets.
Being there stopped being fun ever since the shits started running a massive profile-and-purge program powered by fucking AI, as even casually mentioning violence against right-wingers or POTUS and his merry chucklefucks gets your account flagged for banning. That's why there's now a chilling effect.
finance.yahoo.com/news/reddit-…
Yeah, and it aged hard like milk.
rdx.overdevs.com/comments.html…
RDX for Reddit - Reddit Viewer
rdx for reddit is a fast, lightweight mobile Web Viewer for Reddit app based on Apollo. Mobile friendly reader for Reddit. Browse rdx for reddit app without Ads.rdx.overdevs.com
I got my reddit ban for replying to someone in world news. Their comment was saying spain should declare war on israel. I forget why, this before the flotilla though.
I got banned for saying that was unlikely as israel is a nuclear power.
you dont even have to mention anything you can just get banned for creating a new account, or firing up an years old account, since they will consider those as bots. it happens randomly though. so much so, the shadowban sub had so many of these bans because they got banned for little reason.(besides the one that have multiple accounts get shadowbanned).
they started limiting the amount of time the shadowban questions stay open to silence any discussion of it.
no OP.
I got the F out and deleted my old posts every time they restored them until they stayed gone.
I suggested drawing in chalk on the street outside of the governor's mansion, to protest the GIANT chalk Christ she had commissioned across the driveway to celebrate Easter one year.
It wasn't even a serious call to action.
But I was more wondering about the "sprich deutsch" Part - that's usually more of a racist thing, and therefore right wing politics. But if you don't see public transport as political you might be right-wing overall?
...are we now just connecting things to put everyone in right corner?
God i hate online people...
Guess being against corperates, for self reliance, public owner ship, pro a european state and untouchable democracy, and so on, is now "right wing".
"Sprich deutsch" in litterly ich_iel is litterly the norm! Thats the joke! Everything is worded german. Guess such is now "right wing".
"Everything is politics" omfg. Yeah nah. Thats enought Internet for this month, and it only started. Crazy!
bro just skipped the "usually" part and made a rant against things being judged politically.
I think the "everything has to be written in German" part of ich_iel is also establishing a rather nationalist online culture through linguistic homogeny and illegibility to outsiders. So, yeah, you may not want to recognize the impact your words may have, but it's clear to many others.
I still think it builds an attitude that is toxic to outsiders and can potentially push someone into a right-wing position. I have witnessed first hand how someone fell down a fascist rabbit hole via online places touting language superiority.
Mine was telling someone it was unlikely that spain would declare war on israel, it being a nuclear nation....
Banned for 'glorifying violence.'
i think people were shocked that all thier accounts were banned simulataneously, despite some of them not participating in the same subs, around the same time. they just went after every account in your ip address,device or browser. even if time has passed that a subreddit ban has been lifted in your old accounts. the site filters/AI doesnt take that into account, and i suspect its intentional.
i noticed reddit is very wary of browser forks now too(google, firefox forks), theres a reason they dont like brave(because it hides your fingerprints by default)
deleting your account also wont stop them from finding your new accounts, they mostly archived that as well. they look at browser fingerprinting, device, device components, time zone discrepancy, browser size and VERSION, resolution,,,etc. if you use any paid service/trial service that can spoof any of these above and they arnt the correct versions, they can detect that.
and then theres the warming up period with new accounts(like not posting, reporting, or upvoting too fast after account creation)
Right, and if the moderation allows Nazi ideology to run rampant, you have a Nazi town. Especially when it's all mostly bots spewing Nazi talking points anyway.
Refusing to fight hate speech is tantamount to supporting it.
Does Reddit stock pay dividends or offer shareholder voting? Is most of it at least hell by their owners, giving at least a financial interest to having its value affected? Then it might as well be Yet Another Crypto Scam, in which case it isn't really going to affect Reddit because they've probably already cashed out.
What people don't realize is that the stock market is largely based off of on speculation on who's going to buy or sell when, the articles that tie it directly to how the company performing are basically fortune tellers either telling their customers what they want to hear or catering to their customers by manipulating how their readers will behave.
People use belief in the value of money to illustrate how crypto has value. The stock market is a far better analogy, and there are plenty of confidence scams to go along with it as well.
That's actually quite easy to explain. Reddits entire monetary value (or at least a very large portion) depends on how relevant it is as platform to mine user interactions - to use as training material for AI.
Reddit getting references less is a sign that the models, or the owning companies, value reddit data less compared to before.
You just described most tech stocks.
As Cory Doctrow explains:
the fundamental duty of every CEO of every high-growth tech company: explaining how his company will continue to grow. These growth stories are key, because growth stocks trade at a huge premium relative to the stocks of "mature" companies.
The fact that any AI company thought to train their LLM on the answers of Reddit users speaks to a fundamental misunderstanding of their own product (IMO)
LLMs aren't programmed to give you the correct answer. They're programmed to give you the most pervasive/popular answer on the assumption that most of the time that will also happen to be the right one.
So when you're getting your knowledge base from random jackasses on Reddit, where a good faith question like "What's the best way to get get gum out of my childs hair" get's two two good faith answers, and then a few dozen smart-ass answers that gets lots of replies and upvotes because they're funny. Guess which one your LLM is going to use.
People (and apparently even the creators themselves) think that an LLM is actually cognizent enough to be able to weed this out logically. But it can't. It's not an intelligence...it's a knowlege agreggator. And as with any aggregator, the same rule applies
garbage in, garbage out
Thats why I have stopped calling it ai. Its a dumbass buzzword just like cloud, that tech bros like to use but cant explain (or blockchain).
Its llms, and image generators/OCR (which has been around for decades), Using complex markov chains and a fuck ton of graphics cards. NOT AI. NOT AI.
I've had to start calling it AI because most people don't know what LLMs are, and noone cares to go through the explanation, including myself.
I'm afraid that, as these things go, AI has gained a new meaning by popular use, rather than the original meaning of the acronym.
No point fighting it anymore.
Maybe we just need to adjust and start saying GAI (generative ai). It has a nice ring to it too.
It is AI, along with a bunch of optimization algorithms, statistical decision trees (probably used in adaptive AI in games), etc. AI is a field in computer science that includes a ton of things many wouldn't consider AI.
Basically, if the solution doesn't come from direct commands but instead comes from some form of learning process, it's probably AI.
It's not "general AI", but it is in the field of AI.
I would argue we need to go back to Machine Learning.
The field is machine learning, generative machine learning etc.
This rebrand to AI is doing nothing but confusing people and building investor hype
Also fair.
I find the term machine learning more honest than artificial intelligence
It's more specific, sure, but there's nothing dishonest about using the same terminology that has been used for almost 100 years.
The disconnect is that average people have a different understanding of the term than is used in computer science, probably because of sci-fi films and whatnot. When I hear "AI," I think of the CS term, because that's my background, but when my family hears "AI," they think of androids and whatnot like in Bicentennial Man.
I don't know how to square that circle. Neither group here is wrong, but classifying something like ChatGPT as "AI," while correct, is misinterpreted by the public, who assume it's doing more than it is.
Exactly that.
If I were to google how to get gum out of my child's hair and then be directed to that same reddit post. I'd read through it and be pretty sure which were jokes and which were serious; we make such distinctions, as you say, every day without much effort.
LLMs simply don't have that ability. And the number of average people who just don't get that is mind-boggling to me.
I also find it weirdly dystopian that, if you sum that up, it kind of makes it sound like in order for an LLM to make the next step towards A.I. It needs a sense of humour. It needs the ability to weed through when the information it's digging from is serious, or just random jack-asses on the internet.
Which is turning it into a very very Star Trek problem.
Character designs
Taiwan refuses to move half of U.S.-bound chip production to American shores — trade discussion to be focused on Section 232 investigation for preferential deal on semiconductors
Taiwan refuses to move half of U.S.-bound chip production to American shores — trade discussion to be focused on Section 232 investigation for preferential deal on semiconductors
It wants to focus on tariffs instead of where it makes its chips.Jowi Morales (Tom's Hardware)
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The idea behind that fab was so US can continue to build weapons if Taiwan was under attack, this why it wasn't the latest technology. The weapons would still be important to defend it, but yeah this admin is signalling Taiwan won't get help and is asking for 50% so it won't suffer consequences of not helping them.
They also seem very dumb if they think they could spin 50% just like that even if Taiwan was completely on board with this.
Yeah, I think the whole idea of the US wanting the chips produced inside its own borders makes sense in a vacuum. China fucks around (which, sure, is against their character), chips are safe.
Obviously we don't live in a vacuum, and the US diplomatic mission is, at best, totally unreadable, and at worst, won't help anyone but itself.
As with just about any other nation, the US is using what is ostensibly it's only bargaining chip these days, their massive consumerism, knowing that Taiwan sells the majority of its chips to the US.
This play seems to be Trump's only play: Demand something outrageous, with some thinly veiled threats overlaying the demand. Get rejected. Receive counterproposal that is far, far less than initial demand. Tout superiority.
Good. It was a naked attempt at a shakedown, and also 100% a bluff.
It takes more than a few years to spin up a chip fab, with an outlay on the order of hundreds of billions to trillions of dollars. Even if they'd been eager to take the US up on the deal (and why would they want to relinquish a functional monopoly on cutting end processors?), there's no way they'd be dealing with the same administration by the time it was completed. Even if Trump was still in office, the fucker changes his mind every five minutes. Not conducive to long-term economic projects like this.
Now is emphatically not the time to undermine their strategic defense policy, which largely revolves around “if the CCP invades, we will melt our chip fabs to slag”.
TSMC won't have their edge forever. China's fabs are catching up quickly, with 5nm chips in production and 3nm chips possible in a few more years. This was a good strategy when China needed to import these chips and Taiwan had the market cornered. But if TSMC's rigged-to-explode labs go up in smoke after China's a major player in the market, that actually benefits Beijing.
Strapping yourself with Semtex might be a savvy play in a single moment, but it's not going to work long term.
That's before you consider the real threat Taiwan poses to China is as a launchpad for US strikes into the interior.
Oh I know - but I’m saying they should halt efforts now, because they’ve been going on for several years (I think close to 4-5?) at this point.
I was also under the impression that Mainland was still meaningfully behind the cutting edge, that TSMC was absolutely not resting on their laurels, and that the prospect of the CCP fabs fully catching up isn’t super likely. Out of curiosity, do you have any references/articles about recent ~~CSMC~~SMIC/etc lithography advancements?
The Chinese state industries have been happy enough to throw big chunks of their GDP at the problem of high end chip fab, and it's paying dividends.
That's not to say TSMC is idle, but the whole problem of living on the bleeding edge is that you've got nobody to crib from. All your next-gen advances have to be earned through high end R&D and brute force engineering and lots of money and time. Their rivals can reverse engineer their technology, learn from TSMC's mistakes, and generally coast in their wake.
What's sort of incredibly about America's Intel is that they haven't done any of this shit, clinging to their dead-end chip design long after its expiration date and missing the boom in demand for high end chips entirely.
Out of curiosity, do you have any references/articles about recent CSMC/etc lithography advancements?
Nothing you couldn't just Google up yourself, I'm sure. I picked up SMIC based on their advances in DUV lithography employed by ASML and it paid out big. The high margins on sale are justifying comparatively lower success rates of manufacturing.
Interesting, thanks. And yeah, I too find it utterly baffling at how Intel is turning into a has-been before our eyes. They were The Chip Guys for ages, and then the fucking quants got put in charge and carved away so much of the engineering leadership and underpinnings that it’s a husk of what it was in the 80s and 90s.
I would, however, point out that TSMC’s whole deal is “define, and produce at scale, the bleeding edge of integrated circuit designs”, so the bit about them cribbing off of people hasn’t really been a variable in their equations for at least a couple decades. They have been major (arguably, the predominant) pioneers in chip lithography for a while now.
so the bit about them cribbing off of people hasn’t really been a variable in their equations for at least a couple decades
That's meant to say they can't do that from the front of the pack. There's not much to crib from that they don't invent.
That's a burden on TMSC that guys like Samsung and SMIC don't suffer from, at least until they can match pace. For the time being, other firms can close in on TMSC by following in their footsteps (or, at least, avoiding their errors).
What’s sort of incredibly about America’s Intel is that they haven’t done any of this shit, clinging to their dead-end chip design long after its expiration date and missing the boom in demand for high end chips entirely.
This is the most baffling thing to me. How could Intel leadership be so incompetent? They had the inside track to hundreds of billions in revenue and just decided to coast.
How could Intel leadership be so incompetent?
For the leadership, it was a cash cow. They got a fat dividend doing very little, even as upstarts blasted past them.
They had the inside track to hundreds of billions in revenue and just decided to coast.
At some point, the effort to get from $10B to $100B isn't worth the pressure. How many extra yachts do I actually need?
Your points are exactly why it is surprising. Most executives don't think like me and you. If you give them a million dollars, they say they need 10 million. If you give them a billion dollars, they say they need 10 billion. There is no end to their greed. Look at how Google and Amazon are still trying to strong-arm their industries to get even more billions of dollars. Musk is out there demanding a trillion dollars.
CEOs and execs at large multinational corps like Intel don't usually coast. They might make strategic blunders, but they usually push to make as much money as they can. If they fail, they fall back on their golden parachutes. If they win, they get shitloads more money.
If you give them a million dollars, they say they need 10 million.
Sure. If you show up with a bag of money, they're going to tell you they need two bags.
But if you ask them to work twice as hard to get that second bag? Suddenly, you're asking too much.
CEOs and execs at large multinational corps like Intel don’t usually coast.
They do. They're just not the companies people get excited about. Tons of US business is conducted by C-levels who are barely more than figureheads, commanding massive salaries to glad hands a few friends in between golf games.
Steve Balmer is the out layer. Sam Alton is the out layer. Elon Musk is the norm.
Your points are exactly why it is surprising. Most executives don't think like me and you. If you give them a million dollars, they say they need 10 million. If you give them a billion dollars, they say they need 10 billion.
I think hidden in there is a misconception about capitalism, that its about competition and being the best. While its a nice myth for grade school civics about why we are capitalist its just not the case. Capitalism is about profit. As long as you have it and its growing you are doing well. Intel did get very complacent, but it was still projected to grow and be profitable.
China has the engineering talent and numbers to catch up for certain, but SMIC is not producing advanced chips in volumes, even as designs for next gens of chips and SMIC technology come out fast.
The big factor in all of this is that the market for chips in China is 5x+ that of US, and the business interests of anyone in the sector outside of China would be to choose China over US if they only had to pick one. US IP is going to expire soon enough, but is already abused for colonial power over global chip sector.
China is definitely at a mature point where home grown chips can already compete in phones/laptops (Huawei) and AI due to their energy infrastructure. They don't need to invade Taiwan to have useful electronics, and the home grown industry will accelerate faster than West's. While TSMC's margin of leadership will narrow, they will still be ahead for more than 5 years.
What? Taiwan doesn't want to give up its only strategic advantage? I'm shocked.
/uj
I'm curious how long it would take to build the supply chains and fabs to make the 50% things a reality.
Gee, I wonder why other countries would not want to move production to the US after ICE arrested the Koreans who were doing exactly that?
No way to know, I guess.
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It's quite interesting that no other country has managed to build a chip foundry that would even remotely rival TSMC.
Especially considering they use third-party lithography machines.
Not that they must do it, just a consideration.
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Hey, why don't you give us the one thing that protects you and floats your economy?
Just do it!
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"Give up your only bargaining chip otherwise we'll hurt you!"
Hmm wonder where I've seen this before...
ahem Russia-Ukraine ahem
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It probably would have been on the table if Kamala had won.
I mean, the democrats just had to have a primary, put in a populist and watch Trump get buried.
Instead we have this.
I mean sure but they're also more likely to agree to give America all their resources, factories, and land, and launch kamikazee attacks against mainland China until their population is expended under a dem president than Trump.
Either has a likelihood of approximately zero because it literally only benefits the US at the expense of Taiwan, and the US influence of its puppet government is only so strong, we still need to contend with local politics.
Because the Trump administration has proven itself to be dishonest and willing to go back on past agreements.
I’m not sure you’re aware the reputation America has given itself.
And why would anyone expect Taiwan to give on this? They don’t benefit at all.
Art of the deal my ass.
Yeah, that only worked on small contractors when he was building his casinos because they didn’t have the infinite Russian money for lawyers.
Turns out that doesn’t work so well on sovereign nations and international corporations.
Isn't it already failing anyway? en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TSMC_Ari…
Edit: arguable, I have no expertise in fab building so hard for me to say if the deviations from the initial plan have meaningful impact. Also my understanding is that it's as much an economical partnership as a political one, namely intertwining Taiwan with the US. It's kind of weakening the "silicon shield" but also create interdependence.
The Democrats Finally Grew a Spine
The Democrats Finally Grew a Spine
By daring Trump and the Republicans to shut down the government, the party is taking a stand six months after it should have.The New Republic
The US EPA Is Ending Greenhouse Gas Data Collection. Who Will Step Up to Fill the Gap?
With the agency no longer collecting emissions data from polluting companies, attention is turning to whether climate NGOs have the tools—and legal right—to fulfill this EPA function.
Archived copies of the article:
* archive.today
* web.archive.org
* ghostarchive.org — still loading at time of post
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also most hydrogen is a byproduct of fossil fuels. very little hydrogen is made with green energy.
edit: 95% of hydrogen is produced directly from fossil fuels. Truly "green"hydrogen is less than 1%.
climate.mit.edu/explainers/hyd…
Hydrogen
Hydrogen is the most abundant chemical substance in the universe. It can be used as a fuel that does not produce greenhouse gases when burned.MIT Climate Portal
Dont most people know that? I thought the promise is that you could establish a hydrogen infrastructure and it would get greener over time - similar to EV’s which get greener over time as power generation includes more renewables.
Not that I’m that naive but I thought that was the claim. Realistically it looks like corporate welfare to let fossil fuel companies keep a stranglehold on energy. One of the most satisfying parts of owning an EV is thinking about all that industry that no longer needs to exist. It’s not just the drilling and refining and shipping and military support for oppressive regimes worldwide, but also huge amounts of polluting and profiteering infrastructure to store and distribute gasoline to every street corner. It can all go
Dont most people know that?
most people do not know that in my experience.
thought the promise is that you could establish a hydrogen infrastructure and it would get greener over time - similar to EV’s which get greener over time as power generation includes more renewables.
why should we use renewables to produce hydrogen (not to mention develop an entirely new hydrogen infrastructure) when we could just use that renewable energy as it is? That's just adding extra steps and inefficiency for very little benefit, if any.
One of the most satisfying parts of owning an EV is thinking about all that industry that no longer needs to exist.
agreed.
why should we use renewables to produce hydrogen (not to mention develop an entirely new hydrogen infrastructure) when we could just use that renewable energy as it is? That's just adding extra steps and inefficiency for very little benefit, if any.
Because hydrogen isn't trying to replace the source of energy, it is trying to replace the storage of it, at present batteries are not nearly good enough for the EV only transportation boom, but hydrogen works and only really needs to deal with the volatility issue
Because hydrogen isn’t trying to replace the source of energy, it is trying to replace the storage of it
yes, but the point is renewables>battery storage is a more direct and efficient storage system than renewables>hydrogen which then has to be contained, shipped, and distributed for every refill/charge. Batteries you make once and recharge thousands of times which you can do with distribution through the grid from your local power utility (or even right at home if you have solar).
at present batteries are not nearly good enough for the EV only transportation boom, but hydrogen works and only really needs to deal with the volatility issue
it's not just volatility that's an issue. Even setting that aside, Hydrogen is difficult to contain because it's such a small molecule, and it weakens/corrodes metals. These are not trivial challenges at all.
the other thing you can’t do with hydrogen is energy recovery via braking, so you’d have to build cars with a battery or some other kind of hybrid system for fuel cost efficiency.
It's true that batteries present their own challenges but we are making much more progress in battery tech than we are with hydrogen.
only really needs to deal with the volatility issue
H2 is the smallest molecule there is, and among the worst to contain. It's also quite reactive. And the production of H2 for storage is not wonderfully efficient, nor is the whole lifecycle from production to consumption.
The only real reason for hydrogen is to repurpose rather than scrapping the existing gasoline supply chain. That benefits nobody but the fossil-fuel companies. And that's why it's being endlessly hyped, despite being a profoundly suboptimal solution.
It's typical to see the proposals devolve.
Fully green hydrogen!
Yeah, bit expensive to build now. What if we first do half green and the rest from fossil fuels.
So we ran the budget again. We were thinking just a quarter green.
Well, infrastructure doesn't quite support this, so you know what? Gas with hydrogen added!
Is this a good time to tell we settled on natural gas with a homeopathic amount of green hydrogen?
whatever happened to @Hypx@fedia.io ?
They spammed hydrogen propaganda none stop them just went silent. Looks like they've taken it to their own small sub.
they dismissed their own research theconversation.com/why-electr… as saying electric results in less emissions, but on an aggressive solution their own link shows less than half emissions.
Green H2 is only path to 100% renewables because it monetizes surplus renewable energy that has to have surpluses in order to power everything every day.
A large scale, with labour, installation of DC only solar in China costs $500-$800/kw. prior to financing costs this is 1.25 to 2c/kwh 30 year electricity production at 4 sun hours per day. Solar doesn't need to be replaced for 60 years. Every 1% of financing (or ROI step) costs is 0.34 to 0.54c/kwh. China interest rates are under 2%, and providing that financing rate is the greatest subsidy to capex only projects such as solar, that H2 allows 100% guaranteed monetization rates if they are working. 2c-3c/kwh electricity cost.
Alkaline electrolysis are cheaper than PEM. There is great innovation in other technologies as well, but you will need to have it developed/financed in China instead of trying stupid government bribes, or waiting for oil dependent banksters to follow through on support. Alkaline is $250/kw. PEM is targeted with support at $330 next year, but $500/kw near term is certain. Norway's NEL is also around/close to this mark. PEM is more automatable with distilled water, and voltage variations, and 30mpa pressure output, but Alkaline powered by batteries is perfectly fine, with longer lifespans of 60k+ hours, but with a minimal water additive process. This is over 40 years with 10 hours/day use.
At 55kwh/kg of H2, this is opex of $1.10 to $1.65/kg. $250/kw capex over 30000 hours (half of life) is 45c/kg. each 1% financing cost for 3000 production hours/year is 4.5c/kg. Total cost as low as $1.64/kg uncompressed at 2% financing, but $1.73 with direct solar (minimal battery size excluded) only (1500 hours/year). Financing costs determine how little electrolyzers with how big of a battery buffer to keep them running.
Natural gas can make emission free H2 (excluding fugitive methane emissions during transport) through pyrolysis. It also makes pure solid graphite which can be used from tire rubber to graphene, and has economic value to store and trade. OPEX electricity is cut in half (55c - 82c/kg), and no membranes makes the electronics far easier. Water electrolysis can still be better at low electricity costs (it also costs less than NG input). Free land in middle east/Australia/deserts with much more than 4 sun hours/day means even cheaper costs than China with import of Chinese tech. Water and H2 can exist in same pipeline, and so coastal populations can be provided with energy in return for water. Where desalination provides distilled water, PEM gets more attractive as it can operate at higher efficiency with lower voltage (extending total life hours too), and 24 hour operation from battery unless market prices for H2 are high enough to support high production. 24 hour production at 50kwh/kg makes electrolysis of water cost 10c/kg less in opex, and 5c/kg less in financing costs = $1.49/kg (but excluding the battery costs needed to support)
Retail prices at filling stations in Guangdong are already below $4/kg which is $2/gallon equivalent diesel in a fuel cell. There is massive profit opportunity for $2/kg paid to green producers with social infrastructure support (pipelines mainly but also fuel cell use). H2's biggest advantage over electricity is its transportability and storage. $2/kg H2 can provide a home with 10c/kwh electricity in their fuel cell, and 6c/kwh in combined heat/electricity energy where the waste fraction is enough to provide the usual 40% home energy fraction needed for domestic hot water.
There's no reason to nuke electric grid from orbit, but an H2 only economy could provide cheaper electricity to most of the world.
Why electric beats hydrogen in the race to decarbonise freight vehicles in Australia
Modelling shows a shift to electric trucks is the better, faster option for cutting transport emissions under most plausible scenarios in Australia’s energy transition.The Conversation
Trump Administration Moves to Relax Rules on Climate Super Pollutants
The E.P.A. plan would allow grocery stores, air-conditioning manufacturers and others to phase out hydrofluorocarbons in cooling equipment more slowly.
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Florida Teen Shoots Himself in Fake Abduction
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Is there any alternative to Stremio?
I find it's flakey at best. Non functional at worst. I regularly have to disconnect then reconnect my VPN to get it to work. then the torrentio plugin will just uninstall constantly. Half the time it doesn't even find any results. I'm considering going back to a home server if this stupid thing doesn't work. Anyways, any alternatives? I saw that popcorn time seems to be legit now, so that's out.
TIA.
Since you're just streaming torrents you could just use a torrent client to download the torrent(s) in sequential mode.
e.g. Load the torrent in qBittorrent and make sure to enable "Download in sequential order" and "Download first and last pieces first". When the torrent is about 5-10% downloaded you can start playing the incomplete file while the torrent continues to download in the background. Load the file in your preferred media player (VLC or whatever) and play.
Hmm, having checked “Download first and last pieces first” usually fixes that. e.g. a .mp4 with its moov atom at the end of the file won't stream unless you make sure to download the last part of the file starting out. Just curious which media file type are you referring to that won't stream regardless of having the first/last pieces downloaded?
But either way OP using Stremio + torrentio won't fix that, that's just another torrent client doing a torrent stream. If it won't play mid-stream via qBittorrent it won't play mid-stream in torrentio either.
I am genuinely curious what containers you are refering to. The only ones that come to mind are DVD and BD.
MKV definitely streams great, IIRC so do AVI and MP4. Almost all video torrents are in MKV with some older ones in AVI and few random MP4s here and there.
The one other issue is RAR'd releases, those can't be streamed. I honestly don't understand why people post RAR'd video as it doesn't really save space.
The other issue (perhaps a much more important one) with streaming torrents is sometimes you can't get a high enough speed to stream in real time, but that tends to be limited to more niche content (that often isn't even available via any streaming provider).
Yes, that's why qBittorrent's "Download first and last pieces first" option exists. You'll be able to stream that .mp4 with its moov atom at the end of the file as long as you download that last piece during the beginning of the download. In some ways that makes qBittorrent a better streamer for .mp4 files vs other methods.
Maybe the other commenter is referring to some other media file type that can't be streamed.
EDIT - Haven't checked but am guessing torrentio also downloads first/last pieces first otherwise it'd be a terrible torrent streamer.
Ti ricordi le farfalle nello stomaco? esistono davvero!
Le farfalle nello stomaco: più che un modo di dire, una realtà biologica
I poeti si sono cimentati in lunghe spiegazioni, in chiave poetica e con tutte le metriche del caso, per descrivere le cosiddette “farfall...Giuliano (Blogger)
Ciao 😊 volevo solo ricordarti che per garantire equità, in ogni gruppo è permesso un messaggio al giorno. Ho notato che ne stai pubblicando tre.
Per favore cerca di ridurle, così tutti hanno spazio per farsi sentire. Grazie mille! 🙏
South Africa’s ambassador to France found dead at foot of Paris hotel tower
South Africa’s ambassador to France found dead at foot of Paris hotel tower
South Africa’s ambassador to France was found dead on Tuesday at the foot of the Hyatt Regency hotel, a high-rise tower in the west of Paris, the Paris prosecutor’s office said.Reuters Staff (CTVNews)
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La casa è davvero il posto più sicuro che abbiamo?
L'Inquinamento che Respiri Ogni Giorno: Quando la Tua Casa è Meno Sicura dell'Esterno
Casa dolce casa. Quante volte l'abbiamo pensato tornando a casa dopo una giornata intensa di lavoro? La casa, nell'immaginario col...Giuliano (Blogger)
Do not update single packages on Archlinux, but
On Archlinux it is not recommended to update only one package with the package manager pacman. Let's say I have 11 packages, and one of them is extra/firefox (true story). Updating only a pacman -S firefox could introduce problems, but installing a new single package if it wasn't there is okay.
So my question is, could we get around this by removing and installing the same package again in one go: pacman -Rs firefox && pacman -S firefox
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sudo pacman -Syu package_name so it is always up to date.
it's just unsupported. like, if something breaks by that happening then it's not a bug, but your fault.
installing a new package without updating is the same as updating a single package
That is not true. Installing a package with sudo pacman -S package without updating the package list is totally supported and works without problems. Whats not recommended is to installing package and updating package list with -Sy package. So instead we should do -Syu package and update everything on the system alongside the package.
Maybe if the package list is old, then -S package it will only install from cache? Could it be that?
pacman -S package will install the version of the package that is listed in the current package database, and will not do anything to update that database.like this
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but installing a new single package if it wasn’t there is okay.
Not true. It says clearly "Partial upgrades are not supported". Whether the package was there or not is irrelevant. And I really don't mean this personally, but as general advice, using Archlinux and its wiki requires a modicum of independent thinking.
edit: clarification:
It is OK to use '-S' only if all installed packages are on the same level as the local package info. That is assuming that the cached local version of the package is still available on package servers.
Also read wiki.archlinux.org/title/Syste…
But -S package is not upgrading the ~~package~~ (Edit: I meant system). Installing with that command is supported. That is NOT a partial upgrade of the system. -Sy package is considered a partial upgrade, because that command updates the package list.
And I really don’t mean this personally, but as general advice, using Archlinux and its wiki requires a modicum of independent thinking.
This part was a total unnecessary attack, for someone who asks. Especially if you are not entirely correct.
It is OK to use '-S' only if all installed packages are on the same level as the local package info. That is assuming that the cached local version of the package is still available on package servers.
I just think you're being too literal about this, instead of thinking about the reasoning behind that rule.
But -S package is not upgrading the package. Installing with that command is supported. That is NOT a partial upgrade of the system. -Sy package is considered a partial upgrade, because that command updates the package list.
I disagree. The -S flag stands for "sync", which means sync the local version with the remote version. So if there is no local version it just installs the remote version. This is still a partial update, because any dependencies it might have, that you already have installed, might be the wrong version compared to the one the newly installed package expects.
pacman -S should be discouraged because of this. The correct one is pacman -Syu for installing new packages.
No, pacman -S package is safe. Because the package list is not updated this way, and therefore the system is not updated and nothing else is affected. New packages can be installed with this command, perfectly okay. That is in the spirit of Archlinux.
I think my idea would not work because the nature of the command -S package, as no new version would be synced. This is not a partial upgrade and it does not need to be discouraged.
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No, pacman -S package is safe. Because the package list is not updated this way, and therefore the system is not updated and nothing else is affected. New packages can be installed with this command, perfectly okay. That is in the spirit of Archlinux.
If the package is not in your cache, it needs to download it from the remote server first. The version on the remote server is built against the dependencies on the remote server. So if your local dependency is older, it will be a partial update!
It's not in your cache, because you haven't had it installed before and the remote server only has the newest version.
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You're correct partial upgrades are unsupported. Arch follows a rolling release model, meaning there are no fixed "versions" of the system. Instead, everything is continuously updated. Each package is built and tested against the current state of the rest of the system in the Arch repositories. That package was compiled against the latest system libraries in the repos, not necessarily the ones on your machine.
Your proposed "workaround" may work if the package is standalone and has few/no dependencies. Again, ArchLinux strongly recommends full system upgrades (pacman -Syu) rather than only reinstalling/upgrading a single package, because library or dependency mismatches can occur if your system is out of sync.
A safer approach may be to use "pacman -S package --needed" which will avoid removing it first and automatically handles dependencies safely.
pacman -S package to install a new application is not considered a partial upgrade.
I think you are a little confused at the problem here. The issue is that partial updates are not supported. The reason for this is very simple, Arch ensures that any given package list works on its own, but not that packages from different versions of the package list work together. So if Firefox depends on libssl the new Firefox package may depend on a new libssl function. If you install that version of Firefox without updating libssl it will cause problems.
There is no way around this limitation. If you install that new Firefox without he new libssl you will have problems. No matter how you try to rules lawyer it. Now 99% of the time this works. Typically packages don't depend on new library functions right away. But sometimes they do, and that is why as a rule this is unsupported. You are welcome to try it, but if it breaks don't complain to the devs, they never promised it would work. But this isn't some policy where you can find a loophole. It is a technical limitation. If you manage to find a loophole people aren't going to say "oh, that should work, let's fix it" it will break and you will be on your own to fix it.
Focusing on your commands. The thing is that pacman -S firefox is always fine on its own. If Firefox is already installed it will do nothing, if it isn't it will install the version from the current package list. Both of those operations are supported. Also pacman -Rs firefox && pacman -S firefox is really no different than just pacman -S firefox (other than potentially causing problems if the package can't be allowed to be removed due to dependencies). So your command isn't accomplishing anything even if it did somehow magically work around the rules.
What is really the problem is pacman -Sy. This command updates the package list without actually updating any packages. This will enter you system into a precarious state where any new package installed or updated (example our pacman -S firefox command form earlier) will be a version that is mismatched with the rest of your system. This is unsupported and will occasionally cause problems. Generally speaking you shouldn't run pacman -Sy, any time you are using -Sy you should also be passing -u. This ensures that the package list and your installed packages are updated together.
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But I'm not doing pacman -Sy package. That is not what I am talking about. I am only talking about pacman -S package, which is not updating the system partially. IF the package depends on something else to update, then the system would need to be updated. But that is not what I was asking, because I only talk about the package with -S package. I just chose firefox as an example, it could have been any other package.
To make it clear, when I say -S firefox, then I mean really that without updating a dependency like libssl. The idea is to install only new packages without updating anything on the system. I guess as you say it depends on the dependencies of the package, if this is feasible.
But that is my point. Just running pacman -S firefox is fine as long as you didn't run pacman -Sy at some point earlier. It won't update anything, even dependencies. It will just install the version that matches your current package list and system including the right version of any dependencies if they aren't already installed.
But that means if you already have Firefox installed it will do nothing.
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We can install a new package if it wasn't installed with pacman -S firefox. That is not a partial upgrade of the system. Right? What i don't understand is, when I uninstall with pacman -Rs firefox, delete the cached firefox package (only that file), then the system is in the same state as before I installed it. Then -S firefox should be okay, right? And it even looks up the new version. This is my question, if that would work correctly.
IF no dependency tries to update too. Off course in that case I would stop. Without pacman -Sy, I never do that anyway, only -Syu.
IF no dependency tries to update too. Off course in that case I would stop. Without pacman -Sy, I never do that anyway, only -Syu.
That's all you need to know. As long as you always use pacman -Syu you will be fine. pacman -Sy is the real problem. The wiki page is pretty clear about the sequences of commands that are problematic wiki.archlinux.org/title/Syste…
Right? What i don’t understand is, when I uninstall with pacman -Rs firefox, delete the cached firefox package (only that file), then the system is in the same state as before I installed it. Then -S firefox should be okay, right? And it even looks up the new version.
This isn't correct. It won't look up the new version. Assuming that the system was in a consistent state it will download the exact same package that you deleted. The system only ever "updates" when you run pacman -Sy. Until you use -y all packages are effectively pinned at a specific version. If the version that gets installed is different than the one you removed it probably means that you were breaking the partial update rule previously.
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And it even looks up the new version. This is my question, if that would work correctly.
I think this is where you might have misunderstood what pacman -S does. It does not look for a new version, but tries to install the version of the package from last time you updated your local package list.
If the repository has a newer version since the last time you updated, you would not find the package version you are looking for. As I try to update at least once a day, I haven't had this happen yet (so i am not 100% how this would manifest).
To install only the newest version of firefox on the server you would habe to run it with pacman-Sy firefox which is not supported.
To add to the other comment, package managers keep a local copy of the list of available packages and the version. When you do a pacman -S xxx the package manager looks up xxx in the cache and downloads the package from whatever mirror youre using as well as any dependencies, looking them up in the same way from your cache. This works for a while even if theres a new update available because mirrors usually keep a few previous versions.
Once you do a pacman -Sy you update your cache to the latest one. If you then update xxx, it will update xxx and pull in any dependency updates required, but any other packages that depended on the same packages dont get updated, leaving you in a partially upgraded state.
I'm also not familiar. But my understanding is that the package maintainers should prevent this situation. Because otherwise even if there are package version dependencies (I don't actually know if pacman does this) it would just block the update which results in a partial update which isn't supported. For example if your theoretical unmaintained Firefox blocks the update of libssl but Python requires new functionality you would be stuck in dependency hell. Leaving this problem to the users just makes this problem worse. So the package maintainers need to sort something out.
It is a huge pain when it happens but tends to be pretty rare in practice. Typically they can just wait for software to update or ship a small patch to fix it. But in the worst case you need to maintain two versions of the common dependency. In lots of distros very common dependencies tend to get different packages for different major version for this reason. For example libfoo1 and libfoo2. Then there can be a period where both are supported while packages slowly move from one to the other.
Yeah, that kind of a condition would require the maintainer to patch the source of the non-updated program.
And that would be fine if there is just a little change, with an alternate function available but if the change requires changing the logic of the application, you are essentially expecting the package maintainer to do the software developer's work.
The deprecation process is a good way to prevent this.
The Difference Between Deprecated, Depreciated and Obsolete
There is a lot of confusion about this and I'd like to know, what exactly is the difference between depreciated, deprecated and obsolete, in a programming context, but also in general. I know I co...Stack Overflow
This is an excellent answer and I wish I knew all of this when starting to use archlinux. "Arch does not support partial upgrades" is something you can read everywhere, but it's rare to find such a good explanation of what exactly a partial upgrade is, and which commands lead to it.
I only learned about all of this when I got into some broken state by randomly running pacman commands.
Everyone, be like this guy. This guy explains stuff well. Newbies need stuff explained.
It is only a partial upgrade if you update your databases, without upgrading the rest of your system. If you try to pacman -S firefox, and it gives you a 404, you have to both update your pacman databases, and upgrade your packages. This will only give you a 404 if you cleaned your package cache, and your package is out of date. Usually, -S on an already installed package will reinstall it from cache. This does not cause a partial upgrade.
If you run pacman -Sy, everything you install is now considered a partial upgrade, and will break if you don't know exactly what you're doing. In order to avoid a partial upgrade, you should never update databases (-Sy) without upgrading packages (-Su). This is usually combined in pacman -Syu.
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No, pacman -S firefox will not update your firefox.
pacman -Sy firefox will update your firefox and nothing else.
If you have done pacman -Sy once, then your list of packages and their versions gets updated.
From then on, using pacman -S <package> on any package, whether or not it was already installed, will now get the new version of it.
On the other hand, if you have not updated for long, then if you run pacman -Su to update, it will update nothing, because it looks at the old package list and compares it to installed packages and all of them match.
If you were to use pacman -Sy and then pacman -Su, then it would do the update, similar to pacman -Syu.
If you did pacman -Sy yesterday and then do pacman -Su today, then it will update up to yesterday's packages and will ignore any updates from that point to today.
This can be considered analogous to apt update and apt upgrade.
If you run apt upgrade without apt update, you only upgrade upto the packages that you got until the last apt update.
If arch used apt, then in this case, the recommendation would be to never use apt update without using apt upgrade right after it.
Isn't pacman -Syu the recommended way to update anyway? I have always used that o. EndeavourOS and hadn't any issues.
Except for the recent nouveau nvidia driver :/
I haven't used Arch in a decade, but as unstable as Arch is, I don't think Arch doesn't have dependencies poorly defined like that.
Say, firefox-1 does not depend on libssl-1, but now you upgrade it to firefox-2, you won't succeed if you successfully downloaded firefox-2, but failed to download libssl-1, because pacman shall fail, while saying the reason being failed to download all of its dependencies.
If you start with a system with both firefox-1 and libssl-1 installed, upgrading firefox-1 to firefox-2 sure would have no problem, because its dependencies are already fulfilled.
If your system is breaking, it's probably due to some other issue, but it could not be pacman's.
mensileOSM 5 (Settembre 2025)
Nuovo aggiornamento dalla community italiana di Openstreetmap
Si parla del progetto paesiniNonMappati di settembre, del nuovo progetto di ottobre, per mappare i numeri civici e di tanto altro!
mensileOSM 5 (Settembre 2025)
Foto di gruppo per il wikiraduno e mapping party di Parma (CC BY-SA 4.0, foto di Talete1) Iniziative di mapping A settembre l’iniziativa comunitaria riguardava PaesiniNonMappati.OpenStreetMap Community Forum
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Charlie Kirk, Ezra Klein, and the Cost of Civility-Theater Liberalism
Charlie Kirk, Ezra Klein, and the Cost of Civility-Theater Liberalism
“Talking across divides” is laudable—until it becomes a license to launder antidemocratic and dehumanizing ideas.The New Republic
I massimi leader parlano ai media all'inizio della riunione del Consiglio europeo a Copenaghen — aggiornamenti in tempo reale
Macron warns Europe is now in ‘confrontation’ with Russia — live updates
Top leaders speak to the media as European Council meeting kicks off in Copenhagen.POLITICO
Wednesday, October 1, 2025
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Russia’s war against Ukraine
Anne, Princess Royal, daughter of Queen Elizabeth II, visits a World War II museum in the base of the Motherland Monument during a visit to the Ukrainian capital on September 30, 2025. (Thomas Peter – Pool/Getty Images)
‘We have to settle it up‘ — Trump calls for Zelensky-Putin meeting again. “The only way we can do that is through strength,” U.S. President Donald Trump said. “If we were weak, they wouldn’t even take my phone call. … Zelensky’s got to get them together and get it done.”
Zelensky warns of ‘critical‘ situation at Zaporizhzhia nuclear plant after weeklong outage. Zelensky accused Moscow of obstructing the repair of the power lines through continued shelling: “And this is a threat to absolutely everyone. No terrorist in the world has ever dared to do to a nuclear plant what Russia is doing right now.”
‘Classic false-flag operation‘ — Kyiv denounces Russian allegations of Ukrainian provocations in Poland. The statement comes after the Russian Foreign Intelligence Service alleged that Ukraine was preparing a sabotage and reconnaissance group to stage incidents on Polish territory, using fighters from the “Freedom of Russia Legion” and Belarus’s K. Kalinouski Regiment.
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Kremlin plans record spending hike on law enforcement and security agencies. According to Russian budget documents, federal spending on police, the National Guard, and other law enforcement and intelligence services is set to rise 13% year-on-year to a record 3.91 trillion rubles ($47 billion).
Ukrainian FPV drone destroys Russian Mi-8 helicopter, military says. The 59th Brigade of the Unmanned Systems Forces destroyed the Russian helicopter near the village of Kotliarivka, in Donetsk Oblast.
Ukraine assassinates Russian lieutenant colonel far from front lines, intelligence claims. A Russian National Guard lieutenant colonel and two other service members were killed in a Ukrainian intelligence operation in the North Caucasus on Sept. 27, Ukraine’s military intelligence (HUR) said.
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Ukraine war latest: Poland detains Ukrainian suspected of Nord Stream sabotage, media reports
Polish authorities have detained a Ukrainian citizen suspected by Germany of involvement in the sabotage of the Nord Stream gas pipelines, Polish media outlet RMF 24 reported on Sept. 30.
Photo: Nord Stream 2 / Nikolai Ryutin
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As US mulls Tomahawks for Ukraine, here’s how they could be used against Russia
In what would be a significant boost for Ukraine’s offensive firepower capabilities, U.S. Vice President JD Vance confirmed on Sept. 28 that the U.S. is “looking at” providing Kyiv with Tomahawk missiles.
Photo: U.S. Navy via Getty Images
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We asked 5 young Ukrainians why they chose to go to war
Despite not yet being subject to conscription, these young Ukrainians are voluntarily joining the military, trading lecture halls for dugouts, or trying to balance both worlds.
Photo: From Sofiya Yanchevska’s personal archive
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Russia struggles meeting mobilization targets in Crimea, Ukraine says
Russia is struggling to meet its mobilization goal for 2025 in occupied Crimea, data provided to the Kyiv Independent by Ukraine’s Center of National Resistance shows.
Photo: Stringer / AFP via Getty Images
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Human cost of Russia’s war
At least 1 killed, 28 injured in Russian drone attack on Dnipro. According to Dnipropetrovsk Oblast Governor Serhii Lysak, 28 people were injured, including a 10-year-old boy and a 17-year-old girl.
Russian attacks kill 9, injure 15 in Ukraine over past day. Russian forces launched 65 Shahed-type drones and decoys from Russia’s Bryansk, Orel, Primorsk-Akhtarsk, Millerovo, and Russian-occupied Crimea, at Ukraine overnight, according to Ukraine’s Air Force.
International response
Sweden says no agreement yet on Gripen jets for Ukraine. The statement followed the BBC’s reporting that Ukraine’s Deputy Defense Minister Ivan Havryliuk had hinted that Kyiv is “expecting” additional deliveries of Western aircraft, including Gripen jets.
Hungary would shoot down Russian drones violating its airspace, Orban says.
Orban made the comments even as he downplayed concerns over Russian drones violating the airspace of several European countries and criticized the “posture of Western Europeans.”
EU to allocate over $2 billion for drones for Ukraine, von der Leyen says. “This allows Ukraine to scale up and to use its full capacity. And of course, it will also allow the EU to benefit from this technology,” Ursula von der Leyen said.
Czechia bans entry for unaccredited Russian diplomats. “Sabotage operations are on the rise and we will not risk agents operating under diplomatic cover,” Czech Foreign Minister Jan Lipavsky wrote on X.
European Council president seeks to bypass Hungary’s veto on Ukraine’s EU accession, Politico reports. European Council President Antonio Costa has already discussed the proposal with several EU leaders, according to Politico.
US in contact with Belarus to ‘ensure lines of communication‘ with Putin, Kellogg says. This was one of the reasons why the U.S. lifted sanctions on Belarusian state airline Belavia, U.S. Special Envoy to Ukraine Keith Kellogg said.
In other news
Ukrainian specialists join Danish forces for counter-drone drills amid airspace violations. Ukrainian specialists arrived in Denmark on Sept. 29 to join Danish forces in counter-drone exercises after recent airspace violations.
Ukraine completes legislation screening with EU in key step toward accession.
EU Enlargement Commissioner Marta Kos lauded Ukraine for completing the screening “at record speed” in “the most difficult circumstances.”
Ukraine evacuates 57 people from Gaza, ministry says. The evacuation, carried out Sept. 29-30 in coordination with Ukraine’s military intelligence, included 48 Ukrainian citizens, as well as nine Palestinian nationals.
Kyiv court halts dismissal of Ukraine’s energy grid chief at Energy Ministry’s request. Ukrenergo’s supervisory board fired Zaichenko and three management board members on Sept. 26, just three months after appointing him — prompting questions about potential tensions between the government and the supervisory board or a possible move to seize control of the company.
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Kyiv court temporarily halts dismissal of Ukraine's energy grid chief at Energy Ministry's request
Ukrenergo’s supervisory board fired Zaichenko and three management board members on Sept. 26, just three months after appointing him — prompting questions about potential tensions between the government and the supervisory board or a possible move to…Kateryna Denisova (The Kyiv Independent)
Imgur blocks access to UK users after proposed regulatory fine
Imgur blocks access to UK users after proposed regulatory fine
The image-hosting platform - which is widely used to make memes - was facing a fine over its use of children's data.Liv McMahon (BBC News)
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The title is a little bit misleading, it's mostly about Imgur not adding the age checking that the UK's infamously disliked new law requires on possibly mature content.
Age verification is a notoriously difficult problem to solve in a privacy-respecting way, and Imgur is literally about unobtrusive image embeds so I doubt they could even make this work.
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The title is completely in line with the known facts. This is the ICO statement which does not mention anything about age checking.
There has been widespread speculation that this is related to age-verification but so far I've seen no evidence of this, and the fact that the investigation started in March makes it seem unlikely.
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Thanks for sharing. I should push back on your statement a little.
The investigation relates to how MediaLab’s Imgur social media platform uses children’s information and its approach to age assurance.
And in the Children’s code strategy progress update mentioned.
One platform has committed to introduce age assurance methods, to help ensure that children have an age-appropriate online experience.
To comply with child data protection rules, you necessarily have to either:
- Know that they are a child by checking their age
- Not collect information on anyone
It does look like the focus is mostly on data collection, not content moderation, so I will concede on that point. I should have read a bit more into this before commenting.
Age verification is a notoriously difficult problem
It's not a problem at all, though. Parents should be verifying what programs their kids use.
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Well it is about control they have to at least maintain the illusion that it's about child protection. They have to at least maintain the veneer of legitimacy. So if enough people make enough noise about how this is actually a privacy violating nightmare (even though that's actually the point) they will have to pretend to be concerned about that.
Anyway they have an out, this is mostly a Tory policy anyway that just got implemented under labour, so if it becomes a noose around there necks they can just get rid of the unpopular Tory policy and now they're the heroes.
Wow :
"We have been clear that exiting the UK does not allow an organisation to avoid responsibility for any prior infringement of data protection law, and our investigation remains ongoing."
It's insane. They could be fined even after entirely leaving the country ?
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What I'm understanding is imgur could get fine even if they dont offer their service anymore in the UK.
They could go back to just after the law passed and tell them "hey you were infringing on this extremely disrupting law that would completely change your business in the UK so pay up".
I mean if a business just decides to not serve UK customer they should leave them alone... Especially such a complex law for something like Imgur...
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It's not actually a bad strategy, ultimately the law is probably going to get slapped down as unworkable and there's pretty good evidence to suggest that they knew it wouldn't work even before they implemented it, which won't make them look good.
Unfortunately the courts move so slowly that none of this has happened yet and the law has now gone into effect because the timer ran out, but in theory they could have done all the work to comply only for the law never to have happened.
The law was announced a long time before it came into effect,
Isn't one of the basic principles of law that laws can not be made retroactive so as to arbitrarily extract punishment? if someone tells me "we'll implement this law in 2026" and they do commit, then I'm unconcerned until 2025-12-31.
Practically they can't. In theory they could complain to the United States that a US business is attempting to circumvent UK law, but I can't imagine that having much effect at the moment.
In theory it all works because companies would be more inclined to pay the fine than to lose UK customers, in reality of course it doesn't work because everybody would just use a VPN anyway, but the people who wrote these laws don't know about VPNs because they think computers run on magic smoke.
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Ignore for a second the law in question. Suppose Temu started importing harmful goods into your country in the knowledge that they were going to poison kids. (This doesn't seem too much of a stretch...) Should it be OK for Temu to just say, "OK, we'll just stop importing to the UK then"? Shouldn't they face the consequences for breaking the law?
I think this take is motivated by disagreement with the law in question (although it's not actually clear exactly what they're alleged to have done - the ICO released a statement saying it relates to an investigation from March, so before the age verification requirement).
Well technically, yeah
Practically: good luck getting that money.
On the other side, does the UK now require age of for every website out there, including the millions of semi amateur porn sites?
Because; good luck with that too, that ain't never going to happen
This law was thought up by idiots they actually got consultants in who all told them that this wouldn't work but they decided to ignore the consultants because they wanted to implement the law anyway.
So yeah genuine idiots.
So you've uninstalled the app because you are concerned about the content they may be hosting, yet you had the app installed on your phone already. Eh? How does that work.
Anyway everyone knows that DeviantArt is where you go for that kind of thing anyway.
This kind of malicious compliance is exactly what this dogshit Think Of The Children Act needs. Convenience is everything to the majority of population.
If other major sites and resources do this, then the pressure from the people impacted by it will force UK PLC to un-fuck this awful legislation.
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Harassment, humiliation, and death threats: Tibetan activists face threats from China for protesting environmental destruction, report says
cross-posted from: lemmy.sdf.org/post/43288859
As China continues to ramp up its claim over Tibetan resources, the environmental activists in the region face persistent threats from the Chinese authorities, a report said on Tuesday.It added that between 2010 and 2019, many activists were detained and sentenced to years in prison in China for peacefully protesting against illegal mining activities, the hunting of endangered species, and environmental damage across Tibet.
According to a report in the 'Greek City Times', the imprisoned environmental human rights defenders include Anya Sengdra, Dorjee Daktal, Kelsang Choklang, Dhongye, Rinchen Namdol, Tsultrim Gonpo, Jangchup Ngodup, Sogru Abhu, and Namesy.
The environmentalists, it said, committed to protecting the environment and addressing ecological challenges, continue to face harassment, humiliation, and death threats from China.
"Tibetan environmentalist A-Nya Sengdra, who has spent seven years in jail, was recently denied release. Hence, he will stay in jail until February 2026. Ironically, no explanation was given for the extension of his jail term, which is reminiscent of China’s practice of acting without providing any satisfactory reason," the report detailed.
It stressed that this is not an isolated incident but part of a pattern showing how China has been harassing, torturing, and jailing Tibetan activists for raising their voice against the environmental exploitation in the region.
[...]
Tibetan activists face threats from China for protesting environmental destruction: Report
Beijing, Sep 30 (IANS) As China continues to ramp up its claim over Tibetan resources, the environmental activists in the region face persistent threats from the Chinese authorities, a report said on Tuesday.IANS News
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Qassam Brigades address video message to former 'Israeli' captive Edan Alexander
The video surfaced shortly after Alexander, who also holds American citizenship, announced his intention to rejoin the Israeli Occupation Forces (IOF) and participate in its ongoing genocide in Gaza.
In the footage, the Qassam Brigades reminded Alexander of moments during his captivity. “You will return to the army that tried to kill you multiple times, and we were the ones who protected you. Do you remember?”
The video includes scenes showing Qassam fighters rescuing Alexander from the rubble of a collapsed underground tunnel, reportedly struck by heavy 'Israeli' bombardment. Fighters are seen providing him with oxygen and urgent medical care.
Other footage depicts his safe handover to Red Cross staff, who later escorted him back to 'Israeli'-occupied territory. His release in May came as part of a goodwill deal involving US President Donald Trump.
The closing message of the video underscored the group’s stance on negotiations. “Exchange deal… freedom and life. Military pressure… death and failure.”
Qassam Brigades address video message to former 'Israeli' captive Edan Alexander
'Israeli'-American captive Edan Alexander being handed over to Red Cross (Credit: Al-Qassam Brigades)Roya News
Global Sumud Flotilla Emergency Press Conference 10/1
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Profitez des vidéos et de la musique que vous aimez, mettez en ligne des contenus originaux, et partagez-les avec vos amis, vos proches et le monde entier.www.youtube.com
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Risonanza Magnetica e Oggetti Metallici: Una Lezione Tragica di Sicurezza che NON Possiamo Ignorare
Sembra incredibile, ma purtroppo è vero. Un uomo, spinto dal desiderio di confortare la moglie malata, entra in una sala di Risonanza Magnet...Giuliano (Blogger)
Tienimi per mano: un viaggio tra cura, legami, crescita
Indice dei contenuti
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- Breve biografia dell’autrice
- Il testo: Tienimi per mano
- Due parole sul titolo
- In sintesi:
- Riflessione personale sulla genitorialità: radici, mani e legami
Tienimi per mano. Primi passi nella vita: un viaggio tra cura, legami e autonomia
Gabriella Picerno
manuale
GD Edizioni
giugno 2025
ibs.it/tienimi-per-mano-primi-…
Breve biografia dell’autrice
Gabriella Picerno è psicologa (e scrittrice) pedagogista, consulente in sessuologia e esperta in psicologia del disegno infantile e dell’apprendimento. Direttrice del Centro di Documentazione Educativa Il Grillo Parlante di Rufina (Firenze). Lavora in progetti di formazione e interventi di educazione alla genitorialità, all’affettività e alla sessualità. Si occupa di problematiche familiari quali la separazione e il divorzio. Svolge attività professionale su tematiche come la formazione dei docenti, il disagio scolastico, i disturbi dell’apprendimento e di relazione.
Il testo: Tienimi per mano
“Tienimi per mano”, si apre con una scena simbolica: il primo giorno di nido, il bambino che stringe forte la mano del genitore come a chiedere rassicurazione mentre si apre a un mondo nuovo. Questo gesto diventa metafora del percorso che attraversa tutto il libro: accompagnare il bambino nei suoi primi passi verso l’autonomia, senza mai lasciarlo solo emotivamente. Il testo sottolinea che i genitori sono i primi maestri e punti di riferimento, ma che il nido rappresenta un luogo di crescita affettiva, cognitiva e sociale fondamentale. Il libro nasce come guida empatica, con suggerimenti pratici e spunti di riflessione, per aiutare le famiglie a vivere con serenità la transizione dei primi anni di vita.
Due parole sul titolo
Tienimi per mano: non solo un gesto fisico, ma un ponte silenzioso tra due mondi, due emozioni, due anime. La mano che stringe un’altra racconta fiducia, sicurezza, accoglienza. In psicologia, questo gesto diventa simbolo della relazione di sostegno, della vicinanza emotiva e della capacità di accompagnare l’altro nei momenti di incertezza. Ogni passo condiviso, ogni stretta di mano, è un linguaggio silenzioso che comunica: “Non sei solo, ci sono con te”. In termini pratici, psicologicamente, la presenza tangibile di qualcuno che ci “tiene per mano” può ridurre lo stress, rafforzare la sicurezza interna e favorire la regolazione emotiva. La psicologia dello sviluppo ci insegna che fin dall’infanzia il contatto fisico e la vicinanza emotiva sono fondamentali: i neonati che ricevono carezze e attenzioni sviluppano maggiore fiducia nel mondo e nelle relazioni future. In età adulta, il gesto si trasforma in un atto simbolico: offrire sostegno, ascolto, comprensione. Autori come John Bowlby sottolineano l’importanza dell’attaccamento sicuro, dove la disponibilità di un adulto o di una figura significativa crea le basi per l’autonomia e la resilienza. Donald Winnicott, invece, ci ricorda che il sostegno emotivo funziona come un contenitore: una mano che stringe diventa metafora della capacità di accogliere, contenere e accompagnare l’altro nella complessità dei sentimenti.
Tienimi per mano è quindi un invito alla presenza consapevole, all’empatia attiva, alla cura relazionale. Non è solo protezione: è riconoscere la fragilità e la forza dell’altro, è creare uno spazio dove il cuore può sentirsi sicuro e libero allo stesso tempo.
In pratica, tendere la mano significa:
- Offrire sostegno emotivo: ascoltare senza giudizio, essere presenti.
- Rafforzare la fiducia: comunicare attraverso gesti, parole e attenzione che l’altro può contare su di te.
- Favorire la resilienza: accompagnare nei momenti difficili senza sostituirsi all’altro.
Così, una mano che si tende diventa un filo invisibile che unisce, una carezza silenziosa che cura, un gesto poetico che parla più di mille parole.
In sintesi:
“Tienimi per mano” è un testo che unisce calore narrativo e basi psicologiche solide. La sua forza è la capacità di tradurre teorie complesse in suggerimenti pratici, valorizzando il ruolo del legame affettivo, del gioco, del linguaggio e della comunità nello sviluppo armonico del bambino.
Riflessione personale sulla genitorialità: radici, mani e legami
La genitorialità è un viaggio che non si misura solo in giorni o anni, ma in silenzi condivisi, gesti di cura e sguardi che rassicurano. Essere genitori significa tenere insieme la fragilità e la forza del proprio figlio, accompagnarlo nei primi passi con mani attente e cuori presenti. In psicologia, questa funzione va ben oltre il semplice accudimento: è un processo relazionale che plasma l’autostima, la sicurezza e la capacità di relazione dell’individuo. Il gesto simbolico del titolo di Gabriella Picerno, Tienimi per mano, racchiude l’essenza di questa funzione. Non è solo un invito alla vicinanza fisica, ma un richiamo alla presenza emotiva, alla capacità di offrire contenimento senza soffocare, protezione senza possesso. Come sottolinea l’autrice, la genitorialità è un equilibrio delicato tra cura e autonomia, tra guida e libertà, tra radici e ali.
Dal punto di vista psicologico, questa dinamica si riflette nei concetti di attaccamento sicuro (Bowlby e Ainsworth), dove la disponibilità emotiva e la sensibilità dei genitori creano basi solide per la fiducia nel mondo; e nella teoria di Winnicott, in cui il “contenitore” genitoriale permette al bambino di sperimentare e crescere, consapevole della sicurezza a cui tornare. Ogni mano tesa, ogni parola di incoraggiamento, diventa così un ponte tra il mondo interno del bambino e quello esterno, un filo invisibile che sostiene lo sviluppo emotivo e relazionale.
Nella pratica quotidiana, la genitorialità richiede presenza consapevole: ascoltare senza fretta, osservare senza giudizio, accompagnare senza sostituirsi. Significa saper accogliere le emozioni del figlio, guidarlo attraverso paure e scoperte, trasformando le difficoltà in opportunità di crescita. Come l’autrice evidenzia, essere genitori non implica perfezione, ma autenticità e coerenza, qualità che insegnano ai bambini a relazionarsi con il mondo con fiducia e resilienza.
In definitiva, la genitorialità è un atto poetico e scientifico al tempo stesso: un intreccio di cuore, mente e relazioni, dove ogni gesto semplice, ogni mano tesa, lascia un’impronta duratura. Tenere per mano non significa trattenere: significa accompagnare, sostenere e permettere al figlio di diventare pienamente se stesso, sapendo che le radici sicure sono sempre lì, pronte a sostenerlo.
“Sta a noi, società degli adulti, trovare gli stimoli per i nostri giovani, aiutarli a costruirsi il proprio cervello, che poi significa il proprio comportamento. È una responsabilità che fa o dovrebbe far tremare le vene e i polsi, perché si tratta di formare le nuove generazioni, il mondo di domani”.
Lamberto Maffei
Tienimi per mano: un viaggio tra cura, legami, crescita
Tienimi per mano: un viaggio tra cura, legami, crescita - Recensioni libri - Il Mago di OzCristina Desideri (Magozine.it)
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Was mich ja am meisten nervt ist, dass die Verlage bei ihrem werbefinanzierten Angebot irgendwie ~0,3 Cent pro Artikel bekommen, wenn ich ihn klicke (respektive gar nichts, wegen Werbeblocker, aber theoretisch, wenn sie mir nicht Müll und Schadsoftware aus Werbenetzwerken reindrücken würden).
So, jetzt lese ich, weiß nicht, 3-4 Artikel pro "Zeitung" im Monat. Macht Einnahmen von großzügig 2 Cent. Aber dann wollen die im Abo irgendwie mindestens 5 bis 15€ pro Monat. Ja, äh, nein? Ich runde auf, ich zahle euch dreimal so viel pro Artikel, ihr bekommt einen Cent, ich keine Werbung, ihr mehr Umsatz. Das wäre der Handel, aber nein!
Matrix vs XMPP vs IRC
As long as you're not trying to have e2e encrypted group chats xmpp works flawlessly.
With that it can have some bugs in my experience.
Not OP, but what I do lack here is a decent server Implementation in a single binary and easy deployment.
Also decent native clients for various platforms. Do we have any good ones?
This probably isn't a xmpp specific, but I'd like to have it work like wireguard. If the keys are wrong, self hosted instance would just reject it on the packet level. Then only authorized clients could use it. Outgoing connection on some hub instance would give access to outside world. All this would help with self hosting.
AFAIK:
Threads
xmpp.org/extensions/xep-0201.h…
Spaces (pending approval)
xmpp.org/extensions/inbox/spac…
Best Practices for Message Threads
This specification defines recommended handling of XMPP message threads.Kevin Smith
October 1925
Our look at some of the significant happenings 100 years ago this month.
2. In London, John Logie Baird successfully transmits the first television pictures with a greyscale image.
3. Born. Gore Vidal, writer and public intellectual, in West Point, New York (d.2012)
5. The Locarno Conference began in Locarno, Switzerland between several European powers to negotiate a security pact.
13. Born. Margaret Thatcher, Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, in Grantham, Lincolnshire, England (d.2013)
13. The Locarno conference ended with several agreements in place. German Foreign Minister Gustav Stresemann gave a closing speech in which he said the conference spelled a new era in European relationships, while French Foreign Minister Aristide Briand said it marked the beginning of a new epoch of cooperation and friendship.
16. Born. Angela Lansbury, actress and singer, in Regent’s Park, London (d.2022)
23. Born. Johnny Carson, American comedian and television host (d.2005)
24. Born. Luciano Berio, Italian composer (d.2003)
29. Born. Robert Hardy, actor, in Cheltenham, England (d.2017)
yt: Which method is best for privacy?
cross-posted from: lemmy.ca/post/52603668
Please rank these methods from best to least
- Invidious
- NewPipe
- YoutubeRevanced
- ytlocal
- Downloading with yt-dlp
- Using user script to play in local player
- Playing in local player (eg mpv )
- Watching in TOR
Feel free to add other methods to the list or group some
Define privacy?
Regardless, it seems like every other day one or other is broken - I just use whichever is working at any given moment.
They are all valid, but most front ends are broken by Google.
I use often Andisearch where i search the video and where I can watch it in the search result, sandboxed and through random proxy, also using the SMplayer on desktop, entering the video URL-
Avoiding also that YT put any crap in my PC with the Portmaster
Andi - AI Search for the Next Generation
Andi is AI search for the next generation. Instead of just links, Andi gives you answers - like chatting with a smart friend.andisearch.com
Since I only watch YouTube on desktop I use yewtu.be/ to search for content and redirector to redirect the requested video to https://www.youtube.com/embed/ or https://www.youtube-nocookie.com/embed/. And I use uBlock and Improve Youtube, of course.
Edit: I also use FreshRSS to manage subscriptions.
Redirector – Get this Extension for 🦊 Firefox (en-US)
Download Redirector for Firefox. Automatically redirects to user-defined urls on certain pagesaddons.mozilla.org
Yes, embed redirect was a good solution, also using an iFrame script, but this currently works only in few videos, in the most it got the error "watch video in YouTube·
It's almost a daily battle between YouTube, devs of adblockers and scripts and front-end instances, some solutions work for some days and on the next day YouTube begins to nag and block again.
What we need is an real alternative of YouTube, but that need time to create something with this hugh amount of contents which nothing else has.
Continue the battle against the crap, clickbaits and forced playlist pauses (well, there at least the extension still works for the moment), hoping the best.
Meanwhile Pluto TV, Bandcamp, channels from local public TV, Odysee, Rakuten TV, Internet Radio..... etc..for info, music, movies, docus.....
That is definitely not the best for privacy.
All of that plus a trusted VPN is a good start.
If you're only watching subscriptions and not scrolling the generated feeds, you could presumably run tubearchivist through a VPN and then watch via Jellyfin or Plex (there are plugins).
It will not only be private but it has sponsorblock.
GitHub - tubearchivist/tubearchivist: Your self hosted YouTube media server
Your self hosted YouTube media server. Contribute to tubearchivist/tubearchivist development by creating an account on GitHub.GitHub
So many climate solutions, so few emissions reductions. A new book explains why.
In The Long Heat, Wim Carton and Andreas Malm argue that capitalism has turned the climate crisis into a business opportunity.
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I think you are right, but we also need to factor in that the west has been exporting its industrial production to other countries (cheaper labor, cheaper taxes etc). So it seems to be a tricky thing to see this by country.
The way I see things, it's more that the prevelant economic system dictates this kind of behavior, more than any one country. In the sense that the countries in power change, but they all follow some sort of capitalist model, which is also a form of neo-collonialism imo, at least when it comes from western countries . China is another story imo, that follows the economic model.
Indeed!
Something like this article could be effective too:
Wiki: How to tax the superrich (with pictures)
Wiki: How to tax the superrich (with pictures)
The extreme wealth of the superrich is making our economies insecure. Here's our step-by-step guide on how to apply wealth taxes.Alison Schultz (Tax Justice Network)
Shadow President, a strategy game where you manage the US presidential administration, with a focus on geopolitics, internal politics and a unique early 90s visual style, released on Steam.
Save 10% on Shadow President on Steam
A geopolitical presidential simulation where you manage budgets, diplomacy, covert operations, military actions and even nuclear choices as the U.S. President to maintain popularity, execute your agenda and navigate global crises.store.steampowered.com
Image site Imgur pulls out of UK as data watchdog threatens fine
Image site Imgur pulls out of UK as data watchdog threatens fine
A popular image hosting website has stopped its services in the UK after regulators threatened a fine.Aaron Newbury (Express.co.uk)
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Federal agencies blame Democrats for looming shutdown in apparent Hatch Act violation
Federal agencies blame Democrats for looming shutdown in apparent Hatch Act violation
Housing and VA departments attack ‘radical left’ despite law limiting political activities of government employeesMelody Schreiber (The Guardian)
essell likes this.
Queensland’s biggest coal-fired power station could close six years early
Queensland’s biggest coal-fired power station could close six years early
Crisafulli government wants coal plants to run longer – reversing previous Queensland Labor government’s plans to end reliance on coal power by 2035Graham Readfearn (The Guardian)
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Colombia’s Petro fires own Beijing embassy team for ‘sabotaging’ China outreach
Colombia’s Petro fires own Beijing embassy team for ‘sabotaging’ China outreach
Purge follows Bogota’s pivot to China and President Petro’s open tensions with Donald Trump over immigration, Gaza.Igor Patrick (South China Morning Post)
magnolia1234/bypass-paywalls-clean-filters
Участвуйте в разработке magnolia1234/bypass-paywalls-clean-filters, создав учетную запись в GitFlic.gitflic.ru
awesome and thank you.
the archive sites are so cumbersome to use.
Anyway to watch live sports on LG tv?
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Web Video Cast | Browser to TV - Apps on Google Play
Cast movies, tv shows and live streams to Chromecast, Roku, DLNA, Fire TV & moreplay.google.com
You might get lucky just using the browser.
But unless you're using pihole or some sort of DNS based ad blocking you will likely get smashed with ads.
If you have a DRM-free stream on a mobile device, you can cast from it.
If you have a DRM-free stream on PC, you can use Sunshine (PC) and Moonlight (webOS App, manual install) to stream PC to webOS. You can use webOS Dev Manager to install on TV from PC. docs
GitHub - LizardByte/Sunshine: Self-hosted game stream host for Moonlight.
Self-hosted game stream host for Moonlight. Contribute to LizardByte/Sunshine development by creating an account on GitHub.GitHub
Is there anywhere to watch crappy hotel TV online?
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Beach TV - Panama City Beach
Beach TV is just what it sounds like… a television station dedicated to the beach and beach lifestyle.Beach TV - Panama City Beach
Not exactly current, but as recent as 2009
USA TV - Stremio Addons
USA TV provides access to channels across various categories including local channels, news, sports, entertainment, premium, lifestyle, kids' shows, documentaries, Latino programming, and much more.stremio-addons.com
None of them are shit (well Dubai is).
Last time I was in Costa Rica I enjoyed myself quite a lot actually.
Here is a picture of quepos
There are many m3u8 playlists online. You just need a player. I think VLC is the most common but people use other players specifically for iptv. For example I use simple iptv in Kodi.
Unfortunately most playlists have lots of dead channels. There are online channel checkers but they're pretty slow. Once you get a solid lineup of working channels, it's smooth sailing.
GitHub - iptv-org/iptv: Collection of publicly available IPTV channels from all over the world
Collection of publicly available IPTV channels from all over the world - iptv-org/iptvGitHub
Slope Rider
Slope Rider is an adrenaline-packed endless runner game where speed, balance, and reflexes push every run to the limit. Let’s ride the digital winter now!Slope Rider
How each US senator voted on the Republican plan to avert shutdown
Tracker: how each US senator voted on the Republican plan to avert shutdown
US Senate rejects Republican plan to keep funding flowing as each party mostly unites to block other’s proposalAndrew Witherspoon (The Guardian)
ICE to Buy Tool that Tracks Locations of Hundreds of Millions of Phones Every Day
Archive: archive.is/wfmdL
ICE to Buy Tool that Tracks Locations of Hundreds of Millions of Phones Every Day
Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) has bought access to a surveillance tool that is updated every day with billions of pieces of location data from hundreds of millions of mobile phones, according to ICE documents reviewed by 404 Media.The documents explicitly show that ICE is choosing this product over others offered by the contractor’s competitors because it gives ICE essentially an “all-in-one” tool for searching both masses of location data and information taken from social media. The documents also show that ICE is planning to once again use location data remotely harvested from peoples’ smartphones after previously saying it had stopped the practice.
Surveillance contractors around the world create massive datasets of phones’, and by extension people’s movements, and then sell access to the data to government agencies. In turn, U.S. agencies have used these tools without a warrant or court order.
“The Biden Administration shut down DHS’s location data purchases after an inspector general found that DHS had broken the law. Every American should be concerned that Trump's hand-picked security force is once again buying and using location data without a warrant,” Senator Ron Wyden told 404 Media in a statement.
💡
Do you know anything else about this contract or others? Do you work at Penlink or ICE? I would love to hear from you. Using a non-work device, you can message me securely on Signal at joseph.404 or send me an email at joseph@404media.co.The ICE document is redacted but says a product made by a contractor called Penlink “leverages a proprietary data platform to compile, process, and validate billions of daily location signals from hundreds of millions of mobile devices, providing both forensic and predictive analytics.” The products the document is discussing are Tangles and Webloc.
Forbes previously reported that ICE spent more than $5 million on these products, including $2 million for Tangles specifically. Tangles and Webloc used to be run by an Israeli company called Cobwebs. Cobwebs joined Penlink in July 2023.
The new documents provide much more detail about the sort of location data ICE will now have access to, and why ICE chose to buy access to this vast dataset from Penlink specifically.
“Without an all-in-one tool that provides comprehensive web investigations capabilities and automated analysis of location-based data within specified geographic areas, intelligence teams face significant operational challenges,” the document reads. The agency said that the issue with other companies was that they required analysts to “manually collect and correlate data from fragmented sources,” which increased the chance of missing “connections between online behaviors and physical movements.”
A screenshot from the document.
ICE’s Homeland Security Investigations (HSI) conducted market research in May and June, according to the document. The document lists two other companies, Babel Street and Venntel, which also sell location data but which the agency decided not to partner with.404 Media and a group of other media outlets previously obtained detailed demonstration videos of Babel Street in action. They showed it was possible for users to track phones visiting and leaving abortion clinics, places of worship, and other sensitive locations. Venntel, meanwhile, was for some years a popular choice among U.S. government agencies looking to monitor the location of mobile phones. Its clients have included ICE, CBP, and the FBI. Its contracts with U.S. law enforcement have dried up in more recent years, with ICE closing out its work with the company in August, according to procurement records reviewed by 404 Media.
Companies that obtain mobile phone location data generally do it in two different ways. The first is through software development kits (SDKs) embedded in ordinary smartphone apps, like games or weather forecasters. These SDKs continuously gather a user’s granular location, transfer that to the data broker, and then sell that data onward or repackage it and sell access to government agencies.
The second is through real-time bidding (RTB). When an advert is about to be served to a mobile phone user, there is a near instantaneous, and invisible, bidding process in which different companies vie to have their advert placed in front of certain demographics. A side-effect is that this demographic data, including mobile phones’ location, can be harvested by surveillance firms. Sometimes spy companies buy ad tech companies out right to insert themselves into this data supply chain. We previously found at least thousands of apps were hijacked to provide location data in this way.
Penlink did not respond to a request for comment on how it gathers or sources its location data.
playlist.megaphone.fm?p=TBIEA2…
Regardless, the documents say that “HSI INTEL requires Penlink's Tangles and Weblocas [sic] an integral part of their investigations mission.” Although HSI has historically been focused on criminal investigations, 90 percent of HSI have been diverted to carry out immigration enforcement, according to data published by the Cato Institute. Meaning it is unclear whether use of the data will be limited to criminal investigations or not.After this article was published, DHS Assistant Secretary Tricia McLaughlin told 404 Media in a statement “DHS is not going to confirm or deny law enforcement capabilities or methods. The fact of the matter is the media is more concerned with peddling narratives to demonize ICE agents who are keeping Americans safe than they are with reporting on the criminals who have victimized our communities.” This is a boilerplate statement that DHS has repeatedly provided 404 Media when asked about public documents detailing the agency’s surveillance capabilities, and which inaccurately attacks the media.
In 2020, The Wall Street Journal first revealed that ICE and CBP were using commercially smartphone location data to investigate various crimes and for border enforcement. I then found CBP had a $400,000 contract with a location data broker and that the data it bought access to was “global.” I also found a Muslim prayer app was selling location data to a data broker whose clients included U.S. military contractors.
In October 2023, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Inspector General published a report that found ICE, CBP, and the Secret Service all broke the law when using location data harvested from phones. The oversight body found that those DHS components did not have sufficient policies and procedures in place to ensure that the location data was used appropriately. In one case, a CBP official used the technology to track the location of coworkers, the report said.
The report recommended that CBP stop its use of such data; CBP said at the time it did not intend to renew its contracts anyway. The Inspector General also recommended that ICE stop using such data until it obtained the necessary approvals. But ICE’s response in the report said it would continue to use the data. “CTD is an important mission contributor to the ICE investigative process as, in combination with other information and investigative methods, it can fill knowledge gaps and produce investigative leads that might otherwise remain hidden. Accordingly, continued use of CTD enables ICE HSI to successfully accomplish its law enforcement mission,” the response at the time said.
In January 2024, ICE said it had stopped the purchase of such “commercial telemetry data,” or CTD, which is how DHS refers to location data.
Update: this piece has been updated with a statement from DHS.
ICE says it’s stopped using commercial telemetry data
Spokesperson for Immigration and Customs Enforcement tells FedScoop that the agency is no longer using commercial telemetry data, but regulations are still scant.Rebecca Heilweil (FedScoop)
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As someone with nothing to hide, I'm ok with this.
Edit: Bunch of perverts, sexual harassers, and scammers on lemmy huh? Only cements my stance on increased police presence....
If you give me six lines written by the hand of the most honest of men, I will find something in them which will hang him.
[Cardinal Richelieu]
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Risky post of the day
Edit: why are you downvoting me? You may get a butthole pic from this! That feels risky haha
🤣 why would they? All that is already for sale, pally. Find a data broker, fork over twenty bucks, and all that info is fair game. Hell, fire up a TOR client, find a data breach that contains your device's MAC address or static IP, pay five or ten bucks, and same deal, but now I can drain your credit card.
Don't like it? Well the data comes from somewhere, unregulated floodgates of data collection to be bought, resold and scrutinized (or stolen). Nothing to hide, eh?
I don’t need to show you a badge. No one does. I can’t just go get your info from the data broker.
Perhaps you see the problem here…
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I believe there has been a case of this. I remember a person phished some service to give them access to a person's account or account data under the guise of "lives are on the line here". Might've also spoofed the email, but either way, he managed to get it
Edit: something like this
gizmodo.com/hackers-are-using-…
Hackers Are Using Police Emails to Send Tech Companies Fraudulent Data Requests
Law enforcement send "emergency" requests to tech giants when they believe it's necessary to stop an immediate threat. Hackers are taking advantage of that.Thomas Maxwell (Gizmodo)
Since due process is off the table, we've determined (without a trial) that you're not a citizen, and you're being deported to a country you've never been to, where they will imprison you at our request, and they don't speak any language you do.
Why? Because we're ICE. Fuck you.
Take your clothes off then, and burn them, if you've 'got nothing to hide'. Let's see your address and ssn. Where do you work, and what position do you hold?
Oh, suddenly you have changed your stance on the matter... funny how that works.
Try searching for yourself and let the realization and dread set in that most of those hypothetical questions I just asked, I can find out, without needing to ask you directly - because you've given them away, while having 'nothing to hide'.
As someone with nothing to hide, I'm ok with this.
Do you want to live in 1984? Because this is how we get to 1984.
Thanks for including the mirror, OP.
Companies that obtain mobile phone location data generally do it in two different ways. The first is through software development kits (SDKs) embedded in ordinary smartphone apps, like games or weather forecasters. These SDKs continuously gather a user’s granular location, transfer that to the data broker, and then sell that data onward or repackage it and sell access to government agencies.The second is through real-time bidding (RTB). When an advert is about to be served to a mobile phone user, there is a near instantaneous, and invisible, bidding process in which different companies vie to have their advert placed in front of certain demographics. A side-effect is that this demographic data, including mobile phones’ location, can be harvested by surveillance firms. Sometimes spy companies buy ad tech companies out right to insert themselves into this data supply chain. We previously found at least thousands of apps were hijacked to provide location data in this way.
I really despise these practices. I don't know how people can build these tools with a clear conscience.
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Or you use confirmation bias to tell yourself it's an innocuous use case that won't hurt anyone.
Or you use a bandwagon argument like "everybody else is doing it, so why can't we" or "everybody else is doing it so it doesn't make much difference if we do too"
Or you use a library for ads such as the google-ads-api npm package, without checking it, so you don't realise how much data it's collecting on your users...
build these tools with a clear conscience.
Because if they don't their masters they will become destitute and starve while homeless
And all social interaction happen at veiled gunpoint
Under these conditions it is no surprise at all that conscience plays no role whatsoever, it is just a savage free-for-all for survival happening under our cursed star, an insane 10 billion years long churning of thinking meat, consciousness behind birthed into the wreckage, screaming uncomprehendingly at what is happened until it soon it is just as easily, mercifully and meaninglessly snuffed out again.
Fortunately we have a shot at scorching the surface of this planet thanks to global warming and really the question is, can we make it happen before we genocide ourselves, leaving this planet's biosphere still capable of sustaining the horrors of life ?
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They thought the government cared about them.
One wanted to upgrade their car to add another 100 horsepower they cannot use anywhere.
Another told me, he does not like raising cows but he had to get more cows to make it more economical to raise cows.
They were all bummed out that the end of the end of the week was upon us, and soon they would have to work 40 hours in the next 5 days, doing things they stopped liking doing a long time again, if they ever did at all.
Advanced Privacy - know all about it
Illustration: Advanced Privacy on the Murena One smartphone Advanced Privacy is a specific tool we have developed to limit your data exposure once you have installed third party apps./e/OS community
You can instead use apps which block trackers. I can recommend 3.
Netguard with tracker filters enabled, PersonalDNS filter – a fire and forget DNS filter app, or Adguard android app from Adguard website.
The 1st one needs payment to access some pro features but can also block internet connection to all your apps.
The 2nd one is a simple DNS blocker which can have millions of rules and won't choke under the load.
The last one is not Foss or available on fdroid like the 1st two are, but is much more powerful than the 1st two combined.
Pick your tools and limit information now.
I don’t know how people can build these tools with a clear conscience.
Have you seen the job market for programmers lately? It feels like it's almost all for AI slop, abusive rentier middleman business models that add no real value, ~~defense~~ war contractors, or all of the above at once.
That's not to say that it's acceptable for people to work those jobs with a clear conscience; it's to say that for a bunch of people the only ethical options would be to remain unemployed or leave the industry.
I've been seeing exactly that. Reading through these job descriptions is a bit depressing. I can't virtue signal my lack of morality and unthinking subservience to my potential employer hard enough to make cutoff to become "Director of AI Shilling" or a "Dark Pattern Consent Violation Engineer".
I know the kind of environments that won't work for me. This will always limit the jobs I can and can't work and I'm generally okay with that. I would love some of that bountiful defence contractor money, but I can't ethically justify doing work that harms others or limits their freedom. Advertising tech would have been a good fit for me... if I had no sense of ethics.
It's a tough realization that my gaming consoles, GPS Smart Watch, and fancy modern over-engineered car only became possible because tons of money was poured into building out related tech for defence and surveillance.
I imagine the cognitive dissonance must be really strong in someone working for some of these companies that have monetized governmentally sanctioned or corporately opportunistic civil rights abuses. Then again, we're often kept apart, working in our own little areas where we're safe from having to see the whole horrifying machine.
It’s the same for anyone who works for Meta or MS or Google or Anduril or whatever these days: you look at your comp package that’s worth roughly half a million annually, and you say
They have been paying people to not have morals for quite a while now.
GrapheneOS already runs google play services in a sandbox that doesn't have core access to the device's functionality (you can lie about giving apps storage access or location data, for example), and because you already have alternatives to ad-based services (CoMaps, Thunderbird, etc...) you should be safe from telemetry often hidden inside of popular apps like Google Maps.
Nothing's bulletproof, of course, but the difference with GrapheneOS is that you can see what's going on, grant permissions selectively to certain apps, or opt out entirely by only installing F-droid apps or using Graphene's FOSS suite. You don't have pre-baked telemetry at all, so nothing for them to harvest.
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Yes, maybe a bit much, but it would have been very fitting, since the marketing is obviously aimed specifically at the villains of the world—perhaps for the next project.
It's quite telling of the times we live in that you can make it so obvious these days. You'd think that at least some concealment of the intentions behind these mass surveillance products would be appropriate, but I guess with people like Trump in the White House, Putin in the Kremlin, Netanyahu in Israel, and many others of that caliber, it's no longer necessary.
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A Linux phone could theoretically use other networks. You could pipe traffic through I2P or bounce it around multiple network types with reticulum. It’s actually theoretically possible to make a community mesh that doesn’t need cellular at all. I don’t NEED to carry the entire internet with me everywhere. I can carry a device with a cache of stuff I need but for everything else I can just connect to some sort of network to fetch it when I actually need it on demand.
A Linux phone would let you do that. You can explore that possibility. Android and IPhone will never allow that because latency is shot on the alternative networks and they aren’t expensive enough to make a profit off of.
Bro...my weather app is selling my data? 😦
I just wanted up-to-date travel conditions in a convenient widget. My taxes already pay for the meteorology, why do they need to sell my data too??
Nearly every weather app that exists is repackaging data from an official, tax funded source. Apps using weather underground data possibly being the only exception.
Show me one that doesn't want location permissions and such. So now they've got Your data and can do as they please with it.
Nearly every weather app that exists is repackaging data from an official, tax funded source
The weather source. Not the application source. A dude needs to sit down and write that part.
Not affiliated, just discovered this amazing app relatively recently.
GitHub - breezy-weather/breezy-weather: A feature-rich weather app with good visualizations and more than 50 sources.
A feature-rich weather app with good visualizations and more than 50 sources. - breezy-weather/breezy-weatherGitHub
I think the last time I tried a bunch, it came down to Breezy and Cirrus. I think they're pretty similar but I settled on Cirrus for whatever reason. Here's a link for anyone interested.
f-droid.org/packages/org.wohel…
Cirrus | F-Droid - Free and Open Source Android App Repository
Weather and rain radar for any location - worldwidef-droid.org
If you want the weather info sponsored by your taxes, use the browser.
If you want a convenient widget, someone needs to make it, and the developer who made that widget needs to eat too.
You can either buy an app or pay with your data.
You can either buy an app or pay with your data.
No this implies you get a choice, which you don't. You can get it for free and sell your data, or you can pay for it...and still also sell your data. The real money is in the data, they won't give that up...ever.
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GitHub - breezy-weather/breezy-weather: A feature-rich weather app with good visualizations and more than 50 sources.
A feature-rich weather app with good visualizations and more than 50 sources. - breezy-weather/breezy-weatherGitHub
Yeah, that's true. Often people will take the money from users AND from selling data. But you can (usually) verify if that's the case by checking the app's permissions required.
The point stands, however: you either pay for the software with money, or with data - with the only exception being the unusually rare FOSS project here and there, which either lives in relative obscurity or grows to become large enough for the creators to either start requiring money, or just fold under the load...
GitHub - breezy-weather/breezy-weather: A feature-rich weather app with good visualizations and more than 50 sources.
A feature-rich weather app with good visualizations and more than 50 sources. - breezy-weather/breezy-weatherGitHub
and the developer who made that widget needs to eat too.
He can eat without selling people's data.
This isn't about putting food on the table and you're a dipshit if you believe otherwise.
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He can eat without selling people’s data.
Yes. By making your app paid, not free. 90% of Apple Store/Google Play store users don't want to pay for apps with their money.
This isn’t about putting food on the table and you’re a dipshit if you believe otherwise.
You're childishly naive if you think it's malice 100% of the way top to bottom.
Yes. By making your app paid, not free. 90% of Apple Store/Google Play store users don’t want to pay for apps with their money.
No, by doing something else with his life because developing an app is not an all-encompassing behavior.
You’re childishly naive if you think it’s malice 100% of the way top to bottom.
No, I'm just not a useful idiot going to bat for people making money off of me.
I, personally, have made significantly more complicated apps than what you're defending and I don't charge money for it or harvest my user's data. I'm also not alone.
If we can do it, why can't this scumbag? Oh yeah, because he has useful idiots like you going to bat for him.
Please, tell me more about how ignorant and innocent you are. It's cute and predictable.
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No, by doing something else with his life because developing an app is not an all-encompassing behavior.
Buddy, are you suggesting that software developers should "do something else to earn money"?
Are you high right now?
No, I’m just not a useful idiot going to bat for people making money off of me.
Go ahead. Quote the bit where anyone in this thread is batting for anybody.
I, personally, have made significantly more complicated apps than what you’re defending
I'm becoming fairly certain that you are high. What exactly am I defending....?
If we can do it, why can’t this scumbag?
We can't have a discussion if you don't understand some simple facts of life. Such as: "people need to eat", or "eating costs money", or "not everybody has the privilege of being a software developer as a side-gig", or "not everybody wants or can be a farmer".
Please, tell me more about how ignorant and innocent you are. It’s cute and predictable.
Get sober, then read what you wrote again.
Yeah, morons like you will fight tooth and nail to avoid admitting you're being taken for a ride.
It's in your blood and I don't expect more.
Keep being stupid.
My taxes already pay for the meteorology
Yeah, but it got privatized, so now you need to pay more money to a 3rd party to access the services you are already paying money to access.
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Breezy Weather | F-Droid - Free and Open Source Android App Repository
A feature-rich weather app with good visualizations and many sources.f-droid.org
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Nope.
He should be tried and executed for treason, but those in leadership positions in our country have betrayed their oaths. That means we all need to be armed to the fucking teeth as soon as possible.
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Privacy policies are irrelevant here. They are picking up unique data as your phone communicates with a cell tower. You can do it with a $15 RTL-SDR receiver.
Get a hundred receivers and you can pinpoint anybody in a city.
They don't need the cooperation of telecom providers. They receive the same signal you send to the cell tower. Even if the signal is encrypted so they can't see what you are sending, they can identify that you are sending.
With enough receivers listening, they can identify your location to a pretty high accuracy.
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Some choices to help would be to avoid using precise location for weather apps. Course is usually very good unless you're a weather tracking hobbyist. If you're not using ad blocking it's never a bad time to start.
Ad blocking in browser is good but combined with a DNS service that offers block lists like Hagezi's options it's great. These lists can block a lot of tracking and telemetry data and not just the ads themselves. ControlD and NextDNS are two solid options. NextDNS doesn't offer Hagezi Threat Intelligence Feeds specifically but have their own proprietary version. The company claims it covers much of Hagezi's lists but I haven't compared.
ControlD has a 30 day free trial period with two plans either $20 or $40 per year. The $40 per year option has a future called Redirect. Their description "Spoof various web services, apps and platforms to geo-distributed proxy locations and appear to be in a different country".
NextDNS has a free plan that can be used on multiple devices. Paid is $20 per year for unlimited. The catch to the free plan is it's good for 300,000 queries per month. If you get close they email a warning and if you go over the service will still work as a DNS but without the blocking. It will automatically start again the next cycle.
Here's the Hagezi GitHub but other lists are good too like OISD and AdGuard lists.
github.com/hagezi/dns-blocklis…
I use Ultimate but that may be too restricted for some. It will break websites and apps like FaceBook, WhatsApp, Instagram. If you use those a slightly less strict list a better choice. You'll still get protection but there's a balance to everyone's needs so do read up on each list and what makes sense for you.
All that wrapped in a trusted VPN and you're doing pretty well. Nothing is perfect and if a government power wants to know where you are this isn't going to stop them. For me that's not what this is for. I use this stuff against the ads and tracking crap everywhere. I'm not trying to hide and can't really offer much regarding that.
I'm maybe a bit over the top compared to some. If this all sounds crazy a simple ad blocker (AdGuard, uBlock Origin) in browser and course location for weather and anything else location based that makes sense is a solid start. You can always whitelist websites you wish to support via ad revenue if that's an interest.
GitHub - hagezi/dns-blocklists: DNS-Blocklists: For a better internet - keep the internet clean!
DNS-Blocklists: For a better internet - keep the internet clean! - hagezi/dns-blocklistsGitHub
Yes they can be used with a PiHole. I don't use one so I can't offer much for set up. On the GitHub page each list version has various links depending on the format needed for where it will be used. For example, PiHole is under the Adblock format which works with (Pi-hole, AdGuard, AdGuard Home, eBlocker, uBlock Origin, Brave (only in aggressive mode), AdNauseam, Little Snitch Mini).
In my research about this stuff I saw many people talking about these lists for their own home DNS set up. Good luck!
So they will know where I have been? Even though I am not American... I remember when the British government demanded that Apple give them that kind of information on all iPhone users all over the world and Apple told them to go fuck themselves.
This is some real bullshit.
UK government tries again to access encrypted Apple customer data: Report | TechCrunch
The U.K. Home Office is seeking access to Apple users’ encrypted iCloud backups for a second time, after an earlier attempt failed earlier this year.Lorenzo Franceschi-Bicchierai (TechCrunch)
Because they will never quit. Ever. We need to get lucky and stop them every time (and I feel powerless beyond signing some petition online and maybe making a donation), but they need to get lucky once.
And I cannot recall a single time that such laws were ever repealed. The patriot act has had some questionable efficacy and now ICE and the Trump administration want so many more additions that there is just no going back.
Even in Canada, which never had an issue with terrorism, has passed many laws heavily infringing on people's freedoms and are trying to pass the biggest one yet with Bill C-2, even though it actually weakens border protections and gives American companies far, far more ability to surveil Canadians than ever before. This is when violence and terror threats have been greatly diminishing for years (and not because of some BS laws).
Definitely considering looking into portable Faraday cages...
Guess it doesn't really matter when the license plate on my car is tracked everywhere I go and all the big businesses use face identification the moment you walk into their stores, probably all run by the same vendor and packaged and sold to the highest bidder.
I hate this dystopia.
Meet Rayhunter: A New Open Source Tool from EFF to Detect Cellular Spying
Rayhunter is a new open source tool we’ve created that runs off an affordable mobile hotspot that we hope empowers everyone, regardless of technical skill, to help search out cell-site simulators (CSS) around the world.Electronic Frontier Foundation
Install the android developer tools, or whatever it is that includes the adb utility. Download the software from the EFF & run the install script while your device is plugged in via usb.
github.com/EFForg/rayhunter/re…
Releases · EFForg/rayhunter
Rust tool to detect cell site simulators on an orbic mobile hotspot - EFForg/rayhunterGitHub
reuters.com/article/world/us-s…
bbc.com/news/world-europe-5730…
NSA spying row: Denmark accused of helping US spy on European officials
Denmark's secret service is accused of helping the US target politicians such as Germany's Angela Merkel.BBC News
Salesforce users grumble after Agentforce AI replaces search on some help pages
Salesforce users grumble after Agentforce AI replaces search on some help pages
: This is one way to add a lot of AI users in a hurry, which Wall Street wants to seeIain Thomson (The Register)
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blakestacey
in reply to blakestacey • • •Elon Musk announces "Grokipedia", which is exactly what it sounds like.
for article in wikipedia: grok.is_this_true(article)The Gizmodo story mentions that he retweeted Larry Sanger, but it doesn't dive into the rabbit hole of just how much of a kook Sanger is and how badly his would-be Wikipedia competitors have failed.
Elon Musk's Wikipedia Competitor Is Going to Be a Disaster
Matt Novak (Gizmodo)rook
in reply to blakestacey • • •In today’s torment nexus development news… you know how various cyberpunky type games let you hack into an enemy’s augmentations and blow them up? Perhaps you thought this was stupid and unrealistic, and you’d be right.
Maybe that’s the wrong example. How about a cursed evil ring that when you put it on, you couldn’t take it off and it wracks you with pain? Who hasn’t wanted one of those?
Happily, hard working torment nexus engineers have brought that dream one step closer, by having “smart rings”, powered by lithium polymer batteries. Y’know, the things that can go bad, and swell up and catch fire? And that you shouldn’t puncture, because that’s a fire risk too, meaning cutting the ring off is somewhat dangerous? Fun times abound!
bsky.app/profile/emily.gorcen.…
::: spoiler image description
A pair of tweets, containing the text
:::
saucerwizard
in reply to rook • • •blakestacey
in reply to saucerwizard • • •