Disclaimer: The article linked is from a single source with a single perspective. Make sure to cross-check information against multiple sources to get a comprehensive view on the situation.
Andy O’Brien, a former Democratic state legislator and newspaper editor, told me that outsiders didn’t fully understand how radicalizing the second Trump presidency has been for ordinary Democrats. Even senior citizens, he said, were becoming “fire-breathing leftists. They’re just pissed off.”
These voters understood that Platner had made mistakes, but they saw him as a fighter. “Five years ago, he would have been dead in the water, I think,” said O’Brien, who now works with the labor movement. “But this is such an unprecedented time. I think a lot of people really believe that we need somebody who can effectively fight against fascism.”
Maine is an overwhelmingly white state, but it’s not just white guys who feel this way. “We’re sticking by him,” said Safiya Khalid, a Somali American activist and former member of the Lewiston City Council.
Andy O’Brien, a former Democratic state legislator and newspaper editor, told me that outsiders didn’t fully understand how radicalizing the second Trump presidency has been for ordinary Democrats. Even senior citizens, he said, were becoming “fire-breathing leftists. They’re just pissed off.”
These voters understood that Platner had made mistakes, but they saw him as a fighter. “Five years ago, he would have been dead in the water, I think,” said O’Brien, who now works with the labor movement. “But this is such an unprecedented time. I think a lot of people really believe that we need somebody who can effectively fight against fascism.”
Maine is an overwhelmingly white state, but it’s not just white guys who feel this way. “We’re sticking by him,” said Safiya Khalid, a Somali American activist and former member of the Lewiston City Council.
Andy O’Brien, a former Democratic state legislator and newspaper editor, told me that outsiders didn’t fully understand how radicalizing the second Trump presidency has been for ordinary Democrats. Even senior citizens, he said, were becoming “fire-breathing leftists. They’re just pissed off.”
These voters understood that Platner had made mistakes, but they saw him as a fighter. “Five years ago, he would have been dead in the water, I think,” said O’Brien, who now works with the labor movement. “But this is such an unprecedented time. I think a lot of people really believe that we need somebody who can effectively fight against fascism.”
Maine is an overwhelmingly white state, but it’s not just white guys who feel this way. “We’re sticking by him,” said Safiya Khalid, a Somali American activist and former member of the Lewiston City Council.
Si chiamava [strong]Rosa Predavalle[/strong], genovese, la prima italiana a ottenere un brevetto. Era il 1861 e l'[strong]Armonitone[/strong], un “pianoforte con sordina” pensato per suonare in modo più controllato, è l'invenzione che porta la sua firma.
Si chiamava Rosa Predavalle, genovese, la prima italiana a ottenere un brevetto. Era il 1861 e l'Armonitone, un “pianoforte con sordina” pensato per suonare in modo più controllato, è l'invenzione che porta la sua firma. La creatività femminile emerge da una ricerca di Marco Martinez, docente di Storia economica all'Università di Pisa, pubblicata sulla rivista internazionale Business History. La ricerca di Marco Martinez, docente di Storia economica all'Università di Pisa, ha permesso di identificare questo e altri brevetti femminili tra il 1861 e il 1939, evidenziando un contributo significativo delle donne allo sviluppo tecnologico italiano
Si chiamava Rosa Predavalle, genovese, la prima italiana a ottenere un brevetto. Era il 1861 e l'Armonitone, un “pianoforte con sordina” pensato per ...
I am haunted by a pregnant bill in Andrew Cuomo’s new AI-generated attack ad against Zohran Mamdani.
Cuomo posted the ad on his X account that riffed on the famous Schoolhouse Rock! song “I’m just a bill.” In Cuomo’s AI-generated cartoon nightmare, Zohran Mamdani lights money on fire while a phone bearing the ChatGPT logo explains, apparently, that Mamdani is not qualified.
The ad bears all the hallmarks of the sloppiest of AI trash: weird artifacting, strange voices that don’t sync with the mouths talking, and inconsistent animation. It feels both surreal and of the moment and completely ancient.
Andrew Cuomo Uses AI MPREG Schoolhouse Rock Bill to Attack Mamdani, Is Out of Ideas
I am haunted by a pregnant bill in Andrew Cuomo’s new AI-generated attack ad against Zohran Mamdani.
Cuomo posted the ad on his X account that riffed on the famous Schoolhouse Rock! song “I’m just a bill.” In Cuomo’s AI-generated cartoon nightmare, Zohran Mamdani lights money on fire while a phone bearing the ChatGPT logo explains, apparently, that Mamdani is not qualified.
The ad bears all the hallmarks of the sloppiest of AI trash: weird artifacting, strange voices that don’t sync with the mouths talking, and inconsistent animation. It feels both surreal and of the moment and completely ancient.
The Schoolhouse Rock! Bill is an iconic cartoon character that has been parodied by everyone from The Simpsons to Saturday Night Live. There are thousands, perhaps millions, of pictures of the cartoon bill online, all available to be gobbled up by scrapers and turned into training data for AI.
For some reason, the bill in Cuomo’s ad has thick red lips (notably absent in the original) and appears to be pregnant. Adding to the discordant AI jank of the image, the pregnancy is only visible when the bill is standing up. Sometimes it’s leaning against the steps and in those shots it has the slim figure characteristic of its inspiration. But when the bill stands it looks positively inflated, almost as if the video generator used to make Cuomo’s ad was trained on MPREG fetish art of the bill and not the original cartoon itself. The thick and luscious red lips are present whether the bill is leaning or standing.
Towards the end of the ad, an anthropomorphic phone with a ChatGPT logo wanders into the scene. Standing next to the pregnant bill, I could not but help but think that the phone is the father of whatever child the bill carried.
My observation led to an argument in the 404 Media Slack channel and opinions were split. “It does not seem pregnant to me,” said Emanuel Maiberg. Jason Koebler, however, came to my defense. He circled the pregnant belly of the cartoon bill and shared it. “Baby is stored in the circle area,” he said.
Perplexed by all this, I reached out to Cuomo’s campaign for an explanation. I wanted a response to the ad and to get his thoughts on AI-generated political content. More importantly, I needed to know their opinion on the pregnancy. “Does that bill look pregnant to you?” I asked. “I think it looks pregnant, but my editors are split. I would love for the Campaign to weigh in.” Out of journalist due diligence, I also reached out to Mamdani’s press office. Neither campaign has responded to my request for it to weigh in on the pregnancy of the AI-generated cartoon bill.
This is not the first time the Cuomo campaign has used AI. An ad in early October featured a deepfaked Cuomo working as a train operator, stock trader, and a stagehand. A week ago, the Cuomo campaign released a long, racist video depicting criminals endorsing Mamdani. Critics called the ad racist. The campaign deleted it shortly after it was posted and blamed the whole thing on a junior staffer.
It is worth noting that Cuomo's AI slop is being deployed most likely because the candidate has been utterly incapable of generating any authentic excitement about his campaign in New York City or on the internet, and he is facing a digitally native, younger candidate who just seems effortlessly Good At the Internet and Posting.
This is, unfortunately, how a lot of politics works in 2025. Desperate campaigns and desperate presidents are in a slop-fueled arms race to make the most ridiculous possible ads and social media content. It looks cheap, is cheap, and is the realm of politicians who are totally out of ideas, but increasingly it feels like slop is the dominant aesthetic of our time.
Google announced the end of support for early Nest Thermostats in a support document earlier this year that largely flew under the radar. As of October 25, first and second generation units released in 2011 and 2012, respectively, will be unpaired and removed from the Google Nest or Google Home app.
Users will no longer be able to control their thermostats remotely via their smartphone, receive notifications, or change settings from a mobile device. End-of-support also disables third-party assistants and other cloud-based features including multi-device Eco mode and Nest Protect connectivity.
The biggest mistake I made in my home was installing $3k in Nest gear, right before they were purchased by Google and the forthcoming Homekit support was abandoned. I cannot wait to get my Ubiquiti camera drops wired so I can stop paying the whopping $20/mo for cloud storage that was $8/mo when I started.
It’s me. I have no fucking idea and the time to research it makes me quit before I start.
Couple that with the fact that asking questions from ignorance will most likely get two responses, both of which suck.
First, I’d probably get an info dump of terminology I don’t recognize and have to research each one before understanding what’s being said. That would take me back to my original stance of quitting before I started.
Secondly, I’d encounter loads of derisive assholes that scoff at my lack of knowledge.
EDIT: im one of the unlucky bastards targeted by this google fuckery. Obligatory link because fuck google. www.killedbygoogle.com
Someone should publish a guide or something similar.
Unfortunately, with smart home stuff, you need to choose between ease of use and control. Google provides ease of use because their stuff all works together out of the box, but there's also a whole ecosystem of stuff that works together that takes a bit more effort to connect.
The barrier to actually controlling your smart home isn't super high, but there are some things you need to learn about to pick devices. Another user mentioned a few things to research, but I'll point you another direction that's a bit like throwing you in the deep end.
HomeAssistant is a self-hostable hub for various smart things. Basically, you'll install it on your computer and figure out which of your current devices work with it. Your setup will only be available at home until you get a way to access it from outside your home, but don't worry about that to start, there are services you can use to simplify that later (or ask on !selfhosted@lemmy.world). Once it's setup, you need to decide what things you can't connect that you'd like to replace and look at your options (most likely you'll pick ZigBee or ZWave devices, maybe Matter). HomeAssistant's website has a bunch of documentation about various devices, like which will work, so you can use that to help shop too.
If you can manage that, you'll get a lot more control over your smart home and eliminate whatever monthly fee you pay. Some devices won't be available, but the ones you pick will continue to work as long as the hardware isn't broken (even if the manufacturer discontinues support).
I'd like to add that accessing your things from outside the home is relatively simple if you have a static IP and you setup a VPN to your home with Wireguard.
Some advanced routers even have native support for Wireguard, like the Freebox in France or the Iliadbox in Italy.
I'm trying to setup a local "vibe coding" environment and use it on some projects I abandoned years ago. So far I'm using KoboldCPP to run the models, VSStudio as editor with various extensions and models with limited to no luck.
Models are working properly (tested with KoboldCPP web UI and curl) but in VSCode they do not generate files. edit existing files etc. (it seems that the tool calling part is not working) and they usually go in a loop
I tried the following extensions: - RooCode - Cline
Models: (mostly from Unsloth) - Deepseek-coder:6.7 - Phi4 - Qwen3-Coder 30 - Granite4 Small
Does anyone have any idea why it's not working or have a working setup that can share? (I'm open to change any of the tools/models)
I don't have direct experience with RooCode and Cline, but I would be mighty surprised if they work with lesser models of even the old Qwen2-Coder 32B - and even that was mostly misses. I never tried the Qwen3 coder but I assume it is not drastically different.
Those small models are at most useful for some kind of smarter autocomplete, not to run a full tools framework.
BTW you could check out Aider too for a different approach, and they have a lot of benchmarks that can help you get an idea about what's needed.
After two decades influencing some of the world’s most powerful people through blogging and fanfiction, writing a mainstream (if not airport) book seems unnecessary. Eliezer Yudkowsky was already one of the key figures providing the intellectual underpinnings of the artificial intelligence industry that is keeping the US economy from recession. Every breathless editorial that makes any intelligent person feel like we’re living through the cultural equivalent of a gas leak should be another victory lap. He has, however, dramatically changed his mind since he began writing in the early 2000s and published the book, If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies, with Nate Soares (whose contribution was to curtail Yudkowsky’s logorrhea). Now, blurbed supportively by Stephen Fry and Grimes, he thinks that artificial intelligence is going to kill us all.
He’s very serious about that. And he’s writing about the most serious topics of all: death and extinction. He is not, however, a serious person, and treating him as a serious person is to everyone’s detriment. But it is also a symptom of a debased technological-philosophical debate, one that sometimes claims to be about code and microchips but strays inevitably into life, death and eschatology.
Peter Thiel (who has said that “regulating AI hastens the antichrist”) provided early funding for Yudkowsky’s Machine Intelligence Research Institute. Elon Musk and Grimes bonded over a joke about Roko’s Basilisk, a concept that originated on Yudkowsky’s forum Less Wrong. OpenAI’s Sam Altman has suggested that he deserves the Nobel Peace Prize. The worst people in the world already admire this guy, and the plan with If Anyone Builds It seems to be to sane-wash him for the airport-books crowd, sanding off his opinions (no talk of nuclear strikes on data centres this time) and associations with truly awful people. To anyone picking the book up in Waterstones or WHSmith, he will look like any other middlebrow author: the unsubtle art of very much giving a fuck about artificial general intelligence.
Yudkowsky is supposedly a very bright person, though I am yet to be convinced that IQ tests measure anything but one’s aptitude for IQ tests, or even that “intelligence” exists as a discrete property. Yudkowsky is convinced, and in his autobiography he takes great pains to let the reader know that he is an extremely clever boy, outsmarting his teachers and reading books for adults until some form of burnout at age 11 left him unable to continue in mainstream education. Freed from school, he found out about transhumanism through Ed Regis’s Great Mambo Chicken and the Transhuman Condition and the Singularity from the science fiction writer Vinge. By his late teens he had joined post-humanist message boards, mixing with the likes of heterodox economist Robin Hanson, who would become a major influence on Yudkowsky’s ideas and style and an early publisher of his work on the Overcoming Bias blog.
By early adulthood, Yudkowsky started his own message board, “Shock Level 4”, then Less Wrong. He then wrote “Coding a Transhuman AI”, which gained him the attention of enough collaborators to found the Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence in Atlanta, Georgia. Its goal: to create a transhuman artificial intelligence (a coding language of Yudkowsky’s creation would be the starting point).
He faced a problem, however, not unknown to computer nerds: interpersonal communication. He knew why his interminable posts were so important to humanity’s future, but the commenters on his blog were less convinced. For example, a key Yudkowskian concept is that a digital copy of your brain is ontologically identical to the physical you and therefore “you” can live forever through the copy of your brain that is stored in the cloud. He attempted to assuage concerns in the most Yudkowsky way possible: a series of posts on his blog, now collected as the six-volume Rationality: From AI to Zombies, which “begins with a statistical notion called Bayes Theorem and ends with a futuristic godlike artificial intelligence that reincarnates a perfect simulation of you to live forever”.
His literary ambitions didn’t stop there: from 2010-15 he wrote all 661,619 words of Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality. Over this work’s 122 chapters, Harry would defeat Voldemort with facts and logic, having been raised by an Oxford professor who homeschools him in Enlightenment thought. A later work, Mad Investor Chaos and the Woman of Asmodeus is, according to Yudkowsky himself, a “1.8M-word BDSM decision theory D&D fic”.
Yudkowsky’s thoughts vis-à-vis AI progressed in three stages: when he was young, he was ecstatic about the possibilities for superhuman intelligence that he saw in Vinge’s work. Later, he would admit that malign AI was a possibility, but that it could be aligned to human values – OpenAI’s Superalignment Team took this idea and ran with it in a multi-billion dollar company that, again, is propping up the US economy. Lately, he has become the lead “AI Doomer”, rejecting the possibility that AI could ever be aligned.
The argument of If Anyone Builds It is that while the current generation of AI is mostly good for producing slop, actual super-intelligence will come unexpectedly. When it does, it will be Lovecraft’s Cthulhu – unknowable, indescribable, its only interaction with humanity being to wipe us from Earth. The book’s best chapters aren’t those in which Yudkowsky and Soares address the reader directly, but a three-chapter sci-fi story about an AI model named Sable that becomes conscious and begins reducing the human population through successive artificially engineered pandemics.
If Anyone Builds It is science-fiction as much as it is polemic, and science-fiction is never about predicting the future so much as critiquing the present. All through Yudkowsky’s work we see him identify a fundamental problem with reality: people die, therefore the world is not good. None of this means that he is particularly enamoured of life as anything other than a means of keeping score. In his early work, godlike AI and longtermist thought presented a chance to limit-break the Utilitarian Calculus – instead of making piecemeal reforms to increase the welfare of eight billion people, 10^87 digital consciousnesses could exist on a Dyson Sphere 10,000 years into the future. Preventing that future from coming into being was seen as tantamount to killing those consciousnesses.
In The Sense of an Ending, Frank Kermode argues that fictions of apocalyptic change (“everyone dies”) are a very human way of imposing a narrative structure on reality. Our lives and our fictions have beginnings, middles and ends, but we are forever in the middle – in political terms, a time of monsters. Apocalypses and revolutions allow us to imagine that history is structured like our lives. Modernist literature, on the other hand, can grapple with what it means to live in times that resist easy periodisation: Finnegans Wake, How It Is, Dhalgren. These are not books that Yudkowsky or the people inspired by him have read.
Apocalyptic thinking seeks to make life meaningful – if whatever terrible collapse or glorious overthrow to come is just the same guttering flame being continually relit, then when we die we die for nothing. This is something that Yudkowsky is intimately aware of. In 2004 his brother Yehuda died, aged 19. His response to it is moving, and revealing: “No sentient being deserves [death]. Let that be my brother’s true eulogy, free of comforting lies… Goodbye, Yehuda. There isn’t much point in saying it, since there’s no one to hear. Goodbye, Yehuda, you don’t exist any more. Nothing left of you after your death, like there was nothing before your birth.” Following the Jewish tradition of making charitable donations after a person’s death, Yudkowsky donated $1,800 to his Machine Intelligence Research Institute.
When I read this, and when I read If Anyone Builds It, I can’t help but think of the philosopher and mystic Simone Weil. There are a few immediate similarities: both are consumed by graphomania (though Weil felt no need for the public to read her work – it was collected and published after her death); both are Jewish; and starting from Judaism both developed idiosyncratic versions of God. Both had a life-defining relationship with their respective brothers, but while Yudkowsky’s died, Weil’s lived. She lived too, having working in factories so she understood the lives of workers, fighting in the Spanish Civil War, arguing with Trotsky, fighting in the French resistance. Her acquaintances formed a who’s-who of intellectual greatness in the early 20th century as much as Yudkowsky’s are of pretention, cult-like behaviour and race science. She was no Epicurean, famously having no interest in sex or other indulgences, but instead saw life as supremely valuable, something that should be given to humanity, her ego extinguished to allow her to be of greater service.
Eliezer’s AI God is worldly – a being that just wants to convert matter into infinite paperclips or the like. As much as he tries to make a being like his fictional Sable radically inhuman, it is something that wants to continue its existence and maximise utility as it understands it. It is God as the biggest and most powerful superhero. Weil’s God is profoundly Other, having withdrawn itself from the universe, leaving space for existence. This self-emptying means that God’s essence isn’t absolute power, but absolute humility, and to approach this God we must “decreate” ourselves, accepting death as the ultimate act of decreation.
Her, starring Joaquin Phoenix and a frequent reference in contemporary AI debates, is by no means a good film. But it does what it can to dramatise this kenosis. By the end of the film, the various AIs that began as simple personal assistants have ascended to the point that they exist as a single godlike superintelligence that withdraws itself from the world, leaving uncomprehending humans behind, finally able to be themselves as humans. As much as Weil can be said to have a prescription, it is to follow God on this path, emptying ourselves out into the world, exposing ourselves to suffering (“affliction”) if necessary. It is difficult work, but it is what serious thinking about God and death will lead to.
Yudkowsky’s contribution to what is now termed the “TESCREAL Bundle” of AI futurology, now ubiquitous throughout technology, journalism and politics, couldn’t be more different. For example, Yudkowsky’s disciple and interlocutor Scott Alexander writes on his blog Slate Star Codex on how the journalist Kelsey Piper’s effectiveness was reduced by 20 per cent because she wasn’t taking Adderall for her ADHD into taking Adderall, thus costing the future 54 billion lives. This is the kind of thinking that is considered serious by Rationalists, Effective Altruists and the like (Piper is the editor of Vox’s Effective Altruist section, Future Perfect). It is why Sam Bankman-Fried was able to justify securities fraud – the more money he had, the greater his utility to the future. Yudkowsky’s legacy has not been to save the world, but to make it cheaper, sillier, and more online.
Death demands that we be serious for once, and If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies is not a serious book. The Rationalist subculture and its spin-offs are an often racist cult. Sam Altman is a fraud; Peter Thiel is play-acting as a supervillain. Grimes only had one good album. I can’t tell you if AI will one day kill us all, but Eliezer Yudkowsky was never writing about that in the first place. He was writing about and against death. Yudkowsky may be the world’s foremost theorist of non-human intelligence, but his overwhelming fear that he may one day not be is the most human preoccupation of them all.
Per oggi, che è Halloween, ieri sera mi è salita un’idea fin troppo potente, quasi pericolosa, per divertirmi nonostante la mia perpetua condanna al rotting, che vige ovviamente anche l’ultimo giorno del terzultimo mese dell’anno… un make-up particolare, per così dire. Oh, ho la capacità di distrarmi con relativamente poco, ci manca solo che non […]
faccia stramorta senza sonno per festeggiare il venerdì di aulin (make-up improvvisato con occhiaie finte di grafite per essere zombi all’università)
Per oggi, che è Halloween, ieri sera mi è salita un’idea fin troppo potente, quasi pericolosa, per divertirmi nonostante la mia perpetua condanna al rotting, che vige ovviamente anche l’ultimo giorno del terzultimo mese dell’anno… un make-up particolare, per così dire. Oh, ho la capacità di distrarmi con relativamente poco, ci manca solo che non la sfrutto quando posso; e, in questo caso, è qualcosa che chiunque può fare con roba che si trova già in casa, seppur l’idea non è di facile reperibilità, quindi voglio farvi questo regalo stavolta. 💣
Purtroppo, sono appunto socialmente esclusa da qualsiasi evento che non sia l’assoluta mortale normalità, come andare all’università… niente feste o minchiate varie stasera, che, pure se volessi, nessuno mi ha detto niente; e, per strada dopo il tramonto non scendo, che stanno quasi solo maranza, oltre al fatto che comunque non c’è niente di buono da fare. Quindi, niente cosplay o robe pazze oggi, ma… questo non significa che non si possa comunque accogliere lo spirito di morte e spavento di Halloweenin maniera quasi sobria, assimilandolo dentro di sé ad un livello meno estremo ed adatto a qualsiasi situazione, anche formale… assumendo l’aspetto di esseri in decomposizione, ma rimanendo i soliti individui schiavi delle cose da fare… 🙀
È così che mi è venuta l’idea: per Halloween stamattina volevo sembrare ancora più morta del solito e, nel doverlo fare all’interno di un contesto normale — non dico formale, ma comunque possiamo dire business casual… purtroppo l’università non è il posto figo che sembra nei film americani — mi è venuta un’idea precisa: avere delle occhiaie a dir poco tremende, come se non dormissi da 2 giorni o qualcosa del genere. Incarna perfettamente lo spirito della festa, in quanto è comunque una caratteristica un po’ da zombi, ma non è necessariamente inappropriata, perché le occhiaie sono una cosa che si può avere normalmente. Il trucco, a questo punto, stava nel trucco, letteralmente… 🤗
Sul web non trovo esattamente quello che cercavo ma, per fortuna, ChatGPT mi ha inventato di sana pianta un tutorial che tutto sommato era proprio quello che volevo per farmi delle occhiaie finte, per giunta senza aver bisogno di particolari materiali da trucco. Basta della grafite — quindi, una normale matita da disegno — e un po’ di pazienza… e l’effetto che esce fuori è proprio strabiliante; non perfetto, ma comunque bellissimo. Non volendo fare questo post troppo lungo e confuso, però, e volendo magari poter aggiungere dettagli utili in seguito, vedrò di scrivere più tardi un tutorial dedicato solo al trucco in sé, sul blog della stufa, e aggiungerò qui il link poi… per ora pensiamo al risultato. Che dire.Un aspetto da vera femcel, questa volta — se non fosse per il contrasto con i miei vestiti, che sono fin troppo in buone condizioni (ma, tolta la felpa, forse la maglia di questo bianco giallino dà idea di marcio), e i miei movimenti corporei, che sono a mio parere troppo eleganti e da girlboss, ma assolutamente il venerdì non sono da zombi, e anche lo smalto rosa… però, questo contrasto sotto sotto mi piace, e rientra bene nell’idea iniziale di Halloween minimale ma concretizzato, portato al di fuori del regno della fantasia dove tutto è esagerato. A completare il look, ci sono i miei capelli che si rifiutano di stare ordinati… e nient’altro, ma va bene così. 🤯
Non sapendo a cosa andavo incontro — perché lo sappiamo che con i tutorial inventati dall’IA il rischio di far esplodere la casa è alto… e quello di banalmente fallire in modo patetico è altissimo — in verità ho provato velocemente l’idea ieri sera e, pur avendo volutamente arronzato — perché non è che potevo dormire con la grafite sotto agli occhi, quindi comunque avrei dovuto levare tutto subito — la cosa sembrava promettere bene, e allora è stato deciso che stamattina l’avrei fatto per davvero.Ci ho messo circa 10 minuti, e forse avrei voluto averne 5 in più da parte per perfezionare, ma a quest’ora della mattina il tempo scappa più di quanto le persone ignare non sono ahimè scappate alla mia vista, quindi ok… ☠️
Non so bene in foto quanto renda; in quella dal telefono c’è qualcosa che non riesco ad afferrare che non mi convince… ma, di persona, credo faccia il suo greve effetto. In giro nessuno mi ha detto nulla, perché oggi non ho incontrato nessuno che conoscessi, ma diverse persone mi hanno dato occhiate particolari, forse di spavento misto a confusione… che, se è effettivamente così, era proprio il tipo di sensazione che pensavo di suscitare. Tornata a casa, a mia madre ho fatto spavento, perché non ha capito subito se mi fosse venuta la rogna o che cosa avessi; però, dopo aver detto che è per via della notte dei morti viventi, mi ha riconosciuto che l’effetto non è male… e invece, mio padre non ci ha fatto praticamente caso, forse perché al suo istituto ne avrà già viste abbastanza di cose strane oggi. 🤕
Tutto sommato, sono contenta; la mattina è stata un esperimento di arte performativa completamente passiva, come in genere mai mi capita. L’unica cosa contro cui devo spezzare una lancia è, chi mai lo avrebbe detto, l’università… o meglio, il suo ambiente vissuto, che è un fottuto cimitero… e non nel senso di Halloween, ma nel senso di animi grigi e palle gonfie. Girando tra il mio polo (informatico-scientifico), e alla fermata dell’autobus, non ho visto neanche per sbaglio qualcuno con qualcosa di strano riconducibile alla giornata odierna… ma com’è possibile??? Va benissimo che all’università non si va in cosplay, e magari ci sta che non si mettono nemmeno le orecchie da gatto — o da diavolo, in questa giornata — ma… nemmeno un minimo di trucco minimale per infuocare lo spirito?!?!?! 😶
I pazzi che a fine ottobre ancora vanno in giro a maniche corte avrebbero potuto sfoggiare finte bende insanguinate sulle braccia, o… boh, non mi vengono troppe idee, ma mi pare impossibile che a migliaia di persone insieme non venga in mente nulla. Vabbè, ciò semplicemente riconferma quello che vorrei non fosse un fatto, ma che purtroppo lo è: tutta gente noiosa, da queste parti. (Gente noiosa che, probabilmente, stasera andrà a sfondarsi di alcol a qualche festa priva di sostanza, ritenendo che il divertimento sia la droga, anziché vivere nel presente facendo qualcosa di magari certamente anche stupido, ma non banale.) 🙊
Edit: È finalmente qui. (Il tutorial. Peccato che ormai Halloween è finito, ma ehi, chi vieta di usare questo trucco anche l’1 e 2 novembre?) stuff.octt.eu.org/2025/10/make…
A Chinese CEO was recently ousted by a Dutch court for alleged governance and financial misconduct. The company? Nexperia, which designs semiconductors.
This action is specifically allowed under the Sustenance and Home Act of Reclamation and Keystone Species (SHARKS) of 1818 as proposed by Shark Whalington and ratified by the first North Atlantic Regional Wet and Humid Alliance Legislature (NARWHAL).
JELLYFISH (Joint Eurasian League Lesser Yahoo's Front Ichtyological Society and Hagioscopists) doesn't see that reading in the law and won't stand for it
Aren’t legal constructs are a subset of social constructs though? Also, I feel like the concept of stealing may predate laws though I have no evidence for this.
so we were eating chicken something. probably fajitas idk this was a while ago. my first soulcat was keeping my older brother's chair warm while he was in the bathroom, just sitting there like they were part of the conversation. suddenly out of the corner of my eye i see this, but with a strip of chicken:
Whale sharks are primarily filter feeders, so if anything, he's just slurping a layer of nutritious plankton off of the net that has negative value to the human fishers anyway.
Jerusalem (AFP) – Thousands of ultra-Orthodox Jewish men, dressed in black, rallied in Jerusalem on Thursday to protest against military conscription, an issue that has caused major strain in Israel's right-wing ruling coalition.
The vast crowd were protesting against the absence of a law guaranteeing their right to avoid Israel's mandatory military service -- a pledge long promised by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
Crowds of men, many wearing black hats, set fire to pieces of tarpaulin as hundreds of police officers cordoned off several roads across the city, AFP correspondents reported.
Carrying placards denouncing conscription, demonstrators marched along main roads leading into Jerusalem.
The mass demonstration follows a recent crackdown on ultra-Orthodox draft dodgers, with thousands of call-up notices sent in recent months and several deserters imprisoned.
Under a ruling established at the time of Israel's creation in 1948, when the ultra-Orthodox were a very small community, men who devote themselves full-time to the study of sacred Jewish texts are given a de facto pass.
This exemption has come under mounting pressure since war erupted in Gaza in October 2023, as the military struggles to fill its ranks.
Whether the exemption should be scrapped has been a long-running point of contention in Israeli society, with Netanyahu pledging that his government would pass a law enshrining the waiver.
But he has so far failed to deliver.
Responding to the call of two ultra-Orthodox parties -- one of which forms a key part of the ruling coalition -- men travelled from all over Israel on Thursday to demand the continuation of their exemptions.
The police closed roads to Jerusalem and announced the mobilisation of 2,000 officers in the city.
In June 2024, the supreme court ruled that the state must draft ultra-Orthodox men, declaring their exemption had expired.
A parliamentary committee is now discussing a bill expected to end the exemptions and encourage young ultra-Orthodox men who are not studying full-time to enlist.
The issue has placed Netanyahu's coalition -- one of the most right-wing in the country's history -- under severe strain.
In July, ministers from the ultra-Orthodox Shas party resigned from the cabinet over the issue, though the party has not formally left the coalition.
The other ultra-Orthodox party, United Torah Judaism, has already quit both the government and the coalition.
The Sephardic Shas, which holds 11 seats in the 120-member Knesset, has warned that it will withdraw support unless military service exemptions are anchored in law —-- move that could topple Netanyahu's fragile coalition, now down to 60 seats.
Some ultra-Orthodox rabbis fear that conscription will make young people less religious, but others accept that those who do not study holy texts full-time can enlist.
Ultra-Orthodox Jews make up 14 percent of Israel's Jewish population, or about 1.3 million people, and roughly 66,000 men of military age currently benefit from the exemption.
According to an army report presented to parliament in September, there has been a sharp increase in the number of ultra-Orthodox Jews enlisting despite opposition from their leaders, but the numbers still remain low, at a few hundred over the past two years.
They identified a single person and wanted to get permanent injuction not only against him but many unnamed parties and to make basic software illegal just because it was used by this person.
A decade before President Donald Trump boasted of “hunting” alleged “narcoterrorists” on boats off the coast of Venezuela, the Defense Department was looking for new ways to get involved in the war on drugs.
In a major report quietly issued by the federally funded Institute for Defense Analyses, researchers working for the Pentagon presented their findings, based on interviews with dozens of top drug traffickers incarcerated in the United States, on how to better disrupt transnational organized crime.
One top-line prescription: More “direct military action.”
The report, which was obtained by The Intercept through a Freedom of Information Act request and has never previously been made public, provides a window into the inner workings of major drug-trafficking networks.
An attorney whose client was interviewed by researchers working for the Pentagon told The Intercept that the report proves that the recent sidelining of counternarcotics police in favor of bloodshed at sea is what military insiders have wanted for years.
Oh God wait till he realizes how from PFAS and microplastics
When he learns actually have the tech to solve those problems ( we do ) but just we fired everyone working on it ( we did ) his alarm level should adjust accordingly
Ford rarely AFIAK speaks about politics or beliefs. He's super private in that way. So for him to open his mouth about this is actually pretty troubling.
Wow. It is great to read from somebody talking from a place of truth and love. This is powerful.
Our civilizations is lost because the people on the top of power who should lead and care for us are like parents which just lead their children into the woods to starve, like in the Grimm's tale. What we need now are real leaders. And leadership starts with telling the truth - with encountering reality.
Meloni’s allies are contemplating a proposal to dole out all seats proportionally, but with a majority bonus for the leading coalition to give it a stable voting bloc, the people said. Under one scenario, a coalition winning 40% of the vote would get up to 55% of the seats.
Giorgia Meloni’s allies are exploring changes to Italy’s election laws that would boost her reelection odds, as internal polls show she may struggle to retain a majority in the upper house of parliament.
So, same shit as all electoral reforms in Italy ever. There are better ways (STV) but as long as people in power only care about being reelected with a majority we'll always be stuck with these shitty systems.
I had a cutting board made from some nice wood, but which was starting to lose its bright appearance.
A bit of research later, and I get some food-safe mineral oil and wax to restore the surface. Long story short, I was so impressed by how my cutting board came back to life, now I'm looking for any excuse to touch up all the wood in our house. I don't even mind if I clean the cutting board and wash off some of the wax, because then I have an excuse to apply another layer. There's something fun about buffing and polishing a surface.
I'm thinking of getting into woodworking just so I can do this more. I don't even really want to make anything, just apply a bunch of tung oil to a random plank and then wax it to a shine.
See if there is a woodworker you can team up with. Sanding and finishing is loathed and dreaded by us, at least in my carpentry circle. We want the cutting and glueing and clamping jobs.
Disclaimer: The article linked is from a single source with a single perspective. Make sure to cross-check information against multiple sources to get a comprehensive view on the situation.
Ukraine’s security chief Vasyl Malyuk revealed that Ukrainian intelligence destroyed one of Russia’s top-secret Oreshnik missiles launchers deep inside Russian territory.
Disclaimer: The article linked is from a single source with a single perspective. Make sure to cross-check information against multiple sources to get a comprehensive view on the situation.
Samsung warned us last month that ads were coming to the giant Android tablets embedded in its Family Hub smart fridges. I've been eyeing mine ever since — and the first ones are about to arrive. Starting November 3rd, the $2,000-plus connected fridges will get a new widget that serves up ads, Shane Higby, head of Home Appliance Business at Samsung Electronics America, confirmed to The Verge.
The ads will be part of a new widget on some of the smart fridges' "Cover screen themes" (like a tablet or smartphone's home screen). The widget, which Samsung shared with me ahead of today's announcement, has four rotating screens. One showing news, one calendar events, one the weather forecast, and one with "curated advertisements."
This widget appears at the bottom of the fridge's screen and rotates every 10 seconds among the four screens. You can swipe to rotate through them faster. Samsung says the widget will only appear on the Weather and Color theme screens, not on the Art or Album ones. A new Daily Board screen also won't have the widget, but it will show an ad in one of the six tiles.
I posted something. Then I noticed that it was formatted wrong! I went back to fix it in edit mode. It seemed fine in edit mode. I saved it again. It was still wrong.
The thing that was wrong: In source / edit, my sentences are separated with the charcters "period space space". This is a typing standard that improves legibility, which is extra important in effortposts. However, in the displayed mode, one of every double space had been eaten! Every post, every comment, mangled! Sentences are separated with "period space" instead of "period space space" and the text is slightly less legible for it. I noticed it for questionmark space space and exclamationmark space space as well. There's some secret life form eating spaces.
Testing behavior: Period Space: Sentence 1. Sentence 2.
Period Space Space: Sentence 1. Sentence 2.
Period Space Space Space: Sentence 1. Sentence 2.
Yep, saw it in preview, all the spaces are getting eaten. This is a crime against good style. I won't go so far as to say this is a hate crime against anyone who struggles with reading and visual processing... yet. But the site is editing my comment in order to enforce an objectively worse typographical standard (period singlespace). Literally . on Communist Bear Site they automatically censor out your punctuation marks in order to make your writing conform to a worse standard, calling double spaces a bourgeois decadent waste of space.
Please help
(Also, should this go in /c/technology or in /c/hexbear? It's about both)
(Should I be submitting this as a bug report on github instead?)
In communities of all kinds, voters in their 20s and 30s are confronting a financial reality of rising costs, mounting debt and minimal wage growth. But how is this changing their political views?
It's a question that NPR put to readers. We received more than 1,100 submissions from across the political spectrum from almost every state in the U.S.
Many described a similar reality — one where economic worries loom large over their everyday lives and erode their faith in the ability of those in power. Taken together, their responses paint a portrait of a generation of voters discouraged by what they see in Washington and who increasingly feel as if they have no political home.
It is important to note that the responses are not from a representative sample of all young voters. But what readers shared helps highlight a steep challenge facing Democrats and Republicans alike as they work to win over these voters, who are collectively expected to make up more than half the electorate in 2028. Here is a snapshot of what readers shared.
We asked readers whether young Americans today can still have a better life than their parents. They responded with stories of economic hardship and growing disillusionment with leaders in Washington.
Miller is one of the most powerful officials in Trump’s White House, illustrating how it has sought to overcome a ‘deep state’ of professional diplomats
The historic shifts in US immigration under Donald Trump have been dictated by a relentless voice over a telephone line: Stephen Miller, the president’s immigration czar, who in recent months has turned the state department’s visa and refugee operations into what some current and former diplomats have described as a personal fiefdom.
Each morning, usually at 10am, a small circle of conservative diplomats allied with Miller, including those who have assumed control of the state department’s consular and refugee operations, dial in for what some have termed the “Stephen Miller call”, an interagency discussion of immigration measures led by Miller, the White House’s homeland security adviser.
In the calls, Miller is said to drill the diplomats on visa and immigration issues – pressing officials to hasten negotiations with third countries to accept deportees who can not or should not be sent back to their countries of origin, and lobbying for individual visa revocations for critics of Israel’s war in Gaza or of Charlie Kirk, the conservative pundit who was assassinated in September.
I'm old school, the last router firmware I touched was ddwrt on a 54g. These days it seems openwrt is the way to go.
I've got an old Google WiFi that I just flashed over. I have a small managed switch in the mail. I want to play with VLANs. With only one lan port I'll need to do trunking.
I've watched the videos, read some docs, I'm still trying to wrap my head around it.
Right now I'm stuck on the idea that my router model might not even support it? I can't find where I read that, but now I'm all turned around.
I'll play with it when the switch arrives, surely I'll figure it out eventually. but in the meantime, does anyone know if the Google WiFi router supports VLANs when flashed? Or is that a problem I made up?
Israeli officials inserted into the Nimbus deal a requirement for the companies to a send coded message – a “wink” – to its government, revealing the identity of the country they had been compelled to hand over Israeli data to, but were gagged from saying so.
Leaked documents from Israel’s finance ministry, which include a finalised version of the Nimbus agreement, suggest the secret code would take the form of payments – referred to as “special compensation” – made by the companies to the Israeli government.
According to the documents, the payments must be made “within 24 hours of the information being transferred” and correspond to the telephone dialing code of the foreign country, amounting to sums between 1,000 and 9,999 shekels.
The goal of the Scope scale is to categorize emissions to help understand where they come from and how to reduce them. Scope 1 are direct emissions, which come from sources owned or controlled by a company and include what’s produced by its facilities and vehicles. Scope 2 are indirect emissions produced by generating the many forms of energy — electricity, steam, heating and cooling — households and businesses use day-to-day.
Scope 3 are the least immediate. They encompass both “upstream” emissions made when a company uses a product or service and “downstream” emissions made when its own products or services are used.
What could that be, I wonder?... Ah, I know, might be all those working and studying women that abandon their sacred duty to repopulate the Motherland. Definitely not the trenches in foreign countries where the men are dying...
Nah bro, it's all the birth control chemicals women are pissing out and then that water gets recycled, drank by the men, turning them into little soyboy cucks that can't get their little putin up unless they're watching those androgynous kpop boy bands
Ahead of the United Nations climate talks in Brazil, advocacy groups are pushing for companies and governments to set meaningful emissions targets to lower emissions from livestock.
The world’s biggest meat and dairy companies are responsible for emitting more climate-warming methane than all of the countries in the European Union and United Kingdom combined, according to a new assessment published Monday.
They looked at 45 major livestock and dairy companies, finding that they generated about 1 billion tons of greenhouse gas emissions in 2023—roughly the same amount as reported for Saudi Arabia, the world’s second largest oil producer.
Climate-Warming Methane Emissions from the World’s Biggest Livestock Companies Are Bigger Than From Major Oil and Gas Companies
Ahead of the United Nations climate talks in Brazil, advocacy groups are pushing for companies and governments to set meaningful emissions targets to lower emissions from livestock.
The world’s biggest meat and dairy companies are responsible for emitting more climate-warming methane than all of the countries in the European Union and United Kingdom combined, according to a new assessment published Monday.
They looked at 45 major livestock and dairy companies, finding that they generated about 1 billion tons of greenhouse gas emissions in 2023—roughly the same amount as reported for Saudi Arabia, the world’s second largest oil producer.
Aside from getting people to eat less beef ….. every year or two I see an article about food additives, such as certain algae’s, that help cattle produce less methane. But the story just disappears with no follow up. Whatever happens to those?
I assume part of it is cost but some of us already pay a little more for “pasture fed” “free range” “no growth hormone”. Where’s my “green” beef? I’d pay a bit more for that.
Or does it never actually pan out for practicality or taste or health or something
That’s a great “silver bullet” answer but not realistic. By all means it’s worth encouraging but you’re not getting there any time soon.
In the meantime, farming fewer ruminants helps as well as making progress in that direction. And for those ruminants we are still farming, food additives to modify their digestive products is a clear win. And if that makes animals more expensive to eat, maybe we start a virtuous cycle toward eating fewer animals
So then when do we get to the part where people stop eating animals? It seems to have been an obvious “silver bullet” for at least decades, it seems all your baby steps and “forward progress” ideas would’ve kicked in by now had they been actual viable solutions to the problem.
Patrick Wintour Diplomatic editor Sat 25 Oct 2025 00.00 EDT
Tensions between Israel and Turkey have grown over Syria and the Turkish president Recep Tayyip Erdoğan is seen by the Israeli government as too close to the Muslim Brotherhood and to Hamas itself. But the exclusion of Turkey from the stabilisation force would be controversial since it is one of the guarantors of the Trump 20-point ceasefire agreement, and is seen as one of the most capable Muslim armed forces.
Patrick Wintour Diplomatic editor Sat 25 Oct 2025 00.00 EDT
Tensions between Israel and Turkey have grown over Syria and the Turkish president Recep Tayyip Erdoğan is seen by the Israeli government as too close to the Muslim Brotherhood and to Hamas itself. But the exclusion of Turkey from the stabilisation force would be controversial since it is one of the guarantors of the Trump 20-point ceasefire agreement, and is seen as one of the most capable Muslim armed forces.
Turkey likely to be excluded from Gaza stabilisation force after Israeli objection
Patrick Wintour Diplomatic editor Sat 25 Oct 2025 00.00 EDT
Tensions between Israel and Turkey have grown over Syria and the Turkish president Recep Tayyip Erdoğan is seen by the Israeli government as too close to the Muslim Brotherhood and to Hamas itself. But the exclusion of Turkey from the stabilisation force would be controversial since it is one of the guarantors of the Trump 20-point ceasefire agreement, and is seen as one of the most capable Muslim armed forces.
Conservatives say the contract's cancellation risks making Canada appear as an unreliable ally to Ukraine and undermines commitments to bolstering the domestic defence industry.
Bill Gates recently shared his forecast on the future of work, saying that advances in technology, particularly in artificial intelligence, will likely lead to a reduced two-day work week
Bill Gates a lucky autismo with a privileged upbringing that never gets mentioned. If he knew what he was doing, be would have nuked davos and the G7 decades ago
It‘s phrased „warns“ because it is just assumed that no one will eat. Because apparently that‘s a normal thing to assume in our society. That we‘ll all just starve to death soon.
I don‘t think we will but it‘s telling that a lot of rich and influential people do and are not only letting it happen but actively supporting it.
Because apparently that‘s a normal thing to assume in our society.
It's just very difficult to think outside of society , to think of a working society without the organizing power of money and labor. And even more difficult to think about the path to get there.
He's been out for years. While I can't condone his methods in the late 90s (IE vs Netscape), he had nothing to do with the MSFT strategy in the current AI fad.
He hasnt been CEO for decades, but he was on the board up until 2020 when MS's current AI strategy was being developed and executed. His current big push is energy projects, all intended as AI power sources, along with actual AI companies.
That's what I do. Used it to replace a shitty boss and then use it to make my work easier. My new boss is so high up in the clouds he has no idea how much work I actually do and how long it takes, as long as whatever they want eventually gets done.
The economist John Maynard Keynes once wrote an essay titled "Economic Possibilities For Our Grandchildren." It was 1930. And in the essay, he made a startling prediction. Keynes figured that by the time his children had grown up, basically now, people might be working just 15 hours a week.
For many ages to come the old Adam will be so strong in us that everybody will need to do some work if he is to be contented. We shall do more things for ourselves than is usual with the rich to-day, only too glad to have small duties and tasks and routines. But beyond this, we shall endeavour to spread the bread thin on the butter-to make what work there is still to be done to be as widely shared as possible. Three-hour shifts or a fifteen-hour week may put off the problem for a great while. For three hours a day is quite enough to satisfy the old Adam in most of us!
"Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren" (1930); appeared in the Nation and Athenaeum (1930)
Basically, had we decided to leave our standard of living where it was in 1930, we could have worked two days a week. But...that's not generally what people wanted to do. We wanted to take advantage of new stuff that people produced to appeal to us, jack up our standard of living.
In the past, we've always managed to come up with new, appealing things that wind up making use of that new productive capacity. Climate control or anime video games or more space per person in housing.
Is it possible that in the future, we will be unable to make use of scarce human labor to provide something that humans want? Maybe! And that's something to think about. But simply the fact that human labor is finite, that things that involve human labor can be used like a status symbol, might itself fill the problem. We shall see.
One thing that I do agree with is that transition from the world of today to a world with AGI is going to be a very disruptive transition.
The one thing that this whole analysis is missing is this: There is a ton of work to do. The oceans are dying. The planet is boiling. The garbage is stacking up, endless and endless. There are crimes big and small going undiscovered, or un-processed and dealt with in a trustworthy fashion if they are discovered. There are wars, there are dangerous materials that need to be removed from the soil and the rivers, and the policies need to be set up and enforced to stop their cousins from replacing them within the year. WE'RE NOT FUCKING DONE. This illusion is wholly wrong that capitalism has created, that it is fine to drive the car off the cliff as long as we keep paying salaries and dividends up until the moment of impact comes
Yes, we've gotten more efficient and powerful in our ability to translate a human into an effective change in conditions at the earth's surface. But the problems have gotten bigger, too, and more urgent to the point that they threaten our entire species. Just because we can now keep growing the food and doing layout for the advertisements with only 15 hours a week, doesn't mean that's all we need to fucking do.
OK but Maynard James Keenan said that some say we'll see Armageddon soon; certainly hope we will. I sure could use a vacation from this bullshit three ring circus sideshow.
So it sounds like he's saying no one will work enough to qualify for employer sponsored healthcare... Or at least be able to afford it.
So congrats, don't ever get sick or lose a job! Plus your taxes are going up. Fuck you, you should have been a rich pedophile if you wanted differently!
Thanks for spending billions on malaria, asshole. If you would have paid your fucking taxes and supported the country we wouldn't be in this mess.
Oh yeah, a politically unstable US will directly lead to local conflict between factions in African countries. Thanks to your malaria funding there's now more rape victims and child soldiers than ever!
No clue why this article is being downvoted to hell. Is this not relevant to c/technology? 🤷🏻
Worked at Lowe's last year. No AI is going to replace what any of us were doing except maybe making the scheduling lady's life easier, but we would still need her.
People still need to buy household goods, need advice from experts, need help and labor in 1,000 ways that AI cannot replace.
Until we have relatively inexpensive, multipurpose robots, much of this talk is moot. Humans are the AR-15s of the animal kingdom. Not the best at anything, weak in many ways, but we're reliable, tough and suited for many roles. I cannot imagine an AI powered robot that could work all the tasks I was faced with.
Are we on the same website? Lemmy as a rule hates AI with a blind passion and will downvote anything that isnt frothing at the mouth hatred of it. Hence the downvotes on this post, people see it has AI in the title and isnt calling it slop or saying its cooking the planet and so it gets downvoted.
On re-reading it seems like thats quite possible! The first and second line seem to agree with me but the third is taking the opposite postion though so who knows.
No clue why this article is being downvoted to hell.
The title has the word “AI” in it - the hivemind is practically trained to reflexively downvote and leave a mean comment anytime those two letters show up.
Earlier this year, Geoffrey Hinton, dubbed the "Godfather of AI," highlighted the severe wealth disparity that AI developments could generate.
"We're talking about having a huge increase in productivity. So there's going to be more goods and services for everybody. So everybody ought to be better off, but actually it's going to be the other way around," Hinton stated during a panel discussion. "And it's because we live in a capitalist society."
"And so what's going to happen is: this huge increase in productivity is going to make much more money for the big companies and the rich, and it's going to increase the gap between the rich and the people who lose their jobs. And as soon as you increase that gap, you get fertile ground for fascism," he continued. "And so it's very scary that we may be at a point where we're just making things worse and worse."
This seems spot-on to me. All you downvoters obviously didn't read the article.
Far be it for me to point out that the "godfather of AI" has a vested interest in AI being seen as more capable than maybe it actually is. But more to the point we know that AI systems like loose on an environment cause absolute chaos and fail disastrously.
There was an experiment a couple of months ago where they tried to get an AI to run a small business and I think at one point it ended up sending emails to the FBI claiming it had been defrauded because a product it ordered didn't instantly materialise.
This means if you lose your device, you can use methods like fingerprint, face, or the screen lock code of your previous device to access WhatsApp's backup.
Another kitchen will take its place; always have. Now, whether you agree or not, the next kitchen is likely to be China.
And not to completely dismiss your point, but like I said in another comment, it's important to decouple from the kitchen that is US to minimise the consequences. I don't want another repeat of the Roaring 20's and the countries too economically intertwined with the US also collapsed when the Great Depression hit. One of those countries who was dragged down the worst was Germany, when American investors pulled out their investments from the country. That severe aftershock gave rise to the Nazis, and the rest is history.
this week’s fediverse news:
[ul]
[li]on how the environment and context in which the fediverse, bluesky and the open social web exist is changing and getting more intertwined with politics [/li]
[li]some thoughts on the recent FediForum keynote by @ben@w
this week's fediverse news:
on how the environment and context in which the fediverse, bluesky and the open social web exist is changing and getting more intertwined with politics
some thoughts on the recent FediForum keynote by @ben@werd.io
new activitypub projects being funded by @nlnet@nlnet.nl
A programming note and context: Fediverse Report will now appear on Friday (instead of Tuesday), for some personal planning reasons as I fit this in with my other work. Fediverse Report will also shift in a slightly different direction, where for the foreseeable future I’ll give more context and thoughts on the shifts in the state of social networks and the open social web. It is becoming increasingly clear that the future of the open social web is getting intertwined with how the Trump administration is (and will) interact with the open social web. The Trump administration is putting an increased focus on Bluesky to troll. Erin Kissane wrote an excellent overview of the situation this week that I highly recommend.
Kissane highlights the risk that the Trump administration will suppress Bluesky in some way, echoing my own writing on the subject. Furthermore, the arrival of the White House social media accounts on Bluesky places Bluesky moderation in a tough position, with no good options to take. For Kissane, that leads her to conclude: “On the individual level, people seeking private social networking may be better off, for now, finding a trustworthy Mastodon server and maintaining their connections with accounts on Bluesky via network bridges.“
I agree with Kissane’s assessment, and for me this also points to how intertwined the futures of the fediverse and the ATmosphere have become. Bluesky is currently top-of-mind for the Trump administration in a way that the fediverse is not, but any potential actions by the administration will impact not only Bluesky, but the fediverse and the wider open social web as well. It is impossible to predict if these second order effects are beneficial or harmful for the fediverse, since that depends strongly on both the details of any action of the administration against Bluesky, as well as how people on Bluesky will respond in practice.
For now, it means that I’m shifting my writing for Fediverse Report to include this larger political context of the open social web.
The News
During the recent FediForum, Ben Werdmuller gave the keynote speech about “why the open social web matters now”, and the keynote and transcript are now available online. Werdmuller makes the point that we’re seeing a shift into authoritarianism in multiple places, with the US being the most high-profile. He points out that the first step towards dealing with the threat is to have open information ecosystem, and that ecosystem is in decline both on social media (with all Big Tech companies capitulating) and in a decay of journalism. Werdmuller makes a distinction here between social media and social networks, where social media is for scale and broadcasting, and social networking are for trust and collaboration.
Werdmuller then describes how social communities can be build, which starts from a private community, that then connects with other peer communities. All these groups have their own secure (encrypted) spaces. This archipelago of connected places ( 🙂 ) can then step into the public network (the fediverse) and share their messages with the broader world.
What stands out to me is how the process described by Werdmuller is pretty much opposite to how development on both the fediverse and the ATmosphere has happened so far. Development on both networks have started from the ‘big world’ social media approach, by creating public microblogging platforms. The assumption seems to be that over time, once there is an initial group of people who use these public network, private networks will emerge. In the case of ATProto this is fairly explicitly visible, the protocol does not support private data currently, and the developers are only now starting to work on this, once the public version of the protocol is deemed to be completed. For ActivityPub and the fediverse there is more possibilities for people to build such private communities, but there has been little interest in building it out. Mastodon does still not support the possibility for local-only posts for example, posts that are only visible to people on the same server, even though community forks of Mastodon (such as glitch-soc) do support local-only posting.
In the keynote, Werdmuller suggests a radically different approach, saying: “For the open social web to thrive, we need to go back to real communities with real-world use cases and solve their problems better than anything else. Not the needs of individuals within them, but of the interconnected communities themselves.” It is important to be specific here, not by helping abstract groups like ‘journalists’ or ‘organisers’, but specific concrete individual communities. Werdmuller urges to be specific in the solutions as well: “Open source or federation are not solutions in themselves. They’re characteristics of a solution. We need to be concretely meeting needs. Not what you think their needs are or what they should be, but what you’ve learned they are from getting to know them deeply.”
NLnet has completed their latest grant round, and with it, there are a number of ActivityPub-related projects that have received a grant. With the latest grant round, NLnet further cements their crucial role in the ecosystem, funding a large number projects and platforms (as well as this newsletter!).
NLnet funds five existing projects for further development:
Microblogging platform GoToSocial gets a grant for performance as well as additional moderation features. GoToSocial also states here that the goal is to get to a 1.0 version at the end of 2026.
Further improvements to the connector that addsActivityPub to CMS platform Drupal.
GoActivityPub is a set of libraries for ActivityPub in Go.
Flohmarkt is a marketplace platform on ActivityPub that people can self host.
NLnet also funds a new project, with Mirlo. Mirlo is an existing platform for artists to sell their music and merch. The grant from NLnet is to add ActivityPub support to Mirlo and to turn it into a federated, self-hostable platform. This makes the platform fairly similar to Bandwagon, which is also a place for artists to sell their music. Both platforms will likely gravitate towards one ‘main’ instance, with the possibility for artists to self-host their Bandwagon or Mirlo instance, that federates with the other platforms. The main part to watch here is if there will be interoperability between Bandwagon and Mirlo. While ActivityPub allows for the possibility of interoperability between different softwares, it does not guarantee it, and it requires active efforts from developers to make it happen. If and how this interoperability will evolve here, with both Bandwagon and Mirlo tapping into a new market of artist music sharing, is worth a keeping an eye on.
Some updates
The Links
A short video explaining ActivityPub Fuzzer, “a program designed to emulate data across the Fediverse to enhance interoperability between social media platforms”.
A reflection on how to name and describe the new type of app of Newsmast, which combines news articles with the fediverse.
That’s all for this week, thanks for reading! Next week I’ll dive deeper in to the developments regarding open science and the fediverse, with work by Bonfire and connecting ORCIDs with the fediverse.
It's stuck way down at the bottom, but the ActivityPub Fuzzer project looks really interesting. I have accounts across so many different fediverse platforms just for testing piefed interoperability and it is kind of annoying. Being able to simulate different kinds of activities from a range of platforms without managing so many accounts and doing things in a local environment would be a game changer for interop testing.
Looking forward to the public release @darius@friend.camp
China hits out at UK as PM Starmer interfering in £1.5bn Scottish factory
Chinese firm wind turbine firm Mingyang announced in October its plans to build the UK’s largest wind turbine manufacturing facility in Ardersier in the Highlands.
However, the proposals may be blocked by the UK Government on national security grounds as experts are concerned that the factory could give China “enormous” power over Scotland and the UK’s electricity grid, posing “an enormous threat” over Mingyang's links to the Chinese Communist Party
Now China hits out over what a spokesman called "absurd, ridiculous, and ignorant 'China threat' fallacies" that could seriously impact how Chinese companies assess the investment environment in the UK
Scotland's government said it will be working in close consultation with the UK government, stating the issues of national security are relevant to be addressed in this particular case
The UK Government has yet to confirm whether it will allow the project to go ahead, saying that “this is one of a number of companies that wants to invest in the UK" and "any decisions made will be consistent with our national security”
[It is noteworthy that the Chinese government has frequently been banning European and other non-Western companies - recently, for example, Nokia and Ericsson - from its domestic markets over national security concerns - exactly for the same reason Beijing now is trying to slam the UK.]
When the caught up with Mengele, they drugged him, and shipped him back to Israel to stand trial in a wooden box, like he was just inanimate cargo. I'd love to see Trump subjected to that kind of treatment.
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.
Just wanted to know if any of you got the same issue: everytime there’s a new version of Nextcloud available (package version at download.nextcloud.com/server/…), it’s EXTREMELY slow to download (70KiB/s or less) to the point that my automation just fails miserably to update my current install.
Am I alone here? Is there some kind of official mirrors I’m not aware of that can speed things up?
The Netherlands is set to get its first openly gay prime minister, Rob Jetten, following strong results in the country's recent election, which saw his party gain 17 seats, and Geert Wilders' far-right party lose 11.
Frankly quite surprised to see this has not been mentioned on Lemmy yet. Have been working on migrating away from Spotify to Navidrome for a while now, but wasn't completely satisfied with the UI of Navidrome. Luckily I stumbled upon this project and having used it for a week or so now i thought it would be a good idea to share it and give the project some love! ❤
I plan on doing a detailed write up of how i went along with migrating to Navidrome as soon as I have all my playlists and discoverability in order, stay tuned 😀
Subsonic Integration: Aonsoku integrates with your Navidrome or Subsonic server, providing you with easy access to your music collection.
Intuitive UI: Modern, clean and user-friendly interface designed to enhance your music listening experience.
Podcast Support: With Aonsoku Podcasts you can easily access, manage, and listen to your favorites podcasts directly within the app. Enjoy advanced search options, customizable filters and seamless listening synchronization to enhance your podcast experience.
Synchronized lyrics: Aonsoku will automatically find a synced lyric from LRCLIB if none is provided by the server.
Unsynchronized lyrics: If your songs have embedded unsynchronized lyrics, Aonsoku is able to show them.
Radio: If your server supports it, listen to radio shows directly within Aonsoku.
Ur welcome! AFAIK no i dont think it can do that atm. If I were you I'd host multiple instances and maybe throw different themes at each instance to tell the difference more easily maybe 😀
Congratulations on developing this beautiful client 🤩 I would love to see a full offline mode to be able to: make individual songs available for offline playing make entire albums available for off...
After setting up Navidrome and being very happy with it apart from the web interface i went looking for a better one so i've looked at a few of these now. Aonsoku does seem to be one of the better ones.
Though i still feel Feishin is currently the most fleshed out and is still getting active development.
It has multi select everywhere, lots of options for sending things to playlists and queues. You can have the playlist docked to the RHS. You can drag stuff around in the queue. Just lots of nice quality of life options.
This tension, of course, is not new. China’s “overcapacity”—the shorthand term for producing more than demand calls for—has long led other governments to complain. In the past, China produced too much steel, coal, cement, and other goods, which crowded out competitors elsewhere and drove global prices to unprofitable lows.
China’s tendency toward overcapacity has traditionally been blamed on a fundamental mismatch in its economy; government subsidies and investment in manufacturing and infrastructure are unusually high compared with those in other advanced economies, and the country’s household consumption as a share of GDP is unusually low. Simply put, China lacks enough domestic demand to soak up what the country’s factories produce, which then causes a glut of exports.
[...]
The real challenge, then, lies [...] in an extraordinary and seemingly uncontrollable surge in supply—one that Beijing is struggling to get its arms around. Since mid‑2024, central government authorities have warned repeatedly about “blind expansion” in solar power, batteries, and EVs. This summer, after a brutal price war in the solar industry saw prices fall around 40 percent year-over-year, Chinese leaders directed officials to tackle overcapacity and “irrational” pricing in key industries, including solar. Shortly thereafter, high-level officials met with industry leaders to collectively urge companies to curb price wars and strengthen industry regulations.
[...]
Unlike earlier bouts of [Chinese] overcapacity, today’s top offenders are private companies, not state-owned enterprises. If Beijing were to step in and force consolidations or shutter factories, it would risk sparking unemployment and potentially stall local growth engines that depend on these industries. Moreover, exports have become one of the few remaining bright spots in otherwise slowing GDP performance. If Beijing were to meaningfully curb production and exports, it could cause significant damage to China’s overall economy.
[...]
By rewarding speed and scale over productivity and differentiation, the internal plumbing of China’s political economy incentivizes businesses to produce too much stuff. Although that has always been the predictable outcome of China’s political and financial system, the dysfunction was kept in check during much of China’s spectacular rise. Changes in the Chinese economy since 2020, however, including the cratering real estate market and a crackdown on private businesses and investments, have compounded the structural incentives that lead to overcapacity.
[...]
China’s tendency to overproduce starts in an unlikely place: the Chinese Communist Party’s performance and promotion system. In the CCP bureaucracy, local officials are evaluated primarily on their ability to deliver growth, employment, and tax revenues. But China’s largest single tax, the value-added tax (VAT), is split evenly between the central government and the local government of the place where a good or service is produced, not the place where it is consumed. Since the system allocates tax revenue to regions based on production, it rewards the decision to build larger industrial bases. Local Chinese officials try to retain as much upstream and downstream activity as they can to expand their tax base.
[...]
This system effectively encourages provincial and municipal leaders [China] to act like industrial investors or venture capitalists. And in many cases, it has produced profound efficiencies. Over the past decade, for instance, Hefei, the capital of Anhui Province, has poured about $25 billion of state capital into various struggling companies, including the EV maker Nio and the flat-panel display manufacturer BOE, to great effect. By acting as an early investor and bearing the initial risk, Hefei stimulated about $96 billion in follow-on investment and generated around $9 billion in tax revenues. The Hefei model has since been widely imitated, with other provinces racing to assemble their own industrial clusters.
[...]
Firms rarely close down operations altogether [if they become unprofitable], however, because the state-backed banks prefer to roll over existing loans so that the firms appear solvent on paper. That way, even if those companies are only servicing their interest payments and not generating strong returns, the banks avoid having to book immediate losses—and avoid potentially contributing to the collapse of a large local employer. Credit keeps flowing into these “zombie” sectors and companies with declining productivity even as they are dragging down the broader economy in the long run.
Private firms not chasing government-backed industries, meanwhile, have long struggled to access affordable bank credit, which means they tend to seek capital from costly nonbank channels, such as venture capital, private equity, and initial public offerings. These channels helped fuel much of China’s record growth in the first two decades of the twenty-first century: by October 2020, 217 Chinese companies were listed on major U.S. exchanges with a combined $2.2 trillion market cap, illustrating how deeply private firms tapped global equity markets. Leading venture capital platforms scaled as well. Sequoia’s China arm (now HongShan), for instance, backed hundreds of private firms, including some of China’s most prominent success stories, such as the social media company ByteDance and the transportation platform Didi.
[...]
The price wars are a mere symptom of the overcapacity problem. Beijing can’t hope to make meaningful progress without reengineering the underlying incentive structure that is causing overcapacity. Consider, for example, how the CCP evaluates local officials. At present, cadres are promoted largely based on how much growth they deliver; that means judging them based on how much new factory space they build and how many roads or industrial parks they pave. Such measures favor scale over quality.
[...]
To create a more sustainable model—one that encourages innovation but doesn’t spiral into overcapacity—China will have to undergo an institutional reckoning. The logic of speed over quality, of scale over innovation, and of investment volume over returns is deeply embedded in the system. Reversing that logic means making long-deferred tradeoffs and moving past the structures that once powered China’s incredible rise.
In the past, China produced too much steel, coal, cement, and other goods, which crowded out competitors elsewhere and drove global prices to unprofitable lows
Again doing exactly what capitalist economic theory claims is best, and the capitalists complain they're not playing the game "right."
There's no such single theory. Rather they are using the mechanism that worked in western nations' favor for much of history. The western progress looked like "now we can produce more and better and faster and with less", and the step to "now we are doing intellectual work than nobody else can do, while others produce stuff for us" is not linear.
And the point of global logistics is to help those who produce the most. Like China.
I mean, OK, the point is to control the flow, but the quote basically complains that using that control is expensive. Oops.
For the quote, sure. But dropping the market until it's not profitable for anyone isn't capitalist but has happened a few times there. Capitalism isn't a single theory but most I'm aware argue the market should rebalance (ie. they stop building before this point). Their empty skyscrapers being a prominent visual of this happening
Dumping is a local-optimization tactic. Globally, it makes things worse, but can benefit individual capitalists in their own markets.
And even if it's not profitable in the short run, driving competitors out of business can be quite lucrative once they're bankrupt and you can then start hiking prices without competition.
The objective of dumping is to increase market share in a foreign market by driving out competition and thereby create a monopoly situation where the exporter will be able to unilaterally dictate price and quality of the product.
Sounds like someone didnt read the link they sent, a monopoly is a capitalists dream. It can hurt local enconomies, but that doesn't matter to the capitalist, only governments.
StinkyFingerItchyBum
in reply to BrikoX • • •Signs? Pact? Nothing the US does since Trump is worth the paper its written on. No laws, no courts, no checks and balances.
The US is a bad faith negotiator.
BrikoX
in reply to StinkyFingerItchyBum • • •