Eyes and Teeth are all pointing the correct direction, he doesn't have hotdog skin full of giant viens, and the text is easy to understand, this is not my RFK.
The United States Treasury Department has placed Switzerland on a watch list for currency and economic practices, along with eight other countries.
Switzerland and the eight other countries have a large trade surplus, according to a report by the US Treasury Department on the United States’ most important trading partners. The report was first reported by Swiss radio and television.
According to the report, Ireland and Switzerland are new additions to the list. Switzerland’s trade surplus with the US increased last year, according to the report. China, Japan, Korea, Taiwan, Singapore, Vietnam and Germany are also listed.
The aim of the ministry is to take action against unfair currency practices. Last year, however, no major US trading partner manipulated the exchange rate of its currency against the US dollar in order to gain a competitive advantage in international trade.
Do they.call them, "Ranchers" down there or is everyone a farmer? Legit question, because no one in the states would bat an eye at that ambiguation save for farmers and ranchers.
Free Free Palestine! A space for activists and Palestinians to connect and amplify their efforts for the liberation of Palestine. Promote Palestinian solidarity events, or document and share here.
Hong Kong authorities have warned their residents against downloading a Taiwan-made game called Reversed Front: Bonfire, which they're accusing of advocating...
For those wondering without wanting to click, the title is "Reversed Front: Bonfire". It's supposed to depict an independent Taiwan and Hong Kong which is what obviously pissed off the delicate sensibilities of the CCP.
Sadly a mobile game so it's not really worth your time as it has in app purchases.
But what could be worth your time is Devotion, a Taiwanese horror game which is not available on any store front (but their own) after an easter egg criticial of Xi Jinping was found.
Internal 82nd Airborne Division communications reviewed by Military.com reveal a tightly orchestrated effort to curate the optics of Trump's recent visit, including handpicking soldiers for the audience based on political leanings and physical appearance. The troops ultimately selected to be behind Trump and visible to the cameras were almost exclusively male.
One unit-level message bluntly said "no fat soldiers."
"If soldiers have political views that are in opposition to the current administration and they don't want to be in the audience then they need to speak with their leadership and get swapped out," another note to troops said.
As President Donald Trump viciously attacked his perceived political foes, he whipped up boos from the gathered troops directed at California leaders, including Gov. Gavin Newsom.
For this story, Military.com reached out to Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth's office as well as the Army and the 82nd Airborne Division directly with a series of questions that ranged from the optics of the event to social media posts showing the sale of Trump campaign merchandise on the base, to the apparent violation of Pentagon policies on political activity in uniform.
Internal 82nd Airborne Division communications reviewed by Military.com reveal a tightly orchestrated effort to curate the optics of Trump's recent visit, including handpicking soldiers for the audience based on political leanings and physical appearance. The troops ultimately selected to be behind Trump and visible to the cameras were almost exclusively male.
One unit-level message bluntly said "no fat soldiers."
. . . Service officials declined to comment when asked about the extent to which troops were screened, whether soldiers displaying partisan cheers on television -- a violation of long-standing Pentagon rules -- would be disciplined or if soldiers who objected to participating in the event, citing disagreements with the administration, would be disciplined or admonished in any way.
"This has been a bad week for the Army for anyone who cares about us being a neutral institution," one commander at Fort Bragg told Military.com on the condition of anonymity to avoid retaliation. "This was shameful. I don't expect anything to come out of it, but I hope maybe we can learn from it long term."
The article is some great and ballsy reporting, and the other details are pretty shocking. The military is being rapidly corrupted to becoming a partisan force that serves Trump above America
The military has always been heavily populated by some of the shittiest people. The prospect of carrying a weapon and killing others or just wielding power over others, attracts a certain type of person. In the US since at least 9/11, there's been a disgusting amount of military propaganda that has certainly brought in some people that care and want to do the right thing (for the ignorant wrong reasons) but also the shits that are all in because they think they're tough shit.
Service people don't deserve any more respect than any other profession, and I'd argue in many cases, they deserve less respect. There's hasn't been a draft in a hot minute, so everyone currently in is voluntary. Some soldiers do wind to in life threatening situations, but it's far from the most dangerous job and to me, killing innocence in the middle east for no good reason doesn't earn you any valor in my book.
They're all a bunch of pawns, and I've seen about 2 out of all of them actually stand up and oppose the Trump admin and thousands of others bend over, take it, and ask for more. This article and LA further reenforces my belief that being in the military isn't something noble, but more akin to being in a gang where all of the members are brainwashed and have no spines.
I'm glad this came to light. It's not surprising; this is Trump's whole fake-it-till-you-make-it game with his presidency, from the moment he actually paid actors to cheer for him coming down the escalator in 2015. He's always, always focused on the appearance of things rather than the substance.
ON A PLANE OVER UPPER NILE STATE, South Sudan (AP) — Swooping low over the banks of a Nile River tributary, an aid flight run by retired American military officers released a stream of food-stuffed sa...
He doesn't care about that, he cares that voters will blame Republicans.
It's why traditionally they give everyone tax breaks and then set the ones for the poors to expire when a Dem will likely be in office, and the ones for the wealthy never expire.
There's none of that now, shits going to get bad and there's no one to blame that doesn't have an R by their name.
Oh little buddy, it’s too late now. You’ve made your bed with Nazis, and it’s full of piss and shit, but now you have to lie in it.
If you’re not rich or powerful enough to float to the top – and you’re not – you’re going to have to deal with the Nazi filth. Too bad absolutely nobody warned you. Oh well.
Does the bill still have that clause that says judges are no longer allowed to try to limit the executive branch? Because that's the clause we should be campaigning against.
"If we don't watch out, people are going to get hurt, people are going to be upset. It's going to be the No. 1 thing on the nightly news all over the place," Justice, who served as West Virginia's governor for eight years before winning his Senate seat last year, told Politico.
Because, apparently, no one of any value has been hurt yet. He never figured it out, there’s just a personal consequence now. He looks old as shit, I hope hell claws him under the earth soon and cooks him for eternity.
All the comments from all cross posts on a single page is great. You can also add your own user flair like you could on Reddit, which lemmy doesn’t support. I haven’t messed with it much yet, but the ability to make lists of communities into feeds also seems really useful.
Dr. Alon Ben-Meir is a retired professor of international relations, most recently at the Center for Global Affairs at NYU. He taught courses on international negotiation and Middle Eastern studies.
The latest poll by Quinnipiac University had some grim numbers across the board for President Donald Trump, shocking CNN chief data analyst Harry Enten, who described it as "definitely one of Trump's worst polls."
Cults break down, a good example is something like Sinnanon where up until the authoritarian tendencies kicked in it managed to maintain a pretty decent size. Then they went full authoritarian and the cult started to bleed numbers.
Personally my bet is that Trump can go as low as 20 percent approval, though it'll require some specialized circumstances or shit just getting worse all around.
The historical benchmark I use is this: Nixon was at 31% when he resigned. I think GWB also hit a similar number, but he never was facing articles of impeachment.
Republican congressthings clearly have the same data on their internal polls, which is why they felt it safe to kill the dumpster-fire bill Trump tried to ram through.
On a totally unrelated note, I'm pretty sure he's going to a theatre to see a play at some point soon. Maybe tonight? I don't think it's a comedy, but there's an opportunity for somebody to do the funniest thing possible. Double funny if their name is Mario.
Maybe someone should write a play that is all about Christopher Columbus and Confederate generals who go hunting for fun at Maralago. Like a reverse Most Dangerous Game. Start a rumor that there's a nude scene of Ivanka Trump.
It is relevant. Congress is mostly going along with him because they are afraid of being primaried. If he dips much lower we might suddenly see unexpected people speaking truth to power.
"With Medicaid's future as a healthcare safety net for millions suddenly uncertain, voters make it clear they want the 60-year-old program for those in need to be handled with care," said Quinnipiac University Polling Analyst Tim Malloy.
"I'm the most bigly popular King! Frankly, many people are saying I'm the greatest man who ever lived. And my parade will have YUGE ratings! Better than Barack Hussein's boring, very low energy speeches! Many men, many big tough men have said to me, with literal tears, they say 'Sir, Sir, please spend more of our money on bigly parades and tax cuts for billionaires, who are just born better than we are!' No one honors Trump like Trump, believe me."
But his disapproval rating is thru the roof! No, really he tossed the rating up there when he saw it. Yeah, it doesn't weight that much. Like a kid could through it higher.
Forty percent of voters have a favorable opinion of President Trump, while 53 percent have an unfavorable opinion of him, and 4 percent haven't heard enough about him.
WHO are these people that haven't heard enough about him? And WHY isn't there "I have heard way too much about him" option in the poll?
“Queer people know what it means to struggle against the government, know what it means to struggle against the status quo. And, most importantly, we're not as easily controlled…”
I'm more convinced that they're just taking all of the databases and putting them in an ai bot and asking it to construct a pro trump narrative and then immediately turning it all over to Palantir to fulfill more of their master searchable file on every single bit of information on everybody. For what reason? Who knows? Only Peter Thiel and the other vampires in charge.
Three Rings for the Elven-kings under the sky,\ Seven for the dwarf-lords in their halls of stone,\ Nine for Mortal Men doomed to die,\ One for the Dark Lord on his dark throne,\ In the Land of Mordor where the Shadows lie.\ One Ring to rule them all, One Ring to find them,\ One Ring to bring them all and in the darkness bind them\ In the Land of Mordor where the Shadows lie.
A lawsuit disputing the results of the 2024 election has moved forward after it was revealed that former Vice President Kamala Harris received no votes a New York county.
As President Donald Trump viciously attacked his perceived political foes, he whipped up boos from the gathered troops directed at California leaders, including Gov. Gavin Newsom.
I'm genuinely curious to what extend the societal divide extends into the armed forces. How can can there be trust among soldiers in combat situations if they are diametrically opposed on fundamental things like this.
Hey it could be worse, you could be the jackass who named an area Mentone "beach" here in San Bernardino, fun fact it's not a fucken beach. Forest falls is more of a beach.
Opposite statements. Either they follow orders or they are loyal to the constitution. Can't do both right now.
I can't fathom the industrial amounts of pure propagandium that Americans must have been huffing to think the military will ever be on their side. Blind and unconditional obedience is literally the only way militaries can function properly and everything about them is organized to promote that.
US military apologists (even before Trump) will say "but soldiers are legally obligated to follow the constitution first and must refuse unlawful orders" like Abu Ghraib didn't happen in my lifetime. We all know that 90 % of soldiers will wipe themselves with the original copy of the declaration of independence if Trump orders them to. And those that refuse will be dishonorably discharged, or worse.
The divide absolutely exists. There is a lot of conditioning for following orders and working as a team. That doesn't erase conflicting ideologies, beliefs, or even personality conflict. At the extreme the military will remove outliers from the military, but at the individual level you learn who you trust and who you can rely on. Then you do what you can to mitigate those who you don't trust.
Militaries all over the world also have a long history of killing their own people for not fitting whatever the group around them wants. Sometimes for justifiable reasons, like incompetent leaders likely to get their subordinates killed. Other times for things like someone being uncomfortable with blatant war crimes.
There is nothing magical or special about the military. They just have more weapons. So the solutions are violent more often than the average office job.
I am more than mildly surprised at the amount of brown people in the above article's picture. I can almost understand a certain type of white person cheering for him, deluded as they may me.
However I can not fathom why a non white person would even think about it. They are not only traitors to their country, but also to their race AND to what their race has had to fight for for generations. It boggles the mind.
I watched some bit of this earlier in horror and while I was playing a hard game of "spot the differences between this and nazi speeches" I heard Trump mistaking WW1 for WW2. This is the lunatic in charge of the world's biggest army. We are so cooked...
There sure are fucking truck loads of them in that picture.
I remember when the French helped us beat some tyranny away from our borders, and although I wouldn't ask them to get their hands dirty when we start wrestling ourselves, I sure wish we could channel some of their energy into the people who "oppose" things like this.... From their couch.
I long to see French level of protesting here in the states.
Quite a stretch to call cheering the President traitorous, person could almost say that's the opposite of traitorous, cause, yknow, a non politician actually doing something about the president is one of the real definitions of traitor.
Cheering for a traitor is traitorous. The traitor in question being the president doesn't mitigate that in the slightest - to the contrary, that's the most damaging traitor we could be cursed with.
Their allegiance is supposed to be to The Constitution of the United States of America, not to a tyrant who is ineligible to be president and wipes his ass with The US Constitution. The military is also supposed to be above politics.
But you dont understand one protestor littered , meaning that it is now an illegal gathering and that the thousands of people gathered are a violent mob.
Having seen a couple of vids from folks on the ground it seemed akin to a proper French riot. Folks lobbing bricks, makeshift barricades, vehicles burning etc.
Yeah folks may feel justified an upset but it isn't exactly surprising when authorities crack down to restore order in such a situation.
How do you mean? Most authoritarian regimes are maintained with fear and violence. Even in democratic states that don't primarily rule through fear the government generally has a monopoly on using violence to enforce the law.
I mean that as we've seen cops are easy to start using pellets and gas, and when people respond throwing rocks, suddenly it's a 'violent insurrection'; that's why I said it's important to see who started it.
Just seven of 50 surveyed GOP lawmakers are planning to actually attend the president’s birthday festivities over the weekend, reported Politico. [...] Those sticking around include some of Trump’s most stalwart MAGA supporters: Representatives Marjorie Taylor Greene (who told Politico “of course” she’d be there), Byron Donalds, and Elise Stefanik are all planning to celebrate. Representatives Cory Mills, Rich McCormick, John McGuire, and Lisa McClain are also expected to be in attendance.
They could be busy with shit in their states, they could not want photos/videos/records of them attending the events to exist in the future.
When your opponents say you are trying to become a police state and trample peoples rights, you probably don't want to be featured standing next to a tank on civilian streets.
In 1-3 years when they believe they will be running for office during an election that will potentially have far more people fleeing the MAGA agenda as people see the results, they will want to distance themselves and appear to have maybe been a more "moderate" Republican candidate. Hard to do standing next to a military vehicle resembling those that you rolled into metropolitan cities and whatever ensued occured because of it.
I dunno, I think attending someone's party for themselves is pretty fucking cringe. They've already kissed the ring, I can't imagine it's fun for them to grovel. They just do it when they have to satisfy the crown and virtue signal to their base since they didn't vote for them as much as they did for a Trump green light. Nobody is twisting their arm in this case.
I don't know mate. Standing in front of a tank and shutting down down Fat Boy Hitler's farcical thuper duper birthday parade would be one for the history books. There's not a farts chance in a hurricane that this doesn't go down as a comical clusterfuck.
This whole parade is getting shut down, I promise you.
Major news outlets will not cover the protests. They will happily film the parade though. They will put forth an air of cautious optimism to endear dear leader to their outlet. The only way this gets any MAJOR public attention is if people stop the parade. It will be stopped, there will be a LOT of police action, which will prompt riots, which will prompt more attention. Trump may use it to enact martial law, but he'll do so at his own detriment. It will not look well at all, but the cancellation of his parade, plus the chaos that will be martial law will only spark more civil discourse throughout the nation.
Well that would be nice if everyone was on board. But even if the people that hate him don't turn up, the people that love him will. That would be enough for him.
Not so fun fact: Trump is actually a fan of the way China handled that. Here's the quote:
"Then they were vicious, they were horrible, but they put it down with strength.That shows you the power of strength. Our country is right now perceived as weak... as being spit on by the rest of the world."
"We'll rise together and say: We reject political violence. We reject fear as governance. We reject the myth that only some deserve freedom," wrote the coalition behind "No Kings" rallies planned for June 14.
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The Maghreb Resilience Convoy’s 300-vehicle caravan departed from Tunis on Monday morning, before crossing the Libyan border on Tuesday. It is expected to enter Egypt on Thursday and reach Rafah a few days later.
According to participating groups, “doctors, students, lawyers, and everyday people” are in the convoy, part of the Global March to Gaza scheduled for June 15, during which 2,500 activists from over 50 countries plan to march from El-Arish in Egypt to Rafah in Gaza.
The defense minister called the pro-Palestinians “jihadists,” saying they would also endanger the stability of the governing Egyptian regime and other moderate Arab governments in the region.
The State Department is preparing to order the departure of all nonessential personnel from the U.S. Embassy in Baghdad due to the potential for regional unrest
The State Department is preparing to order the departure of all nonessential personnel from the U.S. Embassy in Baghdad due to the potential for regional unrest, two U.S. officials said Wednesday.
The Baghdad embassy has already been on limited staffing, and the order will not affect a large number of personnel, but the department also is authorizing the departure of nonessential personnel and family members from Bahrain and Kuwait.
Note that we don't have diplomatic relations with Iran, so in the event of a military conflict with Iran, there wouldn't be anyone to evacuate there, just in nearby countries.
I created a secondary Pixelfed account to test the share functionality, but none of the posts I've shared from my main account are showing up in the new account’s feed.
Try again after following the account that post. Having someone from your instance following a remote user is the best way to insure proper federation of content in the fediverse.
if your two accounts are on a different instance, federation takes a while, your follow signals to your instance to synchronize the content from the other account, and it's not instantaneous, it's queued along the requests of everyone else on your instance.
Fediforum happened this week, porting your social graph cross-protocol with Bounce, Bonfire gets closer to release, a prominent Lemmy server shuts down, and much more.
I also run a weekly newsletter, where you get all the articles I published this week directly in your inbox, as well as additional analysis. You can sign up right here, and get the next edition this Friday!
FediForum and related announcements
The FediForum unconference was this week, with three days of sessions, keynotes and demos. The event was originally scheduled for April, but got cancelled at the last minute due to drama around transphobic statements made by one of the co-organisers. The individual in question left FediForum, and instead FediForum set up an advisory board with a number of community members. This edition of FediForum had keynotes for the first time, by ActivityPub co-creator Christine Lemmer-Webber, author Cory Doctorow, and Ian Forrester, who lead a Mastodon instance at the BBC. There were also a large number of demos (list here) and unconference sessions about a wide variety of subjects. I’ll write more about both the demos and the keynotes once the videos of them will become available online, likely next week.
Bounce is a newly-announced tool that allows people to migrate their social graph across protocols. It is made by A New Social, the organisation behind Bridgy Fed. The ability to port a social graph from AT Protocol to ActivityPub reshapes what is possible within the Open Social Web. For that reason, I think Bounce is a meaningful release, with its power mainly being in altering the shape of these networks. I wrote an essay on that this week that goes into the philosophical side of Bounce. For more practical information I can recommend this coverage by TechCrunch and The Verge. Meanwhile, A New Social’s CTO Ryan Barrett has shared all the updates and new features that have happened to Bridgy Fed over the recent months.
Music sharing platform Bandwagon shared more information during Fediforum on their development work, and how they are working on integrating album sales. A dev blog by Bandwagon recently shared their plans on adding a premium subscription, and how album sales work. During a Fediforum session, developer Ben Pate shared some screenshots on what this looks like. WeDistribute has a deep dive into Bandwagon and the current state of development based on the latest FediForum session.
Bonfire is an upcoming fediverse platform that has slowly been reaching the end of the line for development, and they announced the release candidate version of Bonfire 1.0. It is a framework and platform for building communities on the fediverse, and has a large variety of features and extensibility. One of the standout features is circles and boundaries. Circles allow users to define lists of accounts, and boundaries allows users to determine on a per-post basis to what circles each post gets shared. This creates a significant amount of flexibility on how to handle private posts, something which is in huge demand within the open social web. Bonfire also gives users a large amount of control over how they see and filter their feed. For more of a philosophical take on that, I recently wrote about how Bonfire’s approach on custom feeds compares to Bluesky’s approach. The developers are inviting people to install their own instance and experiment with the new features. It is unknown when Bonfire will be ready for a full 1.0 release. For another look at Bonfire, TechCrunch also covered the story.
Filmmaker and fediverse evangelist Elena Rossini has released her fediverse promotion video, which was highly anticipated by the community. The video can be viewed here, and tells the story of why the fediverse matters for a lay audience. The video is worth paying attention to for two reasons: first of all, it is a well-produced promo video for the fediverse that explains some of the core ideas in an accessible manner. Secondly, the video has gotten a huge amount of support from within the fediverse community, with a large number of prominent people within the community supporting Rossini’s work. One of the challenges of analysing a decentralised community is that there is no singular decentralised community, there are a wide variety of different groups and cultures. However, by seeing how and who responded positively to the video, it becomes clear that Rossini’s video does represent a dominant and popular understanding of what the fediverse is, and why it matters. In that way, analysing the video does provide good insight into the one of the more dominant and popular cultures of the fediverse.
Shutdown of Lemmy and opportunity for PieFed
Lemm.ee, one of the biggest Lemmy servers, is shutting down at the end of June. The team says: “The key reason is that we just don’t have enough people on the admin team to keep the place running. Most of the admin team has stepped down, mostly due to burnout, and finding replacements hasn’t worked out.” This has some significant impact on the wider Threadiverse community, as the lemm.ee hosted a significant number of popular communities. This makes server shutdowns on Threadiverse platforms signficantly more impactful, as they also impact people who do not have an account on the platform. Community migration is challenging, and there are no specific tools to help with a community with migrating to a different server.
The shutdown of the Lemm.ee server provides an opportunity for PieFed, a link-aggregator platform similar to Lemmy. PieFed is over a year old, that has seen significant development and new features beyond Lemmy, but has not managed to gain traction yet, with growth of users being slow. However, now that communities on the lemm.ee. server need to find a new place, PieFed is emerging as one of the main destinations. In turn, this is giving PieFed some much need promotion and awareness within the Threadiverse community, with PieFed doubling the number of accounts within a week. Lemmy clients are also starting to add support for PieFed, with the Lemmy client Interstellar already supporting PieFed. PieFed also uploaded two PeerTube video walking through all the moderation and administration features the platform has.
Platform updates
Ghost’s work on implementing ActivityPub is getting close to an official release. In their latest update, Ghost said that their ActivityPub integration will be part of the Ghost 6.0 release, which will come in ‘a few weeks’. The team has been working on ActivityPub for over a year, and have grown from 3 people to 8 people now working on their social web integration. For Ghost, the ActivityPub integration is more than just another connector, describing it as ‘a statement that the open web still matters’.
Mastodon is planning to release a new update, version 4.4, with the first beta now available. Some of the new features include the ability to set more feature content on user profiles, more list and follow management tools. For admins, there are better tools for setting legal frameworks, moderation tweaks and more. The biggest feature of the patch is that it will display quoted posts. The highly requested feature will only be fully available in version 4.5, which will include the ability for users to create quoted posts. Mastodon CTO Renaud Chaput says that he expects version 4.4 to be released at the end of June, with version 4.5 scheduled a few months later in September of October. The organisation also shared their monthly engineering update for May.
PeerTube released their latest version, 7.2, with a new design for video management and publication pages. PeerTube also now has more features for handling sensitive content. Creators can now add an explanation of why the content is marked as sensitive. Users also have more flexibility with how they want sensitive content to be handled, with various different configurations between hiding, blurring or warning about a video with sensitive content. PeerTube is also running a crowdfunding campaign for the mobile app, which has now crossed the halfway mark at 35k EUR. This milestone is for video management from the mobile app, with the next milestone being for livestream support in-app. The PeerTube app developer also shared a blog post with his thoughts on the technical framework considerations for building the app.
Hollo is a single-user microblogging platform, and their latest release has a significant number of new features, including better OAuth and various upgrades to the UX. Developer Hong Minhee also announced that independent fediverse developer Emelia Smith will join as a co-maintainer for Hollo.
That’s all for this week, thanks for reading! You can subscribe to my newsletter to get all my weekly updates via email, which gets you some interesting extra analysis as a bonus, that is not posted here on the website. You can subscribe below:
In this case that's exactly what we need, someone with more money than god that can set precedents to protect the authors and artists that need it the most.
It doesn’t matter it was the evil empire getting that result
It does if it only benefits evil empires. The open source tools can't afford the price which only leaves the big AI companies that can and Disney who holds the data.
All this will do is add a fat price tag and censorship. Artists will not get paid and AI will not go away, the jobs will still be lost. It's the worst of both worlds.
when disney wins there will be nothing left to sue, with the result that now the entertainment industry, which has the available training data, will also have the AI technology, and the only one who profits is disney - because in this situation all open source GenAI is fucked.
I dunno, we've seen corporations come at each other many times before.
Most of you people won't understand this, but copyright and patent laws aren't going to be around forever. They don't help the working class and it's only a matter of time before new generations rise above our tunnel vision and indoctrination.
I mean, just look at this case a prime example. Who is the one suing? Disney. Who stands to benefit? Disney.
Are the random joe's suing? No, they can't afford it. The laws do not exist to protect them. It's another reason why we never see big corporations challenge copyright and patent laws. They know they make more money with them.
I don't see the irony. They perceive AI as a loop hole and need to squash it to keep their grip on things. If anybody can just prompt a movie in ten years, their business is dead. If a small group of indie animators can make a fully fledged movie, their business is dead.
They made it fucked up in their favor, this lawsuit is a continuation of that.
Disney isn't fighting for the little guy. They will still agressively use it to cull their own workforce. They want to control who can use it and don't want to compete against an indie animation scene.
Show me where I can download Midjourneys full model to run it locally and then we can agree to call it "open weights". Unless their base model and training data is also available, it's not open source.
I'd say do it more... generate more star wars media until Disney gives it up as a golden goose to milk. Doesn't matter if it's ai or whatever fuck disney...
The Google-owned site has provided moderators with new guidelines and training on how to deal with inflammatory content that breaks YouTube's code of conduct, writes The New...
Well yes. You obviously still can’t say “le dollar bean” without getting nuked from orbit. YouTube is a goodly Christian corporation after all, can’t have such content.
Are you implying you don't use YT at all? Or you use it and choose to be unhappy with it?
Just curious, I often get mad because they need to censor words, but not to the degrees to say 'fuck this place" and move to the other (unborn) alternative.
Yes they are, some from the very conception of YouTube perhaps, but they are not real alternatives a real alternative would be one where all your subscriptions also upload the same content there, it is totally not YT based and you get the same or similar ecosystem Google provides, I don't think too many channels fit this.
I mean, if your requirement for a youtube alternative is that it's as big as YouTube, you're just guaranteeing that there will never be a YouTube alternative...
Yeah perhaps, we are here on Lemmy after all, which I consider a Reddit alternative, but with YouTube the thing is different because we follow individuals, and here we follow subjects, hopefully somebody can truly stand out against Google in the video field, a movement big enough to motivate content creators to check it out, the last thing I hear was about Odysee, which I think is a step in the right direction.
almost all the right wing contents get pushed to the front. there are some that are also rw that is buried by the algorithim, because they are loud mouths, i wonder if this will change for them too.,
Good. I don't really care about youtube, but less censorship is always a good thing.
How can you people say you respect science when you support silencing any criticism of it? That's not science. That's religion.
That said, this criteria clearly only exists to protect "influencers" who make youtube a proportional amount of money. If you have a channel with very little traffic and you say something controversial, you'd better believe your "freedom of expression value" will not be high enough to outweigh the corporation's perceived "harm risk."
youtube shadowbanning, demonitization and censorship is the most retarded shit that's ever happened to the internet. the whole website is videos and comments of people who cater to kids and commercial advertisers and cant say shit.
We will (still) allow children's cartoon characters to be mutilated and put into explicit situations and then push them as child friendly, but how dare you use a swear in the first 15 seconds of a video or say the work kill.
Intention: YouTubers can stop with the whole self censoring shit.
Example: Unaliving; PDF file; grape; etc.
Reality: Ben Shapiro, Matt Walsh, and other right wing grifters receive zero censorship while YouTubers still have to self censor to receive monetization.
How long before Google locks YT down only to Chrome on Windows, Mac, ChromeOS, or Android, and blocks it from loading at all on non-Chrome browsers and on Linux or iOS, blocks it from loading at all if ad blockers, including hardware-based ad blockers ala PiHole, are implemented, and enforces hardware security measures ala TPM2 for authentication, and ensures that no one can download and re-upload YT vids, with DRM?
Basically, I wouldn't put it above them to ensure their video platform only runs on their browser, on hardware and OS platforms they deem worthy of running it, even down to somehow implementing a Vanguard-style rootkit.
A peaceful protest is underway against mega corporations attempting to impose DRM on the web, aiming to gain control over all content possible and making our lives worse.
They won't ever say it out loud but they have always removed videos for mentioning alternative frontends or other technology they view as direct threats to their revenue stream.
See the issue here is Google/Youtube still get to be the ones to decide what "may outweigh the harm risk". And the answer I bet will usually be whichever one serves their financial interests.
Which on one hand sure, it is their platform after all. But don't do me dry and claim you used lube.
I still wouldn't trust Google not to nuke my channel on a whim even in spite of those relaxed moderation rules. What's stopping a little bribe from the right company or political party from causing them to backpedal or even tighten their grip further?
This is why one should at least mirror their content to PeerTube or a similar alternative platform like that even if they're not going to just outright post future content to said alternative and give up on YT altogether.
I agree. We've seen enough times in the past where a creator would get a strike from a video several years old because the rules changes. Anyone legit should be careful.
Moderators were previously told to remove videos if one-quarter or more of the content violated YouTube policies. Now, that limit has been increased to half.
This seems like alien speak to me. They announce that shit, someone read it, and then repeated it in an article. But what does it mean?
Can you have 6 contents and make 2 really crazy? Can you tell people to commit violence for 5 minutes and then review a game for 6 minutes? Is there a dude with tvtropes open going through and marking the contents of content?
Great, now that 50% of a video can be a direct call for genocide, does that at LEAST mean I can use ONE instance of a "bad" word or speak of "icky" things like death and drug abuse without being demonized?
I like freedom of speech but it seems like it would be pretty difficult to weigh those things against one another. what is the metric that they have in common? I don't know that there is one
This morning, the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics released new data on inflation confirming what many of us have felt at the register: grocery prices are rising again.
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‘Wildly underprepared’: National Guard troops sent by President Trump to Los Angeles amid immigration protests are seen sleeping on floors in exclusive photos
The protestors really need to get the CANG to switch sides and face off against the police. Low key convinced that’s a real possibility if orangeboi or Hesgeth tries to order them to do something really beyond the pale.
I empathize with the hope that the national guard would side with protesters in violation of their orders, but is there any historical precedent for that?
On the other hand, there have been plenty of historical confrontations where the national guard has engaged in violence against demonstrators.
Maybe it can be different this time, but I don't know.
Looking at the US descent into full on fascism is horrifying and frustrating at the same time. Like a car crash in slow motion: it's clear what the result will be, but it's taking its time.
Hi everyone, I just created a PeerTube account on makertube.net/ and wanted to subscribe to a channel on a different instance. I click subscribe and get the pop-up that I have subscribed, however when I reload the page it's gone again, and nothing shows up in my subscriptions. It does the same thing for different channels on different instances. What's going on?
Under Louisiana’s 2024 CAMRA law, community groups now fear they could face fines of up to $32,500 per day – or even $1 million for ‘intentional’ violations – for talking publicly about evidence of airborne pollution, except under a narrow set of circumstances.
From Colorado to Virginia, environmental groups are challenging legal barriers that prevent scientists and communities from seeing the full picture of fossil fuel harms.
While that's a reasonable take, I think you could selectively render domains in non-latin scripts while blacklisting those greek/cyrillic letters that match latin ones, falling back to the "xn--xxx.com" formatting. Though I guess that would be a lot harder.
The first step toward meaningful change begins with us. We must abandon our craving for glossy (and therefore glassy) devices, and instead embrace hardware that may not be as immediately pleasing to the eye (as it is the case with e.g. Fairphones or the PinePhone), but is built to be slightly more durable, somewhat repairable, and capable of outlasting even today’s limited commitments to software updates.
Fairphone and PinePhone being only mentioned anecdotally for being too pretty, and I guess not as sturdy as the author wants, is quite weird for an article about reducing fragility and improving repairability.
I mean phone durability has become a lot better. I use my iPhone 14 Pro without a case, and I have dropped it a few times and more than once it has flown across the room. Just last Saturday it fell on concrete from like 4 feet high. It’s good as new.
It is also the consumer who is mostly at fault anyways. There are many durable phones out there, none of them sell like the shiny sleek phone. Do people really want devices that are more durable? If so, why aren’t they buying them?
The article is disappointing. It appears author of that article only has one narrow view and assumes the rest of the world has the same.
They buy the most fragile and aesthetically pleasing phones, and complain they are fragile. They advocate for manufacturers to stop making fragile aesthetically pleasing phones, and only make rugged or repairable phones instead. They make an inference that phones should be repairable like cars with accessible parts and non-proprietary tools, but they appear to not know that today's cars have difficulty getting replacement parts and absolutely contain mechanical and electronic proprietary tools to repair the cars.
Mr/Ms author, if you want a phone that doesn't break so easily when dropped, you can buy such a thing right now. Something like CAT phones:
... or other ruggedized Android phones.
I think the last time I dropped a phone an broke the screen on it was maybe 2007. I don't even use phone cases. If your particular use case has you dropping your phone more, buy one that exists and is designed to take those kind of conditions. There's no shame in that, but don't advocate for an entire industry shift because of just your own use case.
Smartphones/technology are still incredibly young in the grand scheme of things. Each of the new generation of devices that comes out adds more functionality for features that people want. Until that stops, it doesn't make sense to try to switch everyone to a "buy it for life" approach. My Commodore 64 computer still works, and is very easy to service, however I wouldn't have wanted technology to stop back then just because its a sturdy built machine. Today I have the paper thin laptops with 8 hours of battery and high speed CPUs are not as rugged or repairable as my venerable C64, but I'm quite glad to have the fragile laptop instead.
Theres this pervasive mentality in online spaces that completely disregards the consumer’s role in all of the design choices of products. They completely ignore that it is the consumer who signaled they wanted this and continue to signal they want this by buying more of the same. Corporations cannot create desires, they only fulfill them. Consumers have demonstrated they want sleek devices that are easy to operate and last only as long as they are not outclassed by next thing. The alternative of course is coming to the realization that consumers prefer convenience and novelty than durability above anything else but once you realize that you become elitist and that’s a big no no. So it must be the corporations fault!
You also ignore the role marketing has to play in convincing people that they need those things. Most people don't need an SUV, let alone a truck, yet I see plenty of people driving these, and even thinking they're safer than sedans. But they cost more money, which means more profit, and why would it be surprising that people who sell something with a relatively inelastic market want to maximize profit dollars per sale?
Smartphones are fragile without a case. They should have one, and maybe manufacturers should make that clearer, but a world where removable cases didn't exist would just mean that the case you get is the one that the manufacturer chooses for you and permanently attaches to the smartphone. Less options for you.
Just get a case.
I am also more than willing to carry a slightly thicker device if it means greater durability and easier repairability.
Me too. It's why I have a case.
And I am certain many others would gladly trade their bulky, overpriced cases and bumpers for a sturdier device that inherently provides the protection we now have to purchase separately.
If you want a built-in case, you can get them. There is a whole collection of "ruggedized" smartphones from various manufacturers in China that are large, usually have a hefty battery, and have shielding built into the device.
Personally, I think that the built-in case isn't very interesting relative to a removable case, but the large battery might be, depending upon your needs.
EDIT: A number of manufacturers will even make official cases for their phones, if you can tolerate a removable case and just want something endorsed by the manufacturer.
They don't have to be fragile, though. I have several old, cheap smartphones that didn't need a case and weren't bulky by the standards of the day. Even now all they would need is a new battery (easily replaceable btw) and they would work as good as new.
It’s not a compromise, it’s a reflection of the fact that most people don’t care about these durable devices so they don’t sell well and thus they can’t be supported very well or for very long. This is just a reality of the market.
The global smartphone screen protectors market size was estimated at USD 49.73 billion in 2022 and is expected to grow at a CAGR of 6.9% from 2023 to 2030
It makes total sense to me. A phone case is just a cheap piece of plastic that's made using cheap mold-manufacturing, and cases last for the entire life of the phone, sometimes even living on through a couple of phone lifetimes.
But screen protectors have to be more rigorously designed, - making sure that the material works well between finger and each particular touchscreen, and it's made using relatively much more expensive manufacturing processes like curved glass cutting, and people have to replace them every once in awhile because the purpose of a screen protector is to take all the damage that otherwise would've happened to your screen.
Most "50 MP" cameras are actually quad Bayer sensors (effectively worse resolution) and are usually binned 2x to approx 12 MP.
The lens on your phone likely isn't sharp enough to capture 50 MP of detail on a small sensor anyway, so the megapixel number ends up being more of a gimmick than anything.
That doesn't match my experience with phone hardware. Everyone i know has a bunch of old phones that've been handed down to kids and even more sitting in junk drawers, because they all still work. Yes a couple of them have cracked screens, but even with those the only reason why the screen wasn't repaired is because people wanted or already had a newer phone.
Software is a totally different matter though. The OS and apps stop getting updates at some point even though the hardware is still totally capable of doing what most people want their phone to do. And even worse, many companies don't allow a phone to revert to an older OS version, so the company pushes out an update that slows the phone down and then there's no way to fix that.
The HARDWARE isn't designed to fail, because the SOFTWARE is designed to let the company force the device to fail at whatever exact moment the company later decides on.
The hardware was certainly designed to be less repairable and phones less upgradable. Gone are the days with user-replaceable batteries and MicroSD card slots.
A 20 minute video on how to replace your battery with batteries that are glued down and you need a pry tool to remove them and hopefully not puncture them is not exactly what I would call user-replaceable batteries:
I'm talking about ones like the Samsung Galaxy S3, Nintendo DSi and Nintendo 3DS, etc had where you could just open the cover, take the battery out, and then put the new one in.
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My favourite argument for these things is always: but it has to be water tight. It has to be aesthetic and thin. Okay cool, then make phones for people who use them as a fashion statement or throw them into the water and make one that you can just crack open. I know it's something completely different but my first phone was an alcatel where you could take out the battery and throw in 4 AA's in case you ran out of juice.
I have had few phones over the years, few of them I damaged by using them in bad conditions, mainly on construction sites.
As far I can remember I have never cracked the screen. Phones are and always were fragile, its a piece of condensed technology, with large glass screen. What do people expect from glass dropped from 1m? Just take care of your shit.
It always amazes me how can people cary their phones in back pocket or just throw it in the bag with keys or other sharp objects.
The main issue is the lack of software support. They keep making each new Android version more bloated so you can't update more than once or maybe twice. If it wasn't for that, you could keep using the same 5G phone until they shut down the 5G network as long as the battery is replaceable.
I wish Android was more like Debian where it's lightweight, uses stable versions of software and runs well on old hardware.
The newer Android versions aren't that much more bloated. Sure. If you compare Android KitKat with Android 14 it is gonna be a bit more demanding probably especially on graphics, but overall there were a lot of improvements to the battery usage and memory management over the years and I have an experience of newer Android versions running better than the older ones. You can have a 6 years old phone that will run the newest Android version just fine because you flashed it with a custom ROM.
When we get to the manufacturer's custom Android skins... Well that's a different story. Most of them are gonna be more or less bloated than stock Android, but this is a problem of manufacturers and the fact that mobile OS market and ecosystem is so much locked down compared to desktop, which makes it harder to remove manufacturer's bloat from your OS, install different ROMs and tinker with it, rather than Android being bloated as an OS.
Samsung used to have rugged mainline Galaxy phones. Guess what? They didn’t sell well so they don’t make them anymore.
Mass market doesn’t want this, is that simple. The people who want it are over represented online. It’s a similar case with people who want small phones, why do you think they don’t make them anymore? Because hardly anyone buys them.
I think this highlight the problem with this approach. $500 MSRP would likely not be cost effective for a phone manufacturer to invest in the design, construction, inventory of replacement parts, and multi-year long support of the rugged and long lasting phone. An important part of the premise of the author is that the phone lasts a long time, and your stated desire for long software support.
This is likely a money loser for a phone manufacturer from day one. My guess is that this phone would likely have to cost $2000 to $3000 for a chance to be economically viable. The biggest expenses are going to be on the human labor parts of a staff to provide the regular software updates, maintaining humans that run the manufacturing lines for the replacement parts, and the repair staff to effect the repairs over time for customers. Considering the only time the phone manufacturer gets money is from the initial sale of the phone, they have to price it high enough to cover many years of these support operations.
At the higher, more realistic, phone sale price it likely drops the number of potential customers so low to not even pay for the initial design and tooling to be created.
This is likely why no manufacturer makes this theoretical phone.
It’s stuck on iOS 16. Once iOS 26 releases, companies will quickly pivot to iOS 17 as the minimum supported version and slowly you will find important apps no longer work on the phone.
I've recently learned that the device Sun first made Java for was, well, almost a smartphone in idea. So those Java phones and now Android are not a perversion of the initial intent.
I also think that, if you only compare various places in reality and various casinos by the amount of endorphine per minute spent, you'll choose casinos (OK, maybe brothels).
The reason you don't choose a casino is because you know that in average the casino always wins. That's a knowledge of how casinos work.
The reason you don't choose a brothel is because you know that many people working there are disadvantaged, and because you can control your impulses. That's also a knowledge of how brothels work.
This means, that if we make an analogy between casinos, brothels and the computer industry, including smartphones and the web, the user has to know how it works to make the right decisions.
So the commonly repeated point about grandmas and casual users is simply wrong. There's no way they don't get deceived by the other side profiting from their ignorance, other than learning how things work.
So - I think we need a global social network. We have siloed services because it doesn't bring profits to make such a global service, and the one Sun, Netscape, Macromedia (yes) and many universities made in the 90s has gone obsolete. The Internet itself allows to make a global Facebook. But instead of solving the problems of technical debt and adoption for that, it's simpler to use a centralized service which was relatively easy to launch initially.
From Facebook (or others) you ultimately need 1) search of 1.a) contacts, 1.b) groups and 1.c) posts, 2) storage of 2.a) contacts, 2.b) groups and 2.c) posts, 3) universal forward identifiers of 3.a) contacts, 3.b) groups and 3.c) posts.
With cryptography and #3 you can use untrusted services for #1 and #2.
If they can be untrusted, services for #1 (indexer crawling the network and answering search requests in a standardized way, similar to RSS, maybe just with RSS ; the crawler service and the search result storage can be separated too) and #2 can be contributed to their respective pools like with SETI@home or other projects.
There is the question of a financial incentive to providing such a service. That can be done with using, say, (maybe number 4), a pool of billing services. A user makes a payment and before requesting a search service or a storage service, requests a billing service on which they are registered, providing it with the identifier of a resource they are going to use, that billing service and that resource interact in the sense of payment in background, giving the user a token with which they request the service itself. To pay for used storage or a heavy search request (or a request above a threshold).
Well, that looks ugly, maybe some other way is possible.
Those search results from search services and objects fetched from storage services are presented in a native application similar to Facebook, perhaps.
Contacts would be just PKI certificates or something, with a valid certificate for a registrar domain someplace in chain.
So you'd request in DNS (or someplace else, I dunno) pool.search.nihilsoc.org for a bunch of uniform indexer services, pool.store.nihilsoc.org for a bunch of uniform storage services (if we don't have a paid service saved, probably even encrypted on some available storage service), pool.relay.nihilsoc.org of a bunch of notification servers similar to IRC (except not used for chat directly, or maybe even that), pool.billing.nihilsoc.org to pay for services requiring it. It wouldn't matter much which ones you'd hit, because every post, contact and group identifiers would be global, containing parent identifiers and such.
It would supposedly be seamless for the user. You search for a group on a few indexers, you get a few lists of results showing on which storage services it's present and how much of it, you deduplicate those and you ask those directly by global identifiers, check signatures yadda-yadda.
Seems very archaic, I dunno why nobody is doing this, probably because things seeming simple are complex.
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OK, about smartphones and casinos - just like the way to fight gambling lies in knowing that the casino always wins and there's no luck, the way to fight enshittification lies in users caring what they use. Yep, technologies and systems involved are complex, then maybe those should be made simpler for users to understand. Simpler inside, like OpenBSD, not simpler outside, like ChatGPT.
Software side too: Linux's deliberate choice to not have a stable driver interface is detrimental to atomic distros with the usually shitty proprietary vendor drivers. Causing you to get no updates after a few years or get a new device.
Which is why i think BSD would have been a better fit for Android.
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