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.
Lorenzo Tondo in Jerusalem Fri 24 Oct 2025 12.50 EDT
A joint statement published on the Hamas website said the groups had agreed in a meeting in Cairo to hand “over the administration of the Gaza Strip to a temporary Palestinian committee composed of independent ‘technocrats’, which will manage the affairs of life and basic services in cooperation with Arab brothers and international institutions”.
The statement also called for a meeting to “agree on a national strategy and to revitalise the Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO) as the sole legitimate representative of the Palestinian people”. Hamas is not part of the PLO, which is dominated by its longtime rival Fatah.
It comes as the wife of the Palestinians’ most popular leader, Marwan Barghouti, appealed on Friday to Donald Trump to intervene for her husband’s release from an Israeli jail, after the US President said he would “make a decision” on the matter.
Lorenzo Tondo in Jerusalem Fri 24 Oct 2025 12.50 EDT
A joint statement published on the Hamas website said the groups had agreed in a meeting in Cairo to hand “over the administration of the Gaza Strip to a temporary Palestinian committee composed of independent ‘technocrats’, which will manage the affairs of life and basic services in cooperation with Arab brothers and international institutions”.
The statement also called for a meeting to “agree on a national strategy and to revitalise the Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO) as the sole legitimate representative of the Palestinian people”. Hamas is not part of the PLO, which is dominated by its longtime rival Fatah.
It comes as the wife of the Palestinians’ most popular leader, Marwan Barghouti, appealed on Friday to Donald Trump to intervene for her husband’s release from an Israeli jail, after the US President said he would “make a decision” on the matter.
Palestinian factions say they agree to let independent technocrat committee run Gaza
Lorenzo Tondo in Jerusalem Fri 24 Oct 2025 12.50 EDT
A joint statement published on the Hamas website said the groups had agreed in a meeting in Cairo to hand “over the administration of the Gaza Strip to a temporary Palestinian committee composed of independent ‘technocrats’, which will manage the affairs of life and basic services in cooperation with Arab brothers and international institutions”.
The statement also called for a meeting to “agree on a national strategy and to revitalise the Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO) as the sole legitimate representative of the Palestinian people”. Hamas is not part of the PLO, which is dominated by its longtime rival Fatah.
It comes as the wife of the Palestinians’ most popular leader, Marwan Barghouti, appealed on Friday to Donald Trump to intervene for her husband’s release from an Israeli jail, after the US President said he would “make a decision” on the matter.
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.
Ontario Premier Doug Ford says the province will “pause” its U.S. advertising campaign on tariffs as of Monday so that trade talks can resume after U.S. President Donald Trump broke off trade negotiations with Canada over the ads.
Why does Doug have to do anything? Donny is an autocrat, right? Can’t he just phone the American broadcaster airing the ads and demand they stop airing it.
Big Strong Men shouldn’t just go crying on their pet social network when another country is being mean. They should be Big enough and Strong enough to deal with it themselves.
Hello, lemmy.world! First time posting here, hope you'll find it somewhat useful.\ \ In an attempt to protect my personal info from data-hungry cloud-infested madness that comes from app stores of various kinds, I decided to establish a routine of scraping health metrics from... myself. This particular example requires manual input, however it proved to be working reliably and much more precise than any other mood journaling app.
You might easily think I’ve lost my mind—and you’d be right. It happened a long time ago and hasn’t let go since, so tracking mood changes via a graph isn’t just a quirk anymore, it’s more of a life necessity.
Gadgetbridge allows automatic SQLite database export to the location you specify.\ \ Navigate to Settings -> Automations -> Auto export database, and from there you can configure the details.\ \ You can put it into a shared Syncthing folder, or something alike, or process it with Termux + Tasker. Personally, I hesitate to send megabytes of data over the wire every couple of minutes, so I rigged up a script that extracts the required metrics (for now its my steps only, the rest does not seem to be accurate) and sends a payload to my queue, where a consumer script later adds it to the DB.
Does gadgetbridge have something like an API? It seems like it should already have something along these lines, since health wearables not having one is what gave birth to gadgetbridge in the first place...
I’ve been experimenting with something similar the last two months. My workflow involves self reported health data via NextCloud forms. The api feeds a sql db that’s modeled using grafana. I also have a python tool in open webui to chat over the data with gpt-oss:20b. Fun project. Happy to hear others are tinkering too.
As Ireland's $1,500-a-month basic income pilot program for creatives nears its end in February, officials have to answer a simple question: Is it worth it?
With four months to go, they say the answer is yes.
Earlier this month, Ireland's government announced its 2026 budget, which includes "a successor to the pilot Basic Income Scheme for the Arts to begin next year" among its expenditures.
Ireland is just one of many places experimenting with guaranteed basic income programs, which provide recurring, unrestricted payments to people in a certain demographic. These programs differ from a universal basic income, which would provide payments for an entire population.
This should be the default for anybody in the world. From there on work if you want more. We are social, economical and technologically capable of doing it. Is the 1% the ones preventing it from happening.
In Switzerland, 77% of the population voted against. Granted, the 1% may have influenced the voters by spending money on campaigns, or even by creating a narrative over decades. And maybe that proposal was too ambitious. But in the end, it was not just the 1% who voted against but 77%. There is still a lot of skepticism against UBI, despite all the positive evidence.
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.]
Hi, This is my first post here, pretty intimidating! haha
I shared this on reddit, and one of my community members told me this is a good place to also share it, so here we go!
A couple of months back I have built a checklist/note taking app for myself and called it rwMarkable, posted it on reddit and a lot of people seemed to resonate to it, so I kept adding new features and enjoying the small but very involved community that has built around it.
For anyone who hasn't heard of the project before, here's a quick bullet list of some features:
Checklists: Create task lists with drag & drop reordering, progress bars, and categories. Supports both simple checklists and advanced task projects with Kanban boards and time tracking.
Text Notes: A clean WYSIWYG editor for your notes, powered by TipTap with full Markdown support and codeblock syntax highlighting.
Sharing: Share checklists or notes with other users or publicly with shareable links.
File-Based: No database needed! Everything is stored in simple Markdown and JSON files in a single data directory.
User Management: An admin panel to create and manage user accounts with session tracking.
Customisable: 14+ built-in themes plus easy custom theme support.
API Access: Programmatic access to your checklists and notes via REST API with authentication for various integrations.
OIDC integration: Use any provider to authenticate, follow this tutorial on how to
There have been a lot of requests to change the name due to it sounding a little too close to reMarkable (the tablet - which, btw, i had no idea existed at the time lol) and after getting some amazing community suggestions we landed on jotty.
You can find all the info (and a demo) here: jotty.page/
Let me know what you think, the app is very much still in development and every week new features get added (that said, I really value the simplicity and lightweight nature of it, so I will not add anything that compromises it).
There is no dedicated native mobile app yet (though there is a bounty for it), so the mobile experience happens via a PWA that is decent for browsing and quick editing, but lacks offline support
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.
The fascist connections really took me by the surprise as foss noob. Makes switching from closed source a quite bit more challenging having to navigate around supporting bad actors.
Navigating around supporting bad actors in the foss community is probably far easier than in the closed, commercial software space, given that all the code, discussion, and money are out in the open.
Also I think the proportion of fascists and bad actors in the foss community is probably lower than elsewhere in the first place, given that the community is based on the free and open sharing of work and knowledge.
I agree with what the commenters say, but it's ridiculous that all the OPs normal responses are downvoted to hell. ok people tell them what they think, but after that they should just scroll further and forget about it.
but it also reminds me of some other reddit posts where I have seen such a weird votes pattern. most top level comments heavily upvoted, plenty responses to those heavily downvoted. at some posts it was obvious vote manipulation, and others called it out too. maybe that is what's happening there too? but just consider this: post has a score of 500, 91% of voters upvoted it. how is it possible then that with few exceptions all OP responses are so heavily downvoted.
FUTO (popularly associated with Immich and Louis Rossman) received some backlash for subverting third-party donor guidelines in the conducting of its grant program
selfh.st should recieve some backlash for subverting the reason for the FUTO backlash in this summary.
The guidelines fuckery is just the decor. The main part of the whole cake is: FUTO platforms a guy that calls himself a fascist and talks racist gibberish.
MinIO is really gutting the open source version. I also found it confusing that all of their docs are for AIStor, which I guess is the same product that was rebranded. I suppose open source is not immune from enshittification.
It's resistant, though, specifically because you can fork it. Don't like where things are going? Like the features of a previous version? Fork that version and run with it.
It does mean extra work for somebody to maintain that forked version, but the option is nonetheless there.
yeah, I adopted it last year and I probably wouldn't have picked it today. I'm glad that despite of that, in the end it's just an S3 compatible storage and, thanks to that, it's not too difficult to replace.
"SaveMyServer – The #1 seller of refurbished servers. Shop top-quality Dell PowerEdge and HP servers with expert support, fast shipping, and great deals!"
Yeah, they're legit. Bought a few servers from them over the years. No major issues, packing was good, reasonable ship time.
Had one case where they sent a different NIC than what was listed. They just shipped me the correct one and told me not to bother sending the old one back.
Stopped buying from them though because I prefer off-the-shelf modern consumer hardware nowadays. The real cost is always power consumption, and I prefer to shell out more money up front in exchange for huge savings on power usage down the line. I can always run over to microcenter and replace a part same-day as opposed to ordering it online and hoping it comes soon.
If you're a home-labber, I'd strongly suggest doing the same. Some of those old enterprise servers just gobble power for not that much compute relative to current day consumer machines.
If I was still buying older servers though, I'd probably be looking at their prices.
This is an interesting take. I prefer the other way around, because of redundancy in things like PSU and raid etc. So your take is really interesting to me. I am rethinking my setups for sure.
I get that, that was also something I used to like about old servers, but let me float a few of the things that I've come to realize through my home-lab career to you:
Raid is perfectly feasible in consumer hardware. If your motherboard doesn't have enough SATA ports, you can always get an HBA or a JBOD to support for more disks. There's really no good reason (that I have heard of) for hardware raid today. Just remember raid is not a backup 😀
There are consumer ATX PSUs with redundancy. However, the only reason for PSU redundancy is when you cannot tolerate downtime due to a PSU or UPS failure, and that redundancy might save you a few hours of uptime over 10+ years in comparison to a non-redundant consumer PSU that you can go out and buy if it fails. When was the last time you had a (reputable) PSU fail on you? What kind of uptime are you targeting? If you don't have an answer for that, 99% is very easy to reach even on consumer gear, and is a strong indicator that you don't need enterprise levels of redundancy. 99% is literally 3 days of downtime per year. Also keep in mind that redundant PSUs are just going to gobble more power and increase operating costs.
KVM features - this was the big one for me. I wanted to be able to perform out-of-band remote maintenance on my servers. Then I took a leap and got a Sipeed NanoKVM, and I haven't looked back. there are plenty of them out there - PiKVM is another reputable one. When buying old enterprise servers, you often have to pay for the remote management license, and that is just another added cost. Not to mention that they lose support pretty quickly, and you end up running out of date software on one of your most critical interfaces to the machine. A NanoKVM, PiKVM, and others aren't built into the machine, so they continue to be supported for much longer.
One other thing that I'll mention and you probably already know - enterprise servers are LOUD - even just a single one can literally sound like a jet engine. That's not a hyperbolae. If this is your first one, don't underestimate it. I had my servers in the basement with decent insulation, I used IPMI to throttle the fans back to 10%, and I could still hear the whine on my first floor when everything is quiet. If you end up having to turn down the fans due to noise, you're going to start having heat issues, and then you're losing out on performance and shortening component lifespan. Noise-proofing a server is non-trivial - you have to allow air flow still, and where there's air flow, there's a path for noise too. My current setups all have 120mm and 140mm fans, and I can barely hear them when I'm working right next to them. My 3D printers are the loud ones in the basement now!
Thank you for all the information. I have had servers now for 7 years already, and honestly I still love them. I run a bit more than just seflhosting home-based applications, but I totally get your point. I am a bit older, and therefor a bit more old-school 😀 I sleep safely to the hum of redundant PSUs and Hardware RAID SSDs, haha.
Especially thank you for PiKVM and NanoKVM. I am looking into that a bit.
I am fully off-grid, so power cost is not that big of a deal, and the servers are far enough away for the noise not to bother me.
I am not against anything you said, honestly. And I got a lot of new info. I am going to say this though: I am still not too convinced on the software RAID thing though. Maybe I am just too stupid, but I have not been able to get this going with the same ease, and have it recover as easily as proper hardware RAID. One day I will take the leap again and try to "get with the times".
Thanks again for all the info! Honestly appreciate it.
What's your general self-hosting setup and what machines are you building for that? I'd like to have HA Proxmox running all the time on three nodes with a low power bill and lots of memory available (like 256GB) but space for memory seems to be difficult to find in a reasonable priced consumer board.
Mainly just the HDD's. I already have a server, but having a bunch of extra drives for cheap is really tempting, especially since I haven't filled out all of the bays
Well then very little of what I said actually applies!
Unless you know the hours on a drive, you might get brand new ones, or you might get ones with 50k hours on them. They may also be from the same batch, which isn't ideal for data durability. If you're ok with all that, then go for it. I generally don't buy used drives because I don't want to take the additional risk.
I'd be surprised if you can't find a better deal on used spinning rust though... the shipping alone is probably half the value on a good chunk of sales from SmS.
Yeah they're fine. TechMikeNY usually has better deals though, at least in my experience. Have bought from them several times both for work and homelab, no complaints.
Find great deals on Dell / HP refurbished and used servers, server parts, hard disk drives, storage and switches at other networking equipment at TechMikeNY. We offer customization options to accommodate your individual needs!
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?
A Russian fighter and a refueler crossed the EU’s external border Thursday night as the bloc’s leaders discussed their defense plans.
A Russian fighter jet and a refueling aircraft briefly crossed into Lithuanian airspace from the Kaliningrad region on Thursday evening, the Lithuanian Armed Forces said.
Lithuania’s President Gitanas Nausėda condemned what he described as "a cruel violation of international law and territorial sovereignty of Lithuania.”
“We have to react to this,” he wrote on X, posting from Brussels.
The intrusion came as EU leaders in Brussels were discussing ways to strengthen the bloc’s security at Thursday's European Council. For Lithuania, which has seen a growing number of airspace violations in recent months — from fighter jets and drones to balloons — air defense remains a top priority.
Lithuania borders both Kaliningrad which serves as an important Russian military outpost and Belarus which is very friendly with Russia and is happy to let Russian troops and aircraft through.
Well, they do if you count Oblast, but there’s a looong way from there to Russia without flying over another country.
Yet that's exactly what happened. And yes, Kaliningrad Oblast is a part of Russia. Not sure why one would not count that: planes can fly over sea, or start and land right there in Kaliningrad!
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.
Japan's new Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi pledges to boost military spending and deepen US ties amid rising regional tensions.
Japan's new Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi said she will bolster the country's military spending as tensions rise with China, North Korea and Russia.
In her first major policy speech since taking office Tuesday, Japan's first female leader said the government will increase military spending to 2% of Tokyo's gross domestic product by March—a goal previously set for 2027.
"The free, open and stable international order that we were accustomed to is violently shaken in the face of historic change of power balance and intensifying geopolitical competitions," Takaichi said.
"In the region around Japan, military activities and other actions from our neighbors China, North Korea and Russia are causing grave concerns."
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.
Although the bill still requires several rounds of approval to become law, its preliminary passage has embarrassed Benjamin Netanyahu, who had earlier urged lawmakers to delay its presentation during US vice-president JD Vance’s visit – an effort to preserve the fragile Gaza ceasefire. Washington has repeatedly said that any annexation of the West Bank would cross a red line.
“I will not allow Israel to annex the West Bank,” Donald Trump told reporters at the White House in September. “It’s not going to happen.”
“I think the president’s made clear that’s not something we can be supportive of right now,” Rubio said of annexation as he boarded his plane for a visit to Israel.
Although the bill still requires several rounds of approval to become law, its preliminary passage has embarrassed Benjamin Netanyahu, who had earlier urged lawmakers to delay its presentation during US vice-president JD Vance’s visit – an effort to preserve the fragile Gaza ceasefire. Washington has repeatedly said that any annexation of the West Bank would cross a red line.
“I will not allow Israel to annex the West Bank,” Donald Trump told reporters at the White House in September. “It’s not going to happen.”
“I think the president’s made clear that’s not something we can be supportive of right now,” Rubio said of annexation as he boarded his plane for a visit to Israel.
Marco Rubio warns Israel not to annex West Bank after Knesset vote in favour
Lorenzo Tondo Jerusalem Thu 23 Oct 2025 05.31 EDT
Although the bill still requires several rounds of approval to become law, its preliminary passage has embarrassed Benjamin Netanyahu, who had earlier urged lawmakers to delay its presentation during US vice-president JD Vance’s visit – an effort to preserve the fragile Gaza ceasefire. Washington has repeatedly said that any annexation of the West Bank would cross a red line.
“I will not allow Israel to annex the West Bank,” Donald Trump told reporters at the White House in September. “It’s not going to happen.”
“I think the president’s made clear that’s not something we can be supportive of right now,” Rubio said of annexation as he boarded his plane for a visit to Israel.
I'm just curious how it got like this. What leverage does Israel have that it's got such a strong hold over USA than any influence it might have in the rest of Europe?
AIPAC managed to get in before they began banning international lobbying.
And if you want to put on a tinfoil hat, I would personally would not be surprised if there is a lot of blackmail involved. with plenty of conspiracies about Epstein being a mossad agent.
Machine translators have made it easier than ever to create error-plagued Wikipedia articles in obscure languages. What happens when AI models get trained on junk pages?
As soon as you leave the big languages, esp. English, Wikipedia can be very problematic for all sorts of reasons. Mostly because of a lack of eyeballs. But it doesn't end with merely badly written/generated content but also with narrative manipulation that - unlike in the English version - remains unchallenged.
Sorry, but English-speaking countries have basically invented "narrative manipulation". For most of history it was normal that there are many competing narratives from interested parties on anything. But such sophistication at making one side's narrative seem impartial, perpetually contested and self-healing has never been achieved before.
It's as if you paint a lake red, it's expensive, and people may get used to it and even believe that's kinda normal, but one can still see that it's just one lake. If you paint the world oceans red, so that it rains red and mists red, that's far more persuasive, and that's what the "collective West" has achieved.
To make a lake painted red seem normal, you need to prevent most of your population from looking at other lakes. But when you've managed to paint the ocean red, you don't need to limit them at all. The fence and the punishment would hurt trust, but without them your and other people looking at the red oceans and rains will think they are also free.
Despite being just one alliance of former and current colonizing powers on this planet.
It's very sad to live in an era of frustration where we can see that it can't reform itself further in humanist direction, than it already has by about year 1988.
Sort of like a planetwide revolutionary situation by Lenin, where the dominating powers can't keep the order the old way (that persuasion still slowly dies), and the dominated can't live the old way. But, as we know, revolutionary situations by Lenin generally don't lead to what one would hope for.
EDIT: Oh, I forgot. The point is that it's actually nice sometimes to have alternative pages in smaller languages on niche subjects, explained better to my own taste. And in the bigger languages articles are sometimes removed for no good reason, say, Hotline\KDX have been butchered simply for being not popular anymore.
Sorry, but English-speaking countries have basically invented “narrative manipulation”.
You have no idea how wrong you are. I could claim it was the roman catholic church and there'd probably still be older examples. More likely, no entity "basically invented" it.
Nothing against you personally, but this is not the edgy take you think it is.
Oh, I forgot. The point is that it’s actually nice sometimes to have alternative pages in smaller languages on niche subjects, explained better to my own taste.
No, the point is that there are countries where people speak these languages and they want to read things in their own language. Sheesh.
"Basically invented" here meant the last huge leap, to having one cluster of narratives perceived as "normal and clean" almost globally. Of course literally not. The roman catholic church didn't have such means.
I wonder if language and other cultural fields are the only areas where Linus's law are impossible to safely apply. Programming seems quite easy by comparison.
Hmm, the law begins with "Given enough eyeballs". So it's explicitly not about small-language Wikipedia sites having too few editors.
It also doesn't talk about finding consensus. "All bugs are shallow" means that someone can see the solution. In software development, that's most often quite easy, especially when it comes to bugfixes. It's rarely difficult to verify whether the solution to a bug works or not. So in most cases if someone finds a solution and it works, that's good enough for everyone.
In cultural fields, that's decidedly not the case.
For most of society's problems, there are hardly any new solutions. We have had the same basic problems for centuries and pretty much "all" the solutions have been proposed decades or centuries ago.
How to make government fair? How to get rid of crime? How to make a good society?
These things have literally been issues since the first humans learned to speak.
That's why Linus' law doesn't really apply here. We all want different things and there's no fix that satisfies all requirements or preferences.
For most of society’s problems, there are hardly any new solutions. We have had the same basic problems for centuries and pretty much “all” the solutions have been proposed decades or centuries ago.
That's because people generally don't know or understand these solutions. One can't raise above separate human's ability to understand any system. And I mean any. Doesn't mean a housewife has to know electrical engineering, but enough people in any group reliant upon any system should have passive knowledge and understanding.
So, thanks to AI translators and such, I can now link kvant.digital/ here.
The very first problem in the very first issue of that journal is very enlightening.
Does it really matter? I think the extreme amount of languages in the world right now is not helping us communicate. I don't view language as a cultural heritage thing, just a communication protocol. And I have moved around a lot in the world, it's very difficult to be constantly adapting to different languages. That causes a societal integration barrier for me.
I think if we had a universal language (note that it wouldn't have to be English) we would be able to understand each other better and have less wars.
PS: I'm not advocating to ban languages or something, just to have a universal one. A bit like what Esperanto tried to achieve. Mutual language means more mutual understanding and thus less "us vs them" underbelly feelings that the fascists thrive on.
Yeah I'm just not really wed to any language. I guess it is also because I have moved around so much. I'm from Holland but I don't consider myself a Dutch person, more like a citizen of the world. I've become too different to fit in in my home country (also because it's become an extreme-right cesspool lately 😢 ). I've spent about half my life elsewhere. And the places I've lived where I spoke the languages I fared noticeably better.
Don't forget that a lot of today's problems center around not understanding each other. The hatred of immigrants for example.
But I know a lot of people do view language as a cultural thing, it's just my point of view.
Languages have their own quirks and characters, representative of the people's cultural values and history, and express ideas not even present in other cultures. As many languages have to be preserved as possible for these reasons.
It's profoundly chauvinistic to think that people who speak other languages don't have the same depth of literary resource as English-speakers because Wikipedia has fewer users.
Books. They're called books. Every nation speaking every language has them.
I understand you're trying to be nice to minority languages, but if you write research papers you either limit your demographic to your own country, or you publish in English (I guess Spanish is pretty world wide as well). If you set out to read a new paper in your field, I doubt you'd pick up something in Mongolian.
Even in Sweden I would write a serious paper in English, so that more of the world could read it. Yes, we have text books for our courses that are in Swedish, but i doubt there are many books covering LLMs being published currently for example.
I'm not "trying to be nice to minority languages", I'm directly pushing back against the chauvinistic idea that the English Wikipedia is so important that those without it are somehow inferior. There is no "doom spiral".
As for scientific papers, it's called a translation. One can write academic literature in one's native langaue and have it translated for more reach. That isnt the case with Wikipedia which is constantly being edited.
I’m not “trying to be nice to minority languages”, I’m directly pushing back against the chauvinistic idea that the English Wikipedia is so important that those without it are somehow inferior. There is no “doom spiral”.
I think you missed the problem described here.
The "doom spiral" is not because of English Wiki, it has nothing to do with anything.
The problem described is that people who don't know a "niche" language try to contribute to a niche Wiki by using machine translation/LLMs.
As per the article:
Virtually every single article had been published by people who did not actually speak the language. Wehr, who now teaches Greenlandic in Denmark, speculates that perhaps only one or two Greenlanders had ever contributed. But what worried him most was something else: Over time, he had noticed that a growing number of articles appeared to be copy-pasted into Wikipedia by people using machine translators. They were riddled with elementary mistakes—from grammatical blunders to meaningless words to more significant inaccuracies, like an entry that claimed Canada had only 41 inhabitants. Other pages sometimes contained random strings of letters spat out by machines that were unable to find suitable Greenlandic words to express themselves.
Now, another problem is Model Collapse (or, well, a similar phenomenon in strictly in terms of language itself).
We now have a bunch of "niche" languages' Wikis containing such errors... that are being used to train machine translators and LLMs to handle these languages. This is contaminating their input data with errors and hallucinations, but since this is the training data, these LLMs consider everything in there as the truth, propagating the errors/hallucinations forward.
I honestly have no clue where you're getting anything chauvinistic here. The problem is imperfect technology being misused by irresponsible people.
Is it even getting misused? Spreading knowledge via machine translation where there are no human translators available, had to be better than not translating. As long as there is transparency so people can judge the results …..
And ai training trusting everything it reads is a larger systemic issue, not limited to this niche.
Perhaps part of the solution is machine readable citations. Maybe a search engine or ai could provide better results if it knew what was human generated vs machine generated. But even then you have huge gaps on one side with untrustworthy humans (like comedy) and on the other side with machine generated facts such as from a database
Is it even getting misused? Spreading knowledge via machine translation where there are no human translators available, had to be better than not translating. As long as there is transparency so people can judge the results
Sure there are limitations. The point still stands: an imperfect machine translation is better than no translation, as long as people understand it is.
Can we afford to allow a high bad deprive people of knowledge just because of the language they speak?
The article complains about the affect on languages of poor machine translations, but the affect of no translations is worse. Yes those Greenlanders should be able to read all of Wikipedia without learning English and even if the project has no human translators
Spreading knowledge via machine translation where there are no human translators available, had to be better than not translating
Have you not read my entire comment...?
One of the Greenlandic Wiki articles "claimed Canada had only 41 inhabitants". What use is a text like that? In what world is learning that Canada has 41 inhabitants better than going to the English version of the article and translating it yourself?
Perhaps part of the solution is machine readable citations
The contents of the citations are already used for training, as long as they're publicly available. That's not the problem. The problem is that LLMs do not understand context well, they are not, well, intelligent.
The "Chinese Room" thought experiment explains it best, I think: imagine you're in a room with writing utensils and a manual. Every now and again a letter falls in to the room through a slit in the wall. Your task is to take the letter and use the manual to write a response. If you see such and such shape, you're supposed to write this and that shape on the reply paper, etc. Once you're done, you throw the letter out through the slit. This goes back and forth.
To the person on the other side of the wall it seems like they're having a conversation with someone fluent in Chinese whereas you're just painting shapes based on what the manual tells you.
LLMs don't understand the prompts - they generate responses based on the probability of certain characters or words or sentences being next to each other when the prompt contains certain characters, words, and sentences. That's all there is.
There was a famous botched experiment where scientists where training an AI model to detect tumours. It got really accurate on the training data so they tested it on new cases gathered more recently. It gave a 100% certainty of a tumour being present if the photograph analysed had a yellow ruler on it, because most photos of tumours in the training data had that ruler for scale.
But even then you have huge gaps on one side with untrustworthy humans (like comedy) and on the other side with machine generated facts such as from a database
"Machine generated facts" are not facts, they're just hallucinations and falsehoods. It is 100% better to NOT have them at all and have to resort to the English wiki, than have them and learn bullshit.
Especially because, again, the contents of the Wikipedia are absolutely being used for training further LLM models. The more errors there are, the worse the models become eventually leading to a collapse of truth. We are already seeing this with whole "research" publications being generated, including "source" material invented on the spot, proving bogus results.
No one is saying those who can't access or reqd English wikipedia is inferior. The issue here is when what is on a non-english wikipedia article is misleading or flat out harmful (like the article says about growing crops), because of juvenile attempts at letting machine translations getting it very wrong. So what Greenland did was shut down its poorly translated and maintained wiki site instead of letting it fester with misinformation. And this issue compounding when LLMs scrape Wikipedia as a source to learn new languages.
Clearwater
in reply to hereiamagain • • •From the OpenWRT HWData pages (1, 2), your router supports VLANs.
A majority (70%, according to the ToH) of routers support VLANs, so it's generally a safe bet.
OpenWrt Table of Hardware - Device Compatibility Guide
toh.openwrt.orghereiamagain
in reply to Clearwater • • •jimmy90
in reply to hereiamagain • • •i was surprised that all the hardware i had supported vlans, i think it's actually kinda standard these days
give it a try
hereiamagain
in reply to jimmy90 • • •