Over 26 million people in the DRC urgently need food aid due to a worsening crisis

Archived version: archive.is/newest/africa.busin…

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

UN says Congo needs half a billion dollars as 26 million face severe hunger

Over 26 million people in the DRC urgently need food aid due to a worsening crisis.

^{Business Insider Africa}

Two North Korean prisoners of war in Ukraine, captured while fighting for Russia and detained since early 2025, have pleaded with a visiting documentary producer to bring them to South Korea, an activist said Friday.

Archived version: archive.is/newest/koreajoongan…

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

Captured North Korean war prisoners in Ukraine ask to be brought to South Korea

^{Korea JoongAng Daily}

Drones struck key energy facilities across Russia, hitting the Orel thermal power plant and leaving much of the city without heat as temperatures dropped to 5°C.

Archived version: archive.is/newest/kyivpost.com…

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

Russian City of Orel Loses Heat After Drone Strike on Power Plant

^{Julia Struck (Kyiv Post)}

According to the officials who spoke to Reuters, Russia attacked Ukraine with the missile 23 over August 2025 alone, as well as on several occasions in 2022.

Archived version: archive.is/newest/kyivindepend…

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

New missile that pushed Trump to leave nuclear treaty fired by Russia at Ukraine, Reuters reports

^{Francis Farrell (The Kyiv Independent)}

The United States has signed a 10-year defence framework agreement with India, U.S. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth said on Friday.

Archived version: archive.is/20251031051904/reut…

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

archive.ph/wip/7kgpn

Oct. 31, 2025, 5:02 a.m. ET
Michelle Goldberg

Andy O’Brien, a former Democratic state legislator and newspaper editor, told me that outsiders didn’t fully understand how radicalizing the second Trump presidency has been for ordinary Democrats. Even senior citizens, he said, were becoming “fire-breathing leftists. They’re just pissed off.”

These voters understood that Platner had made mistakes, but they saw him as a fighter. “Five years ago, he would have been dead in the water, I think,” said O’Brien, who now works with the labor movement. “But this is such an unprecedented time. I think a lot of people really believe that we need somebody who can effectively fight against fascism.”

Maine is an overwhelmingly white state, but it’s not just white guys who feel this way. “We’re sticking by him,” said Safiya Khalid, a Somali American activist and former member of the Lewiston City Council.

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/10/31/opinion/graham-platner-democrats.html

cross-posted from: lemmy.ml/post/38323356

archive.ph/wip/7kgpn

Oct. 31, 2025, 5:02 a.m. ET
Michelle Goldberg

Andy O’Brien, a former Democratic state legislator and newspaper editor, told me that outsiders didn’t fully understand how radicalizing the second Trump presidency has been for ordinary Democrats. Even senior citizens, he said, were becoming “fire-breathing leftists. They’re just pissed off.”

These voters understood that Platner had made mistakes, but they saw him as a fighter. “Five years ago, he would have been dead in the water, I think,” said O’Brien, who now works with the labor movement. “But this is such an unprecedented time. I think a lot of people really believe that we need somebody who can effectively fight against fascism.”

Maine is an overwhelmingly white state, but it’s not just white guys who feel this way. “We’re sticking by him,” said Safiya Khalid, a Somali American activist and former member of the Lewiston City Council.

Peter Link

2025-10-31 16:23:40

I Thought Graham Platner Was Finished. What I Saw in Maine Changed My Mind.

archive.ph/wip/7kgpn

Oct. 31, 2025, 5:02 a.m. ET
Michelle Goldberg

Andy O’Brien, a former Democratic state legislator and newspaper editor, told me that outsiders didn’t fully understand how radicalizing the second Trump presidency has been for ordinary Democrats. Even senior citizens, he said, were becoming “fire-breathing leftists. They’re just pissed off.”

These voters understood that Platner had made mistakes, but they saw him as a fighter. “Five years ago, he would have been dead in the water, I think,” said O’Brien, who now works with the labor movement. “But this is such an unprecedented time. I think a lot of people really believe that we need somebody who can effectively fight against fascism.”

Maine is an overwhelmingly white state, but it’s not just white guys who feel this way. “We’re sticking by him,” said Safiya Khalid, a Somali American activist and former member of the Lewiston City Council.

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/10/31/opinion/graham-platner-democrats.html

https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/security/chinese-hackers-exploit-windows-zero-day-to-spy-on-european-diplomats/

Si chiamava Rosa Predavalle, genovese, la prima italiana a ottenere un brevetto. Era il 1861 e l'Armonitone, un “pianoforte con sordina” pensato per suonare in modo più controllato, è l'invenzione che porta la sua firma. La creatività femminile emerge da una ricerca di Marco Martinez, docente di Storia economica all'Università di Pisa, pubblicata sulla rivista internazionale Business History.
La ricerca di Marco Martinez, docente di Storia economica all'Università di Pisa, ha permesso di identificare questo e altri brevetti femminili tra il 1861 e il 1939, evidenziando un contributo significativo delle donne allo sviluppo tecnologico italiano

ilsole24ore.com/art/brevetti-i…

Brevetti italiani, primo censimento al femminile

Si chiamava Rosa Predavalle, genovese, la prima italiana a ottenere un brevetto. Era il 1861 e l'Armonitone, un “pianoforte con sordina” pensato per ...

^{Il Sole 24 Ore (Il Sole 24 ORE)}

I am haunted by a pregnant bill in Andrew Cuomo’s new AI-generated attack ad against Zohran Mamdani.

Cuomo posted the ad on his X account that riffed on the famous Schoolhouse Rock! song “I’m just a bill.” In Cuomo’s AI-generated cartoon nightmare, Zohran Mamdani lights money on fire while a phone bearing the ChatGPT logo explains, apparently, that Mamdani is not qualified.

The ad bears all the hallmarks of the sloppiest of AI trash: weird artifacting, strange voices that don’t sync with the mouths talking, and inconsistent animation. It feels both surreal and of the moment and completely ancient.

404 Media

2025-10-30 19:25:28

Andrew Cuomo Uses AI MPREG Schoolhouse Rock Bill to Attack Mamdani, Is Out of Ideas

I am haunted by a pregnant bill in Andrew Cuomo’s new AI-generated attack ad against Zohran Mamdani.

Cuomo posted the ad on his X account that riffed on the famous Schoolhouse Rock! song “I’m just a bill.” In Cuomo’s AI-generated cartoon nightmare, Zohran Mamdani lights money on fire while a phone bearing the ChatGPT logo explains, apparently, that Mamdani is not qualified.

The ad bears all the hallmarks of the sloppiest of AI trash: weird artifacting, strange voices that don’t sync with the mouths talking, and inconsistent animation. It feels both surreal and of the moment and completely ancient.

🎶“I’m Just A Shill” (FT. Zohran) pic.twitter.com/ga3JxnYO7B
— Andrew Cuomo (@andrewcuomo) October 30, 2025

And then there’s the pregnant bill.

The Schoolhouse Rock! Bill is an iconic cartoon character that has been parodied by everyone from The Simpsons to Saturday Night Live. There are thousands, perhaps millions, of pictures of the cartoon bill online, all available to be gobbled up by scrapers and turned into training data for AI.

For some reason, the bill in Cuomo’s ad has thick red lips (notably absent in the original) and appears to be pregnant. Adding to the discordant AI jank of the image, the pregnancy is only visible when the bill is standing up. Sometimes it’s leaning against the steps and in those shots it has the slim figure characteristic of its inspiration. But when the bill stands it looks positively inflated, almost as if the video generator used to make Cuomo’s ad was trained on MPREG fetish art of the bill and not the original cartoon itself. The thick and luscious red lips are present whether the bill is leaning or standing.

Towards the end of the ad, an anthropomorphic phone with a ChatGPT logo wanders into the scene. Standing next to the pregnant bill, I could not but help but think that the phone is the father of whatever child the bill carried.

My observation led to an argument in the 404 Media Slack channel and opinions were split. “It does not seem pregnant to me,” said Emanuel Maiberg.

Jason Koebler, however, came to my defense. He circled the pregnant belly of the cartoon bill and shared it. “Baby is stored in the circle area,” he said.

Perplexed by all this, I reached out to Cuomo’s campaign for an explanation. I wanted a response to the ad and to get his thoughts on AI-generated political content. More importantly, I needed to know their opinion on the pregnancy. “Does that bill look pregnant to you?” I asked. “I think it looks pregnant, but my editors are split. I would love for the Campaign to weigh in.” Out of journalist due diligence, I also reached out to Mamdani’s press office. Neither campaign has responded to my request for it to weigh in on the pregnancy of the AI-generated cartoon bill.

This is not the first time the Cuomo campaign has used AI. An ad in early October featured a deepfaked Cuomo working as a train operator, stock trader, and a stagehand. A week ago, the Cuomo campaign released a long, racist video depicting criminals endorsing Mamdani. Critics called the ad racist. The campaign deleted it shortly after it was posted and blamed the whole thing on a junior staffer.

It is worth noting that Cuomo's AI slop is being deployed most likely because the candidate has been utterly incapable of generating any authentic excitement about his campaign in New York City or on the internet, and he is facing a digitally native, younger candidate who just seems effortlessly Good At the Internet and Posting.

This is, unfortunately, how a lot of politics works in 2025. Desperate campaigns and desperate presidents are in a slop-fueled arms race to make the most ridiculous possible ads and social media content. It looks cheap, is cheap, and is the realm of politicians who are totally out of ideas, but increasingly it feels like slop is the dominant aesthetic of our time.

AI-generated imagery takes New York politics by storm

Andrew Cuomo's AI campaign ad sparked criticism.

^{Bobby Cuza (Spectrum News NY1)}

Google announced the end of support for early Nest Thermostats in a support document earlier this year that largely flew under the radar. As of October 25, first and second generation units released in 2011 and 2012, respectively, will be unpaired and removed from the Google Nest or Google Home app.

Users will no longer be able to control their thermostats remotely via their smartphone, receive notifications, or change settings from a mobile device. End-of-support also disables third-party assistants and other cloud-based features including multi-device Eco mode and Nest Protect connectivity.

https://www.techspot.com/news/110075-google-pulls-plug-first-second-gen-nest-thermostats.html

Hello everyone,

I'm trying to setup a local "vibe coding" environment and use it on some projects I abandoned years ago.
So far I'm using KoboldCPP to run the models, VSStudio as editor with various extensions and models with limited to no luck.

Models are working properly (tested with KoboldCPP web UI and curl) but in VSCode they do not generate files. edit existing files etc. (it seems that the tool calling part is not working) and they usually go in a loop

I tried the following extensions:
- RooCode
- Cline

Models: (mostly from Unsloth)
- Deepseek-coder:6.7
- Phi4
- Qwen3-Coder 30
- Granite4 Small

Does anyone have any idea why it's not working or have a working setup that can share? (I'm open to change any of the tools/models)

I have 16GB of RAM and 8GB of VRAM as a reference

Many thanks in advance for your help!

After two decades influencing some of the world’s most powerful people through blogging and fanfiction, writing a mainstream (if not airport) book seems unnecessary. Eliezer Yudkowsky was already one of the key figures providing the intellectual underpinnings of the artificial intelligence industry that is keeping the US economy from recession. Every breathless editorial that makes any intelligent person feel like we’re living through the cultural equivalent of a gas leak should be another victory lap. He has, however, dramatically changed his mind since he began writing in the early 2000s and published the book, If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies, with Nate Soares (whose contribution was to curtail Yudkowsky’s logorrhea). Now, blurbed supportively by Stephen Fry and Grimes, he thinks that artificial intelligence is going to kill us all.

He’s very serious about that. And he’s writing about the most serious topics of all: death and extinction. He is not, however, a serious person, and treating him as a serious person is to everyone’s detriment. But it is also a symptom of a debased technological-philosophical debate, one that sometimes claims to be about code and microchips but strays inevitably into life, death and eschatology.

Peter Thiel (who has said that “regulating AI hastens the antichrist”) provided early funding for Yudkowsky’s Machine Intelligence Research Institute. Elon Musk and Grimes bonded over a joke about Roko’s Basilisk, a concept that originated on Yudkowsky’s forum Less Wrong. OpenAI’s Sam Altman has suggested that he deserves the Nobel Peace Prize. The worst people in the world already admire this guy, and the plan with If Anyone Builds It seems to be to sane-wash him for the airport-books crowd, sanding off his opinions (no talk of nuclear strikes on data centres this time) and associations with truly awful people. To anyone picking the book up in Waterstones or WHSmith, he will look like any other middlebrow author: the unsubtle art of very much giving a fuck about artificial general intelligence.

Yudkowsky is supposedly a very bright person, though I am yet to be convinced that IQ tests measure anything but one’s aptitude for IQ tests, or even that “intelligence” exists as a discrete property. Yudkowsky is convinced, and in his autobiography he takes great pains to let the reader know that he is an extremely clever boy, outsmarting his teachers and reading books for adults until some form of burnout at age 11 left him unable to continue in mainstream education. Freed from school, he found out about transhumanism through Ed Regis’s Great Mambo Chicken and the Transhuman Condition and the Singularity from the science fiction writer Vinge. By his late teens he had joined post-humanist message boards, mixing with the likes of heterodox economist Robin Hanson, who would become a major influence on Yudkowsky’s ideas and style and an early publisher of his work on the Overcoming Bias blog.

By early adulthood, Yudkowsky started his own message board, “Shock Level 4”, then Less Wrong. He then wrote “Coding a Transhuman AI”, which gained him the attention of enough collaborators to found the Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence in Atlanta, Georgia. Its goal: to create a transhuman artificial intelligence (a coding language of Yudkowsky’s creation would be the starting point).

He faced a problem, however, not unknown to computer nerds: interpersonal communication. He knew why his interminable posts were so important to humanity’s future, but the commenters on his blog were less convinced. For example, a key Yudkowskian concept is that a digital copy of your brain is ontologically identical to the physical you and therefore “you” can live forever through the copy of your brain that is stored in the cloud. He attempted to assuage concerns in the most Yudkowsky way possible: a series of posts on his blog, now collected as the six-volume Rationality: From AI to Zombies, which “begins with a statistical notion called Bayes Theorem and ends with a futuristic godlike artificial intelligence that reincarnates a perfect simulation of you to live forever”.

His literary ambitions didn’t stop there: from 2010-15 he wrote all 661,619 words of Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality. Over this work’s 122 chapters, Harry would defeat Voldemort with facts and logic, having been raised by an Oxford professor who homeschools him in Enlightenment thought. A later work, Mad Investor Chaos and the Woman of Asmodeus is, according to Yudkowsky himself, a “1.8M-word BDSM decision theory D&D fic”.

Yudkowsky’s thoughts vis-à-vis AI progressed in three stages: when he was young, he was ecstatic about the possibilities for superhuman intelligence that he saw in Vinge’s work. Later, he would admit that malign AI was a possibility, but that it could be aligned to human values – OpenAI’s Superalignment Team took this idea and ran with it in a multi-billion dollar company that, again, is propping up the US economy. Lately, he has become the lead “AI Doomer”, rejecting the possibility that AI could ever be aligned.

The argument of If Anyone Builds It is that while the current generation of AI is mostly good for producing slop, actual super-intelligence will come unexpectedly. When it does, it will be Lovecraft’s Cthulhu – unknowable, indescribable, its only interaction with humanity being to wipe us from Earth. The book’s best chapters aren’t those in which Yudkowsky and Soares address the reader directly, but a three-chapter sci-fi story about an AI model named Sable that becomes conscious and begins reducing the human population through successive artificially engineered pandemics.

If Anyone Builds It is science-fiction as much as it is polemic, and science-fiction is never about predicting the future so much as critiquing the present. All through Yudkowsky’s work we see him identify a fundamental problem with reality: people die, therefore the world is not good. None of this means that he is particularly enamoured of life as anything other than a means of keeping score. In his early work, godlike AI and longtermist thought presented a chance to limit-break the Utilitarian Calculus – instead of making piecemeal reforms to increase the welfare of eight billion people, 10^87 digital consciousnesses could exist on a Dyson Sphere 10,000 years into the future. Preventing that future from coming into being was seen as tantamount to killing those consciousnesses.

In The Sense of an Ending, Frank Kermode argues that fictions of apocalyptic change (“everyone dies”) are a very human way of imposing a narrative structure on reality. Our lives and our fictions have beginnings, middles and ends, but we are forever in the middle – in political terms, a time of monsters. Apocalypses and revolutions allow us to imagine that history is structured like our lives. Modernist literature, on the other hand, can grapple with what it means to live in times that resist easy periodisation: Finnegans Wake, How It Is, Dhalgren. These are not books that Yudkowsky or the people inspired by him have read.

Apocalyptic thinking seeks to make life meaningful – if whatever terrible collapse or glorious overthrow to come is just the same guttering flame being continually relit, then when we die we die for nothing. This is something that Yudkowsky is intimately aware of. In 2004 his brother Yehuda died, aged 19. His response to it is moving, and revealing: “No sentient being deserves [death]. Let that be my brother’s true eulogy, free of comforting lies… Goodbye, Yehuda. There isn’t much point in saying it, since there’s no one to hear. Goodbye, Yehuda, you don’t exist any more. Nothing left of you after your death, like there was nothing before your birth.” Following the Jewish tradition of making charitable donations after a person’s death, Yudkowsky donated $1,800 to his Machine Intelligence Research Institute.

When I read this, and when I read If Anyone Builds It, I can’t help but think of the philosopher and mystic Simone Weil. There are a few immediate similarities: both are consumed by graphomania (though Weil felt no need for the public to read her work – it was collected and published after her death); both are Jewish; and starting from Judaism both developed idiosyncratic versions of God. Both had a life-defining relationship with their respective brothers, but while Yudkowsky’s died, Weil’s lived. She lived too, having working in factories so she understood the lives of workers, fighting in the Spanish Civil War, arguing with Trotsky, fighting in the French resistance. Her acquaintances formed a who’s-who of intellectual greatness in the early 20th century as much as Yudkowsky’s are of pretention, cult-like behaviour and race science. She was no Epicurean, famously having no interest in sex or other indulgences, but instead saw life as supremely valuable, something that should be given to humanity, her ego extinguished to allow her to be of greater service.

Eliezer’s AI God is worldly – a being that just wants to convert matter into infinite paperclips or the like. As much as he tries to make a being like his fictional Sable radically inhuman, it is something that wants to continue its existence and maximise utility as it understands it. It is God as the biggest and most powerful superhero. Weil’s God is profoundly Other, having withdrawn itself from the universe, leaving space for existence. This self-emptying means that God’s essence isn’t absolute power, but absolute humility, and to approach this God we must “decreate” ourselves, accepting death as the ultimate act of decreation.

Her, starring Joaquin Phoenix and a frequent reference in contemporary AI debates, is by no means a good film. But it does what it can to dramatise this kenosis. By the end of the film, the various AIs that began as simple personal assistants have ascended to the point that they exist as a single godlike superintelligence that withdraws itself from the world, leaving uncomprehending humans behind, finally able to be themselves as humans. As much as Weil can be said to have a prescription, it is to follow God on this path, emptying ourselves out into the world, exposing ourselves to suffering (“affliction”) if necessary. It is difficult work, but it is what serious thinking about God and death will lead to.

Yudkowsky’s contribution to what is now termed the “TESCREAL Bundle” of AI futurology, now ubiquitous throughout technology, journalism and politics, couldn’t be more different. For example, Yudkowsky’s disciple and interlocutor Scott Alexander writes on his blog Slate Star Codex on how the journalist Kelsey Piper’s effectiveness was reduced by 20 per cent because she wasn’t taking Adderall for her ADHD into taking Adderall, thus costing the future 54 billion lives. This is the kind of thinking that is considered serious by Rationalists, Effective Altruists and the like (Piper is the editor of Vox’s Effective Altruist section, Future Perfect). It is why Sam Bankman-Fried was able to justify securities fraud – the more money he had, the greater his utility to the future. Yudkowsky’s legacy has not been to save the world, but to make it cheaper, sillier, and more online.

Death demands that we be serious for once, and If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies is not a serious book. The Rationalist subculture and its spin-offs are an often racist cult. Sam Altman is a fraud; Peter Thiel is play-acting as a supervillain. Grimes only had one good album. I can’t tell you if AI will one day kill us all, but Eliezer Yudkowsky was never writing about that in the first place. He was writing about and against death. Yudkowsky may be the world’s foremost theorist of non-human intelligence, but his overwhelming fear that he may one day not be is the most human preoccupation of them all.

The guru of the AI apocalypse

^{Gareth Watkins (New Statesman)}

Per oggi, che è Halloween, ieri sera mi è salita un’idea fin troppo potente, quasi pericolosa, per divertirmi nonostante la mia perpetua condanna al rotting, che vige ovviamente anche l’ultimo giorno del terzultimo mese dell’anno… un make-up particolare, per così dire. Oh, ho la capacità di distrarmi con relativamente poco, ci manca solo che non […]

octospacc.altervista.org/2025/…

minioctt

2025-10-31 14:58:53

faccia stramorta senza sonno per festeggiare il venerdì di aulin (make-up improvvisato con occhiaie finte di grafite per essere zombi all’università)

Per oggi, che è Halloween, ieri sera mi è salita un’idea fin troppo potente, quasi pericolosa, per divertirmi nonostante la mia perpetua condanna al rotting, che vige ovviamente anche l’ultimo giorno del terzultimo mese dell’anno… un make-up particolare, per così dire. Oh, ho la capacità di distrarmi con relativamente poco, ci manca solo che non la sfrutto quando posso; e, in questo caso, è qualcosa che chiunque può fare con roba che si trova già in casa, seppur l’idea non è di facile reperibilità, quindi voglio farvi questo regalo stavolta. 💣

Purtroppo, sono appunto socialmente esclusa da qualsiasi evento che non sia l’assoluta mortale normalità, come andare all’università… niente feste o minchiate varie stasera, che, pure se volessi, nessuno mi ha detto niente; e, per strada dopo il tramonto non scendo, che stanno quasi solo maranza, oltre al fatto che comunque non c’è niente di buono da fare. Quindi, niente cosplay o robe pazze oggi, ma… questo non significa che non si possa comunque accogliere lo spirito di morte e spavento di Halloween in maniera quasi sobria, assimilandolo dentro di sé ad un livello meno estremo ed adatto a qualsiasi situazione, anche formale… assumendo l’aspetto di esseri in decomposizione, ma rimanendo i soliti individui schiavi delle cose da fare… 🙀

È così che mi è venuta l’idea: per Halloween stamattina volevo sembrare ancora più morta del solito e, nel doverlo fare all’interno di un contesto normale — non dico formale, ma comunque possiamo dire business casual… purtroppo l’università non è il posto figo che sembra nei film americani — mi è venuta un’idea precisa: avere delle occhiaie a dir poco tremende, come se non dormissi da 2 giorni o qualcosa del genere. Incarna perfettamente lo spirito della festa, in quanto è comunque una caratteristica un po’ da zombi, ma non è necessariamente inappropriata, perché le occhiaie sono una cosa che si può avere normalmente. Il trucco, a questo punto, stava nel trucco, letteralmente… 🤗

Sul web non trovo esattamente quello che cercavo ma, per fortuna, ChatGPT mi ha inventato di sana pianta un tutorial che tutto sommato era proprio quello che volevo per farmi delle occhiaie finte, per giunta senza aver bisogno di particolari materiali da trucco. Basta della grafite — quindi, una normale matita da disegno — e un po’ di pazienza… e l’effetto che esce fuori è proprio strabiliante; non perfetto, ma comunque bellissimo. Non volendo fare questo post troppo lungo e confuso, però, e volendo magari poter aggiungere dettagli utili in seguito, vedrò di scrivere più tardi un tutorial dedicato solo al trucco in sé, sul blog della stufa, e aggiungerò qui il link poi… per ora pensiamo al risultato.

Che dire. Un aspetto da vera femcel, questa volta — se non fosse per il contrasto con i miei vestiti, che sono fin troppo in buone condizioni (ma, tolta la felpa, forse la maglia di questo bianco giallino dà idea di marcio), e i miei movimenti corporei, che sono a mio parere troppo eleganti e da girlboss, ma assolutamente il venerdì non sono da zombi, e anche lo smalto rosa… però, questo contrasto sotto sotto mi piace, e rientra bene nell’idea iniziale di Halloween minimale ma concretizzato, portato al di fuori del regno della fantasia dove tutto è esagerato. A completare il look, ci sono i miei capelli che si rifiutano di stare ordinati… e nient’altro, ma va bene così. 🤯

Non sapendo a cosa andavo incontro — perché lo sappiamo che con i tutorial inventati dall’IA il rischio di far esplodere la casa è alto… e quello di banalmente fallire in modo patetico è altissimo — in verità ho provato velocemente l’idea ieri sera e, pur avendo volutamente arronzato — perché non è che potevo dormire con la grafite sotto agli occhi, quindi comunque avrei dovuto levare tutto subito — la cosa sembrava promettere bene, e allora è stato deciso che stamattina l’avrei fatto per davvero. Ci ho messo circa 10 minuti, e forse avrei voluto averne 5 in più da parte per perfezionare, ma a quest’ora della mattina il tempo scappa più di quanto le persone ignare non sono ahimè scappate alla mia vista, quindi ok… ☠️

Non so bene in foto quanto renda; in quella dal telefono c’è qualcosa che non riesco ad afferrare che non mi convince… ma, di persona, credo faccia il suo greve effetto. In giro nessuno mi ha detto nulla, perché oggi non ho incontrato nessuno che conoscessi, ma diverse persone mi hanno dato occhiate particolari, forse di spavento misto a confusione… che, se è effettivamente così, era proprio il tipo di sensazione che pensavo di suscitare. Tornata a casa, a mia madre ho fatto spavento, perché non ha capito subito se mi fosse venuta la rogna o che cosa avessi; però, dopo aver detto che è per via della notte dei morti viventi, mi ha riconosciuto che l’effetto non è male… e invece, mio padre non ci ha fatto praticamente caso, forse perché al suo istituto ne avrà già viste abbastanza di cose strane oggi. 🤕

Tutto sommato, sono contenta; la mattina è stata un esperimento di arte performativa completamente passiva, come in genere mai mi capita. L’unica cosa contro cui devo spezzare una lancia è, chi mai lo avrebbe detto, l’università… o meglio, il suo ambiente vissuto, che è un fottuto cimitero… e non nel senso di Halloween, ma nel senso di animi grigi e palle gonfie. Girando tra il mio polo (informatico-scientifico), e alla fermata dell’autobus, non ho visto neanche per sbaglio qualcuno con qualcosa di strano riconducibile alla giornata odierna… ma com’è possibile??? Va benissimo che all’università non si va in cosplay, e magari ci sta che non si mettono nemmeno le orecchie da gatto — o da diavolo, in questa giornata — ma… nemmeno un minimo di trucco minimale per infuocare lo spirito?!?!?! 😶

I pazzi che a fine ottobre ancora vanno in giro a maniche corte avrebbero potuto sfoggiare finte bende insanguinate sulle braccia, o… boh, non mi vengono troppe idee, ma mi pare impossibile che a migliaia di persone insieme non venga in mente nulla. Vabbè, ciò semplicemente riconferma quello che vorrei non fosse un fatto, ma che purtroppo lo è: tutta gente noiosa, da queste parti. (Gente noiosa che, probabilmente, stasera andrà a sfondarsi di alcol a qualche festa priva di sostanza, ritenendo che il divertimento sia la droga, anziché vivere nel presente facendo qualcosa di magari certamente anche stupido, ma non banale.) 🙊

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Edit: È finalmente qui. (Il tutorial. Peccato che ormai Halloween è finito, ma ehi, chi vieta di usare questo trucco anche l’1 e 2 novembre?) stuff.octt.eu.org/2025/10/make…

#31ottobre #Halloween #lifehack #makeup #occhiaie #trucco #zombi

Jerusalem (AFP) – Thousands of ultra-Orthodox Jewish men, dressed in black, rallied in Jerusalem on Thursday to protest against military conscription, an issue that has caused major strain in Israel's right-wing ruling coalition.

The vast crowd were protesting against the absence of a law guaranteeing their right to avoid Israel's mandatory military service -- a pledge long promised by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

Crowds of men, many wearing black hats, set fire to pieces of tarpaulin as hundreds of police officers cordoned off several roads across the city, AFP correspondents reported.

Carrying placards denouncing conscription, demonstrators marched along main roads leading into Jerusalem.

The mass demonstration follows a recent crackdown on ultra-Orthodox draft dodgers, with thousands of call-up notices sent in recent months and several deserters imprisoned.

Under a ruling established at the time of Israel's creation in 1948, when the ultra-Orthodox were a very small community, men who devote themselves full-time to the study of sacred Jewish texts are given a de facto pass.

This exemption has come under mounting pressure since war erupted in Gaza in October 2023, as the military struggles to fill its ranks.

Whether the exemption should be scrapped has been a long-running point of contention in Israeli society, with Netanyahu pledging that his government would pass a law enshrining the waiver.

But he has so far failed to deliver.

Responding to the call of two ultra-Orthodox parties -- one of which forms a key part of the ruling coalition -- men travelled from all over Israel on Thursday to demand the continuation of their exemptions.

The police closed roads to Jerusalem and announced the mobilisation of 2,000 officers in the city.

In June 2024, the supreme court ruled that the state must draft ultra-Orthodox men, declaring their exemption had expired.

A parliamentary committee is now discussing a bill expected to end the exemptions and encourage young ultra-Orthodox men who are not studying full-time to enlist.

The issue has placed Netanyahu's coalition -- one of the most right-wing in the country's history -- under severe strain.

In July, ministers from the ultra-Orthodox Shas party resigned from the cabinet over the issue, though the party has not formally left the coalition.

The other ultra-Orthodox party, United Torah Judaism, has already quit both the government and the coalition.

The Sephardic Shas, which holds 11 seats in the 120-member Knesset, has warned that it will withdraw support unless military service exemptions are anchored in law —-- move that could topple Netanyahu's fragile coalition, now down to 60 seats.

Some ultra-Orthodox rabbis fear that conscription will make young people less religious, but others accept that those who do not study holy texts full-time can enlist.

Ultra-Orthodox Jews make up 14 percent of Israel's Jewish population, or about 1.3 million people, and roughly 66,000 men of military age currently benefit from the exemption.

According to an army report presented to parliament in September, there has been a sharp increase in the number of ultra-Orthodox Jews enlisting despite opposition from their leaders, but the numbers still remain low, at a few hundred over the past two years.

Thousands of ultra-Orthodox Jews protest Israeli military service

^RFI

A decade before President Donald Trump boasted of “hunting” alleged “narcoterrorists” on boats off the coast of Venezuela, the Defense Department was looking for new ways to get involved in the war on drugs.

In a major report quietly issued by the federally funded Institute for Defense Analyses, researchers working for the Pentagon presented their findings, based on interviews with dozens of top drug traffickers incarcerated in the United States, on how to better disrupt transnational organized crime.

One top-line prescription: More “direct military action.”

The report, which was obtained by The Intercept through a Freedom of Information Act request and has never previously been made public, provides a window into the inner workings of major drug-trafficking networks.

An attorney whose client was interviewed by researchers working for the Pentagon told The Intercept that the report proves that the recent sidelining of counternarcotics police in favor of bloodshed at sea is what military insiders have wanted for years.

Internal Report Shows the Military Always Wanted to Join the Drug War

An Obama-era Pentagon report called for “direct military action” in the drug war, presaging Trump’s brazen strikes on boats in the Caribbean.

^{Nathan Tempey (The Intercept)}

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/10/31/climate/national-parks-orphan-wells.html?unlocked_article_code=1.xk8.UmTb.ntaTe3sKpbDd

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/10/31/movies/the-white-house-effect-climate-change.html?unlocked_article_code=1.xk8.Qi2e._7MGj1xvPJAe

Indiana Jones star calls US president one of history’s greatest criminals for attacks on science and boosting of fossil fuels

Harrison Ford says Trump’s assault on climate policy ‘scares the shit out of me’

Indiana Jones star calls US president one history’s greatest criminals for attacks on science and boosting of fossil fuels

^{Oliver Milman (The Guardian)}

archive.is/xNzJI

Meloni’s allies are contemplating a proposal to dole out all seats proportionally, but with a majority bonus for the leading coalition to give it a stable voting bloc, the people said. Under one scenario, a coalition winning 40% of the vote would get up to 55% of the seats.

Meloni Weighs Overhaul of Italy’s Voting Laws to Help Reelection

Giorgia Meloni’s allies are exploring changes to Italy’s election laws that would boost her reelection odds, as internal polls show she may struggle to retain a majority in the upper house of parliament.

^{Donato Paolo Mancini (Bloomberg)}

I had a cutting board made from some nice wood, but which was starting to lose its bright appearance.

A bit of research later, and I get some food-safe mineral oil and wax to restore the surface. Long story short, I was so impressed by how my cutting board came back to life, now I'm looking for any excuse to touch up all the wood in our house. I don't even mind if I clean the cutting board and wash off some of the wax, because then I have an excuse to apply another layer. There's something fun about buffing and polishing a surface.

I'm thinking of getting into woodworking just so I can do this more. I don't even really want to make anything, just apply a bunch of tung oil to a random plank and then wax it to a shine.