At the White House dinner on Thursday night, Big Tech executives put on an uncanny display of fealty to Donald Trump by taking turns praising his leadership.
Family visit is concluded. I really love our pluslife testing kit. We can just have guests test for covid when they arrive, wait 30 mins, then when they're clear we can all take off our masks and just be normal. And @Njord and I don't have to worry about getting infected
Escultores de la realidad: Publicidad y desinformación
El trabajo “Escultores de la realidad: El rol estructural de las agencias de publicidad en el ecosistema de la desinformación”, realizado por Guillermo Ramírez Lovera, analiza en profundidad el poder que tiene la publicidad en la construcción
El trabajo “Escultores de la realidad: El rol estructural de las agencias de publicidad en el ecosistema de la desinformación”, realizado por Guillermo Ramírez Lovera, analiza en profundidad el poder que tiene la publicidad en la construcción de disc…
A few days ago I described seeing thousands of European Starlings on and near a rail dock. Well, maybe there were only hundreds, not thousands, but they were very noisy so it felt like thousands. At the time, I didn’t pay much attention to the structure they were perched on, so today I went back to take a closer look and, to my dismay, all the birds had gone. There was one solitary crow cawing loudly, but otherwise the building was bird-free.
I decided to take some more pictures of the rail dock because it seems now to be disused. At least, it doesn’t look as though it has been used for some time; grass is growing on the wooden boards, and the metal towers need a coat of paint. I should add that I have no idea what this building is formally called, so I am calling it a rail dock with gantries. It may have once served the now-defunct coal industry, and it may still serve the lumber industry.
What I saw today contrasts quite considerably from the satellite image on Google Maps. There it shows a lot of lumber in floating booms waiting to be loaded on to freight cars, a couple of dozen trucks and trailers in the parking lot, and a similar number of cars parked nearby. None of those things was there today. Instead, the city has placed several (maybe thirty) lovely flower planter beds around the empty parking areas, and a city worker with water tanker truck was watering the plants as I passed by. The rail line connects to a railroad freight yard nearby where there are multiple train tracks and I wonder where they all go to. It did not look very busy when I passed by. There must be an opportunity here for tourism to nearby parks and to other cities on Vancouver Island, but currently it is not set up for passenger traffic.
Now I am wondering about the history and the fate of this structure. As its original purpose seems to be diminished or gone, perhaps it will be abandoned. I don’t know who is the owner or if the city has responsibility for it. If any reader can add insight into this, I will appreciate it.
Some things I know, some things I don’t know, and some things I just found out today. When I went for a walk today I headed south along the waterfront and quite soon saw something that captured my imagination. Someone had outlined an area of rough ground with a rectangle of feathers. It is beside a disused rail dock and there is very little foot traffic here.
I wondered who had done this and why. Perhaps an unhoused person likes to sleep here and was marking their territory. No matter the reason, it must have taken some time to create this.
Living in the gantries of the rail dock are thousands of noisy birds. I enjoyed watching them swooping down on to the beach and then taking turns to eat from the nearby blackberry bushes. My Merlin app tells me they are European Starlings.
I walked on from there over the Port Way viaduct to Esplanade where I saw a business that identified itself as a chandler, which is a title I am not familiar with so I determined that I would look it up when I got home. I thought it had something to do with candles but the shop’s signage seemed to be all about boats.
Then I passed this lovely billboard. I stopped to enjoy it when two people came out into the nearby garden and agreed with me it was very nice. They told me it was just a “placeholder” from the billboard company, but I said I didn’t care. It was still lovely.
As I headed towards the main road and the shopping centre, I came across four people who were clearly having trouble finding something on their phones’ GPS systems. One lady stopped me and asked if I knew where the chandlery was!
Well, “Yes I do! It is just around the corner,” I said as though I have known it my whole life, and I gave them directions. Serendipity is a wonderful thing.
And, according to Dictionary.com a chandler is:
a person who makes or sells candles and sometimes other items of tallow or wax, as soap.
a dealer or trader in supplies, provisions, etc., of a specialized type.a ship chandler.
Hungary openly buys Russian oil, while other EU countries purchase it secretly due to low prices — FM Szijjarto
Calls out hypocrisy of 'loudly criticizing Hungary and Slovakia, but quietly importing the same oil through Asia', cited by TASS
🎙Subscr…
Amid reports the Justice Department is weighing banning transgender people from owning firearms in response to last month’s mass shooting at a Minneapolis Catholic church, the National Rifle Association said Friday it will oppose any blanket rule tha…
✅ Haircut finally ✅ Tire replaced finally ❌ Hotel room for the week
I couldn't find our clothes in our overfilled storage unit in time and had to give up and buy a new set of work clothes, which took a bit of my budget for our hotel room. 🙄
I also tipped the stylist generously since it took so long to get rid of six months worth of hair, which took a little bit more of the budget.
I have moved an entire academic project funded by Open Research Area to Delta Chat @delta The project is called ClaimSov and is focused on analyzing discourses of "digital sovereignty" in EU, US, Russia and China.
We have started with the question which messenger to use for our project related communications. We wanted to play the game of "digital sovereignty" and I suggested Delta Chat. The team decided to give it a try. Now we are two months into the project, and all the 13 team members from three universities are sharing several group chats, actively using webxdc apps for planning our calls and seminars, editing texts, voting for various decisions, tracking things on our agenda and even gaming.
This is my first experience of using Delta Chat with my academic colleagues. I could only dream about convincing people, but that turned out so simple and I am glad we have done this!
Stell dir vor, bei einer Erdbebenkatastrophe mit Tausenden von Todesopfern liegst du seit Tagen schwer verletzt unter Staub und Schutt begraben. Endlich hörst du Stimmen und das Graben von Händen, bis dir plötzlich die Sonne ins Gesicht scheint und jemand sagt: "Lass sie liegen, bloß nicht anfassen! Komm, wir gehen weiter."
Strenge Kontaktverbote erschweren seit der Taliban-Machtübernahme die medizinische Behandlung von Frauen. Nach dem jüngsten Erdbeben mussten Frauen offenbar sehr lange auf Hilfe warten
She spells out WTF YOUR GOVERNMENTS DID TO HER COUNTRY. Bitches. How Syria WELCOMED ALL THOSE REFUGEES WITHOUT EVER ASKING ANYONE FOR ONE FUCKING PENNY FROM ANYONE, BITCHES
I SWEAR 99% of so called anarchists in the west are stupid, cops, or feds...
Fine del supporto a Firefox 32-bit su Linux #firefox Mozilla ha annunciato che interromperà il supporto per Firefox su sistemi Linux a 32-bit con la versione 145, prevista per il 2026. Fino ad allora, la versione stabile 144 sarà l’ultima a includere anche i build per sistemi a 32-bit.
Infestation: Origins just crawled out of Early Access and onto full release today—and yes, this is the co-op horror game that puts a grotesque, Steamboat Willie–era Mickey Mouse in your crosshairs.
When it first appeared back in November 2024, it caught headlines because Disney’s grip on Steamboat Willie slipped into the public domain that very week.
Nightmare Forge Games wasted no time dropping their exterminator sim, where the infestations aren’t bed bugs or rats but twisted, public-domain mascots. Cue a disclaimer on the Steam page reminding you that this isn’t endorsed by Disney or anyone else—and also cue Disney’s lawyers grinding their teeth.
Gameplay is simple in premise but nasty in execution. You’re an exterminator called in to handle infestations, which means navigating episodic missions, flipping breakers, choking off spreading corruption, and ultimately surviving boss encounters.
It’s built around online four-player co-op with proximity and global voice chat, though you can run it solo if you’d rather not herd randoms. Private lobbies are supported.
Visually? Perfectly cromulent. Nothing AAA, but the lighting and grime do their job. Minimum specs are modest—GTX 1050, 8 GB RAM—but crank it up and DLSS support smooths things out on mid-range rigs. Engine is Unity.
Windows-only by default, but Steam Deck users report it “runs good” despite janky controller menus, which implies it’s Linux-friendly via Proton.
Reception so far: “Mostly Positive” on Steam, hovering around 78%. Caveat emptor—most reviews are from the Early Access period. That said, Nightmare Forge seems to have added new polish and content for 1.0, including a reworked first episode now dubbed Willie’s Rage.
The price is a ridiculous C$6.29 at launch with a discount until September 19. And for a co-op horror romp starring the world’s most famous rodent in flames, it feels like a bargain.
Disney may not approve—but it doesn’t matter. Mickey’s ours now.
By subverting the voluntary nature of open standards, Apple has defanged them as tools that users might use against the totalising power of native apps in their digital lives.
The upcoming KDE Plasma 6.5 has undergone many changes, such as the setup wizard, the favorites to the clipboard manager, and quick settings toggle. Now, we have another page that is being on the way to the stable KDE Plasma 6.5 release ahead of the Akademy event, called “App Permissions.” As you can see, the “Flatpak Permissions” page, which only showed permissions for all Flatpak applications installed in your system, has now been expanded to cover a more broad range of applications other than the Flatpak ones. To do this, the page has been renamed to “App Permissions.”
It not only allows you to configure permissions for each app separately, but it also allows you to configure settings related to the XDG portal system, such as taking screenshots of an application. Alongside this, there is a brand new permission that allows apps that use the XDG portal to set lock and home screen wallpapers.
You can learn more about this week’s changes here.
This week, the KDE team has officially pushed the initial system setup wizard to the upcoming KDE Plasma 6.5 environment. This ensures that the Keep It Simple Stupid (KISS) principle is applied when setting up the KDE desktop for the first time.
This was inspired by the idea that the introductory window would show up when you first start up KDE Plasma. However, the Welcome Center doesn’t do a job related to user accounts: it’s about setting up a user account for you! So, to solve this problem, the setup wizard will start when you start KDE for the first time, especially on OEM installations.
From now on, when you start your computer that has KDE installed for the first time, you’ll be greeted with this screen: The same official blog article that will be linked below shows you another part of the setup wizard, which, along with the username creation, is the keyboard layout and the language selection. To learn more about the setup wizard, as well as many improvements that landed to this version of KDE Plasma, click on the below button.
Welcome to a new issue of This Week in Plasma!
Every week we cover the highlights of what’s happening in the world of KDE Plasma and its associated apps like Discover, System Monitor, and more.
Coordinamento: Giacomo Basile Conduzione Valerio Francesco Silenzi Ticker: Clara Lacorte e Flavia Falduto Digiwall: Greta Giglio Collegamento: Leonardo Macciocca In redazione: Filippo Saggioro Marco Bertolini Antonio Fera Alessi Garzina Pietro… L'articolo Tg del 5 Settembre 2025 su Lumsanews.
The "unlisted" or "quiet public" post visibility setting on Mastodon is often misunderstood.
An unlisted post DOES NOT show up in search results, trends, hashtag follows or the Local/Federated timelines.
An unlisted post DOES show up in the Home timelines of your followers, including when you make a thread with replies.
If you want to avoid your own long threads cluttering up followers' Home timelines, use a Fediverse server or platform that supports very high character limits.
Yes, and it would still be great to see a #Mastodon web and mobile app feature to collapse series of consecutive self-replies exceeding two to the first and last (in order) with a bar in between showing “View n more replies in thread,” clicking/tapping which opens the first post in the series.
Not everyone someone follows is going to change instances, so it would be better to have an option to follow someone who posts long threads without cluttering one’s feed.
p.s. If you reply in either Public or Unlisted, it will only show up in your followers' timelines if they follow you AND the person you're replying to.
They will also see your threads where you reply to yourself.
@mottenfest I see replies from people I follow to people I do not constantly when they are unlisted, I also see unlisted posts with hashtags I follow from people I don't.
@mottenfest Ok so on the hashtag thing I thought your thing above said you would only see public posts with those tags from people you do not follow, if that's incorrect I may have misread the part. I have several replies in my home right now to people I do not follow and I cannot find any tags I follow in either the thread or on the users profile. I also see followers only replies from people I follow to people I do not and I cannot view chunks of replies in those threads.
@dhamlinmusic I used to have that happen on twitter, and it annoyed the heck out of me. 💀 There was an option to switch it off though, I wonder if it's the same here?
I had a random thought - "what would it take to support arbitrary old screensavers in Plasma 6 again?" 🤔 So here's xscreensaver safely rendered as a background for Plasma screen locker, working on both Wayland and X11 sessions. Turned out so much simpler than I expected 😁 Just some 70 lines of pure QML and a tiny glue to launch the process.
I don't really understand what this is, but here's where I got stuck last time I tried to solve this: jwz.org/b/ykrj So if you have a portable solution, I'd love to hear it.
Welp, I got crickets in answer to my question, "How do I find the wl_surface backing an Xwayland X11 Window?" and that does not bode well for XScreenSaver ever being able to lock your screen on Wayland.
@jwz This is Plasma specific - it's effectively making kscreenlocker outsource its background rendering to another process, which doesn't even have to be aware that it's being used as a screensaver (or a wallpaper, it's the same there). That said, there's no reason other DEs couldn't handle it the same way. A ext-session-lock-v1 locker could also become a simple compositor like this and just pass the buffer forward.
@jwz This one is a simple nested compositor indeed, as that's what was easy to do with the available ready-made building blocks 😀 But technically it doesn't even have to be a "compositor" at all to do this. Wayland itself is a buffer-passing protocol with some optional extras on top after all, so it could pass the client's wl_buffer straight to the server.
How it works? It's a Plasma wallpaper plugin which is an extremely simple QtWayland compositor that only handles a single fullscreen window and draws it - so any Wayland window can be drawn as a background. This window can of course also belong to Xwayland 😄
This means we can go beyond xscreensaver. How about... Wine? 😁
And here it is! Welcome back as my screensaver, Asciiquarium 😊
I could have reimplemented it in Qt, as it was done back in the KDE 3/4 days... or I could just run the original thing in a Konsole window and call it a day 😁
I see a lot in the Papers about this 20th or Child Labor Amendment, and I have been asked how I stand on that. If Congress or the States would just pass one law, as follows, they wouldn’t need any Amendment: “EVERY CHILD, REGARDLESS OF AGE, SHALL RECEIVE THE SAME WAGE AS A GROWN PERSON.” That will stop your child labor.
Will Rogers (1879-1935) American humorist Column (1924-12-28), “Weekly Article”
RFK Jr. says polio ended because of the DDT ban. Wrong. 📉 Cases crashed after the 1955 Salk vaccine. 💊 Sabin oral vaccine in 1961 finished the job. 🚫 DDT ban came in 1972—long after polio was gone.
Vaccines beat polio. This isn’t rocket science. #press
TL;DR: California and Delaware Attorneys General warn OpenAI about potential harm to children from ChatGPT, urging the company to prioritize safety measures for its AI technology. techcrunch.com/2025/09/05/atto… #law #tech #legaltech ⚖️ 🤖 #autosum
California Attorney General Rob Bonta and Delaware Attorney General Kathy Jennings met with and sent an open letter to OpenAI to express their concerns over the safety of ChatGPT, particularly for children and teens.
Das Bild zeigt mehrere Holzkisten und einen roten Plastikkorb, die mit roten und grünen Äpfeln gefüllt sind. Die Äpfel haben eine Mischung aus grünem und rotem Farbton, was auf verschiedene Sorten hinweist. Die Kisten und der Korb stehen auf einem dunklen Teppich, der einen Teil des Bodens bedeckt. Neben den Äpfeln ist ein rotes Plastikstuhl sichtbar, der auf die Kisten gestellt ist. Im Hintergrund ist ein blaues Kühlschrankregal mit der Aufschrift "PAULNER" zu sehen, das einige Getränke enthält. Die Äpfel sind frisch und sorgfältig arrangiert, was auf eine Markt- oder Verkaufsumgebung hinweist. ― Das Bild zeigt einen sonnigen Garten mit einem Apfelbaum im Vordergrund, der mit reifen und unreifen Äpfeln beladen ist. Die Blätter des Baumes sind grün und gesund, und die Äpfel hängen in verschiedenen Reifegraden. Ein weißer Leiterstuhl steht neben dem Baum, bereit für die Ernte. Im Hintergrund ist ein gepflegter Rasen zu sehen, auf dem ein Holzkasten steht. Der Garten ist mit verschiedenen Pflanzen und Sträuchern umgeben, die in voller Blüte stehen. Einige Bäume und Sträucher sind in der Nähe sichtbar, und die Sonne wirft lange Schatten auf den Rasen. Im Hintergrund ist ein Teil eines Gebäudes zu erkennen, was auf eine städtische Umgebung hinweist. ― Das Bild zeigt einen Apfelbaum in einem gepflegten Garten, der mit reifen Äpfeln beladen ist. Der Baum steht auf einem grünen Rasen, und seine Äste sind mit zahlreichen Äpfeln beladen, die in verschiedenen Reifegraden zu sehen sind, von grün bis rot. Im Vordergrund befindet sich ein hölzerner Korb, der mit Äpfeln gefüllt ist, die in verschiedenen Farben und Größen zu sehen sind. Einige Äpfel liegen auch auf dem Rasen. Der Baum wird von einem Stützpfosten gestützt, um seine Äste zu stabilisieren. Im Hintergrund sind weitere Pflanzen und Bäume zu sehen, die den Garten umgeben. Die Sonne scheint, und die Schatten des Baumes fallen auf den Rasen, was auf einen sonnigen Tag hinweist.
Bereitgestellt von @altbot, privat und lokal generiert mit Ovis2-8B
"Pause to enable re-skilling" is a politician lie that drives me nuts because it sounds so reasonable.
But no one is going to build infrastructure or train skills for a tech that's paused. Slow down the timeline, lower the targets.... ug fine if you must. But don't pretend that you think that supply will precede demand.
Friday afternoon reminder to not empty your inbox at the expense of someone else's. You never know, maybe it's someone's birthday. Have a good weekend. Image credit: LSE Library, on Flickr Commons. flickr.com/photos/35128489@N07…
stasera, giuro, ma proprio non gliela faccio, mi sento male, daje Carlos asfaltaloooo
Eniko Fox
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