Netanyahu is insisting that Iran is only months away from having nukes. Experts disagree. My personal opinion is this is another ploy of his to stay in power, since the “war” in Gaza has been winding down.

Technology isn’t inherently bad, obviously, but in our current world it’s primarily owned, controlled, and advanced by bad groups and people (for-profit companies, governments, and the rich). Until we actually extricate ourselves from this situation, we should be very wary of looking to technology for cures to out problems.

The Right will shame us for any form of violence, in order to maintain their own monopoly on violence.

It’s not just expected, it’s accepted by both the Left and Right that right-wingers will use the threat of violent force to their ends, but if anyone opposes that force with their own, the Right will claim they are unreasonable and evil. This is the simple manifestation of White Supremacy as an ingrained mindset, where the same actions that a WASP man takes are wrong for anyone else to, because they are lesser.

We have to move past the half-skeleton Democrats in congress lecturing us because they too have internalized this dynamic. As much as I love Bernie, AOC is correct in actively choosing not to publicly lecture protesters against using whatever means they have to protect human lives and democracy, and in pointing out that MLK only succeeded because the white government was scared of what might happen if they didn’t negotiate with him.

Trump is going to escalate no matter what we do, until this country is nothing but a white christian ethnostate run by a succession of white male conservative dictators. This is not a negotiation, because he’s not going to negotiate.

Excited to be there! This one feels like it’s catching on much more widely than others, including 050501.

At this point, you’re better of self-hosting, or even co-lo hosting. Cloud environments are good when you need to scale faster than servers can be shipped (or plan to scale down before the costs add up), but $5k a month is literally a new, decently-beefy server every 2-3 months.

In terms of solving the money issue, I feel like the only solution is a shared-cost/ shared-ownership model, where you get an initial pool of money together for the initial build-out, and then monthly costs are divided equally among all members. You can’t rely on donations, you need collectivism.

If they’re operating in the US, it doesn’t matter whether the app is intentionally pulling unnecessary information, there are still server logs showing the IP of each request being made for the real-time updates (ISPs also will have logs of the connections, even if they can’t see the SSL traffic directly). That IP + timestamp would let the government know (with the help of your ISP, who we know from the NSA leaks are all sharing info without asking for warrants) exactly who you are.

If you are routing all your traffic through a VPN, you can make that much harder to correlate, but unless you validate on the wire or in the code that the app isn’t sending e.g. a device ID or any other kind of unique identifier, it could still end up compromising you. A webpage just intrinsically doesn’t carry the same level of risk as a local app.

That’s why, as the article notes, many of these have been shutting down preemptively; they know they could be putting their users at risk.

I’m torn on this for any app-operating companies/orgs based in the US.

The real-time maps mean at best they’re able to see at least the IPs of users, and at worst, a ton of device or personal information (depending on what perms are granted to the apps). This would be a treasure-trove of info for ICE. A lot of women stopped using period-tracker apps for a reason after Roe was overturned.

Also, unless people are side-loading the apps, Google or Apple will also know exactly who downloaded them, since you can’t download through their app stores anonymously.

There are websites with real-time information that don’t force you to install an app to view, and visiting a website rather than using an app makes it much easier to minimize the information you’re leaking.

I’m glad that some of these apps are shutting down preemptively if they are certain they don’t possess the resources, or are located in a safe enough place, to ensure their users’ privacy. Ideally they would partner with a legal entity outside the US to operate the app instead, but obviously that’s a big burden.

These definitely look like tubs of chemical agents given the hazmat labels, rather than ammunition as the news was suggesting. A tub of ammunition the sizes in the first video would also be too heavy to carry like they are (if full). I think the comments positing that the cardboard boxes are gas masks are probably spot on.

The kernel is now well beyond the singular control or shepherding of Linus. He’s still hugely influential in the community obviously, so not a pure figurehead, but the kernal dev community will continue on very well.

Yes, but by definition all of them are also playing the game, and given that this is mostly a novelty feature (and also based on how shockingly little use the user-facing chatbots I’ve seen in professional settings are utilized), I personally doubt that the chatbot energy usage will top the game’s.

My guess is there will be 90% of people who use the feature once or twice before ignoring it forever, 9% who will use it occasionally for e.g. video creation purposes, and 1% or less who will actually sit there and use it a bunch just to talk to. That would about match up with ChatGPT’s general usage trends.

It’s just tribalism. They think everything is zero-sum, and that the candidates to their left are actually just as tribalist and selfish as they are.

Every time I see someone say that most people haven’t swung a sword/ shot a gun/ been in a fight/ been in an accident, etc, I always wonder if I’m the one in the bubble or if they are.

In tight quarters like Europe, most countries would not allow this for a country they’re not actively at war with, no. If someone flies something into your airspace and isn’t actively attacking you, the presumption of an accident is normal, and shooting down aircraft would be considered pretty extraordinary. Hell, even the US didn’t actually shoot down the spy/weather balloons that China flew over them until they’d basically crossed the entire continental US. This law is only happening because they know Russia is doing this intentionally, the drones are armed, and they’re unmanned. If any of those factors were different, they probably wouldn’t be doing this.

All my machines except for my gaming desktop are linux already. But there are still games with either DRM that doesn’t support linux, or other niche issues, so I’m keeping my Win10 machine alive for the foreseeable future.

I will trust the experienced lawyers and civil rights advocates at the ACLU, thanks. Nothing about this bill is good for children, it is a direct attempt to allow government to exert control over online spaces’ content, as well as de-anonymize internet users. Both of those are bad, including for kids.

“Does it come in a Men’s Paltrily?”

…but there is now a clarity across Europe, and not just in Paris, that regardless of Vance’s reassurance, Europe has to have the capability to operate autonomously of the US. Trump is self-evidently not reliable, and his benign assessment of Putin’s intentions is not shared.

Planning for a European reassurance force in Ukraine is under way, as is planning for a potential Russian attack on Europe. Since February, France and the UK, through a combined joint expeditionary force, have formed the nucleus of that planning, but this has broadened, with new political leadership increasingly coming from four members of the Weimar+ group: Poland, France, Germany and the UK.

Honestly, I think Europe’s disillusionment with us will be better for them in the long run. The fact that they were waiting on Biden to take the lead in Ukraine, whose fecklessness over lending credence to Russia’s prima facie bogus claim of the war being US vs Russia made him hold back many strategic options from Ukraine, meant that they were also not thinking about what Russia’s aggression meant for them, and reacting accordingly.

I think the original purpose of Article 5 (in terms of US intervening vs Russia) has probably been dead for a couple decades now, and it’s good that Europe won’t be finding that out when Russian troops are rolling in, and the US backs off.

the capitalization of the game names is also completely unnecessary in this example

is it fine to disregard writing conventions just because its possible to understand the meaning without them

s

For anyone wondering:

The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion Remastered, Minecraft and Forza Horizon 5

Look at that complete lack-of-an-Oxford-comma just sitting there, mocking us.

R* sucks. Their asshole-simulator games-turned-live-service-cashgrabs have never represented anything but the worst of the games industry. GTA6 getting canceled would be an excellent opportunity for millions of people who would’ve bought it to spend their time playing something better.

Fight me.