Celeste is 90% off, in case anyone hasn't played that yet.
I still think the DRC coup attempt last month was funnier and worse
It being Russian of course. This article seems to have started this recent circus: "The Nord Stream 2 Files." After this report, the Greens wanted to have a parliamentarian select committee investigate which politicians, behind the scenes, tried to help move NS2 along, even while the US was trying to stop it. The allegation is basically that Merkel, socdems, etc. should have known that Russia is categorically evil (Washington and Kiev tried to warn them!), and that the project was going to be blown up a bad idea from the start.
There were articles recently about who's to blame for Nord Stream in the German media.
And by that they mean who's to blame for Nord Stream 2 ever having been created. The real crime was building the damn thing in the first place! I'm not kidding they're actually hounding politicians for having supported the project like that's some kind of treason.
Cut out the middle man. Smart. Half my searches produce pages and pages of gibberish only an LLM would write.
The 8.5 B is presumably for years and years of production, not per year. With this "up to" language I assume they're not paying all this up front either. I am sure it's a good deal for Rheinmetall, and they probably have guaranteed return on investment.
Some article recently said that shells are going for 8,000 € now in the West, so if you take that number it would be around 1 M shells.
The Bundeswehr is buying 8.5 billion € worth of 155 mm shells from Rheinmetall. (n-tv | archive)
Actually it's a "framework contract" for "up to" 8.5 billion, upped from 1.3 billion previously. They want to start shipping by the beginning of 2025, and want to produce 100,000 per year by the second year, and 200,000 eventually. Mainly this is to replenish stocks in Germany, the Netherlands, Denmark and Estonia, but Germany wants to send some of it to Ukraine.
This is... not that much. I guess Ukraine can hope to get three weeks worth of extra ammunition in 2026 from that.
I don't use Gnome myself, but I have over many years (and before Gnome 3 came out) come to similar conclusions about what you need or don't need, by slowly removing more and more Gnome components from my Gnome 1/2 setup until I only really had the window manager running.
So, thanks to virtual desktops (aka workspaces) and superior window management (like moving/resizing windows with the keyboard, changing focus directionally instead just Alt-Tab, and being able to snap windows to corners or other windows), I tended to have no windows hidden behind other windows. This makes the taskbar and the minimize button unnecessary.
Because I launched apps through shortcuts and the terminal (now I use dmenu), the start menu was unnecessary. The start menu is slow to navigate, and inexplicably only uses a small fraction of the screen. Gnome's launcher thingy uses the whole screen and has a nice search bar.
I never thought putting shortcuts on the desktop was a good idea. They're hidden behind all the windows! Windows 98 (or 95B?) had to invent a new button just to get rid of all the windows so the desktop can be shown. You can create shortcuts on Gnome's launcher thingy and that goes in front of your windows. Whoa imagine that.
I also got rid of title bars from windows on my own setup, because I use keyboard shortcuts to do those things and title bars use up precious screen space. Obviously for users using the mouse, you cannot get rid of the title bar. Gnome opted to instead put extra buttons in there, since title bars tended to be mostly empty space. I think it's a good idea.
I do like when stuff is a little bigger and a bit of space is in between stuff. I think it's aesthetically pleasing and my eyesight isn't great either.
Also since I only rarely use Gnome myself, but I do have it set up on my mom's computer, I appreciate that it's not too overwhelming with the options and buttons. That makes it easier for me to find stuff when I do occasionally use it, and I think it makes it easier for her as well.
And yet if Nvidia went poof, you'd hardly notice.
The NYT just dropped a big article about the 2022 peace talks, even going over specific points. I think this means the Americans are ready to negotiate. If this continues the average redditor lib will be discussing the specific concessions Ukraine could be making instead of talking about how Russia is eventually going to collapse from getting owned too hard.
The way this breaks and introduces the stalker, and then turns into a chase is so fucking great. Best chase music ever. Creepy and exciting and panicky.
Well that's interesting. I was merely thinking they want more funding for their own (very much pro-active) disinformation, which they've already been doing the whole time. Basically a rebrand.
Most moral argument for supporting genocide.
I disagree. The worst election poster is actually this one:
Defend values.
Protect peace.
You all know and love debunking. But have you heard of pre-bunking?
> One approach is so-called “pre-bunking” - the targeted presentation of other perspectives and fact-based information. This involves being proactive instead of just reacting. In other words, not just trying to refute disinformation after the fact.
Check out the big brain on Mr. Osintguy. I spent way too much time looking at their sponsors. You can find the funniest shit in their mission statements:
PulseOfEurope: Defend the heart of Europe – with your vote. !vote
iac Berlin: Understanding and developing relational approaches in the field of philanthropy !yud-rational
> Relational approaches are increasingly recognized for their potential to support sustainable solutions and to nurture greater resilience while navigating complex challenges.
The good Lobby: We democratise lobbying !not-good
Toguna Leadership:
> What do we see as the art of leading people? To be an invested sparring partner as those we lead wrestle with the most fundamental questions, we all bring to work and life: Does my contribution matter? Do I belong (here)? Will I stay relevant and have a future (here)? !agony-limitless
Front Europjeski: Literally just "European Front", I guess Eastern Front was too on the nose? !freedom-and-democracy
Don't download random .exe's off the internet. This is pretty much the only thing that an antivirus has any chance of catching, since it's where you'll find "old" malware your antivirus knows about. If you do risky stuff like that (pirating PC games?) maybe don't use that computer for anything important or personal.
Then the usual stuff, which you want to do anyway, because antivirus doesn't help with that:
- Update your software.
- If you have any reason to believe your computer might be compromised, completely wipe the hard drive, start from scratch, and change all your passwords.
- Install an ublock origin to block ads. Ads are a common attack vector.
- Assume every link or attachment from an email or message is a scam unless you were expecting it or you can prove otherwise.
Antivirus is a fucked approach, it basically scans files for what they call malware "signatures", which they accumulate over the years from malware found in the wild. Problems with that:
- False positives.
- False negatives.
- Slows down the computer.
- Malware developers can obviously see what the antivirus is doing, so they change their malware till it is no longer detected, and/or sabotage the antivirus once they're on the computer.
- You now have a privileged uberparser on your computer, that unpacks and parses all manner of file formats, and it is being run on everything. This increases attack surface a lot.
The whole idea is misguided, and only exists because these companies managed to scare people into buying their snake oil.
No. Linux doesn't make your CPU go faster.
The main thing where Linux helps on old hardware is that you can run it on less RAM, meaning you have more RAM for applications. And running out of RAM is very bad and slows everything down massively. If low memory is not your problem, it won't be faster, or at least not significantly.
The Linux GPU drivers for AMD and Intel are completely different from the Windows ones, and that can in theory make some difference (not necessarily for the better), but not a massive one unless there's something fucked going on.
There's a bunch of other specific or minor stuff, for example file operations can be faster on Linux, but you'd only notice that if you're doing some specific workload involving lots of small files, like switching branches on git or something like that.
idk I'm not seeing it (the photoshop I mean, I see the white people)
Very clever puzzle game. Combines Sokoban-like block pushing with predicate logic. So for example, if you create a rule like "Walls is you", you now control the walls, or you can undo an existing "Walls is stop"-rule and the walls are now non-colliding. The rules themselves are created/destroyed by pushing three blocks together: object IS property.
KUALA LUMPUR, April 25 — Pro-Israel academic Bruce Gilley whose events were cancelled by the Ministry of Higher Education has now accused Malaysia of being an “unsafe”...
Pro-Israel American academic cries of 'Islamo-fascist mob', claims Malaysia 'unsafe' for travellers despite spending days here
> KUALA LUMPUR, April 25 — Pro-Israel academic Bruce Gilley whose events were cancelled by the Ministry of Higher Education has now accused Malaysia of being an “unsafe” country to travel to, despite spending several days here. > > Gilley also accused Putrajaya of stirring an “Islamo-fascist mob” after receiving backlash for his remark claiming Malaysian leaders of advocating a “second Holocaust” for Jews. > > “I have safely departed from Malaysia, one step ahead of the Islamo-fascist mob whipped up by the government there. > > “This is not a safe country to travel to now. Updates to follow,” he wrote on his X account. > > Despite his claim, there was no such mob protesting or physically harassing him in the country.
This guy is something else. He wrote an article called "The Case for Colonialism" (archive):
> There are three ways to reclaim colonialism. One is for governments and peoples in developing countries to replicate as far as possible the colonial governance of their pasts—as successful countries like Singapore, Belize, and Botswana did. The “good governance” agenda, which contains too many assumptions about the self-governing capacity of poor countries, should be replaced with the “colonial governance” agenda. A second way is to recolonize some regions. Western countries should be encouraged to hold power in specific governance areas (public finances, say, or criminal justice) in order to jump-start enduring reforms in weak states. Rather than speak in euphemisms about “shared sovereignty” or “neo-trusteeship,” such actions should be called “colonialism” because it would embrace rather than evade the historical record. Thirdly, in some instances, it may be possible to build new Western colonies from scratch.
He wants to "reclaim" colonialism and make new colonies. Guess where he got this idea?
> His views about the good side of colonialism were strongly influenced by his years as a journalist. We has worked in Hong Kong for the Far Eastern Economic Review, an English language weekly with a good audience among the political and economic elite, and a typical product of the British colonial empire, now defunct. It stood for the values which Gilley defends in his essay: Free government, free press, free market. > > In Hong Kong he got to know the last British governor, Chris Patten, and he saw how this man had the guts to defend ‘the fundamental values of British colonialism’ in the face of a powerful Chinese neighbour. (source | archive)
Also in there is this hot take:
> "Academics keep writing about the glorious slave revolt of Haiti (1791-1804). As if it still is the best thing that could have happened to Haiti. But it is the worst thing that happened to Haiti."
So... you've probably noticed that when downloading a game or doing serious p2p piracy, your internet latency suffers: websites take longer to load, video chats stutter, online games glitch.
Well, good news! You can do something about that if you have a router capable of running the free OpenWrt firmware.
The problem of downloads (or uploads) clogging up the pipes is called bufferbloat. Basically, there's a traffic jam somewhere, usually where your ISP throttles your internet speed. This means data packets have to queue up behind whatever data is clogging up the pipes, and so they get delivered with a noticeable latency.
Some boffins have looked at that and identified ways to improve the situation:
- Have shorter buffers, so stuff cannot queue up as much.
- Create express lanes where other traffic can skip the queue of Final Fantasy asset deliveries.
- Tell the Final Fantasy asset delivery service to slow the fuck down.
Unfortunately, the queuing policy and the size of the buffers coming into your home is controlled by the ISP, so you can't really do much about that, but you can actually do #3.
This works by setting a speed limit on the OpenWrt router in your home, which tells anyone sending too much shit your way to slow down, which means the buffer on the ISPs side never get full, and therefore no traffic jam! You won't even notice you're downloading Final Fantasy. The web browsing and video chatting will feel like there's no download going on at all. You got to set the bandwidth limit 10-20% below your actual internet speed though, which I think is well worth it.
https://openwrt.org/docs/guide-user/network/traffic-shaping/sqm
Robert Habeck (German economy minister, Greens) about the DFB (German Football Association) ditching Adidas and signing a sponsorship deal with Nike:
> I can barely imagine the German football jersey without the three stripes. For me, Adidas and black-red-gold have always belonged together. A piece of German identity. I would have hoped for a bit more economic patriotism.
So there is a report going around (originally by Der Spiegel and ZDF), based on "research" by Adrian Zenz, about German companies' involvement in Uyghur oppression. I couldn't find the document that Zenz is basing this on.
In this article, though not directly related to the allegations against BASF and VW, they put a face to Uyghur oppression: Gulpiya Qazybek, a Kazakh woman from Xinjiang (left for Almaty in 2019), confesses her involvement in spying on people and even helping detain them. She says her own mother was also imprisoned.
I read through a bunch of articles based on interviews with her, the first one I could find is from 2021 (see sources at the end).
I found some discrepancies:
-
None of the pre-2024 articles mention her being complicit. The older articles are just about her mother being in prison.
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According to Der Spiegel, her mother was 65 in 2017, but according to Eurasianet, she was 78 in 2022.
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According to Der Spiegel (Feb 2024), the mother was released and put under house arrest in autumn of 2023. The Telegraph article (Jan 2024) does not mention this, but says "Gulpyia campaigns relentlessly for the Chinese government to free her elderly mother", implying she is still imprisoned.
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According to Der Spiegel, two of them were responsible for monitoring 12 families. The Telegraph article, however, says "she was ordered to monitor 60 families".
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According to Der Spiegel, the mother was sentenced to 15 years. All the other articles say 12.
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In 2021 New East Archive article, the timeline is: The mother gets detained more than 5 years ago, turns up in the hospital several months later. They get told that she was sentenced by a court 8 months after that. In the 2024 Telegraph story, the mother gets detained by the end of 2017, then, 8 months later, she is in the hospital, and then, the following year, they are told of her sentencing. So this "8 months" figure is after the hospital in story one, but before the hospital in story two. And the detention in story one cannot possibly take place by the end of 2017 (as in story two), because it is supposedly more than 5 years before Dec 2021, i.e. 2016 or earlier.
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In the 2021 New East Archive article, she says she "know[s] of people who sleep in their clothes in case they are detained in the night." In the 2022 Meduza story, the people sleeping in their clothes are her relatives. In the 2024 Der Spiegel article, the people doing this are farmers, but she ("we") eventually did that also. This anecdote goes from basically hearsay to something that happened to her personally.
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In the New East Archive story, her mother tells her she is in the hospital because she was kicked in the chest during interrogation, and there is no mention of any other health condition. In the Telegraph article, her mother "had been diagnosed with a brain tumour, and her health was failing". Though the mother does does also tell her "they beat me."
Sources
- New East Archive (London-based NGO) | archive (dated Dec 06, 2021)
- Meduza (Latvian-based Russian opposition media) | archive (dated Jun 07, 2022; but the original Russian version is from Mar 31, 2022)
- Eurasianet (US NGO, chair former RFE/RL, funded by NED etc.) | archive (dated Sep 29, 2022)
- The Daily Telegraph (UK arch-conservative establishment media) | archive (dated Jan 06, 2024)
- Der Spiegel (German establishment media) | archive (dated Feb 02, 2024)
The anti-racist libs of "Munich is colorful" are calling for a protest against an event by a Jewish-Palestinian peace group.
Radlibs love this cursed French-German propaganda channel
arte ultras :stalin-gun-1: :stalin-gun-2:
On tech forums like r/linux or hackernews, you'll frequently see posts by (presumably) old guys reminiscing about how great the user interface of their youth was.
"Oh how tasteful were these pixel art icons!"
"How utilitarian and consistent were the 3D effects!"
"How very intuitive are these menus!"
"It's all gone downhill since $PRODUCT. It's all flat and empty and useless now!"
Bollocks. These user interfaces sucked. The menus were a mess, because trying to shove 50 random items into 6 hierarchical categories, two of which are preordained to be "File" and "Edit", cannot be done in any way that isn't arbitrary and confusing. Thus you looked through all the little menus with your terrible mouse hoping to find something that sounded like it might be what you need, trying not to make a sudden move that made the submenu disappear.
Under the menu bar were between 30 and 200 tiny pixel art icons. They were just as incomprehensible as today's minimalist ones, only there were more of them and most of them looked like ass.
Oh and so many popup windows. Everything you did created a popup window. Why does the settings popup only use one third of the screen while having three tabs? Why can I see my document underneath it, half-obscured, but I can't actually click on anything there? Why do half the operations create an "OK" popup for me to click on?
Nothing about this was "functional" and yet it also looked grey and cramped and ugly. Like it was designed by C++ programmers (who by their choice of programming language have already proven that their opinion cannot be trusted, especially not in matters involving good taste), which of course it was.
***
Fucking brain worms, all of them.
