Art by Sarah Andersen - https://bsky.app/profile/sarahseeandersen.bsky.social

IN FEBRUARY 2024, without warning, YouTube deleted the account of independent British journalist Robert Inlakesh.

The Mozilla Firefox 146.0 release binaries are now available with a very exciting improvement for Linux users relying on Wayland.

Human rights defender and Nobel Peace Prize laureate who advocates for Ukraine on the international stage, Oleksandra Matviichuk, has called on Germany to supply Ukraine with long-range Taurus missiles and to take a more decisive stance against Russia.

The Cragside tree is more than twice the size of the Angel of the North and was planted in the 1860s.

A major earthquake of magnitude 7.6 has hit Japan’s north-eastern region.

私の思いと祈り は,最近 日本 で 起きた 津波 に 影響 を 受け た 人々 と 共 に ある.

A Fediverse Enhancement Proposal (FEP) is a document that provides information to the Fediverse community. The goal of a FEP is to improve interoperability and well-being of diverse services, applications and communities that form the Fediverse.

https://www.amberskyealcock.com/product-page/snird-a2-print

The new CTO stood out to me. Based on his LinkedIn posts, he sounds like a business guy who’s going to shove AI into everything. Not exactly a reassuring change for a bank.

cross-posted from: https://feddit.org/post/22681113

Archived

Last week, the United Kingdom did something all too rare: it chose leadership by backing science and prioritizing public safety. The Labour government announced it would ban new oil and gas licences in the North Sea, strengthen a windfall tax and accelerate phasing out of fossil-fuel subsidies.

Lincolnshire Wildlife Trust is seeking permission to convert grassland in Horncastle into a reserve.

China’s annual trade surplus in goods has topped $1 trillion for the first time, with plunging exports to the United States amid a tariff war more than compensated for by shipments to other markets, new data shows.

PIC s2e9 “Hide and Seek”

I have no experience to relate to this but I asked my wife if she had a class drawing naked people and shes like yeah. I think about how hard it is for the models to sit still. I can’t sit still very well.

Archived

A coalition of more than 230 environmental groups has demanded a national moratorium on new datacenters in the US, the latest salvo in a growing backlash to a booming artificial intelligence industry that has been blamed for escalating electricity bills and worsening the climate crisis.

An update on the discovery suit.

A woman who was recorded shouting racist slurs at a couple in Wisconsin has been fired from the Cinnabon franchise where the outburst occurred. Video showed the woman telling the couple — described in an online fundraiser as a “black Somali Muslim couple” — “I am racist” and directing the N-word at them. A TikTok user who uploaded the video said the interaction happened Friday at a Cinnabon location in Ashwaubenon, a suburb of Green Bay, and targeted her and her husband. On Sunday, a Cinnabon spokesperson called the video “deeply troubling." “The individual seen in the video was immediately terminated by the franchise owner,” the spokesperson said. “Their actions and statements are completely unacceptable and in no way reflect the values of Cinnabon, our franchisees, or the welcoming environment we expect for every guest and team member." The company said it would remain committed to ensuring its customers are treated with respect and kindness. It said the confrontation took place at an independently owned and operated location at the Bay Park Square mall. The video does not show how the confrontation started. The TikTok user said it began after she asked the worker for more caramel on her cinnamon roll. The worker replied that “you could see me squeezing it through that witch craft bandana you’re wearing on the top of your head (basically referring to my hijab……),” according to a caption on the video. The video also showed the worker displaying two middle fingers at the couple and threatening to throw water on the woman recording. Cinnabon did not identify the worker. An online fundraiser allegedly set up to benefit her had raised nearly $100,000 as of Sunday night. Attempts to reach a woman believed to be the worker by phone were unsuccessful Sunday night. Attempts to reach the couple were not immediately successful. This article was originally published on NBCNews.com

cross-posted from: https://quokk.au/c/chevron7/p/480869/who-would-win-in-a-fight-de-aged-o-neill-or-de-aged-picard

A new joint assessment by the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution (BfV) and the Federal Criminal Police Office (BKA) aims to dispel any remaining scepticism among those who still fail to recognise the threat from Russia.

You can download the study here: No sense of safety under heaven

A must-read on the humanization of LLMs / chatbots

We never got a Tim Curry appearance in Trek. Sad

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.zip/post/54567014

Guess when and where 5 pictures were taken.

*Open valve in heating system affects 300 to 400 items just weeks after a brazen jewel theft raised security concerns*

Web archive link

A TABLE OUTLINING AN internal Royal Canadian Air Force 2021 study on the F-35 fighter jet versus Sweden’s Gripen has magically shown up in the press at just the very moment it might most influence the choice about to be made. The confidential internal document lands as Ottawa continues to review its deal of purchasing the full contingent of eighty-eight American-built F-35s following United States president Donald Trump’s threats to Canadian sovereignty—a process now bogged down by concerns inside the RCAF that the purchase is becoming harder to justify.

IN HIS FIRST major guidance to the Air Force, the newly appointed Air Force Chief of Staff Gen. Kenneth Wilsbach emphasized a need for the “recapitalization” of nuclear weapons — an apparent departure from decades of Air Force teaching that the United States maintains nuclear weapons solely for deterrence.

Israeli operatives are conducting widespread surveillance of US forces and allies stationed at a new US base in the country’s south, according to sources briefed on disputes about open and covert recordings of meetings and discussions.

Joshua Wright says a yellow cedar tree he photographed last year was “incredible,” the largest he’d ever seen in a decade of hiking around Vancouver Island.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.zip/post/54563207

A man who spent a decade and a half working as a Chinese spy has shared details of some of his missions with Radio-Canada, including what he knows about a Chinese dissident who died in B.C. in 2022.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.zip/post/54562583

The complaint alleges that Temu does much more than provide Arizonans access to cheap goods. Modeled after an earlier Chinese app, Pinduoduo, the Temu app is allegedly designed to harvest sensitive user data without users’ knowledge or consent and to evade detection.

TL;DR: Mozilla’s translation bot on Support Mozilla (that is currently overwriting user contributions is based on the closed source, copyright infringing LLM, Google Gemini. This is in spite of Mozilla claiming that they are at the forefront of open source AI, and belies their exhortations to choose to build open source AI and data sets. Although Mozilla has experience in attracting open contributions for data sets in projects like Common Voice, Mozilla is using a closed data set to overwrite open contributions. Since (paid) Gemini queries do not train the model, Mozillians can expect to correct errors every time the bot automatically updates an article.

Our recent research into Snapchat shows that its uses misleading notification. This is not legally allowed. Namely, the European Digital Services Act prohibits misleading and manipulative design on online platforms. The research serves as input for possible enforcement actions by the Dutch Authority for Consumer and Markets (Autoriteit Consument & Markt) and supports our advice to include the regulation of attention-grabbing notifications in the Digital Fairness Act.

We’re finally benchmarking GPU performance in Linux, first using the Bazzite OS following thousands of community requests specifically for this operating system.

Cities: Eugene and Springfield, OR

Archived version

Japan has protested after Chinese fighter jets locked radars on Japanese aircraft as tensions between the two nations worsened.

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The Open Rights Group warns the government’s digital ID plan is a “surveillance infrastructure” leading to “unprecedented tracking.” They point to the faulty eVisa scheme.

International Criminal Court [ICC] arrest warrants for President Vladimir Putin and five other Russians accused of war crimes in Ukraine will stay in place even if a blanket amnesty is approved during U.S.-led peace talks, ICC prosecutors said on Friday.

Today’s game is Mario Kart Wii. I was originally going to setup Retro Rewind to give it a try (it was suggested to me by @Pueblo@feddit.org). I ended up having some issues though, namely that the mod was downloading at 0.50 mbps and would take an hour. I tried to install it manually but that didn’t really work out. So i decided to just play regular Wii, it’s not like it’s a bad game or anything.