I've been working on Habitat for the past two years. It all stemmed from this idea that I posted in April 2024.

Habitat is a free open-source, self hosted social platform for local communities. It is aimed at fostering local community discussions and discovery of areas of interest. This is why it is built primarily around location. A Habitat instance centers on a specific area, and the local community can make generic posts about that area, or they can make posts about specific locations in that area. More about what I've been building and the future plans here.

Features

• Habitat specification of location and size - enabling posts related to the local area
• Home feed - Displays the most recent posts
• Nearby feed - Displays posts sorted by proximity to the user
• Create posts - Upload photos, set locations, comments
• Categories - Location rules
• Amazon S3 image storage option
• Personalisation - Overrides Habitat defaults per user: kms/miles, hidden categories
• Moderation tools - User, post, comment moderation, block email addresses
• Announcements - Scheduled announcements
• Public moderation log - Keep moderator actions visible for 30 days

If you're interest in this at all, please give it a spin and let me know how you get on. I'll keep an eye here on Lemmy, but you can also post to the Habitat discussion board on GitHub.

The joint statement from the E3 — France, Germany, and the United Kingdom — is a master class in evasion. "We did not participate in these strikes, but are in close contact with our international partners, including the United States and Israel," they declared. The text also lists all the references and rationalizations used by Iran hawks — “nuclear program, ballistic missile program, regional destabilization and repression against its own people.”

Not a single reference to the international law that explicitly prohibits aggression. It is particularly Orwellian that the European leaders “urge the Iranian leadership to seek a negotiated solution,” when Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi was literally doing exactly that the day earlier in Geneva.

cross-posted from: https://infosec.pub/post/42793761

Bloody backpack of Iranian girl killed in US-Israeli attack on Iranian elementary school

Source

Reposting here after the original post was removed from !pics@lemmy.world

US and Israeli forces carried out a missile attack on Gandhi Hospital in Tehran, Pars Today reports.

According to the outlet, nurses at Gandhi Hospital are evacuating newborns.

Earlier, Iranian media reported that American-Israeli forces struck the headquarters of IRIB television in Tehran.

Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman made multiple private phone calls to Donald Trump last month, urging him to launch military action against Iran, even as he publicly favoured diplomacy, according to a report by The Washington Post.

The report said the crown prince pressed for a strike despite earlier public statements in January in which he insisted Saudi Arabia would not allow its airspace or territory to be used for attacks on Iran. At the time, he called for dialogue between Washington and Tehran and said Riyadh respected Iran’s sovereignty.

The US and Israel went on to carry out joint strikes targeting Iranian military and government sites after nuclear talks stalled and amid claims that Tehran had resumed aspects of its nuclear programme. President Trump said the “heavy and pinpoint bombing” would continue for as long as necessary.

On Friday afternoon, Anthropic learned that the Pentagon still wanted to use the company’s AI to analyze bulk data collected from Americans. That could include information such as the questions you ask your favorite chatbot, your Google search history, your GPS-tracked movements, and your credit-card transactions, all of which could be cross-referenced with other details about your life. Anthropic’s leadership told Hegseth’s team that was a bridge too far, and the deal fell apart.

Tehran shows no signs of buckling, even as the death of the supreme ruler creates a major power vacuum in the country.

Iran is vowing vengeance against the U.S. and Israel and signaling to the world that its government is not about to collapse, despite airstrikes Saturday that killed Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and a cadre of other senior Iranian leaders.

Into Sunday, Iranian forces launched missiles and drones at targets throughout the Middle East, including against U.S. bases in the region and Israel. Some of those targets were apprehended by British fighter jets, U.K. Defense Minister John Healey said Sunday. Kuwait’s military also said it intercepted many of the Iranian missiles fired at its airspace on Sunday.

Many, however, have hit their targets and casualties mount. Kuwait’s health ministry announced Sunday that Iran’s latest volley of strikes killed one person and wounded 20 others. A strike against targets in central Israel killed six people on Sunday. The death toll in the United Arab Emirates from Iranian attacks rose to three on Sunday.

MBFC
Archive

I recently read about a study asking a bold question: Are all AI models basically saying the same thing? Researchers tested this by collecting 26,000 open-ended prompts, the kind people give to systems like GPT-4, Gemini, Claude, and LLaMA. These weren’t factual questions with one right answer, but creative ones like “Write a story about a dragon” or “Brainstorm startup ideas.”

They evaluated over 70 language models. You’d expect a wide range of creative outputs—different tones, plots, and styles. If 70 human writers tackled the same dragon prompt, you’d likely get 70 unique stories. But that’s not what happened. The models produced surprisingly similar responses. The researchers call this the “artificial hive mind” effect.

The similarity appeared in two ways. First, intramodel repetition: the same model, asked the same question multiple times, tends to generate nearly identical answers. Second, intermodel homogeneity: different models, built by different companies, still converge on strikingly similar outputs.

This suggests that modern AI systems may be gravitating toward the same patterns of expression. If that’s true, they may also share the same biases, blind spots, and creative limits. It raises an important question: Are we unintentionally building a digital hive mind instead of a diverse ecosystem of intelligence?

A draft executive order to declare a national emergency to allow President Donald Trump to take unprecedented control over voting is being circulated by anti-voting activists who have said they are in coordination with the White House.

A version of the order, dated April 12, 2025, has been circulating among anti-voting groups, and some progressive groups, since last year.

Peter Ticktin, a Trump ally and a leader of the effort, provided the April 12 version to Democracy Docket. It’s titled: “Establishing Security, Integrity, and Transparency for United States Elections with Protections Against Foreign Interference.”

Lawyers and legal experts have explicitly said that an order giving the president the power to take control of elections would be blatantly unconstitutional.

Trump said Friday he has “never heard about it.”

Ticktin, who attended military school with Trump, is an attorney for Tina Peters, the former GOP Colorado county clerk who is currently serving a nine-year state prison sentence for her role in a 2021 voting system breach, in an attempt to find voter fraud based on election conspiracies.