cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/39198926

https://archive.is/IiCN4

Although environmental groups allege that, with a combustion engine and a large battery, plug-in hybrids are often more polluting than advertised, many see them as a greener interim option for people who are not ready to switch to electric vehicles.

However, the European car industry may have already lost the war before it has even begun. While car groups are lobbying hard for Brussels to loosen the region’s 2035 petrol ban to allow PHEVs and other technologies, Chinese brands are already starting to win over consumers with their plug-in vehicles that are cheaper and have longer ranges.

“Today, the European automakers are still not on par with the Chinese on plug-in hybrid technology,” Pedro Pacheco, an analyst at Gartner, said. “If the market were to pivot towards plug-in hybrids in 2035 in Europe, it will still fall into the hands of the Chinese.”

It is unclear if Trump administration backs deal that would mean Kyiv giving up territory and slashing size of military

US and Russian officials have quietly drafted a new plan to end the war in Ukraine that would require Kyiv to surrender territory and severely limit the size of its military, it was reported on Wednesday as Russian drone and missile strikes killed at least 25 people in the city of Ternopil.

The draft plan, which was reportedly developed by Donald Trump’s envoy, Steve Witkoff, and the Kremlin adviser Kirill Dmitriev, would force draconian measures on Ukraine that would give Russia unprecedented control over the country’s military and political sovereignty. The plan is likely to be viewed as surrender in Kyiv.

No budget for now, and I own the SSDs already I just want to know what's out there and what other people like.

My current setup is cobbled together from random parts and the HDDs are loud in my bedroom. I want all SSD storage (at least 4x) but with enough CPU/Ram to handle a lot of apps/VMs and some above-average demanding tasks (jellyfin, syncthing) than just being a NAS.

The only other criteria is that I would prefer it to be as small as possible (not rack mount).

Besides "don't use Cloudflare/AWS/etc", how can we make our selfhosted setups resilient to outages like the ones we've seen recently?

Home loan borrowers are paying the price as competition heats up with cash back deals, one broker says.

ANZ is offering a 1.5 percent cash back incentive to new loans, up to $30,000, until mid-December.

That is about twice the normal cash back that new home loan borrowers can get.

Cunningham said the cost to the banks meant that fixed-term home loan rates were about five or 10 basis points higher than they would be if the cash backs were not offered.

He said ANZ's cash back offer was the highest ever seen in the market by a huge margin.

"Anything above 1 percent is very unusual so that is incredibly aggressive.

"The flip side is that the fixed interest rates will be a bit higher than otherwise for all borrowers. Not really fair, but it's par for the course."

cross-posted from: https://mander.xyz/post/42162217

Germany is moving toward providing Ukraine with new long-range strike capabilities, with Chancellor Friedrich Merz confirming that technical consultations with Kyiv have been underway for months and are now approaching completion.

...

Speaking at a press conference in Berlin, Merz said the government has agreed in principle to supply long-range missile systems to bolster Ukraine’s ability to hit Russian forces far behind the front line. He declined to reveal how many systems are being prepared or when they will arrive, framing the secrecy as a deliberate strategy.

“The Ukrainian army will be equipped with these weapons systems,” Merz said. But he added that Germany will not publicly outline timelines or quantities, arguing that “a degree of ambiguity is necessary, especially for the Russian side” to complicate Moscow’s efforts to gauge Ukraine’s battlefield reach.

cross-posted from: https://mander.xyz/post/42162217

Germany is moving toward providing Ukraine with new long-range strike capabilities, with Chancellor Friedrich Merz confirming that technical consultations with Kyiv have been underway for months and are now approaching completion.

...

Speaking at a press conference in Berlin, Merz said the government has agreed in principle to supply long-range missile systems to bolster Ukraine’s ability to hit Russian forces far behind the front line. He declined to reveal how many systems are being prepared or when they will arrive, framing the secrecy as a deliberate strategy.

“The Ukrainian army will be equipped with these weapons systems,” Merz said. But he added that Germany will not publicly outline timelines or quantities, arguing that “a degree of ambiguity is necessary, especially for the Russian side” to complicate Moscow’s efforts to gauge Ukraine’s battlefield reach.

cross-posted from: https://feditown.com/post/2165785

cross-posted from: https://scribe.disroot.org/post/5697633

A former Philippines mayor who was accused of spying for China has been found guilty of human trafficking for her role in running a scam centre.

On Thursday, she and three others were sentenced to life in prison and a fine of 2m pesos ($33,832; £25,942).

The case of Alice Guo has gripped the Philippines for years, after authorities uncovered one of the country's biggest scam centres in her small town of Bamban. Some 800 Filipinos and foreigners were later rescued from the scam hub after a raid, with many of them saying they were forced to run "pig butchering" scams.

The 35-year-old, who was arrested last year after being on the run for weeks, has denied all allegations against her.

It is not yet clear if she might appeal.

There are still five ongoing cases against Guo, including one where she has been charged with money laundering.

...

In 2022, Guo was elected as the mayor of Bamban, north of the capital Manila. Residents of Bamban earlier told the BBC she was seen as a caring and empathetic leader.

But in 2024, the sleepy town was thrust into the national spotlight after authorities uncovered a sprawling scam centre there that was hiding under online casinos, known locally as Philippine Online Gaming Operations (Pogo).

Pogos cater to clients in the Chinese mainland, where gambling is illegal.

Guo initially denied all knowledge of the compound, but a senate investigation that followed questioned her inability to detect the eight hectare centre that was located near her office.

It later emerged that the compound - which contained 36 buildings - was built on land which Guo previously owned.

They also found discrepancies in her life story – she was not, as she had claimed, born in the Philippines, but had migrated from China with her family as a teenager. MPs later found that her fingerprints matched those of a Chinese national named Guo Hua Ping.

...

cross-posted from: https://toast.ooo/post/10656689

After years of pushback from the Federal Trade Commission over Meta’s acquisitions of Instagram and WhatsApp, Meta has defeated the FTC’s monopoly claims.

In a Tuesday ruling, US District Judge James Boasberg said the FTC failed to show that Meta has a monopoly in a market dubbed “personal social networking.” In that narrowly defined market, the FTC unsuccessfully argued, Meta supposedly faces only two rivals, Snapchat and MeWe, which struggle to compete due to its alleged monopoly.

But the days of grouping apps into “separate markets of social networking and social media” are over, Boasberg wrote. He cited the Greek philosopher Heraclitus, who “posited that no man can ever step into the same river twice,” while telling the FTC they missed their chance to block Meta’s purchase.

Essentially, Boasberg agreed with Meta that social media—as it was known in Facebook’s early days—is dead. And that means that Meta now competes with a broader set of rival apps, which includes two hugely popular platforms: TikTok and YouTube.

edit: get the script for yourself here https://codeberg.org/CritBase111/Comicify

Someone sent me the comic you see attached to the post, and I thought, hey, that seems like something you could automate. Put 4 images in a folder, run a script, and it automatically lays them out in a 2x2 grid.

With Crush and deepseek it basically writes itself. I'm actually kinda surprised at how well it's doing. There was just one bug that I sent to Claude to fix.

I'm putting the examples in an imgur link because they're still quite heavy on disk space and I don't want to overwhelm the server: https://imgur.com/a/bTiHV4b (yes the pictures make it kinda hard to understand but I'll try to make a real comic with it eventually)

It's difficult to get other people hyped about a work in progress lol but hopefully this makes sense.

It's a python script and this is how you'd run it:

options:
  -h, --help            show this help message and exit
  --folder FOLDER       Path to folder containing comic panels
  --panels {1,2,3,4}    Number of panels to arrange (1-4). Not required when using --all
  --gutter GUTTER       Gutter size between panels in pixels (default: 15)
  --border BORDER       Border size around panels in pixels (default: 0)
  --border-color BORDER_COLOR
                        Border color (CSS color name or hex code, default: black)
  --gutter-color GUTTER_COLOR
                        Background/gutter color (CSS color name, hex code, or "transparent"|"none", default: white)
  --margin MARGIN       Margin multiplier relative to gutter size (default: 2.0, meaning 2x gutter)
  --layout {horizontal,vertical,h,v}
                        Layout direction for 2 and 3-panel comics (default: horizontal). Use "h" or "v" as shorthand.
                        For 4-panel, use "h" or "v" for linear layouts, omit for 2x2 grid.
  --all                 Generate all possible combinations (1, 2, 3, 4 panels with all layouts)

Examples:
  python Comicify.py --folder "Comics/My first comic" --panels 4
  python Comicify.py --folder "Comics/My first comic" --panels 4 --gutter 20
  python Comicify.py --folder "Comics/My first comic" --panels 4 --layout h
  python Comicify.py --folder "Comics/My first comic" --panels 2 --layout v
  python Comicify.py --folder "Comics/My first comic" --all
  python Comicify.py --folder "Comics/My first comic" --panels 3 --gutter-color none

If this doesn't speak to you basically you would download the .py file, and run one of the examples above. The --all flag makes all possible outputs (1, 2, 3 or 4 panel in all layouts). I also plan on adding "--reverse" to handle right-to-left order. you can see the examples in the imgur link, I included the sample code for some of them.

Deepseek wrote all of this, and it only costs like... a dollar or so. It's not the best at coding but it's so, so cheap that I fear I may spend all my savings on it lol. I didn't write a single line of code, just told it what I wanted (with more or less details) and it got it right on the first try. Now I'm just adding new functionalities to it.

I think one HUGE thing with LLM coding is it can go beyond what you know, so even if you can code it can do things you wouldn't necessarily do or know about.

I think this has uses for agitprop, if you want to make quick memes in a comic format for online or offline use. This is just one part of potentially a much bigger pipeline - I was thinking of having a simple gui afterwards you can send the output to, where you can add speech bubble stickers and write into them too, or like for one panel comics just write under it. Also with LLMs you can easily transpose this code to use javascript instead, or whatever else you want.

Oh if you send me a few pictures to comicify I can run them and show you the results. Script will not be available for download until it's fully ready.

Goldman Sachs Research sees 5-6% annual growth in China’s exports and raised its real GDP forecasts for 2026 and 2027 to well above consensus.

China’s growth will likely come at the expense of other high-tech producers such as Europe and Japan