cross-posted from: https://infosec.pub/post/43224320

• A persistent failure to adequately treat inmates’ health issues with medicine beyond a single dose of Ibuprofen

• A proliferation of diagnoses for serious mental health conditions like schizophrenia that inmates had never suffered from before

• An overall lack of sufficient calories and vegetables

• Verbal and physical abuse by guards

• Extreme temperatures

• Forced labor

• "the us is saving iran from evil government!!"
• the us, having a history of fucking over literally every state they've dealt with, bombing hospitals and schools

Recently, I did some research about elections in socialist countries. I found good sources about Cuba, Vietnam, and the People's Republic of China (unfortunately, I couldn't find anything reliable on the DPRK).

I would really like to know how elections worked in the Soviet Union between 1917 and 1953 before Kruschev.

I know there was a Constituent Assembly in January 1918, but I must confess I am quite ignorant about this period.

Looking forward to your answers.

• Lobsters;
• Hacker News.

Debian is the latest in an ever-growing list of projects to wrestle (again) with the question of LLM-generated contributions; the latest debate stared in mid-February, after Lucas Nussbaum opened a discussion with a draft general resolution (GR) on whether Debian should accept AI-assisted contributions. It seems to have, mostly, subsided without a GR being put forward or any decisions being made, but the conversation was illuminating nonetheless.

Nussbaum said that Debian probably needed to have a discussion "to understand where we stand regarding AI-assisted contributions to Debian" based on some recent discussions, though it was not clear what discussions he was referring to. Whatever the spark was, Nussbaum put forward the draft GR to clarify Debian's stance on allowing AI-assisted contributions. He said that he would wait a couple of days to collect feedback before formally submitting the GR.

His proposal would allow "AI-assisted contributions (partially or fully generated by an LLM)" if a number of conditions were met. For example, it would require explicit disclosure if "a significant portion of the contribution is taken from a tool without manual modification", and labeling of such contributions with "a clear disclaimer or a machine-readable tag like '[AI-Generated]'." It also spells out that contributors should "fully understand" their submissions and would be accountable for the contributions, "including vouching for the technical merit, security, license compliance, and utility of their submissions". The GR would also prohibit using generative-AI tools with non-public or sensitive project information, including private mailing lists or embargoed security reports.

I've made accounts on servers running these different software and the user experience feels similar between them. They're all FOSS Reddits. I can log into servers running all of em via the same Interstellar app on Android and see the same communities

Are there more notable differences for folks running the server or the mods running the individual communities/subredits?

Or am i misunderstanding them?

When Donald Trump’s most controversial aide starts advising officials not to listen too much to attorneys, it’s best not to look away.

In Shakespeare’s “Henry VI, Part II,” a character named Dick the Butcher tells a confederate, “The first thing we do, let’s kill all the lawyers.” There’s long been debate over the meaning of the line, but the late Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens wrote in a 1985 opinion that he interpreted it to mean that “disposing of lawyers is a step in the direction of a totalitarian form of government.”

This came to mind while watching White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller speak at the Americas Counter Cartel Conference on Thursday, in which he had quite a bit to say to a group of Latin American military leaders.

At the heart of Miller’s pitch was the idea that it was necessary to combat drug cartels, not through law enforcement techniques or border control, but rather by using deadly military force.

given unlimited money and resources they built the worlds biggest septic tank and go fishing in it.

So this is a bit tricky to explain to people, even a lot of people who grew up in an "Evangelical" household. But I'll try to do my best here, because understanding this is important right now.

The Rapture is an even bigger part of the post-WW2 evangelical theology and identity than you think. This is mostly true for baby-boomers, and decreasingly so for subsequent generations. But we are still here because baby-boomers still have a lot of power in America. To understand Baby Boomer American Evangelicals you have to understand that the world they grew up in really did look like the end times.

Consider their lives: they grew up during a time of absolutely unprecedented middle class wealth, AND they had a new unprecedented national mass media/advertising system telling them they are really special (if they buy the right stuff), AND they are growing up in the shadow of the atomic bomb, AND F***ing Israel was refounded! So yeah, the message that Jesus was going to come back during their lives was damn convincing.

Now, the refounding of Israel is not prophesied in the Bible. In fact, that theology is considered by most Christian denominations to be flat wrong. For most denominations, Christ refounded Israel when he instituted the Church at Pentecost. Israel means "Struggles with God", and everyone who "Struggles with God" is a part of the people of Israel. In the mid-1800s a dude misinterpreted scripture and tried to created the concept of "dispensations". Part of this misinterpretation included a reconstruction of the physical temple of Israel (again this was never orthodox theology. Orthodox theology teaches that Jesus' body is already the reconstruction of the temple).

But this wrong theology gained quite a following, primarily in the US, as "Manifest Destiny" was being widely taught. So, Zionists were happy to piggy back on this theology and make it into a self-fullfilling prophecy.

So the refounding of Israel, combined with a number of unprecedented social, scientific, and governmental events, really convinced the baby-boomers that they were special.

Meanwhile, the American Evangelical movement in America, which traditionally taught a more "personal" view of salvation and reverence, was taken over by charismatic sales people that saw an opportunity to mix the "personal" salvation theology with conservative politics and modern mass media advertising to create the Evangelical Right that we know today.

Then came 9/11. Which was also hugely influential. In the boomers minds, 9/11 was supposed to be the great Armageddon war. And there just happened to be an evangelical in the white house to lead the war. This was finally their moment.

...Except it was a quagmire, which they could not explain. Then a black man with African and Muslim names was elected president and they absolutely lost their minds. (Enter the tea party.) Everything for them fell apart.

And here is the real kicker that blows the minds of progressives: they know Trump isn’t Christian. In fact there is a not small minority of American evangelicals that voted for him because they believe he’s the Antichrist and that his ruinous presidency is necessary for Jesus’ return.

That's where we are today. We are being ruled by people that really believe that in order for Jesus to return the world has to be destroyed.

But that's still not the end of it, because this theology has also been adopted by a new generation of atheist techno-utopianists. Just like the Christian Right has decided that the world must be destroyed to recreate it with them as kings, so does the atheist techno-utopianist right. (It's just the method is different. But the results are the same.)

If are an atheist this fact is probably insulting to you, because you feel implicated. But you need to consider the fact. The people in Power are not all Christians Nationalists. Many, if not most, are atheist techno-utopianists that are happily partnering with the Christian Nationalists.

As much as we are being ruled by a Christian Right that wants to destroy everything, we are also being ruled by an Atheist right that wants the same thing.

I'm building a new activitypub/threadiverse software focused on the needs of self hosters who want a single user instance.

I've been posting with it semi-regularly for the last month, and I think it's ready for an open demo.

One of my objectives is to have the lightest resource usage for memory and CPU constrained hardware, as well as the fastest loading web interface for older phones and limited data plans. I ran out of data on my phone last week and having a 41kb front page came in very handy.

You can try the web UI at https://scrapetacular.ydns.eu/latest You can also POST AS A GUEST TO THE FEDIVERSE without signing up. I'm not sure you can do this anywhere else, I'm manually approving posts on the backend because .. well you know. If it asks for a user and pass, use guest and guest, your post will appear with a username like guest4269.

Ideally, open this post https://scrapetacular.ydns.eu/post/10127 and reply to it.

My other plan for mobile is to target the Sync for Lemmy app, as it's dead, meaning it's no longer a moving target.

I've made a few technical choices aimed at keeping things fast

These include:

No ORMs

• They are convenient but make performance tuning difficult when things get complex as you don't write the queries directly

No Javascript

• I may have to go back on this if I keep the guest posting function, it might need a captcha or anubis.

No nested comments in the web UI

• Nested comments are super slow, you are essentially querying the database for the OP, then querying for the N immediate children, then doing N queries for all of their children, then keep going recursively until you reach your depth limit, or all comments are found, you then need to render this structure with html/css

No front page images

• This is more of a personal preference that happened to make things load faster, the front page displays the text of the OP and last few comments IN FULL, giving a good preview of the conversation, and allocating more space to people who write rather than post memes. Inline images in posts are also replaced with links.

No upvotes/downvotes

• DID YOU KNOW that most threadiverse traffic is upvotes, downvotes adn emojis? You get an instant speedup by simply not processing them. Also, since this is a single user instance, all my comments are by definition awesome

ROADMAP

• Massive refactor
• Make the project public
• unit tests (this is basically my only requirement for v1)
• sync for lemmy API
• admin UI
• "AI" to "My Butt" wordfilter (mandatory and hardcoded)
• default subscription to /c/fuck_AI
• Solve channel discoverablity once and for all
• SUPERBLOCK (i.e. block everyone who liked this comment)
• dockerfile? I don't use docker tbh
• Read Mastodon posts? Do they even have good content?

Tech Stack

• Go
• SQLite

I'm using the pure Go sqlite library, Bluemonday for html sanitisation, Blackfriday for Markdown and Migrate for auto db migrations.

End

Thanks to Snoopy and the Cool Froges at jlai.lu for allowing me to test on their channel.

Is this project of interest to you? Have I missed anything obvious? Is there anything else you would like to know?

Using #Madblog as the easiest way to spin up an Indieweb/ActivityPub-compatible blog.

Zero db, zero JS, entirely hosted on text files.

The rules-based order was always partly a legitimation device for American hegemony, but it was a device that required European buy-in — and that buy-in gave Europe real leverage. Trump has abandoned the legitimation mechanism entirely. He does not need Europe’s moral endorsement because he has dispensed with the need for legitimacy altogether. Power is its own justification. That is precisely what makes the European establishment’s eager compliance so self-defeating.

Sánchez is dragging Europe’s centre-left toward articulating a foreign policy grounded in international law, genuine multilateralism, and the understanding that the international order is rebuilt through principles consistently applied, not selectively invoked. What makes the S&D shift notable is that arguments long dismissed as too radical — when made by voices like Yanis Varoufakis — are now coming from governing parties.

Dubai has only ten days of fresh food left after the closure of the Straits of Hormuz has cut the United Arab Emirates (UAE) off from all its imports, including food. In Abu Dhabi, with the prospect of the region becoming unliveable, real estate prices are also collapsing.

As bne IntelliNews reported, the Hormuz chokepoint could kill Dubai, a hub of investment and business in the region. The Gulf countries don’t have any water and don’t produce much food for their combined population of around 60mn people. Fresh products in particular like vegetables and fruit are almost all imported. The Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) closed the Straits of Hormuz to oil exports on March 2, but the embargo also effectively blocked all food imports at the same time.

The Emirates imports between 80% and 90% of its food, with roughly 70% of food shipments to Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) countries normally passing through the Strait of Hormuz on the 100- odd ships that traversed the Straits until a week ago.

...

cross-posted from : https://lemmy.zip/post/60552836

Source

Using #Madblog as the easiest way to spin up an Indieweb/ActivityPub-compatible blog.

Zero db, zero JS, entirely hosted on text files.

The government's key superannuation reforms are set to soon become law after passing the Senate on Tuesday night, which will see major amendments for low income earners, and those with super balances above $3 million.