a chilling parable for a modern age

It's never made sense to me that some people refuse to drink water even if they know it keeps you functioning properly. The same people will complain of constipation or dry skin but don't want to do the thing that fixes their issues.

Morning frosts have hit Serbian fruit production hard, mainly affecting early stone fruit varieties.

In the Čačak region, experts from the Institute of Fruit Growing report that 95% of apricot crops have been destroyed.

The damage varies by location, with Vojvodina experiencing more than 90% loss in lowland areas, while areas near Belgrade show 40-50% damage.

Cherries and pears have also suffered, with a complete damage assessment expected by the end of April.

archived (Wayback Machine)

Truth is, to get right to the point, the fact that Matrix was accompanied by a for-profit entity, funded by venture capital was the biggest mistake that Matrix as a project has ever made.

Ladies and gentlemen, we got him

A new website and API called AI.gov is set to launch on the Fourth of July.

Archived version: https://archive.is/20250614225252/https://www.404media.co/github-is-leaking-trumps-plans-to-accelerate-ai-across-government/

An apparent mix-up with the technology led to Danielle Horan being wrongly accused of shoplifting.

Guardian investigation finds almost 7,000 proven cases of cheating – and experts says these are tip of the iceberg

Thousands of university students in the UK have been caught misusing ChatGPT and other artificial intelligence tools in recent years, while traditional forms of plagiarism show a marked decline, a Guardian investigation can reveal.

A survey of academic integrity violations found almost 7,000 proven cases of cheating using AI tools in 2023-24, equivalent to 5.1 for every 1,000 students. That was up from 1.6 cases per 1,000 in 2022-23.

Figures up to May suggest that number will increase again this year to about 7.5 proven cases per 1,000 students – but recorded cases represent only the tip of the iceberg, according to experts.

The data highlights a rapidly evolving challenge for universities: trying to adapt assessment methods to the advent of technologies such as ChatGPT and other AI-powered writing tools.

Archived version of RTÉ article (archive.org)

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/31439537

Nicolas Sarkozy has been stripped of his Legion d'honneur award, France's highest distinction, after his graft conviction. The former French president was found guilty of illegal attempts to obtain favors from a judge.

Former French President Nicolas Sarkozy, who led France from 2007 to 2012, has had his Legion d'honneur (Legion of Honor) award revoked after his conviction on graft charges, according to a decree published Sunday.

He has thus become the second French head of state to be stripped of the award after Philippe Petain, who headed the collaborationist Vichy regime during World War II and was convicted in August 1945 for high treason and conspiring with the Nazi occupiers.

The widely-expected decision to take the award back from Sarkozy came despite the opposition of current French President Emmanuel Macron, who said in April that he thought that it was important for "former presidents to be respected."

I'm talking about games that you still like but you had no idea were criticized so much.

The perfect example for me is Sonic Unleashed.

I admit that the game has its bad things, but I would have never imagined that it was so hated at the time... Although, that could be extended to the entire Sonic franchise, since for many years I was not aware at all of that "Sonic was never good", "Sonic had a rough transition to 3D" nonsense.

We me and a couple of the 'bears put our money together and bought a Luigi board.

"Huehuehue what if I summon Stalin", one of us said (just like Seth Rogan, funniest ape actir) and we all nodded and agreed because Hexbears are a hivemind we all put our hogs on the Waluigi board and asked the immortal spirit of tankism to summon Stalin.

You fycking fuck, you summoned him in attack mode you baka! You stupid filthy baka! I screamed as Stalin emerged and used his giant spoon to reduce our life points to zero.

That's why we're in the Shadow Realm now fumking IDIOT

Edit for context:

My view is transracial isn’t valid and this person is trying to dogwhistle. I’ve already blocked this person, and now they’re going after my friend saying my friend is transphobic because they disagreed with them about transracial being a thing (they're purposefully leaving the context out so my friend looks transphobic when what my friend really said was transgender is valid but transracial isn't)

I know, I know, WordPress is no longer cool, the boss is a dork and PHP is sooo 2000s. Unfortunately, life is often not a concert of wishes, and you have to make compromises.

One of the things that annoys me the most about the newer versions of WordPress is the ‘block editor’. (Yes, there is the Classic Editor. But Automattic has already announced that it won't be around forever. And then what?) It may be useful for people in marketing who want to ‘design’ websites, but I just want to write prose on the Internet and not have to think about trivial things like paragraphs. But what do people who write a lot of prose use?

That's right: WordStar. ;-)

A few years ago, Gerald Brandt published WordTsar - great name! -, a WordStar clone for modern systems that doesn't necessarily require (nor even support) DOS. Writing Word documents with it is really fun. So why not blog posts too?

Like many people in this community, I use a Markdown editor that could also publish directly in WordPress. After a few years with Ulysses, I recently switched to iA Writer on macOS to minimise my software subscriptions. Alternatively, there are also a few WordPress plugins that directly support Markdown as an input format, which is probably still the cheaper option.

So my approach for WordPress blog posts that don't necessarily require fiddling around with the HTML code (sometimes I fancy colour or specially formatted embedded photos, for example) is as follows: I write my posts in WordTsar, convert them with ws2markdown to Markdown and then upload the result to WordPress. I enjoy writing longer texts more this way and am therefore happy to recommend it to others. Maybe you like it too.