If the gift link stops working there is an archived copy of the article

Natural history museum

Kia ora te whānau

I have been on a journey of getting away from big tech these last few years. I've started self hosting and become increasingly critical of a centralized internet are large digital monopolies.

That being said, there's parts of social media I really enjoy. I've always favoured reddit over facebook and insta but I don't like that way reddit is going. So I've deleted my account and signed up to Lemmy.

I'm so thrilled there is a kiwi sublemmy.

Really pleased to be here. I hope this community grows

Have a lovely weekend folks

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/43376037

When I open apps on my computer, the GPU temporarily spikes to 100, and my cursor slows down audio stutters and stuff like that. Is this a sign that the power supply is not powerful enough to supply the power for the

New Jersey lawmakers introduced a bill this week that could bar some U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement personnel from ever holding public jobs in the state.

The legislative package includes:

A bill, A4302, that would disqualify ICE agents and officers who served between Sept. 1, 2025, and Jan. 20, 2029, from getting a public job in New Jersey in the future. They would be banned from becoming state or local government employees, including law enforcement officers and public school teachers.

A bill, A4300, that would impose a 50% tax on the gross receipts of private detention facilities operating under government contracts. The money would be directed to a new Immigrant Protection Fund.

A bill, A4301, that would make it a criminal offense for anyone — including federal ICE officers — to block state, county or municipal law enforcement from accessing crime scenes or evidence.___

British Chambers of Commerce official says US supreme court decision ‘does little to clear the murky waters’

The US supreme court just declared Donald Trump’s boldest tariffs illegal, but international businesses and governments are still uncertain over what’s to come.

After the court said the president cannot enact tariffs in peacetime using the International Emergency Economic Powers Act (IEEPA), the White House said it will quickly replace the levies by other – but potentially more cumbersome – means.

William Bain, head of trade policy at the British Chambers of Commerce, said that while the decision “gives clarity on the president’s executive powers to raise tariffs, it does little to clear the murky waters for business”.

The court ruling applies only to the IEEPA and not other trade policy tools at Trump’s disposal.

https://mastodon.social/@jdelacueva/116103089304791787

Played some more of Darksiders 3 and Xuan Yuan Sword: Mists Beyond the Mountains. Not much to add here.

Started couple of other games. Started Tom Clancy's The Division with friends. I played a little bit of it a while ago, and while I liked the world building and the gameplay loop, but game started feeling repititive. Now playing with friends, so hopefully won't have that issue. Played a few missions and so far so good.

Also started Hard West on Switch 2. It's a turn based tactics game in wild west. It has couple of interesting mechanism, like luck. Each time someone shoots at you, your luck reduces (depending on distance, cover etc), and when your luck is down the shot hits you. You can also shoot people through cover. There is also an area map, where you can do a few things (depending on the campaign)

What about all of you? What have you been playing and/or plan to play?

During the latest U.S.-mediated negotiations in Geneva on Feb. 17–18, Kyiv and Moscow discussed a joint Russian-Ukrainian civilian administration to run a demilitarized zone in the Donbas.

But Ukrainian officials say the proposal is unrealistic and unacceptable, and the recent round of talks again ended in a stalemate. The plan follows the failure of other stillborn ideas discussed during talks between Ukraine, Russia, and the U.S.

. . .

Ukraine maintains that freezing current front-line positions offers the most realistic basis for a ceasefire. Russia continues to demand that Ukrainian forces withdraw from the region as a precondition for any agreement — a demand that Kyiv has repeatedly rejected.

MBFC
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President Donald Trump leaked disastrous economic data in a typo-filled social media post on Friday.

In a Truth Social tirade 40 minutes before his Commerce Department released the latest growth domestic product figures, Trump sought to deflect blame for the economy cooling.

The latest figures showed that U.S. economic growth slowed to an annual rate of 1.4 per cent - well below expectations and a significant drop from the previous quarter’s 4.4 per cent pace.

If Donald Trump’s administration really wants to find evidence of foreign interference in Georgia’s elections, then they need look no further than the president’s old friend Elon Musk and his shady super PAC.

Members of the Georgia State Elections Board voted Wednesday to issue a formal letter of reprimand to Musk’s America PAC over the billionaire technocrat’s illegal scheme to get Trump elected. Georgia, a key battleground state in 2024, was the target of aggressive campaigning by Trump’s team.

https://archive.ph/wKj0m

Some Amazon employees said they were still sceptical of AI tools’ utility for the bulk of their work given the risk of error. They added that the company had set a target for 80 per cent of developers to use AI for coding tasks at least once a week and was closely tracking adoption.

Rep. Jasmine Crockett, a Democrat running for Senate in Texas, wants people to know she isn’t taking corporate PAC money — in her Senate campaign.

“In this Senate race I have not taken any corporate PAC money,” Crockett told the Texas journalist Tashara Parker last month. “People don’t know that because my report hasn’t come out yet. But they will.”

But according to her most recent campaign filings, Crockett has a loophole that lets her use corporate PAC money to help fuel her Senate run — by transferring it from her House campaign.

Crockett’s latest filings with the Federal Election Commission show that she transferred at least $26,500 in donations from corporate PACs — including those representing CVS, Home Depot, AT&T, and Wells Fargo — from her House campaign to her Senate campaign on December 19.

“It relies on technicality that you can say ‘I’m not accepting contributions to my Senate campaign from corporate PACs,’” said Brendan Glavin, director of insights at the government transparency group OpenSecrets. “But they can’t say that there’s no corporate money flowing through her Senate campaign, because it’s obviously not true.”

Therefore, the sustainability of the process largely depends on the deepening of the ongoing peace negotiations between Azerbaijan and Armenia and the establishment of solid stability on the ground. Should new tensions arise along the Baku-Yerevan axis, connectivity projects in the South Caucasus could quickly come under pressure from geopolitical competition.