Once again, we are living under a roof made of fabric. Every cold wave and every rain soaks us completely. We cannot protect ourselves or our few belongings from the rain.

The cold is unbearable, and we have nowhere safe to sit or shelter. I am begging you — please help us. Even a small donation can help us find a place to stay and protect us from this freezing cold.

Your support can bring us warmth, safety, and dignity. https://gofund.me/00439328

"Those damn Hexbears are either a bunch of cranks and trolls, or genuine tankies and Stalinists. Don't feed the trolls, don't feed the bears. They'll try to entice you to listen to them with pictures of dope ass bears. None of them are actually cuddly fuzzy teddy bears. Don't fall for the cute bear pics, the Soviet Bear is vicious and these guys embody her, not the cute cubs they post."

Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum said Tuesday that her country intends to send more water to the United States, but not immediately, even as Donald Trump threatens to raise tariffs by 5% on Mexican imports if more water is not delivered as part of a water-sharing agreement.

Sheinbaum said Mexico is proposing a water delivery this month and another one in the coming years. The proposal will be discussed in a virtual meeting with U.S. officials Tuesday, she said.

Mexico is behind water deliveries to the United States from the Rio Grande River because of drought and pipeline limitations, Sheinbaum said.

Secretary of War Pete Hegseth announced the rollout of GenAI.mil today in a video posted to X. To hear Hegseth tell it, the website is “the future of American warfare.” In practice, based on what we know so far from press releases and Hegseth’s posturing, GenAI.mil appears to be a custom chatbot interface for Google Gemini that can handle some forms of sensitive—but not classified—data.

Hegseth’s announcement was full of bold pronouncements about the future of killing people. These kinds of pronouncements are typical of the second Trump administration which has said it believes the rush to “win” AI is an existential threat on par with the invention of nuclear weapons during World War II.

Archive: http://archive.today/R7zCt

“The future of American warfare is here, and it’s spelled A-I.”

The survey found people in the UK spent on average four hours and 30 minutes online every day in 2025

Those clowns in Washington are at it again

Bombshell new reporting from 404 Media found that Flock, which has its cameras in thousands of US communities, has been outsourcing its AI to gig workers located in the Philippines.

After accessing a cache of exposed data, 404 found documents related to annotating Flock footage, a process sometimes called “AI training.” Workers were tasked with jobs include categorizing vehicles by color, make, and model, transcribing license plates, and labeling various audio clips from car wrecks.

In US towns and cities, Flock cameras maintained by local businesses and municipal agencies form centralized surveillance networks for local police. They constantly scan for car license plates, as well as pedestrians, who are categorized based on their clothing, and possibly by factors like gender and race.

In a growing number of cases, local police are using Flock to help Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents surveil minority communities.

It isn’t clear where all the Flock annotation footage came from, but screenshots included in the documents for data annotators showed license plates from New York, Florida, New Jersey, Michigan, and California.

Flock joins the ranks of other fast-moving AI companies that have resorted to low-paid international labor to bring their product to market. Amazon’s cashier-free “just walk out” stores, for example, were really just gig workers watching American shoppers from India. The AI startup Engineer.ai, which purported to make developing code for apps “as easy as ordering a pizza,” was found out to be selling passing human-written code as AI generated.

The difference with those examples is that those services were voluntary — powered by the exploitation of workers in the global south, yes, but with a choice to opt out on the front-end. That isn’t the case with Flock, as you don’t have to consent to end up in the panopticon. In other words, for a growing number of Americans, a for-profit company is deciding who gets watched, and who does the watching — a system built on exploitation at either end.

reporting from behind the great australian firewall, i need your invidious links now more than ever

What things do you self host (or know about) that are fun/interesting/useful to you? I'm thinking of setting up a home server and am looking for things that would be useful or fun for me to run on it. I want to host things that are useful/fun, but not a project itself (I've got enough projects), if that makes sense.

Most of the lists I see online are mostly lists of technical projects like docker, kubernetes, grafana, nginx, etc. I see these as infrastructure rather than the interesting project itself. ETA: the infra is important, but not "interesting" in this context as I deal with infra at my day job.

Examples of the type of service I'm looking at: a media server, photos app (to replace Google Photos), game servers, recipe management, home automation... What other things do you know about that are fun/interesting/useful?

Edit: thank you everyone for your awesome responses!

Two U.S. F-18 fighter jets flying in tandem entered Venezuelan airspace around noon Tuesday, circling over the Gulf of Venezuela in the latest show of force against the regime of Nicolás Maduro.

The flyover — carried out despite the Venezuelan regime’s possession of a number of Russian-made anti-aircraft batteries — took place less than 100 miles northeast of Maracaibo, Venezuela’s second-largest city. Thousands of Venezuelans tracked the aircraft online through specialized tracking websites, watching as the jets traced a bow-tie-shaped pattern over the gulf.

The fighters remained inside Venezuelan airspace for at least 40 minutes at an altitude of roughly 25,000 feet before heading north and leaving the area.

Voith said it plans to cut up to 2,500 jobs, representing about 10% of its workforce,

Voith supplies machines and technical systems to a range of industrial sectors. Its portfolio includes turbines, generators and digital control technology for hydropower plants, as well as systems for processing recycled paper.

In short:

Australia has more than 250 data centres and more in the pipeline, prompting experts to warn against using drinking water to cool servers.

It comes after the Commonwealth announced its National AI Plan after a two-year consultation period.

One water authority is already exploring the use of recycled waste water for data centres.

Welp, 8 Democrats have nibbling on their faces so far...

But we'll see.