French President Emmanuel Macron on Saturday, February 14, urged calm and restraint after the fatal beating of a 23-year-old French youth aligned with the far-right on the sidelines of a conference by a hard-left lawmaker in the southeastern city of Lyon.

The death of the young man – identified only as Quentin – has intensified tensions between France's far-right and radical left who are both eyeing 2027 presidential elections.

He had been hospitalized in Lyon on Thursday after being attacked while providing what his supporters said was security for a protest against an appearance by hard-left MEP Rima Hassan at the Lyon branch of the Sciences Po university.

Archived version

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In tsarist days, legend has it that Prince Yusupov fed cyanide to Rasputin in cakes and a glass of Madeira wine, hoping to kill him. When that failed, Rasputin was shot in the head. Today’s toxins are more terrifying — and their use by the state a powerful deterrent to Putin’s opponents.

Who can forget the haunting images of Alexander Litvinenko, the Russian defector and Putin critic, as he lay in bed suffering an agonising death in London in 2006 after drinking a cup of tea laced with radioactive polonium-210?

“It sends a very clear message: ‘If you screw with us terrible things will happen,’” says a security source. “The message is not only that the state can kill, but that it can do so without ever admitting it has done anything at all.”

Nor is poison the only method favoured for its ambiguity. In recent years a striking number of Russian officials, business figures and critics of the Kremlin have died after falling from windows or balconies — deaths routinely described as suicides. Like poisoning, defenestration offers deniability without subtlety: a violent end that leaves no obvious weapon, no clear perpetrator and just enough uncertainty to smother accountability.

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update 2: The Linux community has suggested that I use a tar file to backup, as this preserves symlinks. With that, the home directory now takes up just 290 ish GiB, as it should. Now I will be distro hopping, wish me luck!

update: I was able to copy it! There are still some folders that are really big (as many have said, it is probably because symlinks aren't supported in exFAT. When I transfer these files over to btrfs, will the symlinks come back or are they permanently gone?) but, with the uninstallation of Steam and Kdenlive (each taking a ridiculous amount of storage), removing a couple games I don't really play, and removing old folders that lingered around from already uninstalled programs means I now have enough space to fit my home folder in the SSD (like 23 GiB left, so the lack of symlinks still hurts, but still, it fits!)

When running

rsync -Paz /home/sbird "/run/media/sbird/My Passport/sbird"

As told by someone, I run into a ran out of storage error midway. Why is this? My disk usage is about 385 GiB for my home folder, and there is around 780 GiB of space in the external SSD (which already has stuff like photos and documents). Does rsync make doubly copies of it or something? That would be kind of silly. Or is it some other issue?

Note that the SSD is from a reputable brand (Western Digital) so it is unlikely that it is reporting a fake amount of storage.

EDIT: Wait, is it because my laptop SSD is BTRFS and the external SSD is exFAT? Could that be the issue? That would be kind of weird, why would files become so much more bigger with the external SSD?

Thanks everyone for your help to troubleshoot! It was super helpful! Now I need to go to bed, since I've been up so late it's already tomorrow!

Speaking in Munich, Volodymyr Zelenskyy also called for a clear date for his country to be allowed to join the EU

Ukraine wants security guarantees for a minimum of 20 years from the US before it can sign a peace deal with dignity, Volodymyr Zelenskyy said ahead of talks with Russia and the US scheduled for next week.

Speaking in Munich on Saturday, he also called for a clear date for Ukraine to be allowed to join the EU. Some EU officials have put the date as early as 2027.

Speaking to the annual Munich security summit, Ukraine’s president said he hoped “the trilateral meetings next week will be serious, substantive, helpful for all of us but, honestly, sometimes it feels like the sides are talking about completely different things”.

“The Americans often return to the topic of concessions and too often those concessions are discussed only in the context of Ukraine, not Russia,” he added.

Adafruit: From Ultimate Driving Machine to Ultimate Rent-Seeking Machine: The BMW Logo Screw Patent.

If you haven’t already heard, BMW’s R&D teams have been busy “innovating.” Unfortunately, they aren’t focusing on the things that actually matter—like stellar engine performance or the legendary driving dynamics that gearheads love. Instead, the C-suite execs decided that the best use of their engineering budget was to design a proprietary security screw specifically intended to prevent BMW drivers from fixing their own cars.

Archived version

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David Stern accompanied Andrew on his publicly funded visit to Hong Kong and the Chinese city of Shenzhen in October 2010. The German citizen was a trusted business contact of Epstein’s at the time of the trip, which took place years before he was appointed to manage two different organisations connected to the royal family.

The visit is a key part of Thames Valley police’s scrutiny of Andrew’s time as UK special trade representative between 2001 and 2011. The force is assessing claims that Andrew forwarded reports from his trips to southeast Asia and Afghanistan to Epstein and whether there are grounds for an investigation into allegations of a criminal offence of misconduct in public office

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Stern was so close to Epstein, who he referred to as his “boss”, that he asked the paedophile to be his child’s godfather.

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Court Circular records show Andrew met the executive vice-president of Huawei, the Chinese telecoms company, and had dinner at the Ritz-Carlton Hotel with “British and Shenzhen businesses” in Shenzhen. In Hong Kong, he attended a lunch given by the British Chamber of Commerce and met the British consul-general.

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Though Andrew lost his role as trade envoy because of his ties to Epstein in early 2011, in October that year Stern wrote again to Epstein that he was going to China with “PA”, understood to be Prince Andrew. He said: “Most meetings by now are organised by me except mayors and governors,” he said. “I stay in the background/hidden. Just make the arrangements.”

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On April 23, 2017, [Stern] emailed Epstein about a dinner in May at Windsor Castle with “50 top Chinese” businessmen and women, including Pony Ma of Tencent and Yang Huiyan, who Stern described as the “wealthiest woman in Asia, age 36”.

“Plus top UK and other guests,” Stern wrote.

Stern stepped down from his role at St George’s House in November 2022. He is now based in Abu Dhabi, according to Companies House.

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The latest tranche of Epstein files reveals that Ghislaine Maxwell was invited to a secret “Shadow Commission on 9/11” by Edward Jay Epstein, an investigative journalist known for his 1966 book Inquest, a critic of the "Warren Commission" which investigated the John F Kennedy assassination.

The disgraced socialite Ghislaine Maxwell politely declined the invitation. The communication happened in January 2003, almost a year and a half after the collapse of the Twin Towers. The exact nature, purpose, or official standing of this "Shadow Commission" beyond being an invitation for a secret group related to 9/11 is not detailed.

Second, it's a chain that serves Cincinnati style chili, generally served over small hotdogs called coneys, or over spaghetti, which is called a three way, with beans and/or onions making it a four or five way. No matter how you get it it comes smothered in very finely shredded cheese. Most people just say Skyline when referring to any Cincinnati chili, but there are plenty of other places that serve it too, including a competing chain called Gold Star, who are the great Shaytan and, inshallah, will cease their apostasy soon.

Cincinnati chili is unique in that it's more of a meat sauce than a traditional chili, and can contain ingredients like chocolate or cinnamon. As you can tell, it's pretty unique, and it tends to be something you grow up with and love, or move here and hate before you surrender to it's deliciousness.

Context: a thread about what instance to reccomend.

Turns out talking about .ml users excusing Russian war crimes and Iranian crimes against humanity is not OK in c/asklemmy. Nor is mocking defederated Hexbears on alt accounts who literally admit to sealioning XD

Seems a tale older than FidoNet, we must remember we're one take a ModGod dislikes away from GOODBYE!

Archive.today.

Anthropic’s artificial-intelligence tool Claude was used in the U.S. military’s operation to capture former Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro, highlighting how AI models are gaining traction in the Pentagon, according to people familiar with the matter.

Dr. Mehmet Oz is pitching a controversial fix for America's rural health care crisis: artificial intelligence.

"There's no question about it — whether you want it or not — the best way to help some of these communities is gonna be AI-based avatars," Oz, the head of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, said recently at an event focused on addiction and mental health hosted by Action for Progress, a coalition aimed at improving behavioral health care. He said AI could multiply the reach of doctors fivefold — or more — without burning them out.

The AI proposal is part of the Trump administration's $50 billion plan to modernize health care in rural communities. That includes deploying tools such as digital avatars to conduct basic medical interviews, robotic systems for remote diagnostics, and drones to deliver medication where pharmacies don't exist.

I see this come up a lot in discussions about voting in America. Postal votes disproportionately go to Democrats, hence the Democrats want to expand postal voting while Republicans want to restrict it (and insist there is totally a bunch of fraud going on).

I've googled with a few search engines and haven't found a convincing reason. Lots of evidence that the skew is real, but no explanation as to why. Indeed, if one just looks at demographics, one would expect postal voting to benefit Republicans by facilitating votes from people in the countryside who live far away from voting centers.

So what actually gives?

I’m looking for storage classes for a multi node cluster. I’m currently using Longhorn and NFS, but I'm not happy with the performance. My cluster doesn’t have beefy nodes, so Ceph/Rook is out of the question (for now).

Nodes:

1. 8 GB RAM, 4 cores VM, control plane. 256 GB SSD
2. 4 GB RAM, 2 cores, control plane, currently cordoned. 128 GB SSD
3. 8 GB RAM, 4 cores, ARM, control plane. 512 GB SSD
4. 8 GB RAM, 4 cores. 256 GB SSD
5. 16 GB RAM, 6 cores. 256 GB SSD + 1 TB HD
6. RPi 4, 4 GB RAM. 128 GB SSD

Stable Video Infinity: Infinite-Length Video Generation with Error Recycling.

Today, anyone can create realistic images in just a few clicks with the help of AI. Generating videos, however, is a much more complicated task. Existing AI models are only capable of producing videos that work for less than 30 seconds before degrading into randomness with incoherent shapes, colors and logic. The problem is called drift, and computer scientists have been working on it for years.

At EPFL, researchers at the Visual Intelligence for Transportation (VITA) Laboratory have taken a novel approach – working with the errors instead of circumventing or ignoring them – and developed a video-generation method that essentially eliminates drift. Their method is based on recycling errors back into the AI model so that it learns from its own mistakes.