I've been trying to learn a new language (Vietnamese) and a thing that has been driving me crazy are all these instances of letters being randomly pronounced differently in different words sometimes. If you don't think about it too much, it's easy to go "this language is dumb, why do they do this?" But then I think about English and we have so many examples of this or other linguistic oddities that make no sense but which I've just accepted since I learned them so long ago.

So I wanted to generalize my question: For all the languages where this applies, why are there these cases where letters have inconsistent pronunciations? For cases where it sounds like another letter, why not just use that one? For cases where the letter or combination of letters creates a new sound not already covered by existing letters, why not make a new one? How did this happen? What is the history? Is there linguistic logic to it beyond these being quirks of how the languages historically developed?

I would also accept Karl Barx

cross-posted from: https://scribe.disroot.org/post/5686876

Archived version

Canada and Sweden announced a strategic partnership to deepen cooperation on defense and trade, as the North American nation looks to reduce its dependence on the US for military equipment and as an export market.

The countries made the announcement Tuesday during a rare visit of Sweden’s King Carl XVI Gustaf and Queen Silvia to Ottawa. The agreement pledges to increase cooperation in five main areas: economic development, security, the Arctic, science and technology, and the environment.

“We are like-minded Arctic nations with shared interests in the North Atlantic and the Arctic region,” the countries said in a joint statement.

The partnership comes as Sweden’s Saab AB is in talks with Quebec-based Bombardier Inc. about building its Gripen fighter jets in Canada.

The companies already work together on GlobalEye early warning surveillance aircraft, which are assembled in Canada before being shipped to Sweden for installation of radar and sensors.

...

Official document warns of "National Security Concerns"

Archive

Basically, the title. I have the domain, and have used it in the past with Google Workspace and MS365, but both of those services enshitified, so I'm looking for something that won't screw me.

Don't really care about things like password manager, VPN, cloud drive, etc. Just looking for email service for about 5 users that can be configured to work w/ native email clients on macos, windows, linux, iOS (so Proton & Tuta are out). Anyone have any experience with this? Really don't want to roll my own.

I migrated over to Proton last night before realizing that I had to set up the bridge for it to work on macos mail, and can only use the nativ client on mobile. So, trying to find something soon, so I can cancel within the 30-day period.

The bank remained vague about the actual nature of its relationship with the convicted sex trafficker. Newly released documents reveal that Epstein and de Rothschild’s personal relationship was much closer than the bank previously acknowledged. According to emails released by the U.S. House Oversight Committee on November 12, Epstein planned to see a Broadway play with de Rothschild in January 2014, and scheduled a private trip with her to Montreal that September.

A second set of documents—the leaked inbox of former Israeli defense minister Ehud Barak, hacked by Handala and uploaded by non-profit whistleblower Distributed Denial of Secrets—sheds light on Epstein’s efforts to leverage his personal friendship with de Rothschild to raise funds for the development of Israeli cyberweapons. After Barak’s retirement from government in 2013, he recruited Pavel Gurvich, a graduate of the Israel Defense Forces’ secretive Unit 81 technology unit, to source cyberweapons startups from the Israeli intelligence community. Gurvich did not respond to a request for comment.

Private communications between Barak and Gurvich show discussions about a wide range of cyberweapons concepts drawn from Israeli military research, inspired in part by the astonishing scope of U.S. global surveillance apparatus revealed by NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden in 2013. Epstein pushed forward a plan to finance Israeli “offensive cyber” startups with the hope of winning de Rothschild’s support.

Since October 2023, the Israeli Air Force (IAF) unleashed tens of thousands of bombs likely containing payloads of Polish-made TNT, resulting in the destruction of as much as 80 percent of Gaza’s buildings, including civilian infrastructure such as hospitals, schools, and refugee camps. “Based on information provided by the bomb’s U.S. manufacturer, General Dynamics Ordnance and Tactical Systems, the Polish company Nitro-Chem, and U.S. government databases, we can conclude that there is a high probability that a significant proportion of [Mk 84s] that Israel dropped on the Gaza Strip since October 2023 are filled with Polish-made TNT,” the report found.

Lithuania will reopen its border crossings with Belarus, ending a closure imposed in response to airspace disruptions by smugglers' balloons

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.zip/post/53373602

The move by the EU comes after it watered down some environmental laws after blowback from business and the U.S. government.

Proposed changes to the GDPR would also allow Alphabet's Google, Meta, OpenAI and other tech companies to use Europeans' personal data to train their AI models.

The move by the EU comes after it watered down some environmental laws after blowback from business and the U.S. government.

Proposed changes to the GDPR would also allow Alphabet's Google, Meta, OpenAI and other tech companies to use Europeans' personal data to train their AI models.

Remote terminal application that allows roaming, supports intermittent connectivity …

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.sdf.org/post/45888879

Archived

The journalist’s appeal went before Beijing High Court on November 13, with the court determining to uphold the original conviction handed down in November 2024. The journalist’s son, Dong Yifu, said the court had provided no reasoning for rejecting the appeal.

Dong was arrested in February 2022, while having lunch with a Japanese diplomat at a hotel restaurant in Beijing after the XXIV Winter Olympics, which was held in the country that year. According to the court judgement, the diplomat was labelled an ‘agent of an espionage organisation’ and had also been detained for several hours before being released.

Dong remained in pre-trial detention for almost one year, before being charged with espionage in April 2023. He then remained incarcerated until the official hearing in November 2024.

[...]

Before his detainment, Dong worked with the Chinese state-run government newspaper Guangming Daily as a senior columnist for 35 years. He primarily published opinion articles and academic journals about legal reforms on social issues, state corruption and constitutional reform. He was awarded a Nieman fellowship at Harvard University in 2006 and worked closely with two scholar Japanese universities that he often visited. In 2017, following a state investigation, Dong’s work was allegedly flagged by the Chinese Communist Party as being ‘anti-communist’.

[...]

China is the world’s worst jailer of journalists in the world. In 2024, the IFJ found the state had imprisoned approximately typ135 journalists and media workers for their reporting.

“Now, do the Mayor-elect and I agree on everything? No, we don’t. But in speaking with him, it’s clear that we share broad and crucial priorities: the importance of public safety, the need to continue driving down crime, and the need to maintain stability and order across the department. We also agree that you deserve the city’s respect and support.”

In California, the Law Enforcement Mutual Aid Fund sets aside $25 million annually to let law enforcement agencies work across jurisdictions to fight natural disasters and other major emergencies. In a briefing obtained by The Intercept, acceptable LEMA use cases are listed as fires, storms, flooding, earthquakes, natural or man-made disasters, and “other extra ordinary events requiring emergency law enforcement mutual aid on a case by case basis.”

As “Gaza solidarity” encampments popped up across college campuses in April and May 2024, Jodi Lopez, staff services manager at California’s Office of Emergency Services, informed the leadership of at least 30 public universities — including Cal Poly Humboldt — that if they were to require mutual aid assistance, LEMA would be available to reimburse their expenses, attaching a flyer that detailed eligible costs.

A Cal OES spokesperson confirmed in a statement to The Intercept that “Local law enforcement who provided that support to Cal Poly Humboldt were reimbursed through the LEMA Fund program.” The statewide office “is committed to protecting Californians and supporting local partners in times of crisis, regardless of political views or affiliation,” the spokesperson wrote.

Plenty of us are using Docker, Podman, Incus, chroot jails, etc to isolate services.

It has become good practice and it makes setting up yet another service, usually, so convenient.

Some services like YunoHost, StartOS, Cloudron and others try to facilitate the process.

What I haven't seen though is a way to facilitate interoperability BETWEEN services we self-host. Sure there are plugins for each service, e.g. https://www.npmjs.com/package/peertube-plugin-livechat to provide XMPP chat for PeerTube, or anecdotal discussions e.g. https://github.com/jitsi/jitsi-meet/issues/7601 to embed PeerTube on Jitsi Meet.

So... how do YOU do it? How do you make on self-hosted service with another? Do you check after each one you install in the plugin category? Do you write your own plugins or extensions? Do you have a design pattern (e.g. Swagger API discovery with token generation per service, "cheat" via sockets, use a dedicate new service or even host) which you repeat?

I do ask because I bet most of you have a moment like this :

• Hey how about we start this new project together?
• Yes, let's change the World!
• OK let's write manifesto.md
• Where are we going to host it?
• Hmmm we could use my Cryptpad instance...
• OK but I don't get notification on my GMail, could we use GoogleDocs instead?

So... I feel like FLOSS self-hosting is honestly on-par functionality-wise with proprietary solutions. I might be bias but it's rare when I think "Damn... that's cool, shame I can't have it at home". I can nearly always (in fact I have a hard time thinking of an example) self-host functional equivalent solutions myself. The ONE thing that I feel is often missing is integration which relies on interoperability.

How do YOU it?

PS: this isn't about ntfy, PeerTube, HA or any specific service to a specific problem, it's about HOW to facilitate, when one wants to, already great services work together.

I played the demo, and it was pretty good IMO. Looking to pick this up when I've cleared my backlog a little bit.