I love webcomics but for fucks sake it's paywalled like crazy, is there something like sonarr but for webcomics? There's readarr but I'm not sure that would have these things on there

cross-posted from: https://scribe.disroot.org/post/5475234

“The [European] Commission today opened an in-depth investigation under the regulation on foreign subsidies into possible market distortions caused by foreign subsidies. The investigation will examine whether these subsidies gave the Chinese state-owned rolling stock manufacturer CRRC an unfair advantage in participating in a public tender for the acquisition of light rail vehicles in Portugal,” the institution announced in a statement.

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According to the European Commission, there is “sufficient evidence that Portugal CRRC Tangshan Rolling Stock Unipessoal may have benefited from foreign subsidies that distorted the internal market, justifying a thorough investigation.”

The investigation now aims to assess whether such subsidies gave the company an unfair advantage in the tender and, depending on the conclusions, the Commission may impose corrective measures, prohibit the awarding of the contract, or issue a decision of no objection.

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According to the Government, the tender for the construction of the Violet Line of the Lisbon Metro will be launched in December 2025.

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“The [European] Commission today opened an in-depth investigation under the regulation on foreign subsidies into possible market distortions caused by foreign subsidies. The investigation will examine whether these subsidies gave the Chinese state-owned rolling stock manufacturer CRRC an unfair advantage in participating in a public tender for the acquisition of light rail vehicles in Portugal,” the institution announced in a statement.

...

According to the European Commission, there is “sufficient evidence that Portugal CRRC Tangshan Rolling Stock Unipessoal may have benefited from foreign subsidies that distorted the internal market, justifying a thorough investigation.”

The investigation now aims to assess whether such subsidies gave the company an unfair advantage in the tender and, depending on the conclusions, the Commission may impose corrective measures, prohibit the awarding of the contract, or issue a decision of no objection.

...

According to the Government, the tender for the construction of the Violet Line of the Lisbon Metro will be launched in December 2025.

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The expressions of these raccoons was satisfaction, like the realization made them happy. Had some colors added. Like those cheesy 90s memes?
If someone saw it too and knows where to find it Thanks <3

Coming soon: Arbeit Mach Five a ragtag group of Jewish engineers in a concentration camp surreptitiously build a hypersonic jet fighter, its The Great Escape meets Iron Man & Inglourious Basterds all by way of The Boy in the Striped Pajamas

Context: Hideo Kojima has been a guest star in this year's Lucca Comics & Games in Italy.

There he met with ZeroCalcare, an appreciated italian comic artist who, among the others wrote a very good visual novel titled Kobane Calling, a depiction of his travel to Rojava to meet the kurdish resistance against ISIS.

They took a picture together, with Kojima showing the japanese edition of Kobane Calling and Kojima put this on his social media.

Then, the turkish nationalists protested against Kojma because they ranked YPG fighters as "terrorists", to the point of asking Kojima to be arrested... As a result, Kojima removed the picture from his social media.

(Sorry for the social media post, but all other sources were either in Italian or from Turkish sites)

A DOCUMENTARY FEATURING mothers surviving Israel’s genocide in Gaza. A video investigation uncovering Israel’s role in the killing of a Palestinian American journalist. Another video revealing Israel’s destruction of Palestinian homes in the occupied West Bank.

YouTube surreptitiously deleted all these videos in early October by wiping the accounts that posted them from its website, along with their channels’ archives. The accounts belonged to three prominent Palestinian human rights groups: Al-Haq, Al Mezan Center for Human Rights, and the Palestinian Centre for Human Rights.

The move came in response to a U.S. government campaign to stifle accountability for alleged Israeli war crimes against Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank.

As US media try to whitewash his legacy in death, the world continues to grapple with the horrors he helped unleash.

Standing on a barren rocky slope overlooking the Killlavaat Alannguat mountain in southern Greenland, Tony Sage pointed across the fjord. "We'll have two pits initially," the CEO of Critical Metals said, gesturing towards the site of the proposed mine.

Backed by jagged-peaks, and covering a 15 sq km (9.3 sq miles) swathe of hillside that plunges steeply to the seashore, the Tanbreez project is among the largest of several rare earth deposits found in Greenland.

"You've got the black, the white and the red," said the Australian, picking up a colourful lump of rock. "The red is what everyone's after. That's where the rare earths are."

Six environmental protesters were convicted after they were denied the ability to put a “reasonable excuse” defence or climate facts before the jury, despite these being afforded to other activists acquitted for taking part in the same demonstration.

After an eight-day trial at Southwark crown court in London, the six Just Stop Oil (JSO) activists were found guilty of public nuisance, which carries a maximum 10-year sentence, for climbing gantries on the M25 in 2022 to demand an end to new fossil fuel projects. They will be sentenced next month.

The way their case was handled contrasts starkly with that of three other JSO activists who took part in the same demonstration on London’s orbital motorway.

They were found not guilty of public nuisance after the judge at Guildford crown court allowed them to argue a defence of reasonable excuse and prosecutors permitted them to include 12 climate facts in the agreed facts – undisputed by both prosecutors and defence lawyers – presented to the jury. The verdicts in the two cases were less than three weeks apart.

Adelheid Russenberger, a history PhD student from London, who is one of those being sentenced at Southwark crown court next month, said: “It was just a complete disparity in how the judges treated the case and, to an extent, how the prosecutors dealt with them.

This paper comes up with a really clever architectural solution to LLM hallucinations, especially for complex, technical topics. The core idea is that all our knowledge, from textbooks to wikis, is "radically compressed". It gives you the conclusions but hides all the step-by-step reasoning that justifies them. They call it a vast, unrecorded network of derivations the "intellectual dark matter" of knowledge. LLMs being trained on this compressed, conclusion-oriented data is one reason why they fail so often. When you ask them to explain something deeply, they just confidently hallucinate plausible-sounding "dark matter".

The solution the paper demonstrates is to use a massive pipeline to "decompress" all of the steps and make the answer verifiable. It starts with a "Socrates agent" that uses a curriculum of about 200 university courses to automatically generate around 3 million first-principles questions. Then comes the clever part, which is basically a CI/CD pipeline for knowledge. To stop hallucinations, they run every single question through multiple different LLMs. If these models don't independently arrive at the exact same verifiable endpoint, like a final number or formula, the entire question-and-answer pair is thrown in the trash. This rigorous cross-model consensus filters out the junk and leaves them with a clean and verified dataset of Long Chains-of-Thought (LCoTs).

The first benefit of having such a clean knowledge base is a "Brainstorm Search Engine" that performs "inverse knowledge search". Instead of just searching for a definition, you input a concept and the engine retrieves all the diverse, verified derivational chains that lead to that concept. This allows you to explore a concept's origins and see all the non-trivial, cross-disciplinary connections that are normally hidden. The second and biggest benefit is the "Plato" synthesizer, which is how they solve hallucinations. Instead of just generating an article from scratch, it first queries the Brainstorm engine to retrieve all the relevant, pre-verified LCoT "reasoning scaffolds". Its only job is then to narrate and synthesize those verified chains into a coherent article.

The results are pretty impressive. The articles generated this way have significantly higher knowledge-point density and, most importantly, substantially lower factual error rates, reducing hallucinations by about 50% compared to a baseline LLM. They used this framework to automatically generate "SciencePedia," an encyclopedia with an initial 200,000 entries, solving the "cold start" problem that plagues human-curated wikis. The whole "verify-then-synthesize" architecture feels like it could pave the way for AI systems that are able to produce verifiable results and are therefore trustworthy.

Authorities in Denmark are urgently studying how to close an apparent security loophole in hundreds of Chinese-made electric buses that enables them to be remotely deactivated.

The investigation comes after transport authorities in Norway, where the Yutong buses are also in service, found that the Chinese supplier had remote access for software updates and diagnostics to the vehicles’ control systems – which could be exploited to affect buses while in transit.

Their investigations found that remote deactivation could be prevented by removing the buses’ sim cards, but they decided against this because it would also disconnect the bus from other systems.

This is a rant plus analysis so please excuse the flowery language that might pop up.

There's this weird celebration from left Lib/mildly lefty figures, mostly online mind you this isn't that present in real life, about supposed end of "woke", these supposed champions of working class politics love that labour rights of queer people are being stripped away and smashed into the ground. They talk about labour rights but when it comes to racism in those same rights? They get squirmy. I literally hate these people, they think just because queer people are receiving backlash that means they went too far and I hate these people with my life. They have done nothing but write jacobin articles while sitting on the money they received for shilling DNC.

So, I've been having issues with voice chat on Discord and I'm looking for alternatives. In my search, I came across Mumble, here. Does anyone here have experience, or information regarding Mumble, or a better alternative to Discord with better latency? Is it relatively easy to set up? Is it safe? Any advice and help is greatly appreciated.

cross-posted from: https://scribe.disroot.org/post/5473034

France started proceedings on Wednesday to suspend online fast-fashion retailer Shein days after weapons and childlike sex dolls were found being sold on its site, marring the opening of the Chinese company's first shop in a Paris department store.

The discovery of the dolls on Shein's website by France's consumer authority on Saturday fuelled an outcry. Shein said it had sanctioned the sellers and implemented a full ban on sex dolls.

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"On the Prime Minister's instructions, the government is initiating proceedings to suspend Shein for as long as necessary for the platform to demonstrate to the authorities that all of its content is finally in compliance with our laws and regulations," the finance ministry said in a statement.

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Lawmaker Antoine Vermorel-Marques had earlier on Wednesday pointed out listings on Shein's site for weapons including brass knuckles, which are banned in France, and an axe.

"Enough is enough with the pedopornographic dolls, and now the weapons," Commerce and Small Business Minister Serge Papin said in parliament on Wednesday, before ordering the suspension of the platform.

France has experience in cracking down on online platforms - it suspended U.S. ecommerce marketplace Wish in 2021 after its consumer watchdog found dangerous products for sale on the site, only allowing it again a year and a half later.

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France has been especially robust in its reaction to Shein, and could ban it from advertising in the country under a planned law to rein in "ultra-fast" fashion that specifically targets platforms adding more than 1,000 new products a day.

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cross-posted from: https://scribe.disroot.org/post/5473034

France started proceedings on Wednesday to suspend online fast-fashion retailer Shein days after weapons and childlike sex dolls were found being sold on its site, marring the opening of the Chinese company's first shop in a Paris department store.

The discovery of the dolls on Shein's website by France's consumer authority on Saturday fuelled an outcry. Shein said it had sanctioned the sellers and implemented a full ban on sex dolls.

...

"On the Prime Minister's instructions, the government is initiating proceedings to suspend Shein for as long as necessary for the platform to demonstrate to the authorities that all of its content is finally in compliance with our laws and regulations," the finance ministry said in a statement.

...

Lawmaker Antoine Vermorel-Marques had earlier on Wednesday pointed out listings on Shein's site for weapons including brass knuckles, which are banned in France, and an axe.

"Enough is enough with the pedopornographic dolls, and now the weapons," Commerce and Small Business Minister Serge Papin said in parliament on Wednesday, before ordering the suspension of the platform.

France has experience in cracking down on online platforms - it suspended U.S. ecommerce marketplace Wish in 2021 after its consumer watchdog found dangerous products for sale on the site, only allowing it again a year and a half later.

...

France has been especially robust in its reaction to Shein, and could ban it from advertising in the country under a planned law to rein in "ultra-fast" fashion that specifically targets platforms adding more than 1,000 new products a day.

...