"This is not merely another war crime committed as part of an illegal war; it is a barbaric assault on basic human core values," Esmaeil Baqaei wrote on social media.

International humanitarian law prohibits countries from targeting civilian facilities, and dictates that a military must do everything possible to limit harm to civilians even if they are striking military targets. Photos of the facility posted by Iranian officials show that the building appears completely destroyed, with the top floor charred and blown out while destruction spilled down to the ground floor.

Since somebody shared this nice comic about manuals in games in another community, I was thinking about them myself.

My most cherished game manual was the Diablo 2 one. The way they created a little story for each single ability was such an atmospheric wonder and probably started my fascination with lore instead of story. They were also probably the main reason why I took the necromancer and started to feel bored, when necromancer are automatically evil in a setting. Get creative!

My father had Falcon 4.0 and that was "just" a technical manual in itself. 5+ cm thick and full of schematics of the cockpit. I was in awe as a child about the complexity of that thing.

Just like many other social media corporations #Reddit is planning to require biometric / ID verification* of some users.

To get ahead of this, I have prepared an alternative for everyone :)

🎉 ...and just launched our rapidly growing #DeMeta Reddit community on a journey into the #Fediverse!

People can now also DeMeta on #Lemmy:

@DeMeta

https://lemmy.world/c/DeMeta

#Privacy #News #Happy #SocialMedia #celebration #Meta #Facebook #Instagram #MetaAI #Threads #Announcement #verification #Internet

Israel’s new death penalty law, which exclusively targets Palestinians, did not come out of nowhere. It was passed down from a scaffold the British had already built on the same land, testing it on the same people under the same sky. In his study of Britain’s “pacification” of Palestine, Matthew Hughes, a military historian at Brunel University, shows how the military courts established by the British Mandate in November 1937 were built for speed above all else — a terror performed so quickly that no one had time to appeal or look away. Shaykh Farhan al-Sa’di, an elderly Qassamite revolutionary leader and one of the principal field commanders of the 1936 uprising, was captured on a Monday, tried on a Wednesday, and hanged on a Saturday. It’s the same law Israel reintroduced today.

What those courts also reveal is that British execution policy was, from the beginning, applied differently depending on who stood before the judge. Palestinians were hanged for carrying four bullets; Jews received prison sentences for firing weapons. The courts were equal on paper and unequal in practice, and everyone living under them knew it.

She did try and pull me into a play fight right after the photo, but she's very good she says!

An Israeli Instagram page has sparked anger on social media after it shared an image of a soldier using a detained, blindfolded Palestinian father to advertise its jewellery business.

The Instagram page, named ‘Shilo_Jewelry’, published on Friday the image of a Palestinian man, with his hands tied and crouched down on a sofa. In his hands is a piece of paper on which the soldier appears to have written the business’s social media handle.

The Trump administration has scaled back its plans to dismantle the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau

In the first two weeks of its war on Iran, the US spent an estimated $2.1 billion a day. It’s no wonder Donald Trump is saying that the cost of war means the federal government can’t afford to spend money to help Americans meet their basic needs.

This is the future that awaits you too within the next 6 or 7 years. The whole world is Textown btw. Don't vote for the dang cyborg after US collapses in the upcoming war after this one.

The national payment service provider NAPAS, in collaboration with Ant International and Vietcombank, has announced the launch of cross-border QR code payment services between Viet Nam and China.

Under the arrangement, Chinese tourists can use the Alipay e-wallet, an Ant International product, to scan VIETQRGlobal codes and make direct payments at merchants within NAPAS’s network in Viet Nam.

Bilateral QR code payment transactions are processed via the connectivity infrastructure between NAPAS and Ant International, supported by Vietcombank’s clearing and settlement system, enabling direct transactions in both local currencies.

The rollout comes as China continues to be one of Viet Nam’s largest source markets for international tourists.

Cross-border QR payments enhance the visitor experience by offering a familiar payment method, while also enabling businesses in retail, services, and tourism to better tap into international customer flows.

Speaking at the event, Nguyen Quang Minh, Chief Executive Officer of NAPAS, said the connection allows Chinese tourists to enjoy a familiar, convenient, and secure QR code payment experience, just as they do at home, while also creating additional growth opportunities for Vietnamese businesses.

Douglas Feagin, President of Ant International, noted that expanding cross-border payments not only serves tourists but also creates further opportunities for small and medium-sized enterprises to reach international customers.

According to NAPAS, in the near future the parties will complete the rollout of outbound payments from Viet Nam to China, allowing Vietnamese users to scan Alipay QR codes using local banking apps.

Once the two-way connection is fully established, the service is expected to significantly boost tourism and trade between the two countries.

Besides China, NAPAS has completed bilateral QR payment connectivity with Thailand, Laos, and Cambodia, and continues to expand into other markets across the region.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/45119134

So essentially Meta imagines a world, in which people don't even have to write their own messages to family and friends anymore?

Like we are not talking useless emails read by a bot here!

This may not be an actual “Wyden siren,” but it still has his name attached to it. What’s being said here isn’t nearly as ominous as this single sentence he sent to CIA leadership earlier this year

Archived version: https://archive.is/newest/https://www.techdirt.com/2026/04/03/senators-ask-tulsi-gabbard-to-tell-americans-that-vpn-use-might-subject-them-to-domestic-surveillance/

Disclaimer: The article linked is from a single source with a single perspective. Make sure to cross-check information against multiple sources to get a comprehensive view on the situation.

By a vote of 62 to 48, Israel’s Knesset approved a law Monday enshrining the death penalty as the default punishment for Palestinians who carry out an “act of terrorism” on citizens of Israel. The law does not apply to the state-backed terrorism of far-right Zionist settlers, who routinely assault and kill Palestinians in the illegally occupied West Bank.

Anyone who deliberately kills a person with the intent of “negating the existence of the state of Israel” is to be executed by hanging. The law restricts access to legal counsel for the accused in Israel’s civil courts and grants immunity to all persons involved in carrying out such state executions.

For the system of military courts established by the Zionist regime in the West Bank, under which only Palestinian residents fall, execution by hanging will be the standard punishment for “acts of terrorism,” even without a prosecutorial request. Such executions must be carried out within 90 days. The only power given to the courts in this setting is to impose a life sentence in “exceptional circumstances.” Given how rampant torture and other forms of abuse in Israel’s prison system are, such a decision would in many instances amount to a death sentence by other means.

Daggerfall is the prequel to Skyrim. I'd never played it until seeing it for free on Steam recently.

Guess from now on;

many apologies will read like: "Sorry my Asisstant-Intelligence made a mistake!" "Sorry my AI ate my homework!"

and replies like: "That sounds really tough. It's OK to feel sorry - here are 2 options for you to solve..."

🤖 - 🤖

Background: https://lemmy.world/post/45119134

So essentially Meta imagines a world, in which people don't even have to write their own messages to family and friends anymore?

Like we are not talking useless emails read by a bot here!

In two recent interviews, Andy Weir stated his support for AI. The first is in this interview with LA Review of Books, in which he says: "It’s only a matter of time before AI is able to write more entertaining, compelling, and exciting stories than any human."

"Train an AI on all the great works of literature, all the great books that people have loved, and it’ll figure out the commonalities and put together stories that are really awesome, in the same way that it can make art that’s really pretty when properly prompted."

He then said "I’m going to be out of my job eventually." When the interview challenges him on this, asking "isn’t a lot of what people enjoy about art the community experience and the person behind it? The human creator?" he responded:

"Take a tool like Photoshop. It can do all sorts of really cool things, but nobody wants to talk to the program. Nobody wants to talk to Google SketchUp about its process in rendering 3D models. People accept that there are tools that do this."

You can read the full interview here: https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/andy-weir-project-hail-mary-novel-film-interview/

In a second interview with Tom Bilyeu on YouTube, he went even further. It's a long interview, but he says that AI can already make great art and that human graphic artists will go away and be replaced by people who can "refine" AI generated art, that AI is just a tool and that it shouldn't be ridiculed, and that AI will be creating whole movies in the future that's better than what humans can make.

You can watch that interview here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZrdVpioZ5dU

Pretty abhorrent stuff, in my opinion. I enjoyed The Martian and Project Hail Mary, but coming out so in favor of art as to say it's going to be better than human created art is just gross. And to not care that it's "trained" on stealing work is ridiculous.

I need to add to this that blocking is not the answer. Actively down vote if your instance allows. The practices discussed here passively harm artists.