Bluesky is experimenting with a dislike button and changes to replies as a way to improve the quality of interactions on its platform.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/38395054

October 29, 2025
[from the BellyOfTheBeast news/#video collective]

Washington has spent weeks trying to strong-arm the world into voting against Cuba's annual resolution at the UN opposing the U.S. embargo. It didn't work. See more details about the vote below.

Meanwhile, as Hurricane Melissa tore through the island, Belly of the Beast journalist Liz Oliva Fernández has been on the ground in Santiago de Cuba reporting on the storm's impact and the resilience of those in its path.

In other news:

• Red state farmers want to trade with Cuba
• Cuban deported from U.S. to Eswatini goes on hunger strike

Maine Senate candidate Graham Platner says his six months in Afghanistan in 2018 as a State Department security contractor revealed how America’s wars had become “a corporate money-grab.” He clarified he never worked for Erik Prince’s Blackwater but for a hedge-fund-owned successor that inherited its State Department contracts. “They used guys like me with these backgrounds to meet the contract requirements so they could pay us bare minimum and walk away with the balance.”

Platner said his job mostly involved driving for the U.S. ambassador’s security team. “We were barely leaving the Green Zone… All I did was lift weights and play video games. I got huge and I played a lot of Far Cry,” he said.

He quit after six months and went home to farm oysters.

Admin page. My parents watching this movie. Wondering why some of the watching progress line is blue and some of it is orange/reddish?

There are tons of women who enjoy the damsel in distress trope and think it's harmless fun.

There are also tons of women who think it perpetuates sexist stereotypes against women.

Both groups of women's opinions are equally valid.

Does this not prove that the statement is independent?

Protestival at Fisherman’s Bend shut down the harms dealer Leonardo for the day. We brought DJs, a crafting station, hot meals and dancing aquatic animals. Disrupting the war machine never felt so good.

#beatsnotbombs #makeprotestrealagain #shutitdown #stoparmingisrael #demilitarise #decolonise #reimagine

The planet can be well again, if we want it.

The 2020 study published in Computers in Human Behavior analyzed the top 100 subreddits — the most influential communities on the entire platform. Their finding? 15% of these subreddits contained content likely posted by bots or corporate trolls specifically designed to promote companies or organizations.

Fifteen percent.

That means if you’re subscribed to ten popular subreddits, statistically, one or two of them are regularly being used to manipulate you.

And these trolls aren’t just posting “Buy Our Product!” spam. They’re smarter than that. They post positive news articles about companies. They create seemingly organic discussions. They upvote each other’s content to game Reddit’s algorithm. The goal is to create an illusion of consensus, to make you think everyone loves this brand or agrees with this corporate talking point.

You see a thread praising a company with thousands of upvotes and think, “Wow, people really love this.” But do they? Or did a team of sock puppet accounts create that perception from scratch?

Monsanto’s PR campaigns are a textbook case. Documents and investigative reporting have shown that the company’s agencies actively monitored online discussions about glyphosate, pesticides, and GMOs. They targeted permaculture bloggers, organic gardeners, and independent scientists, labeling critical voices as “anti-science” or “radical,” and used coordinated sockpuppet accounts to push favorable articles and drown out dissenting opinions.

Similar tactics were reported on Reddit, where users discussing glyphosate or Monsanto products were suddenly met with highly upvoted counter-comments echoing the corporate talking points.

Strangely enough, I remember when I had a Feddit account somebody replied to me in defense of Roundup when I shared the Empire Files video ‘Monsanto, America’s Monster’. They actually implied that Roundup is as safe as table salt.

And here I was waiting to get unplugged, or maybe finding a Nokia phone that received a call.

The timing of this being posted right before Melbourne Cup day is obviously intentional. It's the few days of the year most Australians pay any attention to horse racing.

This was a brutal read. I knew horses and jockeys died occasionally, I didn't realize how frequently horses died. I also had no idea how many people worked in the industry, nor how much money was in it.

I was watching this video of a live chicken trapped on a moving truck and thought it was strange that it's not possible to say anything to them even when circumstances might warrant it. All we got is honking and waving. There could be a touchscreen interface with a map of nearby vehicles. It could be voice controllable or the passenger could do it for safety.

Looking for some advice / recommendations / considerations on running OPNsense on bare metal vs virtualized, and if virtualized how best to do so.

I currently have OPNsense running bare metal on a Protectli FW6E Vault, with the following specs:

• Intel i7-8550U CPU @ 1.80GHz
• 120GB mSATA (1% utilization)
• 16GB RAM (6.5% utilization)
• 6 Gigabit Ethernet NIC ports

The Vault running OPNsense is the primary firewall and router, any wireless devices connect through a dumb AP running OpenWRT. Connected over Ethernet I have a RPi running HomeAssistant OS (would probably also move to virtual if that's the chosen direction) as well as a TrueNAS setup.

How much of a performance hit would be expected running in some sort of container vs the current bare metal setup? Are there any other concerns with running the main firewall / router virtually vs bare metal to take into account?

https://archive.ph/tYPtE

Sung by an American singer. I can't remember any of the actual lyrics, it was a pop song with R&B elements, the guitar instrument is this electronic sound and the guitar parts are sudden and spaced 2-3 seconds apart and only a second long. It's a very vocally intense song and the singer sounds like she's angry or shouting. Then there's this really angelic/harmonic part where she goes oooaaaaahhhaaaaaaahhh and then the guitar part like in the intro kicks in again

It's driving me nuts lol

The smart vacuum cleaner was remotely bricked for not collecting data.

In the next ~6 months I’m going to entirely overhaul my setup. Today I have a NUC6i3 running Home Assistant OS, and a NUC8i7 running OpenMediaVault with all the usual suspects via Docker.

I want to upgrade hardware significantly, partially because I’d like to bring in some local LLM. Nothing crazy, 1-8B models hitting 50tps would make me happy. But even that is going to mean a beefy machine compared to today, which will be nice for everything else too of course.

I’m still all over the place on hardware, part of what I’m trying to decide is whether to go with a single machine for everything or keep them separate.

Idea 1 is a beefy machine and Proxmox with HA in a VM, OMV or TrueNAS in another, and maybe a 3rd straight Debian to separate all the Docker stuff. But I don’t know if I want to add the complexity.

Idea 2 would be beefy machine for straight OMV/TrueNAS and run most stuff there, and then just move HA over to the existing i7 for more breathing room (mostly for Frigate, which could also separate to other machine I guess).

I hear a lot of great things about Proxmox, but I’m not sold that it’s worth the new complexity for me. And keeping HA (which is “critical” compared to everything else) separated feels like a smart choice. But keeping it on aging hardware diminishes that anyway, so I don’t know.

Just wanting to hear various opinions I guess.

This allows America to rearm and continue murdering innocent people. America's military was getting ready to resupply when the rare earth ban came into effect. Why even negotiate with America anymore. They were in a winning position and they just gave it up. China can go without America but America can't go without China. And they didn't even remove all of the tarifs just some of them. China could have gotten far more for that deal if they even wanted to make it. It just feels like a big mistake.

Here is the unlisted demo video from their newsletter: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UP_TBaKODlw

Key bits:

After acquiring Serif last year, Canva is now relaunching its Adobe-rivalling Affinity creative suite as a new all-in-one app for photo editing, vector illustration, and page layouts. Unlike Affinity’s previous Designer, Photo, and Publisher software, which were a one-time $70 purchase, Canva’s announcement stresses that the new Affinity app is “free forever” and won’t require a subscription.

Affinity’s one-time-purchase model was one of the most appealing things about its older software offerings, standing in stark contrast to Adobe’s controversial subscription-based creative suite. While Canva’s own design platform can be used for free, it also locks most of its capabilities behind subscription paywalls, which raised concerns that Affinity would adopt Canva’s subscription-based approach following the acquisition. The company is trying to put those fears to rest for good by repeatedly mentioning how “free” the new Affinity app is, but the AI integrations will likely be met with some resistance by creatives who oppose the technology.

I'm glad they didn't add any subscription pricing, and while I don't know if they'll actually be able to fund it through the optional AI subscriptions alone, at least it can be used offline for those who want any AI things. Now my only complaint is the lack of a solid Linux client.

"I think the big companies are betting on it causing massive job replacement by AI, because that's where the big money is going to be."

Feel like if it was another country they'd be sanctions or something already.