Art by Ryan Rds. - https://bsky.app/profile/rdstonowhere.bsky.social

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ca/post/65421950

Archive: [ https://archive.is/OTfZe ]

cross-posted from: https://hexbear.net/post/8607436

China is home to some of the most brutal deserts on earth, stretching across 2.6 million square kilometers of land so dry, so scorching, and so hostile that billions of tons of sand swallow entire farms and villages every single year. For decades, the desert kept winning, advancing into productive land, burying roads within hours, and sending massive dust storms across East Asia every spring. For a country with 1.4 billion people to feed, losing farmland to sand wasn't just an environmental problem. It was a threat to the entire nation.

But what China did next is one of the most extraordinary stories of the 21st century. Starting with nothing more than dry straw pushed into shifting sand, China launched the largest land reclamation project in human history, planting 66 billion trees, investing over 50 billion dollars, and engineering an entirely new kind of farming system in the middle of the world's most unforgiving terrain. Today those same dead deserts produce 30 million tons of food every year, power hundreds of thousands of homes with solar energy, and even raise fish in a place with almost no water. This is the full story of how they did it.

Inspired by Osamu Tezuka's classic "Princess Knight," THE RIBBON HERO follows Sapphire as she overcomes loss and trauma to protect those she holds dear.

https://www.themoviedb.org/movie/1679730-the-ribbon-hero

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cross-posted from: https://lemmy.zip/post/64949868

Per my last post, (which can be found here: https://lemmy.zip/post/53113975), I continued to mess around with a mobile broadband modem, and got it working! With a caveat... it only works when plugged into wall power. The battery I have does not supply enough power to fully enable the modem through USB power, due the raspberry pi being very power hungry. Unfortunately, this seemingly simple problem is actually a larger problem that seems to only be solved by an overly complicated solution: designing a custom battery controller PCB that responds to the pi5's (or ideally, a different processor entirely) needs more appropriately.

Take a look at the state of the device here:

Last time I posted here, many interested folks responded with great ideas and feedback. Fortunately, one of the comments lead me to the project that would ultimately end this project in its current state. Link to that comment here: https://lemmy.zip/post/53113975/22779544

Its flaws are visible. While the device has personality, it lacks ease of use. These days I use it as a "cyberdeck"/field debugging computer, and I use it with a small controller-sized Riitek keyboard, because the screen's touch capability is on the fritz, likely because of the poor design choice to leave the screen's ribbon cable partially exposed.

This leads me to the conclusion: this project is falling into "hobby" or more accurately, unsupported status. I like the device for my personal use, and I may update the design in the future for my own purposes, and release it for free for public use, though I don't imagine there will be a huge amount of interest in building this device considering the skyrocketing cost of Pi devices nowadays. There is a more reasonable path forward, and I alluded to it earlier: custom PCBs. That's where the SPIRIT project comes in: https://github.com/SPIRIT-org/SPIRIT

You can see in one of the pictures above, the SPIRIT project is designing a phone that can be completely replicated at home. Well, once they get there it will be. I've exchanged brief communications with the individual running the project, Jan, and while he hasn't stated that these projects are linked in any way, I'd like to think that the SPIRIT project carries forward the values and goals of the project I started. If you were at all interested in my project, give the SPIRIT project github a like or favorite.

Take a look at the v3lectronics youtube channel where Jan livestreams work on the SPIRIT project: https://www.youtube.com/@V_Electronics

The spirit github link again: https://github.com/SPIRIT-org/SPIRIT

Please contribute if you have any level of knowledge to contribute! These projects thrive on the careful contributions of other humans across the world!

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/47372299

A handful of anonymous bots have taken over fact-checking on X.

This isn’t hyperbole. In the first three weeks of May, just eight AI contributors wrote 50.3% of all visible Community Notes on the platform.

When the program launched five years ago, X positioned it as a way to harness the knowledge of users to add context and corrections to tweets. It described Community Notes as a way to “broaden the range of voices” fighting misinformation.

Then, in July 2025, X started allowing people to use automation to mass-generate and submit AI notes. That new feature made it inevitable that human writers would eventually be overtaken by bots. But it happened faster than I predicted.

cross-posted from: https://infosec.pub/post/47040797

More than 170 U.S. citizens had been caught up in the Trump administration’s maximalist immigration crackdown, ProPublica reported last October. That was before the brutal killings of queer mother Renee Good and ICU nurse Alex Pretti by federal immigration agents in Minnesota earlier this year.

...

Bazan, a U.S. citizen from Houston, Texas, was assaulted by ICE agents as they pursued his undocumented father. The two were stopping at a McDonald’s for breakfast to celebrate Bazan making his high school varsity team, when multiple unmarked vehicles pulled up beside their family’s van.

“Armed men with masks jumped out and started banging on the windows,” Bazan testified. “They never identified themselves or explained why we were stopped. We didn’t know who these men were. I started recording on my phone. One of the unmarked cars rammed into our car multiple times. I even felt our car lift.”

Outside the van, Bazan ran to help his dad, when some of the armed men grabbed him, he said.

Hi guys, I obtained ~~15~~ 16 Fanatical Steam keys for games that I'm not going to play So I thought, why not give other people a chance to get them for free?

They were all unopened, so they should work as far as I know.

I will list the games down below. If you're interested, please PM me with the game that you want. (One per person). I'll send you the Steam key.

(The ones with a checkmark are already taken except for one out of two copies of Pumped BMX Pro.)

• Pumped BMX Pro [✅ 1/2]
• Rebel Galaxy [✅]
• Repella Fella []
• Golden Light []
• Blind Fate: Edo no Yami [✅]
• Orwell: Ignorance is Strength [✅]
• Danger Scavenger [✅]
• Nomad Survival [✅]
• Golf Gang [✅]
• Syberia II [✅]
• Alfred Hitchcock - Vertigo [✅]
• 10 Second Ninja X [✅]
• Hacknet [✅]
• Smoke and Sacrifice [✅]
• Silver Chains []

And for those who wanted to claim Pumped BMX Pro, you're lucky I have another key.

Original title (LT): Skyrybos karo metu (Divorce During War)

Vilnius 2022. High-flying executive Marija (Žygimantė Elena Jakštaitė) chooses the worst possible moment for an honest conversation with her husband Vytas (Marius Repšys) about divorcing - just one day before Russia’s invasion of Ukraine goes into full scale. Now they must navigate the process of separation as it collides with a refugee and mid-life crisis.

https://www.themoviedb.org/movie/1529024-skyrybos-karo-metu

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