Yeah they are trying to become indistinguishable from the AfD, and they’re also increasing surveillance, repression, censorship and propaganda, which to some degree target the AfD (among others), because what’s important isn’t what someone is doing, but what’s in their heart of hearts.

The signal/disturbance caused by you arriving travels at light speed, and so will theoretically affect anything within a distance of c times time since arrival. While I wouldn’t expect this to affect macroscopic things too much immediately, those lottery machines are literally designed to be chaotic and affected by the slightest changes. But who knows how chaotic it actually is. Like, could you hook up whole bunch of cameras and lasers and gear like that, measure the balls and their tractories and all that and predict the outcome? Or would you need like microscopic level detail to predict it? Because then I guess even just some molecules being a bit out of place could change the outcome, and that could maybe happen within moments of you arriving.

Also, I think (and this is a bit unclear to me because the quantum physics nerds seem either confused, not in agreement, or incapable of explaining this clearly), the usual believe is that actual randomness happens. So I guess just a do-over, without even changing the initial condition (i.e. you arriving), might change the outcome of the lottery. I will say this seems stupid and wrong to me, but what do I know.

This is AI slop. The script is the sort of incoherent rambling an LLM would produce; the topic is like some amalgamation of popular youtube clickbait topics; the video clips, at least in part, are obviously AI generated; and the dude probably hides his mouth because otherwise, it would be super obvious that it’s actually an AI voice talking.

I watched this originally a bit groggy and it almost felt like I was having a psychotic break. This should have a CW for possibly inducing existential angst about being the only conscious human being in existence, and the comments here aren’t helping. I’m starting to think that hexbear is an elaborate AI-fueled prank at my expense.

hell no

Found this, don’t know where it should go I guess it’s news

https://old.reddit.com/r/UkraineRussiaReport/comments/1jnjov7/ru_pov_athlete_from_russia_at_the_olympic_games/

Can’t upload the picture for some reason. No content warning, except it’s still sad in a way.

German Greens want to force people of all ages to serve the state in a new Freedom Service™. Either military or some community service.

“It is time to ask the question: What can you do for you country?”, Schulze said to Deutsche Presse-Agentur. The threats are growing.

“In order make our society more robust, to defend our freedom, and to strengthen cooperation, we need everybody. The Freedom Service is a collective project for Germany, by all and for all. Through the Freedom Service, we will to bring together generations and milieus, strengthen our society, and defend what is important to us.”

I’m not making this up btw.

They’re no longer in government of course, that’s just their contribution to the debate about re-introducing conscription.

Germany, (including “Die Linke” in Bremen and Mecklenburg-Vorpommern) voted “yes” to war loans for more arms.

https://xcancel.com/jungewelt/status/1903029173729263732

He also gave an interview to Süddeutsche Zeitung, published yesterday (in German). Shitty hot takes include:

But we must not forget that the origin of the Enlightenment is humility. Humility in the sense that Europe is the only great civilization to expose itself to permanent self-criticism.

So humble.

The worst thing in Trump’s eyes is for Europe to say: yes, we should significantly increase our military spending. That would be an example of principled pragmatism. Of course I am in favor of peace. But there are situations in which the only way to make peace a little more likely is to arm ourselves and prepare for a possible war.

So doing want Trump says he wants (increase the military budget) is actually the best way to own him, because he doesn’t actually want that. Also why? Then something something “principled pragmatism”, probably just trying to confuse people with that. I hope he chokes on this sophistry.

At the end of the interview he starts blaming migrants for not wanting to be integrated.

Does UNRWA still do anything in Gaza?

The video of Musk speaking (via video call) at the AfD rally is straight Nazi shit. It’s worse than I though it would be, I imagined he would try to be a lot more crypto-fascisct, but I guess we’re past that now.

They probably were asking about the first name, which is Hebrew. But with the answer “from Israel” she emphasized her Israeli identity I think. I might react with laugh/snort if someone professed their Zionist political ideology when that wasn’t the question.

A host at a German public broadcaster allegedly had visceral reaction of disgust, when a guest, an Israeli-German cyber-security professor, said her name was “from Israel”. First of all, there is no such thing as being “from Israel”, and what’s an Israeli name anyway?

Only a Zionist would answer this way, I thought, and yeah, she has written an article about how “Israel must also defend itself on the Internet”.

The host is probably going to get fired, she’s Turkish-German so they’ll count that against her.

I guess you moved it before it was sitting in your corner? Some connection might have came lose during transport. Try re-plugging all the cables and and maybe even the other components. Though it’s probably related to power, otherwise it would likely do something. It’s possible though that it’s actually broken. Since it doesn’t power on that would either be the power supply or the mainboard most likely.

I mean you get updates from your distro. So in that sense every distro is equally backdoored. If some agents or criminals can get at the infrastructure & signing keys (or the people responsible for those), they could distribute backdoors through the update mechanism. I don’t recall this exact thing ever happening, but, for example, someone hacked Mint’s website some years ago and replaced to ISOs with backdoored ones.

Also, there are what’s called remote code execution (RCE) vulnerabilities, those are found regularly in all kinds of software, but those look like (and most likely almost always are) honest mistakes. Anyone with the right know-how can exploit such an RCE in a vulnerable system. We do know that government agencies pay people to find RCEs, or buy them on the black market, and then keep them secret as a potential offensive cyber weapon to break into systems.

Accidents, not Russian sabotage, behind undersea cable damage, officials say (WaPo) | archive

I am very surprised by this. No one saw that coming. Nevertheless:

At a Baltic summit in Helsinki on Jan. 14, NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte announced plans for new patrols by frigates, aircraft, submarine satellites and a “small fleet of naval drones” designed to detect undersea sabotage.

Mission accomplished I guess.

I think too much fibre can result in both constipation or diarrhea under the right circumstances.

White rice or white bread would be my guess.

I have heard vinegar is bad for rubber (silicone?) seals which is why the acidic machine cleaning stuff is usually citric acid. I don’t think using vinegar once is that bad, but maybe don’t do it in the future.

I don’t have anything else to add, but good luck!

Wait, if the game volume is 1%, and the system volume is 50%, shouldn’t the resulting volume be 0.5% of maximum? Do you have that amp setup from Back to the Future?

Sorry, I’m joking. To be more helpful, this reminds me an old problem PulseAudio introduced (and then disabled) on Linux some years ago, it was a feature called “flat volumes”. The idea was to avoid the need to have two volume adjustments (if only one application used the sound card), one a per-application one (done in software) and then another from the sound card, which is wasteful and can result in lowered audio quality if one is set very low. So they got rid of the per-application volume in the case that only one application was playing audio.

But the result would be that, if an application (like a game) changed it’s volume (by setting the application volume), it would in effect set the hardware volume, resulting in this kind of sudden loud noises even if you previously had your system volume set all the way down.

Maybe on your system it works similar to this “flat volumes” feature and maybe that can be disabled somehow?

Notice the flags are just copy and paste jobs. The artist wants the audience to understand that war propaganda is just an oversaturated, cheap reproduction of a simple template. That the choir of voices all telling you the same thing is nothing but an illusion. It’s all just one voice, copy and pasted all over.

The Simpsons seemingly exist inside a void, staring blankly at you as you stare blankly into the emptiness of their expressions. It is frightening. Confronting! It dares the viewer to face what he may not want to: That there is nothing there! It’s all a lie.

Once you look beyond Marge, the focal point, you notice that something is not quite right. The drawing becomes cruder towards the edges, as propaganda tends to look when you look more closely into the details and circumstances. This also creates the impression (quite deliberately) that the artist gave up on this assignment, his professional self-respect, and life in general. Like he wants to say: Please Xi Jinping! The Simpsons yearn for freedom!