Giorgia Meloni is trying to position herself as a mediator between America and Europe, which honestly I think is a fool’s errand, but it is in line with her Atlanticist foreign policy.
I would have personally preferred a real, firm, statement towards Ukraine’s support but until we’ll have people like Salvini - a Putin’s lover - and his ‘Lega Nord’ party in the government it is infeasible to expect it.

At the same time FdI (Meloni’s party) has historically been pretty pro-ukraine, so I will be very surprised if something is not going to happen in the next few days.

Remember that this quote is from Crosetto, the current Minister of Defence, just a few days ago: “Peace, however, must not mean humiliating a free people who have done nothing but die and sacrifice to defend themselves.”

I’m not in line with their national policies - by a wide margin - but currently Meloni’s party and the Partito Democratico are the only pro-ukraine voices in Italian politics with some weight

It’s depressing.

“Look, Mexico and Canada have never been good to us on trade,” he continued. “They’ve treated us very unfairly on trade, and we will be able to make that up very quickly because we don’t need the products that they have.”

Hahahahaha…oh god, comedy heaven!

…Wait, what do you mean this is not the onion?

This was all theatre where nothing in reality changed, to show how tough and intransigent this admin wants to be: the real problem is that if formally and informally allied nations start to think that the USA would really commit to bullying as a real negotiation tactic, they will start to divest from it and expand their pool of partners to make these tactics less impactful.

This could be disastrous in the long run, with decades of integration and diplomacy going in smoke. But in the short term there will be a lot of “winning”, as they keep saying. I guess.

The first Trump term was seen as a short term derailing. The second one has a complete different international impact.

Goodwill is a real diplomatic form of currency and it is getting burned at a real fast pace.

Probably I’m missing something but I’ve read the parent comment as a way to highlight the hypocrisy behind making extensive use of something while, simultaneously, wanting to bar others from using it

I don’t see an insult in there, given the choice of words and the context, but maybe I’m missing something fundamental?

Nice data, but I think we should take a broader view too:

https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/NY.GDP.MKTP.CD?end=2023&locations=RU-IN&start=2019

I semi randomly picked India because it is part of BRICS and had a similar economic trajectory: It is quite interesting playing with all those nobs and labels.

In this context I think PPP - which you showed - is a good indicator of the internal quality of living, but as far as I understand it, it has an hard time showing the difference in quality and standards of the consumer products between countries, so a dip in nominal GDP is an interesting context with the PPP adjusted rise. Less expensive things, because they are less regulated?

Aside from that Russia has almost completely pivoted to a war economy which, as far as I know, tends to give a big initial boost but it stresses and makes the real (for lack of a better term) economy crash in the long run.

What do you think about this? It is an interesting topic.

This is getting weird.

If I would generate an image with an AI and then take a photo of it, I could copyright the photo, even if the underlying art is not copyrightable, just like the leaves?

So, in an hypothetical way, I could hold a copyright on the photo of the image, but not on the image itself.

So if someone would find the model, seed, inference engine and prompt they could theoretically redo the image and use it, but until then they would be unable to use my photo for it?

So I would have a copyright to it through obscurity, trying to make it unfeasible to replicate?

This does sound bananas, which - to be fair - is pretty in line with my general impression of copyright laws.

Psychologists in shambles

Actually Obtainium is mentioned (but thank you, checking back I saw I had a typo in the github link that I had missed, and I’ve now fixed it!), but this is the first time I hear about Accrescent: is it this App store?

You are right, and I forgot to add the link to it in the opening post. I’ll edit it in!

While she has not been named in the police statement about the arrest, it is believed to be Bonnie Spofforth

This, I don’t like. If you - the newspaper, the means of information - are not sure about a name you should really refrain from using it.

It would be not the first time people get their lives ruined by some careless journalist because of a namesake or just an error.

It’s not that different from “spreading rumors”.

That aside, in this case, it is probably a rumor from an inside source. Still. Not a fan.

Silverbullet is like that. It is not an electron or native app, you have to run a server and then get to it from the browser.

TLDR it is best run with docker or podman, but IMHO it is pretty good.

It says it can lead to health issues… Not that it will… soooo…

There are multiple incidents that kind of fit, but I think you are talking about this one: Wiki article

Information declassified since 2013 has shown that one of the bombs was judged by nuclear weapons engineers at the time to have been only one safety switch away from detonation, and that it was “credible” to imagine conditions under which it could have detonated.

Russia is actively in Syria from the end of 2015 as an official belligerent, it’s not something new for Russia to fight directly while others use only proxies.

But I can see your point; still - officially - this is only a three days military operation. When that stance will finally change in the official channels, it will mean they can’t hold the mask anymore.

I find it funny that this is the first video where I’m consistently getting the “This helps us protect our community” and “Log in to confirm that you are not a bot” errors while using an alternative Frontend.

I’m sure it’s just a random coincidence, but it is still funny to me.

This was an interesting question, so I took a quick dive in the docs, it seems it has an S3 integration to help with it, and some comments on the various supported services

More info here: https://owncast.online/docs/storage/

Still, depending on the chosen provider and the amount of viewers, it could be quite costly

I feel there’s some kind of miscommunication going on here.

Probably I’m not understanding what you are putting forward, but to be clear: They are not doing this because they want to. They are doing it because they are forced to do it by the DMA.
It’s true that allegedly they were working on some kind of interoperability layer already. For years now. But no evidence of it being more than lip service to avoid being regulated has ever surfaced - as far as I know.

Which would have been in line with your “Do Nothing”.

as an unwilling Whatsapp user the ability to migrate without having to convince all my social circles to do anything but check a checkbox sounds like a huge step forward.

That’s the point. I feel it will not be a “simple checkbox”, and they will make it the most obnoxious process they can using the Best Dark Patterns the industry has to offer.

Already the general public is not interested in the alternatives or the concept of interoperability - wanting something that Just Works™ - putting in front even the smallest step (and some scary text!) will make the percentage of willing people become even lower.
And that’s not all. As it is portraited in the article by the Threema’s spokeperson it is pretty clear that Meta will just try to make the maintenance of the communication layer as cumbersome as they can - both technically and bureaucratically.
They are explicitly the ones keeping the reins of the standard, the features, the security model, the exchanged data and who, how and when will be approved.

So from one side if they make it hard and scary enough to tank the use rate, they will have the excuse of not being there enough people to give priority to fix it or add features, and from the other side if maintaining the interoperability will be difficult and time consuming enough, the people and businesses from the alternatives or wrappers will not have the incentive to do or keep doing it for the long haul. As we can already see in the article.

Is it better than nothing? Sure, probably. Will it be a slow cooking, easy to break, easy to get excluded from, just bare minimum to comply to the letter but not the spirit of the law? I feel that’s a pretty good bet to make.

Let’s be clear: I will be extremely happy if all the red flags and warning bells that I saw in the article will just end up being figments of my imagination. But yes, I’m very pessimistic - maybe even too much - when I see these kind of corporate speech and keywords.

“One of the core requirements here, and this is really important, is for users for this to be opt-in,” says Brouwer. “I can choose whether or not I want to participate in being open to exchanging messages with third parties. This is important, because it could be a big source of spam and scams.”

Let me translate this for you: "We will make users hop on the most cumbersome, frustrating and inefficient way we can think of to enable interoperability. And making it defaulted to off will mean people using other apps will need to find other channels to ask for it to be enabled on our users’ end, making it worthless.

And don’t forget: we will put a bunch of scary warnings, and only allow to go all in, with no middle ground or granularity!"

Great stuff, thank you. I can’t wait.

“We don’t believe interop chats and WhatsApp chats can evolve at the same pace,” he says, claiming it is “harder to evolve an open network” compared to a closed one.

Ah, so they are going for the Apple’s approach with iMessage and Android sms. Cool, cool.

I hope my corporate-to-common translator is broken, because this does just sound bad.

Yeah. GDPR should have been implemented as a mandatory part of HTML or even HTTP that interacts with a builtin browser feature.

Well, it kind of is. The Do Not Track header has recently seen a court win in Germany (source):

It turned out that the judge agreed with vzbv, ruling that the social media giant is no longer allowed to warn users it doesn’t respect DNT signals. That’s because, under GDPR, the right to opt out of web tracking and data collection can also be exercised using automated procedures.

And it is basically the same in California too Source

GPC is a valid do-not-sell-my-personal-information signal according to the California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA), which stipulates that websites are legally required to respect a signal sent by users who want to opt-out of having their personal data sold.