the experiences around Helene and Milton are just an extreme continuation of a trend where the public is increasingly getting its information from extremist figures online rather than experts

Sadly, all true.

I’ve had to remind people several times that “if you go reading Twitter, please put on your intelligence analyst glasses”. To find a grain of truth in that truckload of dust.

/me listening to the sound of a WinXP virtual machine booting under Debian Linux

They can shoot their foot with a grenade launcher next. I’m already out of range.

Having once worked on an open source project that dealt with providing anonymity - it was considered the duty of the release engineer to have an overview of all code committed (and to ask questions, publicly if needed, if they had any doubts) - before compiling and signing the code.

On some months, that was a big load of work and it seemed possible that one person might miss something. So others were encouraged to read and report about irregularities too. I don’t think anyone ever skipped it, because the implications were clear: “if one of us fails, someone somewhere can get imprisoned or killed, not to speak of milder results”.

However, in case of an utility not directly involved with functions that are critical for security - it might be easier to pass through the sieve.

Say you’re trying to defend against something like a Shahed-136. It can hit pretty much anywhere in Ukraine. You can’t stick an AA gun on everything that Russia might consider trading a Shahed-136 for.

As far as I know, the routine in the current war is - the AA gun is on a truck that moves 80 km/h, the drone comes in slower than 300 km/h, one or multiple truck crews position themselves on likely vantage points for intercepting, and the rest is luck.

Both of you are right.

It’s difficult, but how difficult depends on the task you set. If the task is “maintain manually initiated target lock on a clearly defined object on an empty field, despite the communications link breaking for 10 seconds” -> it is “give a team of coders half a year” difficult. It’s been solved before, the solution just needs re-inventing and porting to a different platform.

If it’s “identify whether an object is military, whether it is frienly or hostile, consider if it’s worth attacking, and attack a camouflaged target in a dense forest”, then it’s currently not worth trying.

None of these countries would permit an abortion at 28 weeks, let alone let her keep the babies remains.

The article sheds no light on why she needed a late-term abortion. If something is permissible and publicly funded, chances are a person gets it done early, in a clinic, without hesitation. In case of wanting an abortion, delay is harmful, having to travel, smuggle something or fear something (or gather money) is harmful. Also note: those countries have a separate schedule for normal and exceptional conditions. Which is generally not possible in a political environment that has banned abortion (some cities in Nebraska - yes, in the US, cities can regulate abortion, very strange for me). Some examples that I know of:

Estonia:

• under normal conditions, 12 weeks
• under exceptional conditions, 22 weeks (risk to health, severe foetal disease, raising the child is prevented by health or sanity, the pregnant is under 15 or over 45)

Finland:

• under normal conditions, 12 weeks
• under exceptional conditions, 20…24 weeks (foetal abnormality gives a limit of 24 weeks)

Latvia:

• under normal conditions, 12 weeks
• for medical reasons, 22 weeks

Thanks for telling - and I wish lots of boring days for new admins. :)

'cause interesting days would mean folks can’t behave

I’m convinced 99% people posting that same blog post that sells opinions as facts, haven’t actually lived through it.

I’m a person who lost contact with people on Facebook while using Pidgin. This unfortunate development in ancient history actually forced me to briefly register on Facebook to maintain contact - because they couldn’t be convinced to adopt Pidgin and Pidgin users were a minority (as were users of other XMPP messenger apps, at least separately counted).

Prognosis: Facebook will play along to gain mass, then go incompatible. They will do this at a moment when they think users will gravitate towards their side of the fence.

Advise: never open that door, there be dragons on the other side.

We should remember what they have already done, and expect more of the same, because they haven’t changed. Justified grudges are perfectly fine to hold. A corporation that has harmed society by supporting polarization in many countries (formation of echo chambers, targeted advertising) should be boycotted in retribution.

Remembering what Facebook did with XMPP (initially allowed their users to speak to other messengers’ users, then got sloppy with compatibility, causing great workload to unrelated app developers, and finally, having accumulated enough mass for Messenger, stopped supporting XMPP) - Facebook should be avoided like fire.

Facebook is also bad for society, allowing manipulation (targeted advertizing), aggregating great amounts of user data (harming privacy) and prioritizing user engagement regardless of the social cost (a hateful conflict generates more clicks than cat photos).

Mods can leave a community private. Reddit can replace mods. But replacing mods is not a trivial process - you either have to pay them, or they have to be interested in doing that.

At long last, if agreement cannot be reached and Reddit decides to show their kingly status (referring to their naming mods as landed gentry :P ), Reddit might establish a standard way of mods being elected.

Alas, most subreddits aren’t invested enough in the process of delegating power to hold regular mod elections, and even those that do (r/anarchism comes to mind), require proof (of work / effort / participation) to qualify. Reddit would have to provide a mechanism.

Since they obviously won’t, apparently they just threaten protesting subreddits with administrative takeover. A great way to ram the platform into ground. :o