trompete

joined 3 years ago
[–] trompete@hexbear.net 29 points 10 months ago (9 children)

I did not have a first communion because my parents decided Catholic rituals are stupid, which means I missed out on quite a lot of cash gifts from relatives I should have gotten. I'm still bitter about it. Where's my fucking money grandma!?

So I'm not skipping my first vote, no matter how stupid liberal rituals are.

[–] trompete@hexbear.net 2 points 11 months ago

I'm a bit torn on the story actually. I'm easily cringed, and some of the dialogue made me cringe. I also think the story takes a very individualistic approach to mental health. You need to overcome stuff yourself and so on (yeah there's Theo but he's just a barely relevant acquaintance). It fits well with the gameplay, but it's a terrible message.

The gameplay is fucking great though.

[–] trompete@hexbear.net 40 points 11 months ago

Biden about abortion: There was this girl, she was killed by an immigrant.

Trump about anything: The {terrorist, criminal, schizo} immigrants are coming for your {family, job, social security}.

[–] trompete@hexbear.net 29 points 11 months ago (1 children)

The framing "Biden senile, Trump lying" gets me. It should be "Biden senile (and racist), Trump wants to lead anti-immigrant lynch mob, both lying."

Biden said so many lies and half-truths that just pointing at Trump is dishonest af. And not putting front and center how Trump basically blamed every single thing on immigrants is just irresponsible. But the fucking libs have decided that the way to beat Trump is that they too need to be extra fucking racist, so they do not want to point that out.

[–] trompete@hexbear.net 18 points 11 months ago (2 children)

Celeste is 90% off, in case anyone hasn't played that yet.

[–] trompete@hexbear.net 19 points 11 months ago

I still think the DRC coup attempt last month was funnier and worse

[–] trompete@hexbear.net 2 points 11 months ago

About twice a year, usually when I'm logging in through someone else's wifi, YouTube blocks me from logging in, until I input a phone number, so they can send me some SMS verification code. This does not make any sense.

I use this account only for YT, so the password is literally the only way to identify me as the account holder. Well, I guess they have my phone number now too. But for some reason they still ask for a phone number every time they want to send an SMS. They're literally asking for the second factor during two factor authentication. Every time. Why? How? WTF???

[–] trompete@hexbear.net 27 points 11 months ago (1 children)

It being Russian of course. This article seems to have started this recent circus: "The Nord Stream 2 Files." After this report, the Greens wanted to have a parliamentarian select committee investigate which politicians, behind the scenes, tried to help move NS2 along, even while the US was trying to stop it. The allegation is basically that Merkel, socdems, etc. should have known that Russia is categorically evil (Washington and Kiev tried to warn them!), and that the project ~~was going to be blown up~~ a bad idea from the start.

[–] trompete@hexbear.net 49 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago) (3 children)

There were articles recently about who's to blame for Nord Stream in the German media.

And by that they mean who's to blame for Nord Stream 2 ever having been created. The real crime was building the damn thing in the first place! I'm not kidding they're actually hounding politicians for having supported the project like that's some kind of treason.

[–] trompete@hexbear.net 18 points 11 months ago (1 children)

Cut out the middle man. Smart. Half my searches produce pages and pages of gibberish only an LLM would write.

[–] trompete@hexbear.net 27 points 11 months ago (2 children)

The 8.5 B is presumably for years and years of production, not per year. With this "up to" language I assume they're not paying all this up front either. I am sure it's a good deal for Rheinmetall, and they probably have guaranteed return on investment.

Some article recently said that shells are going for 8,000 € now in the West, so if you take that number it would be around 1 M shells.

[–] trompete@hexbear.net 56 points 11 months ago (8 children)

The Bundeswehr is buying 8.5 billion € worth of 155 mm shells from Rheinmetall. (n-tv | archive)

Actually it's a "framework contract" for "up to" 8.5 billion, upped from 1.3 billion previously. They want to start shipping by the beginning of 2025, and want to produce 100,000 per year by the second year, and 200,000 eventually. Mainly this is to replenish stocks in Germany, the Netherlands, Denmark and Estonia, but Germany wants to send some of it to Ukraine.

This is... not that much. I guess Ukraine can hope to get three weeks worth of extra ammunition in 2026 from that.

35
submitted 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago) by trompete@hexbear.net to c/the_dunk_tank@hexbear.net
 

You all know and love debunking. But have you heard of pre-bunking?

One approach is so-called “pre-bunking” - the targeted presentation of other perspectives and fact-based information. This involves being proactive instead of just reacting. In other words, not just trying to refute disinformation after the fact.

seen-this-one

Check out the big brain on Mr. Osintguy. I spent way too much time looking at their sponsors. You can find the funniest shit in their mission statements:

PulseOfEurope: Defend the heart of Europe – with your vote. vote

iac Berlin: Understanding and developing relational approaches in the field of philanthropy yud-rational

Relational approaches are increasingly recognized for their potential to support sustainable solutions and to nurture greater resilience while navigating complex challenges.

The good Lobby: We democratise lobbying not-good

Toguna Leadership:

What do we see as the art of leading people? To be an invested sparring partner as those we lead wrestle with the most fundamental questions, we all bring to work and life: Does my contribution matter? Do I belong (here)? Will I stay relevant and have a future (here)? agony-limitless

Front Europjeski: Literally just "European Front", I guess Eastern Front was too on the nose? freedom-and-democracy

 

Very clever puzzle game. Combines Sokoban-like block pushing with predicate logic. So for example, if you create a rule like "Walls is you", you now control the walls, or you can undo an existing "Walls is stop"-rule and the walls are now non-colliding. The rules themselves are created/destroyed by pushing three blocks together: object IS property.

 

Pro-Israel American academic cries of 'Islamo-fascist mob', claims Malaysia 'unsafe' for travellers despite spending days here

KUALA LUMPUR, April 25 — Pro-Israel academic Bruce Gilley whose events were cancelled by the Ministry of Higher Education has now accused Malaysia of being an “unsafe” country to travel to, despite spending several days here.

Gilley also accused Putrajaya of stirring an “Islamo-fascist mob” after receiving backlash for his remark claiming Malaysian leaders of advocating a “second Holocaust” for Jews.

“I have safely departed from Malaysia, one step ahead of the Islamo-fascist mob whipped up by the government there.

“This is not a safe country to travel to now. Updates to follow,” he wrote on his X account.

Despite his claim, there was no such mob protesting or physically harassing him in the country.

This guy is something else. He wrote an article called "The Case for Colonialism" (archive):

There are three ways to reclaim colonialism. One is for governments and peoples in developing countries to replicate as far as possible the colonial governance of their pasts—as successful countries like Singapore, Belize, and Botswana did. The “good governance” agenda, which contains too many assumptions about the self-governing capacity of poor countries, should be replaced with the “colonial governance” agenda. A second way is to recolonize some regions. Western countries should be encouraged to hold power in specific governance areas (public finances, say, or criminal justice) in order to jump-start enduring reforms in weak states. Rather than speak in euphemisms about “shared sovereignty” or “neo-trusteeship,” such actions should be called “colonialism” because it would embrace rather than evade the historical record. Thirdly, in some instances, it may be possible to build new Western colonies from scratch.

He wants to "reclaim" colonialism and make new colonies. Guess where he got this idea?

His views about the good side of colonialism were strongly influenced by his years as a journalist. We has worked in Hong Kong for the Far Eastern Economic Review, an English language weekly with a good audience among the political and economic elite, and a typical product of the British colonial empire, now defunct. It stood for the values which Gilley defends in his essay: Free government, free press, free market.

In Hong Kong he got to know the last British governor, Chris Patten, and he saw how this man had the guts to defend ‘the fundamental values of British colonialism’ in the face of a powerful Chinese neighbour. (source | archive)

Also in there is this hot take:

"Academics keep writing about the glorious slave revolt of Haiti (1791-1804). As if it still is the best thing that could have happened to Haiti. But it is the worst thing that happened to Haiti."

 

So... you've probably noticed that when downloading a game or doing serious p2p piracy, your internet latency suffers: websites take longer to load, video chats stutter, online games glitch.

Well, good news! You can do something about that if you have a router capable of running the free OpenWrt firmware.

The problem of downloads (or uploads) clogging up the pipes is called bufferbloat. Basically, there's a traffic jam somewhere, usually where your ISP throttles your internet speed. This means data packets have to queue up behind whatever data is clogging up the pipes, and so they get delivered with a noticeable latency.

Some boffins have looked at that and identified ways to improve the situation:

  1. Have shorter buffers, so stuff cannot queue up as much.
  2. Create express lanes where other traffic can skip the queue of Final Fantasy asset deliveries.
  3. Tell the Final Fantasy asset delivery service to slow the fuck down.

Unfortunately, the queuing policy and the size of the buffers coming into your home is controlled by the ISP, so you can't really do much about that, but you can actually do #3.

This works by setting a speed limit on the OpenWrt router in your home, which tells anyone sending too much shit your way to slow down, which means the buffer on the ISPs side never get full, and therefore no traffic jam! You won't even notice you're downloading Final Fantasy. The web browsing and video chatting will feel like there's no download going on at all. You got to set the bandwidth limit 10-20% below your actual internet speed though, which I think is well worth it.

https://openwrt.org/docs/guide-user/network/traffic-shaping/sqm

 

Robert Habeck (German economy minister, Greens) about the DFB (German Football Association) ditching Adidas and signing a sponsorship deal with Nike:

I can barely imagine the German football jersey without the three stripes. For me, Adidas and black-red-gold have always belonged together. A piece of German identity. I would have hoped for a bit more economic patriotism.

 

So there is a report going around (originally by Der Spiegel and ZDF), based on "research" by Adrian Zenz, about German companies' involvement in Uyghur oppression. I couldn't find the document that Zenz is basing this on.

In this article, though not directly related to the allegations against BASF and VW, they put a face to Uyghur oppression: Gulpiya Qazybek, a Kazakh woman from Xinjiang (left for Almaty in 2019), confesses her involvement in spying on people and even helping detain them. She says her own mother was also imprisoned.

I read through a bunch of articles based on interviews with her, the first one I could find is from 2021 (see sources at the end).

I found some discrepancies:

  • None of the pre-2024 articles mention her being complicit. The older articles are just about her mother being in prison.

  • According to Der Spiegel, her mother was 65 in 2017, but according to Eurasianet, she was 78 in 2022.

  • According to Der Spiegel (Feb 2024), the mother was released and put under house arrest in autumn of 2023. The Telegraph article (Jan 2024) does not mention this, but says "Gulpyia campaigns relentlessly for the Chinese government to free her elderly mother", implying she is still imprisoned.

  • According to Der Spiegel, two of them were responsible for monitoring 12 families. The Telegraph article, however, says "she was ordered to monitor 60 families".

  • According to Der Spiegel, the mother was sentenced to 15 years. All the other articles say 12.

  • In 2021 New East Archive article, the timeline is: The mother gets detained more than 5 years ago, turns up in the hospital several months later. They get told that she was sentenced by a court 8 months after that. In the 2024 Telegraph story, the mother gets detained by the end of 2017, then, 8 months later, she is in the hospital, and then, the following year, they are told of her sentencing. So this "8 months" figure is after the hospital in story one, but before the hospital in story two. And the detention in story one cannot possibly take place by the end of 2017 (as in story two), because it is supposedly more than 5 years before Dec 2021, i.e. 2016 or earlier.

  • In the 2021 New East Archive article, she says she "know[s] of people who sleep in their clothes in case they are detained in the night." In the 2022 Meduza story, the people sleeping in their clothes are her relatives. In the 2024 Der Spiegel article, the people doing this are farmers, but she ("we") eventually did that also. This anecdote goes from basically hearsay to something that happened to her personally.

  • In the New East Archive story, her mother tells her she is in the hospital because she was kicked in the chest during interrogation, and there is no mention of any other health condition. In the Telegraph article, her mother "had been diagnosed with a brain tumour, and her health was failing". Though the mother does does also tell her "they beat me."

Sources

 

The ~~anti~~-racist libs of "Munich is colorful" are calling for a protest against an event by a Jewish-Palestinian peace group.

germany-cool cure-for-fascism

1
arte schmarte (hexbear.net)
submitted 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago) by trompete@hexbear.net to c/chapotraphouse@hexbear.net
 

Radlibs love this cursed French-German propaganda channel

arte ultras :stalin-gun-1: :stalin-gun-2:

 

On tech forums like r/linux or hackernews, you'll frequently see posts by (presumably) old guys reminiscing about how great the user interface of their youth was.

"Oh how tasteful were these pixel art icons!"

"How utilitarian and consistent were the 3D effects!"

"How very intuitive are these menus!"

"It's all gone downhill since $PRODUCT. It's all flat and empty and useless now!"

Bollocks. These user interfaces sucked. The menus were a mess, because trying to shove 50 random items into 6 hierarchical categories, two of which are preordained to be "File" and "Edit", cannot be done in any way that isn't arbitrary and confusing. Thus you looked through all the little menus with your terrible mouse hoping to find something that sounded like it might be what you need, trying not to make a sudden move that made the submenu disappear.

Under the menu bar were between 30 and 200 tiny pixel art icons. They were just as incomprehensible as today's minimalist ones, only there were more of them and most of them looked like ass.

Oh and so many popup windows. Everything you did created a popup window. Why does the settings popup only use one third of the screen while having three tabs? Why can I see my document underneath it, half-obscured, but I can't actually click on anything there? Why do half the operations create an "OK" popup for me to click on?

Nothing about this was "functional" and yet it also looked grey and cramped and ugly. Like it was designed by C++ programmers (who by their choice of programming language have already proven that their opinion cannot be trusted, especially not in matters involving good taste), which of course it was.


Fucking brain worms, all of them.

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