Lemmy Today

cross-posted from: https://lemm.ee/post/60886715

Schleswig-Holstein, one of Germany’s 16 states, on Wednesday confirmed plans to move tens of thousands of systems from Microsoft Windows to Linux. The announcement follows previously established plans to migrate the state government off Microsoft Office in favor of open source LibreOffice.

Let me be the First to speak it out: Trump has ended the American Empire. He has ended Europe's blind acceptance of American superpower.

America will never again be what it was. That so called beacon of hope that Public relations Geniuses invented and never really existed.

So, yes thank you Mr. Trump for helping us to wake up and thank you for ending the American empire.

Archived

[...]

"There are 155 Chinese citizens who are fighting against Ukrainians on the territory of Ukraine," President Volodymyr Zelensky confirmed this information to journalists on April 9.

"We are collecting information, we believe that there are many more."

"For these 155 there is passport data, where they are from, their Chinese documents, age, etc," Zelensky added.

According to Zelensky, Chinese soldiers had been serving with Russia's 70th Separate Guards Motor Rifle Brigade, the 255th Rifle Division, and others.

A day before, President Volodymyr Zelensky announced the capture of two Chinese citizens fighting for Russia in eastern Donetsk Oblast. The group of six Chinese nationals clashed with Ukrainian forces, and two are now being held by the Security Service of Ukraine (SBU), he said.

The documents, obtained by the Kyiv Independent, list the names, personal data, place of service and position in the Russian army of other Chinese nationals.

[...]

One of the captured soldiers claimed he paid 300,000 rubles (roughly $3,000) to a middleman in China to join the Russian military in exchange for the promise of citizenship, Ukraine's Luhansk military unit press service told Ukrainian Pravda earlier in the day.

"Beijing knows about this. Russians distribute advertising videos about recruitment through Chinese social networks," Zelensky said.

[...]

Watch the full clip guys, it was a decent laugh in these times.

Taken yesterday in Prospect Park, Reading, UK - I quite like it for all I'd accidentally knocked it to F13 from the F9 it should have been

Canon R5 MkII + RF200-800mm

KeShaun Pearson took a seat in front of the Shelby county board of commissioners in Memphis, Tennessee, on Wednesday morning. In the gallery behind him, a small group of people held up signs that said “Our air = our lives” and “Our water, Our future.” With a manner-of-fact demeanor, Pearson addressed the commissioners.

“I’m here because today we’ve learned that xAI is using 35 methane gas burning turbines,” said Pearson, who is the director of the advocacy group Memphis Community Against Pollution. “They have submitted a permit to our Shelby county health department for 15, yet they are using double that amount with no permit.”

It’s been known that xAI, Elon Musk’s artificial intelligence company, has been using around 15 portable generators to help power its massive supercomputer in Memphis without yet securing permits. But new aerial images obtained by the Southern Environmental Law Center show that number is now far higher. The group says these gas turbines combined can generate around 420MW of electricity, enough to power an entire city.

“xAI has essentially built a power plant in South Memphis with no oversight, no permitting, and no regard for families living in nearby communities,” Amanda Garcia, senior attorney for the Southern Environmental Law Center, said in a statement. “These dozens of gas turbines are doing significant harm to the air Memphians breathe every day.”

Some of the allegations in the documents seen by the BBC include that Tate:

• Raped and strangled a woman who was working for his webcam business in 2015

• Assaulted another woman who was also working for his webcam business at the same time

• Strangled both of the above women so often that they developed red petechiae - spots from burst capillaries - in their eyes, a common side effect of asphyxia

• Told a third claimant "I'm just debating whether to rape you or not" before raping and strangling her

• Strangled a fourth claimant, whom we are calling Sienna, during sex until she lost consciousness, and then continued to have sex with her

US Vice President JD Vance says he is shocked to hear that penguins living on The Heard and McDonald Islands 1500km north of Antarctica are yet to show gratitude for Donald Trump’s decision to reverse tariffs in the region.

In an interview today, Vance said he was yet to hear anything at all from the island’s birdlife about the tariffs.

“You would think that they would be happy about this announcement. But yet we’ve heard absolutely nothing from them. Not a squeak. How ungrateful can you be?” Vance said.

Normally, videos over at The Signal Path channel on YouTube have a certain vibe, namely teardowns and deep dives into high-end test equipment for the microwave realm. And while we always love to see that kind of content, this hop into the world of cryogenics and liquid oxygen production shows that [Shahriar] has other interests, too.

Of course, to make liquid oxygen, one must first have oxygen. While it would be easy enough to get a tank of the stuff from a gas supplier, where’s the fun in that? So [Shahriar] started his quest with a cheap-ish off-the-shelf oxygen concentrator, one that uses the pressure-swing adsorption cycle we saw used to great effect with DIY O2 concentrators in the early days of the pandemic. Although analysis of the machine’s output revealed it wasn’t quite as capable as advertised, it still put out enough reasonably pure oxygen for the job at hand.

The next step in making liquid oxygen is cooling it, and for that job [Shahriar] turned to the cryocooler from a superconducting RF filter, a toy we’re keen to see more about in the future. For now, he was able to harvest the Stirling-cycle cryocooler and rig it up in a test stand with ample forced-air cooling for the heat rejection end and a manifold to supply a constant flow of oxygen from the concentrator. Strategically placed diodes were used to monitor the temperature at the cold end, a technique we can’t recall seeing before. Once powered up, the cryocooler got down to the 77 Kelvin range quite quickly, and within an hour, [Shahriar] had at least a hundred milliliters of lovely pale blue fluid that passed all the usual tests.

While we’ve seen a few attempts to make liquid nitrogen before, this might be the first time we’ve seen anyone make liquid oxygen. Hats off to [Shahriar] for the effort.

From Blog – Hackaday via this RSS feed

Donald Trump signed an executive order on Wednesday punishing the law firm that helped Dominion Voting Systems obtain a $787.5m settlement from Fox for lies about the 2020 election.

The order against the firm, Susman Godfrey, marks the latest effort by the president to punish attorneys and firms who have opposed his interests.

The order seeks to harm the firm by limiting its attorneys from accessing government buildings, revoking security clearances and essentially making it impossible for it to represent anyone who has business before the federal government.

A Meta whistleblower told US senators on Wednesday that the company undermined national security in order to build a $18 billion business in China.

At a congressional hearing, Sarah Wynn-Williams, a former global public policy director at Facebook, said she watched as executives decided to provide the Chinese Communist Party‬ with access to the data of Meta users, including that of Americans.

During her testimony before a Senate judiciary subcommittee, Ms Wynn-Williams also alleged the parent company of Facebook and Instagram worked "hand in glove" with Beijing to build censorship tools aimed at silencing critics of the Chinese Community Party.

Specifically, she said Meta capitulated to China's demands that it delete the Facebook account of Guo Wengui, a Chinese dissident living in the US.

The White House is insisting that Donald Trump’s vision of Apple’s flagship iPhones being manufactured in the US will come to fruition, despite assertions from analysts and the company itself that it would not be possible.

The press secretary, Karoline Leavitt, told reporters during Tuesday’s briefing that the president believed Apple’s recently announced $500bn investment, as well as increasing import costs sparked by his trade tariffs, would encourage the company to ramp up manufacturing in the US.

“He believes we have the labor, we have the workforce, we have the resources to do it. If Apple didn’t think the US could do it, they probably wouldn’t have put up that big chunk of change,” she said.

Carl Marx

[...]

Nach Angaben des ukrainischen Präsidenten kämpfen zahlreiche chinesische Staatsangehörige an der Seite der russischen Truppen in der Ukraine - mit Billigung der Regierung in Peking. "Das 'chinesische' Problem ist ernst. Es gibt 155 Personen mit Namen und Passangaben, die auf ukrainischem Gebiet gegen die Ukrainer kämpfen", sagte Selenskyj und fügte hinzu: "Peking ist sich dessen bewusst." Allerdings sei nicht bekannt, ob Peking "einen Befehl" dafür erteilt habe. "Wir sagen nicht, dass jemand einen Befehl gegeben hat, wir haben keine solchen Informationen", sagte Selenskyj.

[...]

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.blahaj.zone/post/24280496

dog rule

Per the title, what options exist in Europe for independent authors and creators to make themselves known and sell their work/receive support from fans, besides through their own personal websites?

Smashwords was the almost default option for years for indie authors; Amazon also took their piece of flesh. Then there was Patreon.

It always made sense to me to have an european alternative to those sites.

I've already found Xinxii and am in the process of exploring it.

What else is out there?

Pixiv・Danbooru

If you spoke to them what were they like?