aleph

aleph , 20 hours ago (edited 19 hours ago)

It depends how you're using the term 'genocide'.

While the CCP might not necessarily be intentionally mass-killing ethnic minorities in the Xinjiang region, there is very strong evidence that they are doing their utmost to stamp out Uyghur culture and forcibly assimilate them. In the process, people are being incarcerated, tortured, and raped, amongst other things.

It could be argued that this is a crime under international law, where the definition of genocide includes

intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group".

Or you could argue it is ethnic cleansing instead. Either way, it's a lot more serious than just overzealous "counter-terrorism" measures.

aleph , 2 days ago

Single lens reflexes have one massive advantage: the sensor is not being used while you're composing or idle, which means the sensor doesn't heat up as much.

The other big advantage is much better battery life.

aleph , 2 days ago (edited 2 days ago)

That reminds me of this real exchange in the Missouri state legislature regarding the "Don't Say Gay" bill that banned any mention of "sexual orientation or gender identity" in schools.

aleph , 3 days ago

They show how fossils contradict evolution

I've heard most creationist talking points before but this one is new.

How do they attempt to argue that the existence of fossils contradicts evolution by natural selection?

aleph , 3 days ago

Ah ok, so what they mean to say isn't so much that fossils contradict evolution but that the existence of fossils can be explained by the biblical account of Noah's Flood.

Not the same thing of course, but then hardly surprising given the apparent level of scientific understanding on display.

aleph , 4 days ago

I find that lemmy has less of an echo chamber, but the average political stance is a lot more left-ish than reddit.

This is true once you've blocked Lemmygrad and Hexbear, which are as much echo chambers as r/The_Donald ever was.

aleph , 4 days ago

You're fine as long as you don't decide to jump in and offer a contrary opinion.

aleph , 6 days ago (edited 6 days ago)

I still wouldn't call it "precise" in the slightest.

Even assuming that this ratio remains constant after the remaining 10,000 unidentified bodies are accounted for, men of fighting age only account for 40% of those being killed and not all of those will be actual Hamas fighters.

aleph , 6 days ago

Grace Ocean and Synergy filed a petition on April 1 in Maryland federal court to limit their liability from the crash. If the court grants it, the companies’ liability could be limited to the present value of the ship, which they estimated to be $42.5 million, according to the petition. Source

Which would leave the tax payer footing the bill for the remaining $1.46B cost of reconstruction. Classic.

aleph , 8 days ago

Each to their own.

Gnome with GTK4 + adw-gtk3 looks far cleaner and more aesthetically pleasing than Plasma + Breeze, IMO.

aleph , 8 days ago

Except Debian is neither interesting nor innovative.

aleph , 8 days ago

Gnome lets you do this on the primary display, but afaik it's not possible on the secondary/tertiary displays.

aleph , 9 days ago (edited 9 days ago)

It's probably worth mentioning that an "arranged marriage" can mean anything from when two families agree to marry off their children without their children's consent, to when families play match-maker and set their children up on dates but their children get the final say.

In India, for example, you get both, with the former being more common in conservative, rural areas and the latter more common in urban and middle-class areas. So it's not a one-size-fits-all situation.

As to why it persists? Practicality, I suppose. If you want to get married, it helps if you filter out all the people who aren't serious about settling down.
Plus it's not like love marriages have a superb success rate, given how common divorce is nowadays.

aleph , 10 days ago

Yup. How long have we been waiting for graphene batteries to revolutionize technology? About a decade now?

aleph , 10 days ago (edited 10 days ago)

But do it properly this time. No wizards or halflings in the Second Age, thank you very much.

aleph , 10 days ago

Nope. Canonically, the blue wizards arrived around the same time as their more famous brothers, early in the Third Age.

aleph , 10 days ago

The project is named The Hunt for Gollum, which implies it will be in the Third Age, between the events of The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings.

In the books, Gandalf mentioned that he and Aragorn tracked Gollum for quite some time during this period, so presumably it will feature these characters as well.

aleph , 10 days ago (edited 10 days ago)

Yeah, same. The blue wizards would have been doable from a lore perspective, and would have been ripe for exploration seeing as they have so little known about them. But no, the RoP writers had to have their Gandalf + Hobbit to fill their nostalgia quota, of course.

The "always follow your nose" 'reveal' was the final nail in the RoP coffin for me.

aleph , 10 days ago

Yeah, the potential is there for another audience fakeout, but I think it's highly unlikely. Their target demographic is a mass audience who enjoyed the Jackson movies but aren't hardcore fans of the books. To these fans, as you said, a blue wizard would be too much of a head-scratcher.

aleph , 10 days ago

That's true, however that was more or less a footnote and not something that featured in the published works. Hence why I said 'canonically', as in 'going by the books'.

I think it would have been fine for the RoP writers to have The Stranger be a blue wizard on this basis, though.

aleph , 11 days ago

I got you

https://archive.is/20240508113226/https://www.bloomberg.com/news/newsletters/2024-05-08/sony-xperia-is-dying-out-as-it-fails-to-compete-with-apple-samsung-google

aleph , 11 days ago

Sony only have themselves to blame for the collapse of their mobile division. Everyone and their dog has been saying for years that Xperia phones are too expensive and lack innovation.

aleph , 13 days ago (edited 13 days ago)

Since you're on EndeavourOS, I suggest using btrfs-assistant instead of timeshift, since it was created by one of the devs and offers more functionality with snapper. Just create a new profile for your root partition and then configure how often you want it to take snapshots.

You can also install snap-pac so that you get OpenSUSE-like automatic snapshots everytime pacman executes a install/remove/update command.

aleph , 13 days ago

Out of interest, hsve you heard/read much about VanillaOS and their AB partition system, and if so what do you make of that compared to Fedora Atomic?

aleph , 15 days ago

Online Accounts only supports Outlook mail at the moment, so it's not a Onedriver replacement yet.

aleph , 16 days ago (edited 16 days ago)

Divestment from Israel can take many forms, depending on the institution. Some colleges may be directly involved with Israeli companies, or receive funding from them, while others may simply have a broad investment portfolio that includes Israeli companies, or just Western companies that also do business with Israel.

So it's not like all colleges and universities in the US are all supporting Israel in the same way, and therefore divesting from Israel can vary in terms of how complicated the process would be.

aleph , 17 days ago

A report came out today confirming that 99% of pro-Palestine protests at US colleges have been entirely peaceful, despite the hysterical rhetoric from Congress and the corporate news media.

I don't think I've seen a greater disparity between the mainstream dialogue surrounding a current issue and the actual reality of it since the 2003 Iraq War.

aleph , 18 days ago (edited 18 days ago)

The danger is that by introducing the threat of civil or even criminal charges against those who are accused of being antisemitic under this strict definition, it will have a chilling effect on freedom of speech and academic debate/inquiry.

You should read this opinion piece by the lead drafter of the IHRA definition itself, talking about the dangers of Trump's 2021 executive order (essentially what this latest bill is proposing to enforce by law). In it he warns about the definition being weaponized, saying:

Starting in 2010, rightwing Jewish groups took the “working definition”, which had some examples about Israel (such as holding Jews collectively responsible for the actions of Israel, and denying Jews the right to self-determination), and decided to weaponize it with title VI cases. While some allegations were about acts, mostly they complained about speakers, assigned texts and protests they said violated the definition. All these cases lost, so then these same groups asked the University of California to adopt the definition and apply it to its campuses. When that failed, they asked Congress, and when those efforts stalled, the president.

The real purpose of the executive order isn’t to tip the scales in a few title VI cases, but rather the chilling effect. ZOA and other groups will hunt political speech with which they disagree, and threaten to bring legal cases. I’m worried administrators will now have a strong motivation to suppress, or at least condemn, political speech for fear of litigation. I’m worried that faculty, who can just as easily teach about Jewish life in 19th-century Poland or about modern Israel, will probably choose the former as safer. I’m worried that pro-Israel Jewish students and groups, who rightly complain when an occasional pro-Israel speaker is heckled, will get the reputation for using instruments of state to suppress their political opponents.

aleph OP , 18 days ago (edited 18 days ago)

For those who aren't aware, this bill aims to effectively enshrine into law the IHRA definition of antisemitism, which has been a controversial doctrine since its inception because critics say it unnecessarily curtails freedom of speech.

Hell, even the Zionist Anti-Defamation League say on their website that the IHRA definition is a guideline that should not be codified into law because it could be used to infringe the First Amendment:

ADL does not support the adoption and application of the IHRA Definition in a manner that would create new categories of legally prohibited speech that are subjected to either civil or criminal penalties – something we believe the First Amendment and principles of free speech would prevent.

This bill does very little that existing legislation does not already except have a chilling effect on freedom of speech on university campuses, and the fact that it got such widespread support from both Democrats and Republicans in the House is an absolute farce.

aleph , 18 days ago

That's quite uncharitable. We don't know anything about the woman, much less that she thought school shootings elsewhere were "fine".

It's pretty normal for people to mentally compartmentalize these types of shocking incidents as "things that happen in other places" rather than their own local community.

aleph , 19 days ago (edited 19 days ago)

this old man shot this young man for seemingly no reason

That itself is reason enough for this story to go viral. The racial element was just the icing on the cake.

aleph , 19 days ago

Not nearly enough, evidently.

aleph , 19 days ago

I understood some of those words...

aleph , 19 days ago

So there would be no practical benefits of switching?

aleph , 19 days ago (edited 19 days ago)

Also, for people on distros that don't have an OOTB solution like OpenSUSE have, I recommend snapper and btrfs-assistant. You just install both packages, open the assistant GUI and create a profile for your root partition.

You can then also install a snapper plugin for your package manager, if one exists (I know DNF and pacman have one), which automatically take pre/post snapshots like OpenSUSE does, so you can quickly roll back if something goes wrong after a particular update/install/removal.

I've been using the above with EndeavourOS for a year now and it's come in very handy on a couple of occasions.

aleph , 20 days ago

That's how it goes all too often with these settlements, sadly. Remember when Fox News got to settle with Dominion over the fact that they knowingly pushed election fraud claims that they privately knew to be false? They just paid their fine and went right back to business as usual.

aleph , 20 days ago (edited 20 days ago)

I don't want to sound patronising, but you have access to the entirety of our species' history

I mean, do you? You think early man was a rugged individualist who pulled himself up by his boot straps?

Homosapiens survived hundreds of thousands of years as a result of collectivism and sharing resources, which are the central tenets of communism. From a historical perspective, the ideas that underpin capitalism - private ownership, the elite controlling the means of production, individuals acting in their own self-interest - came about only very, very recently.

aleph , 20 days ago (edited 20 days ago)

Just to point out, Lemmy.ml isn't really like that, with a few exceptions. Before the big influx of Reddit refugees, it used to be the default Lemmy instance, and so has quite a few non-political communities.

It's Lemmygrad.ml that's the super tanky echo chamber.

aleph , 20 days ago (edited 20 days ago)

You can't just say "in .ml", is my point. Which specific community?

If you're talking about like say, [email protected], then I totally understand, but my point is that if we are talking about instances as a whole, then Lemmy.ml is quite mild in its "tankiness".

aleph , 19 days ago

Well, if we look at humans as a species then obviously the greater part of that is prehistorical. Clearly our "nature" is not incompatible with collectivism when looking at small communities and groups.

However, I think you have a point when it comes to more complex societies with increasingly larger populations, which, as a rule, have tended to form hierarchical class systems that are antithetical to collectivist ideals.

So we could say that humans have historically been fine with communism up to a certain point. It's when they start to form nation states and larger communities that societies have generally gravitated towards hierarchy and plutocracy, for whatever reason.

aleph , 20 days ago

A fucking origin story for Mufasa. Why didn't I see it coming?

aleph , 22 days ago (edited 22 days ago)

Don't forget the Jewish student who is being paraded around mainstream news outlets after allegedly being "stabbed in the eye" at a protest.

Oddly enough, the video of the actual incident rarely seems to be played on air during her segments. I wonder why 🤔

aleph , 22 days ago

I had the same issue and was unable to find a solution.

I'd say switch to gnome-boxes or virt-managerif possible - they don't have this issue with Wayland and perform better than VMWare / Virtual Box anyway.

aleph , 22 days ago

Agreed. I was enthusiastic about Nobara all the way up until I had to do a version upgrade. If I had to start from scratch now, I'd go with Bazzite.

aleph , 22 days ago

The installation is the easy part; first I have to back up all my configs. It's the media machine in the living room, though, so it's not super urgent.

aleph , 24 days ago

Finally, two political heavyweights are on the case.