mcv

@randahl@mastodon.social Are the UEFA members finally stepping out of FIFA? It's about time. I hope they start their own competing international football federation, this time with more accountability and less corruption. Infantino being the end of FIFA sounds entirely appropriate. I really hope UEFA follows through.

@notjustbikes@social.notjustbikes.com @uxMark@cosocial.ca I live in Amsterdam, with a car, and my wife even uses it quite regularly, but I have absolutely no complaints about Amsterdam's autoluw policies. The city keeps getting better. Cars are fine if you need to get out of the city, to a place that has no easy train station. But into the city center? Or any part of the city that's less than 5km away? That's not what cars are for. They're a plague on the city.

@sundogplanets@mastodon.social Wait is this a real plan!? Argh! It is! dezeen.com/2026/07/16/space-mi… So, in light of global warming and too much sunlight being absorbed by our atmosphere, they want to send more sunlight to the Earth? Also: "Eärendil-1 demo satellite". Does every terrible tech bro idea have to steal names from beloved genre fiction?

@david_chisnall@infosec.exchange Interesting perspective. So how do you make it possible for anyone to modify the software? If average users never had the know-how to do this, and programs even getting too big for even experienced programmers to easily understand and modify, what is even the point of a license that allows it? Ultimately it's not just about the legal permission to modify it, but about the physical ability to do it. The skill, knowledge and expertise, that most users lack. Often I wish some application was put together differently, but I'm not going to put in the time to learn and understand that code base. So in light of Linus' announcement that Linux is not going to be anti-AI, I now find myself wondering if AI could be the solution to it. Dangerous of course, to have users vibe-coding their own modifications. But now I'm wondering if open source projects could include the tools and context files to make this viable. AI is not popular among the whole open source community, but now I find myself wondering if it could turn out to be the missing key to enable users to take more control over their system. Not sure what to think about it, but the goal is interesting.

It seems everybody is upset about Microsoft firing hundreds of developers from the many game studios they apparently own. Except for Fallout fans, who are celebrating, because control of Fallout was taken from Bethesda and given to Obsidian, where it belongs.

(I still hate Microsoft for everything else they've done and are doing, but this one thing is a good decision.)

It might be worth pointing out that Elon Musk killed millions of children: youtube.com/watch?v=J6ZgSLX8Up…

@thaodan@mastodon.social @randahl@mastodon.social It's classic Rutte dodging the question and the responsibility. He's has a very long career of doing that.

@evacide@hachyderm.io What is their tech stack? Various job descriptions list perl, node.js, python, go, kotlin, c#, swift. Are there any languages they won't use? I'll have to consider this. Pay is a lot better than what I'm used to, and if I want to work for an American company, DDG is probably better than most.

@hamishtpb@mewblog.thepolarbear.co.uk @Lana@beige.party Even so, many Star Wars movies after Wrath of Khan were also pretty woke. Especially my favourite: The Undiscovered Country. Star Wars was also woke, although in a different way. When people wondered why that galaxy far away and long ago was so white, they immediately introduced Lando. Ewoks were Viet Cong, Stormtroopers were the US. And Leia was never just a damsel to be rescued; she took charge.

@jacqueline@chaos.social Codeberg seems to be the place to be these days.

@tschenkel@mathstodon.xyz Labour has been such a massive disappointment these past 10 years. Greens and SNP seem like the only reasonable options there. If only people would replace the Tories with the LibDems instead of Reform.

@blogdiva@mastodon.social If I'm not mistaken, Adam Smith never talked about capitalism, he talked about the free market. Capitalism comes from Marx, and it's not good. It's about how capital concentrates in the hands of a few, who leverage it to take power away from workers. It was never an ideology, but maybe it became one because of Marx, because rich people likes the idea of concentrating even more wealth in their hands, and they perverted Smith to justify it. But they're the very enemy of everything Smith wrote about. Capitalists don't hate capitalism, they hate the free market. Because they cannot dominate and control a market that is actually free.

@MaryAustinBooks Age verification by facial recognition is one of the stupidest ideas I've heard this year (there's sadly a lot of competition). It's extremely unreliable, and even if it works, it's an invasion of privacy. It should be banned.

@anparker@mastodon.bsd.cafe @bagder@mastodon.social I think 64 bit time will be fine for quite some time after that, but Earth might not be a good place to put those servers anymore.

@jon_ellis @bruces Always keep fighting until you've got a revolution against you, does sound like the Russian way. I hope not, though. Or that revolution should come soon.

@joshbuddy@sfba.social Isn't that a no parking sign? So no parking when you can see fire, flooding or anything breaking through a tiny window?

@pascaline@mastodon.nl @reinouts@mastodon.green Op een plek? Ik heb liever dat ze die auto helemaal nergens parkeren. Zet hem maar in limbo ofzo.

@nixCraft But can we talk briefly about Microsoft's completely nonsensical naming scheme lately? I recently discovered that their version of Remote Desktop (a clean and unambiguous name) oin Mac OS is 'Windows App'. It's hard to imagine a more generic, meaningless name than that. But also, half their apps seem to be called 365 now. Some are just the names of their most popular systems mashed together. Something that might also be used by gamers, even if it's not directly gamer-related? Call it XBox. I have no idea what anything is anymore.

@nixCraft Harder to find, though.

@cmccullough Of all the effects AI has on our society, being unable to believe what you see is by far the most dangerous. Anything can be faked now. I'd support a law that requires AI generated content to be explicitly labeled as such.

@samlitzinger The pope is sticking to matters of morality, and even holding back there. The Trump is deeply immoral, but the pope only addresses their most stupid war and their lies about religion. If anything, the pope should speak out more.

@cmccullough @EthicalProfessor The pentagon apparently suggested the US might appoint their own pope, 14th century Avignon style.

@codinghorror @aesthr Are you saying Anthropic is worse than OpenAI and the others? My impression was that they were the least bad of the bunch. But that CISO is undeniably a piece of shit. Did I just fall for their better PR?

@Sustainable2050@mastodon.energy Air tickets? That's the absolute worst choice. Reducing taxes on petrol for cars I might be able to understand, but air travel needs to be discouraged, doubly so in times of fuel shortage.

@iaruffell @randahl The past decade has left me with a dire shortage of words to express my disappointment in Labour. You'd think it would have been trivial to out up a decent opposition to the clown circus of the Tories, but they didn't, and when they finally got power forced on them because the Tories were such an unmitigated disaster, Labour had no idea what to do with it. Please replace them with the LibDems and Greens. And please not with Ukip/Reform.

@randahl We don't need more devastation by Trump to do all of that. Get him out of office as soon as possible, and do all of these things anyway. Also, I think we need to restructure the EU to allow further growth. The current structure is too inflexible, as demonstrated by our inability to handle Orban. I think we need various levels of membership that countries can move up or down in depending to how well they follow and implement EU rules. Joining and leaving should be easier, and follow simple but strict rules, instead of being the subject of all sorts of political games. And rename it to the Federation of Nations. I still like that name.

@Nigel_Lake@mastodon.world @randahl@mastodon.social It should include all US cloud services, including Azure. And Windows 11 is such a security nightmare it should be banned from government systems anyway.

@randahl@mastodon.social European governments and sensitive private infrastructure (like banks, healthcare, etc) should not be using US cloud providers at all. It's been blatantly obvious that they're legally unable to obey our laws, and under Trump, that conflict has become a lot more urgent.

@georgetakei@universeodon.com No honest "free market capitalist" capitalist would support this. People think a free market is an unregulated market, but that's not true; a free market is a transparent market that's equally accessible to anyone. No barriers to entry, a level playing field, and transparent pricing. This is the complete opposite of transparent pricing. As you might have noticed, free markets are incredibly rare. Large corporations do everything to avoid it, because they have the power to manipulate the market to their advantage. That's why we need regulation.

@sous_mon_masque @GayDeceiver It's weird that the sins of Sodom and Gomorrah got so blatantly rewritten and people just accepted it, because Ezekiel addresses those sins more explicitly: Now this was the sin of your sister Sodom: She and her daughters were arrogant, overfed and unconcerned; they did not help the poor and needy.

@kinsale42 @GayDeceiver It was Nero's persecution of early Christians that got Revelations written.

@liquor_american@universeodon.com @Khrys@mamot.fr Di you understand that we're talking about an optional field on your own, local computer that you control, and which already has similar fields for your real name, your email and your location? I understand people are wary to paranoid about privacy, and you should be, but it's misplaced here. This is the wrong battle to be fighting. There are many worthy battles out there that could use this energy.

@julesbl@mastodon.me.uk @Khrys@mamot.fr Nowhere do I call this a bug. It's an additional field in the user db. Just like userName, realName, emailAddress, location, timezone, preferredLanguage, and many others, some of which are at least as sensitive as age. People are panicking about a complete non-issue. Read the actual discussion on the commit; there is actual discussion there, but nobody is panicking about it the way people here are. The discussion on the Arch commit has a bit more pushback; there the contributor puts more emphasis on legal compliance, receives some pushback that it offers no reliable age verification, so how can it comply with the law? and the decision is made to put in on hold until they get some legal advice. And with or without that law, I don't see any problem with storing yet another piece of personal information. It fits right in with everything else that's already stored. If you don't trust the privacy of your own PC, don't fill it in. It's optional. But I can imagine that parents would want to set this for their kids, and may also want software to restrict their kids' access to certain kind of content based on that. But that's not what this does.

@julesbl@mastodon.me.uk @Khrys@mamot.fr We've long depended on software maintained by fewer people than that. The point is: anyone can contribute, committers review and approve. If that has always been a reasonable process, why not now? There are lots of open source projects where the creator of the project has more power than that, and we've always accepted it because we trust the maintainers, and when they break that trust, the community forks, which has also happened plenty of times. But at the end of the day, it seems to me most people here are irrationally panicking about this. Isn't the field optional? Isn't what goes in the field entirely under the user's control? By all means discuss this honestly, but I don't see anything here that justifies the hype and panic.

@julesbl@mastodon.me.uk @Khrys@mamot.fr But no single person can force this into the code, right? Someone submitted a PR, and two committers approved it, one of them the creator of the project, as far as I understand. If that's not good enough, then what is? Of course discussion about this important, but can we do that without panic and fear mongering?

@Khrys@mamot.fr The lasting damage was knowing it could happen at all: that a single contributor with no stated organizational backing could submit compliance infrastructure for surveillance law directly into the software that boots your computer, get it merged by two Microsoft employees, and have the creator of systemd personally block the removal. What the hell is the issue here? Do you need to be a member of an organization to submit a PR? And if the lack of organisational backing would be a problem, why is it a problem that the people merging it do work for an organisation? The only thing that matters is that an official committer approves it. This whole article sounds like pointless fear mongering. If there's anything else to it that I'm missing, I'd love for someone to explain it.

@Khrys@mamot.fr I don't understand what the fuss is about. This is exactly the right way to comply with that law: an optional birth date field. You don't want to have to submit an idea to your OS or implement facial recognition, and you certainly don't want to tie account creation to external services for those things, but now parents can fill in the birth date for their kids, and everybody else can ignore it. This kind of thing needs to be in the hands of parents, not external companies. So I don't really see the problem here.

@mattmay@mstdn.social Thiel is desperately trying to paint someone other than himself as the Antichrist. He's one of the main forces trying to set up a global surveillance state.

They're throwing all the shit at the wall to see what sticks. Whatever they'll eventually agree the outcome is, they'll be able to claim that it's been their original plan all along.

@ElegantSimplicity @QasimRashid@mastodon.social The ICE situation is far worse. They had a blind man in custody, and released him in the middle of nowhere instead of to his home. If you take someone into custody, you take responsibility over their safety, and ICE is fully responsible for their death. Homeless people freezing to death is tragic of course, and cities should be taking more responsibility for their homeless populations, but it's less of a direct responsibility, and they have no direct control over the whereabouts of homeless people. It's good to address it, but it's not the same thing.

@benroyce@mastodon.social @QasimRashid@mastodon.social Also, you can make the Dems suck less through primaries.

@NegativeK @stib Gaming on Linux is fantastic now. I've tried linux many times in the past, but it was always gaming that brought me back. I've played Morrowind on Wine back in the Ubuntu 6 days, but lots of games didn't really work. Now, largely thanks to the excellent work at Valve l, almost everything just works, and works perfectly. I will never go back.

@csolisr Plenty of multiplayer games work fine on linux. Only the ones with rootkit-level anticheat don't.

I'm not a fan of labels in general, because they can mean a lot of different things to different people, and aren't very informative in general, but I'm not opposed to all aspects of liberalism. Human rights, equality under the law, freedom, democracy, these are not bad ideas. They're certainly better than most alternatives we've seen. Neoliberalism can fuck right off, of course, but we don't have to throw the baby out with the bathwater. Although we should also continue to look for further improvement. Liberalism was a massive improvement over what he had before, but it's not the destination.

@randahl@mastodon.social Pence is not the 48th president of the US and never will be. Maybe he's not as bad as Trump, but that's a very low bar. But at least he's honest and has somewhat of a grasp on reality.

@JoeRess@fosstodon.org How can they not anticipate that? It's perfectly on brand for him. It's what he always does. People keep proving to Trump how gullible they are, and Trump keeps taking advantage of them, and somehow they never seem to learn.

@SyHoekstra@tweesecake.social Those captchas need to die. It was a stupid idea in the first place, and now AI is better at them than we are, so they've become completely pointless. I try to avoid most sites using them, but some sites that really don't need them, still use them. Like webshops. If you make it hard for me to spend my money, I'll spend it elsewhere. But sometimes a site you absolutely need still uses one, and then what?

@lritter@mastodon.gamedev.place @wolfgangcramer@fediscience.org nos.nl/l/2549126

@wolfgangcramer@fediscience.org Turns out the Magdeburg Christmas market attacker was a Musk fan and AafD voter.

Do they know what the other looks like? Maybe Trudy is going to talk to each of them.