Sabotage by lemmygrad to steal users.

It’s going to be up to 30 °C over here tomorrow. That’s like summer temps, two-three months early.

There is this MEP, Nico Semsrott, a comedian, got elected to the European Parliament for a satire party. Anyway he’s depressed and quitting, and promoting his book (which he didn’t write or read apparently, based on his notes), so there’s a bunch of recent interviews.

That guy is such a fucking lib. He describes how utterly pointless and soul-crushing this whole system is, and how it’s 100% totally impossible to change literally anything as an MEP, and yet, he still sounds so very lib. Like how is that even possible? Zeit interview (in German)

UOS is based on Deepin (originally Hiweed, lol) is based on Debian, btw.

Loongson is originally based on MIPS. CPUs seem fast enough for office type stuff.

Couldn’t find out what sort of graphics chips are in these things.

They gave a bunch of genocidal bureaucrats a machine that prints out an endless list of names and locations, just so they can pretend they’re dotting their i’s and not doing indiscriminate bombings. It’s just there to make it easier psychologically for the people pressing the murder button, so they can mash that button as fast as possible.

This is a glimpse into the mind of the death camp pencil pusher. They got forms, numbers, computer algorithms! Definitely not a hate mob on a murder spree.

SZ is reporting about Ukrainian efforts to build fortified lines (in German)

The gist is: It’s not going so well, Ukraine failed to construct defensive lines in the past two years, and now, they do not have the equipment and manpower to this quickly. Quote (machine translation):

Instead of a continuous line, Synjehubov’s men are building “resistance positions” on strategic heights from which advancing Russians can best be taken under fire.

So far, the military governor admits, there has only been “actual construction work” on “30 percent” of the positions selected by the Ministry of Defense for the second line of defence. The work on the inspected position will also take several more weeks, and there is still no sign of dragon’s teeth against advancing tanks, let alone guns or other weapons.

Perhaps worth mentioning: Some unknown person added malware to their tarball releases, specifically to backdoor ssh, which on most Linux distros was patched to load some systemd library, which in turn loads liblzma.

https://www.globaltimes.cn/page/202403/1309489.shtml

Bayrischer Ministerpräsident (Bavarian head of state, CSU) Markus Söder visited China. Looks like it went well.

The Süddeutsche Zeitung is mocking him.

I mean he praises EFI as being a modern BIOS replacement thingy with “features”, but I recall a bunch of complaints about EFI from Linux dev Matthew Garrett, which I don’t exactly remember in any detail, but it was extremely buggy shit when Linux first tried to support this and is definitely overengineered as fuck.

Probably the correct thing to replace the BIOS with would have been something actually way more minimal. On many ARM devices, for example, the built-in ROM basically just initializes the CPU (maybe not even fully?), serial interface (for debug logs) and whatever storage it needs to boot from. No USB, graphics, keyboard support or whatever. There it hopes to find a bootloader that is also just minimal enough to get Linux into RAM.

This way there’s only really one driver for almost all the hardware, the one inside your OS. EFI has it’s own drivers for all sorts of shit. These drivers are separate from the actual drivers your OS is going to use, which is duplicate effort and it causes problems and bugs.

If you really really want to have networking, keyboard, mouse, graphics or whatever before booting into your final OS, which I guess people might want to do, you could just use a stripped down version of (say) Linux, and have that act as a sort of BIOS replacement, and use that to chainload your real OS. That way you can just use the drivers inside Linux and people wouldn’t have to write special shitty EFI drivers which will just run for one second during boot. Which I think is the idea behind LinuxBIOS but I haven’t looked at that to closely.

If you take one antihistamine pill and your symptoms go away in ~1 hour, it’s allergies. In case you want to find out and don’t want to visit a doctor for some reason. Sorry for the unsolicited advice and in case I’m telling you something you already know.

Pollen allergy?

It’s my best translation for “Standortpatriotismus”. Literally it is “location patriotism”. “Der Standort Deutschland” is a common phrase used when talking about how attractive (or not) of a location Germany is for businesses. It’s also the title of good comedy set by Gerhard Polt.

Combines Germans’ favourite things: licking capitalist boots, nationalism and football.

To add to what comrade @[email protected] posted, here’s the RSS feed to add to your app:

https://jumble.top/trueanon/feed.xml

That’s George “Babyface” Nelson!

I suspect someone made the same joke on Twitter, but I swear I don’t have an account and can’t read those and came up with that all by myself and I’m giving myself a gold star. It’s not even a joke really, it’s just a reference to a funny movie, but that’s internet humor for you, it still counts.

https://archive.is/HBCM2

Federal culture minister Roth commissioned an opinion from a constitutional expert, Christoph Möllers from Humboldt-University Berlin, about the legality of having recipients of art grants sign antisemitism provisions (like propsed in the state of Berlin for example). Yes, Claudio Roth is the one that clapped at the Berlinale during the anti-apartheid speech and then was hounded by the Springer press. In her defense she put out a statement about how she was clapping for the Israeli Jew, forgetting to mention there was a Palestinian on stage as well. That one.

So he looked at the legality of having artists and institutions declare their commitment to diversity, and against racism and antisemitism (in general and also according to something like the IHRA definition, which conflates antisemitism with criticism of Israel), if they want to receive government grants.

Findings:

• Since basically everyone receives these grants in Germany, this is pretty delicate, because it de-facto impacts artistic freedom. The vast majority artists and cultural institutions cannot realistically get out of these pledges, even if they can in theory.
• A commitment to diversity is too vague and would leave the signees unsure about what they can and cannot do.
• A commitment against racism and antisemitism is more concrete, but the IHRA definition is subject to scientific debate, and the state weighing in on this violates academic freedom.
• In order to enforce this, a new control mechanism would have to be implemented, which would be rife for abuse and might narrow the space for artistic expression.

So basically he thinks this would be unconstitutional and a bad idea.

Nazis left most of them alone as long as they kept their heads down, so they survived the war. Western allies put some of them in positions of power when they formed the first occupation governments, because the liberals and conservatives had all pretty much joined the Nazis. This didn’t last long of course, denazification was called off and fascists that swore they were now democrats got back in power almost immediately. But the class-collaborationist and anti-communist SPD was, unlike the KPD, not repressed at all, so they became the default and only workers’ party. Then they gave up on being a workers’ party in order to appeal to bourgeoise media, social climbers, and the industrial sector, and became a generic leftish-liberal party in what was (almost) a two-party system.

Macron apparently put sending troops on the agenda (The Guardian | archive).

France’s President Emmanuel Macron said on Monday he refused to rule out sending ground troops to Ukraine, but said no consensus existed on the step, at a meeting of 20 mainly European leaders in Paris convened by Macron to ramp up the European response to the Russian military advances inside Ukraine.

Protecting France’s strategic ambiguity he said “there is no consensus to officially back any ground troops. That said, nothing should be excluded. We will do everything that we can to make sure that Russia does not prevail.”

He doesn’t know when to stop.

Russia, he said, “cannot win this war. It is the sole aggressor. It is the sole country that instigated this war. Russia is now clearly affecting our own safety and security through both traditional and hybrid war.” But he added “we are not at war with the Russian people”.

Macron found a way to passive-aggressively declare war. Or maybe he’s declaring a passive-aggressive war, which would be a lot better than an actively aggressive war.

Avatar, the revisionist Plotbender