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politicalcustard

@[email protected]

Politics, queer politics, techno, gayming, Linux and books. Lots of books. Free Palestine! Trans ally. He/him. @politicalcustard

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politicalcustard , (edited )

They did something similar with Chelsea Manning, announced they were “thinking about a pardon” to see if there would be pushback.

It’s proving to be rather embarrassing for the UK, it’s clear to many here how he’s been treated and how much of a stitch up the trial has been. I imagine the US could do without the international attention on this - court cases, more Russia speculation in an election year.

And the “authorities” have made their point: don’t try to take the piss out of us, we will ruin your life even if we don’t get you to trial. Julian Assange’s case will certainly be putting off quite a few people from becoming radical journalists.

politicalcustard ,

Espionage can result in a death penalty but it’s currently the case that the UK (courts) would like a guarantee from the US (lol) that he won’t be executed. Other than that I think it’s over 100 years and they can add more charges when he arrives.

politicalcustard ,

Shit in… shit out, or to put it another way: racism in… racism out.

I propose we create another LLM… a Left Language Model.

politicalcustard ,

Nice news to read. I hope we will see many more court cases; it’s clear we cannot rely on politicians to try to fix this problem.

politicalcustard ,

I can’t wait to get a (regular) Kobo, my Kindle Paperwhite is still going strong and it’s 10 years old, but I really want a Kobo because it’s opensource. Amazon’s OS is dreadful, mine’s been in airplane mode for most of those 10 years and I just use a usb cable with it. I hope it dies soon so I will have a good excuse to replace it.

politicalcustard ,

Sorry, you are correct. I researched plans to get a Kobo last year and I guess what I found out morphed from a rooted Kobo with Koreader into Kobo being open source. My apologies.

politicalcustard ,

@genocide[email protected]?

politicalcustard ,

Let’s hope they chose a memorable password for the account… a very very memorable password.

politicalcustard ,

People in India were watching people checkout?! Poorly paid workers watching Westerners consume… this is so grim.

Time to dust off those guillotines.

politicalcustard ,

People are still printing? I love it, proppa old skool that is. I thought the only person who printed stuff anymore was my mum who prints out her daily crossword.

Don’t forget to boycott HP because, not only are they shit printers, they provide computer hardware for the IDF, Israel’s police, and their Immigration and Population Authority. bdsmovement.net/boycott-hp

politicalcustard ,

One very important word missing from that headline. The BBC should be ashamed of its coverage as they do this again and again.

Corrected version: “World Central Kitchen halts operations in Gaza after ISRAELI strike kills staff”

politicalcustard , (edited )

There have been a couple of recent (post-October) studies into BBC coverage, the issue I raise concerning the language used in the title is consistent with its use of language elsewhere. For example, Israelis are “killed” and Palestinians “die”.


<span style="color:#323232;">"About 700 people have been killed in Israel since Hamas launched its attack on Saturday, with a further 500 having died in Gaza in retaliatory air strikes."
</span><span style="color:#323232;">"Some 1200 people have been killed in Israel, while more than 1000 have died in retaliatory air strikes on Gaza."
</span><span style="color:#323232;">"More than 700 people have been killed in Israel since Saturday and over 500 people have died in Gaza."
</span>

[…] the openDemocracy analysis found that the phrases “murder”, “murderous”, “mass murder”, “brutal murder” and “merciless murder” were used a total of 52 times by [BBC] journalists to refer to Israeli deaths – but never in relation to Palestinian deaths.

When I read this sort of coverage on a daily basis, I see these patterns repeated again and again, it’s a subtle reframing that many don’t notice but editors (and headline writers) at the BBC will be very aware of how they are using language. Space is not an excuse to remove the perpetrator from the picture regardless of how obvious that perpetrator might be, it is disingenuous.

Study shows BBC ‘bias’ in reporting on Palestinian and Israeli deaths - The National

politicalcustard , (edited )

I am against MTX because they have put parents in debt when their children have racked up huge MTX bills and it’s very difficult/impossible to get refunds. Yes, parents can protect themselves against this but many parents are not particularly tech savvy and games companies will see these as potentially huge revenue streams and abuse the hell out of them… like EPIC did.

Also, gaming addicts should also be considered and potential routes to indebtedness avoided.

Knowing a game has MTX just makes me less likely to buy it. Price the game correctly in the first place, and offer DLCs if you want some extra revenue.

politicalcustard ,

Oh, this looks great. Honestly, I am very happy when closed-source apps become worse, these are all just opportunities for open source to move in and take over.

politicalcustard ,

Horizon Forbidden West, stunning graphics. I find the main character a bit off-putting as she can be a bit arrogant and rude and those are traits I don’t have a lot of patience for, but it really does look good.

politicalcustard ,

It’s still clunky and repetitive. I didn’t finish Zero Dawn and the more I play Forbidden West the more I feel it likely I won’t finish this either. I think you’re right to make a comparison to Ubisoft. Fine looking games with loads of potential but I suspect fear of bad sales result in bland, generic characters and storylines that are just not engaging.

politicalcustard ,

I really wish they had; I was playing again today and her character was just being so awful to people. It would be fine to have such a character if over the course of the story she realises she has attachment issues and gradually tries to deal with them throughout the game, but she doesn’t, she just keeps being mean. I have no idea why you would have someone like this as the main character, I have no sympathy for her and the game is not even attempting to get me to empathise or sympathise with her. She’s meeting some really lovely people and I’m getting embarrassed by her behaviour! 😅

Android users who have a keen eye for design and detail, how is the whole stutter/lag situation? Esp. after a few years of use?

I haven’t used an Android device since my last one, the Galaxy S8. Beautiful hardware, beautiful design, but it was plagued with animation stutters and dropped frames. I switched to an iPhone and an iPad around 6 years ago. And the animations were buttersmooth. It was almost unthinkable to achieve such a fluid interface on any...

politicalcustard , (edited )

I’d imagine quite a bit of the stuttering and lag on Androids was/is a result of all the bloatware phone companies insist on putting on their phones. I’ve a 2018 OnePlus 6 that doesn’t lag or stutter because the only apps on it are the ones I choose to have on it and allow to run - it’s a degoogled phone running Lineage OS (Android 14) with zero bloat and zero ads and as a result a six-year-old phone is still buttery smooth. Phone companies have a lot to answer for… it’s lucky they don’t sell cars; they’d sell you a Ferrari and then weld a mobile home to the back of it to make it incredibly difficult to disconnect.

politicalcustard ,

I thought I didn’t like zombie games until I discovered Days Gone… it’s been really engrossing and has a wonderful plot, great characters and I don’t skip the dialogue, which is quite rare for me. It also looks stunning.

politicalcustard , (edited )

The Ubuntu article is using this Mozilla announcement as its source (I am not saying they say different things, it’s just best to see the source material sometimes). The article mentions litigation and this might be the important bit, Skyhook Holdings Inc. was acquired by Qualcomm in May 2022.

Skyhook’s business is wifi location and I’m guessing that Mozilla’s been costing them money and Qualcomm might be looking for a little return on investment from its purchase of Skyhook.

I hope there’s an open source project that comes out of this that we can get behind and that this will turn out to be a good thing in the end. Mozilla did say their service was getting worse and it sounds like the litigation might be what’s behind this. I wish Mozilla were better at communicating stuff… oh well, that ain’t gonna change!

politicalcustard ,

Here’s some potentially good news about an alternative…

There’s an interesting comment on this Mozilla Github post about Graphene OS’ plans in this area, it’s quite a long comment so I’ll link it. The first para reads:

GrapheneOS Foundation has been planning to host a network location service for GrapheneOS and projects collaborating with us for a while now. We’ve received significant funding we can put to use for this to make a high quality, modern implementation on both the client and server side. A new unified app (cellular, Wi-Fi, Bluetooth beacons) for gathering data to publish as fully open data could also be part of it. We also plan to make a SUPL implementation as part of the same service as an alternative to our Google SUPL proxy to replace it as the default in the long term.

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