Yet again we see students being the ones to stand against injustice. It’s a shame that in Israel, as in other countries, such protests are harshly suppressed.

The only thing that I would miss is contactless payments via my phone.

Hence the quietness

Neat info. Positive comments in this thread prompted me to go read the thing, and I appreciated how it is a ground-up explanation, but still quite accessible. Now I understand why WINE is not an Emulator (I had been wondering, tbh)

Archive link for anyone who finds this useful https://archive.ph/E7XFt

Edit: Have read the article and daaamn, this is ridiculous. Thanks for sharing this, I hadn’t seen it yet.

For me, it’s actually easier to trust sources like unionriot.ninja — though by “trust”, I don’t mean “take them at their word”. It’s more like a “I understand how to situate this journalism within its wider context”. Which is to say that I find them easier to vibe check.

I find smaller outlets like this are often pretty good with their sourcing. For the example, from these guys, I think I read some really good coverage of some specific issues in the prison system. The article was clearly written to persuade (and as you say, clearly left wing), but the way it was doing that felt transparent. In particular, I think there was a quote they used from a legal expert, but they also included links to that person’s work/full quote, which makes it easier for a keen reader to vibe check the person. I like their transparency.

I agree that it’s hard to place them on a “reliable” spectrum. My instinct would be to place them quite high, because the fact they’re open about their biases (i.e. left wing perspective) and they are good at citing sources makes it easier for me to evaluate their work. However, that doesn’t feel right when we consider what kind of news outlets would typically sit there — many of our heuristics for parsing media are still anchored in a more traditional model of news coverage, which these guys clearly aren’t.

I hadn’t considered this, so thanks for the info

When you get a moment, you could try switching over to the tty again, login to the shell, and then try typing in the command btop (which I think is the Bazzite specific version of the default “top” command, and should be installed by default). Top is basically a task manager, and you can see what programs are running (and taking up resources) right there in the terminal. If your system freezes up, you can often unfreeze it by killing the unresponsive programs. It’s probably useful to familiarise yourself with that interface before you need it.

See, this is a thing that I do not want (and have not even read the article in the linked post due to this). However, I gotta say that your recommendation has me intrigued (over recent years, I have been trying to be more mindful of who is writing the various bits of non-fiction that I enjoy (especially journalists), so your mentioning this person’s name sticks out to me)

Fucking hell, I love these cool people

I don’t disagree, but to lean into your analogy: I worry that we don’t have any viable long term solutions here, and I’m very nervous about how that will affect the fallout from a ban. My own stay in a mental health ward comes to mind, because it took years after that point before I was able to get the kind of support that helps someone build wellness long term. The hospital stay did the job, in the sense that I’m still alive, but my mental health was probably worse in the initial aftermath.

(This comment brought to you from the UK, where the Reform party (not nearly as bad as the AfD, but still racist shits) made heavy gains in recent local elections.)

“But previous attempts at banning them have failed because such an official report was missing.”

Man, this is peak modern society, and the absurdity makes me laugh. I don’t mean that in a derisive way, more in a "wow, making democracy work is haaard ". Hopefully this will lead to something positive though, even if I’m anxious that banning a party like the AfD may lead to some things worsening.

Microblogging is surprisingly good for discussions between scientists and other academics, but I think this feels like the exception that proves the rule — a particular scenario where it does make sense to follow people rather than topics

I don’t use Mastodon particularly, but I share your view here. I find that Mastodon makes me go “little bit of algorithmic feed, as a treat?” sometimes, because it feels like it takes work to find good stuff sometimes.

The two problems have a decent amount of overlap though. For example, I recently learned that car tyres are a huge contributor to microplastic pollution. This means that improving public transport infrastructure will reduce CO2 emissions and microplastic pollution.

Whilst automated tools can help on this, there is a heckton of human labour to be done in training those tools, or in reviewing moderation decisions that require a human’s eye. I think that in a world where we can’t eradicate that need, the least we can do is ensure that people are paid well, in non-exploitative conditions, with additional support to cope.

Actually securing these things in a way that’s more than just lipservice is part of that battle— I remember a harrowing article a while back about content moderators in Kenya, working for Sama, which was contracted to work for Facebook. There were so many layers of exploitation in that situation that it made me sick. If the “mental health support” you have access to is an on-site therapist who guilt trips you into going back to work asap, and you’re so hurried and stressed that you don’t have time to even take a breather after seeing something rough — conditions like that are going to cause a disproportionate amount of preventable human harm.

Even if we can’t solve this problem entirely, there’s so much needless harm being done, and that’s part of what this fight is about now.

They’re a minority, to be sure, but you’re right that there are Israelis who were fighting apartheid and continue to fight against the ongoing genocide. We just don’t hear about the good people who are resisting evil from within Israel, because that’s counter to Zionist rhetoric.

Edit: made it clearer that I’m agreeing with you

I wonder if we’ll ever find out why they did it.

Damn, I hadn’t heard about her husband being abusive. It’s striking to me that Giuffre was 41 when she died, and had been married to her husband for 22 years, meaning she was around 19 when they married. That’s very young, and so soon after being sex trafficked by Maxwell and Epstein.

It’s unclear how far back the abuse by her husband stretched back, but I wouldn’t be surprised if it was present to some degree for their entire relationship. And surviving abuse at the hands of Epstein and co may well have made her more vulnerable. Fucking hell.

You’re comparing between different sample pools, which matters when we’re talking about probability adjacent stuff. We’re not asking “from this large pool of people at an airport, who is likely to receive additional scrutiny?” Because of this, your comment about how you’ve seen people of all backgrounds get scanned isn’t relevant to OP’s point.

The scope we’re looking at is the pool of experiences across one person’s trips. Imagine if it was every time that you got stopped for additional checks at an airport, even when you couldn’t see any mistakes that you had made. If you get checked because your keys triggered the sensors, then that’s a mistake that you can learn from, but consider how it would feel if you meticulously complied with everything you were meant to do, but were still consistently pulled aside for additional checks.

I know that on the internet, you never know whether someone is being hyperbolic, or straight up spinning a yarn, but try to take OP on faith here and consider how dismissive your comment comes across. I don’t know OP’s particular circumstances, but I have previously made a comment similar to yours to a friend, who called me out on being an asshole. Back then, I was oblivious to the reality of these things.

My friend explained that the first time they were pulled aside for additional checks, they opted to believe that it was just a random thing. The second time, they felt more uneasy, but actively resisted the “victim mentality” (their words). By the 20th time, they had come to expect it as inevitable, and that no change to how they packed, or what they wore would change things. They desperately wanted to believe that they weren’t being targeted for additional searches, but after a certain point, it becomes impossible to believe that these things are random.