Maybe then this:

“If the others are the problem, then why do you choose to have a big vehicle that has trouble parking? Couldn’t you get a smaller vehicle that’s easier to step into, can transport just as easily, and is cheaper in terms of fuel usage?”

Much better, and it automatically picks a fight with the advertising industry (that has a very clear answer to that question), so double-plus good.

My mental response to that kind of people is,

“You chose to be the problem. Have you tried not being one?”

I do admit that it sounds catchy in my head, too. But I don’t think it would be a good or practical approach to convince others, starting off a retort with an ad-hominem right away 😅

A former colleague once complained to me that they could never find a parking spot for their humongous SUV in Berlin and that the city should be more accommodating in that regard. They weren’t even a permanent resident or a commuter but a foreign diplomat.
To my discredit I wasn’t assertive enough back then to calmly explain public transportation to them, I was just dumbfounded.

OK, here’s a somewhat famous case of email that could only be sent within something over 500 miles, but no further: https://web.mit.edu/jemorris/humor/500-miles

Thank you for sharing this!

In continental Europe you must have governemnt ID and in some countries you have to have it at all times with you and show it to authorities if requested.

I can’t speak for the other continental nations but that is not correct for Germany. You just have to have an ID. You don’t have to have it with you at all times.

I don’t see why not. Again, the resource footprint is so tiny that you can just throw in Mumble anywhere. You can make it tinier still if you limit sending pictures via that chat and allocate a maximum bandwidth via the config.

If pi zero, you’re serving 12 users low latency over wifi? Does it route the actual audio?

Yes, it’s sufficient. I wouldn’t advise it due to the extra overhead of wireless packet loss, but it’s absolutely technically possible. Don’t overestimate how little bandwidth voice chat really needs. It’s like 10-50kB/s per person and you’re unlikely to ever have more than 2 or 3 people talking at a time.

Foreign intelligence must be having the best day ever. Soldiers, with access to lots of interesting stuff, desperate for cash.
I’m not sure the US administration thought this one through properly. But at least they have that “warrior mindset” and no beards now. So that’s good I suppose.

That’s a very interesting point.

So, I’ve been having issues with voice chat on Discord and I’m looking for alternatives. In my search, I came across Mumble, here. Does anyone here have experience, or information regarding Mumble, or a better alternative to Discord with better latency? Is it relatively easy to set up? Is it safe? Any advice and help is greatly appreciated.

Been running a server for my friends for over a decade now. Can recommend. It’s just one apt-get to set up, runs on a Pi Zero for a dozen people, has clients available for pretty much any platform and doesn’t really require any maintenance. Latency will depend on the routing between you and your friends’ ISPs, of course, but the whole purpose of the software itself was to provide a low-latency voicechat server for gaming.

But: That’s it. You don’t get anything else. It’s a barebones voice chat server. You can set up rooms and have basic text-functionality, but you don’t get any fancy user management, no full-fledged chatrooms, no persistence beyond the room setup and only limited backend options. Keep that in mind.

I have no way to gainfully apply this in my life but I am glad you made it!

then 9/11 bombers trained on Microsoft Flight Simulator.

My SO calls it the “Hitler also ate sugar!” argument.

Look at the picture, this is insane.

Why would it matter what it looks like? No harm, no foul.

When I reduce the quote, I understand it as “bureaucracy is inhumane, depersonalized processes, evading individual concerns and preventing social mobility (that those worse off can get into a better situation)”.

I read that as well - but again, that’s a completely disconnected statement, so what’s the point? Ai Weiwei doesn’t elaborate on what kind of bureaucracy he encounted, how that bureaucracy differs from the one he was used to or holds as ideal. There’s nothing actionable here, i.e. that paragraph didn’t teach me anything about German bureaucracy.

My expectation for this article was very different, maybe because I’m not at all familiar with the author. This seemed like a loose collection of aphorisms and not really like anything I’d lump in with what I generally think of as “journalism”. Take this for example:

Bureaucracy is not merely sluggish. It is a cultural scorn. It rejects the possibility of dialogue. It insists that ignorance, codified into policy, no matter how wrong and inhumane it is, remains the best resistance against social mobility, against moral motion. In such a society, hope is not misplaced. It is extinguished.

What does this mean? What does it refer to? Which bureaucratic processes specifically? This could have been a useful think-piece, but it doesn’t contain any actual information. It’s more… like a word-picture for feelings.

Maybe the ZEIT editors also had different expectations?

I do a presentation of the Fediverse to my college students and will soon be giving short workshops to organization as well. I realize that a viable, decentralized altenative to Facebook is IMO the biggest missing piece of the puzzle. We need something that offers some kind of central platform for networking, events, groups

Well if you want decentralised solutions, there’s Mattermost and there’s just a plain old Matrix server. Both are better-suited to collaboration projects than Facebook ever was. I’d argue the only reason it ever morphed into that role in the first place was because everyone was on there, it had little to do with features.

Basically what the title says. I know online providers like GPTzero exist, but when dealing with sensitive documents, I would prefer to keep it in-house. A lot of people like to talk big about open source models for generating stuff, but the detection side is not as discussed I feel.

I wonder if this kind of local capability can be stitched into a browser plugin. Hell, doesn’t even need to be a locally hosted service on my home network. Local app on-machine should be fine. But being able to host it as a service to use from other machines would be interesting.

I’m currently not able to give it a proper search but the first glance results are either for people trying to evade these detectors or people trying to locally host language models.

In general it’s a fool’s errand, I’m afraid. What’s the specific context in which you’re trying to apply this?

I read about OLLAMA, but it’s all unclear to me.

There’s really nothing more to it than the initial instructions tell you. Literally just a “curl -fsSL https://ollama.com/install.sh | sh”. Then you’re just a “ollama run qwen3:14b” away from having a chat with the model in your terminal.
That’s the “chat with it”-part done.

After that you can make it more involved by serving the model via API, manually adding .gguf quantizations (usually smaller or special-purpose modified bootleg versions of big published models) to your Ollama library with a modelcard, ditching Ollama altogether for a different environment or, the big upgrade, giving your chats a shiny frontend in the form of Open-WebUI.

Nothing beats skipping from Bach to TMNT theme tune

I agree with that sentiment, but that’s not what happens at all. It’s especially funny since you excplicitly mention Bach. My damn “Bach, Johann Sebastian” artist folder contains 226 different albums. Albums, not songs. And boy, that guy wrote some stinkers, too.

I mean, I guess I could roughly see the system working if you have the same amount of songs for every artist, that would somewhat balance it. Otherwise your playlist will always be dominated by the prolific writers and you’ll get a few dozen Händel concertos and a handful of random Zelda dungeon sounds before the next TMNT theme tune plays.

What kind of mad person shuffles their whole collection? Do you preemptively purge all albums/artists of the songs you don’t like before adding them to your collection? 😮

While I’m not trying to dismiss the headline, this isn’t really news. This has been happening over the course of more than two decades.

In terms of financial volume the global advertising industry operates on the same order of magnitude as the entire global petrochemical sector. There’s an industry with the explicit purpose to influence others’ behavior and convictions - it’s literally a way to turn money into votes, favors and support - of course this is what’s going to happen with it.