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😱 Canadian tar sands pollution is up to 6,300% higher than reported, study finds #climatechange #Canada

theguardian.com/environment/20…



#Blind #Android folx, does anyone have any good recommendations for a good, #accessible email app for non-gmail accounts? Thanks.


Today at 13:55 MDT (19:55 UTC), my colleague Georges Stavracas will talk about bringing accessibility back to WebKitGTK:

events.gnome.org/event/209/con…

#gnome #guadec #guadec2024 #igalia #accessibility #webkit #a11y

Andy Holmes reshared this.



Pozerám dokumenty o českých hradoch a myslím že pôjdem na výlet. Presne pred a na začiatku Covidu som chodil po zrúcaninách tak môžem nadviazať.
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is anyone tracking twitter's move to and pushing of people to the right?

there was much ado about facebook's different contextual bubbles in 2016, which allowed targeted ads that many of us never saw.

i happened to log into a twitter account i had as a test account. it follows a few academics, etc, but i haven't posted or liked anything for 10 years.

all the random posts (not from who i follow) are about (mostly weird) rightwing things.



pičujem

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SuspiciousDuck
Pičování

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in reply to SuspiciousDuck

Pičování
Tak nepičuj a měj v piči .. snowflaking nech na jindy :)


En BCN estamos a 25 grados. Se ha puesto a llover esos 10 minutos para aumentar el bochorno, y sales al balcón y parece que te metas en una sauna. Además, con estas temperaturas las paredes de los edificios no han tenido tiempo de refrescarse un poco.
in reply to Tere Codina

Yo no digo nada, pero después de haber sufrido un ivierprimaverano hasta esta semana, por fin llega el calor aquí. Eso sí, ahora mismo 14 grados como debe ser.

@terecodina



Not sure how many Survive the Wild players are on my timeline, but Sam Tupy, the game's developer, just posted this blog post announcing it's coming to an end. samtupy.com/blog/2024/07/stw-l…

reshared this

in reply to Quin

I used to dream of making an MMO. I have several code bases where I've started on exactly that. Even the current engine started life because of my dreams for an MMo. The longer I kept working though the more I realized that no. No I most likely do not actually want that. Moderating a forum, moderating this mastodon, moderating a few discords really put it into perspective. Not only is the code much more complex, not only will upkeep and continued development take a lot of energy, not only will it be expensive but it will also be a very thankless task. A constant uphill battle. You can only ever choose between premature optimization or tech debt. And the longer a project lives, the more it grows organically, the messier it naturally becomes. Combine all of those things and you end up with a very unpleasant sandwich indeed. So I get it. Life's short, life's messed up enough without those problems. Sad news, but he does a bunch of work already, and maybe now he'll feel better about working on things that give him more joy. Some people are just truly awful and if you realize it's too much, then it's best you stop. Good on him. It might be slightly different if you spent a lot of money on the game but even so. Did the money you spend lead to fun? Should have been worth it. If it wasn't hopefully you know now how to better spend your funds. This is simply what live service games are.
in reply to Talon

@talon It's quite sad though. STW is a one-of-a-kind game in our space. It's basically the closest thing we have to Minecraft.
in reply to The Cube!

@TheCube hasn't it been fun while it was around? You can't expect centralized live service games to stay around indefinitely. Someone's going to have to tend to it.
in reply to Talon

@talon I wasn't exactly a hard core player, though I did play it for 8 hours straight towards the end of last year when the beta came out lol. Still, it was good fun. Just a shame I could never find where that premium gift card was.
in reply to The Cube!

@TheCube I never much played it. I got confused a lot. But I know many did. Certainly sad that it's over, but on the flip side, now Sam has a lot of time and mental freedom to focus on other things if he chooses to. Or even just to finally take a rest. If the game isn't set up for smaller communities where individual servers can be hosted, maybe it's better to look to the future and see what he can come up with next.
in reply to Talon

@talon Why didn't he sell it? Someone else may have been willing to try, and he could get free and get some cash. Most of what I heard is "I'm burned out, and someone may be saying some naughty things to kids, but I don't know, and there's no evidence, but maybe, so shut it all down. Plus, God told me to." I get being burned out, but burning it down in response is a real crap way to inspire confidence in potential users of any future projects.
in reply to Bryan Smart

@bryansmart I don't think so. It's been up for 10 years or so and he did try to get more people to help, but it reads in the post as if it didn't work out. Selling a project like this is easier said than done and I can pretty much guarantee you nobody would've bought it to continue it.
in reply to Talon

@bryansmart not to mention sentimental value. Maybe he didn't want to sell it because it's his, and he feels like he doesn't trust anybody enough to continue his ideas. Plus it does say that it might return at some point, so that might have been another point against selling it even if it would have worked, which is highly unlikely.
in reply to Quin

I hope he finds something that he can enjoy more. Sometimes you have to let things go to move on to bigger and better things.


Der Grund, warum ich immer wieder erkläre, was der #Induktionsfehler ist, ist dass ich glaube, dass er ein Schlüsselinstrument von Populisten ist und dass es nicht mehr funktioniert, sobald man ihn erkennt. Und es ist sehr einfach, ihn zu erkennen und seine Medienkompetenz darauf zu trainieren, ihn zu erkennen. Das ist so wie wenn man Menschen Kerning erklärt und ab diesem Moment sticht ihnen das fehlende Kerning bei jedem zweiten Werbeplakat ins Auge (was schrecklich annoying ist).
1/9
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Já znám široko daleko všechny krávy, ale vás jsem tady ještě neviděl #cyklovýlet #filmove_hlasky
This entry was edited (2 months ago)
in reply to Archos :distros_arch: :matrix:

jej, já si toho užil předvčírem, kdy jsme museli ráno brzo vstávat abychom je zahnali do stájí...


OMG, stumbled on this website with very very old audio games for Windows and the nostalgia kicked in: dracoent.com/Windows/ So many hours spent playing these! Wish some of these titles were available for Mac. :)




GUADEC has been fun and Thunderbird is doing a good job representing 😁





Updated my search engine article to add information on Ghostery Private Search’s reliance on Brave Search. In my tests, all Ghostery results seem to come straight from Brave. Excerpt from my article (linked):

Ghostery’s own documentation at the time of writing is extremely misleading, using clever language that seems to heavily imply the use of an independent index and crawler while not saying so outright: Ghostery says it “gets you objective results from a unique search index” and that it will “crawl it’s [sic] search index.” Privacy claims require trust, and word games do little to build it.


#SearchEngines

in reply to Seirdy

This is even more misleading than DDG saying it has “over 400 sources” (one source for organic link results, at least 399 for infoboxes) and its CEO claiming that it downranked Russian propaganda (Bing downranked it, and DDG doesn’t have permission to modify Bing results. DDG just took credit for it).

Oh, and there’s no such thing as an “unbiased” engine. If an engine tells you it’s unbiased, it’s straight-up lying.

The closest thing to an “unbiased” search engine is one with no result quality standards that ranks results randomly. Full of spam without any criteria, let alone bias, for “better” results. If you thought Google results were full of slop and SEO bait, you haven’t seen anything yet.

Hell, even that hypothetical “unbiased” engine would have emergent bias towards whoever has the most pages. Own your bias, both intentional and emergent.

This entry was edited (2 months ago)
in reply to Seirdy

how hard is it to just say “we get our organic link results from [partner]” instead of dancing around it with all this flowery language ffs. Almost every popular engine with third party results does this.
This entry was edited (2 months ago)
in reply to Seirdy

That would be the kiss of death for most. They don't want people to know that they are just another Bing retread.
in reply to Brad Enslen

SERP proxying (well, search in general) is such a shady business. it’s hard to be a good player in such a toxic industry.
This entry was edited (2 months ago)
in reply to Seirdy

They are all trying to run a "search service" on the cheap. They don't want to do the hard work of building their own index. Some claim they are but it's not a serious spidering.

Anyway, you know far more about this than I do. And it all seems like a dark pattern in the end.

in reply to Brad Enslen

@bradenslen They don’t have to build their own index if they can’t afford to (it costs tons of money, talent, and not-very-public knowledge on how to deal with spam and whatnot). They can just be honest and say where their results come from and what they offer that their sources/competitors don’t.

I honestly like DDG’s predictable infoboxes more than Bing/Google ones; if they leaned into that they could have a lot more users.

in reply to Seirdy

wait didn't startpage openly market themselves as something like that back when they used google
in reply to not_leader

@not_leader yep and it worked, but now they switched to Bing making it indistinguishable from the other dozens of private Bing proxies.
in reply to Seirdy

anyway is it possible for searxng to have marginalia as an engine?
in reply to not_leader

@not_leader I’ve seen plenty of instances that list it as an option if you scroll far enough.


Decades after the first images from Mars rovers, I still can’t get over the fact that we have actual photos of landscapes, sunrises, skies, and formations from the surface of another fucking planet. Sci-fi creators have imagined the extraterrestrial landscapes for centuries, but NASA went out to see the real Martian surface (holy fucking shit) and it was gorgeous. I’m reminded of the “Holy Shit: Man walks on fucking moon” headline from The Onion.

Quote posting to add alt-text: various photos of a Martian landscape. It resembles a desert with large sand dunes. Soil colors range from brown dunes to reflective cracked orange flats below. The sky is a pale yellow-orange. In some images, parts of the Perseverance rover are visible.

Original post by @pomarede
RE: mastodon.social/@pomarede/1128…

This entry was edited (2 months ago)


If you pitched the idea of Las Vegas today people would think you're a lunatic.

So no water to speak of?
Correct.
And no oil or natural gas to speak of?
Correct.
And it's a desert?
Yep.
So every single resource will have to be trucked in?
Yep.
And it's interesting because...?
Gambling laws.

Las Vegas is the Bitcoin Island of its time, except the mob actually made it happen.



The Crowdstrike outtage is just the reminder that corporate IT is just treated as an expenditure, and one that it shall be reduced.


Microsoft-CrowdStrike Memes Celebrate 'Happy International Blue Screen Day' cnet.com/tech/services-and-sof…


Why are Japanese developers not undergoing mass layoffs? gamesindustry.biz/why-are-japa…


Question for infosec folks: Someone recommended that I look at using Drata (drata.com/) to help my SaaS company comply with ISO 27001, HIPAA, etc. Is this another CrowdStrike?
in reply to Matt Campbell

Another compliance standard it is viable for is SOC2, but this mainly means that you acknowledge various company policies via their website. The client you install on your machine checks for certain settings but at least on Windows it is unable to verify whether the system goes to the lock screen automatically after 5 or so minutes and whether drive encryption is enabled. Instead, you need to take screenshots and upload them, but nobody checks them.
in reply to Matt Campbell

For wiping a device remotely, a separate MDM tool is required (at least for Windows). I'm not sure if the Drata agent scans for or prevents the installation of software the company doesn't allow or that is malicious - I haven't noticed its presence at all other than a yearly reminder for acknowledging policies. It doesn't seem to do much, so probably not a CrowdStrike.


I just had a potluck lunch at home with Italian, Japanese, and Chinese friends. So many different kind of food that all mixed incredibly well together


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Wow, this battle with the new #spitfire LABS Manager really has become something of a sagga. Good guys they are but gee they just can't get their software right. I got in touch with them on Discord for that reasn. I do not have high hopes though... Too bad their instruments are something that I quite like. I mean LABS ones.
in reply to Michael Marshall

@TheVoiceGuy @Scott I mean, their support are the nice guys, but it doesn’t solve the long-standing problems with accessibility.
in reply to victor tsaran

@Scott Agreed. Their support is always very kind, they always say the right things but it doesn’t amount to anything.


trump threatened to jail Zuckerberg if he’s elected less than a month ago, now zuck calls him badass … why are the most rich and powerful also the most craven?


🎶 “Once again I fall into my feminine ways” 🎶

Full of gratitude that this immersive exhibit was extended at the SFMoMA. I cannot recommend it enough. A beautiful reflection on community, friendship, and music.

This was my third time experiencing it, and I still cried and sang. So moving.

in reply to victor tsaran

@vick21 the exhibit is called The Visitors and can be found on the 6th floor of the SF moma! Strongly recommend!!


55 years ago, an American became the first person in history to walk on the lunar surface.

As President Kennedy said, it was a challenge we were unwilling to postpone and one we intended to win.

We led the world to the moon in 1969. Now, we'll lead the world back.



That is beyond cute! I wonder if AI wrote that statement? :) disabled.social/@Faylen/112816…


Look, I've had numerous (well documented) complaints about the Biden administration and the fact that I don't think its liberal, incrementalist policies go nearly far enough in the face of a fascist project to control every aspect of our society, backed by corporate power. With that having been said however, I dunno how *anyone* can still be arguing that there are political, institutionalist answers to the fascist takeover we're experiencing in America when even straightforward incrementalist policies by an elected Democrat President are being struck down or otherwise blocked by Calvin Ball rulings from federal courts stacked full of fascists:

truthout.org/articles/appeals-…

Appeals Court Blocks Biden’s Student Debt Relief Plan

"The U.S. Court of Appeals for the 8th Circuit’s temporary ruling against the administration’s Saving on a Valuable Education (SAVE) plan comes just over a year after the Supreme Court struck down Biden’s sweeping student debt cancellation proposal."

This case isn't even about using political power to stop fascism, it's a clear cut situation of providing debt relief for folks being ground up by the student loan industry. If fascist judges are prepared to interfere with regular policy issues and block milquetoast presidential initiatives, you can sure as shit bet they're going to do the same thing about any political efforts to stop the fascist takeover of our society. Whether you're for taking to the streets, or you believe in stopping fascism at the ballot box, it's 100% clear to me that we're not going anywhere good as a country so long as these corrupt, be-robed nazis are running Bartertown.

There's more than one way to reform the American federal court system, and I don't have all the answers for you. It's entirely possible the Biden administration can keep working around these rulings for a little while to continue offering student loan debt relief to millions of Americans victimized by the student loan industry. What I do know however is that sooner or later the political issues raised by the fascist takeover of our courts will come to a head, and by hook, or by crook, we need to find a way to shatter the power of corrupt judges who're now running the country for their reactionary corporate donors; rich donors and corpos who clearly support the larger fascist project, might I add. Ignoring this reality is a nonstarter - both politically, and in our greater society.

#StudentLoans #USPolitics #CourtReform #Biden

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Day 2 talks are all wrapped up! We’ll be back tomorrow at 16:00 UTC for more presentations.
events.gnome.org/event/209/tim…
#GUADEC2024


Considering using DeepL to translate a couple of Japanese audio games (most notably the BK series and possibly Shadow Rine. Will the free API work for this, or would it be better to get the sub for Pro? Thanks! #Blind #Gaming #Gamers #Audiogames


"The ... PAC effort is spearheaded by Mike Novogratz, the cryptocurrency billionaire who backed Dean Phillips in the Democratic primary"

Folks, the movement to replace Joe Biden is being led and funded and promoted by media moguls (who hate that he's going after them for antitrust) and by cryptocurrency bros (who hate that he's regulating and taxing their magic internet money), and rich folks in general (who hate that he's staffing and funding the IRS to make them pay their fair share).

The people standing by him? Bernie Sanders. AOC. The Congressional Black Caucus. The United Auto Workers.

Of those, which side do *you* think is more likely to be right about this?

hawaiitribune-herald.com/2024/…



Remember a major camera vendor had a firmware update process that required a specific flashing tool (other just load the file from the memory card) and said tool required elevated privileges at least on macOS. Which mean that deliberately the software team (management) thought this was ok.


So in GNOME we apparently got DRM-leasing, which is critical for playing VR stuff on Wayland. That does raise a question though: Is it currently possible to play VR games on X11?


I’m trying to find a way that lets me get my emails through an RSS feed. Does anyone know of a way to do that? Thanks #tech
#tech
in reply to Talon

I tried it. For some reason, I had a problem with subscribing to some newsletters with it. I don’t know why. Well, I’m really hoping for us to find a way to connect a Gmail folder/label that I have assigned to receive the newsletter/mailing list on it to a service that would let me view them in an RSS feed. Thank you though, I really appreciate it!
This entry was edited (2 months ago)


I'm about to spin up a single-user GoToSocial test instance for myself to figure out if it'd be a good fit for me. Venera.social has been struggling a bit lately with multi-day outages, and after switching to firefish.social and losing that account when the server tanked, I think I just need to manage this infrastructure myself if it's going to be something I count on.

If you get a follow from @Nolan Darilek, that's me. Think I added most followers who I recognize posting regularly, but if I missed you then feel free to follow there.

If this works out then I'll switch to it for my main account.

Related: blind folks, what's the latest in Windows Masto client accessibility? GTS doesn't have a web interface so I'll need a custom client.