Dawn has become dusk and may she sleep forever well in dreams among clouds above. My heart sorrowly sends my condolences to those she loves. Farewell, Michelle, thank you for Dawn Summers. 🙏💔😢 #RIP #RestInPeace #MichelleTrachtenberg #DawnSummers #Buffy
More issues with trakt. I'm using an app to keep track of films and tv episodes I've watched and which I have in my collection. Lately it's been giving me an error saying that the list is full, like it says I own too many DVDs. Maybe true. Turns out that the API the app uses, trakt, has overnight and without any emailing existing users, introduced a limit of 100 items you are allowed to have in your collection.
Initially they counted individual tv episodes, meaning that if you owned a box set of one tv show you may already have been over the limit. But they corrected that. Now I still have 162 shows and 182 films marked as collected (I know, I have not been keeping it complete), way more than allowed.
The solution is to pay, as free accounts have become unusable. But they have only one membership plan and it costs more than a streaming service does. 😥
This is the same service that recently was offline for several weeks because they couldn't restore backups. It's also the same service that has their 'inventory' still messed up since they swit
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More issues with trakt. I'm using an app to keep track of films and tv episodes I've watched and which I have in my collection. Lately it's been giving me an error saying that the list is full, like it says I own too many DVDs. Maybe true. Turns out that the API the app uses, trakt, has overnight and without any emailing existing users, introduced a limit of 100 items you are allowed to have in your collection.
Initially they counted individual tv episodes, meaning that if you owned a box set of one tv show you may already have been over the limit. But they corrected that. Now I still have 162 shows and 182 films marked as collected (I know, I have not been keeping it complete), way more than allowed.
The solution is to pay, as free accounts have become unusable. But they have only one membership plan and it costs more than a streaming service does. 😥
This is the same service that recently was offline for several weeks because they couldn't restore backups. It's also the same service that has their 'inventory' still messed up since they switched providers for the episode data a few years ago. The same service that also doubled their subscription price recently. It's not all inspiring confidence. #trakt #trakttv
Be the @TeenVogue you want to see in the world: "To put it bluntly, Trump is now violently pursuing, rounding up, and disappearing immigrants, the majority not charged with any criminal offense, while right-wing loyalists convicted and sentenced for violent felonies against the country are released and celebrated." teenvogue.com/story/donald-tru…
Trump is rounding up immigrants, while right-wing loyalists convicted and sentenced for violent felonies against the country are released and celebrated.
It's just chocolate sprinkles... I don't get why foreign journalists are so obsessed by it that they write this whole BBC article about us eating hagelslag on a sandwich. I had it today...
Well, they could sort of, couldn’t they? I mean – Putin went into Ukraine to find fascists – so he said - and now he’s found them, only not in Ukraine, so he could just send his army home, now he’s talked to the real fascists? Nothing to do with Ukraine. Job done.
It's a big #Shitshow by #Trump, to show how much "#Influence" he has on #Putin, not knowing, that HE ist the #Puppet on a String, being played by Putin.
We're talking about the Orange One. He sold himself as a successful selfmade billionaire in a reality show without actually being a successful selfmade billionaire.
For such a top tier gaslighting champion, concluding a peace deal between Russia and Ukraine without Ukraine even sitting at the table is an easy task ... he just has to lie whilst his followers believe.
You also can't initiate peacetalks when you have just threatened to invade your neighbour and a part of another sovereign country, both allies. And condone genocide in another country by another ally. And condone an attempt to overthrow the democratically chosen government of your own country. And when you have your cabinet members ridicule other democracies.
It's not peacetalks. It's payback to the enemy dictator that has helped Trump into office.
Ukraine #1 in Human and Organ Trafficking since 2005. Militant Nazi groups in their country's military. Then, all the regular people just wanting to live peacefully. Maybe like Switzerland and some other non-warmongering country should be doing peace treaties.
the most awkward thing is that 🇷🇺 was starting to struggle with economy and supplies… meaning although some progress in a couple of kms it was weakening deeply each day. They would need to go to table in less advantage mood … Not seeing the big picture … but it seem dark …
Only Trump can do that, not the rest of the world. For this you need to demonstrate every absence of empathy and be a 100% self-centred sociopathic narcissist as Trump is.
Sitting down for talks with the initiator of a war of aggression like Adolf Hitler is as promising & revealing as shooting your leg & hoping to not start bleeding.
Putin's invasion & devastation of Ukraine is not his first aggression, and it won't be his last unless he's impressively & lastingly stopped.
Agent Trump's meeting with his commander Putin won't be but a show of the servant reporting to his master - all he can remember...
I mean, you could. But it would have to sound something like: "Putin, you need to withdraw from Ukraine at once, or you and I are gonna have a huge problem..."
Buzzards (I presume) seen from my balcony. The local newspaper in Best had just printed an article that they were spotted in town and they were not wrong. I think I saw four flying together over my flat, I don't know whether that's normal behaviour.
Photos by me, re-use allowed with attribution (cc-by). Canon EOS R10, Canon RF 100-400, cropped. #Photography #Bird #BirdOfPrey #Buzzard
The Windows Experience is it showing you a screen waiting for your input but when you actually try to provide that input it is like 'hang on, I wasn't ready for that'.
But, given that Tumblr has a history of breaking all kinds of stuff in various novel ways, I have just one question: what will they break this time, Tumblr, WordPress, or Activitypub?
My understanding of WordPress must be missing something.
There's this default theme 'twenty twenty four'. When you activate it, it inserts various hardcoded texts into your site. Things like "my book Money Studies is out now" and "I'm Leia Acosta, a passionate photographer". You have to use the site editor to find these and remove them. There are about four.
You have to do this on your live site, you can't customise a theme and preview it before activating, like you used to be able to. If you don't find them all, or ever did "Remove Customisations", you're site will say stuff like "A commitment to innovation and sustainability", without you knowing it.
So what if you're not called "Leia Acosta"? Or you don't have a book out called "Money Studies"? How did they think this was going to work? #WordPress
Apparently Jenna Ortega and Natalie Portman have just wrapped filming The Gallerist yesterday, a film I didn't yet know they were making and which I know nothing about... #JennaOrtega #NataliePortman #TheGallerist
When photographing a waterfall the temptation is often to pop the camera on a tripod, add an ND filter and drop the shutter speed to 1sec to produce that classic, silky stream look. Today, I did the exact opposite, cranking my shutter speed to 1/8000sec, with auto ISO and a wide open aperture to produce the abstract images below. I'm happy with the results and will probably pursue this more in future visits to the woods. #photography #AbstractPhotography #waterfalls #nature
A new Tah 2.0 video on YouTube reminds me that I meant to mention how much I like having found that channel. She feels very real and honest. The channel is quite new, just 11 videos and 2k+ subscribers so far. When YouTube recommended it to me, I think she had only three videos; apparently YouTube knew after all exactly the thing I wanted to have recommended to me... youtube.com/@tahstory
The 2.0 refers to starting over. Apparently, she used to be a travel content creator, but that didn't feel right anymore. Now she talks about her insights in film making and storytelling itself. This is her video about starting over: youtu.be/7eE9uUU9zUY
A convergence of interests: I follow the MinuteEarth (and MinutePhysics) YouTube channel because I like how they quickly explain interesting science concepts, and I'm a fan of the actress Miranda Cosgrove because she's great. Now Miranda is on the MinuteEarth channel! youtu.be/OCfvQGj4jVQ #MirandaCosgrove #MinuteEarth
You season 5 will be on Netflix on 24 April. I don't know which characters/actresses will come back, the two I'm hoping for I didn't spot in the teaser. #You #YouNetflix
New toy: a Laowa 2x macro lens. Comes very favourably out of reviews, also for non-macro distances. It's the crop sensor advantage that this is small-ish and cheap-ish, while still being a super-sharp f/2.8 apochromatic lens. Now I have to learn to manually focus, and to use (flash) lighting. #Laowa #Macro
Glad it's winter and there are no insects about, testing out my macro lens.
Canon R10 with Laowa 65mm F2.8, either with Godox speedlite flash off-camera or the light of my Samsung phone when I had already put the speedlite away.
There seem to be too many politicians at every level secretly thinking "Well the politics is rough and tumble, but at the end of the day we can shake hands and agree to disagree."
This kind of performative disagreement for the cameras is totally unsuited to governments that pose existential threats to their own citizens and the world in general.
I guess a lot of them were brought up in more gentle times and are trying to take their cues from that bygone age? Whatever the reason, they are going to let us all down if they carry on with their prioritising of civility above responsibility.
unicode proposal: you should be able to send an emoji with a specifier for which image set and version you want.
sometimes you want to send 😔, and you don't mind which version is displayed. but sometimes you want to send 😔, and have it specifically be the Samsung TouchWiz 7.0 (2016) version.
no other iteration of 😔 captures the feeling of "sigh... if only my girlfriend Chiaki Nanami from Danganronpa 2 was real... then i could be her Ultimate Gamer Husband instead of studying for this lame physics exam..." quite like this one
sometimes you want to send 😔, and you don't mind which version is displayed. but sometimes you want to send , and have it specifically be the Samsung TouchWiz 7.0 (2016) version.
@IngaLovinde yes but ideally every client would have to contain every iteration of every emoji set, so i could just send U+1F614 PENSIVE FACE followed by U+200D ZERO WIDTH JOINER and U+EA07 TOUCHWIZ SEVEN MODIFIER
> A #cosmic object spotted by the James Webb Space Telescope has flummoxed #astronomers. Now, a research team has studied hundreds of these "little red dots" and found clues about their identity.
This is her first pottery and I think she doesn't seem satisfied with the result... She was caught off guard, the poor Kitty Perhaps another attempt would please her 😸🐾
And it's that resource usage for training that is my problem with it, so I'm not happy about AI subtitles in VLC. I also suspect it doesn't work, but that is maybe just me.
So, here is the first concrete technical info about VLC AI subtitles:
* it uses OpenAI whisper model. * you'll have to download that bit separately [1]. * vlc will use that on your computer, so it is not using the paid for API version.
So still using all the water and power to train models, and to run on your computer when you watch something that need translation.
VLC va intégrer de l'IA générative dans son lecteur vidéo open-source. Le plus célèbre des logiciels français prépare un générateur automatique de sous-titres capable de parler plusieurs dizaines de langues.
Why are people so proud of their religion and class and caste instead of, you know, being proud of themselves as a person? I'd think that's something a whole lot valuable.
The oldest surviving deck of 52 playing cards (1475 AD), made in the Netherlands 🇳🇱
The concept of playing cards is thought to have originated in Asia, making its way to Europe by the late 14th Century AD, likely through trading routes.
In the Netherlands, cards became popular during 15th Century AD, as both a pastime and a means of socialization among nobility and the growing merchant class.
Temple of Poseidon is one of the most important monuments from the Golden Age of Athens. It is perched on the edge of a cliff, located 70m above the sea, located at Cape Sounion 🇬🇷
Built in 5th Century BC, the temple is in the typical Greek hexastyle - featuring six doric columns on the front portico. 16 out of the original 38 columns are still standing today, and they were 20ft tall.
Whether you like the direction that things are going with AI or not you need to stop deluding yourself into thinking that you'll always be able to tell it's fake, you are going to eventually get scammed.
There are still some tells if you really know what you're looking for, but we're not at Will Smith spaghetti, 6 fingers or 2 left feet. Pretending like this is not a real problem you have to deal with isn't going to make the problem go away anymore.
UPDATE: I have created an account for updates and other information on FediMeteo - follow the account @admin to stay updated!
UPDATE: Ireland, Poland, Portugal and Switzerland have just been added
Weather has always influenced our lives: from agriculture to outdoor activities, to extreme events that, thanks to modern technology, can now be predicted with greater reliability. Personally, weather plays a significant role in my daily decisions, which is why I decided to create a service tailored for the Fediverse.
FediMeteo uses Open-Meteo data to publish updates every 6 hours, including current weather conditions, forecasts for the next 12 hours, and predictions for the upcoming days. Each country is served by its own dedicated instance (e.g., it.fedimeteo.com for Italy), managed through snac to ensure simplicity and efficiency in publishing.
You can follow FediMeteo directly in the Fediverse (on Mastodo
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Announcing FediMeteo – Weather in the Fediverse!
UPDATE: I have created an account for updates and other information on FediMeteo - follow the account @admin to stay updated!
UPDATE: Ireland, Poland, Portugal and Switzerland have just been added
Weather has always influenced our lives: from agriculture to outdoor activities, to extreme events that, thanks to modern technology, can now be predicted with greater reliability. Personally, weather plays a significant role in my daily decisions, which is why I decided to create a service tailored for the Fediverse.
FediMeteo uses Open-Meteo data to publish updates every 6 hours, including current weather conditions, forecasts for the next 12 hours, and predictions for the upcoming days. Each country is served by its own dedicated instance (e.g., it.fedimeteo.com for Italy), managed through snac to ensure simplicity and efficiency in publishing.
You can follow FediMeteo directly in the Fediverse (on Mastodon and compatible platforms), via RSS, or by visiting the dedicated page for your city (e.g., fr.fedimeteo.com/paris).
Currently supported countries include: Austria, Germany, France, Ireland, Italy, Netherlands, Poland, Portugal, Spain, Switzerland and the United Kingdom, – with many more regions coming soon!
FediMeteo is hosted on a FreeBSD-based VPS, with each country isolated in its own jail to ensure security and scalability.
Visit the main site to explore the national instances and start following your local weather updates today: fedimeteo.com
Happy weather monitoring to all! 🌦️
FediMeteo is dedicated to my grandfather, who every evening would give me the weather forecast based on TV, radio, and his personal experience. He would convince me that the weather would be bad, so he had an excuse to accompany me to school instead of me going alone.
FediMeteo brings real-time weather updates to the Fediverse, covering cities across multiple countries. Explore country-specific weather forecasts and RSS feeds.
I guess you're going to run into this even more with Switzerland?
EDIT: Maybe there could be multiple accounts for countries with several languages? Would this be feasible, or would it add a lot of complication to FediMeteo?
@Bruticus Yes, I'd like to, but I need some more time. I'll probably use another VPS (located in the USA) and include the American continent. I'm still evaluating if it's better to create a single "usa." instance or divide or by state.
Might be worth doing by state as there is such a high level of repetition of place names in the US? Americans usually include the name of a state when describing a city for this reason. (The disambiguation page for Miami is a good example: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Miami_(d… )
Trump promised "mass deportations". That will not mean deportations. Deporting people is not actually that easy. What it will mean is mass roundups and detentions. "Mass" means difficult to police the edges of. It means criteria will be arbitrary. Ethnicity-based by design, targeting people politically in practice.
There are no good and bad deportations. Someone's documentation status does not mean they deserve to be uprooted, detained in a desert, sent to some other country.
However, there is a *second* problem. In the previous Trump administration there was a running issue where Trump tried to deport people to Mexico, and Mexico did not allow this for a simple reason: It did not believe these people were Mexicans. And in fact, most of them probably were not.
To deport someone to a country, that country has to accept them. Some (most) of Trump's deportees will be nationals of some country other than Mexico, or citizens of the United States. Mexico has no particular reason to accept the deportation of a U.S. citizen to Mexico. The processing time caused by Mexico trying to figure out which of these non-Mexicans it will accept will mean even the Mexican nationals will be "detained" (imprisoned) for long periods while the backlog proceeds.
Again: No one deserves this. Being born in Mexico does not mean you should be sent to Mexico. But there's a bad problem and a worse problem and the worse problem is *what happens when the U.S. government holds large numbers of people its officers have already mentally dehumanized indefinitely in remote locations in Texas*.
The first thing that will happen is that the detainees will be subjected to forced labor. The second thing (or maybe first thing) is that some of them will die.
U.S. immigration is a never ending horror show and people not subject to its cruelty quickly stop caring. The "mass deport anyone who looks possibly Mexican via military tactics" thing has been done before, "Operation Wetback", 1954. Most people haven't heard of it. (And yeah, U.S. citizens got deported, if that matters.) People talk about Trump's walls and "camps". They talk less about Clinton, Bush, Obama and Biden's walls and detention camps. Biden opened new detention facilities.
When people stop paying attention, the horrors multiply. The greater the speed and density of events, the less our already-weakened journalistic system can notice any single one. We probably still don't know the worst thing that happened during the last Trump detention/deportation wave. The promise of the next one (that word, "mass") is simply that *the events will be denser*, and even the Trump cadre members don't care what the events will be. They just plan to do more.
When you study the third reich, you encounter this idea of "working toward the führer". Donald Trump is a lazy, incompetent and easily distracted man. But so was Adolf Hitler. (You can build a case one cause of the downfall of the nazis was Hitler inserting his approval as a requirement into military decisionmaking processes and then either making mediocre decisions or simply refusing to get up early enough in the morning, to give the required go-aheads early enough to be acted on.)
You can't predict the future. Trump administration II by its nature be unpredictable. It's dangerous to make a hard prediction (mine: "at least one U.S. citizen will be targeted for activism against the Trump administration, sent to an immigration detention camp, where they'll be detained indefinitely because there's nowhere to deport them, and eventually die there") because it could be wrong. Like so many of Trump's promises, the "mass deportation" idea might be simply forgotten.
But I don't think so. For two reasons. One, Trump has long had an interest in creating some sort of federalized police force that reports directly to him and can be deployed on arbitrary whims, and in the one test case of this ( npr.org/2020/07/17/892277592/f… ) ICE/CBP was in part operationalized to achieve it. To repeat: Customs and Border Patrol was deployed at least once to police a protest against Minneapolis police brutality, not a customs issue, and nothing legally stopped this then.
And the other reason is "working toward the führer". Trump administration I did not go as badly as it could have because Trump's underlings would simply ignore things he asked them to do, and he lacked the focus to follow up. I believe Trump admin II will be the reverse; this time he will have underlings in sync with his vile values from the start, and they will come up with and act on "Trump-like" things Trump didn't even think of, without Trump even being involved in the process.
Let's suppose Adolf Hitler was the most evil person who ever lived. The Hitler administration was more evil than even he himself was, because he had a fractious cabinet full of self-directed people, managing their own fiefdoms within the reich, *imagining* what Hitler would do and acting on that. And being, ultimately, much more creative and efficient at it than Adolf Hitler (again, a deeply mediocre man at best) himself could have ever been.
It's risky to project intentionality onto the actions of Donald Trump. But he seems to try to set up situations where people are encouraged to exercise their worst impulses. The CBP oddness in the Portland George Floyd protests seems to have come from a *hope* the CBP officers would cut loose and brutalize; instead they drove people around confusedly a bit then dropped them off. On Jan 6 2020 he encouraged people at a rally in Washington DC to do *something*, and they did… something.
The danger of Trump II is that Trump (a man too out of it to execute any particular plan himself) creates a space encouraging a cabinet member to be their worst selves who sends an underling admin to be their worst selves who sends a CBP officer to be their worst selves to one single person the CBP officer has mentally coded as an "immigrant" not a person, and this happens in a target-rich environment of many "immigrants" detained, arbitrarily and with no one caring, in remote Texas.
And there's a lot of things I'm afraid of. I'm afraid of Trump waking up one day and making a nonsense Presidential decree against trans people on Truth Social, which the Democrats and NYT liberals are too toothless and indifferent to notice or care it's illegal. I'm afraid the "war" in Gaza simply won't end, and will continue until no one is left alive. But what I can't stop imagining is the worst thing CBP/ICE could do with no one watching when you give them a pool of victims.
I don't want to write about this. I don't want to put these bytes on the Internet. I don't want to put these words in your head. I don't want this to be the reality we live in. I don't want to be right.
Sadly, you most likely are right. I believe there's another component to this, trump wants to be as famous as Hitler and for the same reasons, though never being defeated or seen as wrong.
On the gates of Auschwitz:
"Arbeit Macht Frei" Translation "work makes one free"
I kept trying to explain to cis het white people what I was scared of. I kept having a problem where whenever I made a specific prediction (even a prediction like "Trump will keep this widely publicized campaign promise"), they would come up with a reason why my specific prediction would not happen exactly as I laid it out, and therefore I have nothing to worry about.
The stuff you're saying is the stuff I'd been saying. It's refreshing to see someone else say it instead of dismiss it.
I want you to know, when you read this link, that the Laken Riley act received 11 votes from Senate Democrats¹, and if it had not received those votes it would have failed at cloture like every Democratic initiative does when the Democrats have a bare majority. Don't take that as a statement about blame. Just think about it.
President Donald Trump says he's directing the opening of a detention center at Guantanamo Bay to hold up to 30,000 migrants who are living illegally in the United States. The U.S. military base has been used to house detainees from the U.S.
there's also the fact that many people will likely try to anticipate what trump wants based on his public statements, in hopes of currying favor in order to advance
the counter-argument to this is to say that in large parts of the country the people that would feel empowered by trump being president already feel empowered, and in the parts of the country where they're not already empowered (to the extent such places exist) they have to fight the state and local people that are also there on the ground
@bob I don't think this first part follows. If they feel empowered, they act. I think you're saying if they were going to do this they'd have done it already. But what we see is that *as* they do it, they realize they can do more, and so do. They did more under Biden than they did under Trump, simply because Biden happened after Trump. They are doing the things I am afraid of already. The camps are already here. The problem is acceleration and conditions that encourage acceleration.
@bob The difference between monstrous immigration policy under Trump and monstrous immigration policy under a hypothetical president Harris, as I see it, is the cap on how bad things can get.
right I think we're actually agreeing except I'm skeptical there would have actually been such a cap under Harris (Trump's monstrous immigration policy was an extension of Obama's monstrous immigration policy)
that (directly controlled police force and synergetic underlings) very much describes the ascend of Putin and his administration and all the horrors of it and i’m scared of this
@yottatsa There are a lot of scenarios which people are dismissing as entirely implausible, hysterical doomerism but which, factually speaking, either have been successfully deployed in the past or are currently being successfully deployed somewhere in the world right now. I don't know if it makes sense to be scared and I don't think it's good to panic. I don't find those emotions useful. But I don't see a counter-argument against the idea the worst case scenario could happen.
Apparently everybody totally forgot about the "kids in cages" horrors of his last time in office. I don't remember it even being mentioned during the election campaign. And that's utterly shameful. Everybody was just yakking about the economy and ignoring all the abhorrent shit he already did, and promised to do again. I guess America gets the president it deserves.
Gidi Kroon
in reply to Gidi Kroon • •