tobychev @tobychev@qoto.org

A senior U.S. military official said yesterday that Ukrainian troops had killed or wounded “several hundred” North Korean soldiers in Russia’s Kursk region. The North Koreans are “not battle-hardened,” and Ukraine “struck their command and control sites as well as infantry positions.” https://www.nytimes.com/2024/12/17/us/politics/ukraine-aid-biden-trump.html

Vladimir Putin, 72, says, "We need more girls" and expresses concern that too much Russian land is being left empty. Maybe cool it with the annexations and tend to that unpopulated territory, my dude. https://meduza.io/en/news/2024/12/19/territory-is-good-but-it-must-be-populated-says-putin-telling-russians-we-need-more-girls

Taught my parrot to swear in Finnish, no body in the house speaks the language, the family are confused but it fills me with warmth when he says "vittu" or "perkele". Childish I know but so much fun.

16 months ago, these young people sued the state of Montana and won. A judge ruled that the state’s greenhouse gas emissions are “a substantial factor in causing climate impacts to Montana’s environment, and harm and injury to the youth plaintiffs.” The judge rolled back two Montana laws that prevent the state from considering climate impacts when deciding whether to approve permits for energy and mining projects.

The state of Montana appealed the decision.

But today the Montana Supreme Court upheld the judge's ruling! It affirmed that the youth plaintiffs have a “fundamental constitutional right to a clean and healthful environment”. And it said:

"Plaintiffs showed at trial—without dispute—that climate change is harming Montana’s environmental life support system now and with increasing severity for the foreseeable future."

The battle is far from done. It will probably go to the Supreme Court, packed with judges appointed by Trump. But this is a sign: as the climate crisis worsens, more and more of us will fight to make governments treat it as the calamity that it is.

Think of the world these kids will face.

More details here:

https://washingtonstatestandard.com/2024/12/18/montana-supreme-court-affirms-decision-in-held-historic-youth-climate-case/

"...a power outage at #SpaceX’s California facility caused a loss of #GroundControl, meaning that the mission control team was briefly unable to command the #spacecraft."

Single outage brought GROUND CONTROL down?! On the ground where power grids & diesel generators at a nearby home improvement store are! Have they never heard of battery backups and generators?! They have no idea what 3 points-safe₁ means, nor failover₂, and have no business trying to send so much as a spatula to #space.

🧵 1/3

What's it like to live in a country where the president is held accountable? https://www.politico.eu/article/court-ex-president-nicolas-sarkozy-corruption-france-human-rights-supreme/

"In light of the continuing proliferation threat of Pakistan’s long-range missile development, the United States is designating four entities for sanctions pursuant to Executive Order (E.O.) 13382, which targets proliferators of weapons of mass destruction and their means of delivery." - State Dept.

Up until the age of 27 I thought the word knackered was spelt NAKED. Day to day this wasn't a huge problem. But sometimes I would text people and say something like "I'm not going out, I am totally naked. You can come round here if you like?"

Don Pettit is one of the astronauts currently on board the International Space Station. He's also a serious shutterbug and amateur astronomer. To take advantage of his current lofty perspective, he rigged up a special star tracking mount that he could use to take long-exposure astrophotos from the ISS. The homemade orbital sidereal tracker rotates at a 90-minute period to match the pitch rate of the ISS, allowing him to take 30-second exposures.

https://www.reddit.com/r/astrophotography/comments/1h9dovl/time_exposure_from_iss/

Are there any PhDs in law/social sciences/public policy out there in the fediverse who would like to help hammer global, regional, and local AI Policy into shape? The AI Policy Lab at Umeå University is looking for a staff scientist/policy analyst for a full-time, permanent position. #getfedihired #academicchatter

Last day to apply is January 15th!

https://umu.varbi.com/en/what:job/jobID:775734/

A new report from Human Rights Watch recalls that the first Trump administration's family separation policy met the definitions of "enforced disappearance" and "torture."

https://www.hrw.org/report/2024/12/16/we-need-take-away-children/zero-accountability-six-years-after-zero-tolerance

Code inheritance, the traditional way

(•_•) (*_*)
<) )╯ to be
/ \

(*_*)
\(•_•)
( (> or not
/ \

(•_•)
<) )> whatevs
/ \ (*_*)

Another extremely eyebrow raising pardon is a woman who had 5 years of house arrest left on her sentence for committing the largest local government embezzlement in US history, over $53M stolen.

You'd think being the person known for stealing the most ever from a small government shouldn't get special treatment. There's certainly more deserving individuals for sure.

https://www.cbsnews.com/chicago/news/president-biden-commutes-sentence-dixon-comptroller-rita-crundwell/

I was going to write a singular positive post about Biden taking a break from protecting war criminals for a day to finally getting around to pardoning average people. And for sure he totally did the typical pardon of several "non violent drug offenders" which is great. But also, oh god he pardoned some real monsters who earned every minute of their sentence and then some.

At least one of the kids the Conahan jailed committed suicide as a result.

https://www.citizensvoice.com/2024/12/12/biden-commutes-sentence-for-kids-for-cash-judge/

#Biden #JudgeConahan

Wer transportiert eigentlich Donald Trumps Klimaleugner-Ideen nach Deutschland? Wie fließen die Gelder und bei welchen Parteien landet beides? Achtung: Die Antwort ist wenig überraschend! (by @correctiv_org)

So a crazy thing happened. In a crime thriller film called Les chambres rouges (Red Rooms, 2023) there is a scene where the hacker protagonist is attempting to purchase a snuff film in online auction. The auction happens via IRC or IRC-like chatting environment and to my surprise there's actually me @rolle and my wife @mustikkasoppa who are one of the bidders.

1) The nickname of my wife is mistakenly written as "mustikasoppa" (with one k) but if I recall correctly she has used a mistakenly written nickname in the past
2) We are both operators and on the same IRC channel as we've been for the past 17 years

This is not a coincidence. One nickname can be made up by accident but not two with these features and definitely not in a French movie. My wife's nick "mustikkasoppa" is Finnish and means "blueberry soup".

Our IRC logs are more or less public because of open source and statistics so I presume the scene has been made with chatgpt which has scraped our nicks from the Internet so that they ended up in the movie. We still chat via IRC every day together.

The era of AI... Do your background check, folks. I'm glad this wasn't a dramatized documentary film but a complete fiction. However my wife and I are real. Mixed feelings.

#OpenAI #Privacy #Movies #IRC #GenerativeAI #ChatGPT