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Kremlin revives Soviet-style youth indoctrination as it eyes ‘forever war’ with Ukraine and the West
  • I mean even before the war ends, 19% interest is not stable. Capital investment has fallen to a third of what it once was. (ignoring forced investments needed to workaround sanctions) The Russians will also run out of old Soviet stockpile weapons which will be a major hit to their GDP as Russia starts to go into recession.

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    Japan to criminalise cannabis use
  • This is worse than you think. Most countries don't criminalize use, only possession. Criminalizing use like Sweden does likely means that even having cannabis in your system is illegal and could lead to fines, criminal record, and jail time. It's insanely backwards.

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    EU, China should build bridges, avoid trade war, says Spanish Prime Minister | The Straits Times
  • Well I do, and I refuse to vote for politicians that support dictators. If everybody thinks like that, then even the most self-serving, jingoistic politicians have an interest in protecting human rights.

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    EU, China should build bridges, avoid trade war, says Spanish Prime Minister | The Straits Times
  • It would be great to have closer ties to Asia. The concern is the imperialist claims to Taiwan and the whole Xi dictatorship thing. We have already learned what trading with an imperialist dictator does to Europe after Putin. Just blindly jumping into a closer relationship with Xi without a carrot and stick and without building closer cultural ties to the Chinese, Tibetan, and Uighur people, will only backfire for Europe.

    It's not a cold war, a trade war, or any sort of economic competition thing, it's just concern over the volatility and human rights issues of dictatorships.

    As an aside, Sanchez is missing the fact that the EV tarriffs were implemented in response to excessive state aid by the PRC. It's not good for him to promise to drop the tarriffs without committing to more negotiation regarding the EU's concerns about state aid.

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    Republicans threaten a government shutdown unless Congress makes it harder to vote
  • pretty sure Republicans care about counterpoints if their counterpoint to "Republicans are shutting down the govt" is "them illegals!". The correct reply is "your kids!"

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    Republicans threaten a government shutdown unless Congress makes it harder to vote
  • That's the counterpoint. The data shows that it was already illegal for "illegals" to vote and there are no reported cases of it. However, there are hundreds of cases of republicans using this law to prevent (your) college students from voting. If you have a son or daughter away at college, do they have their birth certificate with them so they can register to vote?

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    True love
  • She could have always asked for a different ring. This ring wasn't what was wrong with that relationship. it is hilariously awful though.

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    'Cities: Skylines II' Found a Solution for High Rents: Get Rid of Landlords
  • Aren't coops basically democratic condos? In Sweden we have "bostadsrätt" which are condos governed by a democratic resident association. They're good for democratic control over housing, but they still require a mortgage and they're still subject to market speculation. Some of the apartments can be rentals, but that still means you have a landlord, just that your landlord is your neighbors.

    Having the city or the state as your landlord seems like it would be more ideal, or at least a balance of coops and public housing.

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    Foreshadowing rule
  • You're mixing two different kinds of inequality here, The top graph is wealth (aka savings), while the bottom one is income. Wealth is the much harder one to crack, and Sweden actually has much higher wealth inequality than all of the other countries being compared.

    It's worth noting that one of the main reasons that Sweden has relatively equal income before tax is because of the way the tax system works. Because social security contributions cap out at ~$70k/year, similar to the US, but there is no similar cut off for social security payroll taxes, employers generally pay their employees in dividends and private pensions instead of income, above that $70k level. Taxes are generally flat in Sweden, though.

    - a swede

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    Foreshadowing rule
  • is the modern one right? Why are there two bars per quintile? Isn't the top 10% above 90% of the populations wealth?

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    SteamOS 3.6.12 Beta Will Start Bring SteamOS 3.6 Into Stable - Steam Deck HQ
  • SteamOS is immutable, you always get the same update no matter what you were running before. I think the only files that can get out of sync are in your home folder.

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  • www.wired.com How One Bad CrowdStrike Update Crashed the World’s Computers

    A defective CrowdStrike kernel driver sent computers around the globe into a reboot death spiral, taking down air travel, hospitals, banks, and more with it. Here’s how that’s possible.

    https://web.archive.org/web/20240719155854/https://www.wired.com/story/crowdstrike-outage-update-windows/

    "CrowdStrike is far from the only security firm to trigger Windows crashes with a driver update. Updates to Kaspersky and even Windows’ own built-in antivirus software Windows Defender have caused similar Blue Screen of Death crashes in years past."

    "'People may now demand changes in this operating model,' says Jake Williams, vice president of research and development at the cybersecurity consultancy Hunter Strategy. 'For better or worse, CrowdStrike has just shown why pushing updates without IT intervention is unsustainable.'"

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    www.bleepingcomputer.com Leaky Vessels flaws allow hackers to escape Docker, runc containers

    Four vulnerabilities collectively called "Leaky Vessels" allow hackers to escape containers and access data on the underlying host operating system.

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    www.docker.com Docker Security Advisory: Multiple Vulnerabilities in runc, BuildKit, and Moby

    Docker security advisory about multiple vulnerabilities in runc, BuildKit, and Moby: We will publish patched versions of runc, BuildKit, and Moby on January 31 and release an update for Docker Desktop on February 1 to address these vulnerabilities.  Additionally, our latest Moby and BuildKit release...

    Seems like a really serious vulnerability, any container attack or malicious image could take over a container host if there's no hardening on the containers.

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    I wanted to share an observation I've seen on the way the latest computer systems work. I swear this isn't an AI hype train post 😅

    I'm seeing more and more computer systems these days use usage data or internal metrics to be able to automatically adapt how they run, and I get the feeling that this is a sort of new computing paradigm that has been enabled by the increased modularity of modern computer systems.

    First off, I would classify us being in a sort of "second-generation" of computing. The first computers in the 80s and 90s were fairly basic, user programs were often written in C/Assembly, and often ran directly in ring 0 of CPUs. Leading up to the year 2000, there were a lot of advancements and technology adoption in creating more modular computers. Stuff like microkernels, MMUs, higher-level languages with memory management runtimes, and the rise of modular programming in languages like Java and Python. This allowed computer systems to become much more advanced, as the new abstractions available allowed computer programs to reuse code and be a lot more ambitious. We are well into this era now, with VMs and Docker containers taking over computer infrastructure, and modern programming depending on software packages, like you see with NPM and Cargo.

    So we're still in this "modularity" era of computing, where you can reuse code and even have microservices sharing data with each other, but often the amount of data individual computer systems have access to is relatively limited.

    More recently, I think we're seeing the beginning of "data-driven" computing, which uses observability and control loops to run better and self-manage.

    I see a lot of recent examples of this:

    • Service orchestrators like Linux-systemd and Kubernetes that monitor the status and performance of services they own, and use that data for self-healing and to optimize how and where those services run.
    • Centralized data collection systems for microservices, which often include automated alerts and control loops. You see a lot of new systems like this, including Splunk, OpenTelemetry, and Pyroscope, as well as internal data collection systems in all of the big cloud vendors. These systems are all trying to centralize as much data as possible about how services run, not just including logs and metrics, but also more low-level data like execution-traces and CPU/RAM profiling data.
    • Hardware metrics in a lot of modern hardware. Before 2010, you were lucky if your hardware reported clock speeds and temperature for hardware components. Nowadays, it seems like hardware components are overflowing with data. Every CPU core now not only reports temperature, but also power usage. You see similar things on GPUs too, and tools like nvitop are critical for modern GPGPU operations. Nowadays, even individual RAM DIMMs report temperature data. The most impressive thing is that now CPUs even use their own internal metrics, like temperature, silicon quality, and power usage, in order to run more efficiently, like you see with AMD's CPPC system.
    • Of source, I said this wasn't an AI hype post, but I think the use of neural networks to enhance user interfaces is definitely a part of this. The way that social media uses neural networks to change what is shown to the user, the upcoming "AI search" in Windows, and the way that all this usage data is fed back into neural networks makes me think that even user-facing computer systems will start to adapt to changing conditions using data science.

    I have been kind of thinking about this "trend" for a while, but this announcement that ACPI is now adding hardware health telemetry inspired me to finally write up a bit of a description of this idea.

    What do people think? Have other people seen the trend for self-adapting systems like this? Is this an oversimplification on computer engineering?

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    www.theguardian.com Facebook and Instagram users in Europe can pay for ad-free versions

    Charges of €12.99 a month smartphone users for and €9.99 for desktop introduced to comply with EU data privacy rules

    Awful to see our personal privacy and social lives being ransomed like this. €10 seems like a price gouge for a social media site, and I'm even seeing a price tag of 150SEK (~€15) In Sweden.

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