can’t see how this can possibly be a good thing, you know it will mean funding with conditions.

Well, the things they are funding will get funded? How is that a bad thing?!

The conditions range from very broad, like “fix bugs” (curl), over somewhat specific like “improve cross-platform compatibility and the Linux RNG” (Wireguard), to very specific like “create a test-suite and drive development on the Fediverse account migration functionality” (ActivityPub).

You can see more for yourself at https://www.sovereign.tech/tech

All of these seem to be rather tame conditions that are just there to ensure the funds get used in the way they were intended to be used. And I don’t really see how that gives the STF any sort of direct control over these projects, while it gives those projects resources to achieve more than they might have otherwise. There are no long-term funding models that would enable implicit control over these projects.

They could set up an account on one of the larger well established Canadian instances or even better start up their own.

Both of these options have their pros and cons, and I think it is important to explain these well to the council if you want to have any hope of convincing them.

A line of argument that has had some success in Europe is what has become known as “Digital Sovereignty”, basically a fancy term for saying government should control its own infrastructure. So you might want to sell it as an easy way to have a permanent archive of public communication and a method for it that is under their direct control, rather than as a way to find more engagement.

As others have said self hosting has a maintenance and moderation overhead, but this can be lessened by running an instance together with other cities while still retaining most of the benefits of self hosting.

Seeing from the linked cross-post that this is about Port Alberni, and considering that http://portalberni.ca/ returns an empty reply while https://portalberni.ca/ lets me know I have been geoblocked because I’m outside of Canada and the US, I’d say you have an uphill battle before you though. These people made a website (probably paid for it, too), and then killed much of its use by geoblocking most of the world.

Good luck.

There is a blue van in the right lane,

*car in front of a blue road sign

at 270 km/h (168 MPH), he’s going to be right behind it in a second.

The bollards on the right side of the road are at a distance of 50m from each other, by which we can estimate that the other car is at least 250 to 300 meters away. 270km/h equals 75m/s so they are about 4 seconds behind (if the other car was stationary).

Therefore the lane is not – in fact – free.

To answer this question it is much more important to know what is on the right lane next to or behind the car, which we do not see in this image anyway.

I think you are being naive.

Fair.

The LofN failed, the UN is now failing too.

That’s why I’m looking for ideas to reform or replace it.

They by definition cannot solve problems. That said some related incentives have succeeded, such as the WHO.

That’s kind of the crux here though, it can solve problems and it does. People are being fed by the UN every day. Yes, it’s not good enough at solving the problems it is charged with solving. But that makes improving upon it the obvious course of action, does it not? What else is there except apathy?

Bodies like the LvN and UN are inherently going to fail to achieve peace because they rely on willing compliance with almost zero enforcement mechanisms.

Because having enforcement mechanisms slams face first into the principle of state sovereignty.

I agree on the state sovereignty part. But both the LvN and UN bettered the world within their limited means, while obviously more often failing than succeeding. So I don’t agree on the failure part entirely. They may be inherently aspirational, but they tried and managed to improve conditions somewhat, exactly by being an (if ever so slight) impediment on state sovereignty that didn’t exist before.

But yeah the general consensus seems to be that the UN is a failure, so I’m just looking for people who are thinking about what to do about that. Seems like the only people talking about it are the World Bank and Russia with its multipolar world order.

Yeah in a way. That particular keyword has a big conspiracy factor when you search for it though. :D

Local international institutions are of course an obvious avenue whether you aim for a world government or not, but I doubt they have velocity required for the problems we are facing, old and new.

Creating bigger and stronger governments will only lead to the protection of an elite that is way too irresponsible with their powers.

Well I clearly see the danger. The many against the few is a problem as old as society. And where there is power, there will be abuse. And every system we have, like separation of powers and checks and balances, is flawed. But the cold hard truth is that we have run out of time and I don’t really see any other viable solutions. If somebody has one please let me know, that’s why I made this post.

It’s genuinely very hard to find someone that says: “I don’t care about microplastics, “I have no issue with air pollutants causing cancer” and “I don’t care we are trashing the ocean”.

I know what you mean, most people would agree on this. But sadly it is very easy to find the people who would say so. Cui bono? Who is benefiting? So we need to regulate them. And then of course there are people too consumed with simply subsistence to care about any of this.

I don’t know if governments and corporations will solve the climate crisis, but goddamn I’ll do my part and help businesses and others do their part too.

On this we agree.

This is indeed interesting. That charter reads like a git diff on the current one. Exactly the stuff I was looking for, thanks.

World Bank ties though? Oof. People are going to call me a lizard person. /s

FYI you have a typo in your last screenshot (This sign m[a]y not…):

I don’t know if there is any single takeaway here, this story is just fucking ridiculous on every single level.

1. They bullshited themselves into a search warrant based on typical cannabis “investigation methods”.
2. In a state where recreational cannabis use is legal.
3. Persisted in the search even after their main argument for it, high energy usage indicating a grow-op, fell away when it was clear it was indeed a medical facility.
4. Made the motherfucking “Gun flies to MRI” TV trope a certified reality. This is a thing that verifiably happened now.
5. Instead of getting help, used a sealed (!) emergency shutdown button…
6. …which damaged the machine. And released thousands of dollars worth of helium gas.
7. Forgot their loaded magazine on the ground.

This can’t be real. I’m fucking dying over here. Please let there be bodycam footage of the cop speaking in a high pitched voice after. (I know the helium was probably not released into the room, but one can hope I guess)

android auto

First I heard of this, but since it seems to be just some software that runs on the hardware of car manufacturers it seems rather unlikely. But very theoretically possible, if the car manufacturer was using default process scheduling in a CPU constrained machine and now switches to real-time scheduling in an update. But that was possible for years before this news, the code has just been mainlined to the default kernel now. If the car manufacturer cared about that they would probably have done it already with a patched kernel.

Because bee stingers are mostly used against other insects. They don’t get stuck in a chitin exoskeleton, only in the more flexible skin tissue of mammals. In insects the barbs instead pull out soft tissue from inside, thus making them more lethal (to the bees victim).

Sittenhaft

*Sippenhaft

Sippe = kin/clan Sitte = morals/tradition

You thought it was AI, but she just has ulnar polydactyly. How do I know this is ulnar instead of radial or central polydactyly? The wedding ring, it’s on the ring finger.

(/s of course, this is obviously AI. But yeah people with extra fingers do in fact exist. They or the parents often cut away the extra finger for cosmetic reasons.)

The attempts to onshore chip production, for instance, have mostly just been gobbled up by AI compute.

But that leaves an existing chip industry to be nationalised if needed, having an ongoing hype around AI just helps keeping the necessary investment down.

That has some military uses (see: Israel) but it’s ultimately a boondoggle.

If you are talking about Lavender that’s hardly a military use. They basically built an elaborate RNG as an ethical fig leaf for their indiscriminate bombing and called it “AI” to gain credibility from the ongoing hype cycle. That’s more of a political use than a military one I would say. They must know I hope they know it’s bullshit, so then the only realistic use-case left is justification of their actions towards the growing number of AI believers.

I’ll have you know that this is famous sci-fi author Charles David George Stross posting an excerpt from his seminal novel Don’t Create The Torment Nexus. The warning is right in the title, I’m sure nobody will be dumb enough to ignore it!

[…] a public institution is really not a great example of the general population […]

Which I touched upon in my disclaimer, but in some ways it is a great example. Public institutions are defined by the general population, indirectly through their representatives creating the rules that govern them, and directly through contact with the public at large. Now if all our institutions still use this very outdated technology, and you can have trouble convincing them - during a global pandemic mind you - that using email is just as safe as using fax (so not safe at all basically), then that speaks to a larger mindset in the general population.

Many in the general public are also a lot quicker, some might even say careless, with adopting new technology of course. But as a society we are rather slow, and there are surprisingly many individuals who are hesitant or entirely resistant to adopting new technology. The fediverse usage is a bubble in a bubble here.

The internet infrastructure is another good example for this on the societal level, as there were plans in the 1980ies [!] to lay out a glass fibre network between every publicly used building in the country, which would have gotten us a good part of the way towards adopting this new material at scale. But in the end it was deemed unnecessary and too expensive and the project got canned (mixed in with rumours of “close friendship” between the chancellor and a major copper producer). Instead now we have people running around thirty years later and collecting signatures at the door for last-mile fibre network projects that seldom make quorum and thus almost never materialise public funding.

2. […] But also how are Germans technologically behind regarding common personal life?

I bet you wherever in Germany you are, if you go to the website of your local city government right now they will have a still active fax number in their contact information. I guarantee it. Well if they have a website that is.

Which is a bit silly as an example but highlights the central problem, which is that adoption of new technology happens at a glacial pace, especially in public institutions. There are many reasons for that of course, some good, like the aforementioned inclination towards privacy, some bad like whatever allows fax machines to still be around.

And don’t get me started on internet infrastructure… In an international comparison we certainly aren’t leading the field regarding adoption of new technologies.

*laughs in player.modav carryweight 9999999*

Depends on the kind of colour blindness you have I guess. I think I have the congenital red-green blindness common among men, and saturate Just Works™ for me. Plus I don’t have to fiddle with setting a rotation degree there.