Why are the Teamsters Endorsing Greg Abbott?
counterpunch.org/2026/02/17/wh…

"Abbott’s hostility to working class people and unions is not a secret. He’s fearmongered about “Big Labor,”especially public sector unions for years. Labor unions by any stretch of the imagination are not big, at all Texas is a right-to-work state. Union membership is barely 4.5% of the statewide workforce. Abbott aggressively promotes Texas as a

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> Lurk on a subreddit
> Someone with an account less than a year old makes a post that's clearly astroturfing talking points and engagement farming
> Make a comment calling it out, report it to mods
> Thread gets deleted for breaking subreddit rules
> A couple minutes later another even newer account makes the exact same post but worded JUST right so it skirts the rule that got the previous one taken down
> Both accounts are actively harassing anyone who criticizes them in the new thread

It's always sad seeing a community that used to be kinda cool succumb to blatant propaganda

Y’all. I’m giddy with joy.

I’m designing and building my own music player app. I’ve been slowly working my way through views. But tonight, I finally reached the moment of truth.

It’s playing! The music is playing!
🎉 🔊

vid.northbound.online/w/o5HZBE…

#macOS #Design #Development #App #Music

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Ma ei suuda uskuda, et nii kõva raamat 17 aastat hiljem veel ikka müügil on, liiatigi sedavõrd naeruväärse hinnaga.

shop.ut.ee/pood/20-sajandi-mot…

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⭕La ville de #Lyon détient le record national d'insécurité lié aux groupuscules d'extrême droite | Un recensement réalisé par #Rue89 dénombre plus de 102 faits de violences entre 2010 et 2025 « Allant de l'agression raciste à l'attaque en masse » perpétrés par l'extrême droite à #Lyon.

Carlos Quero : le « loup » d'extrême droite qui veut séduire l'électorat de gauche en Espagne
basta.media/carlos-quero-le-lo…

"Le nouveau porte-parole du parti d'extrême droite espagnol Vox affiche un engagement pour le droit au logement. Le trentenaire Carlos Quero est un fin connaisseur de la pensée sociale et veut conquérir les classes populaires. Son profil inquiète.

-
Démocratie

/
Enquêtes,
Droites extrêmes,

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The energy transition is happening, faster than many realize. This week, I look at how clean energy is surging, where we can get it wrong, why silence on climate is spreading, and what we can do about it.

🌞 Good news: Renewables are now so cheap they’re “virtually unstoppable.” Wind and solar plus storage are outpacing fossil fuels globally as well as in the US, UK, Australia .... simply because they make economic sense.

⚠️ Looks like good news, but isn’t (unless we do it right): Where we build clean energy matters. Poor siting can harm ecosystems and communities: and this week, approval of a new pumped storage facility in WA that threatens the Yakama Nation's sacred site embodies this risk.

🤐 Not-so-good news: “Climate hushing” is on the rise as political and industry leaders avoid the topic altogether, even at major global forums. But silence doesn’t neutralize climate risk; it just delays action when we can least afford it.

💬 What you can do: In an era of climate hushing, talking about climate change matters more than ever. Start with shared experiences, local impacts, and hopeful solutions. Our voices are still the most powerful climate tool we have!

talkingclimate.ca/p/climate-hu…

in reply to Dr. Katharine Hayhoe

Consider Finland.

Electricity in Finland in 2025: 40 % nuclear, 28 % wind, 16 % hydro. Third cheapest in Europe, averaging 5.1 cents per kilowatt hour (kWh). Wind power increasing rapidly.
yle.fi/a/74-20205942
yle.fi/a/74-20201799

However, more wind brings additional volatility to the market. With the polar vortex splitting, we've had a cold spell with little wind, so electricity demand and prices have been spiking, yesterday around 60 cents/kWh for much of the day.

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One of the most common objections I hear to climate action is: “But what about China?”

The person making this argument usually goes on to claim that China is doing nothing, while everyone else is making sacrifices. But that’s not what the data show.

Here’s the reality:

* As the U.S. doubles down on fossil fuels and blocks new wind and solar projects, its emissions are ticking up.

* In contrast, China’s emissions appear to have peaked — and may now be starting to decline.

* Last year, China installed a full half of all the world's new wind and solar energy.

* Over the past two years, China installed more new solar power each year than the U.S. has installed in total across its entire history.

* China's clean exports alone are cutting CO2 outside its borders by 1% year on year.

Of course no country can fix climate change on its own. But just as it's a global problem, progress in one place helps everyone.

carbonbrief.org/analysis-china…

in reply to Dr. Katharine Hayhoe

They also planted huge forests in deserts, they finished Taklamakan desert (desert of South Xinjiang) green belt this year. This huge work started, in 1978, this become a huge carbon sink livescience.com/planet-earth/p… and will continue to grow. They done the same in several place of Gobi desert about the same time, more than the surface of the Belgium has been covered since, On all roads around Qinghai plateau and Northern desert part of Xinjiang autonomous region (The Tianshan moutain range divide the region in Two parts) you see large ranges of young trees. The same on hills of desertic parts of Gansu and Shaanxi provinces. . See this by my eyes, and large forest in other Northern part of China, around some monuments that was surrounded by desert after 1900s photographies.

Regreening the desert documentary is interesting about what done China and other mega projects like in African Sahel desert, that was already reforested a lot, and some others : youtube.com/watch?v=IDgDWbQtlK…

They also made the greatest electrified train network and fastest and greatest and most efficient bullet train network. Transporting lot of products this way at 350Km/h, soon 400Km/h, this reducing a lot trucks, planes or other carbon emissions with faster delivery time.

Trains, also travels from Hubei province (around Wuhan), to France, since about 10 years, to bring products instead to Europe, not sure it's efficient as large fuel boats. There are also some projects of selenium based nuclear engine for cargos in China to reduce their gas emissions. This is huge, as they produce near the half of cargo boats.


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babylonbee.com/news/democrats-…

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Jeremy taking a L to vtuber spergs as he gets felted on MTG pulls :marseyxd:


@PraxisOfEvil The Casino's about to watch Quarter Pounder get felted on Pokemon card pulls again, peak Jeremy content incoming.
kick.com/kinocasinogaming

Leaky Chrome extensions with 37M installs caught divulging your browsing history csoonline.com/article/4132712/…

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cz24.news/p-c-roberts-izrael-s…
P. C. Roberts: Izrael schválil rozsáhlý zábor půdy na Západním břehu Západní Jeruzalém poprvé od roku 1967 přistoupil k registraci rozsáhlých oblastí na okupovanýc

Auspol

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current thoughts after experimenting with some proposed discord alternatives recently:

matrix: despite the honourable efforts of instance maintainers, i actually think that client apps are the achilles heel of matrix. every app is missing features i would really rather have, even if the server supports them all. everything feels like a hack built on a hack, and its fragile ecosystem shows. i can't recommend it if you're moving from discord, but i welcome you to try it out and see if it works for you and your friends!

signal: if your primary use for discord is DMs and group chats, you may feel right at home with signal! i just chatted with my girlfriend for about four hours with webcam and screenshare, and it was a very pleasant experience! do note that the desktop app is rough around the edges; signal is a mobile app first.

mumble (in progress): i have a server i've kept as a voice chat fallback for discord for months- if i can convince my friends to Put Up With the huge interface downgrade, i'd love to test it on its strengths. its weaknesses are quite the blight, though. it's open-source, so i wonder could a third-party client claim superiority with a better UX and design.

fluxer: evidently vibe-coded: the commit history dates back to early january with an inhumane amount of code in its first commit (1.4m lines of code across 9k files. ok bud). assuming that didn't kill it for you already, i'm concerned about the long-term maintainability of the app. i expect it to be unstable for quite some time, and self-hosting is not recommended by the developer for the time being. on the upside, they seem like a nice fellow! no ill will here. the app's design also blatantly rips from discord, which i suppose is a selling point to some, but i'd personally like to see something new.

stout (ex. revolt): same "copying discord" comment from before applies. despite being open-source, it seems to sorely lack self-hosting support, which i consider a must-have for my future community chat app. it's failed to take hold of discord's marketshare since it launched, and i suspect there's a good reason for that.

teamspeak: even ignoring controversial military ties, i echo similar sentiments to mumble, except that teamspeak also fails by being closed-source. for my purposes, it's mumble but worse. at least it's a bit prettier, i guess...

in reply to encrypted.vvhispers 💫

@vv element was the best all-rounder i've seen, but lacks some more outstanding features like custom emoji. cinny has custom emoji, but for some reason lacks basic account management features??

it's really tragic considering what i and many others are trying to do, but if the majority of matrix users are happy, who am i to rock the boat?

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#Trump said that he discussed with Xi Jinping the supply of weapons to Taiwan and intends to accept in the near future a decision on this matter. Earlier, #China warned the US that continued arms supplies to Taiwan could disrupt Trump's planned v

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Discourse is another excellent self-hosted alternative to Discord. I’ve just published a guide on how to get it up and running on your own server for less than the cost of a Discord “server boost” (bleh).

neatnik.net/setting-up-a-disco…

Walkaway spoilers

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As @pluralistic wrote: "AI is asbestos in the walls of our tech society, stuffed there by monopolists run amok. A serious fight against it must strike at its roots" theguardian.com/us-news/ng-int…

cyberplace.social/@GossiTheDog…


Today in InfoSec Job Security News:

I was looking into an obvious ../.. vulnerability introduced into a major web framework today, and it was committed by username Claude on GitHub. Vibe coded, basically.

So I started looking through Claude commits on GitHub, there’s over 2m of them and it’s about 5% of all open source code this month.

github.com/search?q=author%3Ac…

As I looked through the code I saw the same class of vulns being introduced over, and over, again - several a minute.


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in reply to Alexandre B A Villares 🐍

@Alexandre B A Villares 🐍 @Cory Doctorow

I don't believe the AI bubble will burst the way he expects...

I'm more likely to believe that it is the whole market that is going to go down for the unsustainable rate of unemployement.

Market always collapse when people don't spend money... 🤔

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Cory blogged about my paper! It's a great write-up. Thanks Cory!

"Anything that is in the world when you're born is normal and ordinary and is just a natural part of the way the world works. Anything that's invented between when you're fifteen and thirty-five is new and exciting and revolutionary and you can probably get a career in it. Anything invented after you're thirty-five is against the natural order of things."

--Douglas Adams, as quoted by @pluralistic

x.com/InfraHaz/status/20235377…
The Left-Right paradigm is completely meaningless when both sides define the other side by the exact same thing.

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The attitude of modern compiler maintainers toward "undefined behavior" really drives me nuts. Here's a 2015 paper on the subject that explores why far more patiently and politely than I am able to...

complang.tuwien.ac.at/kps2015/…

Anthropic's CEO says we're in the 'centaur phase' of software engineering
businessinsider.com/anthropic-…

Dario Amodei compared AI and humans working together to a mythical creature — the centaur.

A 2018 study (N=46K) of DNA samples & questionnaires found no genes associated with sex played a role in empathy. Women display more empathy, not because it is innate, but because girls are socialized to act on their emotions & prioritize needs of others. bbc.com/future/article/2026021…
in reply to Amy Diehl, Ph.D.

Men who claim women are softhearted also tend to harbor dread and resentment toward the female authority figures of their own childhoods while expecting the women in their adult lives to clean up messes without nausea while enforcing social norms without mercy.

There's no room for honest empathy in what misogynist traditionalists really expect from women. Plenty of room for performative shrinking from Others and Think Of The Children rhetorical tricks. Empathy? Nah.

in reply to Amy Diehl, Ph.D.

Of course (I'm sure you don't need me telling you this, but for the sake of others, it's worth also mentioning), the disparity is also because boys are socialized to shut down access to their own vulnerable emotions—fear, sadness, shame, guilt, and loneliness—and consequently, their ability to empathetically handle those emotions in others.

If a vulnerable emotion cannot be ignored, repressed, rationalized away, or papered over with humour or rage, then it must be purged through excessive physical exertion or suppressed using alcohol or another substance.

By cutting off every part of a boy's identity and experience that would have him seek and accept—hence learn to provide—emotional support, normatively socialized men are, through parental and pedagogic neglect and abuse, then through peer social aggression, and through the constant threat of humiliation and violence, emotionally stunted. Toxic masculinity is toxic to men too.

For example, in popular culture, here's an example of (one of the least violent parts of) how that looks:
youtube.com/watch?v=kGxW2toAvz…


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Préface à « La déception informatique » | @ploum

"Ce n’est pas que l’informatique n’ait pas exaucé nos rêves ! Non, c’est pire : elle a produit exactement le contraire. Elle semble avoir amplifié les problèmes que nous souhaitions résoudre tout en créant des nouveaux, comme l’espionnage permanent auquel nous sommes désormais soumis."

ploum.net/2026-02-16-preface_d…

Toute ma #VeilleNum sur app.flus.fr/collections/173214…

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17 February 1896 | Czech Jewish woman, Eliška Ritterová, was born.

She was deported to #Auschwitz from #Theresienstadt ghetto on 6 September 1943. She did not survive.
---

The history of deportations of Jews from the Theresienstadt ghetto to Auschwitz & the so-called family camp created in Birkenau by the SS: artsandculture.google.com/exhi…

“Sid Meier’s CIVILIZATION was one of the most addicting games of my life… I was pleasantly surprised to hear that Iain M. Banks shared the addiction and that his Culture novel EXCESSION was in part inspired by it.”

—Peter Tieryas on how Sid Meier’s CIVILIZATION helped inspire Iain M. Banks’s 1996 Culture novel EXCESSION

@bookstodon

reactormag.com/on-iain-m-banks…

#Scottish #literature #sciencefiction #IainBanks #IainMBanks #TheCulture #videogames #Civ #Civilization #SidMeier

in reply to Assoc for Scottish Literature

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“An Outside Context Problem was the sort of thing most civilisations encountered just once, and which they tended to encounter rather in the same way a sentence encountered a full stop…”

—Iain M. Banks, EXCESSION (1996)

#Scottish #literature #sciencefiction #IainBanks #IainMBanks #TheCulture #videogames #Civ #Civilization #SidMeier

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"But while Ontario has experienced the weakest job market of any province over the past year, it’s the Ottawa-Gatineau region that has suffered the steepest losses, faring much worse than cities closely associated with tariff-hit industries such as steel and autos.

And as federal cuts to spending and the civil service begin to ramp up, economists say the fallout in Canada’s hardest-hit job market will only deepen."

archive.is/Tdm92

#Ottawa #cdnpoli

From Facebook. If someone does these 5 things, they are using you. 1. they reach out Only when they need something no contact. 2. they rarely reciprocate. effort flows one way. 3. They disappear after getting help. gratitude is temporary 4. They guilt you into helping. Manipulation over respect. 5. They ignore your needs. Utility replaces care.

"more than half of all capital gains in any given year go to about 5,000 people."

That's a hell of UK tax stat

#MoreOrLess

pca.st/episode/4ece3148-d2f9-4…

"… for those of us who came here escaping precarious democracies or authoritarian regimes, it is unsettling to see how quickly free speech can be curtailed, how swiftly the right to peaceful assembly can become conditional, and how easily police powers can be expanded."
johnmenadue.com/post/2026/02/w…
#AusPol #NSWpol #Israel #CrimesAgainstHumanity #genocide #WarCrimes #protest
in reply to Drop Bear

"The most dangerous shift is not technological, but psychological. It is the moment when societies begin to believe that extreme violence is sometimes necessary for stability. Once that belief becomes normalized, the question is no longer whether extreme force will be used again.

The question becomes who will be reclassified as a legitimate target next."
drstaceypatton1865.substack.co…
#AusPol #NSWpol #Israel #CrimesAgainstHumanity #genocide #WarCrimes #authoritarianism

Here's a thought experiment.

Imagine a stamp mark with the words "Made with #AI" on it.

If you see this mark on a picture, illustration, mobile app, song, movie, or story - do you get the notion that this product is of higher, lower or unchanged quality?

If you see two identical products for the same price, where one has an AI mark and the other doesn't - which one would you buy?

(Please retoot this #LLM #poll for wider reach)

  • AI mark signals HIGHER quality (0%, 4 votes)
  • AI mark signals NO DIFFERENCE in quality (2%, 67 votes)
  • AI mark signals LOWER quality (97%, 2800 votes)
2871 voters. Poll end: in 3 days

This entry was edited (3 days ago)
in reply to Salve J. Nilsen

Actually, I don't think using AI inherently brings down quality.

But the fact that they thought AI would help to promote it suggests they could not think of a better reason.

Sort of like how I automatically distrust food and drink that is marketed for its health benefits -- they wouldn't feel they needed to say that if it tasted good, right..?

in reply to Salve J. Nilsen

i put "no difference", but i really want to say "it depends". In the general case i would say it's not really useful information, in many cases, ai will produce muqh better quality than a low skilled or low motivated human, in many cases it will produce the same quality than a decently competent human, in some cases it will do terrible mistakes that humans would very rarely do.

i think we'll see less and less of the latter.

This entry was edited (7 hours ago)

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