I believe this is one of the famous Omar cannons:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Improvised_artillery_in_the_Syrian_civil_war#Omar_cannon

Easily one of the most sophisticated Syrian hell cannons. It's breach-loading, it has a recoil damper and it's mounted on a strong enough truck chassis. They are even seemingly hitting what they are actually intending to hit, which is far from guaranteed with these kinds of improvised artillery pieces.

It seems like the entire industry is in pure panic about AI, not just Google. Everyone hopes that LLMs will end years of homeopathic growth through iteration of long-existing technology, which is why it attracts tons of venture capital.

Google, which sits where IBM was decades ago, is too big, too corporate and too slow now, so they needed years to react to this fad. When they finally did, all they were able to come up with was a rushed equivalent of existing LLMs that suffers from all of the same problems.

This appears to be the new norm among autocratic regimes (although it isn't all that new - think of Trotsky, for example, or the infamous umbrella murder).

Vietnam is doing this as well:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tr%E1%BB%8Bnh_Xu%C3%A2n_Thanh

https://rsf.org/en/dissident-exile-stops-blogging-because-family-vietnam-being-hounded

Eritrea, a regime that is similarly repressive as North Korea, but far less known, is also notorious for this:

https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/press-release/2019/06/eritrea-government-officials-and-supporters-target-critics-abroad-as-repression-stretches-beyond-borders/

Saudi Arabia is among the worst in this regard:

https://freedomhouse.org/report/transnational-repression/saudi-arabia

I'm getting the impression that liberal democracies housing refugees and dissidents from autocratic regimes are unprepared to counter these threats. It is our responsibility to protect people seeking refuge and this includes proactive action against governments that seek to extend their violent rule outside of their borders.

There's a new application-layer Internet protocol like (but also very much unlike) http by the name of Gemini. It was first launched in 2019 and until yesterday, flew completely under my radar. It's primarily meant to be used for uncluttered text-only pages (although any type of file can be distributed), which are created using a deliberately simple and limited markdown language. Unsurprisingly, this results in a plethora of small niche blogs being published through it.

The basic user experience is essentially the same as browsing the web, until you notice just how much it isn't. You enter URLs (except that they start with gemini://) you read texts and you click on hyperlinks - except that every page looks exactly the same due to the markdown language. There are no pop-ups, no ads, nothing autoplays, nothing wants your consent to exploit your user data. Even images only load when the user clicks on them. It shows just how little is actually needed, how many aspects of the modern web are completely unnecessary and mere pointless distractions.

Gemini pages - and this is a small hurdle that will keep most people away from it - can not be accessed with a normal web browser and instead require a specialized client for viewing (although paradoxically, creating pages often requires a web browser, at least for now). The idea is that both the underlying tech and the browsers are much more straightforward than anything related to http and html. A Gemini client is not effectively an entire operating system of its own that can execute near arbitrary code. It displays formatted text with basic images and videos - that's it.

Here's a neat, but slightly outdated introduction that also recommends a few clients and where to find pages to read:

https://geminiquickst.art/

The entire thing feels very early, tiny, experimental and odd, almost like a parallel reality, as if the World Wide Web didn't exist and someone came up with something like it only now, using today's hard- and software. If Lemmy is a response to social media in general and reddit in particular, Gemini feels more like a response to the World Wide Web as a whole or like a time machine back to a highly idealized version of the early days of the information system (the primary difference being the lack of horrendous '90s UX design and malware everywhere), including some unfortunate aspects that I had long forgotten about, like how the common method of finding content next to feeds - manually updated indexes instead of search engines - is plagued by dead links; and these dead links, unlike on the normal Internet, cannot be attempted to be resolved using the Wayback Machine or some other cache, at least not yet.

Gemini is equally parts exciting and promising, like a new frontier, but also at times confusing and frustrating. Don't expect your Gemini client of choice to replace your web browser any time soon (or ever), but it's still worth trying out, if for the novelty alone.

This is one of those American absurdities that thankfully hasn't made its way over to Europe yet, at least to my knowledge. I hope I have an electric car by the point they start introducing these here.

They released a few statements about being upset about people sending demanding/rude messages to them. They also complained about the cost of hosting (there are no ads on the page). Originally, they wanted to only open for people who are donating, but they appear to have backtracked on that, at least for now.

It's a common issue on the Internet. The moment you're doing anything, especially for free, you are basically inviting vitriol.

This studio is not just known for an even by Japanese standards exploitative work culture, but it also reuses assets of all kinds far more liberally than other developers. Art is by far the biggest cost factor in games development and they are taking significant shortcuts wherever they can.

Sounds nice in theory, but it works both ways: It would make political progress very difficult. Imagine a scenario in which e.g. trans rights are being rejected as unconstitutional in the past. The same politicians are then trying again in a different political climate year or decades later. This would be illegal according to your proposal.

Not to mention, it would be fairly trivial to circumvent this by using different politicians from the same party or an aligned interest group.

I looked for Ethiopian or African news sites that confirm this story, but it seems like it's not accurate. This African green news site only mentions that ICE cars will be phased out in line with the EU by 2035 and that the government encourages the sale of electric cars through incentives and local assembly:

https://www.afrik21.africa/en/ethiopia-non-electric-vehicles-soon-to-be-banned-from-importation/

There is nothing on this on any large Ethiopian news site. The Reporter has no article on this:

https://www.thereporterethiopia.com/?s=electric+cars

Neither does The Ethiopian Monitor:

https://ethiopianmonitor.com/?s=electric+cars

This Senegalese outlet states that it's not clear when the ban comes into effect:

https://apanews.net/ethiopia-to-ban-importation-of-non-electric-cars/

Given that there are significant issues with maintaining and insuring existing electric cars in the country, it's safe to assume that the ban will not happen immediately:

https://www.thereporterethiopia.com/30035/

There is a different car import ban since October of last year aimed at returning citizens, which doesn't appear to have anything to do with the move to electric vehicles though:

https://www.thereporterethiopia.com/36044/

So in other words, this awful article containing a chat log for some reason (What on Earth was the author thinking with that?) is just an example of poor reporting.

It's already on the Internet Archive:

https://archive.org/details/hobbes-os2-archive_202401

Remember when he was widely being portrayed as the intelligent version of Trump we should all be afraid of?

Speaking from experience with this firm, this bot spoke the truth.