SDF Chatter

When I was growing up, we had discovery channel. That sparked my intrinsic curiousity. My daughter has that intrinsic motivation as well, but only for k-pop now. She likes youtube videos and she likes when I tell her about science stuff. Maybe I can combine that by recommending her some good youtube channels.

While looking for Discord alternatives I came across this project which looks like a great alternative for the kinds of Discord servers centered around Open Source projects and organizations. Ones where live chat and voice rooms aren't the focus.

It's a combination of forums and knowledge base that would be perfect for this use case.

French President Emmanuel Macron on Saturday, February 14, urged calm and restraint after the fatal beating of a 23-year-old French youth aligned with the far-right on the sidelines of a conference by a hard-left lawmaker in the southeastern city of Lyon.

The death of the young man – identified only as Quentin – has intensified tensions between France's far-right and radical left who are both eyeing 2027 presidential elections.

He had been hospitalized in Lyon on Thursday after being attacked while providing what his supporters said was security for a protest against an appearance by hard-left MEP Rima Hassan at the Lyon branch of the Sciences Po university.

More than 980 knife-related offenses and some 2,200 sex crimes were registered at train stations and in trains across Germany in 2025, according to a report from the weekly Bild am Sonntag newspaper that cites federal police figures.

https://www.nytimes.com/games/connections

Since Discord has decided to set itself on fire you might be looking for an alternative. Fluxer is open source (AGPL), selfhostable and based in Sweden. But maybe wait a while before you try to install the server yourself because the dev writes on github:

I know it's hard to resist, but please wait a little longer before you dive deep into the current codebase or try to set up self-hosting. I'm aware the current stack isn't very lightweight. In the next update, self-hosting should be straightforward, with a small set of services: Fluxer Server (TypeScript) using SQLite for persistence, Gateway (Erlang), and optionally LiveKit for voice and video.

The developer hosted instance has a Nitro-like premium tier for their service named Plutonium, if you selfhost you get all the premium features for free.

Fluxer is not federated (yet), but according to the website, federation is planned in the near(-ish) future. Furthermore the service is a bit spotty at the moment as they are fighting with an unusually big influx of new users.

I really hope they die soon, this is unbearable…

Syria’s ruling Hay’at Tahrir al-Sham-led (HTS) administration says it has pursued a diplomatic approach towards Tel Aviv, while the Israeli regime keeps escalating tensions in the region.

From Presstv via This RSS Feed.

I had Pinchflat set up on my server and never got around to putting it back in after I nuked it. I remember organizing backed up videos in jellyfin was a mess I never quite got working as well as I’d like.

I see there’s a couple alternatives mentioned on the Pinchflat GitHub. What is everybody else using to accomplish this?

Speaking in Munich, Volodymyr Zelenskyy also called for a clear date for his country to be allowed to join the EU

Ukraine wants security guarantees for a minimum of 20 years from the US before it can sign a peace deal with dignity, Volodymyr Zelenskyy said ahead of talks with Russia and the US scheduled for next week.

Speaking in Munich on Saturday, he also called for a clear date for Ukraine to be allowed to join the EU. Some EU officials have put the date as early as 2027.

Speaking to the annual Munich security summit, Ukraine’s president said he hoped “the trilateral meetings next week will be serious, substantive, helpful for all of us but, honestly, sometimes it feels like the sides are talking about completely different things”.

“The Americans often return to the topic of concessions and too often those concessions are discussed only in the context of Ukraine, not Russia,” he added.

When running

rsync -Paz /home/sbird "/run/media/sbird/My Passport/sbird"

As told by someone, I run into a ran out of storage error midway. Why is this? My disk usage is about 385 GiB for my home folder, and there is around 780 GiB of space in the external SSD (which already has stuff like photos and documents). Does rsync make doubly copies of it or something? That would be kind of silly. Or is it some other issue?

Note that the SSD is from a reputable brand (Western Digital) so it is unlikely that it is reporting a fake amount of storage.

EDIT: Wait, is it because my laptop SSD is BTRFS and the external SSD is exFAT? Could that be the issue? That would be kind of weird, why would files become so much more bigger with the external SSD?

I see this come up a lot in discussions about voting in America. Postal votes disproportionately go to Democrats, hence the Democrats want to expand postal voting while Republicans want to restrict it (and insist there is totally a bunch of fraud going on).

I've googled with a few search engines and haven't found a convincing reason. Lots of evidence that the skew is real, but no explanation as to why. Indeed, if one just looks at demographics, one would expect postal voting to benefit Republicans by facilitating votes from people in the countryside who live far away from voting centers.

So what actually gives?

Any open source P2P apps you can recommend? Anything really, torrent/file sharing/messenger...

• https://github.com/qbittorrent/qBittorrent
• https://github.com/c0re100/qBittorrent-Enhanced-Edition
• https://code.briarproject.org/briar
• what more?