https://xcancel.com/MFA_China/status/1917069881142612278

This version of the video has English audio. There is a another version of the video with Chinese audio.

This gist of the video is that China will not concede to US pressure because when you give a bully an inch, then they will take a mile. The video says "all bullies are paper tigers".

The video is only 2 minutes, worth watching.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/29343892

By Maha Hussaini in Gaza City, occupied Palestine
Published date: 29 April 2025 14:07 BST

"On 1 April, all 25 bakeries supported by the World Food Programme (WFP) across the Gaza Strip shut down due to the lack of wheat flour and fuel.

Today, families are using the last remaining bags of wheat flour they received from the WFP before the aid suspension to bake their bread in primitive, handmade ovens using firewood."

I am not planning on coming back to the website nor do I think it’s suitable if I be unbanned. This is not an unban request rather an apology to my peers on this website.

Five years ago I joined Hexbear after sailing on the lifeboat a while after the r/chapotraphouse subreddit was shut down. The plan for the website wasn’t known entirely and my assumption was that it wouldn’t last too long but I’m gladly mistaken that this was not the case. In fact, the site has been able to stand on its own two legs for over half a decade and this is an accomplishment within itself and even though we are a small community, we still make our presence within internet history for all time to come.

And this is what disheartens me the most… I was hoping I would be able to reach the decade mark to be able to share that 10 year honor with everyone else here, but my wishes flew close to the sun and my wings of wax melted.

It was never my intention to cause upset on this website or any platforms outside of this one, but wishing and doing are two different things and I have failed in that regard. I did treat my peers, friends actually, poorly at times and for this I am deeply apologetic. But some actions by suspect individuals shouldn’t go without punishment and for that I am not apologetic for and I stand firm that some of my actions were necessary and some users were deserving to feel the might of a small fraction of my power. I digress.

What I want to address and I hope people hear me on this issue, and I hope this isn’t classed as “meta” posting or “particular user” jacketing but there is an infection, rather a virus that has infested this website and we were infected from the start. For all that is good in this world, and for all the goodwill and faith I have in my comrades who posted alongside me. I have a name for this virus, the virus is Melina.

If you aren’t aware already Melina was a user who moderated the c/fakenews community which acted as a containment comm after they were subsequently banned on other alts for posting very sensitive, destructive and always unfunny fakenews posts in various communities. This was very damaging as people would believe said posts and this would have an bad effect on them because being lied to constantly is a form of gaslighting and it’s extremely damaging to be lied to about a celebrity death or the threat of WW3. Blocking Melina wasn’t enough because they would frequent cytube and continually harass me and other users and say the most outlandish things. I was nice to Melina and messaged them every day they logged on until one day they messaged me “you don’t have to keep sending me DM’s if you can send messages through the tube” or something to this degree, and I felt extremely heartbroken because this is someone I could have had a connection with but they were very dismissive of this caring attitude I was exhibiting from the start. So for me to be banned after alleged hostility on the tube, I can only attribute this to feeling “on edge” after everything Melina put me through.

I think Melina is an admin on hexbear, it makes perfect sense in all honesty. Nobody has been treated the way Melina has, no user of that caliber has been unbanned on multiple occasions, no user has ever maintained such a presence (stain) on a community than Melina has. All you have to do is search for Melina in the search bar and you will see countless comments condemning their behavior and being critical of the user.

There is a Melina supremacy going on within Hexbear and all the admins are in support of this supremacist movement. They can’t outright claim to be pro Melina, if anything a lot of admins are openly opposed to Melina in comments, but this is just to disfranchise the effect Melina has had on the users of this website because the admins are just like “we see you we hear you we hate them to” only to be possibly applauding one another in their secret admin discord.

I will miss this website and its users but it’s time for me to retire and touch grass. I have my lady to attend to. So long fellow comrades, it has and always will be an honor.

Disposable multiblade razors are objectively worse than safety razors, on all counts. They shave less smooth, while causing more burns. They're cheaper on initial investment but get more expensive very quickly, making you dependent on overpriced replacements and gimmicks that barely last a few uses. That's not counting the "externality costs", which is an euphemism for the costs pushed onto poor countries and nonhuman communities, thanks to the production, transport and disposal of all that single-use plastic (a safety razor is 100% metal, and so are the replacement blades, which come packed in paper).

About the only advantage of disposables is that they're easier to use for beginners. And even that is debatable. When you're a beginner with a safety razor you maybe nick yourself a few times until you learn the skill to follow the curves of your skin. You skin itself maybe gets sensitive at the start, unused to the exfoliation you get during a proper smooth shave. But how long do you think you stay "a beginner" when you shave every day? Like it's not like you're learning to play the violin, it's not that hard of a skill, a week or two tops and it becomes automatic.

But this small barrier to entry is enough, when paired with the bias and interests of razor manufacturers. Marketing goes heavy on the disposables, and you can't find a good quality safety razor or a good deal on replacement blades at the grocery shop, you have to be in the know and order it online. You have to wade through "manly art of the masculine man" forums that will tell you the only real safety razor is custom-made in Tibet by electric monks hand-hammering audiophile alloys and if you don't shave with artisinal castor soap recipes from 300BCE using beaver hair brushes, your skin is going to fall off and rot. Which is to say, safety razors are now a niche product, a hipster thing, a frugalist's obscure economy lifehack. A safety razor is a trivially simple and economic device, it's just a metal holder for a flat blade; but its very superiority now counts against it, it's weaponised to make it look inacessible. People have been trained to think of anything that requires even a little bit of patience or skill as not for them; perversely, even reasonableness can feel like "not for my kind".

Not by accident; since the one thing that disposables do really well is "transferring more of your monthly income to Procter & Gamble shareholders."

I could write a long text very similar to this about how scythes can cut grass cheaper, faster, neater, requiring no input but a whetstone—and some patience to learn the skill but how long does it take to learn that if you're a professional grass-cutter—when compared to the noisy motor blades that fill my morning right now, and every few months, as the landlord sends waves of poorly-paid migrant labour to permanently damage their own sense of hearing along with the dandelions and cloves that the bees need so desperately. But you get the point. More technology does not equal better, even for definitions of "better" that only care for the logic of productivity and ignore the needs (material, emotional, spiritual) of social and ecological communities.

You get where I'm going with this analogy. I keep waiting for the moment where the shoe is going to drop in "generative AI". Where the public at large wakes up like investors waking up to WeWork or the Metaverse, and everyone realises omg what were we thinking this is all bullshit! There's no point at all in using these things to ask questions or to write text or anything else really! But I'm finally accepting that that shoe is never dropping. It's like waiting for the moment when people realise that multi-blade plastic Gilettes are a scam. Not happening, the system isn't set up that way. For as long as you go to the supermarket and this is the "normal" way to shave, that's how shave is going to happen. I wrote before on how "the broken search bar is symbiotic with the bullshitting chatbot": Currently Google "AI" Summary is better than Google Search, not because Google "AI" Summary is good or reliable, but because the search has been internally sabotaged by the incentive structures of web companies. If you're a fellow "AI" refuser and you've been struggling to get any useful results out of web searches, think of how it must feel for people who go for the chatbot, how much easier and more direct. That's the razor we have on the shelves. "AI" doesn't have to work for the scam to be sustainable, it just has to feel like it more or less kinda does most of the time. (No one has ever achieved a close shave on a Gilette Mach 3 but hey, maybe you're prompting it wrong). As long as "generating" something with "AI" feels like it lets you skip even the smallest barrier to entry (like asking a question in a forum of a niche topic). As long as it feels quicker, easier, more convenient.

This is also the case for things like "AI translations" or "AI art" or "vibe coding". The real solution to "AI", like other forms of unnecessarily complex technology, would involve people feeling like they have the time and mental space to do things for pleasure. "AI" is kind of an anaerobic infection, an opportunistic disease caused by lack of oxygen. No one can breathe in this society. The real problem is capitalis—

Now don't get me wrong, the "AI" bubble is still going to pop. There's no way it can't; investors have put more money on this thing than on entire countries, contrary to OpenAI's claims the costs of training and operating keep exploding, and in a world going into recession at some point even capitalists with more money than common sense will have to think of the absence of ROI. But the damage is done. We're in ELIZA world now, and long after OpenAI is dead we'll still be reading books only to find out the gormless translation was "AI", playing games with background "art" "generated" by "AI", interacting online with political agitators spamming nonsense who turn out to be "AI", right until the day when electricity becomes too scarce to be cost-efficient to spam people in this way.

I've been killing myself trying to figure out what's going on with my gut. I have a sensitivity to SOMETHING but elimination diets aren't pinpointing the source. Has anyone used one of these type of tests? My doctor said it's a scam but I figured the internet wouldn't, no.... COULDN'T lie to me. Thanks Lemmings!

https://www.vice.com/en/article/teens-are-using-chatgpt-to-invest-in-the-stock-market/

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

Edit: Everyone is asking for the code, so here it is. Keep in mind, this code assumes a few things:

1. You'd need to specify the virtual environment path for Python.
2. You'd need to specify the directory for which the games are located.
3. You'd have to put a "game_info" file in each game's root directory.
4. You'd need to have steamcmd installed.
5. The format of the game_info file is like this (I use CS.RIN.RU):

build: 17601020
steamid: 548430
csrinru: https://cs.rin.ru/forum/viewtopic.php?f=10&t=81377

Hope I'm not breaking any rules. This is my first post on Lemmy. I tried to post on garbage-ass Reddit but apparently being a new user means you can't do fuck-all. So, I'm gonna try to make Lemmy a home.

Anyway, I pirate games. Mostly because I'm broke, and somewhat because I hate spending money on a game and then hating it 15 minutes into it. But anyway..that's neither here nor there.

The entire purpose of this post is just to share this neat little thing I created. I'm not promoting it -- it isn't released. I just wanna share nerdy shit with other people.

The issue that I was having is that I figured, over time, my pirated game collection will get quite big. It will become increasingly more time-intensive to check back to the piracy forums for updated pirated versions of the game.

So I came up with a solution. Whenever I download a new pirated game, I will create a file called "game_info" in the directory which will include three little bits of data.

1. The build number of the pirated game
2. The Steam App ID
3. The link to the forum topic about that game from the piracy site I go to.

I wrote a script that will scan my games directory for each game_info file. It will then use steamcmd to check SteamDB for the latest patches released and compare that to the current build number in the game_info file. Obviously if they don't match -- there's an update. And it will inform me. This way I can quickly check if there are any updates available for a game, then I can go to the piracy forum and check to see if anyone has released the updated version yet.

I thought it was cool. Anyway, just thought I'd share some nerdy shit.

Feel free to degrade me.

Very strong reminder that every little bit helps! Each donation brings me closer and gives some sense of relief, especially since time is short.

Strength in numbers! 20 comrades donating $20 would put me more than halfway there.

My Cash App is $QuingCrimson, and I have Venmo, Zelle, and PayPal as well. You can DM me for those. I really appreciate it!

Ich bin mir nicht sicher ob ich hier an der richtigen Adresse bin mit dem Thema, falls das woanders hin muss bitte gerne sagen.

Ich werde meinen Einbaukühlschrank durch einen größeren freistehenden ersetzen. Dadurch wird Platz für eine Spülmaschine.

Beim Kühlschrank sehe ich keine größeren Probleme auf mich zukommen aber bei der Suche nach einer Waschmaschine war ich gestern am Abkotzen. Hatte eigentlich Bosch ins Auge gefasst weil die Maschinen im mittleren preissegment bei Stiftung Warentest super abschneiden und die zumindest teilweise noch in der EU produzieren. Jetzt habe ich aber gestern zufällig durch ein YouTube Video erfahren, dass teilweise Features nur über die App mit Cloud Integration verfügbar sind was für mich ein absolutes No-Go ist. Jetzt gibt es zwar zufälligerweise seit Ende letzten Jahres über openhab ein Modul das es einem erlaubt dieses Zeug komplett lokal zu steuern (Home Connect local binding). Ich habe zwar auch geplant für dieses Jahr mal openhab aufzusetzen und smart Thermostate anzuschaffen, aber damit habe ich noch nicht angefangen und aktuell auch wenig Zeit dafür.

Deshalb jetzt meine Frage ob jemand Erfahrungen mit den Bosch Spülmaschinen mit App zwang hat, wie schlimm ist das? Sind das nur Dinge die man eh nie benutzt die hinter der App gelockt sind? Wenn das der Fall wäre könnte ich mir überlegen die anzuschaffen und dann wenn ich openhab aufsetze kann ich den Rest ja nutzen. Geht mir aber grundsätzlich schon mal gegen den Strich und ich hab eigentlich schon keinen Bock mehr auf Bosch. Spricht etwas gegen AEG? Preislich vergleichbar, eher noch günstiger. Schneiden bei Tests schlechter ab als Bosch aber noch gut? Bauknecht scheint mit schlechter zu sein als AEG und bosch. Miele ist zu teuer, würde gerne mit beiden Geräten zusammen unter 1000 bleiben, absolute Schmerzgrenze ca 1200.

A majority of Americans say President Trump is a "dangerous dictator" who poses a threat to democracy and believe he's overstepped his authority by actions such as the mass firing of federal employees, a new survey says.

The wide-ranging poll released Tuesday, on Trump's 100th day in office, is the latest sign of him losing support for his immigration and economic policies — the two issues that largely fueled his election.

Someone should probably jump in and explain what federation means.

Whenever I stumble across a song I like on youtube I download it into my personal music folder, I started this practice more than 4 years ago and I accumulated a large amount of socialist music from very niche spaces, spanning across a wide variety of languages. Because I see that nobody else is doing this specific thing on this site, I feel compelled to share this collection track by track, maybe it will lead to someone else also feeling the same inspiration that I felt when first listening to it.

The Internationale is a classic all can recognize, but this rendition in particular is my favorite. The inflection of the vocalist, distinct choices of instrumentation as well as the upbeat tempo give it an unmistakable energy which makes it stand out from other renditions of the song. As far as the musical group this originates from I sadly can't provide much insight, but surface level information says that they are politically active and involved in the fight for minorities rights in Japan, anti-war causes and support for Palestinian rights.