SDF Chatter

by Nyazsche

The BBC has commissioned a slate of new shows to mark Sir David Attenborough’s 100th birthday, on Friday 8 May, and will be showcasing some of the finest programmes from his extraordinary seven-decade career in a week-long celebration of his work and legacy.

New programmes

• Making Life on Earth: Attenborough’s Greatest Adventure - featuring new interviews with David and the original production team as they reflect on the making of the ground-breaking series Life on Earth for BBC One and iPlayer

• Secret Garden - a new primetime series for BBC One and iPlayer, in which Attenborough reveals the hidden worlds and remarkable wildlife thriving within Britain’s gardens

• David Attenborough’s 100 Years on Planet Earth - a celebratory live event for BBC One and iPlayer from the Royal Albert Hall, featuring the BBC Concert Orchestra and special guests.

From the archive

• Special episodes from some of Attenborough’s most beloved landmark series, airing on BBC One in the week leading up to his birthday

• A dedicated BBC iPlayer collection showcasing more than 40 series presented by David, celebrating one of the most remarkable bodies of work in broadcasting history.

Officials previously blamed a staffer for a grotesquely racist video reposted by the president’s account earlier this month

Asked whether the president's latest Truth represented an official shift in American policy against the Chagos deal, Leavitt told reporters that Trump's post "should be taken as the policy of the Trump administration” because it had come “straight from the horse's mouth.”

“When you see it on Truth Social, you know it's directly from President Trump,” she said.

But Leavitt’s defense of the president’s latest social media activity directly contradicts what White House officials and Trump were saying just days ago after he posted a video to social media that showed Barack and Michelle Obama’s faces superimposed onto apes in a jungle, swaying side to side and smiling as the song “The Lion Sleeps Tonight” played in the background.

heya fellow cat havers!

things are going pretty well, but I just wanted to hear from folks who are familiar with my situation :~)

I have gotten a kitten who's 5 months old, and have been slowly introducing him to my soon-to-be-sweet-17-year-old cat. my old man is the sweetest, loveliest and clingiest boy in the world with humans, but he's taking his time warming up to the kitten.

they live separately - kitten lives in the spare room - and they also have been feeding through a window into the spare room with full visual contact and no negative reactions (the architecture of this house is bizarre; there's a window in the living room looking into the spare room lol. see the image for their feeding set-up).

they're at a point where they can exist in the same room together for a limited time, provided the old man is distracted by treats and the kitten doesn't touch him. however, as soon as the kitten approaches him too playfully, the old guy swats and hisses at him (with no claws out but.. it's not ideal). if the kitten dares gets in the way of him and treats, he also hisses and swats.

who else has dealt with introducing an old kitty to a kitten? how long did it take ya? are they besties now? it's only been a week and a half so I'm well aware that it will take some time.

Mayor Zohran Mamdani's first preliminary budget cancels his predecessor's plan to hire 5,000 additional police officers and keeps the NYPD's roughly $6.4 billion budget essentially flat.

The $127 billion city budget unveiled on Tuesday directs $421 million toward items the administration said had been underbudgeted, including NYPD overtime shortfalls, aging police cars and surveillance technology costs.

The department's uniform head count is projected to remain just under 35,000 officers next year, effectively scrapping the 40,000-officer force envisioned under previous Mayor Eric Adams, who announced the expansion shortly before leaving office.

Funding for the Department of Community Safety, Mamdani's signature proposal to dispatch mental health teams to some 911 calls instead of police, is notably absent from the preliminary plan. Administration officials said funding for the new department would appear in the executive budget, which is expected in late April. Whether that money materializes could be a clearer test of whether the mayor’s campaign promises on public safety take shape.

Budget officials also did not provide details on funding for a promised expansion of B-HEARD, the city’s mental health crisis response program.

Mamdani said the preliminary budget accounts for expenses that had been underestimated in prior years.

"This is a reflection of what overtime actually is," Mamdani said. "What we've seen under prior administrations is an inability to account for the actual costs of city services."

The budget presentation kicks off months of negotiations with the City Council, which must approve a version of the budget by the end of June.

cross-posted from: https://hexbear.net/post/7704676

by Nyazsche

Trump has repeatedly attacked Milley — and even suggested he could be executed for committing treason in 2023. Milley denied the accusations at the time and said he was taking “appropriate measures” to ensure his safety in the wake of Trump’s comments.

One must ask, when is too much cocaine and alcohol simply too much cocaine and alcohol?

Cross-posted from ""Look up": A panel from my comic" by @jjj@lemmy.blahaj.zone in !art@lemmy.blahaj.zone

I drew this panel for my MSPFA Failbent a day or so ago. It's the first large scale outdoor panel I've made and I'm overall really happy with the background at least.

I'm not so sure about the trees' texture/density/etc. It's supposed to be in a dream so I guess I can write it off...

Drawn with GIMP.

https://ghostarchive.org/archive/lPqow

Whenever we hear that a platform like Twitter was valued at 44 billion dollars, a simple question arises: how does an app reach such an enormous valuation? This question came up during one of our FSHM weekly GLUG meetings.

Of course, technology matters. The infrastructure, the algorithms, the scalability all of that is important. But is that really what gives these platforms their value?

The real value lies in the people.

Platforms like Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram are not valuable merely because of their code. They are valuable because of their users. the millions and billions of people who create content, build networks, share opinions, upload photos, react, comment, and interact every single day. Without this constant human activity, these platforms would be empty shells.

Most importantly, the data generated by users becomes the true asset.

• Take early Facebook as an example. Features like facial recognition were not built in isolation. They were trained on the photos we uploaded. We tagged ourselves and our friends. We helped the system learn faces. In doing so, we unknowingly became unpaid contributors to a massive data infrastructure.

• Older versions of Google's reCAPTCHA asked users to identify distorted words. Millions of humans collectively performed micro-labour for free under the guise of security verification. In reality...we were helping digitize books, labeling images, training computer vision models.

• Social Media Reactions: Emotional Data as Raw Material, These are not simple interactions. They are behavioral signals. The system learns on what makes you angry, afraid, keeps you scrolling like what triggers you to engage. That knowledge feeds targeted ads and sometimes targeted political messaging. We generate the emotional dataset. They monetize the psychological profile.

• Coming to GPS & Location Data, Every route we take trains routing algorithms. But that same location history can reveal our Religious visit, Medical appointments, Political gatherings, Personal routines. These location data becomes one of the most sensitive behavioral datasets ever created and it is continuously harvested.

We are the labour. The infrastructure of surveillance capitalism is built not only on code - but on our everyday lives.

The problem is not technology itself. The problem is extraction without consent, ownership, or collective benefit.

If technology is built from our participation, then it should be accountable to us. If our data creates value, we should have power over it. If we are the labour, we should not be the product. Artificial Dependency & Algorithmic Control

Instead of an open, lightweight, decentralized internet, we now have a surveillance-heavy ecosystem optimized for extraction.

The web becomes slower, heavier, and more controlled not because of necessity, but because surveillance is profitable.

Toward Consensual Technology for the Masses, Technology should enable people, not harvest them.

We need:

• Transparent systems.
• Minimal data collection by default.
• Collective ownership models.
• Community-governed platforms.
• Open protocols instead of closed monopolies.
• Real consent, not forced agreement.

Technology should be participatory. Technology should be accountable. Technology should be consensual.

If our labour builds the system, we should have control over it. If our data creates value, we should share in that value. If technology shapes society, it must be shaped by the people not by a handful of shareholders.

As these tech corporations grow, their economic power often transforms into political and cultural power. Large technology companies increasingly influence public discourse, policy, and even global politics. When technology concentrates in the hands of a few, it shapes the world according to their interests.

Technology should not belong to one or two powerful entities.

Technology should be consensual. Technology should serve the masses. Technology should be built around people - not profits.

like if you wanted to mix paint to get a color from a computer would you do the opposite of what the RGB value is? I'm confused

like if I wanted to take the RBG code R:99, G: 66, B, 33 wouldn't it look more lightful than if I mixed paint into 1 part blue, 2 part green, 3 part red? how would you paint a color code?

Cross-posted from ""Look up": A panel from my comic" by @jjj@lemmy.blahaj.zone in !art@lemmy.blahaj.zone

I drew this panel for my MSPFA Failbent a day or so ago. It's the first large scale outdoor panel I've made and I'm overall really happy with the background at least.

I'm not so sure about the trees' texture/density/etc. It's supposed to be in a dream so I guess I can write it off...

Drawn with GIMP.

Snip:

Deepfake nudes and “revenge porn” must be removed from the internet within 48 hours or technology firms risk being blocked in the UK, Keir Starmer has said, calling it a “national emergency” that the government must confront.

Companies could be fined millions or even blocked altogether if they allow the images to spread or be reposted after victims give notice.

Amendments will be made to the crime and policing bill to also regulate AI chatbots such as X’s Grok, which generated nonconsensual images of women in bikinis or in compromising positions until the government threatened action against Elon Musk’s company.

Critical support to Starmer on this one thing I guess....

Well a plurality did vote for this after he was convicted of crimes and they saw what he did in the first go around.

Post body

Dbzero Governance Vote Post https://lemmy.dbzer0.com/post/63525728

Ahoy mateys!

A few of our users have recently pointed out that a lot of the pro-Zionist accounts on the fediverse nowadays seem to come from the feddit.org instance.

But whatever the excuse happens to be, they need to do better imo. Israel is currently the most violent, fascist and genocidal nation state in the Middle East (if you exclude the US military bases there). And yet feddit.org seems to regard the Palestinians fighting against Israel’s ongoing illegal occupation of their land as the real terrorists. ....

More context

Our instance already voted to ban pro-Zionist accounts (see https://lemmy.dbzer0.com/post/60585441 for reference) and the rule that was implemented is here: Golden Rule #8.

As further context, you can find relevant comments and discussion in this post by a banned feddit admin in MoG (that fact they chose to post in MoG is in itself quite telling), and this post about their defederation from quokk.au over anti-semitism allegations has recently become active again. ...

Note 2: If you think feddit.org deserves a full instance ban instead, or have alternative suggestions, then please leave your comments below. If enough people think that’s the better option, then we’ll do that instead.

In the end the Post had around 70% of support by dbzer0 users, who in the comments also called for defederation.

Here is a Link to Dbzer0 instances tab https://lemmy.dbzer0.com/instances where if you go to blocked instances you can see fedddit.org is now defederated

i dont think feddit has made a post now, but when they do i will add it