SDF Chatter

Experiment rather than product, but still an interesting read. Plus it looks cool.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.dbzer0.com/post/40497343

Share yours!

Someone will have to pay for this one day/

Donald Trump has privately encouraged Ukraine to step up deep strikes on Russian territory, even asking Volodymyr Zelenskyy whether he could strike Moscow if the US provided long-range weapons, according to people briefed on the discussions.

The conversation, which took place during the July 4 call between the US and Ukrainian leaders, marks a sharp departure from Trump’s previous stance on Russia’s war and his campaign promise to end US involvement in foreign conflicts.

Two people familiar with the conversation between Trump and Zelenskyy said the US president had asked his Ukrainian counterpart whether he could hit military targets deep inside Russia if he provided weapons capable of doing so.

“Volodymyr, can you hit Moscow? . . . Can you hit St Petersburg too?” Trump asked on the call, according to the people.

They said Zelenskyy replied: “Absolutely. We can if you give us the weapons.”

Trump signalled his backing for the idea, describing the strategy as intended to “make them [Russians] feel the pain” and force the Kremlin to the negotiating table, according to the two people briefed on the call.

The discussion between Trump and Zelenskyy led to a list of potential weapons for Kyiv being shared by the US side with the Ukrainian president in Rome last week, according to three people with knowledge of it.

During a meeting with US defence officials and intermediaries from Nato governments, Zelenskyy received a list of long-range strike systems that potentially could be made available to Ukraine via third-party transfers.

The arrangement would allow Trump to sidestep the need for Congressional approval on direct US military aid by authorising weapons sales to European allies, who would then pass the systems on to Kyiv.

Russia has repeatedly threatened to attack western targets in response to western supplies of advanced weaponry to Ukraine, but has yet to do so.

The Russian president said Moscow was entitled to “use our weaponry against military facilities of countries that allow their weapons to be used against our facilities, and in the case the aggressive action escalates, we will respond just as decisively and symmetrically”.

cross-posted from: https://slrpnk.net/post/24727109

The right to be analog is a critical enabler to the power to boycott.

Suppose you boycott Microsoft and Google. If you need to reach a gov office who uses MS or Google for email, then you are writing a snail mail letter. Denmark has eliminated the national postal service. The loss of an important analog option forces Danes to use the digital mechanism. No one in Denmark can say: “hold on, I am boycotting Microsoft, so I cannot be obligated to correspond with your office”.

No country gives its people either rights. That is, there is no country that gives you a right to boycott or the right be analog. In principle, we could loosely claim to derive those rights through the human rights to autonomy, dignity, and self-determination. But that won’t hold up in court, as human rights are generally disregarded in court. Abstract human rights like that are really a long-shot as well. Even if a court were to concede to human rights, you’ve already lost if you have to go to court because in Europe you cannot generally recover all damages even if the judge takes your side.

I believe a window of opportunity is passing us by. If we do not establish a right to be analog hard and fast, it will be too late once mechanisms supporting our analog refuge are gone.

Europe is quietly removing the cash option. Europeans are boiling frogs. They don’t see that they have already lost the option to be free from banks. Forced banking is already in force. This enables banks to gradually force you onto their enshitified digital platforms.

What I find most disturbing is how a vast majority are blind to this.

I know everybody is probably sick of hearing that the lotto is a tax on people who are bad at math, but it's far more deceptive than just a complicated expected value equation. Powerball and Mega Millions advertising the sum total of a thirty year annuity as the value of the jackpot is simply a lie. It is false. No, the Powerball is not $248 million dollars. That's literally not what the value of the jackpot is worth.

Advertisements are prohibited from being deceptive because people are gullible. If you were selling jars of tomato sauce, and when people opened them up, they find a bunch of tomato seeds, that would be less of a lie than the current promotion for lotto tickets. You wouldn't be able to say "well, everyone knows that the jars don't have the sauce yet. Eventually, the tomatoes will grow and you can make sauce with them, or we can plant them for you and send you a few tablespoons of sauce every year." You'd be laughed out of court and right into jail, because that's fraud.

You could still have the lotto without the fraud. It would still be a tax on people bad at math. $70 million dollars is functionally equivalent to $248 million, in that it's enough money to change your life forever. People could still purchase the dream of a better life for $2 each, and most of the same people still would because gambling is an addiction. You could be completely honest about how unfair the game is, and people would still happily play.

And that's what bugs me about it. It's so unnecessary. No other casino or gambling establishment could get away with something so transparently dishonest, and they don't have to while still making money hand over fist.

This is the closest I’ve ever been to a bun encounter!

http://archive.today/2025.07.15-104024/https://www.nytimes.com/2025/07/15/world/europe/ukraine-weapons-us-nato.html

Patriot air defense systems, missiles and ammunition are among the American-made weapons NATO allies will buy under an arms deal brokered with President Trump to help Ukraine defend itself from Russian attacks, officials say.

Nearly all of the weapons are immediately available to ship to Ukraine, officials said, meaning they are either from existing military stockpiles or have just been built.

Neither Mr. Rutte nor Mr. Trump detailed what other kinds of missiles and ammunition might be sold to allies for Ukraine. It could include more of what Ukraine already got in the first three years of the war, such as 155-millimeter artillery shells that are crucial to holding back Russia on the front lines, officials said.

Some could be weapons that Ukraine has requested but never received from the United States, including deep strike Joint Air-to-Surface Standoff Missiles, or JASSMs (pronounced “jazz ’ems”). They can reach into Russia and can be fired from F-16 fighter jets that European allies have sent Ukraine over the past year.

Generally, a single Patriot battery costs about $1 billion to build, depending on the model, and interceptor missiles cost about $3.7 million each. JASSMs sell for about $1.5 million each. And 155-millimeter artillery shells can cost thousands of dollars per round.

Ukraine has about eight Patriot systems, although as recently as May, two were being refurbished and not functioning, U.S. officials have said. Most are positioned around the capital, Kyiv, which has left other cities vulnerable to Russian attacks.

Ukraine has other air defense systems, but only the Patriot has intercepted Russian ballistic missiles that can hit targets from many hundreds of miles away in minutes.

More Ukrainians were killed in June than in any other single month so far in the three-year war, the United Nations reported. Russian forces continue to advance in eastern Ukraine.

This time the example seems ironed out. It is not pretty, but it works.

https://github.com/Halfwake/guile-quad-tree/commit/295224563162839dbf8e5fec86c3fdb757a9ac87

The search for middleware between emacs and Lemmy was a dead end. So the next question is naturally:

Does anyone else use emacs to compose Lemmy posts, before copy-pasting them into a lemmy client?

I work offline, so of course I use emacs for this. But I wonder if I am alone.

So far I’ve only used org mode with a single file. Each post starts with an asterisk, then I put this at the top of the file to start in the collapsed state:

#+startup: hideblocks
#+startup: fold
~disable~ #+STARTUP: showall

The competing workflow would be to have each post in its own file with an .md extension to get markdown mode. But markdown mode is not using the same markdown as Lemmy. And it would be tedious to deal with many separate files.

problems with markdown mode:

• many files to manage
• markdown language differences
• paraphaphs must be unwrapped before copying to the buffer

problems with org mode:

• no syntax highlighting for markdown
• paraphaphs must be unwrapped before copying to the buffer

Am I missing anything?

Any tips for coping with this? I know there is an add-on somewhere that will fill and unfill paragraphs as a toggle, but that would still be tedious if it’s one paragraph at a time.

Yes, in part that they don't care that they are making more work for me (logging back in to every site), but moreso that they don't care how (or that) their website is broken.

If I, through ordinary use of a website, can get it into an inconsistent state, then other users probably are too. Isn't the site-specific state VALUABLE in diagnostics? Shouldn't your SREs be itching to get ahold of a bonafide failure case? Why is it the first thing that is so carelessly destroyed?

In theory, even if they are getting flooded with tickets from their broken website... what if it's not THAT known issue your site is dealing with, but a DISTINCT issue that might not be solved by the same solution. Where is the science/knowledge process here?

Yes, I ought to be able to cast it into a perspective of them trying to unblock me as fast as possible, but for some reason... hearing something so blithe tends to send a clear signal that you want me to quickly go away and stop bothering you... that they don't care in general.

Bob Wells, the Cheap RV living guy, has sold his last van-based rig and moved into a Subaru Forester.

He explains his reasoning in the video. I am all for people doing what makes them happy. :-)

Is there more to life?

Made as an example to the GNU Guile quad tree module https://github.com/Halfwake/guile-quad-tree/ using David Thompson's https://dthompson.us/projects/chickadee.html module.

Music is from somewhere in https://archive.org/details/TheColumbiansCollection1924-1929DirectedByBenSelvin.