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/o\ (lemmy.sdf.org)
submitted 8 minutes ago by Zwrt to c/funhole
 
 
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This talk goes over the development of a distributed filesystem tailored for OpenBSD. While OpenBSD excels in many areas, its native filesystem support has room for improvement. This talk goes into using the Filesystem in Userspace (FUSE) on OpenBSD to provide for a distributed and highly available filesystem.

This talk also includes an introduction to the Raft Consensus Algorithm, which plays a critical role in ensuring data consistency and reliability across distributed systems. The Elixir programming language is used, providing the necessary foundation for the implementation of the distributed FUSE filesystem on OpenBSD.

Talk link

For more information, please visit: https://www.bsdcan.org/

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Bonus video of bun fleeing the scene.

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Designing more and better platforms to support democracy can be an antidote to the wave of global autocracy that is increasingly bolstered by tech platforms that tighten public control.

Op-ed by Lisa Schirch, Professor of the Practice of Peace Studies, University of Notre Dame, Paris, France.

[...]

Democracy is in crisis globally, and technology is playing a role. Most large platforms optimize their designs for profit, not community or democracy. Increasingly, Big Tech is siding with autocrats, and the platforms’ designs help keep society under control.

[...]

A handful of tech billionaires dominate the global information ecosystem. Without public accountability or oversight, they determine what news shows up on your feed and what data they collect and share.

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Tech companies design platforms based on extensive psychological research. Examples include flashing notifications that make your phone jump and squeak, colorful rewards when others like your posts, and algorithms that push out the most emotional content to stimulate your most base emotions of anger, shame or glee.

[...]

A techno-autocracy is a political system where an authoritarian government uses technology to control its population. Techno-autocrats spread disinformation and propaganda, using fear tactics to demonize others and distract from corruption. They leverage massive amounts of data, artificial intelligence and surveillance to censor opponents.

For example, China uses technology to monitor and surveil its population with public cameras. Chinese platforms like WeChat and Weibo automatically scan, block or delete messages and posts for sensitive words like “freedom of speech.” Russia promotes domestic platforms like VK that are closely monitored and partly owned by state-linked entities that use it to promote political propaganda.

Over a decade ago, tech billionaires like Elon Musk and Peter Thiel, and now Vice President JD Vance, began aligning with far-right political philosophers like Curtis Yarvin. They argue that democracy impedes innovation, favoring concentrated decision-making in corporate-controlled mini-states governed through surveillance. Embracing this philosophy of techno-autocracy, they moved from funding and designing the internet to reshaping government.

Techno-autocrats weaponize social media platforms as part of their plan to dismantle democratic institutions.

The political capture of both X and Meta also have consequences for global security. At Meta, Mark Zuckerberg removed barriers to right-wing propaganda and openly endorsed President Donald Trump’s agenda. Musk changed X’s algorithm to highlight right-wing content, including Russian propaganda.

Designing tech for democracy

Recognizing the power that platform design has on society, some companies are designing new civic participation platforms that support rather than undermine society’s access to verified information and places for public deliberation.

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In 2014, a group of technologists founded Pol.is, an open-source technology for hosting public deliberation that leverages data science. Pol.is enables participants to propose and vote on policy ideas using what they call “computational democracy.” [...] People participate anonymously, helping to keep the focus on the issues and not the people.

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Taiwan used the Pol.is platform to enable mass civic engagement in the 2014 democracy movement. The U.K. government’s Collective Intelligence Lab used the platform to generate public discussion and generate new policy proposals on climate and health care policies. In Finland, a public foundation called Sitra uses Pol.is in its “What do you think, Finland?” public dialogues.

Barcelona, Spain, designed a new participatory democracy platform called Decidim in 2017. Now used throughout Spain and Europe, Decidim enables citizens to collaboratively propose, debate and decide on public policies and budgets through transparent digital processes.

Nobel Peace Laureate Maria Ressa founded Rappler Communities in 2023, a social network in the Philippines that combines journalism, community and technology. It aims to restore trust in institutions by providing safe spaces for exchanging ideas and connecting with neighbors, journalists and civil society groups.

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In 2024, the Alliance for Middle East Peace began using Remesh.ai, an AI-based platform, to find areas of common ground between Israelis and Palestinians in order to advance the idea of a public peace process and identify elements of a ceasefire agreement.

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tom_celica (self.sudonyms)
submitted 16 hours ago by wesker to c/sudonyms
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cross-posted from: https://lemmy.sdf.org/post/38367381

This is an op-ed by Amalendu Misra, Professor of International Politics, Lancaster University.

The Brics group of nations has just concluded its 17th annual summit in the Brazilian city of Rio de Janeiro. But, despite member states adopting a long list of commitments covering global governance, finance, health, AI and climate change, the summit was a lacklustre affair.

The two most prominent leaders from the group’s founding members – Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa – were conspicuously absent. Russia’s president, Vladimir Putin, only attended virtually due to an outstanding arrest warrant issued by the International Criminal Court over his role in the war in Ukraine.

China’s Xi Jinping avoided the summit altogether for unknown reasons, sending his prime minister, Li Qiang, instead. This was Xi’s first no-show at a Brics summit, with the snub prompting suggestions that Beijing’s enthusiasm for the group as part of an emerging new world order is in decline.

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The Brics group is a behemoth. Its full 11 members account for 40% of the world’s population and economy. But the bloc is desperately short of providing any cohesive alternative global leadership.

While Brazil used its position as host to highlight Brics as a truly multilateral forum capable of providing leadership in a new world order, such ambitions are thwarted by the many contradictions plaguing this bloc.

Among these are tensions between founding members China and India, which have been running high for decades.

There are other contradictions, too. In their joint Rio declaration, the group’s members decried the recent Israeli and US attacks on Iran. Brazil’s president, Luiz Inácio “Lula” da Silva, also used his position as summit host to criticise the Israeli offensive in Gaza.

But this moral high ground appears hollow when you consider that the Russian Federation, a key member of Brics, is on a mission to destroy Ukraine. And rather than condemning Russia, Brics leaders used the Rio summit to criticise recent Ukrainian attacks on Russia’s railway infrastructure.

[...]

Brics declared intention to address the issue of climate change is also problematic. The Rio declaration conveyed the group’s support for multilateralism and unity to achieve the goals of the Paris agreement. But, despite China making significant advances in its green energy sector, Brics contains some of the world’s biggest emitters of greenhouse gases as well as several of the largest oil and gas producers.

[...]

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can’t say i remember much from using winME. maybe i blocked it out, haha.

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BSDCan 2025 Keynote: Hardware Support for Memory Hungry Applications by Margo Seltzer

For nearly 60 years, we lived in a CPU-centric universe. Today, we are on the brink of a transition -- GPUs are the new golden child and those children demand unprecedented amounts of DRAM to satisfy modern data-hungry applications. I'm going to talk about these hardware trends and what they mean for those of us who build systems.

Speaker bio: Margo Seltzer is Canada 150 Research Chair in Computer Systems and the Cheriton Family chair in Computer Science at the University of British Columbia. Her research interests are in systems, construed quite broadly: systems for capturing and accessing data provenance, file systems, databases, transaction processing systems, storage and analysis of graph-structured data, and systems for constructing optimal and interpretable machine learning models.

She is the author of several widely-used software packages including database and transaction libraries and the 4.4BSD log-structured file system. Dr. Seltzer was a co-founder and CTO of Sleepycat Software, the makers of Berkeley DB, the recipient of the 2021 ACM Software Sytems award and the 2020 ACM SIGMOD Systems Award. She is a past President of the USENIX Assocation and served as the USENIX representative to the Computing Research Association Board of Directors. In 2019 recipient of the USENIX Lifetime Achievement Award.

For more information, please visit:

 https://www.bsdcan.org/2025/

#bsdcan

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I built these bleachers from recycled pallets. I use them for container gardening (tomatoes and eggplants this year).

Today was very hot (30C) and this bun was laying down back there when I got back from work. I set out a tray of fresh water just in case bun’s feeling a bit dehydrated.

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D.A.R.E. (lemmy.sdf.org)
submitted 23 hours ago* (last edited 23 hours ago) by pmjv to c/funhole
 
 
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A player on Big Brother said that both her parents ran track and so she was "literally born on the track". Unless your mother went into labour on the track and gave birth right there, you were not literally born on the track!

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I think the server components need a reboot or some part of the system needs to be looked at. Seems to have been getting worse as the week has gone on....

Did we ever figure out the best course of action to get the instance mod from SDF to look at it?

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Album: Da Devil's Playground: Underground Solo

Genre: Hip Hop

Style: Gangsta, Horrorcore, Memphis Rap

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Cookie hell (lemmy.dbzer0.com)
submitted 1 day ago by Melatonin@lemmy.dbzer0.com to c/rant
 
 

I can't believe I had to deal with this! I just opened an article in Firefox on my Android, and the damn site bombarded me with a staggering 912 cookies! 912! And of course, I was forced to accept whatever they call "essential" cookies, or suffer through the nightmare of toggling each one off individually. But here’s the worst part—they weren't even organized! No, they were scattered everywhere, forcing me to scroll endlessly through this mountain of cookies just to find the few I actually wanted to disable. It’s infuriating! How can anyone tolerate this level of intrusive, irresponsible design? This is an outright invasion of privacy, and it’s sickening!

PS. Apparently I'm not usually angry enough so I used https://goblin.tools/Formalizer to make it more ranty. Completely my experience, angrified.

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content country (lemmy.sdf.org)
submitted 1 day ago by pmjv to c/funhole
 
 
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flat circle (lemmy.sdf.org)
submitted 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago) by pmjv to c/unix_surrealism
 
 
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Light content (lemmy.blahaj.zone)
submitted 1 day ago by jawa22@lemmy.blahaj.zone to c/funhole
 
 

This is my first attempt at making art with something other than my thumb or Unity.

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