The article itself claims that 87% of news outlets are avoiding the phrase “ethnic cleansing”. There are those that are calling it for what it is.

If you want an example: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2025/feb/05/un-chief-warns-against-ethnic-cleansing-after-donald-trump-gaza-proposal

Uneducated 2 cents. afaik the publishers have some kind of “part ownership”, where they can pull it out from the store whenever. The “anti-piracy” feature you get with DRMs is why many publishers actually like them tho. The part ownership thing is just icing on the cake. So no, a good chunk of publishers won’t be furious at all. DRM gives what publishers want and more, at the expense of the consumers in a way that most wouldn’t realize.

And if anything, I think it makes more sense to think that these publishers are also just granting Amazon some kind of “license” to sell their e-books.

Amazon would absolutely be destroying their relationship with a publisher though, if they decide to block the selling or access of a book to large group of people who are would-be buyers. But, at the end of the day, publishers want to know how much they’re making from putting their e-books on Amazon, and as long as that revenue is enough to satisfy their needs, they don’t need to care too much about the odd customer who had their book revoked, and they would generally be pretty shielded from any sort of disputes as long as Amazon is making those revoking calls.

I wish there’s some kind of follow up to news like this.

Did the police report go anywhere? Or is it just sitting in some paper pile, or trashed? Follow it up, or call it out.

$60 can buy you a lifetime license for the Affinity Designer 2, which is a fantastic alternative to Adobe’s Illustrator, which some people can’t live without. AFAIK, Serif isn’t backed by a venture capitalist as well. So, are you still happy paying $20 more for a social media app?

Like, look, I get that we should support devs for what they do, especially if they don’t take venture capitalist money to sell their products for cheap to gain market share. But this seems really overpriced. What are you getting with an $80 app for social media?

And lemme guess what we’ll hear in the next couple of weeks or months:

“I’ve made the best deals with Canada and Mexico. They’ve been rude and uncooperative in helping us secure the borders, but now look, they had to.”

And then there’d be the the suckers and ass-kissers:

“Fentanyl’s not a thing anymore in the USA because of Trump.” (says a person who lives in a neighbourhood never affected by fentanyl abuse)

“President Trump has made our country more secure than ever, preventing illegal immigrants and drugs coming in from Canada and Mexico, while making them pay for it.” (vixen news or something)

“Illegal immigration was at an all time low under President Trump.” (says a person who’s never looked at the stats)

Given what was actually realized, Trump did not have to play coy and use tariffs as threats, and it would’ve been a rather easy call to ask for what he wanted. He’s essentially sent US allies on a wild episode to essentially bully them to show off his regained powers.

Oh, and of course he only “pauses” the damn thing. He could re-use it after all. Classic bully behaviour.

Fwiw mentioning, the level of fentanyl crossings is not even high, and is simply an enlarged wedge issue for the Trump administration to stave off dissuaders and forcibly push their way pass Congress to do whatever they want.

For some, human pride and dignity have literally no value, or is something they will hold simply to trade it off whenever convenient, especially in a world that can value it, so it’s just like a commodity.

It’s the 21st century. Many of us are educated enough and have a strong enough image of what a country is. Any country may try to annex any land, but they’ll almost always face resistance. Even in the event of a full annexation, you can’t stop the people from revolting, essentially making your country look as miserable as possible to everyone. Heck, even the full cleansing of an entire population won’t guarantee you’ll reach long-lasting stability on annexed lands; people will hide, repopulate, teach their descendants about their past and forever torture your nation and its people, however horrifying of a worldview it may sound like.

I remember reading somewhere that some department in the US gov have a paper on their inability to annex or even control foreign lands and their people. Essentially, it doesn’t matter if the USA has the most powerful military in the history of humanity; it cannot conquer the minds of people today, and will suffer from instability for a very long time.

Says the company that literally crawled the Internet without anyone’s permission to train their damn model.

Rules for thee, not for me.

Didn’t something similar happen just a couple months ago?

This. Any time someone’s tries to tell me that AGI will come in the next 5 years given what we’ve seen, I roll my eyes. I don’t see a pathway where LLMs become what’s needed for AGI. It may be a part of it, but it would be non-critical at best. If you can’t reduce hallucinations down to being virtually indistinguishable from misunderstanding a sentence due to vagueness, it’s useless for AGI.

Our distance from true AGI (not some goalpost moved by corporate interests) has not significantly moved from before LLMs became a thing, in my very harsh opinion, bar the knowledge and research being done by those who are actually working towards AGI. Just like how we’ve always thought AI would come one day, maybe soon, before 2020, it’s no different now. LLMs alone barely closes that gap. It gives us that illusion at best.

Most of us can’t help but feel powerless while trying to change the world. That’s normal, because the reality is, no one can change the world as quickly as we can make a turn at the next junction. Not Donald Trump, not Elon Musk, not Vladimir Putin, not Xi JinPing. They’ve spent decades getting to where they are today, but the best they can do is do big strokes to sway the world to some extent. And these people just look so lonely; nobody seems to really understand them, neither do they seem to truly understand people, aside from knowing enough to take advantage of them, and they put up some sort of distance between themselves and others, distance in various ways you can measure. Meanwhile, most of us spend our times to be close to those we love and care, trying to be a part of a larger society in a healthy and responsible way.

If the alternative is to give up and watch this beautiful world burn and die, watch wonderful people suffer and I turn a blind eye to their pain, I would rather continue trying, and one day die knowing that I tried, instead of regretting alone.

The world? Or just many world governments that have the power to do so? There are many people out there doing what they can to dissuade governments from supporting the genocide, and they make up a fair size of “society”. Do you no longer care about them then?

You care. You’re just tired of seeing that nothing’s changed despite people’s efforts. But that’s totally okay. Great powers don’t and won’t immediately change to what we desire it to be, and there is a vested interest for some to keep the status quo, so it’s hard. We get it, and so do you.

Go take a rest.

Knowing how these people behave, it’s “rules for thee, not for me”, and “yes that’s true but every woman should follow, but I’ll continue to say whatever the fuck I want anyways”. Cognitive dissonance on the surface level does not stop them. It’s always been a “I will say whatever the fuck I want and hide behind some pretty words, and all I have to do is to ignore your criticisms. You can’t touch me.”

Or things that remind you of some event, which may not be a pleasant one.

Somewhat unfair judgement against emails IMO, especially cause it’s the “trust list” that’s in the control of a few, with no open manner to add more people to the trust list. The protocol isn’t at fault for failing to prevent problems; it’s the ability for corporations to gain significant market share without control, before they are then allowed to put barriers down to disallow or discourage interaction between those in and out, forcing those within to stay in, while those outside to give up on others in order to gain usability.

Let’s see here.

Near unlimited power for ten years?

You have no idea how our politics work here.

Imported 2 million people we didn’t need

You have no idea what Canada faces with a declining population.

acted like a fuckling child over a fucking cold

Alright, we know who you are now. We’re done here.

You have no idea what this country is, what problems it faces, have no regards to the well-being of its residents.

Note: the linked video was from 9 years ago

Take that info with what you will

I wasn’t saying that my reasonings are exactly it, and hence the “plausible”. But fair.

Sorry, I just didn’t really understand what your point was, at least not from reading your reply.

I believe I’m confused by where your understanding is.

Apart from Xi beginning this shit before Covid and the economic slowdown, I agree completely.

This replied led me to believe that you don’t think the CCP has been ramping up their military pre-COVID, and hence my reply.

But you’re now telling me that what I said was exactly your point? I’m confused.

My point about the economy slowing down was that it has led to Xi / CCP being unable to further stomach the current situation, and thus they’ve gotten much more aggressive post-COVID. That, of course, I should preface, is just one plausible reason. Others may include general weakness in alliances across the globe, especially amongst NATO members, especially with Trump going back into the WH, and for the years where Trump will be in office, China is expected by many to reach peak population growth and start seeing a collapse at the level of that of Japan.

To clarify, the economic slowdown is not dissuading the CCP from becoming more aggressive; it’s doing the opposite.