Humanius

Having cycled in that pedestrian zone several months ago when I was in Brussels, I can certainly see why they would want to ban cycling in the area.

I got the impression that it was too busy with pedestrians to meaningfully cycle there. It would be better if cyclists dismount and walk if they need to be there, and otherwise cycle around the area.

The alternative suggestion in the article to clearly mark a bike lane with paint, would only work if the pedestrians also honour the paint by not walking in the bikelane. Somehow I doubt that that will happen.

Sometimes cycling and walking are incompatible, especially if there is large masses of people. If you can’t have both keeping the space as pedestrian-only seems like the preferable outcome.

Car companies (According to the article Volkswagen AG (Volkswagen, Audi, Porsche), Stellantis (Peugeot, Citroën, Fiat, Opel), BMW, Renault) want to keep selling petrol vehicles, because they have a smaller profit margin on EVs than they do on petrol vehicles.

The smaller profit margins also spook legislators in certain countries (particularly those with a large car manufacturing industry) because the car companies employ a lot of people there. Lawmakers from countries like Germany and Italy (Volkswagen, Audi, Porsche, BMW, Opel, Fiat, etc) were never fully on board with the 2035 combustion engine ban, and they are now trying to push the EU to reconsider it.

France and Spain (Peugeot, Citroën, Renault, Seat, etc.) are in favour of the combustion engine ban staying in place, but they would like to see some flexibility on the specifics.

Meanwhile critics argue that scrapping, delaying, or watering down the combusion engine ban means that European car industry will have less of a drive to innovate on EVs, which in turn would cause the gap between them and the Chinese car industry to widen.
EVs are the future and we need to be competitive on that front.

Edit: It’s all a bit disappointing, because many of these car companies do actually have very compelling and competitive EVs on the market at the moment. It’d be a shame to not keep that momentum going.

Germany and Austria have already said they would not participate if Israel was excluded from participation. So it stands to reason that they are not going to boycott the Eurovision now that Israel is allowed to participate. Belgium was on the fence about participating, but they have since come out that they will be participating regardless of Israeli participation.

The only countries that have thusfar said they are not participating are Ireland, Iceland, Spain, Slovenia and the Netherlands.

Edit: Slovenia, not Poland

Most people aren’t cheering that we are rearming, but they understand that it is a necessary evil.

Russia is right at our doorsteps and is increasingly aggressive. So we either rearm in the hope that that threat keeps Russia at bay, or we don’t and will hopelessly lose if Russia invades.

Personally I prefer the first option.

Given that it’s a humanoid robot, I suspect that this is more of a marketing stunt than any practical deployment of robots.

Humanoid robots don’t make a ton of sense in manufacturing. Why mimic the sub-optimal anatomy of a human when you can make your robotic work slave have any appendage you want, which are designed to be optinal for their task along the assembly line?

Humanoid robots mostly only make sense in spaces that need to be designed for humans (like homes or hospitals) where the robot needs to regularly interact with human infrastructure.

I would still recommend tweaking the provided text a little to be more personal to you, but it’s a really good baseline to work from.

Once again I will post the following link:
https://fightchatcontrol.eu/

I will keep posting this link whenever Chat Control shows its ugly head again.

It’s a BBC article, so it stands to reason that this is about the UK government.

From the coverage that I read in my national newspaper (which admittedly isn’t Slovakian) the speed limit applies to everyone on the sidewalk. Not just to e-bikes and e-scooters, but also to pedestrians.

The speed limit is set to 6 km/h. Joggers and people making a sprint to catch a bus, would easily be breaking that speed limit.

The countries that oppose Chat Control are:

• Austria
• Belgium
• Czechia
• Finland
• Germany
• Luxemburg
• Netherlands
• Poland

Supporters are:

• Bulgaria
• Croatia
• Cyprus
• Denmark
• France
• Hungary
• Ireland
• Italy
• Latvia
• Lithuania
• Malta
• Portugal
• Slovakia
• Spain
• Sweden

All other countries are currently undecided

Source: https://fightchatcontrol.eu/

Contact your representatives and tell them they should oppose Chat Control. The link above lists who they are and provides some templates for emails you could send them

The article speculates that the increase in pedestrian deaths is due to e-bikes and e-scooters. I’m not convinced that this speculation is based on actual data though.

After a bit of digging I found a government resource on road fatalities:
https://catalogue.data.infrastructure.gov.au/dataset/australian-road-deaths-database

This data does not seem to track the vehicle that caused the road fatality, unless that vehicle is a bus, heavy-rigid truck, or articulated truck. So there would be no way to determine from the data available whether the increase in fatalities is due to e-bikes and e-scooters.

Citizen’s Initiatives are great, but I’m not sure they are the right mechanism in this case.

They are meant to make parliament address a concern, and not to inform legislators how you feel about a law proposal that is already on the table. All a Citizen’s Initiative does is force the European parliament to address a concern if a certain threshold of signatures is met. They will be doing that anyway when the law proposal is being voted on.

And on top of that, the time frame for a Citizen’s Initiative is too long (over a year) to be a meaningful shield against Chat Control.

Contacting your representatives to the European Parliament is probably the best way forward at this point.

I’m not sure how contacting my representatives in the European Parliament over something that I am concerned about, would be spam.

I don’t care what party they are from, or what part of the country they are from. They are still my representatives.
They sit there to represent the concerns of their constituents in parliament, and they cannot effectively do that if they do not know the concerns of their constituents.

If you have good ideas for collective action I’d love to hear them, but until then shooting an email can never hurt.

Edit: Just so there is no confusion, I don’t think signing a four year old change.org petition is any more effective than directly contacting your MEPs

Instead it might be more helpful to directly contact your representatives.

This website can help you figure out who they are, and help formulate an email send to them:
https://fightchatcontrol.eu/

(Obviously it is best to write your own response, or at least update the text to be your own, but it could be a good springboard)

Oops! We accidentally added Putin himself to our top secret summit Signal group-chat

This looks like an AI generated article

I’m Dutch, but I don’t live in a place that is particularly affected by these explosions, nor am I an expert on the matter… but I’ll drop my two cents, based on my reading of the situation

These explosions are happening in cities like Rotterdam and the Hague. They are places that traditionally have gang/mafia activity.
From my understanding a lot of the explosions are related to underworld dealings. It’s possible that there is some petty conflicts as well, but the individuals are almost always connected to the underworld somehow.

It’s also worth noting that in the NL (as I imagine it happens in other places?) crime tends to come in waves.
Criminals figure out a new effective method to commit crime. The police and institutions scramble at first in order to deal with it. Then eventually they figure out an effective method in order the combat the issue. After which criminals lose interest and either the problem moves to a different location, or they change tactics.

Edit: The article also mentions that “the use and possession of fireworks generally are also laxer in the Netherlands.”
This is simply not true. The kinds of fireworks that are legal in the NL are much more restricted than they are in Belgium and Germany, and you can only legally purchase and use it leading up to New Year’s Eve.

The dangerous stuff is illegally imported from Belgium and Germany.

OS: Unraid

It’s primarily NAS software, with a form of software raid functionality built in.
I like it mainly because it works well and the GUI makes is very easy to use and work with.

On top of that you can run VMs and docker containers, so it is very versatile as well.

I use it to host the following services on my network:

• Nextcloud
• Jellyfin
• CUPS

It costs a bit of money up-front, but for me it was well-worth the investment.

I see. In that case I stand corrected.

To a certain extent I agree, but you can buy a book and still commit copyright infringement by copying its contents (for use other than personal use)

If this would go to court, it would depend on whether training an LLM model is more akin to copying or learning. I can see arguments for either interpretation, but I suspect that the law would lean more toward it being copying rather than learning