• 3 Posts
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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 29th, 2023

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  • All great on paper, but why would EU leaders fight against Trump? They’re all fragmented, trying to hold on to their countries’ benefit. Given the most recent decision to cripple the 2035 ban on ICE cars due to pressure from Germany and Italy, I really doubt the leaders here are capable of punishing Trump.

    Even if von der Leyen pushed for this (which I doubt, see her behaviour in the first USA EU Deal), the EU would have to act unanimously to do it, and we already know that it is not possible. Given recent polls, it might be possible that Hungary will keep Orban as PM, and other countries will soon vote in their own MAGA-like leaders. See Romania, Bulgaria, and quite a few others in Eastern Europe where corruption is rampant. They’d sell their own mother if it got them a second villa.

    I wish to be as hopeful as the author, but the EU leaders keep proving the opposite. In order to survive, the EU should have focused on separating from the US during the Bush era, or even as late as Trump’s first mandate. As it is, the EU will probably just wait for Trump’s term to be over, and then return to business as usual. I am afraid we won’t be seeing any big disturbances to the current world order for a while, unless the AI bubble bursts (which will probably be due to other factors, not EU intervention).


  • This article just screams rage-bait. Not that I am against making people aware of this kind of privacy invasion, but the authors did not bother to do any fact checking.

    Firstly, they mention that the vacuum was “transmitting logs and telemetry that [the guy] had never consented to share”. If you set up an app with the robot vacuum company, I’m pretty sure you’ll get a rather long terms and services document that you just skip past, because who bothers reading that?

    Secondly, the ADB part is rather weird. The person probably tried to install Valetudo on it? Otherwise, I have no clue what they tried to say with “reprinting the devices’ circuit boards”. I doubt that this guy was able to reverse engineer an entire circuit board, but was surprised when seeing that ADB is enabled? This is what makes some devices rather straight forward to install custom firmware that block all the cloud shenanigans, so I’m not sure why they’re painting this as a horrifying thing. Of course, you’re broadcasting your map data to the manufacturer so that you can use their shitty app.

    The part saying that it had full root access and a kill-switch is a bit worse, but still… It doesn’t have to be like this. Shout-out to the people working on the Valetudo project. If you’re interested in getting a privacy-friendly robot vacuum, have a look at their website. It requires some know-how, but once it’s done, you know for sure you don’t need to worry about a 3rd party spying on you.


  • Right, but then rich people can no longer exploit other regions if everyone is considered equal! Think about the shareholders for a bit :/ (I’m sarcastic, in case it is not clear :D)

    The main problem here is that people flocking to positions of power are often the ones that do it for the wrong reasons. Until that part is sorted out, we will keep having leaders that will enforce things that are best for them and their closest ones. Some form of anarcho-communism would probably help this, but the current globalisation effort will make it very hard to implement. The best thing we can do as individuals is to just improve our social circle, and try to rely on as many local things as possible.











  • For notes, I have moved to Joplin with the option to synchronize my data using a WebDAV server. It works really well, and it has both a mobile and desktop app. If you’re interested in developing your project, maybe you can have a look at the options this provides. For example, I really like the ability to separate notes between groups, assign tags, create drawings, and the possibility to use Markdown.

    Good luck with your projects! To mirror @enemenemu’s suggestion, I would also look into collaborating with the people trying to push the EU Docs alternative. Not sure if that will work, but it’s worth a shot if you’re interested :D




  • Well, what I’m thinking about is not too far from education. I am suggesting that we have independent fact-checkers, or at least tools that show all the angles of a certain issue (e.g., something like Ground News, but not owned by a for-profit organisation), paid by tax money. This should be incorporated in something like an API that Fediverse instances could tap into. Again, not governments deciding who is right or who is wrong, but citizen-backed initiatives that work for the people. There should be open source plugins that could be used by fedi instances to relay the fact-checking or other relevant information.

    I am categorizing this as governmental regulation because the tax money is allocated by the government specifically for content “moderation”. However, this doesn’t mean that content should be removed from social media just because it talks about a topic (unless it is illegal), but people should at least have additional information available for free that they could research further. And no, I don’t think the community notes employed by Meta and Twitter are enough, as we’ve seen how that went for the Americans in the last election.


  • Mate, I am not advocating here for the EU to break E2EE, nor support linking of your social media profile to a citizen number that can be used against you. Similarly, I do not wish for the EU to start generating its own propaganda machine to replace the US one.

    I am merely stating that we should invest more in EU open source, promote more fact checking and open algorithms (or even banning them) for social media. What is happening with Twitter, Facebook and TikTok is not ok. We do not need social media to profile us and push content that a state or rich person deems necessary for their benefit. Aren’t you on Lemmy specifically because of that?




  • It’s a bit short-sighted to say that Trump is the one calling in shots here, specifically to weaken the US. It is pretty clear that he is following the plan put forward by the Heritage Foundation word by word. If I understood correctly, the idea is to make the American economy more resilient at the expense of all of its (poor) citizens. Once that is done, they can then leverage their safe zone to further influence policies in other countries. For example, get the EU to lower regulations, so American companies can extract more wealth.

    Here is a quote from the actual “Project 2025 Mandate for Leadership” PDF:

    Needed reforms

    […]

    Increase allied conventional defense burden-sharing. U.S. allies must take far greater responsibility for their conventional defense. U.S. allies must play their part not only in dealing with China, but also in dealing with threats from Russia, Iran, and North Korea.

    1. Make burden-sharing a central part of U.S. defense strategy with the United States not just helping allies to step up, but strongly encouraging them to do so.
    2. Support greater spending and collaboration by Taiwan and allies in the Asia–Pacific like Japan and Australia to create a collective defense model.
    3. Transform NATO so that U.S. allies are capable of fielding the great majority of the conventional forces required to deter Russia while relying on the United States primarily for our nuclear deterrent, and select other capabilities while reducing the U.S. force posture in Europe.
    4. Sustain support for Israel even as America empowers Gulf partners to take responsibility for their own coastal, air, and missile defenses both individually and working collectively.
    5. Enable South Korea to take the lead in its conventional defense against North Korea.

    […]

    They are engineering most of these situations that we’ve seen in the media specifically to make the ideas more digestible to the average population. See the Zelenskyy case: “This is going to be great television” - the guy is not even hiding it.

    On one hand, Taiwan is right to say that the US won’t abandon them. The US does not produce enough chips locally to just let them get gobbled up by China. However, this sort of “theatrics” is not over, and they will come up with a reason to scare Taiwan into investing a lot more in defence, specifically to prepare them for a fight to destabilize China.

    It’s truly sad that this administration is now in power to push these ideas. The average American is going to become much poorer and hateful due to all protections previously put in place being dismantled. Hopefully people wake up and kick them out of office, but the damage done to foreign relationships is already done.