The private sector is ceasing to be China’s primary driver of growth, with that role year after year being further taken up by the state. Diminishing private funding is obviously not good, but it does align with their goal of reaching socialism by 2050. We’ll see how their economy does from now on…

Reminds me of the time an investigation into a high-profile corruption scandal in Spain revealed the names of those involved, among them “M. Rajoy”. There’s a running joke that no one knows who might be behind that name, it’s a mystery that may never be solved.

They count it as Linux, yes!

I wanted to delete all the subfolders in the current directory:

 rm -rf ./*

After a few seconds, I realize in horror that I had mistyped the path. Whole system nuked. Had backups though.

If you can’t find a tool, this has worked to some degree for me. Open on e.g. GIMP, scale the images to the desired size in different layers, use perspective transform to align them very precisely, then set layer opacity so that you can merge them down with equal weight on each photo. It’s not a really good method, but might do the job. Good luck!

I wonder what the writings were, although I’m cautious on believing that they were antisemitic, since hating Jews and hating Israel have historically been opposing positions expressed by two widely different demographics, and now that division is clearer than ever.

The article gives me bad vibes… On the one hand, it (and linked articles) seems to present the implicit assumption that Israel = Zionism = Judaism, which is very clearly false but could be easily used to used to “prove” other statements, like this: “Israel = Judaism -> Criticism of Israel = Criticism of Judaism = antisemitism”. Same logic can be used for “anti-Zionism = antisemitism”.

Additionally, the article does not mention any criticism of Israel that would not be considered disinformation, leaving that question open. This, of course, is dangerous, as it leaves open the possibility that people who “only care about truth” (but do not unconditionally support Israel) support restrictive measures on X as suggested by the article while those measures are then effectively meant to silence criticism of Israel.

Finally, one linked article seems to support the idea that all footage from the warzone should be fact-checked before being published. While this would curb some (minority) false footage, it would dramatically reduce the exposure that the conflict can get, as well as potentially exposing its spread to censorship from many sources.

So, overall, I think this article is using a reasonable-sounding rhetoric to push forward centralized control of social media narratives. It’s not a problem that some information on the platform is false, but if the overall narrative is biased, that would really become a problem, and X already implemented community notes (which use a really innovative de-biasing algorithm) to fight that. I can only conclude that we should resist the call to introduce potential sources of systematic bias to counter ultimately “inoffensive” random bias, which would be a step towards true authoritarianism.

Haha yeah, it did take 2-3 days for me to get up to speed with it, it does not work like a typical keyboard at all.

I use Thumb-Key, which is available both in the Play Store and F-Droid. The layout is pretty unusual but I really like it, and the main developer (one of Lemmy’s creators) really cares about privacy.

One way to see it is that if you tried to use a Linux filesystem on Windows, it would entirely refuse to read it. At least Linux can handle Window’s filesystems to a reasonable degree.

Either they sent it there on purpose to provocate a respone, which would at least make some sense, or it malfunctioned, which also makes sense since the balloon did not send any communications during that time.

Edit: on further thought, I think if it had broken down, they could simply have reported it. It’s likely they sent a weather balloon on purpose, either to test the waters or create bad PR in the US.

I’m not performing any comparison. The US Air Force destroyed the Chinese balloon, then analyzed it, then destroyed three non-suspicious balloons. I understand the reasons why the Chinese balloon was suspicious, and I understand the reasons the other three balloons were not. Also, one of those three balloons (presumably the one from a research institution, but I could not find any source linking identified balloons with statements made prior about them) was of a comparable size to the Chinese balloon. My point is simply that the US never takes down its own balloons, and much less in such a short time, right after analyzing a balloon that they found suspicious. If you have a better hypothesis, I’ll be glad to hear it.

Since they already state they “suspect it was a spy balloon” and anyone would assume they would have performed such an analysis, them mentioning either that they performed it or that the analysis revealed it was a spy balloon would not reveal any otherwise secret information. But not mentioning either seems like an indication that the analysis was performed and did not reveal anything of use. Also, it does not explain why they destroyed three regular weather balloons right after the analysis.

The article repeatedly uses the adjectives “surveillance”, “spy” to refer to the balloon, even though there is no source confirming that was the device’s purpose, and notably it did not send any data home during its transit over the US. Forensic analysis only revealed meteorological equipment, antennas (which according to leaks were just regular communication antennas), basic steering devices and solar panels. Notably, no firmware analysis was mentioned, which would have easily confirmed its status as a surveillance balloon.

The other three balloons downed a week later were confirmed not to be spy balloons; the Northern Illinois Bottlecap Balloon Brigade claimed one, one research institution from the US (I don’t remember) claimed another. They were the kind of balloons that the Air Forces typically don’t take down, but apparently just decided to in a very short timeframe.

Maybe they initially feared it was a spy balloon, discovered in a few days it wasn’t, then tried to alleviate the diplomatic hit by destroying every other “unidentified” balloon in their airspace, Chinese or not. And the PR mitigation for the local population is here: the balloon must have been for surveillance. This is the only hypothesis that makes sense to me (edit: feel free to provide others or point out flaws in my reasoning).