GOOD Regulation can be good: like, not selling contaminated food to the public.

BAD Regulation can be VERY bad: like, requiring hospitals to use middlemen who negotiate medication pricing with insurance providers, and whose only goal is to steadily increase the “savings” to insurance by increasing the “prices”, then requiring hospitals to “forgive” most of it to the insurance, while people without insurance get a bill for 1,000,000% the real cost.

Unfortunately, the US has seen bipartisan support for the latter kind, and recently has been slashing the former.

Shifting the point of view might be a good idea.

Based on this:

• June 22, 2025 - Where the US attacked nuclear sites in Iran

Hassan Abedini, deputy political head of Iran’s state broadcaster, said Iran had evacuated the three sites some time ago.

“The enriched uranium reserves had been transferred from the nuclear centres and there are no materials left there that, if targeted, would cause radiation and be harmful to our compatriots,” he told the channel.

The International Atomic Energy Agency also said Sunday morning it had detected “no increase in off-site radiation levels.”

…this other one would make more sense now:

• June 16, 2025 - Russia is ready to mediate on Iran, and to accept Tehran’s uranium, Kremlin says

TLDR: It’s a mess.

Back in the day, I started migrating notepad stuff to Markdown on a Wiki. Then on a MediaWiki. Then DokuWiki. Then ZimWiki. Then Joplin. Then GitHub Pages and a self-hosted Jeckyll.

Each, single, one, of, them, uses a slightly different flavor of Markdown. At this point, I have stuff spread over ALL OF THEM, much of it rotting away in “backups to migrate later”. 😮‍💨
I’ve been considering “vibe coding” some converters…

As for syncing… the Markdown part is easy: git.
Working with a Markdown editor to update GH Pages, was a good experience.
Having ZimWiki auto-sync to git, was good, but didn’t find a decent compatible editor for Android.
I switched to Joplin lured by the built-in auto-sync options, but kind of regret it now, when it has a folder with thousands of files in it.

Obsidian is not OSS itself, but has an OSS plugin to sync to git.
I’ve read that using Logseq alongside Obsidian should be possible… and was planning to test that setup, keeping Obsidian in charge of sync. Possibly with GitHub/Jeckyll, git-lfs for images and attachments.

PS: assuming one could have working back-and-forth converters for the different Markdown flavors, and everything stored in git, then one could theoretically use git hooks to convert to/from whatever local version used by a particular editor.

The Play Store has become way more restrictive, they’ve purged tons of old and/or “inactive” apps… including some I happened to have bought some time ago.

It’s made me even more of a fan of F-Droid.

replacement cycles for phones extending past 40 months

Rookie numbers. Unless disaster strikes, I fully expect to ride my current phone for the 60 month official support period I was promised.

Another one to the list:

Google Flagged Parents’ Photos of Sick Children as Sexual Abuse

Google uses Microsoft’s PhotoDNA screening algorithm

BTRFS, with periodic snapshots and scrubbing, in RAID 1, only accessible remotely.

Just saying, that can be a “2”.

If you don’t mind imgur keeping the images ( doesn’t mirror them, just links to imgur), then you can share from imgur to a browser, long press on the image, and get the direct image link from there.

Most free image hosting services require links to their page so they can show ads to visitors. Imgur seems to have started slightly enforcing that requirement. Pixelfed may or may not be an option depending on how trustworthy is the instance, and how much you care about it not disappearing out of the blue. Self-hosting a service is not all that complicated, but requires some commitment.

Works on Android:

• The Play Store exists
• All apps run in secured containers
• Sketchy* apps run in VMs
• Rooting disables banking and security apps

(* including all versions of Windows)

It’s not Israel or Iran or whatever, it’s the region itself:

• Main land bridge from Africa to the rest of the world
• Scarce in basic resources like water and arable land
• Lately, plentiful in oil, which everyone wants some of

Add to that some religions where everyone can go “but before that, you [insert aggression]” for thousands of years back, and it’s no longer about any dozen of countries.

Rather than ask “who is a greater source of instability”, one should ask “which country is a source of any stability”.

Hm, makes sense, but I feel like we’re still missing something.

I saw comments about Durov, similar to this investigation, maybe around a month ago.

With the xAI partnership news, I looked into it and found this nice thing:

• Tool to delete all your messages from chat/channel/ conversation on Telegram without requiring admin privileges - https://github.com/en9inerd/tgeraser

In Telegram, you can clear them one by one, or date ranges, or use disappearing messages, but this tool still found some I had missed.

(Disclaimer: I got pulled into Telegram by some friends leaving WhatsApp with the policy changes of 2021, my threat model is less one of FSB, and more one of indiscriminate AI siphoning for ad targeting)

people who advocate for animal welfare tend to also be more outspoken against human suffering

If I got a cent for every time I’ve heard an animal advocate say “I love animals, I hate people”… I’d have a couple bucks already. This thread seems to count towards that.

This isn’t a zero-sum game you can help people and the animals at the same time.

Prove it.

Show me how you get the resources to do both. Animalists are high on saving whales, kitties, puppies, etc. while letting their neighbors die home alone, or worse… when not directly saying “I love animals, I hate people”.

Please leave this thread and post articles about human suffering

No, I think I’m right where I should be. I don’t doompost either.

You “love” the idea to “force” people to suffer, because they aren’t your chosen ones?

Are you sure?

How does this fit into these two pieces of news?

• May 28, 2025 - xAI to pay Telegram $300M to integrate Grok into the chat app
• June 10, 2025 - Russian MPs back new state messaging app to combat WhatsApp and Telegram

Can we solve human suffering first? Not saying this isn’t important… just that it’s kind of hypocritical to shift the focus away from the “hard” stuff, to something “easier”.

In their email, Jagex management also told staff: “[…] Our job is not to use the game as an outlet for our own views, but to craft worlds that serve our players, offering immersion, escape and meaning.

Well, isn’t that some of the best BS contortionist corpospeak I’ve seen in some time…

A law, to be law, needs to be enforceable, otherwise it’s just a suggestion. International law is only enforceable through voluntary compliance, coercion, or war. Yes, during peace time many countries pick the voluntary way, others need coercion… and some ignore everything.

Curfews and martial law, are war-time measures. Check how they work in countries openly at war. If you get them in a country “at peace”… well, I have bad news, but it isn’t really at peace.

When you get a government fighting its own population, that isn’t simply oppression, that’s civil war.

Martial law, curfews, IDs, “papers”, etc. are intended to protect a nation’s citizens against enemy units… in times of war. The problem comes when someone is allowed to re-classify “some residents” as “enemies”… then you get a civil war.

International law is a bunch of agreements for peace time, for countries to enforce onto their own citizens. Trying to enforce any law against the will of a country, is an act of war. Most countries, don’t want to go to war, they’d rather look for loopholes like sanctions, that don’t require invading a country and spanking its leaders.

What you need, is to recognize the early signs of deranged leaders, and prevent them from gaining power. That moment has passed in the US, now it’s in the hands of people with power (money, guns, cult leaders) to decide whether to go into a civil war or not.

You may try talking to them, but whether they’re willing to listen is a separate question.

In the United States:

Article 1, Section 9 of the US Constitution states, “The Privilege of the Writ of Habeas Corpus shall not be suspended, unless when in Cases of Rebellion or Invasion the public Safety may require it.”

On a national level, both the US President and the US Congress have the power

martial law has been imposed at least 68 times in limited, usually local areas of the United States

Right now, the US border is under “invasion by undocumented alien criminals”, and there is a mounting “rebellion in Los Angeles”.

Honestly, I’m kind of surprised they’ve been waiting so long, the “invasion” Executive Order 14159 has been in force since Jan 20, 2025… but I guess they first needed to make sure to dismantle any internal opposition, put key people in key places, and so on.