Ah yes Orban that champion of personal freedoms and heroic warrior against government overreach

works fine for me too

Same as most European countries, Germany has the adversarial system - no jury, just the judge.

Don’t know about elsewhere, but in Germany, for some trials, there are an additional 1 or 2 “lay judges” - non-professional judges from the community.

install synaptic and your basically there man

What’s my basically there man? (Or should I say who is my basically there man?) I don’t think I’ve installed this. Is it like the Linux version of Bonzi Buddy?

</ smart arse little shit >

I don’t think you can have spreadsheets with multiple “sub sheets” (can’t think of an unambiguous name for them - basically the equivalent of browser tabs)

Pretty sure there’s no way to have graphical charts either.

that was a shocking article, I had no idea that went on in Brazil.

A Brazilian court’s decision to acquit a 35-year-old man accused of raping a 12-year-old girl—arguing that they were “two young lovers” united by “a consensual emotional bond”

Some 34,000 Brazilian girls under the age of 14, mostly poor and Black, declared themselves as “married” in the census

It basically means dodging legal restrictions on investigation by using illegal (or at least inadmissible) means to obtain evidence, and once the police have it, they look for legal ways to get that same information.

So everywhere “has it”, the question is whether they use it. I don’t know if there’s reason to believe that EU police forces use such methods more or less than their US counterparts.

If I’m getting it right, they’re basically questioning the quantities mentioned and how Ecosia is presenting this whole thing.

The blog post says they saved 4000 tonnes, or 800 elephants, of potatoes from going to waste.

However the 4000-tonnen.de website - which seems to be a site that Ecosia have set up just for this problem of surplus potatoes - says that only 174 tonnes will have been delivered to Berlin:

Kommende Woche werden vorr. 132 Tonnen verteilt (nach 42 Tonnen in der ersten Woche). Dann wird es allerdings kalt - was für die Kartoffeln nicht gut ist - und mehr können wir auch nicht finanzieren.

The last sentence says it’s going to be cold which is bad news for spuds and in any case they are not able to finance any more.

So are they really just saving 174 out of 4000 tonnes, and yet somehow presenting it as a victory against food waste?

TBH it seems like a marketing stunt - not necessarily a bad thing, if they can draw attention to the difficulties of avoiding food waste. But still, they need to be honest and not deceitful or it can easily backfire.

The big unanswered question seems to be what’s going to happen to the remaining 3826 tonnes?

And the “World Wide Web” mostly means HTML - “hypertext” documents which can be published on the internet, and which are regular documents but with embedded links to other documents (hyperlinks), and a vision to ultimately create the “semantic web” - human-readable text which can also be processed by computers.

Apparently Russia has been using (or still is using?) drones to kill/maim civilians in Kherson. That’s what I’m really on about - using drones & drone swarms to target normal people going about their day-to-day lives. It’s just really hard to defend against, and is only going to get worse as the tech progresses.

a machine capable of running Wasteland 2

Is there even such a machine on God’s good earth? It’s definitely a good game, but absolutely blighted by instability & CTDs last time I tried it a few years ago.

think what absolute chaos could be wrought if a terrorist group were to release a swarm like this in a large city

I wonder what difference it makes when the user isn’t using English. They don’t mention that they aren’t considering this and don’t mention it on their How it Works page, but they do in the paper’s abstract: “Finally, our focus on English-language prompts overlooks the additional biases that may emerge in other languages.”

They do also reference a study by another team that does show differences in bias based on input language which concludes, “Our experiments on several LLMs show that incorporating perspectives from diverse languages can in fact improve robustness; retrieving multilingual documents best improves response consistency and decreases geopolitical bias”

The subject of how and what type of bias is captured by LLMs is a pretty interesting subject that’s definitely worthy of analysis. Personally I do feel they should more prominently highlight that they’re just looking at English language interactions; it feels a bit sensationalist/click-baity at the moment and I don’t think they can reasonably imply that LLMs are inherently biased towards “male, white, and Western” values just yet.

You’re stretching it - it’s not highest robbery when you catch someone driving a car with fake plates and smuggled goods in the back

The tail end of an evening train between Malaga and Madrid with some 300 passengers came off the rails near Córdoba at 7:45 p.m. local time and jumped onto the track in the opposite direction and slammed into a train with some 200 passengers coming from Madrid to Huelva, killing at least people 21 and injuring dozens more

oh wow that’s a serious crash. At first it sounded like a case of a train going too fast at a corner but apparently not:

Spain’s Transport Minister Óscar Puente said the causes of the crash were unknown. He called it “a truly strange” incident because it happened on a flat stretch of track that had been renovated in May. He also said the train that jumped the track was less than four years old.

Article doesn’t mention how fast the trains were going but they can go at up to 300 km/h, depending on the track, and this being a straight section of a route to Madrid, 200 km/h would seem a conservative estimate. It also doesn’t say if both trains were high speed - but in any case a head-on collision between 2 trains at these kinds of speeds is going to be catastrophic.

As none of the candidates secured an absolute majority, António José Seguro, a former head of Portugal’s Socialist Party, and André Ventura, leader of the far-right Chega party will face each other in a Feb. 8 runoff election.

But while Ventura performed strongly on Sunday, few believe he has a real shot at winning the runoff vote. Political watchers expect the public to mobilize to prevent him from capturing the presidential palace and to rally round Seguro. That may not matter to Ventura, who said he has no real interest in being “the president of all Portuguese people” and has hinted he was only running to gauge support for his eventual candidacy for prime minister.

Was it the part that’s normally responsible for pooping?

my information might be out of date yeah! I’ve just skimmed their wikipedia which hasn’t helped clear things up! Seems they did have difficulties around 2011 - “After two decades in decline, Philips went through a major restructuring, shifting its focus from electronics to healthcare.”

Then, “On 29 January 2013, it was announced that Philips had agreed to sell its audio and video operations to the Japan-based Funai Electric for €150 million […] Funai was to pay a regular licensing fee to Philips for the use of the Philips brand.[59] The purchase agreement was terminated by Philips in October because of breach of contract[61] and the consumer electronics operations remained under Philips”

It’s a long wiki article with a hell of a lot of transfers and acquisitions, and it’s not clear how up to date some sections are. So I’m not sure what the current situation is.

Phillips is another one not on that list. European company that AFAIK have mostly resisted the enshittification urge.

Same. This hardware keyboard is taking up potential screen real-estate.

If you want a hardware keyboard, just use a bluetooth one, you can get folding ones which fold up pretty small.