Super initiative!

I came across https://defed.xyz/ the other day, but it doesn’t seem to fully report everything.

I suspect there is wisdom to be learned from forest management, specifically how regular, small controlled burns are how you avoid huge, unmanageable forest fires.

Diane Duane’s “So you want to be a wizard?” series makes almost the exact opposite in creative choices as Rowling does for Harry Potter:

• female protagonist with male best friend and partner-in-training
• becoming a wizard is something that you choose, not something you are born into
• being a wizard means upholding a certain responsibility towards the rest of the world, specifically that of slowing the progression of entropy and of the universe reaching heat death
• as part of their initiation, each wizard personally confronts and is tempted by an embodiment of entropy - a sort of reverse pact-with-the-fel
• Wizards learn their magic through their personal magic guide book, not some boarding school. The book automatically updates it’s content according to what the wizard is currently interested in learning about.
• magic is not incompatible with technology. although the main character is more into “nature” magic at the start of the series, her best friend is very mechanically inclined and his brand of magic follows suit. There is also a young wizard-in-training in a later book whose “personal magic guide book” takes the form of a laptop.

The author seems to have pretty decent views. Notably, she heavily rewrote one of the books that features an autistic wizard kid after getting feedback on how ablist she had written it the first time. (Which means if you’re interested in picking them up, do really try to get a more recent printing).

There’s also a book in the series that deals with having a parent losing the battle against cancer.

All in all, while they never gave me similar feelings of whimsy and quirk as Harry Potter, I loved these books just as deeply while growing up.

It’s probably not what you’re imagining, but there is the lemmynsfw instance which is a Lemmy instance that is more or less explicitly for porn.

But there is one other, probably even more important advantage: Prolog is a programmer’s and software engineer’s dream. It is compact, highly readable, and arguably the “most structured” language of them all. Not only has it done away with virtually all control flow statements, but even explicit variable assignment too! These virtues are certainly reason enough to base not only systems but textbooks on this language.

The 90s certainly were a different time…

Not enough burritos available near me, but I’ve certainly been through the exact same experience with cheese naan kebab in front of the computer.

Et sinon, amener un marteau & burin avec soi la nuit ca peut aussi être du temps a perdre mais moins que de tenter le tribunal.

Encore moins de temps a perdre, une bonbonne de peinture jaune fluo, histoire que le dos-d’âne soit visible a > 50m. Idéalement en écrivant “CE DOS-D’ÂNE EST ILLEGAL ET MEURTRIER” dessus 😈

Je pense au fameux meme du ricain qui dessinait des teubs autour des nid-de-poules dans son village pour “obliger” sa municipalité de les remplir/réparer.

In France, we literally call freedom of religion “freedom of cult” sometimes (and “freedom of conscience” some other times). I think it’s weird how different the connotations of “cult” and “religion” are nowadays. Too many people don’t realize that dictionaries record how words are used, they don’t define what they mean.

Which raises a larger question: Did prompt engineering roles ever truly exist?

All experts interviewed for this piece were skeptical. The market itself was real enough: The North American prompt engineering market was valued at $75.5 million in 2023, with a compound annual growth rate of 32.8%. But whether that translated into formally titled roles is another matter.

… How can the market be “real enough” if we can’t tell if any jobs actually existed? Maybe I just don’t know enough about economics.

It’s not much of a dystopia, and it certainly doesn’t seem to end that way, but the animated movie Robots just keeps feeling more and more relevant.

Yeah, that’s closer to the truth. Also, state education makes sure that we are at least aware of a certain few parts of our history, from executing our King and subsequently fighting off most of Europe to preserve the republic, to armed resistance when the Nazis occupied and the state capitulated, and finally De Gaul’s staunch non-alignment (as far as Western former empires go). Not to mention that the biggest improvement in the collective safety net for our society was obtained thanks to an ostensibly leftist coalition in the 1930s.

So it’s very much in our collective consciousness that we can protest, and that it’s a pretty normal thing to do, all things considered.

More to your point, I don’t know how many people here in France still expect protests to meaningfully obtain anything nowadays.

The magazine coming with a free operating system is something that will probably never happen again. Wild to think about.

Does this make “be gay, do crime” easier or harder now?

Alors que France télévisions a récemment diffusé un film sur le procès de Klaus Barbie, chef de la Gestapo condamné à la prison à perpétuité pour crime contre l’humanité en 1987, « La Tribune Dimanche » a dévoilé hier les ultimes confessions que le « bourreau de Lyon » avait faites en août 1979.

Il aura quand même gambadé 42 ans âpres la fin de la guerre le bougre avant qu’on ne l’attrape !

L’université de Stanford a, en effet, rendu publiques 14 heures d’enregistrements inédits de Klaus Barbie, captés en Bolivie par le journaliste de Stern Gerd Heidemann, qui accompagnait l’ancien SS Karl Wolff. Ces enregistrements jettent une lumière froide sur ce que l’ancien chef de la Gestapo à Lyon voulait dire, ou faire croire, près de quarante ans après les faits alors qu’il était en exil sous le nom de Klaus Altmann. Face au magnétophone, Barbie ne plaide pas coupable, mais construit un récit où Jean Moulin, chef de la Résistance, occupe une place centrale.

« Vous allez perdre la guerre »

« Je ne l’ai pas torturé. Il n’a pas été torturé. Au contraire, j’ai longuement conversé avec lui. Nous avons parlé de politique et d’autres choses. Vous pouviez discourir de politique tant que vous vouliez avec lui, il était ouvert d’esprit. Ce qui je voulais, c’est qu’il me parle de Londres, de son départ, de ses activités, etc. Il m’a dit : “Vous allez perdre la guerre”. Il n’a pas parlé. Pas un mot, C’est pour ça que je le respecte », raconte l’ancien SS qui se remémore les jours d’interrogatoire, l’obstination du résistant, son alias - « Jacques Martel, artiste » - et la scène ou il a confondu le résistant. Barbie tend une feuille de papier à Moulin : « Très bien, dessinez-moi. » Provocation ou piège ? Le détenu prend le crayon, fait un croquis et le tend à Barbie qui signe au bas de la feuille : « Moulins », avec un s. Moulin s’empare de la feuille, barre la lettre superflue, et déclare : « C’est bon, c’est moi, Moulin. »

Barbie raconte aussi la détention du résistant, comment, selon lui, il a tenté de se suicider. « En prison, nous avions une cave en bas. C’est là que [Jean Moulin] a fait une tentative de suicide. Il était certes attaché par les mains mais je ne l’avais pas fait attacher par les pieds. Je n’y ai pas pensé. Les gardiens n’ont pas fait attention. Il prenait de l’élan et entrait avec la tête dans le mur et s’ouvrait le crâne. C’est pour ça qu’il est mort. Puis, il a été transporté à Francfort et il est mort pendant le transport ». Barbie confirme aussi la trahison de René Hardy qui a permis l’arrestation de Moulin à Caluire-et-Cuire le 21 juin 1943. Puis Barbie fait une confidence étonnante, qui illustre un respect étrange, teinté d’admiration perverse pour Moulin : il affirme avoir fait déposer au Panthéon, sur le cénotaphe de son « ennemi préféré ». Il n’était pas en France, mais dit avoir chargé un ami autrichien de le faire. « Klaus, j’étais aujourd’hui sur la tombe de Moulin. J’ai fait comme tu m’as demander. J’ai déposer une fleur, » lui téléphonera cet ami.

Les confessions de Barbie - qui s’endormait face à un portrait d’Hitler dans son petit appartement de La Paz et n’a jamais renier ses convictions nazies selon Gerd Deidemann - sont restées enfouies jusqu’à ce mois de mai. Elles confirment en tout cas que Klaus Barbie était bien le bourreau et Jean Moulin le héros…

The morphing cube (or Escafil Device for the initiated) from Animorphs still has a special place in my heart. Nerfs for the sake of narrative tension aside (notably the 2 hour time limit), what a cool piece of tech that empowers people:

Only one use needed for any individual, the device itself seems to have unlimited uses, and you only need to touch it for a few seconds for it to permanently give you abilities!

And what abilities they are! Copy any living animal’s DNA by touch, morph into an exact copy of any animal whose DNA you’ve already acquired, and heal all physical damage each time you morph while expelling any foreign bodies from your own (someone is even canonically cured of rabies via morphing).

I don’t expect ai/LLM tools to make it easier to create nice looking art, but they should make it easier for anyone to create their own placeholder graphics that at least would allow them to run the game on their own.

Merci pour le taf!

I like the idea of a space marine character and armor based on Isaac from the dead space series. Unitology and the Ishimura are much more appropriate as chaos [space marine] factions than an imperial-aligned chapter. Even more appropriate would be some sort of warp-spawn aligned group, for example a chapter that has been captured by enslavers.

Enfin un espoir pour les films d’animation de ne pas être réduits à “pour les enfants”!