He/Him

Sneaking all around the fediverse.

Also at [email protected] [email protected]

  • 314 Posts
  • 208 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: October 4th, 2023

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  • I’ve never used Misskey but used various Misskey forks for about a year. I ended moving back to Mastodon. In my experience, the forks are very good at all the extra razzle dazzle they add (MFM, emoji reacts, drive, etc.) but often aren’t as good at the basics. I’d pretty routinely have federation issues, missing posts from my TL, and posts that would just repeat endlessly in the TL until I reloaded the page. And those are problems I experienced on every fork I tried. I found that stuff more of a minor nuisance at first but it got pretty old over time. It’s been a few months since I migrated back, so some or all of those issues could be fixed or improved by now too.

    Also, app support isn’t great. I think most of the forks implement basic Mastodon support now that will allow most apps to work. But the downside is you only get Mastodon functionality in those apps and not the extras.

























  • It has more to do with them being identified and fleeing the country:

    Holocaust memorial had recorded two figures arriving at about 3am with spray paint and stencils, as well as two or three other people who may have been involved. They were reportedly quickly identified from mobile phone information.

    All were Bulgarian and left Paris by coach for Brussels later the same morning just after spray-painting the graffiti, France Info reported, confirming an earlier report in the satirical weekly Canard Enchaîné.

    And the similarity to a previous incident:

    In October, about 60 Stars of David were discovered on walls in Paris and districts on the outskirts. All were in a blue similar to the blue of the Israeli national flag.

    A Moldovan couple were arrested in that case and their alleged handler, a pro-Russian Moldovan businessman, was identified, according to Agence France-Presse.


  • That does make it sound less good, but there’s also a compelling pro-Ukrainian argument for using revenue (and other funds) rather than the seized assets for defense. It’s widely agreed that Ukraine is owed those assets for reconstruction. Many want to liquidate them as an alternative to directly funding the defense effort, which could harm Ukraine’s ability to rebuild after the war. So it’s sort of robbing future-Ukraine to pay for the present. It’s especially risky because countries tend to lose focus of things like reconstruction and get distracted by the next shiny conflict or crisis.

    That obviously depends on Ukraine’s allies continuing to fund their defense though.







  • The concern isn’t about the consequences faced by Russia, but the impact on the rest of the world. Like, if Russia were to collapse, I think most would agree that Egyptians don’t deserve to find out what suddenly not having $1.7 billion in wheat would mean, right? I don’t think anyone has any idea what that would mean for, say, Tajikistan and other post-Soviet states with economies closely tied to Russia. Collapse would be chaos and it wouldn’t stay confined within Russia’s borders.

    And, again, I don’t think that justifies preventing Russia from losing. There are worse concerns for Russia winning. And the idea that Russia neither winning nor losing could be a sustainable final state is probably a fantasy.






  • It was initially incorrectly reported that she was alive and unconscious. This isn’t a new correction. She was declared dead in late October after investigators identified a piece of her skull:

    A source involved with her identification told CNN Louk’s death was announced after forensic examiners found a bone fragment from her skull.

    The bone fragment was from the petrous part of the temporal bone, which is at the base of the skull, normally near the carotid artery, a major blood vessel that provides blood to the brain. A DNA test concluded the fragment belonged to Louk.

    . . .

    The bone fragment, combined with the circumstances surrounding the October 7 attack and video that appeared to show Louk unconscious on the back of a Hamas truck, led investigators to conclude these were her remains.



  • The NYT coverage says:

    The change came because the United Nations switched to citing a more conservative source for its numbers — the Gazan Ministry of Health — rather than using Gaza’s Government Media Office, as it had in recent weeks.

    . . .

    That Gaza media office has consistently provided an overall death toll similar to the one given by the ministry of health, but different and often higher figures for the number of women and children killed.

    Ismail Al Thawabateh, the office’s director general, said in an interview that the health ministry listed and categorized an individual as dead only when all of their details had been documented and verified by a next of kin. He did not explain why his office used a breakdown of women and children based on the overall death toll.

    Most of the coverage, including this Guardian piece, makes it sound like they switched to a different dataset but this sounds like a switch to a different source. The HM numbers have generally been regarded as accurate – historically, at least. I don’t think that the media office has that same reputation. It seems like the previous numbers were calculated from the HM’s total death toll figure, and not from observed data. I’m not really sure what that means for interpreting the numbers.

    Archive


  • People say the same thing literally any time there’s a negative story about Hamas. That isn’t how this story is framed. Israeli policy (blockade) and military are not portrayed as a relative good at all. It also speaks directly against a narrative by some Israelis that Palestinians bear collective responsibility for the actions of Hamas.

    The idea that we must help Hamas cover up their crimes is a bad one, however well-intentioned. If they don’t want their crimes and misdeeds reported by the world, they should consider not committing any.