botanical

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With regards to the topic, I've noticed this when using FreeTube during certain periods of the day.

Sounds like justification for a false flag operation by the US government. How would they transport these massive things and launch them on a different continent? That, or the US is trying to justify that this illegal war is on their doorstep and need to expand their terror.

Load shedding hasn't been a problem for a while now. With proper maintenance of the coal stations and investments in solar, we haven't had it in Winter either. But you're right, it's always lurking. With increased renewable energy, and less reliance on coal, hopefully it stays in the past.

https://african.business/2025/10/energy-resources/has-south-...

True, but I meant in South Africa, SA is the most used. Less so with RSA or ZAR. ZA is somewhat used but SA (I would say) dominates in conversation and in written text.

By what metric is it in "steady decline"? As as South African, it's amusing to see how my country is generalised.

ISO 3166-2 code for South Africa. It's from Dutch: Zuid-Afrika. It's used quite often to refer to South Africa; RSA or SA is also used.

Are they going to rehire the employees they fired for being against this and Microsoft's support of the genocide now? It's more than just mass surveillance, and their leaders need to be held accountable.

https://www.dropsitenews.com/p/microsoft-azure-israel-top-cu...

That's really commendable, but I wonder how to do it on a large scale. Uruguay's installed capacity is 4.6 GW. On a larger scale, batteries can't be the answer as their energy density is quite poor.

WhatsApp's call quality is second to none. Also the fact that it's ubiquitous, and its sync just works, makes it difficult to move to anything else. Everyone's on it in South Africa. I think we can only hope for regulation to keep it safe and force interoperability with other chat apps.

As much as I like WhatsApp, I hate that it's been bought by a company like Meta. Its voice-calling quality is the best from all similar apps, companies use it to communicate with people, and my entire family solely uses it.

I just wish there was something else with such far reach and capability. We can only hope for interoperability with other chat apps.

At least the ads are in Updates, where I never bother looking at

North Korean and Chinese hackers are soundly shunned but for some reason it's always a "company" from a pariah country like Apartheid Israel that are able to sell their software weapons to indiscriminately target any civilian from any country.

This translucent 3D look doesn't feel like they took usability into consideration. They just wanted to force a glass-look. At least the Aero look was frosted, this makes it so you have to strain to differentiate buttons and text on it.

As if Western-backed companies are some type of beacon of light. If news of your company has Trump and Oracle linked to it, you aren't the good guys. This is just the American way of "consolidating power", by "spreading democracy."

Also, it's not like OpenAI responses aren't censored when it comes to "sensitive" topics.

I wanted a board with Zigbee support but $21 ($16 plus $5 shipping) is quite expensive for a single board.

If Apartheid South Africa could last just a little bit longer, they would still be an apartheid state like Israel is today.

Western media is just as complicit in this genocide as the fascists in charge of the Israeli government. And media are self-censoring which is reprehensible.

The idea of Hamas wouldn't exist if Gaza (and the West Bank) wasn't occupied by land, air and sea; their land stolen on a daily basis, and Palestinian people treated as subhuman animals.

It's such madness that all this resource usage is for LLMs that are barely useful (at least for me). So many billions in resources wasted for machine learning systems that mimic human speech, it's not intelligent in any sense.

Now we see models showing the user it's "thinking" as some sort of intelligent agent, when really, ploys like that is to prop up the AI sector's stock price.

Surely LLMs in this form can't be the future of AGI?

NSO Group are a terrorist group for hire. This 0-click, 0-day exploit was found targeting civil society. Any one can pay to target journalists, NGOs, politicians. This is why open-source is paramount to security, and having code out in the open.

If I'm not mistaken, all Firefox tabs are cookie isolated:

https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/introducing-total-cooki...

Containers are no longer necessary unless you're logging into the same site with multiple accounts.

It's funny how Mozilla is being vilified non-stop this past week when nothing's really changed (only their legal wording). Whereas Google are literally personal information vampires; they make the web a worse place for people and their freedoms.

I will continue supporting Mozilla and using Firefox.

The idea of Hamas will never be eradicated for as long as Palestinians live under occupation and dehumanisation. Hamas came to be after Palestinian land was occupied, large swathes stolen and its people killed by Apartheid Israel.

There already are 5.6 million refugees in Jordan and neighbouring countries, created by Israel's ethnic cleansing of Palestinians; that's almost half the population of Israel. Why should Palestinians forcibly leave their own land?

When people ask how could IBM facilitate in the Holocaust, this is how it happens.

Google rushed to sell AI tools to Israel’s military after Hamas attack:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2025/01/21/google-...

Also related is apparently data.gov datasets being scrubbed:

https://old.reddit.com/r/ClimateOffensive/comments/1idiize/d...

I hope the leaders of this genocide are brought to be accountable. Apartheid Israel have killed 10s of thousands, stole their land and dehumanised the Palestinian people; all supported by the so-called enlightened West (especially the US). This leaves a huge black spot on their morality.

So there's a Carnarvon in Australia that has to do with radio telescopes and a Carnarvon in South Africa that has to do with radio telescopes? In South Africa, the Square Kilometre Array telescopes (and others) are situated within the Meerkat National Park outside of Carnarvon.

You left out politicians. As far as companies like this are concerned, they are functioning within the limits of the law.

I've just come across this, Planetary boundaries

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planetary_boundaries

We've impacted the Earth to our detriment, I feel, for the sake of chasing money. We need to rethink what it means to live in peace and harmony on this living planet of ours.

Some of my polyester t-shirts have lasted more than 10 years without any loss in colour or quality, it's a damn shame they cause microplastics since it's probably better that people don't buy clothing every month if clothes lasted longer.

They have $118.4 billion in USD reserves?

Slowly, more citizen rights are being eroded by so-called democratic countries by weaponising legislation to get what the few elite in government want.

Another example was US sanctions against Russia, which led to the Linux kernel maintainers removing Russians. Not all Russians support or endorse the war criminal Putin. Are we going to see Western-allied countries like Apartheid Israel also sanctioned? Probably not. Legislation should not be used as a weapon to promote state propaganda.

Are we really going to block freely-available content on the internet? It seems like decentralisation is key to citizen liberty divorced from any one country's legislation.

Only the US government can allow corporations to beta test unproven technology on the public.

Governments should carry out comprehensive tests on a self-driving car's claimed capabilities. This is the same as cars without proven passenger safety (Euro NCAP) aren't allowed to be on roads carrying passengers.