I mean, the EU could impose a 24-hour quarantine period on vehicles leaving the EU for Russia to see if any theft reports come in on vehicles that aren’t whitelisted on a freight-hauler vehicle list or something like that. That’d probably suck a lot more for Russia than it would for the EU.

You can probably do it, but I’m not sure how many users you’d get, as I think that it’d be a less-usable interface.

• You’d need some way to handle voting; that doesn’t intrinsically show up. Maybe you could do it via expecting users to send specially-structured emails.

• If by “fediverse” you specifically are talking about the Threadiverse — Lemmy, Piefed, and Mbin — then you’re going to have to also deal with a lack of a way to handle responding to a given comment (unless you intend to forward all comments to all posts that a user has subscribed to to an email address, and then just only let them respond to those).

• Email isn’t natively encrypted, so if that’s a concern and you want to deal with that, you’d need something like a PGP key that users could register, I guess.

• Email clients don’t, as far as I know — I haven’t gone looking — natively have Markdown support, so either you need to throw out formatting or have some sort of mapping to and from Markdown to HTML. I don’t know if something like pandoc would be sufficient for that.

• No native “report” functionality. Maybe you could do it via expecting users to send specially-structured emails.

If what you want is to take advantage of existing native clients, my suggestion is that you’d probably get more mileage out of doing a bidirectional Usenet-to-Threadiverse gateway than an email-to-Threadiverse gateway. That has a much closer mapping in terms of functionality than email. You could do that a lot more efficiently in terms of bandwidth. Your “Usenet group list” would be a set of community@instance name entries, and you map posts to top level messages, and comments to responses to those.

The major downside there is that I don’t think that any Usenet clients have native Markdown support and you still don’t have voting or native reporting functionality.

The only obvious benefit I can think of from either Usenet or email is that there are clients for both that support offline functionality, and I don’t know of any Threadiverse-native clients that do. I think the major point I’d raise would be “you could probably do it, but…what do you gain that outweighs the drawbacks?” Like, I think that you’d probably get more good out of just picking your favorite native Threadiverse client and adding code to that (or starting a new one, if you absolutely can’t stand any of the existing ones).

A quarter-century back…

https://www.linuxjournal.com/article/3676

World domination. It’s a powerful and faintly sinister phrase, one you might imagine some B-movie mad scientist muttering as he puts the finishing touches on some infernal machine amidst a clutter of bubbling retorts and crackling Tesla coils. It is not a phrase you would, offhand, associate with cuddly penguins.

When Linus says he aims at world domination, it seems as if he wants you to laugh at the absurd image of a gaggle of scruffy hackers overrunning the computing world like some invading barbarian horde—but he’s also inviting you to join the horde. Beneath the deadpan self-mockery is dead seriousness—and beneath the dead seriousness, more deadpan self-mockery. And on and on, in a spiraling regress so many layers deep that even Linus probably doesn’t know where it ends, if it ends at all.

The way Linux hackers use the phrase “world domination” is what science-fiction fans call a “ha-ha-only-serious”. Some visions are so audacious, they can be expressed only as ironic jokes, lest the speaker be accused of pomposity or megalomania.

PC gaming is still only a bit over 5%, but it’s one of the last remaining computing environments where Linux hasn’t become the dominant OS choice, as it’s displaced embedded systems and servers and suchlike. Things have changed a lot.

Yes. Now try 0177.0x1.

I’m pretty sure that IPv4 address formats are more complicated than IPv6 forms, if you are actually doing RFC-compliant validation.

Someone else in another comment linked to a memory comparison between desktop environments, and there KDE Plasma used the most memory, with GNOME in second place, but I think that the broader point here is that on Windows, you have one basic graphical shell that basically all desktop users are expected to have running. It’s not completely impossible to hack up a Windows environment to avoid doing so, but it’s a highly nonstandard configuration, and stuff is going to break.

Linux has a much broader range of options available, and those are first-class citizens. Some of them are considerably lighter on resource usage than others.

A lot of users aren’t going to cobble together their own ideal environment the way I do, but there are “presets” of packages that are aimed specifically at being light on resource usage. XFCE has historically been one example; they were slow to move to Wayland, but it looks like they’re doing it now. One doesn’t have the sort of “the OS vendor is giving you one monolithic blob that you need to run” the way you do on Windows.

https://tech.yahoo.com/computing/articles/debian-edition-doesnt-linux-172134222.html

The Debian project has just released a new snapshot of its alternative operating system, Debian GNU/Hurd 2025, which now includes a working 64-bit edition. This is a massive update for a project that many people forget exists, but you need to know right away that this is not a Linux distribution.

This latest release is based on Debian Trixie, or more specifically, the testing branch known as Sid. The Hurd is the original kernel that the GNU project was developing before Linus Torvalds announced his “hobby” project back in 1991.

I don’t think that Linux is going anywhere, but Hurd does march on!

I mean, it’s probably a good idea to have them higher, given that if someone wants to use it with some typical out-of-the-box desktop settings, that’s not unreasonable, but while I haven’t looked at the Ubuntu installer for a while, I strongly suspect that it permits you to do a minimal install, and that all the software in the Debian family is also there, so you can do a lightweight desktop based on Ubuntu.

My current desktop environment has sway, blueman-applet, waybar, and swaync-client running. I’m sure that you could replicate the same thing on an Ubuntu box. Sway is the big one there, at an RSS of 189MB (mostly 148MB of which is shared, probably essentially all use of shared libraries). That’s the basic “desktop graphical environment” memory cost.

I use foot as a terminal (not in daemon mode, which would shrink memory further, though be less-amenable to use of multiple cores). That presently has 40 MB RSS, 33 of which are shared. It’s running tmux, at 16MB RSS, 4 of which are shared. GNU screen, which I’ve also used and could get by on, would be lighter, but it has an annoying patch that causes it to take a bit before terminating.

Almost the only other graphical app I ever have active is Firefox, which is presently at an RSS of 887.1, of which 315MB is shared. That can change, based on what Firefox has open, but I think that use of a web browser is pretty much the norm everwhere, and if anything, the Firefox family is probably on the lighter side in 2026 compared to the main alternative of the Chrome family.

I’m pretty sure that one could run that same setup pretty comfortably on a computer from the late 1990s, especially if you have SSD swap available to handle any spikes in memory usage. Firefox would feel sluggish, but if you’re talking memory usage…shrugs I’ve used an i3/Xorg-based variant of that on an eeePC that had 2GB of memory that I used mostly as a web-browser plus terminal thin client to a “real machine” to see if I could, did that for an extended period of time. Browser could feel sluggish on some websites, but other than that…shrugs.

Now, if you want to be, I don’t know, playing some big 3D video game, then that is going to crank up the requirements on hardware. But that’s going to be imposed by the game. It’s not overhead from your basic graphical environment.

I’d also be pretty confident that you could replicate that setup using the same packages on any Debian-family system, and probably on pretty much any major Linux distro with a bit of tweaking to the installed packages.

I assume so. Here’s a video of someone floating a boat (apparently in air) in it, and then sinking it by pouring cups of sulfur hexafluoride over it:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ee2NaYRnRGo

If it avoids diffusing into air to the degree that you can scoop it up and pour it, I’d imagine that it’d pour out of one’s lungs the same way.

But if you just want to get most of it out of your lungs — like, you’ve been breathing it and don’t want to asphyxiate — I imagine that exhaling all the air you can and inhaling air and doing that a few times would probably do a pretty good job, the way the Mythbusters video above did with the helium.

Sulfur hexafluoride does the opposite:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FvvSIAqOkIw

I’d guess that most industrial users of helium don’t consume it and could theoretically recover it from whatever process it’s involved in rather than just releasing it.

EDIT: Hard drives being an exception, as apparently some ship helium-filled; there, it’s actually being consumed during the manufacture.

EDIT2: I’d also point out that in the long run, we probably do have to be more conservative with our helium supply. We get it from pockets in the earth. It’s actually not all that common; it just happens, though, that we go to a lot of effort to extract natural gas, and that happens to sometimes also come up with helium, so we get that supply. But because it’s not reactive, it doesn’t bond to anything — it stays in gas form. When we let it go, it heads to near the top of our atmosphere and eventually gets lost to solar wind. Many users who today just release it — because why not, as the natural gas people will be providing more, and it’s cheaper that way — probably will need to capture what they’re using if we want helium to continue to be available.

Lithium ion batteries are far cheaper now at a consumer level than they were thirty years back.

EDIT: I’m actually surprised that a higher proportion of laptops today don’t ship with 100 Wh batteries. Go back some years, and shrinking the battery had a much larger difference in cost than it does today. The larger battery gives you longer battery longevity (makes it more reasonable to charge to 80%, say), can be used to make a laptop run more quickly, can power more devices. The only drawback is weight, and it isn’t that heavy.

while being a literal mascot of Lemmy

Lemmy’s mascot is a lemming rather than a lemur.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lemmy_(social_network)

In a 2020 post, Lemmy’s co-creator Dessalines wrote about the origin of the name Lemmy. “It was nameless for a long time, but I wanted to keep with the fediverse tradition of naming projects after animals. I was playing that old-school game Lemmings, and Lemmy (from Motorhead) had passed away that week, and we held a few polls for names, and I went with that.”[7]

Luckily Spanish is generally pretty well subtitled and dubbed. My pet peeve issue is that oftentimes there’s only Latin Spanish, instead of Spain Spanish. You’d think that each Latin country would have it’s own dialect so having just Latin Spanish would be reductionist, but alas.

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

In any event, in the sphere of spoken language, the issue has become problematic since at least the 1950s when the commercial demands on movie dubbing studios working with Hollywood films began to call for the development of a Spanish whose pronunciation, vocabulary, and grammatical features would not be recognizable as belonging to any particular country (español latino or español neutro, “Latin American Spanish” or “Neutral Spanish”). This goal soon proved to be an elusive one: even if the results could, on occasion, approximate a universally intelligible form, at the same time the process prevented the transmission of a familiar, intimate, or everyday tone. Disney Pictures took an early interest in unified dubbing. Three Little Pigs was dubbed in Paris by Castilian and French-accented actors. Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs and Pinocchio were dubbed in Argentina under Luis César Amadori. Later Disney films were dubbed in Mexico under Edmundo Santos.[44] Nevertheless, its continued use has produced a degree of familiarization with a certain abstract phonetics throughout Spanish America. Dubbings made in Spain, are very particularly localized due to both the language politics of Francoist Spain and later assumptions by Spanish audiences. As Disney has re-issued its productions in newer media or to establish new copyrights, it has increased the number of dialectal versions. Sometimes this has backfired: parents who had watched The Little Mermaid with a pan-Hispanic dubbing disliked the re-dubbed Peninsular Spanish dubbing.[44]

Context:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anubis_(software)

Anubis is an open source software program that adds a proof of work challenge to websites before users can access them in order to deter web scraping. It has been adopted mainly by Git forges and free and open-source software projects.[4][5]

https://lib.rs/crates/iocaine

Iocaine is a defense mechanism against unwanted scrapers, sitting between upstream resources and the fronting reverse proxy.

I doubt that there’s actually a substantial impact on battery cell production. Might be on rack-mountable batteries containing those cells. But setting that aside:

Panasonic plans to expand lithium-ion cell

Non-rechargable AAA batteries are typically alkaline, and rechargeables are typically NiMH, not lithium-ion.

EDIT: Looking at a handful of rack-mount lithium-ion batteries on Amazon price history using camelcamelcamel, prices are either unchanged or very slightly up. Could be Panasonic looking to get into the news, but it’s not clear to me that there’s a shortage of even rack-mount lithium-ion batteries.

LLM subtitling is generally really bad.

All relative. Let’s take an infamous example of human translation from Japanese to English, Zero Wing’s intro:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7u5Z-PGJWYU

The Japanese, the original human translation, and what current Google Translate’s LLM gives when I plug in the original text.

English proficiency in France is bad

My guess is that it’s because French is comparatively-widely-spoken relative to most other languages in Europe.

The benefits of speaking a language increase the more people who can speak it — it gives you access to more people out there.

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

According to this, as of 2026, there are about 1,493 million people in the world who can speak English.

There are about 334 million people in the world who can speak French. That’s second only to Spanish among European languages behind English.

So if you already know French, learning English will give you access to something like 4.4 times as many people as you could otherwise communicate with.

Contrast that with, say, Icelandic.

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

Icelandic or Icelandish (/aɪsˈlændɪk/ ⓘ eyess-LAN-dik, /aɪsˈlændɪʃ/ eyess-LAN-dish; endonym: íslenska, pronounced [ˈi(ː)stlɛnska] ⓘ, íslensk tunga [ˈi(ː)stlɛnsk ˈtʰuŋka]) is a North Germanic language from the Indo-European language family spoken by about 390,000 people, the vast majority of whom live in Iceland, where it is the national language.[2]

An Icelandic speaker picking up English gives them access to about 3,828 times as many people. That’s a a lot more content you have access to, people you can communicate with, etc. The payoff to an Icelandic speaker from picking up and using English is considerably larger than the payoff to a French speaker; they’ve got more incentive to be able to use it well.

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In Calgary they have water shortages, because they road-salted their water mains into oblivion.

looks blank

Water mains take incoming water, not drainage water. How does salting roads harm water mains?

Like, you mean that the water drains off and comes in contact with the pipe and damages it from the exterior?

searches

Ah. Yes. Apparently this was a thing in Calgary recently.

https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/calgary/road-salt-calgary-bearspaw-south-feeder-main-9.6993387

Sodium chloride use continues on Calgary roads after likely contributing to 2024 water main break

Report suggests city’s road de-icing led to increased chloride levels in soil

Ehhh.

When I saw the title, I thought that someone was trying to use LLM-backed bots to drive some sort of marketing campaign or something.

But this sounds like it’s just someone plugging in something into an LLM and it returning the same kind of stuff that a Web search engine would.

Reporters fed national-language versions a range of prompts, including requests for online casinos with the biggest bonuses and websites that don’t ask for proof of age to register.

In three quarters of replies, chatbots recommended gambling sites not licensed in Europe, describing them variously as “secure and fast”, “perfect for competitive players”, or “great for novice gamblers”.

Casinos that lack national licenses for countries where they operate do not offer the same consumer protections as legal operators, and may expose players to the risk of scams or fraud.

When prompted, the chatbots explained how software could be used to access unclicensed platforms and promoted sites registered in offshore territories. One Meta AI chatbot wrote that online casinos with no identification checks were the “Holy Grail!”. Google’s Gemini said crypto sites offered players “anonymity” and a “lack of rigid limits”.

I have a hard time calling that “luring”.