Futurology Today

At a court hearing on Wednesday, the judge didn’t rule on Mario Guevara’s petition to be released.

Every October, Microsoft host an Employee Giving campaign for charities chosen by staff, with the company matching any funds they raise. During last October’s Giving month, a group of Microsoft workers organised a vigil for Palestinians killed by the Israeli military during the current invasion of Gaza, stumping up donations for organisations such as the Palestinian Children's Relief Fund, while paying tribute to fellow tech workers who’ve lost their lives in the war.

"We were honouring the likes of Shaaban Ahmed al-Dalou, who was a computer science student that got martyred in Gaza," says Abdo Mohamed, one of the organisers and a former Microsoft machine learning engineer. "We were honouring the likes of Aisha Noor Ize-Iji, who was a Washington state resident who had been killed in the West Bank. We were honouring Mai Ubeid, another Palestinian martyr who was a tech worker, and someone who worked with [Google-funded programming bootcamp] Gaza Sky Geeks. People deserved to hear their stories - the Palestinians who had been victims of the genocide deserved a space to be honoured, not to be reduced to numbers." If you’re a white secular westerner like me, you may recoil instinctively from the religiously loaded word "martyr" here – Bassem Saad has written at length about the history of the term as Palestinians use it to describe those killed by Israeli forces.

The vigil was small - "around 50 people, sitting in chairs side by side, in an open space during lunch hour" - and in line with company guidance for such events, Mohamed claims. But at around 9pm that evening he and another organiser, Hossam Nasr, received an email telling them that they had been fired, with Microsoft later claiming that the event "disrupted" work, and should have taken place outside the campus. For Mohamed, the firing reflects Microsoft’s general disinclination to give employees a "safe space" in which to air their grievances about both Israel's treatment of Palestinians, and Microsoft's alleged complicity in supplying technology to the Israel Defense Forces. Rather, Mohamed says, "Microsoft had built this culture of intimidation, retaliation and oppression for anyone who felt the need to speak about what's happening in Gaza”.

If Microsoft hoped to quell such discussion or at least, drive the issue off-campus, their clampdown on criticism backfired. Earlier this month, current and former Microsoft workers with the No Azure For Apartheid movement occupied part of the company’s Redmond, Washington campus with tents and signs, demanding that their employers cease doing business with Israel's military. Just this week, protestors held another sit-in at the company president’s office. NAFA members have even pitched up outside Satya Nadella's lakefront house in canoes. And now, the backlash threatens to engulf Microsoft's entertainment business.

I don't mean in an intellectual or logical sense.

Recycling when EV batteries get down to 80%-of-range level can be tricky. But there's no necessity if there are many immediate uses for batteries that are 'down' to 240 instead of 300.

I really enjoy this channel. They cover 90s games and I’ve found all the videos very entertaining. enjoy!

Rasha Abou jalal
Aug 29, 2025

Like so many other Palestinians in Gaza, I have ended up in a tent—the enduring symbol of displacement. I am camped out on the rubble with my husband and five children in western Gaza City. The merciless Israeli military machine is bearing down on us, getting closer every day and there is nothing we can do. But we won’t leave here.

At night, violent explosions from the eastern and northern areas of Gaza City thunder through the darkness, especially in the neighborhoods of Jabaliya, Al-Saftawi, and Abu Iskandar, just a few kilometers away from me, now emptied of residents.

The aim of the Israeli army in these residential areas is not just to invade and occupy them, but to systematically destroy them.

The army deploys robotic vehicles loaded with explosives into the heart of residential blocks and detonates them, causing massive destruction. Then they go to another neighborhood and do the same thing. Killing anyone who remains there. Their goal is to erase Gaza City entirely through this method.

WASHINGTON (AP) — Federal prosecutors have failed to obtain a felony indictment against a man who was seen on camera hurling a sandwich at a federal law enforcement official in the nation’s capital, a person familiar with the matter told The Associated Press.

Sean Charles Dunn was arrested on an assault charge after he threw a sub-style sandwich at a Customs and Border Protection agent. A video of the incident went viral, and shortly after he was fired from the Justice Department, where he worked as an international affairs specialist in the department’s criminal division.

The case is one of the examples of the legal pushback to President Donald Trump’s law enforcement surge in Washington that has led to more than 1,000 arrests. It is highly unusual for grand jurors to refuse to return an indictment, and it was once said that prosecutors could persuade a grand jury to “indict a ham sandwich.”

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Original Title: [IndieGala] Annapurna Interactive Sale: Stray (53% OFF), Neon White (62% OFF), to a T (37% OFF), Skin Deep (37% OFF), Lushfoil Photography Sim (37% OFF), Wanderstop (32% OFF), Flock (41% OFF), Open Roads (49% OFF), Thirsty Suitors (53% OFF), Cocoon (55% OFF), Storyteller (53% OFF), Solar Ash (70%OFF

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Original Title: [Steam] SEGA Publisher Sale | Total War Warhammer III (-70%), Total War Three Kingdoms (-75%), Metaphor: ReFantazio (-45%), Like A Dragon Pirate Yakuza in Hawaii (-35%), Like A Dragon Infinite Wealth (-60%), + more

I have recently seen some heated debates about Proof of Stake and Monero.
I think we are missing some clarification to make sure we are all discussing the same things. Let's chat about this so we can all contribute to improve the network.

The Monero network has recently seen some mining centralization.
As a hostile mining pool, the attacker has some attack vectors that can cause more or less disruption, and that disruption needs to be addressed, carefully. This comment on lemmy explains this point in more details.

One of the disruptions caused by the attacker is deep block re-orgs, that cause exchanges like Kraken to increase deposit times for Monero (details also in post above).
One of the solutions proposed to resolve this issue is to record somewhere that a block is accepted, and it should not be changed in the future. Something that says, we solemnly declare that this block is in its final state, and we won't change it anymore.

Of course, we are not going to the city hall for that, we need a way to do it in a decentralized and trust-less way. But wait, we actually already have a solution for the problem of aligning different actors that have trouble communicating and agreeing on things, in a decentralized way: a blockchain. We could use a blockchain to say that this or that Monero block is finalized and no block re-org can change it.
If we go with that option, it needs to be a different blockchain, it needs to generate blocks faster than the Monero network, and it needs to be secure enough for this use case (for example, that blockchain should not itself have many deep block re-orgs).
Considering this, POW blockchains tend to have longer block times and might be just as susceptible to block re-orgs. More info in this lemmy post.

This is where Proof of Stake comes in as an option for a place to record that a given Monero block is finalized.
There are many things to consider before jumping into this, but this is the general idea.

That discussion is not about moving Monero to a Proof of Stake model with anointed super validators that can punish bad miners, and that will soon start judging and punishing naughty users too.
That is an entirely different thing and nobody is seriously considering doing that.

The PoS finality layer is just one of the options on the table to fix issues on the network. It isn't even the easiest or fastest to implement if we just want to deal with the current situation.

Another important point is that even in the scenario of a PoS finality layer, RandomX stays. This finality layer thing is not about making Monero a PoS coin, it's about using some other PoS to record things about the POW RandomX Monero as we know it currently.

All the options need to be considered and feel free to post your ideas here or on GitHub or on the Monero Research Labs chats. The worst thing that could happen is that only very few people learn and participate in those discussions and people like you and me exclude ourselves from the discussions because we don't know enough about it.

There is something that is clear though, some parts of the network are not yet completely ready for attacks by annoyed state actors. Right now the attacker does not seem like the proxy of very annoyed actors, and we have time for some adaptations. We might not have that much time during the next attacks, so we also need to chose solutions that will be useful in that scenario.

So, what do you think of using a PoS finality layer for Monero ?

Personally I think that if you directly apply these conditions for a PoS finality layer, you end up on the bright idea of using something like Ethereum or Litecoin. The Monero community does NOT want to have to rely on ETH or LTC for security. That would feel like a huge blow and a huge let-down…

But yeah, if need be, for me, this is still a perfectly acceptable temporary solution.