China announced Monday the discovery of a crude oil reserve estimated at 100 million tons in the northeastern part of the South China Sea, according to a statement from the China National Offshore Oil Corporation (CNOOC).

The reserve was located at the "Huicou 19-6" oil field, situated approximately 170 kilometers off the coast of Guangdong province in southern China. The field lies in waters averaging 100 meters in depth.

CNOOC said test drilling at the site yielded 413 barrels of oil and 68,000 cubic meters of natural gas per day.

I have a pretty big seed collection, I've only planted potatoes so far 😅

cross-posted from: https://beehaw.org/post/19213440

The Socialist Equality Party condemns the attack on the Youth Demand organisation and demands the release and dropping of all charges against its members and supporters arrested over last Thursday and Friday by London’s Metropolitan Police.

The raid on the group’s publicly advertised meeting at Westminster Quaker Meeting House, a little over half a mile from Downing Street, is a major escalation in the Starmer Labour government’s assault on democratic rights. Up to 30 police officers, some armed, smashed their way into the meeting at St Martin’s Lane, central London Thursday evening (March 27).

///

I just want to point out how the Quakers have been real OGs for the side of human rights, historically.

Summary

Germany has launched its first permanent foreign troop deployment since WWII, stationing a 5,000-strong armored brigade in Lithuania to reinforce NATO’s eastern flank amid Russia’s ongoing war in Ukraine.

Officially activated near Vilnius, the 45th Armored Brigade marks a major shift in German defense policy, long averse to permanent overseas combat troop presence.

The deployment, set to be fully operational by 2027, includes support units and reflects NATO’s deterrence strategy.

Lithuania views it as crucial for national security, while Germany repositions itself as a more assertive military power.

“I know it’s hypothetical right now, but if you’re allowed for some reason to run for a third term, is there a thought that Democrats could try to run Barack Obama against you?” Fox News correspondent Peter Doocy asked Trump in the Oval Office on Monday..

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/27991220

Lorenzo Tondo in Jerusalem, Malak A Tantesh in Gaza and Julian Borger
Tue 1 Apr 2025 14.17 EDT

"Dr Ahmed al-Farra, a senior doctor at the Nasser medical complex in Khan Younis, witnessed the arrival of some of the remains.

“I was able to see three bodies when they were transferred to the Nasser hospital. They had bullets in their chest and head. They were executed. They had their hands tied,’’ Farra said. “They tied them so they were unable to move and then they killed them.”"

I've been slowing building a kind of "tool box" for myself using Tampermonkey, that makes the LemmyUI do some stuff I wanted. I finally have it in a stable place and wanted to share it with everyone. You can see the repo above, or read below.

Reds-Lemmy-Tools

This is a userscript that can be used with Tampermonkey or other userscript plugins.

Features

This small utility adds the following features to the LemmyUI.

• External Community Highlight
• URL post "Quick Search" button in post feed
• Auto-Closes the Subscribed Communities sidebar.

External Community Highlight

Posts in the feed that are made in a federated community will be highlighted. I implemented this so I could distinguish local posts from remote posts in the feed. See the screenshot below for an example of what this looks like.

URL post "Quick Search" button in post feed

I also call this the "Combat Liberalism" button.

Posts that have an external URL as part of their post will have a 🔍 icon in the post's action button area. This button will open a new window to your instance's search page, searching on the post's URL. I implemented this because the "Cross Posting" feature of the UI is frankly strange. Instead of some explicit "Cross Posting" list, I would rather just see where else the post's URL has been posted across federated communities. So, this search button will show you exactly that. This way you can find out where else this conversation is happening, and engage with or read other comments on the topic.

Search Button:

Search Results:

Auto-closes the Subscribed Communities sidebar

This one does what it says on the tin. My subscribed communities list is massive, and it stretches on forever, it feels like. This simply clicks that minimize box for me when the page loads.

Notes

1. The default match query is for Hexbear.net. You will want to update that with your preferred instance. // @match *://hexbear.net/*

Do Canada’s governments spend too much? Or tax too little?

There is so much in Canada that needs fixing.

The health care system, once our national pride, now comes in various shades of broken.

In Toronto, an underfunded Toronto Transit Commission, once North America’s model transit agency, has reduced service, and a growing hole in the city’s budget means more cuts are likely coming.

The city’s homeless shelters are beyond capacity and facing cutbacks.

And across Canada, random stranger attacks are suddenly a worry. Those charged are often deeply troubled people who have spent a lifetime cycling through the justice system, with little of the support, supervision and continuing addiction and mental-health treatment needed to break the cycle.

Why? Because we don’t fund things like that.

And as The New York Times helpfully informed its readers, you can blame global warming for all that Canadian wildfire smoke, but maybe you also blame Canada for being unprepared, including gutting the budget of the federal forest service.

We can do better. Can’t we?

The thing is, getting better public services generally involves spending more on public services. You tend to get what you pay for. And what you don’t pay for, you don’t get.

If you have ever been to Vienna or Copenhagen, and marvelled at how everything just seems to work, take a look at the accompanying chart. It shows general government revenues – that’s all levels of government, not just federal – in the world’s richest countries. Europeans tend to have more extensive social services, and the social payoffs they provide, because their taxes – which pay for everything from poverty reduction to public transit – are higher.

On the flip side, the USA has a low tax burden, and more limited low-income supports and public services. It also has relatively high levels of poverty, millions without health care, and the rich world’s lowest life expectancy.

You get what you pay for. And what you don’t pay for, you don’t get.

Canada sits somewhere in the middle. We are a low-tax country with weak social services compared with Western Europe, and a high-tax/more-government country compared with our neighbours.

So, back to where I started: the feeling that so much in Canada is broken, and so much needs fixing. Where to find the money for those fixes?

There are a couple of options.

• We can identify other areas of spending to cut, and use the savings to fund higher priorities.

• We can raise taxes, to pay for the things that need to be paid for.

• Or we can do a bit of both.

Higher taxes are the third rail of Canadian politics. But if some brave politician decided there was something that needed paying for, one obvious option would be to raise the GST or related provincial taxes.

The Harper government cut the GST from 7 per cent to 5 per cent more than a decade ago. The cut was popular, but nothing in life is free. It costs the federal government $20-billion a year. That’s about three-quarters of a percentage point of GDP – or roughly 4 times what the federal government plans to spend this year on its signature child-care and early learning program.

Again: You get what you pay for. And what you don’t pay for, you don’t get.

On the flip side, federal and provincial governments also spend money in areas where they ought to cut back.

For example, there are questions about whether the unprecedented subsidies for electric-vehicle manufacturers – Volkswagen is in line for as much as $13-billion from Ottawa – are going to deliver big bangs for all those bucks.

But there are other areas where there’s no question that cuts are clearly warranted. Consider Old Age Security. The federal government expects to spend $76-billion this year on elderly benefits – OAS and the related Guaranteed Income Supplement (GIS) – rising to more than $93-billion by 2027.

These programs are unfunded pensions, meaning that current taxpayers are writing cheques to current retirees. Old Age Security and Guaranteed Income Supplement are supposed to be about preventing senior poverty, which is a very good objective.

But OAS goes to all seniors – and the Trudeau government even gave a permanent 10-per-cent bonus to everyone 75 years and up. The money only begins to be gradually clawed back once a senior’s income reaches roughly $87,000, and is only fully clawed back once income hits $142,000 – and nearly $148,000 for those 75 and over.

A couple in their late 70s with a combined income of nearly $300,000 will still be receiving some OAS.

We could save billions of dollars by lowering the clawback threshold to $60,000 or $70,000, and increasing the speed of the clawback.

Or how about this idea, which is the norm in much of the rest of the world: Stop using billions of taxpayer dollars to build and maintain “free” highways. Have users pay for them. Toll highways are widespread in Europe. In Canada, we have moved in the opposite direction.

We have chosen to spend scarce taxpayer dollars - billions of dollars worth every year - on free roads. But that has a price. The price is all those other broken things we can’t afford to fix

• Tony Keller

Federal Green Party co-leader Jonathan Pedneault was in Whitehorse on Monday, pitching a plan to build a 120,000-person civil defence corps, and expand Canada's reserve forces.

He also proposed free civil defence training for any Canadian who wants it.

He also promised optional defence skills training for "tens of thousands" of Canadians, such as firearms training, survival techniques, and tactical first aid.

Pedneault also promised to expand Canada's reserve forces by 20,000 people, to fund the expansion of the Canadian Rangers, overhaul the Canadian Service Corps. for youth, and to "place Inuit, Dene, Gwich'in, and other Indigenous nations at the heart of our Arctic Indigenous strategy."

Republicans and Democrats agree prior authorization needs fixing, but patients are growing impatient.

cross-posted from: https://lemm.ee/post/60070513

This is something I always get in arguments about, whenever I use the word tankie hexbear and grad users argue that its just a term for socialists.

I've always just used it to referr to authoritarian communists, i.e, people who unironically support modern russia, and/or oppose ukraine, and think nothing happened to the uyghurs.

Archived

Unveiling Trae: ByteDance's AI IDE and Its Extensive Data Collection System

Trae - the coding assistant of China's ByteDance - has rapidly emerged as a formidable competitor to established AI coding assistants like Cursor and GitHub Copilot. Its main selling point? It's completely free - offering Claude 3.7 Sonnet and GPT-4o without any subscription fees. Unit 221B's technical analysis, using network traffic interception, binary analysis, and runtime monitoring, has identified a sophisticated telemetry framework that continuously transmits data to multiple ByteDance servers. From a cybersecurity perspective, this represents a complex data collection operation with significant security and privacy implications.

[...]

Key Findings:

• Persistent connections to minimum 5 unique ByteDance domains, creating multiple data transmission vectors
• Continuous telemetry transmission even during idle periods, indicating an always-on monitoring system
• Regular update checks and configuration pulls from ByteDance servers, allowing for dynamic control
• Permanent device identification via machineId parameter, which appears to be derived from hardware identifiers, enabling long-term tracking capabilities
• Local WebSocket channels observed collecting full file content, with portions potentially transmitted to remote servers
• Complex local microservice architecture with redundant pathways for code data, suggesting a deliberate system design
• JWT tokens and authentication data observed in multiple communication channels, presenting potential credential exposure concerns
• Use of binary MessagePack format observed in data transfers, adding complexity to security analysis
• Extensive behavioral tracking mechanisms capable of building detailed user activity profiles
• Sophisticated data segregation across multiple endpoints, consistent with enterprise-grade telemetry systems

[...]

• MediaTek Filogic 880 processor
• 1 x 10 Gigabit SFP port
• 1 x 5 Gigabit Ethernet port
• 4 x 2.5 GbE Ethernet port
• 1 or 2 Gigabit Ethernet ports
• WiFi 7 (tri-band)

OpenWrt Two is expected to sell for around $250 when it hits the streets in late 2025

It's still April 1st somewhere...

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/27678244

" The team at StonedCode is very proud to present the fork of the future. We have finally developed an operating system intended to be useable at any skill level and levelmof conciousness!

We have used the latest breakthroughs in minimal integrated graphical interfacing technology to ensure our custom open source high-flo software and streamlined operating system is bullet proof."

Seems really promising you guys I’ll post a link to the github soon.!

Hey guys, stupid question here: if I'm recording gameplay in HDR through ShadowPlay with RTX HDR, does the maximum amount of nits I set in RTX HDR affect the brightness of the video? Or is HDR HDR? For example, my monitor supports only 400-nits brightness, but if I set RTX HDR to a maximum of 1000-nits, does that mean the video will look better on HDR screens capable of showing 1000-nits?