*Subject: Trump Bullies Flip-Flopping Senators Into Defeating Vote to Block Venezuela War.*
That was just barely enough to defeat the resolution.
*[the bully] is making China – not America – great again, global survey suggests.*
An experiment demonstrates that horses respond to odor of human sweat differently depending on whether the human was feeling fear at the time of collection.
Journalist Laura Jedeed applied for a job with the deportation thugs, expecting to write a story later about the process and how they rejected her for what their background investigation would reveal about her politics. But they did not bother to investigate — they accepted her even though she had not actually even filled out the forms.
She is concerned that they may be accepting all sorts of violent criminals without bothering to check.
A special company in New South Wales, Australia, is authorized to fell trees in areas that are a habitat for endangered native species (plants and animals). It is supposed to take care not to harm those species, but it seems to take insufficient care.
It is so prone to mistakes that I wonder who profits from them.
After the imperious bully told Iran he would launch an attack if Iran executes protesters, the Iranian regime reacted just as I expected: by saying executions would start soon.
The bully is cruel and unpredictable. The mullahs are cruel and rigid.
Denmark has ordered its soldiers to fight any armed attack on Danish territory, including in Greenland.
Denmark's army cannot militarily stop the US army from seizing Greenland. The point of this order seems to be to prevent the imperialist from sending his troops to seize Greenland and then pretending that the attack didn't start a war.
Iran is hunting down the Starlink connections that are still running, trying to eliminate all external communication.
People think that Iran is planning to sever its domestic internet entirely from the rest of the world.
US citizens: call on Big Tech to cancel contracts with Israel's government.
US citizens: Call on Interior Secretary Burgum not to let Big Oil destroy Chaco Canyon.
Two months before it changed its name to "Meta," Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg personally introduced us to his metaverse for work: Horizon Workrooms, envisioned as a virtual space for workers to collaborate. Today, the company announced it's shutting that space down: "Meta has made the decision to discontinue Workrooms as a standalone app, effective February 16, 2026," reads the note tucked away on a help page. [...]
Meta just laid off roughly 10 percent of its entire Reality Labs division, over 1,000 jobs. In the aftermath, it's becoming increasingly clear that Zuckerberg has changed his mind about what the word "metaverse" actually means. [...]
Bloomberg writes that "Meta will continue to develop the metaverse, but with a focus on mobile phones instead of the fully immersive VR headsets that the company initially imagined." To be clear, the term "metaverse" was coined by Snow Crash author Neal Stephenson to describe a fully immersive shared VR world, but I suppose mobile makes sense if you consider Fortnite to be a metaverse and don't need the "fully immersive" part.
Previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously.
Let's say you run a nonprofit animal shelter. And for some reason, some people feel you should be seeing hockey-stick growth, but the donations aren't covering it.
So you decide to start up a side-line of selling kittens for meat.
Then you will inevitably have someone stroking their chin and saying, "Yes, yes, but how could they afford to stay open if they weren't selling kitten deli slices?"
Some might say -- maybe you aren't an animal shelter any more. Some might say.
I wrote that a couple of years ago but it remains relevant and widely applicable, so I want to do what I can to get the Kitten Meat Deli into the general discourse. My hope is that some day we can say, "Ah yes, they are using the Kitten Meat defense, that's a poplar defense" and people will know what you're talking about.
It was originally about Mozilla becoming an advertising company but it could as easily have been about Mozilla becoming an AI company or about Mozilla going all in on cryptocurrency or about Internet Archive doing the same or about Mozilla being funded by Google or about The Long Now Foundation releasing NFTs or about Mozilla allowing W3C to bless DRM or, more recently about Wikipedia taking funding from Microsoft, OpenAI, Facebook and Amazon (and without even the fig-leaf of "donation" but as customers).
Yes, the Sliced Kittens Defense. A strong defense!
XScreenSaver 6.14 is out now, including iOS and Android. A whopping eighteen new savers this time! As I mentioned last month, I wrote a new XScreenSaver module that is API-compatible with Shadertoy, which means that I am now able to pull demos written that way into the XScreenSaver fold. These 18 savers are the first of that batch. A limitation here is that I can only redistribute Shadertoy-derived savers that have licenses that are compatible with the rest of XScreenSaver.
The default license on shadertoy.com is "CC-BY-NC-SA", and so the vast majority of uploads use that. However, that license, by prohibiting commercial use, is not an open source license, and is more restrictive than the license used by the rest of XScreenSaver. For a Shadertoy saver to be distributed with or within XScreenSaver, it must be licensed under a compatible license, such as: MIT, BSD, CC-BY, CC-BY-SA or CC0.
So this first batch of 18 new savers are the ones that I was able to find that were both interesting and compatibly-licensed.
If you know of other cool Shadertoys that use one of the above licenses, please send them my way, and maybe I'll include them in a future release.
Likewise, if there are some others that are really good but that are not compatibly licensed, let me know about those as well and maybe I'll ask the author if they'd be willing to relicense them for inclusion. It's worth a shot.
(XScreenSaver does not, cannot and will not load the savers from shadertoy.com directly, because reasons, so let that idea go.)
One odd thing that you may notice about these is that they are oddly static as far as screensavers go, which is to say that despite their complexity, they draw the exact same scene every time. Most things written for Shadertoy generate each frame based on time-since-launch, without any mechanism for external sliders, or a random number seed. That's just how they're written.
Anyway, about the new XShaderToy framework that powers these new savers:
You may find that performance sucks on your machine. That means your GPU is not good, oh no. In particular, the Raspberry Pi 4b sucks at running most of these. Crank down the "Resolution" slider for a better frame rate.
To make these work in the wider XScreenSaver ecosystem, I had to target four different versions of GLSL that are all stupidly and arbitrarily incompatible with each other, both in the set of available library functions, and in basic syntax of the language such as the type promotion rules and whether integers exist.
- Linux: An OpenGL "compatibility profile" context anywhere from 3.1 to 4.6. Pi is 3.1, some other Linux devices are other versions.
- macOS Cocoa: An OpenGL 4.1 "core profile" context, which means no backward compatibility affordances for earlier versions.
- macOS X11: OpenGL 2.1, yes, 2.1.
- iOS: OpenGL ES 3.0. Note that "OpenGL ES 3.0" is not "OpenGL 3.0", it is "WebGL 2.0". This is all completely sane and normal.
- Android: An OpenGL ES context anywhere from 3.0 to 3.2.
So I had to write a bunch of compatibility shims to, for example, make code written to the "OpenGL ES 3.0" API able to run on an "OpenGL 2.1" system. And it's a complete shitshow. Maybe it will work, most of the time. Huge thanks to Carsten Steger for helping me understand this nonsense.
And of course thanks to the original authors of these "new" savers for putting there work out there, and under compatible licenses: mrange, otaviogood, nemerix, kali, jaszunio15 and 3w36zj6.
Who could have predicted this outcome except everybody:
Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department says it is not enforcing the new law while the constitutionality of California's state mask-visibility bills, SB 627 and SB 805, is challenged in court. [...]
Lacking any clear path to action, LA County's mask ordinance is simply political theater, said Sam Brown-Vazquez, a coordinator with Avocado Heights Vaqueros who leads environmental justice and rapid response work in the unincorporated LA County neighborhood.
"It's a performative farce," he said, "a pat on the back for the Supervisors to look like they're doing something."
The lawsuit alleges that the No Secret Police Act and the No Vigilantes Act threaten the safety of officers facing harassment, doxing and violence while carrying out enforcement duties.
The DOJ also contends the laws violate the Constitution's Supremacy Clause, under which states have no power to control the operations of the federal government.
In interviews with Politico and the New York Times published on Monday, [Kimberly Guilfoyle's ex-husband] described his office's efforts to kill the proposed billionaire tax and told the Times he would "do what I have to do to protect [rich people's yacht money]". As a direct-to-voters ballot initiative, Newsom would not have the power to veto the tax if the proposal passed.
Newsom's opposition to the ballot measure -- which would levy a one-time 5% tax on any residents of the state worth more than $1bn -- comes amid an uproar from some of California's most prominent billionaires. The Google founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page have both moved assets out of state in recent months, while the Palantir founder Peter Thiel donated $3m in December to a political action committee lobbying against the tax.
In interviews this week, Newsom cited billionaires who are shifting away from the state -- such as Page and Brin, with whom he has longstanding relationships -- as proof that his concerns about the tax deterring industry were vindicated.
Previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously.
While state residents have had the right to demand that a company stop collecting and selling their data since 2020, doing so required a laborious process of opting out with each individual company. The Delete Act, passed in 2023, was supposed to simplify things, allowing residents to make a single request that more than 500 registered data brokers delete their information.
Now the Delete Requests and Opt-Out Platform (DROP) actually gives residents the ability to make that request. Once DROP users verify that they are California residents, they can submit a deletion request that will go to all current and future data brokers registered with the state.
I signed up for this, despite it being a red-flag factory. It makes sense that to tell data brokers to fuck entirely off, you would have to identify yourself to them, but giving information to the enemy still goes against my every instinct.
Again, it makes me twitch to ever upload a photo of my ID, but I guess sending the ID to the same government that issued it should be fine? But signing up for login.gov is a complete shitshow.
You can't just upload a photo of your ID: desktop browsers are "not supported". You have to take the photo in-browser on a phone, and it took me literally 15 times to succeed at that, because iOS Safari kept crashing so hard that I had to kill the app. Repeatedly. Sometimes it would crash at the front scan, sometimes at the back, but restarting meant you had to start over with the front again. Also it somehow drained 40% of my battery in 15 minutes. Amazing technology. Great work everybody.
And you have to consent to "something something AI something something" and there was also some "binding arbitration" nonsense in there too. (I could hear Cory's head exploding from here.)
"Powered by Socure" who I guess are the AI-blah-blah also-ran trying to get whatever government contracts id.me didn't already get. Apparently they are burrowed in to Docusign as well ("your second most favorite source of phishing emails!")
I guess people who don't have iOS or Android are expected to go to the post office to do this in person. I was seriously considering it.
At least they didn't demand that I give them a facial.
Previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously.
Planet Debian upstream is hosted by Branchable.