They could set up an account on one of the larger well established Canadian instances or even better start up their own.

Both of these options have their pros and cons, and I think it is important to explain these well to the council if you want to have any hope of convincing them.

A line of argument that has had some success in Europe is what has become known as “Digital Sovereignty”, basically a fancy term for saying government should control its own infrastructure. So you might want to sell it as an easy way to have a permanent archive of public communication and a method for it that is under their direct control, rather than as a way to find more engagement.

As others have said self hosting has a maintenance and moderation overhead, but this can be lessened by running an instance together with other cities while still retaining most of the benefits of self hosting.

Seeing from the linked cross-post that this is about Port Alberni, and considering that http://portalberni.ca/ returns an empty reply while https://portalberni.ca/ lets me know I have been geoblocked because I’m outside of Canada and the US, I’d say you have an uphill battle before you though. These people made a website (probably paid for it, too), and then killed much of its use by geoblocking most of the world.

Good luck.

I don’t know if there is any single takeaway here, this story is just fucking ridiculous on every single level.

1. They bullshited themselves into a search warrant based on typical cannabis “investigation methods”.
2. In a state where recreational cannabis use is legal.
3. Persisted in the search even after their main argument for it, high energy usage indicating a grow-op, fell away when it was clear it was indeed a medical facility.
4. Made the motherfucking “Gun flies to MRI” TV trope a certified reality. This is a thing that verifiably happened now.
5. Instead of getting help, used a sealed (!) emergency shutdown button…
6. …which damaged the machine. And released thousands of dollars worth of helium gas.
7. Forgot their loaded magazine on the ground.

This can’t be real. I’m fucking dying over here. Please let there be bodycam footage of the cop speaking in a high pitched voice after. (I know the helium was probably not released into the room, but one can hope I guess)

And further from that, maybe if Youtube’s Chief Enshittification Officer is against it then taking 23andme private might actually be the best thing to do?

Sittenhaft

*Sippenhaft

Sippe = kin/clan Sitte = morals/tradition

You thought it was AI, but she just has ulnar polydactyly. How do I know this is ulnar instead of radial or central polydactyly? The wedding ring, it’s on the ring finger.

(/s of course, this is obviously AI. But yeah people with extra fingers do in fact exist. They or the parents often cut away the extra finger for cosmetic reasons.)

I’ll have you know that this is famous sci-fi author Charles David George Stross posting an excerpt from his seminal novel Don’t Create The Torment Nexus. The warning is right in the title, I’m sure nobody will be dumb enough to ignore it!

Depends on the kind of colour blindness you have I guess. I think I have the congenital red-green blindness common among men, and saturate Just Works™ for me. Plus I don’t have to fiddle with setting a rotation degree there.

PSA for my fellow colour blind people, you can use inspect element option of your browser to add a filter: saturate(100); rule to the element for this kind of image:

https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/loss

TL;DR: Somebody made a really weird episode of a web comic and the configuration of the figures in the panel has become a meme named “Loss” after the name of that episode. Pic related:

The joke here is that evolution gave you pattern recognition to avoid predators, but now you are using it for useless things like recognising this comic is spatially organised in the same way the Loss comic is.

Damn, TIL I became a Nazi when I first visited my grandparents as a child. Thanks for letting me know, at least I can lean into it now. /s

We’ve had TWO incidents of legislative violence (Sumner slavery incident and 6 January incident).

I mean I guess it depends on your definition of “legislative violence”, but I feel like you are forgetting a certain “states rights” incident here…

They used both terms as well as “Machtübergabe” (transfer of power) to refer to Hitler being appointed chancelor, but that was neither the beginning nor the end of the multi-step coup the Nazis enacted, which is what I wanted to highlight. The term makes it seem like a singular event, when in reality it was a longer process.

This somewhat misleading, Hitler and the NSDAP were indeed voted into the position to seize power by democratic means which they then abused, the voter supression mainly happened in later elections when the undermining of institutions and the consitution was already well underway. “Machtergreifung” is the propaganda term the Nazis used themselves to describe the process of what happened after the fact, which in reality was much more cloak and dagger-y than the term suggests.

P.S.: Germany didn’t have a two-party system, so having a majority wasn’t that important. You would form coalitions of parties after an election which then had a majority, or even form a minority government that then has to actively hunt for their missing votes from other parties to get any legislation passed.

As Shelena said it means Artificial General Intelligence. It’s a term coined to distinguish a hypothetical future system with actual intelligence in the colloquial sense of the word from currently existing “Artificial Intelligence” systems, because that has turned into an almost meaningless buzzword used to sell machine learning systems to investors and the general public over the last two decades or so. Don’t get me wrong, “AI” has indeed made impressive progress as of late, I’m not doubting that. But the existing systems are hardly “intelligent” in the sense that most people would define that word.

More than 5,700 Palestinians have been killed by Israeli airstrikes since the war began, according to the Hamas-run Ministry of Health in Gaza, the New York Times reported.

I would take this number always with a grain of salt.

Understandable, it’s a claim made by a partisan faction after all. That said, according to this random X/Twitter account the IDF itself claimed two days ago to have made “over 10,000 targeted strikes” on Gaza since the beginning of the current conflict, so the casualty number given by Hamas works out to about 0.57 fatalities per strike, which doesn’t seem like that outlandish a claim to me given how densely populated Gaza is.

Unclear to me, according to the OP the service is set to manual start. But there is an event trigger attached to the service and the article doesn’t mention what that event is.

A VPN provider has the same level of insight into your traffic as an ISP does when not using a VPN. If having one installed without your consent isn’t a privacy issue I don’t know what is…

This is literal fake news. Climate change is certainly a thing. Flowers blooming in Antarctica currently is not.

Uhm, your own source says differently though?

While a 2022 study did find a global warming-related expansion in the range of two Antarctic flowering plants, the photo does not show those plant species.

I feel like I was living under a blanket or something.

I mean I guess. Didn’t lots of people on “the left” (by American standards) suspect something like this to happen? Think of the man what you will, but that comedian Bill Maher predicted it since before Trump was sworn into office, kept saying it for four years straight at every opportunity.