I hate the debate over “what is art”. Honestly I think the best answer I could give to the question is “something that was ruined by a bunch of idiots asking ‘what is art’”.

That said, and not wanting to go into that discussion, calling this guy an “artist” seems like a mockery. He’s not an artist, he’s just some idiot with double sided tape.

Perhaps the greatest takeaway from this entire fiasco is yet another reminder of the precarious position open source projects with a solo maintainer leave their user base in - especially when that maintainer is a teenager whose priorities are subject to changing rapidly as they get older and discover more about the world than discarded Ubuntu interfaces

What a terrible takeaway. I’d rather say that the takeaway is that all things come to an end, even Unity 7 which it’s honestly incredible didn’t die ages ago.

Those interested in keeping on working on Unity should perhaps focus their efforts instead on Lomiri, the community continuation of Unity 8 and default environment in Ubuntu Touch.

Here’s a demonstration from two months ago, running desktop apps like Librewolf on an external monitor powered by Ubuntu Touch on a Fairphone 4. It is of course not limited to Ubuntu Touch; Ubuntu Touch is just the only distro where it’s the default interface.

I’d say the Clash were simultaneously highly mainstream and true to the spirit of punk. Dead Kennedys as well, albeit slightly less mainstream.

Honestly I’d say there’s a lot of punk bands that enjoyed something close to mainstream success without being sellouts.

Ah shit. This is it.

Just my luck that GNOME 49 just dropped support for X11. I guess if it’s unbearable I can downgrade.

At least now I know what to watch. Thank you!

I can’t believe I hate them more than the Tories. That’s an achievement.

I’m European and I only went to the US this year (first and last time), and it’s true I was weirded out by the amount of billboards. But still, the same billboard usually stays within your line of vision for a little while.

And if they really count it in such a crazy way by knowing what’s in everyones field of vision all the time, that’s a crazy approximation from their side.

I think it’s likely they instead measure how mamy ads come through the web to your device, which is different from how many you actually see. Like an ad at the bottom of a website you don’t scroll through and stuff like that.

Take radio ads - if they last 10 seconds each and you listen to the radio non-stop all day, 2/3rd of the content on the radio would have to be ads. If they play 2 minutes of pop music for every 30 seconds of ads you just can’t reach these numbers.

It’s true that you can get several ads all at once online, I just still find it hard to believe one could reach 10 000 in a day without basically making an effort. At least in terms of visible ads - trackers is another thing.

But maybe I’m just out of touch. Recently I generally forget to install ad blockers because I have pretty much stopped using the majority of the web.

I did the math myself assuming seven hours of sleep and the higher estimate of 10 000 ads - yup, one every 6.12 seconds.

If an add lasts more than six seconds you would start lagging behind. Then again, I guess some people consume multiple adds at once.

With seven hours of sleep and 4000 every day we’re down to one ad every 15 seconds. Still seems wild even by American standards.

I suspect Google have been manipulating data in order to convinse buyers of the efficiency of their ad selling business, and this is the result of flipping these data back to society.

I think Wafrn communicates also with Bluesky! But I’m not sure how well it works.

That Mastodon at least makes an effort to present content in a meaningful way is a great thing for the fediverse. It’s hard to imagine Bluesky growing into a huge set of different services when the mothership refuses to display more than 300 characters.

I think the communication between the different platforms in itself is also something new and exciting that is brought to the table. Like when a comment on Lemmy suddenly starts making the rounds on Mastodon because it works well as a stand-alone toot.

I also like the potential for services to evolve more naturally. I honestly don’t think Mastodon is all that similar to Twitter, or PieFed all that similar to Reddit. Sure, they started out as similar concepts, but they develop in pretty different directions.

I mean, it self-identifies as a hellsite. I think they are making some active decisions to make sure their appeal is not too broad. Probably not a bad idea honestly, as long as a large user base is not a goal in its own right.

There’s a similar weird thing going on just north of Trondheim in the middle of Norway (and the middle of nowhere, really). I have no idea what it’s about. @beacondb@mapstodon.space (not sure if Mastodon mentions work from PieFed)

The genocide started in 1948, but it’s been bouncing back and forth a bit. Netanyahu has been prime minister for the majority of the last decades, and he is a profoundly evil person. Like, in the 90s a prime minister of Israel signed a peace treaty with Palestine, so the Netanyahu and his ideological allies had him assassinated. The widow after Rabin directly blames Netanyahu.

He never wanted peace, but genocide. That’s why he has been actively supporting Hamas—they share a common goal of maximum bloodshed. Any peaceful and stable Palestinian leadership is a threat to the Zionists. Netanyahu has controlled the media, attacked the courts, and did his best to brainwash the population through fear-based propaganda.

Today it is a genocide on Palestinians. Tomorrow Israel will reap the consequences of Netanyahu’s terror regime. This is not a comforting thought - I have friends (well, one colleague) in Israel, and she’s in the streets protesting constantly. That I believe her country is illegitimate does not make me any less worried about her and her family once Israel finds themselves alone with nothing but enemies and its horrors are turned back at itself. The fascist regime in Israel is a disaster for everyone.

Also for Jews outside of Israel. They all had an open invitation to move there for decades, they have refused to do so, many in spite of antisemitism in the societies where they live. That’s anti-zionism in practice, yet now antisemitism is again on the rise thanks to Israel and Europe’s bullshit tradition of antisemitism continues. Protect them and support them whenever you see a chance to, even if it can be a mental challenge to keep Jews and Israel as separate concepts in your mind. They really are separate.

The only ones benefiting from all of this are American evangelical Christians cheering for the rapture. They are trustworthy political allies of Netanyahu because they literally want the world to end. I guess western weapons exporters are also having a blast.

Well, sorry for rambling on. It has been going on for a long time, and once one starts to realize the extent of the problem it is easy to start hating. If you do, make sure to hate the right thing: Netanyahu, his political allies, the IDF, and Zionism are all very fair targets of hatred. May they rot.

The Freedom Flotilla Coalition has been at it since 2010. They are run by activists and generally lack government support, as governments fear “diplomatic incidents”.

The Italian navy sent a ship to help guarantee the safety of the Global Sumud Flotilla, but then withdrew it out of fear of confrontation with Israel. Spain sent a ship, but decided only to help rescue lives if necessary. As far as I know this is the closest we’ve gotten to government intervention, if you don’t count occasional statements and obviously everything the Israeli government is doing.

As for breaking the blocade, there has been some attempts at airdropping food, there’s 40 Turkish boats on their way last time I checked, and the UN is really working their asses of within their set of constraints to get aid in. But nobody is really capable of doing anything real at the moment.

Some things you can do to help is:

1. Protest, pressure your government to do more
2. Donate to the UN - in terms of fighting starvation, they are the most likely to succeed
3. Donate to or join the next wave of the Flotilla - this is less likely to succeed bringing large amounts of food and medicine, but it is good for highlighting Israel’s genocide and cause international pressure to do something about the situation.
4. Give directly to families in Gaza - https://gaza-verified.org/ is a repository of verified people in Gaza on the fediverse. Donating directly can help save someone’s life, but in the end they are fighting over resources that are scarce by design. The situation can really only get better once Netanyahu is put to justice.
5. Rally behind institutions that matter. Voice your support for the ICJ and the ICC.

It has been going on for a while. You can follow the next wave here, which is currently only nine ships: https://thousandmadleens.fr/tracker/

I have heard rumours a large number of ships have left from Turkey, but I’m not sure where to find information on that.

Well, it’s not unlikely, but Israel are reluctant to kill European whites because there’s a slight chance European leaders would actually care. So they stress how Greta Thunberg is doing great in their fascist news flashes. Meanwhile thousands are starving - they are murdering them all by refusing aid from entering. Each boat intercepted is murder.

Nine ships intercepted as of 0:33. Apparently the israelis are shooting with water cannons to try to deter the others from continuing, hopefully they lack the capacity to board all the remaining ships before dawn. 33 ships remain on their way to Gaza, one of which (the Marinette) is significantly behind the others.

Exactly this. If you try ticking a grizzly bear it’s a mistake even if it is intentional.

But again, I’m not a native speaker so I’m not saying this is the correct interpretation of the word, but that’s the impression I get from the dictionary.

Yeah, I guess these links are not all that useful to most people here unless they also have Mastodon accounts or something. I like to try to link other parts of the Fediverse when relevant, but I guess it’s really limited how useful it is.

I saw Rimu post something about working more towards mastodon integration in Piefed at some point, and for Mbin users at least it makes sense.