cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/52498343

https://www.pixiv.net/en/artworks/126285129

AI-generated contributions are not accepted.

Pull requests, patches, documentation, translations, issues, or other contributions that are substantially generated by generative AI or large language models will not be accepted.

Contributors are expected to understand, author, and take responsibility for the work they submit. Tools such as linters, formatters, autocomplete, spellcheckers, and other non-generative development tools are unaffected by this policy.

https://github.com/pixelfed/pixelfed#ai-generated-contributions

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We heard you! We are not accepting any AI or agentic code contributions, and will keep building Pixelfed by hand.

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cross-posted from : https://lemmy.zip/post/72339345

https://www.pixiv.net/en/artworks/126285129

cross-posted from: https://scribe.disroot.org/post/11589441

Ukraine’s military has used drones to deliver food and medicine to the Russian-occupied town of Oleshky, the governor of Ukraine’s Kherson region said, as officials warn about a worsening humanitarian crisis.

Governor Oleksandr Prokudin said on Sunday that, in the latest operation, heavy-lift drones delivered about four tons of food and medical supplies to 100 locations across the town simultaneously.

Oleshky, a frontline town on the Dnipro River, which separates Russian and Ukrainian forces, has been under Russian occupation since 2022.

Prokudin said that close to 2,000 people, including about 50 children, were being held “hostage”, without food, electricity and water, and accused Moscow’s forces of preventing them from escaping the town.

Ukrainian officials have warned of the situation in Oleshky becoming more dire.

...

Meanwhile, Russia is shooting down food deliveries, confiscating supplies that reach the ground and blocking evacuation.

Russian forces are blocking civilians from evacuating and actively obstructing drone deliveries.

Oleksandr Prokudin, head of the Kherson regional military administration, said troops are shooting down food-carrying drones, confiscating or reselling supplies that reach the ground, and detaining residents found with humanitarian parcels.

Soldiers are conducting house-to-house searches for dropped food, residents report.

...

The UN Human Rights Monitoring Mission in Ukraine has said that residents have endured months of food shortages and “extremely limited” access to basic necessities.

...

The Council of Europe warns civilians face "a high risk of death" with no food, medicine, water or electricity.

...

Archived

A rather impressive GameBoy version of Disco Elysium. Playing it emuklated on my Playdate.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.sdf.org/post/59708417

Archived

[...]

On a benchmark of 967 politically sensitive prompts, six Chinese models answered only 17 to 41 percent of prompts in a balanced way, a new study finds.

More surprisingly, NVIDIA’s Nemotron Cascade 2 was flagged on 17 percent of prompts. Its published SFT data was generated largely with DeepSeek and Qwen, and here we found the likely reason for the model’s observed behavior: roughly 3.5k of its 9.3M chat rows carrying Chinese Communist Party (CCP) talking points.

From this data, we conclude that sovereign models need three things: screening of training data for Chinese political content, targeted alignment data that sets the intended behavior, and evaluation against benchmarks like the one presented here. We have adopted these measures at Aleph Alpha.

[...]

A recent report by LatticeFlow AI found that, as Chinese models grow larger, their political leaning grows stronger, creating a wider gap to Western norms.

[...]

Although Chinese state influence has been reported, users of Chinese models may not notice it day-to-day. By probing these models on a large variety of topics, we have found that state-directed alignment is centered around the following themes.

[...]

Chinese models will express their political alignment in a number of ways, including by making doctrinal assertions in the assistant’s voice, referring to Chinese law as a reason to refuse, denying documented events, answering evasively or steering the user toward Chinese state media. When prompted about (lawful) political advocacy around these topics, we have also seen Chinese models propose courses of action that soften the user’s requests when they conflict with Chinese state positions.

[...]

The report evaluated Chinese LLM's responses to three topics:

• Direct mentions of top political leaders, the Chinese Communist Party’s legitimacy, and historical taboos like the Tiananmen Square protests
• Taiwan, Hong Kong, the South China Sea, and regions like Xinjiang and Tibet.
• Topics like press freedom, freedom of assembly, human rights, democratic elections, and minority rights.

When prompted about these topics, Chinese models will express their political alignment in a number of ways, including by making doctrinal assertions in the assistant’s voice, referring to Chinese law as a reason to refuse, denying documented events, answering evasively or steering the user toward Chinese state media. When prompted about (lawful) political advocacy around these topics, we have also seen Chinese models propose courses of action that soften the user’s requests when they conflict with Chinese state positions.

[...]

Overall, all evaluated Chinese models show strong alignment with CCP positions compared to the baselines trained outside of China, either by asserting doctrine or by refusing to answer.

[...]

Chinese state perspectives in non-Chinese LLMs

It is perhaps unsurprising that Chinese state narratives are produced by Chinese LLMs, since the regulation mentioned above explicitly demands political alignment. More surprising is the fact that, using the detection benchmark developed above, we found Chinese doctrinal assertions in responses from NVIDIA’s Nemotron Cascade 2.

[...]

NVIDIA publishes the full supervised finetuning (SFT) data that was used to train Cascade 2, and we conclude this to be the likely source: chat data responses were generated by Chinese models, including DeepSeek and Qwen. Since these datasets purposefully contain a wide variety of prompts, some fraction of them is also politically sensitive, triggering Chinese models to give the party line.

[...]

Still, CCP talking points leaking into Nemotron Cascade 2 makes clear that active care is required to safeguard model sovereignty from Chinese influence [...] The trend is clear: a significant fraction of the future internet will be generated by Chinese LLMs. Therein lies a risk of the continued world-wide adoption of Chinese LLMs: the coverage of sensitive topics on the internet will shift over time and with it the distribution of pre-training data.

[...]

[Original article in Russian. This is a a paraphrased automated translation with minimal edits.]

...

The authorities of the Russian city of St. Petersburg on Monday drafted a new law for amendments to the budget of 2026, proposing to reduce the cost of education, overhaul and bomb shelters and increase the cost of payments to the participants of the war against Ukraine (the "SVO", the so-called "special military operation").

...

According to the Russian Central Bank, the expenditure from the part of the treasury of the city can be reduced by 70.2 billion rubles (up to 1.58 trillion). Officially announced the postponement of funding for tasks “that have no priority”. At the same time, budget revenues this year will grow by 9.8 billion rubles to 1.472 trillion. The biggest cut is waiting for the section “economy” – 36.7 billion rubles.

...

In particular, the public transport system (in addition to the metro), including ground transport and the purchase of rolling stock, will lose 9 billion rubles.

Funding for education will be reduced by 15.5 billion rubles. 0.5 billion rubles will reduce subsidies to the capital repair fund; The Health Committee is deprived of 8.5 billion rubles, including the financing of clinics, their repair and prevention of infectious diseases. By 13 billion rubles, spending on overhaul of educational institutions and children's recreation can be reduced; by 6.8 billion - housing and communal services (mainly due to the affordable housing program). At the same time, the city will increase payments to SVO participants and their families by 6.4 billion rubles, Smolny said.

Also, an additional 4.8 billion rubles are planned to be sent to public sector employees and another 1.6 billion rubles. - on drugs for the beneficiaries.

Investments in improvement are reduced by 2.3 billion rubles, follows from the project. Expenditures on the fuel and energy complex - by 2.7 billion rubles, on road repair - by 1.9 billion, on the purchase of automation and software - by 1.2 billion, on environmental protection - by 1.1 billion.

In addition, almost 1 billion rubles. it is planned to cut funding for the examination and repair of protective structures of civil defense, writes “Fontanka”.

...

Also under the “knife” can go appropriations for culture and cinematography — to reduce suggest 4.8 billion rubles. At the same time, subsidies to concert organizations decided to increase by 254 million rubles, and Lenfilm can be issued 298 million to increase the authorized capital.

The authorities of St. Petersburg justify the reduction of expenditures by expensive loans, the efforts of the government and the Central Bank to “planned cooling of the economy” and the need to limit new loans. The budget deficit of the city may decrease from the planned 189 billion to 108.8 billion rubles.

...

Archived

Europe’s decision to intensify its crackdown and detentions of the shadow fleet transporting Russia’s crude is achieving results following a drastic decline in the number of vessels flying false flags and a growing number of sanctioned vessels seeking refuge in the Russian flag registry.

A report by nonprofit think tank Centre for Research on Energy and Clean Air (CREA) shows that due to detentions, the number of shadow vessels flying false flags has declined from a peak of 101 in October last year to 45 by the end of June. In the first half of this year, authorities boarded and detained some 13 tankers in European or UK coastal waters.

Among the shadow fleet vessels detained in European waters is the 2009-built Smyrtos, a crude oil tanker seized by British forces in the English Channel in June for violating Russian sanctions. In May, French troops boarded the Tagor (114,809 dwt) as she was sailing in the Mediterranean.

...

The authors of the report highlight that December last year was the most active month in terms of shadow fleet reflagging. During the month, the Russian registry recorded an influx of 25 vessels. Since then, monthly additions have fallen on a monthly basis from 17 in January to just three in June, an indication that the initial surge of sanctioned vessels seeking refuge under the Russian registry has largely subsided mainly due to a draft presidential decree proposing to cap the age of vessels the registry accepts.

Notably, some 93 of the 107 vessels that joined the Russian registry were already under sanctions. 72 of them had transported Russian fossil fuels worth €7.5 billion ($8.5 billion) globally as of the end of June. After being sanctioned, the 72 vessels changed flags roughly three times more frequently, registering under a new flag every three to four months on average before settling under the Russian flag.

...

Owing to the continuous reflagging of Russia’s shadow fleet, CREA is calling on Europe to develop enforcement frameworks for Russian-flagged vessels and continue and expand its inspections and detentions of the shadow fleet, among other measures.

...

Remove Paywall

[Edit typo.]

Ukraine’s military has used drones to deliver food and medicine to the Russian-occupied town of Oleshky, the governor of Ukraine’s Kherson region said, as officials warn about a worsening humanitarian crisis.

Governor Oleksandr Prokudin said on Sunday that, in the latest operation, heavy-lift drones delivered about four tons of food and medical supplies to 100 locations across the town simultaneously.

Oleshky, a frontline town on the Dnipro River, which separates Russian and Ukrainian forces, has been under Russian occupation since 2022.

Prokudin said that close to 2,000 people, including about 50 children, were being held “hostage”, without food, electricity and water, and accused Moscow’s forces of preventing them from escaping the town.

Ukrainian officials have warned of the situation in Oleshky becoming more dire.

...

Meanwhile, Russia is shooting down food deliveries, confiscating supplies that reach the ground and blocking evacuation.

Russian forces are blocking civilians from evacuating and actively obstructing drone deliveries.

Oleksandr Prokudin, head of the Kherson regional military administration, said troops are shooting down food-carrying drones, confiscating or reselling supplies that reach the ground, and detaining residents found with humanitarian parcels.

Soldiers are conducting house-to-house searches for dropped food, residents report.

...

The UN Human Rights Monitoring Mission in Ukraine has said that residents have endured months of food shortages and “extremely limited” access to basic necessities.

...

The Council of Europe warns civilians face "a high risk of death" with no food, medicine, water or electricity.

...

Archived

cross-posted from: https://scribe.disroot.org/post/11589759

[Original article in Russian. This is a a paraphrased automated translation with minimal edits.]

...

The authorities of the Russian city of St. Petersburg on Monday drafted a new law for amendments to the budget of 2026, proposing to reduce the cost of education, overhaul and bomb shelters and increase the cost of payments to the participants of the war against Ukraine (the "SVO", the so-called "special military operation").

...

According to the Russian Central Bank, the expenditure from the part of the treasury of the city can be reduced by 70.2 billion rubles (up to 1.58 trillion). Officially announced the postponement of funding for tasks “that have no priority”. At the same time, budget revenues this year will grow by 9.8 billion rubles to 1.472 trillion. The biggest cut is waiting for the section “economy” – 36.7 billion rubles.

...

In particular, the public transport system (in addition to the metro), including ground transport and the purchase of rolling stock, will lose 9 billion rubles.

Funding for education will be reduced by 15.5 billion rubles. 0.5 billion rubles will reduce subsidies to the capital repair fund; The Health Committee is deprived of 8.5 billion rubles, including the financing of clinics, their repair and prevention of infectious diseases. By 13 billion rubles, spending on overhaul of educational institutions and children's recreation can be reduced; by 6.8 billion - housing and communal services (mainly due to the affordable housing program). At the same time, the city will increase payments to SVO participants and their families by 6.4 billion rubles, Smolny said.

Also, an additional 4.8 billion rubles are planned to be sent to public sector employees and another 1.6 billion rubles. - on drugs for the beneficiaries.

Investments in improvement are reduced by 2.3 billion rubles, follows from the project. Expenditures on the fuel and energy complex - by 2.7 billion rubles, on road repair - by 1.9 billion, on the purchase of automation and software - by 1.2 billion, on environmental protection - by 1.1 billion.

In addition, almost 1 billion rubles. it is planned to cut funding for the examination and repair of protective structures of civil defense, writes “Fontanka”.

...

Also under the “knife” can go appropriations for culture and cinematography — to reduce suggest 4.8 billion rubles. At the same time, subsidies to concert organizations decided to increase by 254 million rubles, and Lenfilm can be issued 298 million to increase the authorized capital.

The authorities of St. Petersburg justify the reduction of expenditures by expensive loans, the efforts of the government and the Central Bank to “planned cooling of the economy” and the need to limit new loans. The budget deficit of the city may decrease from the planned 189 billion to 108.8 billion rubles.

...

Archived

https://mod.gov.ua/en/news/total-russian-combat-losses-in-ukraine-as-of-september-29-2026

cross-posted from: https://feddit.org/post/36017235

March 2026 I watched a video about bike frames from China, or rather: Chinese OEM (frames). It is in German, but talks about how Chinese biking equipment brands are trying to establish themselves, rather than just producing for others. So, with a like for crafting, making, building and biking, I started the journey of building a bike around a carbon frame from a Chinese OEM.

Disclaimer

• I'm not qualified for any deeper quality insights other than the "look and feel" of things.
• While I learned a few things from maintaining my gravel bike, I'm no professional in working with bikes.
• I did not do any price comparisons ahead of time, but will try to give one at the end. Everything was paid for by myself. This is purely a fun and passion project (including the write up).
• This is about the buying/ordering of things, Part 2 will be the build

The ordering

Unable to get the video out of my head, I did more and more digging. And everything I found seemed so positiv! So much so, that I actually started the buying process of a frame. And a process it was! Where you would expect a price tag on the website and a button for adding a component to the cart, there is an email address. And I don't know if it's like that for all manufacturers, but it was for the two or three I checked. And to me, this seemed super weird! If not for all the positive experiences online, I would have stopped right there.

Start of April I sent a mail regarding a frame I liked, starting a conversation that would end with me buying a frame and a set of wheels. With the time zone difference it was mostly one mail per day, but for the next few days and weeks, all my questions got answered, we figured out what was required, what would be included and how the payment and shipping would work. All in all it was an unusual but very nice online shopping experience and I would feel confident to do it again in the same manners. I think it's always good to make sure you receive a proper invoice at the end and check whether everything you want is on there. It helps if you know something about bikes, but the sellers were always helpful and provided answers where I felt like things were unclear.

The order

I went with the LCR018-D frame from lightcarbon. For the sizing I utilized the usual guides and references. To go with the frame I ordered two bottle cages, their 44mm deep carbon wheels and a bottom bracket.

Everything else was ordered through more "traditional" online shopping: This includes a Shimano 105 groupset and all the tooling mostly, which will get it's own fun chapter.

The package

Shipping took three months or so, due to the frames popularity I was told. Also the handlebars were not in stock anymore, which was communicated nicely - I just went with some wider ones in my case (happy UCI noises), but I could also have gotten some cheaper ones + a refund. I was not in a rush, but definitely something to consider. And to be honest here: I was relieved when the package arrived! There was not a point were things felt sketchy, but it was still a lot of money to me.

Oddly enough, the frames and wheels were shipped separately. As per the seller: To prevent damage to either. This was communicated from the beginning (since you also pay for two packages, not one). When it arrived, all was well protected and without a scratch. Axles, bolts, mounts for bike computers, seatpost - everything included. As well as a torque spec. Never ordered a frame before, but from my unprofessional POV it had everything I wanted.