It’s been reported that in the German elections, a far right party has made ‘significant gains’.

In the UK (at least before the scandals) Reform UK seems to have had a significant boost and has even surpassed the right-wing Conservative Party in some polls/predictions.

Even France, one or two years ago, was threatened with a far-right government due to the French far right party gaining a lot of support.

Now I’m not political, but it feels like in the last few years, the far-right has exceeded itself and had a surge in popularity. Is this the case? And if so, wtf is fuelling it?

I understand the consensus at large is no, but what if they could be used for, say, administrative purposes, or some other task which, though not unimportant, might be considered trivial compared to, say, surgery or assessments?

Just a thought.

Also, in addition to whether such technology should be used, do you believe it to be inevitable in any case?

To be sure, I’m not advocating for or against it, merely curious what other people’s opinions are and why they hold such opinions on this potentially inevitable subject

excluding lemmy and not corporate ad slop

Hey, Ask Lemmy, we all know that people love to talk about themselves, and I'd love to hear about some of your pleasant experiences. So, please, no matter how big; no matter how small, tell me something that you are proud to have made :)

I'm learning traditional Chinese using Taiwan's 華語八千詞 database. That's the 8000 most common Mandarin Chinese characters according to Taiwan's Ministry of Education (教育部)

It helps much to understand the character's etymologies and to that end I'm using this online database. Problem is, I like studying outdoors where no internet is available, hence the downloadable database I'm looking for.

It doesn't have to include explanations in English, just how characters are decomposed and what variations are used (like heart is written in some characters like 忄as in 忻 instead of using the full radical 心)

Or if somebody knows how to download the whole set of images of the webpage I linked maintaining it's structure...

The database I linked is also available as a book (Chinese Characters: A Genealogy and Dictionary, English and Mandarin Chinese Edition) but is so poorly printed characters are sometimes extremely difficult to read.

Yesterday I wanted to watch a show with 2 different subtitles on simultaneously. I looked it up and found a 6 years old thread saying it was possible with VLC4.

I found VLC 4 on their website, presented as something like a rolling beta release.

The interface is far superior to VLC3, with things I usually add manually that are already there.

I don't get why things that have been available for years aren't pushed to the stable version. Are those still unstable? Abandoned?

I didn't have time to test it much.

I (23M, American) feel completely paralyzed from a career perspective because I have no idea what the hell to do. If I choose the wrong degree program, I have to pay back all the debt with nothing to show for it. Even if I get a job, there's no telling how long that will last. Everything keeps changing so fucking fast and it seems like any field I could go to college for could cease to be viable by the time I finish. On top of that, I have chronic health conditions to worry about that limit what I can even do.

(Edit: Basically I have POTS and a neck injury, so it’s hard to do physical labor and I suffer from dizziness, brain fog, and fatigue from being up for an hour or so. I don’t know my exact limits yet, since the severity of my condition varies by day and there appear to be ways to partially recover from the fatigue without having to lay down.)

I think stuff like urban planning and designing walkable environments would be cool, but I'm not sure if that's a viable path in 2027 and beyond. I also used to be interested in programming, but ever since AI and mass layoffs hit the scene, I've become disillusioned and stopped pursuing that path.

I used to feel like the world was stable and I could pick a career based on my passion and be fine. But ever since 2020, everything has felt increasingly more uncertain. The world seems to be losing its collective shit and that doesn't appear to be changing anytime soon.

Is staking your sense of stability on your career the wrong way to think about this? Should I be trying to find close friends or some kind of supportive community that could act as a safety net? Or is everyone too hyperindividualist to look out for each other?

First off: I know now is a terrible time to house search with interest rates, home prices and rents through the roof. No arguments there.

My wife works remotely for a nonprofit out of DC. On a recent trip to work in office, she has expressed interest in moving closer to better support her team. We've just started exploring options within the Washington metropolitan area, that'd be a reasonable commute, preferable by public transit.

If you have knowledge of this area with suggestions for where we should consider, and/or any dos and dont's please let me know.

Thanks very much!

Yes, I know, it's the plural form of Sun, but the word Sun likely predates our understanding that stars and our Sun are the same thing.

I get "stars", but where did "suns" come from?

Apologies for any weird formatting. I'm a lurker with no idea how to post. For context, I live in the USA, asscrack of the planet.

I had a surgical extraction of a broken tooth at an oral surgeon in a town about an hour away from me. It was a little bit brutal, so I was told to load up on the prescribed ibuprofen/acetominophen and start antibiotics that evening after surgery. After the hour drive home, I went to the pharmacy that I had listed in my paperwork. They had no scripts for me since last year. I called the surgeon's office. The woman on the phone said she saw them in her system, had an hour left in her shift, and would call me if she saw them sent out. I told her not to worry, that the pharmacy would contact me as soon as they received it. I assumed there was no way they'd leave a patient without post-op meds. Well, I was wrong.

They never sent my prescriptions before closing up for the weekend.

The office doesn't have an emergency number of any kind. Voicemails or text messages can be left for them to check on Monday. What in the world do I do or even say to these incompetent assholes?

I'm managing my pain with my own medication, but it's expensive, and they sure as hell aren't antibiotics. I'm broke, if that helps.

It was once an idea that if you got into retail sales, you could work your way to rasises, bonuses, and promotions that would make you a considerable amount of money, as well as being able to stay a while at the job. Now? The pay sucks, the work is nowhere carries no glamour or bonuses, and anybody who can last more than a year or two is in danger of being laid off.

Are there any other jobs that went in that route? What are your experiences?

I just got a new electric oven and range. It's a slide-in. The oven makes a nasty chemical smell when I run it. The instructions say that's normal and it should take around thirty minutes if running for it to stop.

I've run it for around eight or nine hours and it's still making a stink.

Those of you who have gotten new electric ovens: how long until it stopped producing an odour?

My Tecno Spark 10 Pro (MediaTek Helio G88, Android 12) bootlooped after a banking app froze. Now it boots straight into stock recovery with the message that Android cannot be loaded and data may be corrupt. The bootloader is unlocked. I hooked it up to an Android tablet via OTG with Bugjaeger. The device uses A/B partitioning and was running on slot b. I switched it to slot a via fastboot, but slot a gives the exact same recovery loop, so the issue is clearly a corrupted userdata partition failing to mount during early init. All I need is my local KeePass database file from internal storage. I know modern Android uses File-Based Encryption with keys sealed in the TEE, but since my bootloader is unlocked, is there any known way via fastboot, MTK tools, or custom boot images to extract or decrypt that single file before I wipe the device? Or is it completely unrecoverable once the filesystem fails to mount?

So, I've been trying to drum up activity over in c/RWBY (mostly by posting art) and someone suggested cross-posting to relevant communities, which I've been doing, only now I'm starting to second-guess the way I've been doing it.

Should I be cross-posting right away, or waiting some amount of time before doing so? And how long should that wait be, if I should wait?

With how society has reacted to the meta glasses, it has me wondering about optical implants. They're going to be here eventually, and presumably will have cameras in them out of necessity. I'm sure there will be a whole thing about getting ones that aren't back doored by a corp, but we are also talking about curing blindness. This isn't something everyone will skip on due to a fear of surveillance, simply because blindness can be so difficult to live with.

Are we careening towards a deus ex scenario where the majority of humanity villifies and ostracizes anyone with augments? I always expected that to a certain degree, religious folks especially being what they are, but the reaction to smart glasses has me concerned that the discrimination against people with optical implants might be way more extreme than I expected, from groups of people I would have previously considered level headed when it comes to technological advancements.

Anyway, I was just curious to hear from others what their thoughts might be on the subject. Do those of you that despise smart glasses think you'll have the same moral issues with optical implants? What could be done to avoid the issues you have with the glasses when it comes to implants, if anything? Do you intend to discriminate against people with augments if you live long enough to see them in widespread use?

Google tells me that: "HireRight reports social media comments to employers only if the prospective employer explicitly requests and pays for a social media background screening package as part of their pre-employment check"

Anyone in recruiting in the US ever seen candidates not hired because of their social media posts being too pro human rights?

For me it's Whatsapp. Like 99% of people i know use it so yeh.. i still need it. I am considering moving the Whatsapp Gdrive backup to a local backup btw.

Google photos is also a major problem for us. We have a lot of stuff that want to migrate to different service (or store locally).

Including your age is appreciated but not required

I am currently reading this book about the five large carnivores of Scandinavia and I am absolutely humbled, both by finding out how little I knew about them, what prejudice I had against them and how people that live in close proximity to them can both love, respect and be angry with them at the same time. I am reading the original release in Swedish.

• What have you encountered in the wild?
• When, where, how?
• What were your initial thoughts, feelings and reactions (physical, psychological, etc.)?
• What do think of them in general? <--- this last question applies to everybody, regardless of whether you have seen or met one of these large carnivores or not.

Personally, without having met any one of them, I am humbled, scared, amazed and intrigued by them. I feel for those whose - for instance - livestock are threatened by them, especially if it directly damages business. I also strongly believe that the matter should not be dumbed down to the dichotmy of "ignore those that suffer from them" or "eradicate them". We are far too intelligent and developed a race to degrade ourselves so.

I have LineageOS on my phone and noticed the media player has the wavy progress bar on it. Not only that, a lot of music players also have it and lowkey I personally don't like them. I find it hard to position where I actually want to be in the song and I just don't like the constant movement. I rather a normal progress bar but that just a personal choose.

For me:

• Slipknot - The Nameless
• Josh a & iamjakehill - Cycles
• +44 - Baby Come On
• Shinedown - Call me
• Anderson .Paak - Jet Black