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Noun

1. (chiefly Northern England, Scotland) A sniff.
2. (figurative)
   • (chiefly Northern England, Scotland) A strong or severe wind.
   • (originally and chiefly US) A small, wide, pear-shaped glass used for drinking aromatic liquors such as bourbon and brandy.
   • (originally US, informal) Synonym of "nip" (a small amount of an alcoholic beverage, especially one equivalent to what a snifter might hold).
   • (US, slang) Synonym of "cocaine addict"; a sniffer.
   • (US, slang) A small amount of cocaine taken by inhaling through the nose.
   • (US, slang) A handheld device used to detect signals from radio transmitters; a sniffer.

Verb

1. (intransitive) To sniff; also, to snivel or snuffle.
2. (transitive, archaic, rare) Followed by "out": to speak (words) in a nasal, snuffling manner.

https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Wiktionary:Word_of_the_day/2024/November_27

I was hoping to grab a wider set of wheels to use on my Cannondale Synapse and use it as a gravel bike. Has anyone tried this? I have 28s on there now.

A machine learning librarian at Hugging Face just released a dataset composed of one million Bluesky posts, complete with when they were posted and who posted them, intended for machine learning research.

Daniel van Strien posted about the dataset on Bluesky on Tuesday:

“This dataset contains 1 million public posts collected from Bluesky Social's firehose API, intended for machine learning research and experimentation with social media data,” the dataset description says. “Each post contains text content, metadata, and information about media attachments and reply relationships.”

The data isn’t anonymous. In the dataset, each post is listed alongside the users’ decentralized identifier, or DID; van Strien also made a search tool for finding users based on their DID and published it on Hugging Face. A quick skim through the first few hundred of the million posts shows people doing normal types of Bluesky posting—arguing about politics, talking about concerts, saying stuff like “The cat is gay” and “When’s the last time yall had Boston baked beans?”—but the dataset has also swept up a lot of adult content, too.

Our 2024111700 release overhauled the way sandboxed Google Play runs background services. Our GmsCompat app runs a foreground service and used to keep a connection open to Play services and Play Store. It now creates the connection on-demand when they need a foreground service.

Toggling off background data usage for Play services and Play Store will now stop their background services being able to use data. That now blocks it from using mobile data when it's not running a foreground service since another foreground service isn't always using it anymore.

Some users previously blocked background data usage for them and now they don't have FCM and other features working anymore.

Similarly, some users never granted it Unrestricted battery usage which was required for FCM to work reliably but is now even more required than before.

Apps can be set to one of 3 different battery modes: Restricted, Optimized (Default) and Unrestricted. Optimized heavily restricts the app running in the background based on how much it's used. Restricted nearly fully prevents apps running in the background on their own.

Android 14 QPR2 changed this from a menu with the 3 options to a toggle for Restricted being on or off. The text next to the toggle is a button to open an inner menu with Optimized vs. Unrestricted. Users find this confusing and we're considering changing it back to how it was.

Our sandboxed Google Play compatibility layer makes a notification requesting Unrestricted battery usage for Play services with a permission request dialog. The issue is that if users miss this or dismiss it, it's trickier than before to find the setting to enable it manually.

We also show this as a detected issue in Settings > Apps > Sandboxed Google Play in the suggestions in shows. The issue is that some users may want the background usage heavily restricted for sandboxed Play services. We don't want to nag people who actually want it very limited.

Our compatibility layer already shows a notification about this until users either grant Unrestricted battery mode for sandboxed Play services or press "Don't show again" to dismiss the notification permanently. It will show again if it's only dismissed without pressing that.

It seems this isn't quite enough because we see a steady stream of people not granting Unrestricted battery mode and not realizing it's why their push notifications are delayed. It's valid to not grant it to it. It runs fine without it granted but it means push, etc. won't work.

Find out what McLaren must do to win its first F1 constructors' championship since 1998 in this weekend's Qatar Grand Prix.

Russia launched its largest drone strike on Ukraine overnight with 188 drones, Ukraine's air force said Tuesday.

Archived link

Information manipulation tends to have specific aims in the here and now: to shift a policy, to confuse voters, to create instability in a society seen as hostile. But sometimes, these aims are best achieved by projecting manipulation into the past. The symbolic dates of 3 October and 9 November are good recent examples.

3 October, a public holiday in Germany, marks the day in 1990 when the Federal Republic of Germany and the German Democratic Republic were reunited in a single state. German unification had been made possible by the fall of the Berlin Wall on 9 November 1989.

But 9 November also marks another occasion, as the pro-Kremlin disinformation outlet RT Deutsch gleefully pointed out last year(opens in a new tab) – the first large-scale anti-Jewish pogrom in Nazi Germany in 1938, known as Reichspogromnacht or Kristallnacht (the Night of Broken Glass).

[...]

[The] RT German pieces question the meaning of 9 November and how German unification is being commemorated in contemporary politics in Germany. They shed doubt on the historical accuracy of the parallels being drawn between distinct events in an effort to address current issues related to anti-Semitism, violence, immigration, and the European position towards Russia.

While not immediately apparent as disinformation, the cumulative effect of such assertions is clear enough: a wholesale rewriting of recent history, at the service of contemporary agendas.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/22940159

Bernie Sanders caused a stir last week, when the independent senator from Vermont and two-time contender for the Democratic presidential nomination sent a post-election email to his progressive supporters across the country. In it, he argued that the Democrats suffered politically in 2024 at least in part because they ran a campaign that focused on “protecting the status quo and tinkering around the edges.”

In contrast, said Sanders, “Trump and the Republicans campaigned on change and on smashing the existing order.” Yes, he explained, “the ‘change’ that Republicans will bring about will make a bad situation worse, and a society of gross inequality even more unequal, more unjust and more bigoted.”

Despite that the reality of the threat they posed, Trump and the Republicans still won a narrow popular-vote victory for the presidency, along with control of the US House. That result has inspired an intense debate over the future direction not just of the Democratic Party but of the country. And the senator from Vermont is in the thick of it.

In his email, Sanders, a member of the Senate Democratic Caucus who campaigned in states across the country this fall for Vice President Kamala Harris and the Democratic ticket, asked a blunt question: “Will the Democratic leadership learn the lessons of their defeat and create a party that stands with the working class and is prepared to take on the enormously powerful special interests that dominate our economy, our media and our political life?”

His answer: “Highly unlikely. They are much too wedded to the billionaires and corporate interests that fund their campaigns.”

via https://fosstodon.org/@gagliardi_vale/113555734570831505

It is predominantly easy to just accept bad conditions when an alternative is seemingly unfeasible. "I need this software", a lot of us will say when even presented with a better alternative. A lot of us will argue to our bones that being subject to cruelty from software developers is necessary for one potential gain or another. All of which creates a feedback loop of re-enforcement of this parasitic idea that proprietary software is somehow inescapable and we need to give up trying to do something about it. But we shouldn't give up and we should fight. Not just to switch from Windows to GNU / Linux, but to make it so Windows itself will start respecting you too.

...

With software a lot of people lose freedom all the time. Windows is so predominately used that I don't understand why people don't get crazy over this. Yet banning Windows would be a problem, arguably a worse problem, than all those people using it. You should have the right to use software that you want to use, the same way as you should have the right to agree with that drug-lord. The fact that people have the choice to use something like Windows is not a problem. The problem is that Windows is not respecting the person back. There are two ways to solve this problem. One would be to chose something else. Another would be to make Windows better.

If you think that it is impossible to push on corporations with enough force, so they would yield, and start respecting freedom of people, you don't know nothing. Progress in this area has been done numerous times. Netscape Navigator, a popular 90s web-browser, became Free Software, and now it is known as Firefox. Linux, the kernel so associated with Free Software, was at some point proprietary. Blender was proprietary before 2002. Unreal Engine started releasing their sources to people. Not under a very freedom respecting license, but it is a start. And it is way better than having nothing at all. Hell Microsoft, of all companies, started developing Free Software. Visual Studio Code, their text editor from Microsoft is mostly Free Software. Hell "Meta" the Facebook company jumped onto the Mastadon bandwagon with their Threads. Not a very good thing. But them embracing Freedom is progress. And there are more examples of this, which I hope you would provide by using the comment section, that I worked so hard to make, in the bottom of this article.

We did all this by not yielding. Most web-servers are running on Free Software because configuring proprietary software is a nightmare. Proprietary software is basically incompatible with configurability. And configurability is a key to development. Hell, most software development happens on GNU / Linux for that same reason. So much so that Microsoft reacted and put what they call "Windows Subsystem for Linux" on their system, to get some developers away from GNU / Linux. But they are doing bad job themselves. They are constantly worsening the conditions on their systems so much so that people fly out of there as soon as they know how.

Enshitification cannot happen forever. At some point people just can't take this no longer. They would not use computers at all if that came to it. But it doesn't need to come to it. There is software available right now to switch to. Software protected from enshitification by respecting freedom. But no... "I have to use it!", right?

Computers are interesting beasts. They are designed to run anything. Any computation can be done. Any digital information can be processed in any way what so ever. All you need to do is to tell the computer how to do it. And it will!

There was a time where almost nothing was possible with Free Software. It was many decades ago. And what people did about it? Did they yield to the corporations? Well some did, yes. But a lot of us stood up and said "Enough!". And we developed one tool after another. First a text editor. Then a compiler. Then a whole operating system. Why? Because we wanted those same features as in proprietary software, but without the terrible terms. Without the disrespect. Without the slavery. And it was not impossible.

Those corporations did not like it. They still don't like it. But they have no choice. We can always tell the computer to do something ourselves. And the only way they can stop us from having this freedom is if we yield to them.

The more people using Free Software, the less they can control us. The less they will have a choice. More people using Free Software is more pressure on those corporations to release their software as Free Software. They can. And they will. If people will not yield under any circumstances to their dubious demands, they will remove the demands. If people will not blindly use a program that they don't like, that disrespects them constantly, the program will have no other choice, but to stop disrespecting.

But more than that. The more people respect themselves, the more people use Free Software, the more feedback loop, more re-enforcement Freedom itself has. And in a few decades, after the war for Freedom is over, those trying to argue for proprietary software will be met with "I need to use it" as a counter argument. Which this time I will support.

Happy Hacking!!!

Google is preparing some new features for Android’s desktop windowing mode, including a button to minimize apps.

The Swedish battery maker filed for bankruptcy last week, dashing ambitions for the European electric vehicles sector – and leaving significant EU loans outstanding

It’s too late to count for Spotify Wrapped.

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As chaos erupts in London after a spiked shipment of cocaine kills hundreds, fan-favourite characters collide with new faces bound by blood ties, sparking brutal power struggles, unexpected alliances, and fierce rivalries.

Former undercover cop turned gangster Elliot navigates his new role as a top-level criminal alongside the Dumanis, but the spiking throws their operations into disarray. The Wallaces, Luan, Lale, and the street gangs face devastating consequences as personal vendettas collide with professional power struggles bleeding into violent turf wars.

In the ruthless fight for control of London’s criminal underworld, no one is safe. This was no accident — it was a calculated attack. But who’s pulling the strings?

Gangs of London 3 will be available on Sky and NOW in 2025.