"If Ukraine is forced to surrender its sovereign territory to Russia, it will be the greatest betrayal of a European ally since Poland in 1945." - Ed Davey.

"Why is US politics so unreasonsable?" 🇺🇸 and 🇨🇭 once fancied themselves "sister republics", sharing similar institutions & founding spirits. However, at the beginning of the 20th century, the two countries reformed their electoral systems in markedly different ways. My analysis of this divergence is now available in English in my knowledge garden. Reasonable feedback is always welcome! There you go: 👇 https://logikunsererzeit.ch/en/USA/us-unreason

Hm, I just remembered Threads exists 🤔 The end.

My pupils' notes reflecting what I said in my programming intro 😅 "Important: Always think as stupidly as a computer."

...the audacity... 😲 "...the website loads in a special browser built into the app, rather than your phone’s default browser. In 2022, privacy researcher Felix Krause found that Meta injects special “keylogging” JavaScript onto the website you’re visiting that allows the company to monitor everything you type and tap on, including passwords. Other apps including TikTok do the same thing..."

Gizmodo

Meet ‘Link History,’ Facebook’s New Way to Track the Websites You Visit

Facebook introduces a confusing new setting as the walls close in on Zuckerberg’s data machine.

"Meta and TikTok confirmed that the code exists but said they don’t use it to snoop." https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2022/09/13/facebook-instagram-data-privacy/

Oh wow, Snort/Iris have gotten really smooth. I left for Primal a few months ago, but this is nice! 😊

Blender is 30 today! 😊 This video gave me watery eyes... It's come soooo incredibly far! I was only 15 when I went to Amsterdam to the Blender conference 2003, knowing nothing about CS, coding... Now I'm almost 37, contributed money and even some code, and Blender looks healthier by the day! Open-source collaboration and the tools that facilitate it are, IMHO, really among the pinnacles of human achievement. It's profoundly awesome.

"The West" is making an energetic comeback as the foremost signifier of stupidity in political commentary. 😣

Found the perfect ending for my block on binary and hex codes: The plates carried by the space probes Pioneer and Voyager! They use a fundamental measurement of hydrogen amounting to 0.7 nanoseconds and binary code to try to communicate with aliens. Here's an example: If you jot down the binary number around the disc, it's 100110000110010000000000000000000. In decimal numbers, that's 5'113'380'864. If you multiply that with the fundamental measurement of hydrogen (0.7 nanoseconds), you get ~3.6 seconds, which is how long one rotation of the disc should take to hear the sounds properly. Besides this, it was apparently also upon Carl Sagan's initiative, to turn Voyager 1 around and shoot that picture where earth is just a "pale blue dot".... His take is very moving 🥹

Why so few gun deaths in Switzerland compared to the US - when we also have many privately-owned guns? Johnny Harris did a video on it. And he nailed it.

This is how Twitter seems to be breaking up for me: - Bluesky is where my journo friends & academics go - Mastodon is where my IT tech guys go (have gone a while ago) - And Nostr is the most exciting tech of them all, I think, but, sadly, nobody interesting is there but crypto fans... 🤷

Why are people not flocking to Nostr? Is it that the signup procedure is too techy? Content too shitty? 🤔 It seems journos in Switzerland are more drawn to Bluesky.

There's a group of men who, upon hearing I studied international politics & wars, feel instantly compelled to tell me how the world works according to their gut... 🤷

If, like me, you're confident with programming but you don't know much about elegant software architecture, there's a great book we use at university called "Software Design by example" by Greg Wilson. I've not had so much fun coding in a long time 😊 Also: You can access it for free! 🤯 third-bit.com/sdxpy/

What do you guys think of this combo? Any nays? All ayes? 😅

"If former President Trump were convicted in a court of law, would you still support him as your party's choice? Please raise your hand if you would." Fuck me, they outright say it: Yes I'd support a felon for President who got caught trying to overturn an election. 🤯

Viktor Frankl, an Austrian psychiatrist and Holocaust survivor, is best known for his psychological approach that emphasizes meaning in one's life as the primary driving force for human beings (as opposed to power or pleasure or sex). Frankl's work, including his seminal book "Man's Search for Meaning", underlines the idea that purpose and personal responsibility can help individuals overcome suffering and achieve fulfillment.