DdCno1

This isn’t IS though.

This is built from scratch. There is no reason to use an antique cannon barrel for this - and it’s not like those are lying around in Syria, whereas material and equipment to manufacture this is far easier to come by.

I believe this is one of the famous Omar cannons:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Improvised_artillery_in_the_Syrian_civil_war#Omar_cannon

Easily one of the most sophisticated Syrian hell cannons. It’s breach-loading, it has a recoil damper and it’s mounted on a strong enough truck chassis. They are even seemingly hitting what they are actually intending to hit, which is far from guaranteed with these kinds of improvised artillery pieces.

I’ve watched that beheading and worse things. I wish I hadn’t. Imagine having the audacity of calling Hamas saints by comparison. What a despicable and inane thing to do.

Like the other user said, the anti-apartheid movement in South Africa only became successful after it abandoned violent resistance - and citing Haiti as an aspirational example is downright hysterical.

There’s also a massive difference between demanding outright perfection and not applauding people who behead Asian guest workers (who, as I’m sure you are aware, but equally willing to ignore, are not “evil Zionist colonizers”) with a rusty gardening hoe while live-streaming the torture-murder on the Internet. Coincidentally, you seem to have no trouble with demanding outright perfection from the IDF, who, by the way, has a roughly similar soldier kill rate in this conflict according to most estimates - but I bet you are not willing to applaud them for that.

As for what Gaza actually was, here’s what this supposed “concentration camp” looked like before the war:

https://youtu.be/W1r1z3x53ZU

At some point you might learn that simplistic, childish concepts of pure good and evil rarely apply in this world. Yes, the Allies were the good guys in WW2. Being the good guy doesn’t mean you’re perfect, because absolutely nothing is.

The fact that a large number of people in the West are denying this and portraying Hamas as freedom fighters is very worrying.

There’s a new application-layer Internet protocol like (but also very much unlike) http by the name of Gemini. It was first launched in 2019 and until yesterday, flew completely under my radar. It’s primarily meant to be used for uncluttered text-only pages (although any type of file can be distributed), which are created using a deliberately simple and limited markdown language. Unsurprisingly, this results in a plethora of small niche blogs being published through it.

The basic user experience is essentially the same as browsing the web, until you notice just how much it isn’t. You enter URLs (except that they start with gemini://) you read texts and you click on hyperlinks - except that every page looks exactly the same due to the markdown language. There are no pop-ups, no ads, nothing autoplays, nothing wants your consent to exploit your user data. Even images only load when the user clicks on them. It shows just how little is actually needed, how many aspects of the modern web are completely unnecessary and mere pointless distractions.

Gemini pages - and this is a small hurdle that will keep most people away from it - can not be accessed with a normal web browser and instead require a specialized client for viewing (although paradoxically, creating pages often requires a web browser, at least for now). The idea is that both the underlying tech and the browsers are much more straightforward than anything related to http and html. A Gemini client is not effectively an entire operating system of its own that can execute near arbitrary code. It displays formatted text with basic images and videos - that’s it.

Here’s a neat, but slightly outdated introduction that also recommends a few clients and where to find pages to read:

https://geminiquickst.art/

The entire thing feels very early, tiny, experimental and odd, almost like a parallel reality, as if the World Wide Web didn’t exist and someone came up with something like it only now, using today’s hard- and software. If Lemmy is a response to social media in general and reddit in particular, Gemini feels more like a response to the World Wide Web as a whole or like a time machine back to a highly idealized version of the early days of the information system (the primary difference being the lack of horrendous '90s UX design and malware everywhere), including some unfortunate aspects that I had long forgotten about, like how the common method of finding content next to feeds - manually updated indexes instead of search engines - is plagued by dead links; and these dead links, unlike on the normal Internet, cannot be attempted to be resolved using the Wayback Machine or some other cache, at least not yet.

Gemini is equally parts exciting and promising, like a new frontier, but also at times confusing and frustrating. Don’t expect your Gemini client of choice to replace your web browser any time soon (or ever), but it’s still worth trying out, if for the novelty alone.

They released a few statements about being upset about people sending demanding/rude messages to them. They also complained about the cost of hosting (there are no ads on the page). Originally, they wanted to only open for people who are donating, but they appear to have backtracked on that, at least for now.

It’s a common issue on the Internet. The moment you’re doing anything, especially for free, you are basically inviting vitriol.

Xi might be the smartest guy in China

He’s just another mediocre autocrat. Chinese history is filled with idiots like him. Most don’t die in their sleep.