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Wednesday Reads
Good Day!!
I spent the last 3 days reading books and relaxing, and mostly avoiding watching or reading news social media. My RA pain had been pretty bad lately, and it has definitely improved as a result. I’ll have to see what happens after I engage with the news for this post, but at the moment I plan to go back on a news diet when I finish. I definitely think my health is improved by avoiding news about Trump.
Here’s what’s happening this morning:
Cable news Legend Ted Turner has died.
The New York Times (gift article): Ted Turner, Creator of CNN and the 24-Hour News Cycle, Dies at 87.
The rest of the article is fascinating–dealing with Turner’s personal life, political beliefs and more. I’ve included a gift link in case you want to read more.Ted Turner, the media mogul who cut a brash and vivid figure on the American scene of the late 20th century by dominating the cable television industry, creating the 24-hour news cycle with CNN, and extending his restless reach into professional sports, environmentalism and philanthropy, died on Wednesday at his home near Tallahassee, Fla. He was 87.
Phillip Evans, a spokesman for the family, confirmed the death. Mr. Turner announced in 2018 that he had Lewy body dementia, a progressive brain disorder.
Ted Turner
Mr. Turner’s signature creation was CNN — the Cable News Network — which revolutionized television news in 1980 by presenting it all hours of the day and eventually inspiring other media operations to follow suit. But his portfolio of business ventures bulged with much more, and their impact on American culture was considerable.
As a spinoff of CNN, Mr. Turner created the channel CNN Headline News and CNN International. He founded the cable and satellite sports and entertainment “superstation” that became known as TBS and spawned a sister channel, TNT, both of which continue to reach millions of homes.
In 1985, he bought for $1.5 billion the MGM studio’s library of films and nine years later created the cable franchise Turner Classic Movies, or TCM. He made a similar purchase of Hanna-Barbera cartoons and, relying on them, created the Cartoon Network in 1992. And in 1996, he merged his conglomerate, Turner Broadcasting System, with Time Warner to create one of the world’s largest media companies.
Along the way, he found the time and energy to captain the winning yacht in the America’s Cup race in 1977 and to take an active role as owner of the Atlanta Braves, giving the team extended national exposure on Turner-owned television.
“I’m trying to set the all-time record for achievement by one person in one lifetime,” he told the journalist Dale Van Atta in a Reader’s Digest article in 1998. “And that puts you in pretty big company: Alexander the Great, Napoleon, Gandhi, Christ, Mohammed, Buddha, Washington, Roosevelt, Churchill.”
Not even his staunchest admirers placed Mr. Turner on that high a pedestal. But even a bitter rival like the media magnate Rupert Murdoch — who once had his New York Post run the headline “Is Turner Insane?” — had to concede that he was one of the most influential figures in the history of mass media.
An Atlanta-based entrepreneur, Mr. Turner took astounding risks in business, often teetering on the edge of bankruptcy and then roaring back to multiply his fortune.
Against the advice of colleagues and the conventional wisdom of his industry peers, he poured millions of dollars into pioneering ventures that combined cable and satellite broadcasts. He warred against the big television networks. He almost lost his shirt in Hollywood but emerged from these gambles and brawls as a billionaire astride a vast cable empire of news, sports and entertainment channels.
Of course the big story is still Trump’s war with Iran. It’s difficult to know what to believe about what’s going on, since Trump and Hegseth lie constantly.
CNN reports the Trump/Hegseth line: US and Iran closing in on memorandum aimed at ending war, source says.
The United States and Iran are moving closer to an agreement on a short memorandum to end the Iran war, a regional source familiar with the negotiations said, although Trump administration officials cautioned that talks had previously fallen apart at the last minute.
The White House received positive feedback from Pakistani mediators on Tuesday that the Iranians were progressing toward a compromise, two administration officials told CNN while offering some skepticism about Pakistan’s optimism.
From CentCom: Project Freedom at Strait of Hormuz
But a renewed diplomatic push has emerged in recent days, the regional source said. President Donald Trump appears to be simplifying issues in peace negotiations so moderates in the Iranian regime can come back to the negotiating table, the source added, with the aim being to tackle thornier issues later.
A one-page plan being floated internally contains provisions that have been at the heart of negotiations to end the conflict, a person familiar with the plan told CNN. The document would declare an end to the war while triggering a 30-day negotiation period on resolving sticking points, including on nuclear issues, unfreezing Iranian assets and future security in the Strait of Hormuz, the person said.
Precise details of the plan couldn’t immediately be verified, but the source familiar said it would include discussion of a moratorium on uranium enrichment for a period of longer than 10 years. A previous US proposal had set it at 20 years.
The plan also requires Iran to ship its stockpile of highly enriched uranium out of the country, but details were still being negotiated.
News of positive movement from the Pakistanis helped spur Trump on Tuesday to announce a pause of “Project Freedom” – an operation to guide stranded ships out of the strait – citing progress in negotiations with Iran, the administration officials said. The pause came after Secretary of State Marco Rubio told reporters that Operation Epic Fury had ended and that the administration’s full focus was on Project Freedom.
The regional source told CNN that the harder the US pushed its agenda of Project Freedom and Operation Epic Fury, the more the hardliners in Iran stood up and had a bigger voice.
The Guardian reports on Iran’s reaction: Middle East crisis live: US proposal to end war a ‘wishlist, not a reality’, warns Iranian official.
‘American wishlist, not a reality’: Iranian officials cast doubt on US proposal to end war.
Ebrahim Rezaei, the spokesperson of the Iranian parliament’s national security and foreign policy commission, has poured cold water on the Axios report claiming the US and Iran were nearing a one-page memorandum to end the war, saying it was an “American wishlist [and] not a reality”.
Ebrahim Rezaei
In a fiery statement on X, he said: “Americans will not gain in a lost war what they failed to achieve in face-to-face negotiations. Iran has its finger on the trigger and is ready; if they do not surrender and grant the necessary concessions, or if they or their lapdogs attempt any mischief, we will respond with a harsh and regrettable response.
Iran’s foreign ministry spokesperson, Esmail Baghaei, also responded to the Axios report, telling the Iranian Isna news agency that the US proposal is still being reviewed by Tehran.
“Once Iran concludes its assessment, it will convey its views to the Pakistani side,” Isna reported, adding that the US demands detailed in the Axios report “included excessive and unrealistic demands that have been strongly rejected by Iranian officials in recent days”.
Isna reported that the Iranian negotiating team is solely reviewing the “termination of the war” and the nuclear issue is not currently being discussed.
That doesn’t sound like an agreement is coming soon. And Trump is issuing threats.
AP: US and Iran appear to move closer to ending their war as Trump threatens more bombing.
The United States and Iran appeared to be moving closer Wednesday to an initial agreement to end the war, as U.S. President Trump sought to pressure Tehran with threats of a new wave of bombing if a deal is not reached.
Trump posted on social media that the two-month war could soon end and that oil and natural gas shipments disrupted by the conflict could restart. But he said that depends on Iran accepting a reported agreement that the president did not detail.
“If they don’t agree, the bombing starts,” Trump wrote.
Trump made his latest comments after he suspended a short-lived U.S. effort to force open a safe passage for commercial ships through the Strait of Hormuz, a vital waterway through which major oil and gas supplies, fertilizer and other petroleum products passed before the war.
Iran’s effective closure of the strait has sent fuel prices skyrocketing, rattled the global economy and put enormous economic pressure on countries, including major powers such as China.
China’s foreign minister called for a comprehensive ceasefire Wednesday after meeting in Beijing with Iran’s top envoy. Wang Yi said his country was “deeply distressed” by the conflict, which began Feb. 28 when the U.S. and Israel launched strikes against Iran.
China’s close economic and political ties to Tehran give it a unique position of influence. The Trump administration is pressing China to use that relationship to urge the Islamic Republic to open the strait.
Meanwhile it appears that the Trump administration has been trying to conceal how much damage Iran has done to U.S. bases in the Middle East region.
The Washington Post (gift article): Iran has hit far more U.S. military assets than reported, satellite images show.
Iranian airstrikes have damaged or destroyed at least 228 structures or pieces of equipment atU.S. military sites across the Middle East since the war began, hitting hangars, barracks,fuel depots, aircraft and key radar, communications and air defense equipment, according to a Washington Post analysis of satellite imagery. The amount of destruction is far larger than what has been publicly acknowledged by the U.S. government or previously reported.
The threat of air attacks rendered some of the U.S. bases in the region too dangerous to staff at normal levels, and commanders moved most of the personnel from these sites out of the range of Iranian fire at the start of the war, officials have said.
Since the start of the war on Feb. 28, seven service members have died in strikes on U.S. facilities in the region — six in Kuwait and one in Saudi Arabia — and more than 400 troops have suffered injuries as of late April, the U.S. military said. While most of the wounded returned to duty within days, at least 12 suffered injuries that military officials classified as serious, according to U.S. officials who, among others, spoke on the condition of anonymity due to the sensitivity of the issue.
Satellite imagery of the Middle East is unusually difficult to acquire at present. Two of the largest commercial providers, Vantor and Planet, have complied with requests from the U.S. government — their biggest customer — to limit, delay or indefinitely withhold the publication of imagery of the region while the war is ongoing, making it difficult or impossible to assess Iran’s counterstrikes. Those restrictions began less than two weeks into the war.
Iranian state-affiliated news agencies, however, have from the start regularly published high-resolution satellite imagery on their social media accounts that claimed to document damage to U.S. sites.
Images of damage to Camp Buehring in Kuwait, released and annotated by Iranian state-affiliated media. Washington Post illustration.
For this examination — one of the first comprehensive public accounts of the damage to U.S. facilities in the region — The Post reviewed more than 100 high-resolution Iranian-released satellite images. The Post verified the authenticity of 109 of the those images by comparing them with lower-resolution imagery from the European Union’s satellite system, Copernicus, as well as high-resolution images from Planet where available. The Post excluded 19 Iranian images from the damage analysis because comparisons with the Copernicus imagery were inconclusive. No Iranian imagery was found to have been manipulated.
In a separate search of Planet imagery, Post reporters found 10 damaged or destroyed structures that were not documented in the imagery released by Iran. In all, The Post found 217 structures and 11 pieces of equipment that were damaged or destroyed at 15 U.S. military sites in the region.
Experts who reviewed The Post’s analysis said the damage at the sites suggested that the U.S. military had underestimated Iran’s targeting abilities, not adapted sufficiently to modern drone warfare and left some bases under-protected.
“The Iranian attacks were precise. There are no random craters indicating misses,” said Mark Cancian, a senior adviser with the Center for Strategic and International Studies and a retired Marine Corps colonel, who reviewed the Iranian images at The Post’s request. The Post previously revealed how Russia provided Iran with intelligence to target U.S. forces.
Read the rest and view more images using the gift link above. I wonder what it will take to repair the damage?
Here’s a bit of hopeful news from The Washington Post: Poll finds broad rejection of religion-related messages from Trump, Hegseth.
Americans are deeply uncomfortable with recent religion-related statements by President Donald Trump and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth — a striking rebuke in a closely divided country, according to a Washington Post-ABC News-Ipsos poll.
The poll finds positive ratings for Pope Leo XIV, who has criticized U.S. actions on immigration andin Iran, drawing criticism from Trump that the president repeated on Tuesday.
Eighty-seven percent of Americans have a negative view of Trump’s social media post appearing to depict himself as Jesus, according to the poll. Sixty-nine percent dislikeHegseth praying at the Pentagon for “overwhelming violence of action against those who deserve no mercy.”
Both expressions drew criticism even from Republicans and Trump voters, unusual at a time of deep political tribalism. Eighty percent of 2024 Trump voters had a negative reaction to Trump’s Jesus post, as did 79 percent of Republicans. On Hegseth’s prayer, more than 40 percent of both groups reacted negatively.
“There is only one Jesus! I found the posts to be inappropriate and offensive. Humility is at the core of being Jesus,” said Kimberly Chopin, a 57-year-old Catholic who lives in suburban Baton Rouge and voted for Trump. She added that Hegseth’s prayer calling for violence made her “extremely uncomfortable. That kind of language sounds like the language of al-Qaeda.”
Interesting.
Of course Trump is much less interested in the war he started as a distraction from the Epstein files than remaking the White House and surrounding buildings and monuments in his own image. And his number one obsession is his insane ballroom.
Now Republicans in Congress are getting into the act. We were told that the ballroom project would be paid for with private money. Suddenly, we learn that taxpayers are expected to cover the growing price tag.
The New York Times: G.O.P. Proposes $1 Billion for Security Improvements in Ballroom Project.
Senate Republicans have inserted $1 billion for White House East Wing security enhancements in the immigration enforcement funding bill they hope to rush through Congress this month, setting up a political fight over a ballroom that President Trump has said would be financed with private money.
The leaders of the Judiciary and Homeland Security Committees on Monday released plans for the roughly $70 billion package, which would significantly bolster spending on Immigration and Customs Enforcement and border patrol through the end of Mr. Trump’s term using a party-line legislative process that can skirt a filibuster.
Trump’s proposed ballroom addition to the White House
A surprise addition to the measure was the $1 billion proposed by the Judiciary Committee for security work related to Mr. Trump’s East Wing renovation. The measure does not mention the president’s proposed new ballroom, which is being challenged in court, but Mr. Trump has insisted that a main reason for the project is to enhance security.
While the president has previously insisted that the renovation would be funded through private donations, a spokesman on Tuesday said the White House applauded the proposed security funding for a “long overdue” project.
Mr. Trump and congressional Republicans have escalated their efforts to defend the project after the attempted assault late last month at a journalism gala in Washington attended by the president.
The bill says the public money would be directed to “security adjustments and upgrades, including within the perimeter fence of the White House compound to support enhancements by the Secret Service relating to the East Wing Modernization Project, including above-ground and below-ground security features.” It also bars any of the funding being spent on “non-security elements.”
WTF?!
“Republicans are on a different planet than American families,” Senator Chuck Schumer of New York, the Democratic minority leader, said in a post on social media. “Republicans looked at families drowning in bills and decided what they really needed was more raids and a Trump ballroom.”
Top Democrats also noted that consideration of the bill would put all senators on the record on a White House construction project that polls have shown to be unpopular.
“Just flagging that now everyone gets an up or down vote on the ballroom,” Senator Brian Schatz, Democrat of Hawaii, said on social media.
Should the provision survive and be enacted into law, it could clear away legal obstacles to construction of the ballroom, which a federal judge has ruled requires congressional approval.
Republicans are advancing the legislation outside of normal congressional spending channels because Senate Democrats had blocked money for ICE and the border control in a dispute over the tactics and conduct of federal immigration officers. That fight shut down parts of the Department of Homeland Security for almost 80 days.
“The Senate Judiciary Committee is taking action to help provide certainty for federal law enforcement and safer streets for American families,” Senator Charles E. Grassley, Republican of Iowa and the chairman of the Judiciary Committee, said in a statement. “We will work to ensure this critical funding gets signed into law without unnecessary delay.”
Trump is destroying our country and our Capitol. He has to be stopped. One more on this from NPR: The many ways Trump wants to change D.C., from buildings to statues to parks.
President Trump is looking to make his mark on the White House and Washington, D.C., and not just politically.
The longtime real estate developer has either announced or embarked on a number of construction and renovation projects across the nation’s capital.
“I have two jobs,” Trump said in late 2025, the presidency being just one of them. “I have a construction job, which is really like relaxation for me because I have been doing it my entire life.”
The White House ballroom, reflecting pool resurfacing, Kennedy Center renovations and a triumphal arch are among the many changes Trump wants to make in D.C.
Some of those changes are seemingly temporary, like the huge banners of Trump’s face hanging from the Justice Department, Department of Agriculture and other federal buildings. Several concern the decor and aesthetics of the White House, like the paved-over Rose Garden and gilded Oval Office. Others are matters of nomenclature, like the addition of Trump’s name to the signs on the Kennedy Center and U.S. Institute of Peace buildings.
But many of the efforts in progress could reshape D.C.’s architectural landscape for decades to come.
Neil Flanagan, an architect and public historian in D.C., says while Trump had aesthetic ambitions during his first term, his “insistence on making it so much about his own style and his own brand and wearing this glory of America’s past is distinct to this term.” Many of his initiatives are connected to the country’s upcoming 250th anniversary in July.
“They all sort of declare the glory of America rather than actually building any kind of growth or future for America,” Flanagan says. “If you’re trying to slash the science budget … at the same [as you’re] building these grand monuments, you’re not building a creative America, you’re wearing a great American past as a costume.”
The latest change was to the Lincoln Memorial reflecting pool.
Trump is resurfacing the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool, coating its gray bottom with a shade he described to reporters as “American flag blue.”
The 2,030-foot-long reflecting pool has been the backdrop of marches, speeches and inaugurations for a century.
It last underwent a major renovation from 2010 to 2012, both for structural fixes (to address decades of leaking and sinking) and aesthetic improvements (it was intentionally made shallower). But the Department of Interior says the wrong-size pipes were installed, resulting in the continued need for expensive refills (71 million additional gallons, exceeding $1 million, in 2019 alone).
Trump has been talking publicly about fixing the pool since at least November 2025, but ramped up his efforts in April after what he described as complaints about the state of the landmark. He told reporters that he is working with one of his best “pool builders” from his real estate days, who talked him out of a turquoise shade “like in the Bahamas.”
Flanagan says Trump is treating the pool, and the city itself, “like it’s his personal country club.”
“You get some pool guys and then they refinish it in a way that is more suitable to, basically, a swimming pool at Mar-a-Lago,” he adds.
That’s all I have for today. I can’t take anymore. \
Have a peaceful Wednesday.
#DonaldTrump #EbrahimRezaei #EsmailBaghaei #IranWarNegotiations #LincolnMemorialReflectingPool #ProjectFreedom #StraitOfHormuz #TedTurner #TrumpSBallroom -
Wednesday Reads
Good Day!!
I spent the last 3 days reading books and relaxing, and mostly avoiding watching or reading news social media. My RA pain had been pretty bad lately, and it has definitely improved as a result. I’ll have to see what happens after I engage with the news for this post, but at the moment I plan to go back on a news diet when I finish. I definitely think my health is improved by avoiding news about Trump.
Here’s what’s happening this morning:
Cable news Legend Ted Turner has died.
The New York Times (gift article): Ted Turner, Creator of CNN and the 24-Hour News Cycle, Dies at 87.
The rest of the article is fascinating–dealing with Turner’s personal life, political beliefs and more. I’ve included a gift link in case you want to read more.Ted Turner, the media mogul who cut a brash and vivid figure on the American scene of the late 20th century by dominating the cable television industry, creating the 24-hour news cycle with CNN, and extending his restless reach into professional sports, environmentalism and philanthropy, died on Wednesday at his home near Tallahassee, Fla. He was 87.
Phillip Evans, a spokesman for the family, confirmed the death. Mr. Turner announced in 2018 that he had Lewy body dementia, a progressive brain disorder.
Ted Turner
Mr. Turner’s signature creation was CNN — the Cable News Network — which revolutionized television news in 1980 by presenting it all hours of the day and eventually inspiring other media operations to follow suit. But his portfolio of business ventures bulged with much more, and their impact on American culture was considerable.
As a spinoff of CNN, Mr. Turner created the channel CNN Headline News and CNN International. He founded the cable and satellite sports and entertainment “superstation” that became known as TBS and spawned a sister channel, TNT, both of which continue to reach millions of homes.
In 1985, he bought for $1.5 billion the MGM studio’s library of films and nine years later created the cable franchise Turner Classic Movies, or TCM. He made a similar purchase of Hanna-Barbera cartoons and, relying on them, created the Cartoon Network in 1992. And in 1996, he merged his conglomerate, Turner Broadcasting System, with Time Warner to create one of the world’s largest media companies.
Along the way, he found the time and energy to captain the winning yacht in the America’s Cup race in 1977 and to take an active role as owner of the Atlanta Braves, giving the team extended national exposure on Turner-owned television.
“I’m trying to set the all-time record for achievement by one person in one lifetime,” he told the journalist Dale Van Atta in a Reader’s Digest article in 1998. “And that puts you in pretty big company: Alexander the Great, Napoleon, Gandhi, Christ, Mohammed, Buddha, Washington, Roosevelt, Churchill.”
Not even his staunchest admirers placed Mr. Turner on that high a pedestal. But even a bitter rival like the media magnate Rupert Murdoch — who once had his New York Post run the headline “Is Turner Insane?” — had to concede that he was one of the most influential figures in the history of mass media.
An Atlanta-based entrepreneur, Mr. Turner took astounding risks in business, often teetering on the edge of bankruptcy and then roaring back to multiply his fortune.
Against the advice of colleagues and the conventional wisdom of his industry peers, he poured millions of dollars into pioneering ventures that combined cable and satellite broadcasts. He warred against the big television networks. He almost lost his shirt in Hollywood but emerged from these gambles and brawls as a billionaire astride a vast cable empire of news, sports and entertainment channels.
Of course the big story is still Trump’s war with Iran. It’s difficult to know what to believe about what’s going on, since Trump and Hegseth lie constantly.
CNN reports the Trump/Hegseth line: US and Iran closing in on memorandum aimed at ending war, source says.
The United States and Iran are moving closer to an agreement on a short memorandum to end the Iran war, a regional source familiar with the negotiations said, although Trump administration officials cautioned that talks had previously fallen apart at the last minute.
The White House received positive feedback from Pakistani mediators on Tuesday that the Iranians were progressing toward a compromise, two administration officials told CNN while offering some skepticism about Pakistan’s optimism.
From CentCom: Project Freedom at Strait of Hormuz
But a renewed diplomatic push has emerged in recent days, the regional source said. President Donald Trump appears to be simplifying issues in peace negotiations so moderates in the Iranian regime can come back to the negotiating table, the source added, with the aim being to tackle thornier issues later.
A one-page plan being floated internally contains provisions that have been at the heart of negotiations to end the conflict, a person familiar with the plan told CNN. The document would declare an end to the war while triggering a 30-day negotiation period on resolving sticking points, including on nuclear issues, unfreezing Iranian assets and future security in the Strait of Hormuz, the person said.
Precise details of the plan couldn’t immediately be verified, but the source familiar said it would include discussion of a moratorium on uranium enrichment for a period of longer than 10 years. A previous US proposal had set it at 20 years.
The plan also requires Iran to ship its stockpile of highly enriched uranium out of the country, but details were still being negotiated.
News of positive movement from the Pakistanis helped spur Trump on Tuesday to announce a pause of “Project Freedom” – an operation to guide stranded ships out of the strait – citing progress in negotiations with Iran, the administration officials said. The pause came after Secretary of State Marco Rubio told reporters that Operation Epic Fury had ended and that the administration’s full focus was on Project Freedom.
The regional source told CNN that the harder the US pushed its agenda of Project Freedom and Operation Epic Fury, the more the hardliners in Iran stood up and had a bigger voice.
The Guardian reports on Iran’s reaction: Middle East crisis live: US proposal to end war a ‘wishlist, not a reality’, warns Iranian official.
‘American wishlist, not a reality’: Iranian officials cast doubt on US proposal to end war.
Ebrahim Rezaei, the spokesperson of the Iranian parliament’s national security and foreign policy commission, has poured cold water on the Axios report claiming the US and Iran were nearing a one-page memorandum to end the war, saying it was an “American wishlist [and] not a reality”.
Ebrahim Rezaei
In a fiery statement on X, he said: “Americans will not gain in a lost war what they failed to achieve in face-to-face negotiations. Iran has its finger on the trigger and is ready; if they do not surrender and grant the necessary concessions, or if they or their lapdogs attempt any mischief, we will respond with a harsh and regrettable response.
Iran’s foreign ministry spokesperson, Esmail Baghaei, also responded to the Axios report, telling the Iranian Isna news agency that the US proposal is still being reviewed by Tehran.
“Once Iran concludes its assessment, it will convey its views to the Pakistani side,” Isna reported, adding that the US demands detailed in the Axios report “included excessive and unrealistic demands that have been strongly rejected by Iranian officials in recent days”.
Isna reported that the Iranian negotiating team is solely reviewing the “termination of the war” and the nuclear issue is not currently being discussed.
That doesn’t sound like an agreement is coming soon. And Trump is issuing threats.
AP: US and Iran appear to move closer to ending their war as Trump threatens more bombing.
The United States and Iran appeared to be moving closer Wednesday to an initial agreement to end the war, as U.S. President Trump sought to pressure Tehran with threats of a new wave of bombing if a deal is not reached.
Trump posted on social media that the two-month war could soon end and that oil and natural gas shipments disrupted by the conflict could restart. But he said that depends on Iran accepting a reported agreement that the president did not detail.
“If they don’t agree, the bombing starts,” Trump wrote.
Trump made his latest comments after he suspended a short-lived U.S. effort to force open a safe passage for commercial ships through the Strait of Hormuz, a vital waterway through which major oil and gas supplies, fertilizer and other petroleum products passed before the war.
Iran’s effective closure of the strait has sent fuel prices skyrocketing, rattled the global economy and put enormous economic pressure on countries, including major powers such as China.
China’s foreign minister called for a comprehensive ceasefire Wednesday after meeting in Beijing with Iran’s top envoy. Wang Yi said his country was “deeply distressed” by the conflict, which began Feb. 28 when the U.S. and Israel launched strikes against Iran.
China’s close economic and political ties to Tehran give it a unique position of influence. The Trump administration is pressing China to use that relationship to urge the Islamic Republic to open the strait.
Meanwhile it appears that the Trump administration has been trying to conceal how much damage Iran has done to U.S. bases in the Middle East region.
The Washington Post (gift article): Iran has hit far more U.S. military assets than reported, satellite images show.
Iranian airstrikes have damaged or destroyed at least 228 structures or pieces of equipment atU.S. military sites across the Middle East since the war began, hitting hangars, barracks,fuel depots, aircraft and key radar, communications and air defense equipment, according to a Washington Post analysis of satellite imagery. The amount of destruction is far larger than what has been publicly acknowledged by the U.S. government or previously reported.
The threat of air attacks rendered some of the U.S. bases in the region too dangerous to staff at normal levels, and commanders moved most of the personnel from these sites out of the range of Iranian fire at the start of the war, officials have said.
Since the start of the war on Feb. 28, seven service members have died in strikes on U.S. facilities in the region — six in Kuwait and one in Saudi Arabia — and more than 400 troops have suffered injuries as of late April, the U.S. military said. While most of the wounded returned to duty within days, at least 12 suffered injuries that military officials classified as serious, according to U.S. officials who, among others, spoke on the condition of anonymity due to the sensitivity of the issue.
Satellite imagery of the Middle East is unusually difficult to acquire at present. Two of the largest commercial providers, Vantor and Planet, have complied with requests from the U.S. government — their biggest customer — to limit, delay or indefinitely withhold the publication of imagery of the region while the war is ongoing, making it difficult or impossible to assess Iran’s counterstrikes. Those restrictions began less than two weeks into the war.
Iranian state-affiliated news agencies, however, have from the start regularly published high-resolution satellite imagery on their social media accounts that claimed to document damage to U.S. sites.
Images of damage to Camp Buehring in Kuwait, released and annotated by Iranian state-affiliated media. Washington Post illustration.
For this examination — one of the first comprehensive public accounts of the damage to U.S. facilities in the region — The Post reviewed more than 100 high-resolution Iranian-released satellite images. The Post verified the authenticity of 109 of the those images by comparing them with lower-resolution imagery from the European Union’s satellite system, Copernicus, as well as high-resolution images from Planet where available. The Post excluded 19 Iranian images from the damage analysis because comparisons with the Copernicus imagery were inconclusive. No Iranian imagery was found to have been manipulated.
In a separate search of Planet imagery, Post reporters found 10 damaged or destroyed structures that were not documented in the imagery released by Iran. In all, The Post found 217 structures and 11 pieces of equipment that were damaged or destroyed at 15 U.S. military sites in the region.
Experts who reviewed The Post’s analysis said the damage at the sites suggested that the U.S. military had underestimated Iran’s targeting abilities, not adapted sufficiently to modern drone warfare and left some bases under-protected.
“The Iranian attacks were precise. There are no random craters indicating misses,” said Mark Cancian, a senior adviser with the Center for Strategic and International Studies and a retired Marine Corps colonel, who reviewed the Iranian images at The Post’s request. The Post previously revealed how Russia provided Iran with intelligence to target U.S. forces.
Read the rest and view more images using the gift link above. I wonder what it will take to repair the damage?
Here’s a bit of hopeful news from The Washington Post: Poll finds broad rejection of religion-related messages from Trump, Hegseth.
Americans are deeply uncomfortable with recent religion-related statements by President Donald Trump and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth — a striking rebuke in a closely divided country, according to a Washington Post-ABC News-Ipsos poll.
The poll finds positive ratings for Pope Leo XIV, who has criticized U.S. actions on immigration andin Iran, drawing criticism from Trump that the president repeated on Tuesday.
Eighty-seven percent of Americans have a negative view of Trump’s social media post appearing to depict himself as Jesus, according to the poll. Sixty-nine percent dislikeHegseth praying at the Pentagon for “overwhelming violence of action against those who deserve no mercy.”
Both expressions drew criticism even from Republicans and Trump voters, unusual at a time of deep political tribalism. Eighty percent of 2024 Trump voters had a negative reaction to Trump’s Jesus post, as did 79 percent of Republicans. On Hegseth’s prayer, more than 40 percent of both groups reacted negatively.
“There is only one Jesus! I found the posts to be inappropriate and offensive. Humility is at the core of being Jesus,” said Kimberly Chopin, a 57-year-old Catholic who lives in suburban Baton Rouge and voted for Trump. She added that Hegseth’s prayer calling for violence made her “extremely uncomfortable. That kind of language sounds like the language of al-Qaeda.”
Interesting.
Of course Trump is much less interested in the war he started as a distraction from the Epstein files than remaking the White House and surrounding buildings and monuments in his own image. And his number one obsession is his insane ballroom.
Now Republicans in Congress are getting into the act. We were told that the ballroom project would be paid for with private money. Suddenly, we learn that taxpayers are expected to cover the growing price tag.
The New York Times: G.O.P. Proposes $1 Billion for Security Improvements in Ballroom Project.
Senate Republicans have inserted $1 billion for White House East Wing security enhancements in the immigration enforcement funding bill they hope to rush through Congress this month, setting up a political fight over a ballroom that President Trump has said would be financed with private money.
The leaders of the Judiciary and Homeland Security Committees on Monday released plans for the roughly $70 billion package, which would significantly bolster spending on Immigration and Customs Enforcement and border patrol through the end of Mr. Trump’s term using a party-line legislative process that can skirt a filibuster.
Trump’s proposed ballroom addition to the White House
A surprise addition to the measure was the $1 billion proposed by the Judiciary Committee for security work related to Mr. Trump’s East Wing renovation. The measure does not mention the president’s proposed new ballroom, which is being challenged in court, but Mr. Trump has insisted that a main reason for the project is to enhance security.
While the president has previously insisted that the renovation would be funded through private donations, a spokesman on Tuesday said the White House applauded the proposed security funding for a “long overdue” project.
Mr. Trump and congressional Republicans have escalated their efforts to defend the project after the attempted assault late last month at a journalism gala in Washington attended by the president.
The bill says the public money would be directed to “security adjustments and upgrades, including within the perimeter fence of the White House compound to support enhancements by the Secret Service relating to the East Wing Modernization Project, including above-ground and below-ground security features.” It also bars any of the funding being spent on “non-security elements.”
WTF?!
“Republicans are on a different planet than American families,” Senator Chuck Schumer of New York, the Democratic minority leader, said in a post on social media. “Republicans looked at families drowning in bills and decided what they really needed was more raids and a Trump ballroom.”
Top Democrats also noted that consideration of the bill would put all senators on the record on a White House construction project that polls have shown to be unpopular.
“Just flagging that now everyone gets an up or down vote on the ballroom,” Senator Brian Schatz, Democrat of Hawaii, said on social media.
Should the provision survive and be enacted into law, it could clear away legal obstacles to construction of the ballroom, which a federal judge has ruled requires congressional approval.
Republicans are advancing the legislation outside of normal congressional spending channels because Senate Democrats had blocked money for ICE and the border control in a dispute over the tactics and conduct of federal immigration officers. That fight shut down parts of the Department of Homeland Security for almost 80 days.
“The Senate Judiciary Committee is taking action to help provide certainty for federal law enforcement and safer streets for American families,” Senator Charles E. Grassley, Republican of Iowa and the chairman of the Judiciary Committee, said in a statement. “We will work to ensure this critical funding gets signed into law without unnecessary delay.”
Trump is destroying our country and our Capitol. He has to be stopped. One more on this from NPR: The many ways Trump wants to change D.C., from buildings to statues to parks.
President Trump is looking to make his mark on the White House and Washington, D.C., and not just politically.
The longtime real estate developer has either announced or embarked on a number of construction and renovation projects across the nation’s capital.
“I have two jobs,” Trump said in late 2025, the presidency being just one of them. “I have a construction job, which is really like relaxation for me because I have been doing it my entire life.”
The White House ballroom, reflecting pool resurfacing, Kennedy Center renovations and a triumphal arch are among the many changes Trump wants to make in D.C.
Some of those changes are seemingly temporary, like the huge banners of Trump’s face hanging from the Justice Department, Department of Agriculture and other federal buildings. Several concern the decor and aesthetics of the White House, like the paved-over Rose Garden and gilded Oval Office. Others are matters of nomenclature, like the addition of Trump’s name to the signs on the Kennedy Center and U.S. Institute of Peace buildings.
But many of the efforts in progress could reshape D.C.’s architectural landscape for decades to come.
Neil Flanagan, an architect and public historian in D.C., says while Trump had aesthetic ambitions during his first term, his “insistence on making it so much about his own style and his own brand and wearing this glory of America’s past is distinct to this term.” Many of his initiatives are connected to the country’s upcoming 250th anniversary in July.
“They all sort of declare the glory of America rather than actually building any kind of growth or future for America,” Flanagan says. “If you’re trying to slash the science budget … at the same [as you’re] building these grand monuments, you’re not building a creative America, you’re wearing a great American past as a costume.”
The latest change was to the Lincoln Memorial reflecting pool.
Trump is resurfacing the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool, coating its gray bottom with a shade he described to reporters as “American flag blue.”
The 2,030-foot-long reflecting pool has been the backdrop of marches, speeches and inaugurations for a century.
It last underwent a major renovation from 2010 to 2012, both for structural fixes (to address decades of leaking and sinking) and aesthetic improvements (it was intentionally made shallower). But the Department of Interior says the wrong-size pipes were installed, resulting in the continued need for expensive refills (71 million additional gallons, exceeding $1 million, in 2019 alone).
Trump has been talking publicly about fixing the pool since at least November 2025, but ramped up his efforts in April after what he described as complaints about the state of the landmark. He told reporters that he is working with one of his best “pool builders” from his real estate days, who talked him out of a turquoise shade “like in the Bahamas.”
Flanagan says Trump is treating the pool, and the city itself, “like it’s his personal country club.”
“You get some pool guys and then they refinish it in a way that is more suitable to, basically, a swimming pool at Mar-a-Lago,” he adds.
That’s all I have for today. I can’t take anymore. \
Have a peaceful Wednesday.
#DonaldTrump #EbrahimRezaei #EsmailBaghaei #IranWarNegotiations #LincolnMemorialReflectingPool #ProjectFreedom #StraitOfHormuz #TedTurner #TrumpSBallroom -
Wednesday Reads
Good Day!!
I spent the last 3 days reading books and relaxing, and mostly avoiding watching or reading news social media. My RA pain had been pretty bad lately, and it has definitely improved as a result. I’ll have to see what happens after I engage with the news for this post, but at the moment I plan to go back on a news diet when I finish. I definitely think my health is improved by avoiding news about Trump.
Here’s what’s happening this morning:
Cable news Legend Ted Turner has died.
The New York Times (gift article): Ted Turner, Creator of CNN and the 24-Hour News Cycle, Dies at 87.
The rest of the article is fascinating–dealing with Turner’s personal life, political beliefs and more. I’ve included a gift link in case you want to read more.Ted Turner, the media mogul who cut a brash and vivid figure on the American scene of the late 20th century by dominating the cable television industry, creating the 24-hour news cycle with CNN, and extending his restless reach into professional sports, environmentalism and philanthropy, died on Wednesday at his home near Tallahassee, Fla. He was 87.
Phillip Evans, a spokesman for the family, confirmed the death. Mr. Turner announced in 2018 that he had Lewy body dementia, a progressive brain disorder.
Ted Turner
Mr. Turner’s signature creation was CNN — the Cable News Network — which revolutionized television news in 1980 by presenting it all hours of the day and eventually inspiring other media operations to follow suit. But his portfolio of business ventures bulged with much more, and their impact on American culture was considerable.
As a spinoff of CNN, Mr. Turner created the channel CNN Headline News and CNN International. He founded the cable and satellite sports and entertainment “superstation” that became known as TBS and spawned a sister channel, TNT, both of which continue to reach millions of homes.
In 1985, he bought for $1.5 billion the MGM studio’s library of films and nine years later created the cable franchise Turner Classic Movies, or TCM. He made a similar purchase of Hanna-Barbera cartoons and, relying on them, created the Cartoon Network in 1992. And in 1996, he merged his conglomerate, Turner Broadcasting System, with Time Warner to create one of the world’s largest media companies.
Along the way, he found the time and energy to captain the winning yacht in the America’s Cup race in 1977 and to take an active role as owner of the Atlanta Braves, giving the team extended national exposure on Turner-owned television.
“I’m trying to set the all-time record for achievement by one person in one lifetime,” he told the journalist Dale Van Atta in a Reader’s Digest article in 1998. “And that puts you in pretty big company: Alexander the Great, Napoleon, Gandhi, Christ, Mohammed, Buddha, Washington, Roosevelt, Churchill.”
Not even his staunchest admirers placed Mr. Turner on that high a pedestal. But even a bitter rival like the media magnate Rupert Murdoch — who once had his New York Post run the headline “Is Turner Insane?” — had to concede that he was one of the most influential figures in the history of mass media.
An Atlanta-based entrepreneur, Mr. Turner took astounding risks in business, often teetering on the edge of bankruptcy and then roaring back to multiply his fortune.
Against the advice of colleagues and the conventional wisdom of his industry peers, he poured millions of dollars into pioneering ventures that combined cable and satellite broadcasts. He warred against the big television networks. He almost lost his shirt in Hollywood but emerged from these gambles and brawls as a billionaire astride a vast cable empire of news, sports and entertainment channels.
Of course the big story is still Trump’s war with Iran. It’s difficult to know what to believe about what’s going on, since Trump and Hegseth lie constantly.
CNN reports the Trump/Hegseth line: US and Iran closing in on memorandum aimed at ending war, source says.
The United States and Iran are moving closer to an agreement on a short memorandum to end the Iran war, a regional source familiar with the negotiations said, although Trump administration officials cautioned that talks had previously fallen apart at the last minute.
The White House received positive feedback from Pakistani mediators on Tuesday that the Iranians were progressing toward a compromise, two administration officials told CNN while offering some skepticism about Pakistan’s optimism.
From CentCom: Project Freedom at Strait of Hormuz
But a renewed diplomatic push has emerged in recent days, the regional source said. President Donald Trump appears to be simplifying issues in peace negotiations so moderates in the Iranian regime can come back to the negotiating table, the source added, with the aim being to tackle thornier issues later.
A one-page plan being floated internally contains provisions that have been at the heart of negotiations to end the conflict, a person familiar with the plan told CNN. The document would declare an end to the war while triggering a 30-day negotiation period on resolving sticking points, including on nuclear issues, unfreezing Iranian assets and future security in the Strait of Hormuz, the person said.
Precise details of the plan couldn’t immediately be verified, but the source familiar said it would include discussion of a moratorium on uranium enrichment for a period of longer than 10 years. A previous US proposal had set it at 20 years.
The plan also requires Iran to ship its stockpile of highly enriched uranium out of the country, but details were still being negotiated.
News of positive movement from the Pakistanis helped spur Trump on Tuesday to announce a pause of “Project Freedom” – an operation to guide stranded ships out of the strait – citing progress in negotiations with Iran, the administration officials said. The pause came after Secretary of State Marco Rubio told reporters that Operation Epic Fury had ended and that the administration’s full focus was on Project Freedom.
The regional source told CNN that the harder the US pushed its agenda of Project Freedom and Operation Epic Fury, the more the hardliners in Iran stood up and had a bigger voice.
The Guardian reports on Iran’s reaction: Middle East crisis live: US proposal to end war a ‘wishlist, not a reality’, warns Iranian official.
‘American wishlist, not a reality’: Iranian officials cast doubt on US proposal to end war.
Ebrahim Rezaei, the spokesperson of the Iranian parliament’s national security and foreign policy commission, has poured cold water on the Axios report claiming the US and Iran were nearing a one-page memorandum to end the war, saying it was an “American wishlist [and] not a reality”.
Ebrahim Rezaei
In a fiery statement on X, he said: “Americans will not gain in a lost war what they failed to achieve in face-to-face negotiations. Iran has its finger on the trigger and is ready; if they do not surrender and grant the necessary concessions, or if they or their lapdogs attempt any mischief, we will respond with a harsh and regrettable response.
Iran’s foreign ministry spokesperson, Esmail Baghaei, also responded to the Axios report, telling the Iranian Isna news agency that the US proposal is still being reviewed by Tehran.
“Once Iran concludes its assessment, it will convey its views to the Pakistani side,” Isna reported, adding that the US demands detailed in the Axios report “included excessive and unrealistic demands that have been strongly rejected by Iranian officials in recent days”.
Isna reported that the Iranian negotiating team is solely reviewing the “termination of the war” and the nuclear issue is not currently being discussed.
That doesn’t sound like an agreement is coming soon. And Trump is issuing threats.
AP: US and Iran appear to move closer to ending their war as Trump threatens more bombing.
The United States and Iran appeared to be moving closer Wednesday to an initial agreement to end the war, as U.S. President Trump sought to pressure Tehran with threats of a new wave of bombing if a deal is not reached.
Trump posted on social media that the two-month war could soon end and that oil and natural gas shipments disrupted by the conflict could restart. But he said that depends on Iran accepting a reported agreement that the president did not detail.
“If they don’t agree, the bombing starts,” Trump wrote.
Trump made his latest comments after he suspended a short-lived U.S. effort to force open a safe passage for commercial ships through the Strait of Hormuz, a vital waterway through which major oil and gas supplies, fertilizer and other petroleum products passed before the war.
Iran’s effective closure of the strait has sent fuel prices skyrocketing, rattled the global economy and put enormous economic pressure on countries, including major powers such as China.
China’s foreign minister called for a comprehensive ceasefire Wednesday after meeting in Beijing with Iran’s top envoy. Wang Yi said his country was “deeply distressed” by the conflict, which began Feb. 28 when the U.S. and Israel launched strikes against Iran.
China’s close economic and political ties to Tehran give it a unique position of influence. The Trump administration is pressing China to use that relationship to urge the Islamic Republic to open the strait.
Meanwhile it appears that the Trump administration has been trying to conceal how much damage Iran has done to U.S. bases in the Middle East region.
The Washington Post (gift article): Iran has hit far more U.S. military assets than reported, satellite images show.
Iranian airstrikes have damaged or destroyed at least 228 structures or pieces of equipment atU.S. military sites across the Middle East since the war began, hitting hangars, barracks,fuel depots, aircraft and key radar, communications and air defense equipment, according to a Washington Post analysis of satellite imagery. The amount of destruction is far larger than what has been publicly acknowledged by the U.S. government or previously reported.
The threat of air attacks rendered some of the U.S. bases in the region too dangerous to staff at normal levels, and commanders moved most of the personnel from these sites out of the range of Iranian fire at the start of the war, officials have said.
Since the start of the war on Feb. 28, seven service members have died in strikes on U.S. facilities in the region — six in Kuwait and one in Saudi Arabia — and more than 400 troops have suffered injuries as of late April, the U.S. military said. While most of the wounded returned to duty within days, at least 12 suffered injuries that military officials classified as serious, according to U.S. officials who, among others, spoke on the condition of anonymity due to the sensitivity of the issue.
Satellite imagery of the Middle East is unusually difficult to acquire at present. Two of the largest commercial providers, Vantor and Planet, have complied with requests from the U.S. government — their biggest customer — to limit, delay or indefinitely withhold the publication of imagery of the region while the war is ongoing, making it difficult or impossible to assess Iran’s counterstrikes. Those restrictions began less than two weeks into the war.
Iranian state-affiliated news agencies, however, have from the start regularly published high-resolution satellite imagery on their social media accounts that claimed to document damage to U.S. sites.
Images of damage to Camp Buehring in Kuwait, released and annotated by Iranian state-affiliated media. Washington Post illustration.
For this examination — one of the first comprehensive public accounts of the damage to U.S. facilities in the region — The Post reviewed more than 100 high-resolution Iranian-released satellite images. The Post verified the authenticity of 109 of the those images by comparing them with lower-resolution imagery from the European Union’s satellite system, Copernicus, as well as high-resolution images from Planet where available. The Post excluded 19 Iranian images from the damage analysis because comparisons with the Copernicus imagery were inconclusive. No Iranian imagery was found to have been manipulated.
In a separate search of Planet imagery, Post reporters found 10 damaged or destroyed structures that were not documented in the imagery released by Iran. In all, The Post found 217 structures and 11 pieces of equipment that were damaged or destroyed at 15 U.S. military sites in the region.
Experts who reviewed The Post’s analysis said the damage at the sites suggested that the U.S. military had underestimated Iran’s targeting abilities, not adapted sufficiently to modern drone warfare and left some bases under-protected.
“The Iranian attacks were precise. There are no random craters indicating misses,” said Mark Cancian, a senior adviser with the Center for Strategic and International Studies and a retired Marine Corps colonel, who reviewed the Iranian images at The Post’s request. The Post previously revealed how Russia provided Iran with intelligence to target U.S. forces.
Read the rest and view more images using the gift link above. I wonder what it will take to repair the damage?
Here’s a bit of hopeful news from The Washington Post: Poll finds broad rejection of religion-related messages from Trump, Hegseth.
Americans are deeply uncomfortable with recent religion-related statements by President Donald Trump and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth — a striking rebuke in a closely divided country, according to a Washington Post-ABC News-Ipsos poll.
The poll finds positive ratings for Pope Leo XIV, who has criticized U.S. actions on immigration andin Iran, drawing criticism from Trump that the president repeated on Tuesday.
Eighty-seven percent of Americans have a negative view of Trump’s social media post appearing to depict himself as Jesus, according to the poll. Sixty-nine percent dislikeHegseth praying at the Pentagon for “overwhelming violence of action against those who deserve no mercy.”
Both expressions drew criticism even from Republicans and Trump voters, unusual at a time of deep political tribalism. Eighty percent of 2024 Trump voters had a negative reaction to Trump’s Jesus post, as did 79 percent of Republicans. On Hegseth’s prayer, more than 40 percent of both groups reacted negatively.
“There is only one Jesus! I found the posts to be inappropriate and offensive. Humility is at the core of being Jesus,” said Kimberly Chopin, a 57-year-old Catholic who lives in suburban Baton Rouge and voted for Trump. She added that Hegseth’s prayer calling for violence made her “extremely uncomfortable. That kind of language sounds like the language of al-Qaeda.”
Interesting.
Of course Trump is much less interested in the war he started as a distraction from the Epstein files than remaking the White House and surrounding buildings and monuments in his own image. And his number one obsession is his insane ballroom.
Now Republicans in Congress are getting into the act. We were told that the ballroom project would be paid for with private money. Suddenly, we learn that taxpayers are expected to cover the growing price tag.
The New York Times: G.O.P. Proposes $1 Billion for Security Improvements in Ballroom Project.
Senate Republicans have inserted $1 billion for White House East Wing security enhancements in the immigration enforcement funding bill they hope to rush through Congress this month, setting up a political fight over a ballroom that President Trump has said would be financed with private money.
The leaders of the Judiciary and Homeland Security Committees on Monday released plans for the roughly $70 billion package, which would significantly bolster spending on Immigration and Customs Enforcement and border patrol through the end of Mr. Trump’s term using a party-line legislative process that can skirt a filibuster.
Trump’s proposed ballroom addition to the White House
A surprise addition to the measure was the $1 billion proposed by the Judiciary Committee for security work related to Mr. Trump’s East Wing renovation. The measure does not mention the president’s proposed new ballroom, which is being challenged in court, but Mr. Trump has insisted that a main reason for the project is to enhance security.
While the president has previously insisted that the renovation would be funded through private donations, a spokesman on Tuesday said the White House applauded the proposed security funding for a “long overdue” project.
Mr. Trump and congressional Republicans have escalated their efforts to defend the project after the attempted assault late last month at a journalism gala in Washington attended by the president.
The bill says the public money would be directed to “security adjustments and upgrades, including within the perimeter fence of the White House compound to support enhancements by the Secret Service relating to the East Wing Modernization Project, including above-ground and below-ground security features.” It also bars any of the funding being spent on “non-security elements.”
WTF?!
“Republicans are on a different planet than American families,” Senator Chuck Schumer of New York, the Democratic minority leader, said in a post on social media. “Republicans looked at families drowning in bills and decided what they really needed was more raids and a Trump ballroom.”
Top Democrats also noted that consideration of the bill would put all senators on the record on a White House construction project that polls have shown to be unpopular.
“Just flagging that now everyone gets an up or down vote on the ballroom,” Senator Brian Schatz, Democrat of Hawaii, said on social media.
Should the provision survive and be enacted into law, it could clear away legal obstacles to construction of the ballroom, which a federal judge has ruled requires congressional approval.
Republicans are advancing the legislation outside of normal congressional spending channels because Senate Democrats had blocked money for ICE and the border control in a dispute over the tactics and conduct of federal immigration officers. That fight shut down parts of the Department of Homeland Security for almost 80 days.
“The Senate Judiciary Committee is taking action to help provide certainty for federal law enforcement and safer streets for American families,” Senator Charles E. Grassley, Republican of Iowa and the chairman of the Judiciary Committee, said in a statement. “We will work to ensure this critical funding gets signed into law without unnecessary delay.”
Trump is destroying our country and our Capitol. He has to be stopped. One more on this from NPR: The many ways Trump wants to change D.C., from buildings to statues to parks.
President Trump is looking to make his mark on the White House and Washington, D.C., and not just politically.
The longtime real estate developer has either announced or embarked on a number of construction and renovation projects across the nation’s capital.
“I have two jobs,” Trump said in late 2025, the presidency being just one of them. “I have a construction job, which is really like relaxation for me because I have been doing it my entire life.”
The White House ballroom, reflecting pool resurfacing, Kennedy Center renovations and a triumphal arch are among the many changes Trump wants to make in D.C.
Some of those changes are seemingly temporary, like the huge banners of Trump’s face hanging from the Justice Department, Department of Agriculture and other federal buildings. Several concern the decor and aesthetics of the White House, like the paved-over Rose Garden and gilded Oval Office. Others are matters of nomenclature, like the addition of Trump’s name to the signs on the Kennedy Center and U.S. Institute of Peace buildings.
But many of the efforts in progress could reshape D.C.’s architectural landscape for decades to come.
Neil Flanagan, an architect and public historian in D.C., says while Trump had aesthetic ambitions during his first term, his “insistence on making it so much about his own style and his own brand and wearing this glory of America’s past is distinct to this term.” Many of his initiatives are connected to the country’s upcoming 250th anniversary in July.
“They all sort of declare the glory of America rather than actually building any kind of growth or future for America,” Flanagan says. “If you’re trying to slash the science budget … at the same [as you’re] building these grand monuments, you’re not building a creative America, you’re wearing a great American past as a costume.”
The latest change was to the Lincoln Memorial reflecting pool.
Trump is resurfacing the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool, coating its gray bottom with a shade he described to reporters as “American flag blue.”
The 2,030-foot-long reflecting pool has been the backdrop of marches, speeches and inaugurations for a century.
It last underwent a major renovation from 2010 to 2012, both for structural fixes (to address decades of leaking and sinking) and aesthetic improvements (it was intentionally made shallower). But the Department of Interior says the wrong-size pipes were installed, resulting in the continued need for expensive refills (71 million additional gallons, exceeding $1 million, in 2019 alone).
Trump has been talking publicly about fixing the pool since at least November 2025, but ramped up his efforts in April after what he described as complaints about the state of the landmark. He told reporters that he is working with one of his best “pool builders” from his real estate days, who talked him out of a turquoise shade “like in the Bahamas.”
Flanagan says Trump is treating the pool, and the city itself, “like it’s his personal country club.”
“You get some pool guys and then they refinish it in a way that is more suitable to, basically, a swimming pool at Mar-a-Lago,” he adds.
That’s all I have for today. I can’t take anymore. \
Have a peaceful Wednesday.
#DonaldTrump #EbrahimRezaei #EsmailBaghaei #IranWarNegotiations #LincolnMemorialReflectingPool #ProjectFreedom #StraitOfHormuz #TedTurner #TrumpSBallroom -
The sound you hear is coming from #HPC data centers as jaws drop and the research community gasps at the news that #NVIDIA acquired SchedMD - the #SLURM developer.
SLURM is very popular for job scheduling on high performance compute clusters. Let us hope this will at least keep #CoPilot from being bolted onto SLURM. After a recent experience with CoPilot on GitHub, I’m questioning some of my life choices.
-
Roasted Christmas Spam from Muhu.ai
I wrote what I thought would be the final blog post of 2024 last week, and was looking forward to starting 2025 strong with a blog I’d been drafting since July 2023.
But then, a little after Midnight on Christmas, I received the following unsolicited email from “the muhu team”:
Now, a total fucking stranger using “AI” to “roast” the open source software you thanklessly developed might not be the absolute worst of all possible holiday gifts to receive, but it’s definitely in the F Tier.
Art: CMYKatEven worse, it’s a transparent attempt to piggyback off open source developers to viral market their AI product, which purports to “helps you understand what your developers are doing, no tech degree required“.
The implied value proposition for this “Muhu.ai” startup is to enable clueless suits to surveil the proles working for them without needing to understand any of the domain expertise their developers have accumulated.
That sure sounds pretty shit to toss at open source developers, doesn’t it? Using “AI” to shift even more of the power dynamic away from workers and towards company executives.
This and many other problems with AI are covered quite succinctly in Philosophy Tube’s video on the subject.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AaU6tI2pb3M
One thing you may have noticed missing from that screenshot is an opt-out mechanism. Indeed, there is no such thing on their website, either.
but no worries, we’re not spamming you.
Gaslighting from someone that is definitely spamming you.
In fact, many webpages that used to be available on their website (such as their security policy page) are no longer available, but still exist in Google’s cache.
ArchivedThat’s at least a little suspicious, right?
Surely I’m not the only one who finds it fascinating that, around the time they pull the trigger on their email marketing campaign to send unsolicited “roasts” to random open source developers, their security information page would stop working.
Yet, it was working recently enough for Google to still have a cached copy of it, as of this writing.
CMYKatIn fact, the muhu.ai website doesn’t have any contact information.
The email, signed simply as “the muhu team”, was delivered from
104.245.209.201, an IP address that belongs toactivecampaign.com(a marketing automation company), which is almost certainly a proverbial haystack.Who’s running this ship anyway?
I’m almost certainly not the only open source developer to receive one of these unsolicited “roasts”.
However, as of this writing, there is no discussion about them on Mastodon or Bluesky, which are both popular for open source developers.
At this point, annoyed by this intrusion to my inbox on a family holiday, my curiosity has been thoroughly piqued.
You may have noticed: I’m only linking to archived snapshots of any web pages that belong to the offending “AI startup” or their other properties, lest I give them some of that sweet SEO backlink juice they crave.
There are some consistency issues with different archive tools. Thus, I’ve switched between the Internet Archive, archive.today, and Ghost Archive where one tool worked better than the others. When no tool successfully retrieved a snapshot, I’ve opted for screenshots instead.
Please be aware, some of these archive tools don’t work for some users. Archive.today is known to block Cloudflare DNS users, for example. Ghost Archive relies heavily on service workers to retrieve web pages.
I’m providing this information for the sake of transparency, so that any claims I make can be independently verified. If one of the archive sites doesn’t work for you, there’s little to nothing I can do about it.
Who is running muhu.ai?
The only platform where anyone was talking about muhu.ai was Twitter (or, rather, X–the husk of what Twitter once was).
ArchivedIndeed, the
@heymuhuaccount only has 1 follower as of the time of this writing: Franck Nouyrigat.Although he’s credited by Franck as a co-founder, I’m left to guess Teddy Pejoski didn’t feel like following the account for his own startup?
Despite this, they both have been desperately trying to promote muhu.ai everywhere they can:
Archive / AlternativeThe
Archived@heymuhuTwitter account claims to hail from a location called Muhu in Estonia–which is, in turn, an EU member state.Consent was not obtained and no opt-out or unsubscribe mechanism was included in the email that Muhu sent me.
This is illegal in the European Union (where they’re based) and doesn’t comply with CAN-SPAM (where I’m based).
But my curiosity isn’t sated yet. What more can we uncover about their operation?
HarubakiWho is Franck Nouyrigat?
Where to start with a character like Franck Nouyrigat?
You could begin by examining his bad takes about the humanities in public education on Twitter, and examine how devaluing the humanities lines up with the incentives of the AI griftosphere.
academia is easy to fix.
ban all non science and focus on math and physics plus engineering as a core the rest will follow (biology / médecine being its own thing) use ai on top of peer to peer (even as a replacement one day to review the math)
the rest eg politics art social “science” economics should have its own special place away from real science but where it can be celebrated as human studies where people are free to explore and maybe one day find something useful
Statements dreamt up by the utterly deranged
You could look no further than his reflections on emigrating to the United States during 2008–a year marked by an economic crisis that haunts many libertarians and anarchocapitalists for not being enriched by the recovery efforts, as Dan Olson covered in this excellent video:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YQ_xWvX1n9g
Hell, you could also start from Franck’s 14 years of Hacker News comments.
And while starting from either point could yield a ton of insight into the man behind the spam, I will instead turn toward the irresistible beacon of startup hustle criminals–the forum where they gleefully share their sketchy escapades in broad daylight:
LinkedIn.
Live. No archive link available, sadly.Right off the bat, we notice a few things:
- More confirmation that he operates under Estonia law
- He has 9,701 followers on LinkedIn
- He’s raising the flag of another startup called Electis
Electis? Who the fuck is Electis?
Job Experience: A graveyard of dead tech startups and consulting firms.Electis Dysfunction
If Franck’s LinkedIn work history is to be believed, he founded “electis solution” in June 2023.
According to sirene.fr, Electis Solution (SIRET # 91895617800019) was incorporated in 2022, under the name “ELECTIS SOLUTIONS” (plural this time).
PDF version hereElectis purports to “protect the integrity of each vote” using “blockchain technology”.
Their blog includes a category called “Votig technology” which talks about client-side encryption, but fails to provide any technical details about what their product offers. Another post makes it clear that they’re building on the Tezos blockchain.
Interestingly, searching for their software on GitHub yields this repository that hasn’t been updated for 3+ years. The specific technologies involved seem to line up with the Electis website’s advertised technologies. Although the current website is light on details, the 2021 website includes a whitepaper.
The older site even indicates a demo app, available at
Why are they so bad at this?electis.app, which includes pages that were missing from muhu.ai: Privacy Policy and Legal Notices.It sure seems that Franck Nouyrigat is physically incapable of actually complying with the laws for the countries his business operates within.
CMYKatIt’s certainly very interesting that, for a company incorporated in 2022, the “founder” joined in June 2023 to sell a business around an open source project that’s been on GitHub since 2021.
The Muhu.ai “Roast”
So now that we know who’s behind this stupid spam campaign, what was their “roast” anyway?
Unfortunately, a transcript wasn’t provided, so I had to suffer through “Greta”, bad fake German accent and all, to transcribe it manually.
Guten tag, Soatok Dreamseeker.
You stand before ze ominous gaze of your code’s judge, jury, und executioner.
Your lone commit in zis forsaken repository is like a solitary scream in ze void. A plead for mercy zat shall go unanswered.
Ah, zere it is. Ze “fix CI update deps”… commit. Zis, mine dear, ist not a commit, but a desperate attempt to appease ze CI gods. Yet I find your sacrifices… lacking.
In ze src/minisign.php file, line 42, I see your error handling is ze equivalent of a black hole–sucking in all hope of recovery. Did you think ze try-catch block would hide your sins? Nein. It only amplifies the stench of failure.
Und the travis.yml, line 13, ze versioning of PHP. Who uses such outdated versions? Your retro approach is to delight to my malevolent heart. But instead of going forward, you’ve chose to travel backwards into obsolescence.
Zis single commit has given me much power. But I vill not be satisfied with just this taste. Continue on this path, and I will feast upon your despair.
[sales pitch]
Ooh–are we negging?
Ironically, this “roast” is a great demonstration of how bad these “AI” products are. They cannot understand context. As others have observed with ChatGPT: It cannot summarize, only shorten.
My minisign-php library is a PHP implementation of Frank Denis’s minisign project. I created it a few years ago to give PHP developers an alternative to PGP for file signing. These details aren’t hidden at all; in fact, it’s in the README file.
PHP implementation of Minisign. Powered by Libsodium.
The entire purpose of the commit in question was to remove Travis CI and replace it with GitHub Actions. The .travis.yml file it tried to “roast” was being deleted.
No human would make such a stupid fucking mistake.
The relevant part of the minisign.php file that the AI tried to roast is actually a command-line script, and the try-catch block is intended to print detailed error information if it wasn’t caught by another layer of the underlying library.
If you have an uncaught exception at this point, dumping it to the terminal is the most developer-friendly way to handle it. The alternative is just terminating abruptly without any visual indication of a problem.
As Eleanor Saitta is fond of saying:
Repeat after me: all technical problems of sufficient scope or impact are actually political problems first.
Creating a PHP implementation of minisign was trying to solve a political problem within the open source software community.
The AI tools that exist today are incapable of truly understanding humans, or our politics.
Ironically, this could change if AI enthusiasts actually invested in the humanities, but we’ve already seen what jackasses like Franck Nouyrigat think about “soft” sciences:
the rest eg politics art social “science” economics should have its own special place away from real science but where it can be celebrated as human studies where people are free to explore and maybe one day find something useful
Hoisted by your own petard, Franck!
It’s not at all surprising that the person trying to badly market an unwanted AI product was most recently involved in the web3 startup griftosphere. Nor is it surprising that the sort of personality that gravitates towards blockchain and AI would devalue the arts and humanities so blatantly.
It is a little pathetic, though.
CMYKatIn case Franck, or any other startup hustle grifter, is reading this wondering why their career sucks so much: Fake it ’til you make it requires introspection and a feedback mechanism. Consider this your first iota of real criticism.
At least Postmark responded quickly to their misbehaving client.Why write about this?
The calm, sensible, and mature thing for an open source developer to do when an anonymous jackass sends an unsolicited email offering an AI-generated “roast” of one of your open source software projects, is to click the “report spam” button and move on with your day.
But this email came in right after midnight on Christmas. This was a rude intrusion into my time away from code.
Upon further inspection, it’s probably also an illegal one (as I’ve laid out the evidence above).
But, of course, that’s up to the Data Protection Inspectorate of the Republic of Estonia to determine. Or perhaps France, if that is indeed where he resides from (leveraging an Estonian digital nomad e-residency).
I chose to write about this so anyone else that feels insulted or frustrated by this AI-generated spam can find a kindred spirit in the blogosphere, and to highlight how starkly their demo highlights the deficiencies of the technology they’re trying to hock.
Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have time to spend with my chosen family.
WeaselWorksSmell ya in 2025, nerds.
#AI #blockchain #business #grifts #MuhuAi #startupCulture #Startups #Web3
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Hey mastodon, time for an #introduction
I'm a #cloud / #systems / #devops / #platform engineer based in #London, working on #multicloud #data platforms in #healthtech. Prefer #GCP to #AWS 😛 and have a soft spot for #security.
I'm a #GDE - Google Developer Expert - in Cloud Platform, and a #WomenTechMakers Ambassador 🎉 I love the tech community and try to contribute back by writing blogposts and speaking at meetups and conferences.
I'm #Ukrainian, into #photography and #fashion 👜
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Stand back! I'm doing a developer!
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Stand back! I'm doing a developer!
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Stand back! I'm doing a developer!
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Stand back! I'm doing a developer!
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WordCamp Canada 2025
This past week was the 2nd edition of WordCamp Canada (affectionately known by the hashtag #WCEH on “the socials”).
Organizing
It was my honour last year to be part of the organizing committee for WordCamp Canada. We had a great team led by Shanta Nathwani, Matthew Graham and myself.
Even with a great team, organizing an event like this is a huge amount of work. So this year I decided to step back from organizing, and instead volunteered.
The 2025 organizing committee led by James Giroux did a fantastic job putting together this year’s camp. My personal thank you to Miriam Goldman, this year’s volunteer coordinator, for making that experience a great one!
The 2025 Organizing Committee during end of camp thank yous.The Venue
This year’s WordCamp was held in Richcraft Hall at Carleton University in Ottawa. Although this was WordCamp Canada’s first time here, WordCamp Ottawa has used this venue several times for the local camp.
Not only is it a beautiful building (the patio overlooking the river is particularly stunning), but Carleton University itself uses WordPress for hundreds of sites that make up the carleton.ca web presence.
View from the patio at Richcraft Hall / Carleton University (Photo: Shawn Hooper)Contributor Day
WordCamp Canada hosted a Contributor Day. This is an event dedicated contributing back to the WordPress open source project. This could be working on the core product, documentation, accessibility, translations, or many other teams.
I chose to work on the WP-CLI command line project, adding the ability to delete all comments from a site with an
--allflag on thewp comment deletecommand. As of the time of writing this post, the pull request for this feature is almost ready to be merged.I’m hoping someone will put together a list of all the contributors that were worked on during WordCamp Canada.
The Content
Like most WordCamps, I don’t spend a huge amount of time in the talks themselves. I prefer to network in the “Hallway Track”, or volunteer where needed.
I was able to catch parts of several talks over the two days of the camps.
The team put together a lineup of talks across a wide range of topics.
Ryan Welcher presenting “The Block Developer Cookbook: WCEH 2025 Edition”To nobody’s surprise, AI was a hot topic of discussion this year, but the camp covered:
- Accessibility
- AI
- Business
- DevOps
- Development (Blocks, etc.)
- Documentation
- Federation
- SEO
as well as three keynote talks, and a town hall with one of the co-founders of WordPress.
Carl Alexander presenting “Serverless WordPress Demystified: Scale, Savings & Modern Workflows”My Takeaways
The WordPress Community in Canada is still going strong. The attendees this year were mostly first timers, with a solid group of returning attendees.
Sound like Fun?
It’s likely that the next WordCamp Canada will happen somewhere else in the country. Like WordCamp US, we’d planned to have the camp in the same city two years in a row. I’m thinking… west coast?
If you’re interested in helping out, reach out on the WordCamp Canada site, or on WordPress Canada’s Slack. They’ll be looking for organizers from around the country to help put 2026 together!
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A problem often neglected when it comes to choosing #cloud infrastructure over self-hosted is the often inevitable loss of test coverage.
I'm currently working on a project involving deep graphs, and the management has been toying with the idea of migrating the data model from a vanilla MySQL to a graph db like #Neptune over #AWS.
The data model and storage layer are usually the most crucial parts in any piece of software, and that's where you want your integration tests coverage to catch all the possible corner cases.
But where do you even start to write CI tests for a service that is cloud-only?
It's quite straightforward with MySQL. You just spawn a MySQL container with #TestContainers from your code, and you've basically got an exact replica of the storage infrastructure that you'll be using wherever your software runs.
But what about a service like Neptune?
If you're lucky and you're using a popular cloud service, then #LocalStack may probably provide you with a reliably similar replica of that service that you can run locally, and instruct your tests to spawn before running.
But more niche services, or services like Neptune that take a heavy toll on memory, aren't usually provided by LocalStack.
So what do you do? Create a test AWS account to be used only by your integration tests? And face the nightmare of how to properly secure it in a context where anybody with the source code can run stuff on your cloud infrastructure without authentication?
And how about the costs, since every request is diligently billed, even if it comes from your own integration tests? As your team size scales up and the number of pull requests, CI pipelines and local test runs increases what do you do? Ask them to run test suites only when really required in order to save money?
Any modern piece of software infrastructure must also provide developers with the ability to have a local replica that they can reliably use to test things out. Products like LocalStack shouldn't be an afterthought developed by 3rd-party companies or volunteers. We can argue if we prefer a cloud-first or local-first infrastructure, sure. But a cloud-only infrastructure is a guarantee of poorer test coverage, poorer developer experience, and probably more unstable code.
@programming.a.gup.pe -
No lo había dicho, pero hace un mes pase a usar Void Linux.
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Apple ogłosiło, że w przyszłym roku ich autorski konkurs Swift Student Challenge ruszy z nową kategorią Distinguished Winners. Co dokładnie będzie oznaczała?
Informacja prasowa
Program Każdy może kodować wzbogacono o nowe materiały, które pomagają nauczycielom w przekazywaniu wiedzy o projektowaniu i tworzeniu aplikacji
Organizowany przez Apple konkurs Swift Student Challenge daje tysiącom uczniów z całego świata możliwość wykazania się kreatywnością i zdobycia praktycznych umiejętności, które przydadzą się w życiu zawodowym i nie tylko. Od 2020 r. uczniowie uczestniczący w konkursie dołączają do światowej społeczności deweloperów używających języka Swift – w którym programują także zawodowcy – aby tworzyć nową generację przełomowych aplikacji. Kolejna edycja konkursu rozpocznie się w lutym 2024 r. Pojawi się w nim nowa kategoria, w ramach której 50 autorów znakomitych prac zostanie wyróżnionych tytułem Distinguished Winner.
W 2024 r. kolejna edycja konkursu Swift Student Challenge firmy Apple ruszy z nową kategorią, w ramach której 50 uczestników zostanie wyróżnionych tytułem Distinguished Winner.
Nauką kodowania i tworzenia aplikacji jest zainteresowanych mnóstwo uczniów. Związane z tym umiejętności są niezwykle pożądane na rynku pracy bez względu na to, czy uczniowie planują karierę w branży technologicznej, czy w innym sektorze. W niezależnym badaniu przeprowadzonym we wrześniu w Stanach Zjednoczonych na próbie ponad 1000 studentów, badacze z YPulse stwierdzili, że dla 92 procent z nich nauka programowania jest ważna, a 94 procent uważa, że jest to istotna umiejętność na przyszłym rynku pracy. Ponadto uczniowie zdają sobie sprawę z wielu korzyści, jakie niesie za sobą umiejętność programowania i tworzenia aplikacji, takich jak rozwój kreatywności, możliwość rozwiązywania lokalnych i globalnych problemów, a finalnie także czynienie świata lepszym.
Z perspektywy uczniów kluczowe znaczenie mają świadomość dostępności materiałów na temat kodowania i tworzenia aplikacji oraz wiedza, jak z nich korzystać. Badanie pokazało, że 85 procent uczniów jeszcze nie zaczęło, ale chciałoby nauczyć się kodować, a 48 procent nie wie, od czego zacząć. Aplikację Swift Playgrounds od Apple zaprojektowano z myślą o tym, by poprowadzić uczniów od pierwszej linijki kodu do ich pierwszej aplikacji w języku Swift. To doskonałe narzędzie dla nowicjuszy, które umożliwia poznawanie, zgłębianie i odkrywanie tajników kodowania i tworzenia aplikacji na iPadzie i Macu, a także swobodne eksperymentowanie.
W Apple wierzymy, że każdy może nauczyć się kodować i tworzyć aplikacje. Co roku w ramach konkursu Swift Student Challenge z przyjemnością wspieramy i wyróżniamy ambitnych uczniów, którzy stawiają pierwsze kroki w programowaniu. Wiemy, że uczniowie chętnie uczą się kodować, ponieważ pragną rozwiązywać interesujące ich problemy – bez względu na to, czy chodzi o stworzenie aplikacji ułatwiającej rówieśnikom znajdowanie materiałów dotyczących zdrowia psychicznego, czy też aplikację wspierającą proekologiczne działania na kampusie. Chcą też wiedzieć, od czego powinni zacząć. Apple publikuje nowe materiały na temat kodowania skierowane do uczniów i nauczycieli, a jednocześnie wspólnie z organizacjami partnerskimi promuje programowanie w języku Swift. Oprócz tego zapowiadamy już harmonogram konkursu Swift Student Challenge w 2024 r. Nie możemy doczekać się aplikacji, które uczniowie zgłoszą w przyszłym roku.
– mówi Susan Prescott, wiceprezeska Apple w pionach Worldwide Developer Relations i Education and Enterprise Marketing.
Firma Apple współpracuje z nauczycielami z całego świata, aby ułatwiać uczniom naukę tworzenia aplikacji. Aby wspierać nauczanie przy pomocy aplikacji Swift Playgrounds, cztery nowe projekty „Everyone Can Code” („Każdy może programować”) dostarczają zasoby, które pomagają studentom rozwijać niezbędne umiejętności – w trakcie tworzenia aplikacji, które rozwiązują ważne dla nich problemy.
Tina Lewis to nauczycielka przedmiotów ścisłych w siódmej klasie placówki Montgomery Public Schools w Alabamie. Ukończyła program Apple Learning Coach, a w 2023 r. została specjalistką z tytułem Apple Distinguished Educator. Prowadzi też szkolne kółko programistyczne w placówce Brewbaker Middle School. „Jako nauczycielka czuję się odpowiedzialna za kreowanie bezpiecznej przestrzeni, która pozwala usłyszeć głos uczniów”, mówi Lewis.
Dzięki kodowaniu taką przestrzeń można stworzyć dosłownie, jednocześnie pobudzając ciekawość uczniów i ucząc ich radzenia sobie z niepowodzeniami.
Lewis nauczyła się kodować w 2021 r. dzięki zasobom edukacyjnym dostępnym w ramach programu Każdy może kodować. Ponadto razem z podopiecznymi korzystała ze Swift Playgrounds na iPadzie. Jeden z jej uczniów wziął nawet udział w konkursie Swift Student Challenge w 2022 r. „Motywuje mnie kreatywność uczniów i pragnienie bycia nauczycielką, która rozbudza ją wśród podopiecznych”, wyjaśnia Lewis.
Poza globalną współpracą z nauczycielami Apple wspiera partnerów edukacyjnych w 99 krajach i regionach w ramach inicjatywy Community Education Initiative. Jednym z nich jest organizacja National Coalition of Certification Centers (NC3). NC3 oferuje praktyczne możliwości rozwoju zawodowego, które przygotowują dydaktyków ze szkół wyższych i średnich do realizacji programu App Development with Swift. W tym roku organizacja zamierza pomóc jeszcze większej liczbie uczniów w zgłoszeniu projektów aplikacji do konkursu Swift Student Challenge w 2024 r.
„Udział w konkursie Swift Student Challenge stanowi dla młodych twórców duży krok naprzód, a my pomagamy im w osiągnięciu sukcesu”, tłumaczy Roger Tadajewski, dyrektor wykonawczy w NC3. „Szkolenie App Development with Swift wyposaża kadrę w umiejętności potrzebne do asystowania uczniom nauce. Pomaga stworzyć środowisko nastawione na rozbudzanie ciekawości i promowanie kreatywnego myślenia, w którym każdy pomysł ma szansę na realizację”.
Nowe projekty Każdy może kodować
Przygotowane przez firmę Apple nowe projekty Każdy może kodować obejmują szczegółowe materiały, które pomagają nauczycielom stopniowo odsłaniać przed uczniami tajniki kodowania i tworzenia aplikacji, a przy tym rozwijać wśród podopiecznych niezbędne umiejętności i zachęcać ich do tworzenia aplikacji odpowiadających na interesujące ich problemy.
Projekty Każdy może kodować przeznaczone do realizacji z użyciem Swift Playgrounds można wykonać podczas każdej lekcji. Dzięki temu nauka kodowania oraz projektowania i tworzenia aplikacji przebiega znacznie sprawniej.
Projekty Każdy może kodować pomyślano tak, aby można je było realizować na każdej lekcji. Sprawdzają się idealnie zarówno w klasie, jak i w kółkach programistycznych. Wprowadzają uczniów do SwiftUI – nowoczesnego sposobu budowania interfejsów użytkownika przy zaskakująco niewielkiej ilości kodu – i wykorzystują najnowsze technologie tworzenia aplikacji dostępne w Swift Playgrounds. Podczas kodowania uczniowie mogą na żywo obserwować, jak zmienia się ich aplikacja, dzięki funkcji podglądu.
Oto cztery nowe projekty dostępne od dziś:
- Projektowanie prostej aplikacji: Uczniowie mogą zbudować prototyp aplikacji w Keynote, aby poznać podstawy tworzenia aplikacji, przećwiczyć szybkie opracowywanie prototypów i zebrać informacje zwrotne. Zupełnie tak, jak zawodowi programiści.
- Praca z użyciem stosów i kształtów: Uczniowie mogą wykonać pierwsze kroki prowadzące do zbudowania aplikacji w Swift Playgrounds. Stworzą autoportret lub pracę plastyczną z wykorzystaniem SwiftUI, aby poznać podstawy projektowania interfejsu użytkownika.
- Tworzenie niestandardowych kształtów: Uczniowie mogą udoskonalić interfejs aplikacji poprzez zaprojektowanie kształtu, wyznaczenie współrzędnych i zaprogramowanie niestandardowego kształtu za pomocą SwiftUI i przykładowej aplikacji About Me w Swift Playgrounds.
- Projektowanie ikony aplikacji: Uczniowie mogą poznać i zastosować w praktyce zasady projektowania, aby stworzyć niepowtarzalną i fantastyczną ikonę aplikacji, która idealnie wyraża ich zamysł. Przećwiczą szybkie opracowywanie prototypu, zbiorą informacje zwrotne i prześlą do Swift Playgrounds ikonę, która stanie się częścią aplikacji.
Realizowane w Swift Playground projekty Każdy może kodować zdecydowanie ułatwiają naukę kodowania oraz projektowania i tworzenia aplikacji na iPadzie i Macu. Materiały te świetnie sprawdzą się podczas organizowanych w tym sezonie na całym świecie wydarzeń poświęconych programowaniu, takich jak dzisiejszy Dzień STEAM w USA, a także Tydzień Edukacji Informatycznej i Godzina Kodowania obchodzone w grudniu w ponad 180 krajach i regionach.
Nowe materiały poświęcone nauce kodowania i tworzenia aplikacji z wykorzystaniem Swift Playgrounds, w tym cztery nowe projekty Każdy może kodować, są już dostępne w centrum Apple Education Community, gdzie nauczyciele mogą m.in. znaleźć zasoby dopasowane do różnego poziomu zaawansowania czy skontaktować się z innymi dydaktykami. Aplikacja Swift Playgrounds 4.4 jest już dostępna. Obsługuje język Swift 5.9 oraz pakiety SDK dla systemów iPadOS 17 i macOS Sonoma.
Uczniowie będą mogli zgłaszać projekty swoich aplikacji do konkursu Swift Student Challenge w ciągu trzech tygodniu w lutym 2024 r. Zarejestruj się na stronie developer.apple.com, aby otrzymać powiadomienie o rozpoczęciu konkursu. Spośród 350 laureatów 50 osób wyróżnionych tytułem Distinguished Winner zostanie zaproszonych do odwiedzenia latem przyszłego roku siedziby Apple w Cupertino w Kalifornii. Będzie to dla nich wspaniała okazja, aby poznać innych uczestników konkursu i zespół Apple. Wszyscy laureaci otrzymają roczny dostęp do programu Apple Developer Program, w ramach którego można zgłaszać aplikacje do App Store i korzystać ze wsparcia Apple.
https://imagazine.pl/2023/11/09/zmiany-w-konkursie-swift-student-challenge/
#Apple #deweloper #konkurs #studenci #student #SwiftStudentChallenge
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https://www.howtogeek.com/this-open-source-linux-app-got-me-to-ditch-the-git-command/
I am not a developer, but I do hang out with a bunch of them. I've learned just enough about programming/scripting to be an annoyance :P
So that said I'm not sure HOW useful people will find this, but it came across my Radar, "Lazygit" a TUI interface for GIT, intended to make life slightly simpler.
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Hi! My personal website is finally in its alpha!
https://jekentaite.netI'm still a beginner developer (pls roast me), the site is not super accessible unfortunately, but I managed to self-host the page on a Oneplus 6 running #postmarketos . For security reasons, I yet have to figure out a script to pause charging once the phone is fully charged, I also need to clean and categorize my 'sketchbook' page, and finish my #documentation on its setup, but one step after another...
Point is, I am looking for a junior #job or (paid) #internship in the Netherlands, Belgium, Germany, Switzerland and Austria, preferably, but not necessarily, covering my skill set of animation, motion design, visual art in general, OR my newly acquired skills of basic webdev/sysadmin work, event production/facilitation, educational roles.
Important for me is gaining work experience inside a cultural institution or ethical :permacomputing: studio before pursuing a master's degree towards media studies.Any leads are greatly appreciated! #FediHire :boost_anim_vanilla:
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“Preposterously Large and a Potential Rival to the Castle rock”: the thread about Argyle House
Brutalist buildings are the Marmite of architecture – passionately loved or loathed. It’s easy to assume that the term comes from their brutal appearance (adj. savage; violent; unpleasant or harsh) and not the French béton brut for raw concrete. One such specimen was much in the news in Edinburgh yesterday when it was announced that plans had been lodged for the demolition and replacement of Argyle House in the West Port area of the city. But while other news sources make much click capital out of it having briefly appeared in some Netflix police show or another, here at Threadinburgh I prefer instead to go down the rabbit hole of the hows, whys and whats of this much-critiqued building of the moment.
“Argyle House vs. New Barracks. A shot taken to deliberately contrast the ‘ugly’ Argyle House (I disagree), with what is frankly the ugliest part of Edinburgh Castle – the New Barracks from the 1790s. A soulless block, totally out of scale and unsuited to its context, with few relieving features. Yes – I’m talking about the category A listed barracks” (quotation from the learned Tom Parnell). CC-by-SA 2.0, Tom Parnell via FlickrArgyle House takes its name from its developer; Argyle Securities Ltd. This was an Edinburgh-based property development company that had been formed in 1960 to take advantage of the wave of prominent civic redevelopment schemes sweeping the nation in that decade. Its chairman and managing director was Meyer (Mike) Oppenheim, a prominent local businessman, philanthropist and managing director of theJames Grant & Co. (West) chain of furniture stores.
Meyer – known as Mike – Oppenheim and his wife Violet (Vi). Photo via Meyer Oppenheim Trust (meyeroppenheim.org)Meyer had done very well for himself in life and he and his family lived at the historic Whitehouse in Barnton, that quiet and leafy quarter of the city to where the real money retreats behind tall hedges and well manicured lawns and driveways.
The Whitehouse in Barnton, the Oppenheim family home in Edinburgh. The core of the building is 17th century and it was subsequently sold to the businessman David Murray and then a well known author of wizarding novels.In October 1960 it was publicly announced that Oppenheim had acquired the Royal Lyceum Theatre from Howard & Wyndham. This coincided with a plan first mooted in 1956 to replace the adjacent Synod Hall on Castle Terrace, whose occupants included Poole’s Synod cinema, with a new opera and concert hall for the city.
Sketch design by Alan Reiach for the 1956 Opera and Festival Centre on Castle Terrace and Lothian Road. The buidling with the domed roof is the Usher Hall, which was to be retained. Oppenheim had acquired the Lyceum, to its left, for speculative redelopment.Oppenheim wasn’t really that interested in running a theatre – instead he came up with his own, rival million-pound plan to transform the block into a “magnificent centre… for the Edinburgh Festival“. This would replace both the Synod Hall and Lyceum with a multi-purpose performance, entertainment and commercial venue replete with restaurants and a hotel.
Oppenheim’s rival scheme, by Rowand Anderson, Kininmonth & Paul, for the Castle Terrace plot, Evening News, September 15th 1961The Town Council approved his scheme in 1962 with a promise to lease it back off of Oppenheim once it was complete. But as a businessman known for sticking scrupulously to budget and deadlines, he soon tired of rising costs and delays from the meddling of officialdom and walked away from the whole thing. Instead he gifted the Lyceum to the city in 1964. The city tried to take up the opera house scheme on its own and had the Synod Hall demolished in 1966, but each of its multiple subsequent attempts faltered and instead an ugly gap was left on the Castle Terrace site for almost 40 years.
Before that scheme had collapsed, in 1961 Argyle Securities acquired the long-established Edinburgh firm of garage proprietors, Rolls-Royce body builders, car hirers and undertakers John Croall & Son for £300,000, substantially outbidding a number of other offers that had wished to take it over as a going concern. Like the Lyceum, Oppenheim wasn’t actually interested in owning a garage for the purpose of running it, he was much more interested in the plot of land on the corner of Castle Terrace where Croall’s had their main works.
Croall’s Motor Garage on Castle Terrace, the ornamental entrance to a very substantial works. Photo from 1915, via Edinphoto.org.uk with credit to The Museum of EdinburghIn 1953 Edinburgh had adopted its City Development Plan which had re-zoned much of the decrepit old housing of the West Port and High Riggs area for commercial purposes. This made what was then almost worthless residential land potentially very valuable to commercial developers; it was protected from rebuilding the housing and could be easily acquired on the cheap. Meyer Oppenheim was once such developer of the moment. Times were good – Argyle Securities had quickly gained a reputation for completing projects on time, on budget and for a handsome profit. It floated on the stock exchange in 1962 with a market capitalisation of £400,000 at which time it owned a portfolio worth some £843,000. Argyle added to the Croall’s site by buying up adjacent condemned residential properties between the West Port and King’s Stables Road Lane and formed a grand new redevelopment scheme. This would become the eponymous Argyle House and was approved by the Corporation Planning Committee in September 1966.
The site of Argyle House in 1952, showing Croall’s garage, and then in 1969. Ordnance Survey 1:1250 maps. Move the slider to compareThe architects were Michael Laird & Partners and the principal contractors were James Laidlaw & Sons of Rutherglen, probably best known for the enigmatic St. Peter’s Seminary at Cardross. Curiously, Laidlaw’s Edinburgh office at 24 Manor Place was shared with Argyle Securities. But this was no coincidence – Oppenheim had bought the firm in 1964 as he sought to vertically integrate his operations.
Artist’s impression of the Argyle House scheme, as published in December 1966.To mark the commencement of work, Laidlaws took out a half page spread in the Scotsman extolling the worthiness of their new construction.
Argyle House. A new building for the New Town will be worthy of the fine architectural traditions in this unique area
To finance the £1,500,000 development, loans were provided by Standard Life Assurance who also bought the site and leased it back to the developer for 175 years. At this time Croall’s business operations were sold to new owners and relocated to Corstorphine. Demolition commenced in 1966 with construction starting the following year. Argyle already had occupants lined up, a sixty-three year lease having been agreed with the Ministry of Public Buildings and Works for the entire building. This would allow the centralisation of existing government departments in the city including the headquarters of the Department of Health and Social Security and the Department of Employment and Department of the Environment in Scotland and offices of HM Stationery Office.
The lower storeys of Argyle House begin to emerge from the ground. The development dug down some 50 feet from street level, leaving the lower four storeys below ground level, resulting in some office floors suffering from a lack of natural light. In the background stands the Chalmers Territorial Free Church, which would soon be demolished. Scotsman, August 31st 1967.A two-storey L-plan block on Castle Terrace and Lady Lawson Street would contain public facilities such as enquiry counters, a job centre, and meeting rooms for the DHSS. This lower section, which the untrained eye can mistake for a separate building entirely, was faced in Blaxter stone with the pair of public entrances dominated by massive abstract concrete reliefs by George Garson: “bound to cause discussion and some bewilderment… if they have a message it is that the ways of authority are mysterious and that the symbolism of government through sculpture is a happily dead art“.
To enter Argyle House’s public-facing block, one first had to walk beneath either of George Garson’s huge, abstract concrete reliefs. CC-by-SA 2.0, Tom Parnell via FlickrRising up behind this were the two J-shaped office towers which extended down to eleven-storeys at their deepest point and were connected by a central service core. Their construction made use of the Bison prefabricated large panel system (LPS) which promised reduced costs and quick, easy construction but resulted in a highly repetitive and monotonous “impersonal egg-box”external appearance of the 4.5 ton wall slab panels.
The montonous wall of “impersonal egg-boxes” rising up behind the low-level public building on Castle Terrace. CC-by-SA 2.0, Tom Parnell via FlickrArgyle House was completed on schedule and on budget, as was the Oppenheim way, and was officially opened by John Silkin MP, Minister of Public Buildings and Works, on July 22nd 1969. At this time, with a floor plan totalling over 250,000 square feet of office space, it was both Edinburgh and Scotland’s largest commercial office and could house between 1,400 and 1,700 civil servants. At 320,000 square feet, the equally visually controversial New St. Andrew’s House at the St. James Centre took the city’s number one spot the following year (although it would not be occupied until 1974).
Aerial photo showing Argyle House (bottom left) in 1982 and the still-vacant plot of the Synod Hall above it. Edinburgh and Scottish Collection, Edinburgh City Libraries.Colin McWilliam, the Scotsman’s architecture critic (“he admired modernism, but his taste was catholic and his judgement sound“) was quite taken with the end result and tried valiantly to compare the building’s scale and architectural effect with Playfair’s Georgian Royal Terrace on the Calton Hill. He summarised it as:
A huge three-dimensional balance-sheet set up specifically to show the maximum profit to investors.
He gushed over the “pencil-slim margins in limestone-concrete” and “backwards splay of the dark flint facing below each window“. His main complaint was that too much had been crammed in to too small a site, resulting in a building that was “preposterously large and a potential rival to the Castle rock“.
Argyle House, showing the central service core that connects the two main office wings. This shows the slim, bare concrete verticals and the panels dashed in dark flints that Colin McWilliam so appreciate. CC-by-SA 2.0, Tom Parnell via FlickrMcWilliam hoped that subsequent development would show a similar “high level of care in layout and detail” so that they would “not be a denial of Edinburgh’s own character” and result in the “hell of over-intensive commercial use, of which London already [held] so many examples“. Given much of the output of the Edinburgh architecture scene since, his hopes were probably in vain.
Argyle House in the early 1970s, before the office tower block of West Port House was built diagonally opposite. This new office is already suffering from the monotonously grey appearance of so many contemporary public buildings. The red sandstone building on the right is the Edinburgh College of Art, the blue hoarding marks were until recently the Chalmers Territorial Free Church stood © Edinburgh College of Art via Trove.Scot, DP 579486Postscript. Architectural champions of Argyle House, Malcolm Fraser and the Fraser/Livingstone practice have proposed how a low-intensity intervention could make the existing building fit for the next 60 years of its life with a much reduced cost and environmental impact.
After Argyle House, Oppenheim’s next big scheme was through another company he controlled, the Scottish Homes Investment Company, buying over the rights to develop the private enterprise “new town” of Dalgety Bay, across the Forth in Fife. Laidlaw would make its mark on the city by constructing the Royal Commonwealth Pool in time for the 1970 Games. Meyer Oppenheim retired in 1971 at the age of 66, having grown the value of Argyle’s investments five-fold, its market capitalisation three-fold and its profits twelve-fold in a little over a decade. Standard Life Assurance, his long-term financial backer, bought over much of his shareholding and he retired to an active life of philanthropy. As well as the Lyceum and the vista of Argyle House, one of his lasting gifts to the city was founding and endowing the Water of Leith Walkway Trust in 1976. He passed away in 1982 at the age of 77, a year after the first section of what would become a fifteen mile walkway was opened to the public.
Tablets commemorating – left – the opening of the first section of the Water of Leith Walkway in 1981 and – right – Meyer Oppenheim. CC-by-3.0, Gyula Péter via WikimediaNote to readers: unfortunately in April 2026, a third-party plug-in more than exceeded its authority and broke many of the image links on this site. No images were lost but I will have to restore them page-by-page, which may take some time. In the meantime please bear with me while I go about rectifying this issue.
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#Lochend #Logan #Restalrig #StMargaret -
Time for my #introduction! Trying to get a feel for #mastodon so using a lot of unnecessary #hashtags.
I'm a father of two amazing #kids with the love of my life. 👧🏼 👦🏻
I am a #freelance #fullstack #developer, mostly doing #reactjs, but everything #javascript or #typescript really. 👨🏻💻
When I am not with my family or working I enjoy playing #videogames, #boardgames, listen to #music and play the #drums in my band #muts. 🤘
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Silvermine Market in New Canaan to become French bistro
A Weston developer plans to renovate the shuttered Silvermine Market in New Canaan and turn it into a French-inspired bistro with live piano music. Courtesy Pavel Jansa NEW CA…
#dining #cooking #diet #food #Frenchbistrofood #bistrofood #CTInsider #francais #france #French #lowerFairfieldCounty #NewCanaan #NorwalkHour #shoreline #WiltonBulletin
https://www.diningandcooking.com/2583577/silvermine-market-in-new-canaan-to-become-french-bistro/ -
Apple’s Video Podcast Play: Consumption Solved, Creation Wide Open
Apple announced today that Apple Podcasts is getting video streaming support. Starting with iOS 26.4, you’ll be able to watch video podcasts right in the app, toggle seamlessly between audio and video, and download for offline viewing. It’s powered by HLS, supports dynamic ad insertion, and launches with a handful of hosting partners.
This is clearly a response to YouTube eating their lunch. Video podcasts have exploded, and Apple’s been watching from the sidelines while creators flocked to YouTube for the reach and Spotify for the features. This move makes sense.
But here’s what caught my attention. Jason Snell, writing at Six Colors:
Interesting, you know what Apple doesn’t have? A podcast creation app in its brand new creative suite. Hmmm.
He’s right. Apple just shipped a whole suite of creative tools, and podcasting — one of the most democratic forms of media creation — didn’t make the cut.
Consumption vs. Creation
Apple is really good at consumption. Apple Podcasts is a fine player. Apple Music is great. The TV app aggregates your streaming services. They’ve nailed the “lean back and enjoy” experience.
But creation? That’s a different story.
GarageBand is ancient. Logic is powerful but intimidating. If you want to record a podcast with a remote guest, sync up the tracks, edit out the ums, and export something clean — you’re cobbling together a workflow from five different apps and services.
The podcast hosting companies Apple partnered with today (Acast, Simplecast, etc.) handle distribution. But the actual making of the podcast? That’s still surprisingly painful, especially for anyone who isn’t already neck-deep in audio production.
The Gap
YouTube solved this by being YouTube — you just upload a video. The creation tools are wherever you already edit video. But for audio-first podcasters who want to add video, or remote recording setups, or anything more sophisticated than “point a camera at your face” — the tooling is fragmented and expensive.
Riverside. Squadcast. Zencastr. Descript. They’re all solving pieces of this, but there’s no simple, native, “it just works” solution. Apple could build this. They probably should. But today’s announcement suggests they’re more interested in the distribution side.
That leaves a gap. And gaps are interesting.
What I’m Watching
I think the podcasting tools space is about to get a lot more attention. Apple validating video podcasts as a format brings more creators into the space, and those creators are going to need better tools.
If you’re building in this space — or thinking about it — now’s the time.
I’m a Forward Deployed Engineer at WordPress VIP by day and an indie app developer by night. I’ve been thinking a lot about podcasting tools lately. More on that soon.
#Apple #Audio #CreatorTools #IndieDevelopment #Podcasting #tech #Video #youtube -
I did it!
I successfully 2d printed a document from my framework laptop running Linux! This is a momentous occasion!
Also I get to sign this doc tonight to formalize our monthly software developer group as a nonprofit. Which is pretty cool too.
I’ve never been president of anything before. I’m going to make people address me as “Mr. President”. I’ll do this with a necessarily haughty kind of arrogance.
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CW: Talon speech to text, mini-review
I'm using Talon for speech to text on Linux now.
It can do a ton of other voice-control stuff too, potentially in conjunction with an eye tracker or pedals, so you don't necessarily need to use your hands whatsoever. In using it purely for dictation, I'm only really scratching the surface of its capabilities.
You have to be at least a little bit techie to get it up and running, and you pretty much have to be on the Slack if you need any help. I wouldn't be surprised if the documentation improved in future - it's early days yet and the developer is clearly working hard on the software itself. Meanwhile he does answer questions impressively fast on the Slack, as do some power users.
(There _is_ a fair amount of documentation already, inc for abundant customisation options - but it's not at all beginner-level. My heart sinks at the amount of background reading I'd need to do to understand it! So I've done very little customising so far.)
The speech model is imported, and unlike Dragon, it doesn't try to train itself from you correcting your text: it only changes interpretation via being explicitly told stuff, to the effect of e.g. "this name exists" or "what you've been guessing as bleep should be blorp". After about a month of adding new correction-instructions to it, and me getting used to it, I was finding it reasonably comparable to Dragon in terms of dictation accuracy.
I actually kind of prefer Talon to Dragon now, because my Dragon would crash a lot, which outweighed some of its bells and whistles, and Talon's been really stable. And I like the clarity of the correction-instructions (even if they don't _always_ catch what I meant) versus the trying to "train" Dragon on things it might or might not learn to get.
Talon's not compatible with Wayland, and, I gather, won't ever be, because Wayland intrinsically doesn't support the way it works. So you need a Linux distro which can do the older one, ISTR it's called X or X-something. As I understand it, this factor could be a question-mark over Talon's long-term future on Linux, depending on how long the older one remains supported (or substitutable). Can't forecast that aspect because I don't fully understand the relevant Linux landscape.
I'm still on the free version of Talon, and there's a paid beta with more things and integrations, including being able to teach it a variety of pops and clicks and suchlike!
HTH
-
CW: Talon speech to text, mini-review
I'm using Talon for speech to text on Linux now.
It can do a ton of other voice-control stuff too, potentially in conjunction with an eye tracker or pedals, so you don't necessarily need to use your hands whatsoever. In using it purely for dictation, I'm only really scratching the surface of its capabilities.
You have to be at least a little bit techie to get it up and running, and you pretty much have to be on the Slack if you need any help. I wouldn't be surprised if the documentation improved in future - it's early days yet and the developer is clearly working hard on the software itself. Meanwhile he does answer questions impressively fast on the Slack, as do some power users.
(There _is_ a fair amount of documentation already, inc for abundant customisation options - but it's not at all beginner-level. My heart sinks at the amount of background reading I'd need to do to understand it! So I've done very little customising so far.)
The speech model is imported, and unlike Dragon, it doesn't try to train itself from you correcting your text: it only changes interpretation via being explicitly told stuff, to the effect of e.g. "this name exists" or "what you've been guessing as bleep should be blorp". After about a month of adding new correction-instructions to it, and me getting used to it, I was finding it reasonably comparable to Dragon in terms of dictation accuracy.
I actually kind of prefer Talon to Dragon now, because my Dragon would crash a lot, which outweighed some of its bells and whistles, and Talon's been really stable. And I like the clarity of the correction-instructions (even if they don't _always_ catch what I meant) versus the trying to "train" Dragon on things it might or might not learn to get.
Talon's not compatible with Wayland, and, I gather, won't ever be, because Wayland intrinsically doesn't support the way it works. So you need a Linux distro which can do the older one, ISTR it's called X or X-something. As I understand it, this factor could be a question-mark over Talon's long-term future on Linux, depending on how long the older one remains supported (or substitutable). Can't forecast that aspect because I don't fully understand the relevant Linux landscape.
I'm still on the free version of Talon, and there's a paid beta with more things and integrations, including being able to teach it a variety of pops and clicks and suchlike!
HTH
-
CW: Talon speech to text, mini-review
I'm using Talon for speech to text on Linux now.
It can do a ton of other voice-control stuff too, potentially in conjunction with an eye tracker or pedals, so you don't necessarily need to use your hands whatsoever. In using it purely for dictation, I'm only really scratching the surface of its capabilities.
You have to be at least a little bit techie to get it up and running, and you pretty much have to be on the Slack if you need any help. I wouldn't be surprised if the documentation improved in future - it's early days yet and the developer is clearly working hard on the software itself. Meanwhile he does answer questions impressively fast on the Slack, as do some power users.
(There _is_ a fair amount of documentation already, inc for abundant customisation options - but it's not at all beginner-level. My heart sinks at the amount of background reading I'd need to do to understand it! So I've done very little customising so far.)
The speech model is imported, and unlike Dragon, it doesn't try to train itself from you correcting your text: it only changes interpretation via being explicitly told stuff, to the effect of e.g. "this name exists" or "what you've been guessing as bleep should be blorp". After about a month of adding new correction-instructions to it, and me getting used to it, I was finding it reasonably comparable to Dragon in terms of dictation accuracy.
I actually kind of prefer Talon to Dragon now, because my Dragon would crash a lot, which outweighed some of its bells and whistles, and Talon's been really stable. And I like the clarity of the correction-instructions (even if they don't _always_ catch what I meant) versus the trying to "train" Dragon on things it might or might not learn to get.
Talon's not compatible with Wayland, and, I gather, won't ever be, because Wayland intrinsically doesn't support the way it works. So you need a Linux distro which can do the older one, ISTR it's called X or X-something. As I understand it, this factor could be a question-mark over Talon's long-term future on Linux, depending on how long the older one remains supported (or substitutable). Can't forecast that aspect because I don't fully understand the relevant Linux landscape.
I'm still on the free version of Talon, and there's a paid beta with more things and integrations, including being able to teach it a variety of pops and clicks and suchlike!
HTH
-
CW: Talon speech to text, mini-review
I'm using Talon for speech to text on Linux now.
It can do a ton of other voice-control stuff too, potentially in conjunction with an eye tracker or pedals, so you don't necessarily need to use your hands whatsoever. In using it purely for dictation, I'm only really scratching the surface of its capabilities.
You have to be at least a little bit techie to get it up and running, and you pretty much have to be on the Slack if you need any help. I wouldn't be surprised if the documentation improved in future - it's early days yet and the developer is clearly working hard on the software itself. Meanwhile he does answer questions impressively fast on the Slack, as do some power users.
(There _is_ a fair amount of documentation already, inc for abundant customisation options - but it's not at all beginner-level. My heart sinks at the amount of background reading I'd need to do to understand it! So I've done very little customising so far.)
The speech model is imported, and unlike Dragon, it doesn't try to train itself from you correcting your text: it only changes interpretation via being explicitly told stuff, to the effect of e.g. "this name exists" or "what you've been guessing as bleep should be blorp". After about a month of adding new correction-instructions to it, and me getting used to it, I was finding it reasonably comparable to Dragon in terms of dictation accuracy.
I actually kind of prefer Talon to Dragon now, because my Dragon would crash a lot, which outweighed some of its bells and whistles, and Talon's been really stable. And I like the clarity of the correction-instructions (even if they don't _always_ catch what I meant) versus the trying to "train" Dragon on things it might or might not learn to get.
Talon's not compatible with Wayland, and, I gather, won't ever be, because Wayland intrinsically doesn't support the way it works. So you need a Linux distro which can do the older one, ISTR it's called X or X-something. As I understand it, this factor could be a question-mark over Talon's long-term future on Linux, depending on how long the older one remains supported (or substitutable). Can't forecast that aspect because I don't fully understand the relevant Linux landscape.
I'm still on the free version of Talon, and there's a paid beta with more things and integrations, including being able to teach it a variety of pops and clicks and suchlike!
HTH
-
CW: Talon speech to text, mini-review
I'm using Talon for speech to text on Linux now.
It can do a ton of other voice-control stuff too, potentially in conjunction with an eye tracker or pedals, so you don't necessarily need to use your hands whatsoever. In using it purely for dictation, I'm only really scratching the surface of its capabilities.
You have to be at least a little bit techie to get it up and running, and you pretty much have to be on the Slack if you need any help. I wouldn't be surprised if the documentation improved in future - it's early days yet and the developer is clearly working hard on the software itself. Meanwhile he does answer questions impressively fast on the Slack, as do some power users.
(There _is_ a fair amount of documentation already, inc for abundant customisation options - but it's not at all beginner-level. My heart sinks at the amount of background reading I'd need to do to understand it! So I've done very little customising so far.)
The speech model is imported, and unlike Dragon, it doesn't try to train itself from you correcting your text: it only changes interpretation via being explicitly told stuff, to the effect of e.g. "this name exists" or "what you've been guessing as bleep should be blorp". After about a month of adding new correction-instructions to it, and me getting used to it, I was finding it reasonably comparable to Dragon in terms of dictation accuracy.
I actually kind of prefer Talon to Dragon now, because my Dragon would crash a lot, which outweighed some of its bells and whistles, and Talon's been really stable. And I like the clarity of the correction-instructions (even if they don't _always_ catch what I meant) versus the trying to "train" Dragon on things it might or might not learn to get.
Talon's not compatible with Wayland, and, I gather, won't ever be, because Wayland intrinsically doesn't support the way it works. So you need a Linux distro which can do the older one, ISTR it's called X or X-something. As I understand it, this factor could be a question-mark over Talon's long-term future on Linux, depending on how long the older one remains supported (or substitutable). Can't forecast that aspect because I don't fully understand the relevant Linux landscape.
I'm still on the free version of Talon, and there's a paid beta with more things and integrations, including being able to teach it a variety of pops and clicks and suchlike!
HTH
-
@prex Sit down, get a snack and a drink, for this will be long.I wish someone made the federated G+
"The federated G+" was literally made before Google+ itself.diaspora*
Have you ever heard of diaspora*?
If not, let me take you back to 2010. Back then, it first came out that Facebook was spying on its users and selling their private data. In spring, four students asked for $12,000 of crowdfunding for an ambitious project: a free, open-source, non-commercial, non-corporate, decentralised alternative to Facebook named diaspora*.
The word spread like wild fire. Tech media jumped upon it. Non-tech mass media jumped upon it. These four guys were about to develop a Facebook killer! Of the requested $12,000, they got over $200,000.
They started working in May, 2010. In October, they presented a first very early alpha version of diaspora* that could only run on Macs as servers. It would take the likely suicide of the project founder, the replacement of the whole development team and several years to even release a first beta. To this day, diaspora* did not have a 1.0 stable release.
In general, diaspora* did not become the huge, super-popular Facebook killer. It always remained obscure.Google+
Then came Google. They saw that people wanted to move away from Facebook, but they thought they had nowhere to go. And Google wanted to exploit the self-same source of income as Facebook. So they launched Google+.
Google+ was a blatant, full-on, all-out rip-off of diaspora*. The circles that almost everyone "knows" were invented by Google? diaspora*'s aspects, stolen by Google. Google's entire new corporate UI design with the black navigation bar at the top? diaspora*'s design.Like, cirlces? So ahead of its times!
Again: diaspora* had Google+'s circles before Google+ had circles. diaspora* has aspects, and Google stole them and named them circles.
Google got away with it easily. Nobody knew diaspora*. Nobody knew what diaspora* looks like. And diaspora* itself had other things to take care of than a multi-billion-dollar lawsuit against a power-mongering Silicon Valley teracorporation or even a C&D against Google.The slow death of diaspora*
But seriously, diaspora* isn't worth looking at nowadays. It may have released a 0.9 beta last year, skipping 0.8 altogether. But it's withering away.
Shortly before New Year's Eve 2024, three major diaspora* pods shut down. According to one statistics website, diaspora* lost more than half its user accounts within three days. For April 1st, 2025, the shutdown of diasp.org, one of the biggest and most important pods, has been announced. JoinDiaspora, the old lighthouse pod, has been gone for quite a while now.
But diaspora*'s issues lie not only in its slow development, but also in its design decisions. It's beautiful, but it's minimalist to the point of being lack-lustre. Also, diaspora* does not support ActivityPub and never will. It only supports its own protocol. The developers have explicitly decided against supporting ActivityPub because Fediverse projects don't "implement ActivityPub", they "implement Mastodon". This, however, also means that diaspora* cannot connect to most of the Fediverse by far.Friendica
But: There's even better than diaspora* and Google+ that's free, open-source, decentralised and federated. And it was there before Google+. I'm not kidding.
Remember, it took four students, $200,000 of crowd-funding and five months (May to October, 2010) to create a first, very unfinished preview of diaspora*.
But the same year, it took one developer and protocol designer with some three decades of experience (@Mike Macgirvin 🖥️), zero crowd-funding and only four months (March to July, 2010) to create a first, very fleshed-out and useable release of something initially called Mistpark.
At this point, when the four diaspora* creators were still tinkering, Mistpark was already more powerful than both diaspora* and Mastodon are today. It already had everything a social network needs. It had diaspora*'s aspects before diaspora* had aspects and long before Google+ had circles; only it called them lists. And Mistpark's lists were diaspora*'s aspects and Google+'s circles on coke.
Since early 2012, Mistpark has been known as Friendica (official website). Since mid-January, 2025, it is the primary go-to alternative to Facebook in the Fediverse. And it has continuously been fully federated with Mastodon for as long as Mastodon has been around. Since January, 2016. Again, I'm not kidding.Friendica's descendants
But Mike didn't stop there. He went on and improved the same concept further and further by forking his own creations and advancing them technologically.
In 2011, he invented the concept of nomadic identity (something that Bluesky claims to have invented much later, but has yet to prove to be functional) to make identites more resilient against server shutdown, and he created another all-new communication protocol named Zot (today known as Nomad) for that purpose.
In 2012, he handed Friendica over to the community and forked it into something called Red, later the Red Matrix. It was the first not only decentralised, but nomadic social server application in the world. In 2015, it was redesigned, vastly expanded in features and renamed Hubzilla (official website).
To this day, Hubzilla is the one most powerful and feature-rich Fediverse server application. It is not a vague concept or in early development; instead, it has been a rock-solid multi-purpose daily driver for longer than Mastodon has been around.
Another one of its key features is what's the second-most advanced and fine-grained permissions system in the Fediverse, something that Mastodon doesn't have at all. Its privacy groups are diaspora*'s aspects or Google+'s circles on coke and 'roids because you can do things with them that are impossible even on Friendica, much less diaspora* or Google+, not to mention what Mastodon calls lists. They aren't called privacy groups for nothing.
In 2018, Mike handed the development of Hubzilla over to the community to concentrate on the further advancement of Zot. This led to:- Osada (2018, discontinued in 2019)
- Zap (2018, discontinued in 2022)
- another Osada (2019, discontinued later in 2019)
- yet another Osada (2020, discontinued in 2022)
- Redmatrix 2020 (2020, discontinued in 2022)
- Mistpark 2020 a.k.a. Misty (2020, discontinued in 2022)
- Roadhouse (2021, discontinued in 2022)
- (streams) (code repository, 2021)
- Forte (code repository, 2024)
Except for the first Osada, all of them were or still are nomadic. Except for Zap until some point in 2019, all of them supported or still support ActivityPub. And they all had or still have an advanced permissions system which, at least on (streams) and Forte, even slightly surpasses Hubzilla's. Their access lists are at least on par with Hubzilla's privacy groups.Finally
If you're looking for a decentralised Google+ drop-in replacement, that'd be diaspora*. But diaspora* is dying, and it will never federate with Mastodon.
If you're also interested in something that's even better than Google+, check Friendica, Hubzilla and (streams).
#Long #LongPost #CWLong #CWLongPost #FediMeta #FediverseMeta #CWFediMeta #CWFediverseMeta #Fediverse #Google+ #GooglePlus #diaspora* #Mistpark #Friendika #Friendica #RedMatrix #Hubzilla #Osada #Zap #Mistpark2020 #Misty #Redmatrix2020 #Roadhouse #Streams #(streams) #Forte #Lists #Aspects #Circles #PrivacyGroups #AccessLists -
@prex Sit down, get a snack and a drink, for this will be long.I wish someone made the federated G+
"The federated G+" was literally made before Google+ itself.diaspora*
Have you ever heard of diaspora*?
If not, let me take you back to 2010. Back then, it first came out that Facebook was spying on its users and selling their private data. In spring, four students asked for $12,000 of crowdfunding for an ambitious project: a free, open-source, non-commercial, non-corporate, decentralised alternative to Facebook named diaspora*.
The word spread like wild fire. Tech media jumped upon it. Non-tech mass media jumped upon it. These four guys were about to develop a Facebook killer! Of the requested $12,000, they got over $200,000.
They started working in May, 2010. In October, they presented a first very early alpha version of diaspora* that could only run on Macs as servers. It would take the likely suicide of the project founder, the replacement of the whole development team and several years to even release a first beta. To this day, diaspora* did not have a 1.0 stable release.
In general, diaspora* did not become the huge, super-popular Facebook killer. It always remained obscure.Google+
Then came Google. They saw that people wanted to move away from Facebook, but they thought they had nowhere to go. And Google wanted to exploit the self-same source of income as Facebook. So they launched Google+.
Google+ was a blatant, full-on, all-out rip-off of diaspora*. The circles that almost everyone "knows" were invented by Google? diaspora*'s aspects, stolen by Google. Google's entire new corporate UI design with the black navigation bar at the top? diaspora*'s design.Like, cirlces? So ahead of its times!
Again: diaspora* had Google+'s circles before Google+ had circles. diaspora* has aspects, and Google stole them and named them circles.
Google got away with it easily. Nobody knew diaspora*. Nobody knew what diaspora* looks like. And diaspora* itself had other things to take care of than a multi-billion-dollar lawsuit against a power-mongering Silicon Valley teracorporation or even a C&D against Google.The slow death of diaspora*
But seriously, diaspora* isn't worth looking at nowadays. It may have released a 0.9 beta last year, skipping 0.8 altogether. But it's withering away.
Shortly before New Year's Eve 2024, three major diaspora* pods shut down. According to one statistics website, diaspora* lost more than half its user accounts within three days. For April 1st, 2025, the shutdown of diasp.org, one of the biggest and most important pods, has been announced. JoinDiaspora, the old lighthouse pod, has been gone for quite a while now.
But diaspora*'s issues lie not only in its slow development, but also in its design decisions. It's beautiful, but it's minimalist to the point of being lack-lustre. Also, diaspora* does not support ActivityPub and never will. It only supports its own protocol. The developers have explicitly decided against supporting ActivityPub because Fediverse projects don't "implement ActivityPub", they "implement Mastodon". This, however, also means that diaspora* cannot connect to most of the Fediverse by far.Friendica
But: There's even better than diaspora* and Google+ that's free, open-source, decentralised and federated. And it was there before Google+. I'm not kidding.
Remember, it took four students, $200,000 of crowd-funding and five months (May to October, 2010) to create a first, very unfinished preview of diaspora*.
But the same year, it took one developer and protocol designer with some three decades of experience (@Mike Macgirvin 🖥️), zero crowd-funding and only four months (March to July, 2010) to create a first, very fleshed-out and useable release of something initially called Mistpark.
At this point, when the four diaspora* creators were still tinkering, Mistpark was already more powerful than both diaspora* and Mastodon are today. It already had everything a social network needs. It had diaspora*'s aspects before diaspora* had aspects and long before Google+ had circles; only it called them lists. And Mistpark's lists were diaspora*'s aspects and Google+'s circles on coke.
Since early 2012, Mistpark has been known as Friendica (official website). Since mid-January, 2025, it is the primary go-to alternative to Facebook in the Fediverse. And it has continuously been fully federated with Mastodon for as long as Mastodon has been around. Since January, 2016. Again, I'm not kidding.Friendica's descendants
But Mike didn't stop there. He went on and improved the same concept further and further by forking his own creations and advancing them technologically.
In 2011, he invented the concept of nomadic identity (something that Bluesky claims to have invented much later, but has yet to prove to be functional) to make identites more resilient against server shutdown, and he created another all-new communication protocol named Zot (today known as Nomad) for that purpose.
In 2012, he handed Friendica over to the community and forked it into something called Red, later the Red Matrix. It was the first not only decentralised, but nomadic social server application in the world. In 2015, it was redesigned, vastly expanded in features and renamed Hubzilla (official website).
To this day, Hubzilla is the one most powerful and feature-rich Fediverse server application. It is not a vague concept or in early development; instead, it has been a rock-solid multi-purpose daily driver for longer than Mastodon has been around.
Another one of its key features is what's the second-most advanced and fine-grained permissions system in the Fediverse, something that Mastodon doesn't have at all. Its privacy groups are diaspora*'s aspects or Google+'s circles on coke and 'roids because you can do things with them that are impossible even on Friendica, much less diaspora* or Google+, not to mention what Mastodon calls lists. They aren't called privacy groups for nothing.
In 2018, Mike handed the development of Hubzilla over to the community to concentrate on the further advancement of Zot. This led to:- Osada (2018, discontinued in 2019)
- Zap (2018, discontinued in 2022)
- another Osada (2019, discontinued later in 2019)
- yet another Osada (2020, discontinued in 2022)
- Redmatrix 2020 (2020, discontinued in 2022)
- Mistpark 2020 a.k.a. Misty (2020, discontinued in 2022)
- Roadhouse (2021, discontinued in 2022)
- (streams) (code repository, 2021)
- Forte (code repository, 2024)
Except for the first Osada, all of them were or still are nomadic. Except for Zap until some point in 2019, all of them supported or still support ActivityPub. And they all had or still have an advanced permissions system which, at least on (streams) and Forte, even slightly surpasses Hubzilla's. Their access lists are at least on par with Hubzilla's privacy groups.Finally
If you're looking for a decentralised Google+ drop-in replacement, that'd be diaspora*. But diaspora* is dying, and it will never federate with Mastodon.
If you're also interested in something that's even better than Google+, check Friendica, Hubzilla and (streams).
#Long #LongPost #CWLong #CWLongPost #FediMeta #FediverseMeta #CWFediMeta #CWFediverseMeta #Fediverse #Google+ #GooglePlus #diaspora* #Mistpark #Friendika #Friendica #RedMatrix #Hubzilla #Osada #Zap #Mistpark2020 #Misty #Redmatrix2020 #Roadhouse #Streams #(streams) #Forte #Lists #Aspects #Circles #PrivacyGroups #AccessLists -
PCGamesN just posted:
Party Animals' $75,000 AI video contest is a slap in the face to its creative team, and I'm not surprised it's getting blasted on Steam
Party Animals’ ‘Golden Paw Awards’ is a gross celebration of generative AI, and the internet’s quickly rallied against the game’s developer
https://www.pcgamesn.com/party-animals/ai-video-contest-backlash
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#Development #Techniques
You’re not a CSS developer without a reset · A CSS reset can also elevate your typesetting https://ilo.im/160pq6_____
#CSS #CssReset #Scrolling #Spacing #Typesetting #Kerning #Accessibility #Browser #WebDev #Frontend