Hard Pass

The account is an example of how artificial intelligence is being used to push political agendas in wartime

MAGA has been swooning over photos of a blonde U.S. Army soldier, walking defiantly alongside President Donald Trump to carry out the America First agenda. But there’s just one problem — she’s AI.

Images most likely generated by artificial intelligence depicted Jessica Foster wearing heels on a U.S. warship in the Strait of Hormuz, posing for selfies with Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin, and giving a speech at the president’s “Board of Peace” event earlier this year.

The account, which has since been taken down, gained more than one million followers since its mysterious creator started posting on it four months ago, The Washington Post reports.

The survey lasts until April 20. I'm glad transport Canada is looking into it.

Edit: thanks @Quilotoa@lemmy.ca for pointing out that I got the date wrong.

Early reactions to Nvidia's DLSS 5 were swift and skeptical, with some observers likening the technology to an Instagram-style filter applied over gameplay footage. Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang refuted the allegations, but subsequent clarifications have helped outline how the system actually works – and where it can fall short.

Built a small encrypted messenger that runs over any MQTT broker you host. The broker is just a dumb relay — it only sees ciphertext, never plaintext. Setup is dead simple: spin up an MQTT broker (EMQX, Mosquitto, whatever), share a room name and encryption key with someone, done. ChaCha20-Poly1305 + Argon2id, fresh salt and nonce per message. Rust backend (Tauri), React frontend, single portable exe around 5MB. There's also a clipboard encryption mode — type plaintext, it encrypts to clipboard, paste into any app. Useful if you don't want to run a dedicated chat client. Originally designed for people in censored regions, but it works as a minimal self-hosted secure chat for anyone who wants it. Limitations: no forward secrecy, no traffic obfuscation, Windows only for now. Tauri should make cross-compilation straightforward if anyone wants to build for Linux/macOS. Unlicense, public domain. I'm not maintaining it — fork and do what you want.

Looking for a simple card/cal/WebDAV server that runs in docker.

Have tried Davis, Radicale and Baikal but have either struggled to get them working or found them a bitch to maintain.

Doesn't have to be a DAV type solution. Syncing/backing up contacts and calendars from an android phone is essential.

Hello everyone!

I recently switched my Android phone to a custom ROM, and while setting things up, I wanted push notifications without relying on Google. That’s how I discovered UnifiedPush.

Really liking the concept, I decided to rent a small VPS (1 vCPU, 2GB RAM) and started hosting NTFY. So far, it's been working great. Over time, I’ve added a few more services like FreshRSS and Audiobookshelf.

All of this is just for personal use, so the resource usage is minimal (the whole setup only uses around 500MB of RAM). I really enjoy how much value you can get out of such a small machine.

That brings me to my question:

What other lightweight, self-hostable tools would you recommend? I’m especially interested in small, resource-efficient services that you’ve personally found useful.

Thanks in advance for any suggestions!

Archived link

• While 16 F-35 fighters remain contractually committed for delivery starting this year, the full 88-jet procurement is stalled amidst trade friction with the Trump administration.

• Rising program costs—now estimated at $30 billion—have reopened the door for Saab’s JAS 39 Gripen E.

• The Gripen offers superior industrial benefits, including 12,600 domestic jobs and Arctic-optimized maintenance.

• Ottawa must now balance the F-35’s unmatched NORAD interoperability against the Gripen’s economic sovereignty as the aging CF-18 Hornet fleet reaches its structur

This is admittedly somewhat redundant to the earlier post about the taskbar, but there's enough additional information that I find it worth posting.

If you were eating in a restaurant and the head chef came out from the back multiple times to loudly proclaim that the kitchen was deeply committed to the quality of the food, would you find that reassuring? Or would you start wondering why the chef felt the need to keep saying it?

That’s the conundrum facing the Windows team at Microsoft right now. Windows VP Pavan Davuluri has gone on the record several times since the start of the year to insist that Microsoft is committed to Windows 11’s quality, most recently in a post today titled “our commitment to Windows quality.” Windows 11 is an operating system that many people use but that few enthusiasts seem to love, either because of recent high-profile bugs or the steadily increasing flow of annoying add-ons, notifications, “helpful” “reminders,” and ads for other Microsoft products and services that coat most of the operating system’s virtual surfaces.

“Every day, we hear from the community about how you experience Windows,” Davuluri wrote. “And over the past several months, the team and I have spent a great deal of time analyzing your feedback. What came through was the voice of people who care deeply about Windows and want it to be better.”

Today’s post at least shows Microsoft attempting to put its money where its mouth is, as it included a short list of specific changes the company will begin rolling out to Windows Insider Program testers between now and the end of April.

Two turds