cross-posted from: https://lemmy.sdf.org/post/31629438

Archived

Finn Lau [...] fled [Hong Kong] after local officials arrested him at a pro-democracy demonstration in 2020. Months later, while he was walking down a quiet street in London, three masked men jumped him and beat him unconscious. Now 31, Lau still has a faint scar on his boyish face.

British authorities called the incident a hate crime, but Lau was convinced that Beijing had sent the men to silence him. He wasn’t being paranoid: Last year, Chinese authorities declared that Lau would be “pursued for life.” They froze his remaining assets in Hong Kong and offered a bounty for information leading to his arrest. Since then, fake journalists have approached Lau seeking interviews, dozens of social-media accounts have impersonated him, and he’s received death threats. A group on Telegram posted his address in London, forcing him to move multiple times. The intimidation extended to his family members in Hong Kong. Eventually they had to flee too.

[...]

Lau is one of thousands who fled Hong Kong to Britain once the protests started—and particularly since June 2020, when China passed a national-security law that led to often-violent suppression. [...] Assailants have stalked them in public and smeared them online. Letters have shown up at their neighbors’ doors promising a reward for turning over dissidents to the Chinese embassy. Back home, government authorities have suspended their retirement savings and interrogated their families. Some have been attacked.

[...]

Even though China’s responsibility [for assaults of Chinese exiled dissidents] is an open secret, Western governments have struggled to deter the country from interfering on their soil. Xi’s crusade appears so brazen and far-reaching that it suggests he has little fear of provoking the West. By the same measure, it seems to reveal that something else really does scare him: China’s exiles.

[...]

Accounts of intimidation and harassment have emerged from virtually every corner of Britain where Hong Kongers have gathered. In 2019, a group of men dragged a refugee through the gates of the Chinese consulate in Manchester and assaulted him. Similar incidents have occurred in London’s Chinatown and on college campuses, including in Southampton, where Chinese students attacked Hong Kongers during a demonstration in 2023. Videos of the incident circulated on Weibo, China’s version of X, and prompted death threats against the victims.

[...]

In 2023, the Hong Kong government offered rewards for information leading to the arrests of [exiled dissident Simon] Cheng and 12 other overseas dissidents, six of whom lived in Britain. Officials in Hong Kong interrogated Cheng’s family, who became a focus of attention in Chinese media. “Watching my father dodge the news cameras on television sent me into a deep depression,” Cheng said. In an effort to protect his parents, Cheng encouraged them to sever ties with him. “If needed, criticize me and cut me off,” he wrote on X. “My hope is that my parents can enjoy a dignified, peaceful, and serene old age—until our next life.”

[...]

On Christmas Eve, Hong Kong issued bounties on six more exiles, including Chloe Cheung, who was 19 at the time. “I came here to protect my future,” Cheung told me. She had moved to the city of Leeds with her family in 2020. “I had dreams of pursuing a career in business or finance,” she said. “The bounty has changed all of that.”

She showed [...] a video on her phone of a Chinese man shouting death threats at her during a protest she helped organize in November. After another demonstration, two Asian men followed her into a restaurant; she alerted the police, who opened an investigation. On Instagram and X, strangers send her sexually explicit messages written in Mandarin. Friends have asked her to stop contacting them, worried that ties to her could create problems for their relatives in Hong Kong. “It feels impossible, suddenly, to meet new people or apply for jobs,” she said. “I have no idea who I can trust.”

[...]

Alberto Fittarelli, a senior researcher at Citizen Lab, a cybersecurity watchdog group, who [said] China has two main goals when it targets activists online: to encourage self-censorship and to “discredit the targets in the eyes of the audience hosting them.”

That strategy nearly ruined the livelihoods of two exiled painters, who go by Lumli and Lumlong. When I visited their London apartment, which doubles as their studio, it was filled with oversize canvases depicting baroque scenes from the protests in Hong Kong. For years, mysterious accounts had posted hateful comments on the Facebook page they used to sell their artwork, which Lumli and Lumlong took with them when they fled Hong Kong in 2021. (A standard post: “You dogs and rioters will all die with your family.”) Many of the profiles showed signs of fakery; they were created recently, had few followers, rarely posted, and used simplified Chinese characters typical of mainland China. Experts at Citizen Lab told me the accounts’ features are “consistent with what has been observed over the years for pro-China networks.”

[...]

Archive article: https://archive.ph/kRM5f

Huawei on Thursday notched a milestone in its effort to cut its reliance on Google's Android operating system, releasing the first smartphone in its flagship Pura series that runs solely on its HarmonyOS Next operating system as well as an AI assistant it says can interact with humanlike "emotions."

Because I'm feeling like a Newman!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7lyhccGJHUk

Sing along if you know the lyrics:

Rats, rats, we are the rats,
Celebrating yet another birthday bash!
𝓶𝓲𝓬𝓱𝓪𝓮𝓵, it's your birthday today,
Cake and ice cream is on it's way!
And 𝓶𝓲𝓬𝓱𝓪𝓮𝓵, has been such a good boy this year,
Open up your gifts while we all cheer!

After spending 2024 cycling through different looks, Google Messages has widely rolled out a redesign of the text field...

It is somewhat of xy problem too, so please read the post for more details.

A bit about my background - I am currently doing Bachelours of Technology (last semester) from a somewhat reputed university. (If you belive in those sham rankings - it is in top 200 in world).

I want to do a doctorate (and stay in academia/research, not interested in industry). I am still not fixated on a particular research field (intersted by many things) but I have a strong inclanation towards one, so currently that only.

One option is to do phd in my current uni only, but thing is that my uni is not that great in terms of research (can be generalised to country as well to some extent) - mostly it comes down to lack of funding and lack of students interested in doing research, most people are interested in joing some or other industry.

Other option is to go abroad. Considering the current environment, my current preference would be "Europe only".

From what I know, doing a doctorate in most european schools requires masters.

Also before anybody says this - I know for doctorate, the school matters less, and a good supervisor matters more. I understand this, but I can not really find any way to find a good supervisor. Maybe it is my ignorance, but I have never really paid attention to any names, and If I staart looking up names, there are tons. Also, I don't really know how to rate people. One thing would be to find someone with my interests, and ask them, but I do not know anyone. One is to rank them by their publications, but that definitely does not feel right to me. Some people just have a easier chance to get in bigger journals. I know at the end of the day, citations do not depend much on journal, but still it does not feel right. Also, most newer profs are definitely handicapped here (because they just have not had enough time to get enough citations, or may be their research may not be justly appreciated)

Another thing is, I would prefer to do masters in the same institution in which i would be potentially doing my phd, mostly because I do not want to spend a lot of time relocating (I am lazy).

Another thing is - I would really prefer a school where there is no or low academic fees (for low, lets say 1000-1500 Euros, because that is roughly what I pay currently). I do not really want to burden my parents anymore, and not having to pay a exorbident amount would be a great help.

I have done some lookup - in europe, from what I can find, it is mostly german uni which are offering no tution fees (I know that is not a general statement, for example I checked TU Munich has my prefered interest as masters program, and also no tution fees, but there are more)

I have tried doing "interest" phd and "interest" masters and a billion results come, mostly reasearch groups - but they all seem good to me.

One way to compare is use the said "sham" rankings. I think they do a good-sh job in rough categorisation, for example if they say some school is top 10, and some school is 1000+, I would generally accept that (but I think in that sense, most people would be able to tell that, sometimes just by having a look). But how their rankings swing wildly for some schools, where nothing really changed, and also, they don't put out weights for individual components, they say they use n number of components to judge, and also claim n components have n different wieghts, but we don't know them. They also sometimes give subject/domain wise rankings, which is better, but there is still a fundamental problem - their sources for ranking, and being private ventures, potential for being swayed by "some people" is deal breaker for me. So I can not blindly depend on them. I would much rather prefer human opinion on forums. Reddit has helped to some extent - but there are definitely both sides of opinions present, and I can not compare.

Also if anybody wants to know how did i choose when I did for bachelours - well I did not choose. In our country we have a nation wide entrance exam, for our best schools, and you are alloted based on ranking in that exam. So only choice I had made was to give that exam.

I want to know both - in general - how to compare different schools/supervisors and more specific to me - what should I do (for this part, name of schools/programs would be helpful)

It's 2028; Trump has lost his bid for re-re-election. America has somehow held together as a single nation and succeeded in electing a new leader.

You've been tasked with designing and creating a sculpture/statue/art piece to commemorate the ordeal America has just survived.

What do you do/create?

Text/drawn art prefered, but you can post AI art if you really want. LMK if I'm posting this in the wrong place; happy to move it if I've picked wrong.

Google today previewed upcoming safety features coming to Google Play and Android apps in 2025. Play Protect live threat...

Google has finally arrived

Some observations on the model

• Gemini 2.5 pro is absolutely a beast in coding, perhaps the best model right now
• They spent all the computing resources on training it on coding data and forgot to give it a distinct personality
• Doesn't do well on reasoning as well as Grok 3 (think) and Claude 3.7 Sonnet (thinking)
• On par with 03-mini-high in general mathematics

If you're a coder, you'll absolutely love it, or else you will be fine with other frontier reasoning models (Deepseek r1, if you ask me)

https://inv.nadeko.net/watch?v=KaooeJzsRU8

Global politics has profoundly changed in recent years. Russia’s war in Ukraine, Israel’s genocide against Gaza, and the election of Donald Trump for a second time, have all shifted expectations, norms and policies. The ICC has issued an arrest warrant for Benjamin Netanyahu; after some of the most punitive sanctions in history the United States now wants rapprochment with Russia. Meanwhile countries around the world, including the UK, are cutting their aid budgets and spending more on defence.

Matt Kennard can speak with authority on all of this. A journalist and author, his work has ranged from how U.S. military recruitment changed during the ‘war on terror’, to the corporate capture of international aid.

In recent years he has examined Britain’s contribution to Israel’s war in Gaza, from the role of RAF airbases in the Mediterranean to intelligence-sharing with Tel Aviv. In this interview he covers a range of issues, from USAID being eliminated to what next for the British left. Central in the conversation, though, are the revelations he has covered in recent years, mostly in his work for Declassified, about Britain’s complicity in the genocide of Gaza. It’s even worse than you imagine.

00:00 Intro 02:48 Trump is right to end USAID - but for the wrong reasons 21:08 US-funded media or American propaganda? 45:10 The British legacy media is compromised 58:26 The need for independent progressive media 01:06:30 The military base on Cyprus: a remnant of British empire 01:14:28 Direct British military involvement in Gaza 01:30:47 Europe remilitarising 01:39:26 Will Russian invade further into Europe? 01:49:40 When is “defence” spending really justified? 01:57:17 Why the UK needs a new progressive party 02:03:16 The future of British politics

Learning a lot here. The RAF flew 47% of recon flights over Gaza in the current genocide. British police raided journalists homes and took their electronics without charging them with anything. Britain retained 3% of Cyprus (for bases) when Cyprus became independent, etc.

Maybe then she'll SHUT UP! Oh my god, is there a single person on this platform who doesn't get these messages every month???

Guys, you all KNOW what I'm talking about, right? Gonna have to go get Tim Misney on this case! And you KNOW what he DOES! eyebrows