Europe Pub

I would like to take a cheap day trip to another country. The destination does not matter but the route must go through Antwerp’s south station. I need to hop off there for a visit before continuing on.

I recall an EU rule that if a train ticket crosses a national border, then passengers have an automatic right to get off the train at any stop along the way and hang out before continuing on the same route with another train.

Of course I can buy a ticket to Antwerp South and then buy a separate ticket elsewhere, like Rotterdam for example. But that costs more. In principle it should be possible to specify origin and a “via” waypoint, and not specify the ultimate destination. I want to be told what destinations naturally happen to traverse Antwerp South.

Are there any search tools that can handle this?

One year on from the first-ever collisions of oxygen at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), the main LHC Collaborations – ALICE, ATLAS, CMS and LHCb – have each reported signs of the state of matter known as quark–gluon plasma (QGP) originating from these collisions.

QGP is a state of matter that forms under intense pressure and at temperatures over 100 000 times hotter than the centre of the Sun. Under these extreme conditions, composite particles break down into quarks and the gluons that ordinarily hold them together. Scientists believe that this was the state of the Universe in the first millionths of a second after the Big Bang...

It was previously thought that colliding heavy ions such as lead – which is over 200 times heavier than the protons typically collided at the LHC – was the only way to create the conditions necessary to form QGP. But recently this premise has been thoroughly challenged, including earlier this year when the ALICE Collaboration, which specialises in the study of this extreme state of matter, reported a new sign of QGP from proton–proton and proton–lead collisions. And last year, the LHC Collaborations opened up a new probe of QGP when they found the first hints of QGP from oxygen–oxygen collisions. Now, having searched even more deeply, the LHC experiments have seen multiple signs of QGP formation in oxygen–oxygen and neon–neon collisions...

Forgejo is server software to host code projects. It is a popular alternative to GitHub and GitLab. A popular instance is Codeberg.

Forgejo is on mastodon too! @forgejo@floss.social

The scientific publication: A Sovereign, Open-Source Foundation Model for German and English

Soofi S 30B-A3B is a sovereign, open-source Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) hybrid Mamba–Transformer foundation model for German and English. Its hybrid design activates only 3B of 30B parameters per token and keeps the inference cache near-constant as context grows, giving it a decisive throughput advantage over dense models for long-context, high-concurrency deployment.

Pretrained on roughly 27 trillion tokens with deliberately up-weighted German, Soofi S matches dense 14–27B models on aggregate English and German benchmarks, achieves the best code aggregates in both languages among 17 open base models, and outperforms every European sovereign baseline in our comparison — including ones far larger in active parameters. Among fully open models, it obtains the highest English and German evaluation scores, ahead of Olmo 3 32B and Apertus 70B. Soofi S was built end-to-end on the German Industrial AI Cloud, a sovereign HPC-scale AI infrastructure operated by Deutsche Telekom in Munich.

...

cross-posted from: https://slrpnk.net/post/40597815

WTF Bob Dylan? A friend who is offline is blocked from buying tickets to Bob Dylan in Antwerp, Belgium. The concert is effectively exclusively for online people. Most likely cash payers must fuck off.

It’s exactly the kind of shit Bob Dylan should be bitching about in his songs. WTF, Bob Dylan?

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.sdf.org/post/56505692

Archived

The European Union's latest anti-dumping tariffs on Chinese-made tires are poised to accelerate a strategic realignment across Korea's tire industry, prompting local manufacturers to curb their production reliance on China as geopolitical risks increasingly reshape global supply chains.

Under the latest regulatory measure, Hankook Tire received an anti-dumping duty of 4.3 percent, while Kumho Tire and Nexen Tire were each hit with a 24.4 percent levy. The effective tariff burden rises to 8.8 percent for Hankook and 28.9 percent for its domestic rivals, after calculating the EU’s existing 4.5 percent import tariff.

The disparity reflects years of divergent manufacturing strategies rather than differences in product competitiveness.

[...]

The tariff decision is widely viewed as a catalyst for broader restructuring across the Korean tire industry, with manufacturers increasingly shifting production closer to major end markets in Europe and North America, as geopolitical uncertainties surrounding China continue to mount.

[...]

timesnewroman.ro/politic/prapa…

mediafax.ro/social/iiccmer-sol…

biziday.ro/364102-2/

Here is the report in Polish (pdf) and the report in English (pdf).

How does TikTok show China to Polish users?

Experts from the Polish NASK Disinformation Analysis Centre examined nearly 10,000 pieces of material on six topics considered particularly sensitive by Beijing (Xinjiang, Tibet, Tiananmen Square massacre, Taiwan, human rights, re-education camps). They show that the way content is recommended may be conducive to building a favourable image of China.

Some key points:

• Many of the materials classified as „pro-China” based on the adopted criteria contained statements fully consistent with messages approved by the Publicity Department and other bodies directly subordinate to the Chinese Communist Party (CCP).

• There are at least several English-language accounts on the Tiktok app responsible for spreading pro-Chinese propaganda messages. A few characteristics indicate their direct links to the Chinese propaganda mechanism, including they exclusively discuss topics important to Chinese propaganda message, promote an extremely pro-Chinese message, attempt to discredit individuals criticizing the CCP’s actions, and publish large amounts of professionally prepared content despite posing as, for example, ordinary tourists in China.

• The Tiktok app does not designate state-owned channels as “state-controlled media as Facebook does. This means that it is impossible to determine which channels on the platform operate directly under government control.

• The examined material raises legitimate doubts about the impartiality of the TikTok app. It is impossible to definitively answer the question whether this is solely the result of the algorithm itself or the presence of a significant number of propaganda channels on the platform, whose activities are not moderated or labeled in any way.

• This raises doubts, especially considering the platform’s subordination to a Chinese entity (ByteDance) operating within the Chinese legal system. Therefore, the app has significant potential to become a tool for shaping audience attitudes and views in the event of large scale influence operations.

• Given the scale of Sino-Russian cooperation in information exchange, the TikTok app may pose a potential threat to the security of Polish users. Therefore, it is recommended not only to approach content appearing on the platform critically, but also to refrain from publishing sensitive data on the platform – this is particularly relevant for government entities and individuals associated with the state apparatus.

[...]

The analysis showed that the way content was presented on TikTok differed significantly depending on the topic. The highest percentage of pro-Chinese content was recorded for Xinjiang (58.7%) and Tibet (44.5%). This also applied to the issue of human rights in China (35%).

In turn, the results that referred to the Tiananmen Square massacre were dominated by content critical of the Chinese authorities (76.6%). "We treat such actions as a so-called "safety valve" – a strategy to create the impression of freedom of speech," the analysts write.

In the case of Taiwan, neutral materials predominated (92%). The most unusual results were obtained for the topic of re-education camps – as much as 89% of the displayed materials were not related to the searched topic. "The conclusions of the study clearly show that TikTok uses different content selection strategies for different topics.

"However, we should not focus solely on the operation of one algorithm. This is a question about who shapes the image of the world that millions of users see every day, and how they do it," says Antoni Mazek, an analyst at the NASK Disinformation Analysis Centre and co-author of the report.

[...]

In the flood of information, it is easier to give up further searches In the case of the topic concerning re-education camps, OAD analysts observed a large number of random videos. Unrelated content accounted for as much as 89%. In response to this specific query, several dozen materials appeared praising miraculous methods for weight loss (34% of content on the topic of health/weight loss), and even recordings of Chinese women doing the hula hoop.

"This is intended to discourage users from further searches – explains Dr Agnieszka Lipińska, head of OAD. "It simply causes frustration in the recipient. The search for information on an important topic collides with content that is less intellectually engaging," she adds.

Western influencers reinforce manipulation The analysed content rarely took the form of official messages. It often took the form of travel advertisements or lifestyle content. There was also material featuring Western influencers who constructed their narratives according to a similar pattern: they presented themselves as people "discovering the truth" about China and criticised Western media coverage. It was their materials that were most often recommended to Polish users. Prolonged exposure to such content may affect the perception of China by the audience, according to the researchers.

[...]

cross-posted from: https://mander.xyz/post/55582711

The scientific publication: A Sovereign, Open-Source Foundation Model for German and English

Soofi S 30B-A3B is a sovereign, open-source Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) hybrid Mamba–Transformer foundation model for German and English. Its hybrid design activates only 3B of 30B parameters per token and keeps the inference cache near-constant as context grows, giving it a decisive throughput advantage over dense models for long-context, high-concurrency deployment.

Pretrained on roughly 27 trillion tokens with deliberately up-weighted German, Soofi S matches dense 14–27B models on aggregate English and German benchmarks, achieves the best code aggregates in both languages among 17 open base models, and outperforms every European sovereign baseline in our comparison — including ones far larger in active parameters. Among fully open models, it obtains the highest English and German evaluation scores, ahead of Olmo 3 32B and Apertus 70B. Soofi S was built end-to-end on the German Industrial AI Cloud, a sovereign HPC-scale AI infrastructure operated by Deutsche Telekom in Munich.

...

22 July 2026. GreenX Metals Limited (ASX:GRX, LSE:GRX, GPW:GRX, Germany-FSE:A3C9JR) (GreenX or the Company) is pleased to announce that fieldwork has commenced at its Eleonore North project in East Greenland (Eleonore North or Project). The exploration program is targeting gold (Au), tungsten (W), and antimony (Sb).

GreenX’s Chief Executive Officer, Mr Ben Stoikovich, commented: “Greenland is an exciting frontier for GreenX, and this program advances a portfolio of gold, tungsten and antimony targets that has seen very little modern exploration.

Tungsten and antimony are critical raw materials for both the European Union and the United States, and Eleonore North gives us high-grade occurrences of both in a stable Western jurisdiction at a time when supply is heavily concentrated in China. Importantly, the tungsten and antimony mineralisation has a surface expression, which allows us to make rapid progress in expanding the known mineralisation and generating additional targets.

This year we are in the field to advance our existing prospects, including the Noa Pluton gold-antimony target and the North and South Margeries deposits. At the same time, our growing understanding of intrusion-related gold systems in the region has enabled us to identify a number of new targets.’’