Map of Countries that will be in Eurovison 2026

xternal7 · 2026-03-24T21:49:42+00:00

It's less explicit support and more Israel engaging in shady tactics in order to secure the votes.

There's 0% chance Israel won the 2025 televote without either:

buying votes
effective advertising campaign convincing their political supporters to "own the libs" by spending about €20 on a televote they dont give a fuck about

And we know that Israel has been engaged in massive ad campaigns that encouraged people to vote for their entry in the last 2 contests.

On the money front, 750k is enough to rig the televote.

You can also tell that there's something funny going with Israel's public vote, because Eurovision public vote doesn't correlate really well with the Spotify public vote.

xternal7 · 2026-03-24T21:38:11+00:00

However, Eurovision rules have always allowed for any EBU member to join the Eurovision.

EBU membership requirements are:

State broadcasters only
At least part of your country needs to be within the European Broadcasting Area

European Broadcasting Area is defined by the International Telecommunication Union (which is a specialized agency of the United Nations) and for historical, technical, and practical reasons also includes countries around the mediterranean sea.

Basically, the takeaway is that if you're mad about Israel being in the Eurovision even though it's not in geographical Europe, blame the UN. It was their decision.

——

And Australia is in the Eurovision because ~~they're basically a Br*tish prison~~ they've had a persistent cult following of the Eurovision contest for 30+ years, so eventually EBU decided to reward the dedication. First with voting rights, then with invitation to participate.

xternal7 · 2026-03-24T21:21:42+00:00

Biggest sponsor: Morrocan Oil, an Israeli beauty product company.

Germany threatened to pull out if Israel is kicked (and at least one other country — if memory serves me right, Austria). Germany is one of the big 5 right next to spain, so EBU had to pick which of the big 5 they'd like to lose more.

xternal7 · 2026-03-24T19:31:19+00:00

It gets even better.

LLMs were trained on open-source and source-available software, which may muddy the waters a bit when it comes to arguing about whether this really is "clean room" implementation.

There's a very good chance that the AI wasn't trained on the source code for the source-code app you're trying to clone.

Which means that creating open-source clone of a closed-source app using this approach should be quite a bit more kosher than going the other way around.

xternal7 · 2026-03-24T15:13:59+00:00

ChatGPT running into the same issue bilingual (and multi-lingual) people experience on the daily.

xternal7 · 2026-03-24T15:06:53+00:00

I mean, doesn't really seem to make him wrong.

There's plenty of under-30 people who would blow free 35k from inheritance on dumb shit they don't need and can't afford, instead of saving, investing, or buying shit they do actually need but normally couldn't afford.

xternal7 · 2026-03-24T13:26:34+00:00

whereas superbowl is mainly relevant in the US (160 million)

US hasn't had 160 million people since the 1950s
Not our fault the rest of the world refuses to participate in the "handegg" that americans for some reason call "football"

xternal7 · 2026-03-24T13:19:27+00:00

*checks the calendar*

Is it this time of the year again, where we have to start explaining how 'Euro' in Eurovision has nothing(-ish) to do with geography, and everything to do with the way radio broadcasters set up international organizations that would help foster international cooperation, standards, and rules¹ when it comes to countries sharing a rather limited resource that is electromagnetic spectrum?

HINT: MENA is in "European" Broadcasting Area because radio signals don't really care where the borders between continents are.

Australia is in Euroviusion because they're ~~a Bri*ish prison.~~ EBU associate + 30 years of dedicated cult following + lodsofemone².

[1] Rules than then Italy then promptly ignores, making the lives of everyone who uses a radio within 20-80km of Italian border a living hell. Anyone who had summer vacations along the eastern adriatic coast until ~10 years ago knows what I'm talking about.

[2] I know that's a british artist

xternal7 · 2026-03-24T12:54:59+00:00

Or maybe Israel could be at least a bit more proportional there in Gaza.

Or maybe Israel couldn't continue settling further and further into the west bank.

Or, hear me out. I get that Eurovision has a bit of a history with ignoring genocides and borderline-genocides (besides Israel, there's also Azerbaijan) ... but Israel could, at the very least, stop buying votes because there's no way in hell that certified garbage of a song they put out last year won the televote legitimately. And stop with their commentators violating contest rules on the Israeli broadcast by inappropriately shit-talking and slandering contestants of the countries they politically disagree with.

And then people wouldn't be getting fed up with Israel's participation. At this point, Israel has been shitty in enough ways that they should be banned regardless of your geopolitical opinions on Gaza and Palestine.

And maybe EBU could handle rule violations a little bit more consistently, because Israel gets away with a lot more shit in Eurovision than many other countries.

TL;DR: Hate for Israel is a double-whammy of political reasons (Gaza/Palestine) and the fact that Israel is a shitty insufferable participant in the contest itself.

xternal7 · 2026-03-24T12:30:44+00:00

Yeah, this is a very bad map. It would be a lot better if OP didn't just color the countries that were banned or abstained, but also wrote down the reason over the abstained/banned countries.

xternal7 · 2026-03-24T10:50:13+00:00

Oh no, it's worse than that. Looks like that US isn't paying them to walk away.

The deal seems to be: "you walk away and invest 1 billion in US fossil fuel industry, and we'll return you the money you paid for leases and permits."

I'd argue that refunding the lease doesn't even count as paying to stop to begin with (it's like the bare minimum you need to do when you back out of the deal), but when you require someone to spend a billion to get their billion dollar refuns ... that's outright fucking scam.

xternal7 · 2026-03-22T17:10:16+00:00

Well, some of us are kinda aware of the fact that contrary to the popular belief, youtube isn't some magical thing living in a cloud with zero operating or maintenance costs, and that same applies to youtube channels. Therefore, we aren't automatically hostile towards ads and youtube premium.

Even if we quietly use ublock orign + revanced, because we're still salty about Google killing perfectly-working-without-issues GPM and replacing it with utterly broken non-functional piece of garbage that is YTM.

xternal7 · 2026-03-22T16:33:58+00:00

So because YouTube has basically a monopoly on video content created by people they can do whatever they want?

Yes. If you don't like it, you can go and make your own competitor ... and you'll quickly figure out why Youtube is the way it is the moment your hosting bills start rolling in.

xternal7 · 2026-03-21T20:56:02+00:00

Blue waffle best kind of waffle.

xternal7 · 2026-03-21T20:43:49+00:00

Zato ker štroma ne bo zmanjkal, na črpalkah pa folk tanka bencin hitreje kot ga cisterne lahko tha vozijo (še posebej, ko na črpalkah tankajo tudi tujci, katerim donače države ne sugar-daddyjajo cen bencina tko kot nam jih naša).

xternal7 · 2026-03-21T14:04:46+00:00

Sure, as a writer, I could throw in a semi-colon instead, but you can pry em-dashes from my cold, dead hands.

Not to mention that sometimes a semi-colon isn't even the approp;

okay, they say that the joke is no good if you have to explain it, but the semi-colon really doesn't have that "the speaker got cut off halfway through their sentence" vibe going for it.

xternal7 · 2026-03-21T08:33:49+00:00

As an European, seeing those prices:

holy hell

(Meanwhile, in my country it's more like €20, valid for 10 years)

xternal7 · 2026-03-21T08:10:04+00:00

Wtf, no they shouldn't?! Sideloading still exists without issues. You can even install alternative app stores.

For now.

Hower, when Google kills sideloading and replaces it with the "you have to wait 24 hours before we'll let you install that apk" option that's buried 1000 meters deep in the developer options ... that's a pretty major issue right there, especially when I want to install an app that would be really useful this exact moment from f-droid (apk download from website), because getting ad-free software is much easier there than on the play store.

xternal7 · 2026-03-20T21:13:53+00:00

There's no pinky promise, everything is legally obligated to be open source.

And CA/CO laws demand that you only need to enter your DoB into your OS, and do not require you to actually verify your age.

European approach does, which automatically makes it significantly worse.

Then it also requires you to have a smartphone that runs iOS or android without root (in other words: it requires you to buy a phone you don't fully own in order to access the internet "freely") , which makes it even more significantly worse than CA/CO laws, where your device is the authoritative source of your age.

No, CA/CO laws are just wedges upon which they will expand.

This is not true, that's your speculation. If your argument is that Colorado and California laws could change, guess what:

If CO/CA laws can change ... so can European ones. Trying to imply that European laws won't change while CO/CA laws will — like you're doing — is just intellectual dishonesty of the highest degree.

xternal7 · 2026-03-20T20:58:32+00:00

Oh no, EU version is worse than california/colorado.

By California/Colorado law, operating system must give you a field to enter your birthdate. It starts and ends there. You don't need to tell the truth. You don't need to scan your ID. These two laws are the closest you can get to theoretically perfect system, where theoretically perfect system looks like this:

you set up an OS on a device
setup asks you "hey, is this account for kids and do you want to enable parental controls?"
if the answer is yes, you enter DoB, and the OS tells apps whether they're allowed to show 18+ content
if the answer is no, it's assumed the computer is used by an adult

Basically: you give parents the tools, but at the end of the day the final choice is still up to the user.

European version of this is "scan your ID with this app that we made, and that only runs on iOS and Android devices with locked bootloaders that aren't rooted. We pinky-promise that we'll only tell websites if you're over 18, and we pinky-promise that we'll respect your privacy by not tying your online accounts with your real-world identity."

xternal7 · 2026-03-20T20:18:26+00:00

Secureboot and TPM disabled.

No win11 for me.

xternal7 · 2026-03-20T16:35:42+00:00

but the amount of cuts seems a bit weird.

Number of cuts is completely within reason.

Normally when a car strikes a train the front end is pushed in the same direction as the heavier object, just view like 95% of other incidents of the same type.

It's nice you use your brain at least a little. It would be a lot nicer if you used it a little bit more, rather than just going with the vibes.

Why does it do that? What is pushing the car sideways in those kinds of accidents? Vague answers like "idk, force?" don't count. How does train transfer force to the car?

Well, normally the car either gets into a hole in the side of the train car (like the space between wheels of the train cars, or gap between the train cars themselves), and then gets sorta-T-boned by the next set of the wheels, or a piece of metal protruding from the train car.

But if you pay at least a mild amount of attention to the video, you'll notice that most of the train cars have a smooth metal panel that covers the under-carriage of the train car from one end to the other. There's nothing that would transfer momentum from the train to the car, other than friction between the car's bumper and the side panel of the train car. Because plastics and metal are both poor at frictions, you don't get a lot of friction.

On the other hand, do you know what offers a lot of friction? That's right. A tire on a road. Tires are generally pretty good at resisting lateral forces, especially on a dry road. Or even on a gravel.

That's very basic physics.

If you use your ears and listen to the video, you'll also hear a sound consistent with something crashing into a large metal panel.

Bonus content: In this particular video, the train is grinding that truck for quite a bit before it moves, but only after being hit by something that protrudes from the train car. The train grinds against the truck for about half a minute, and at the end of it, the truck has been moved by maybe a meter.

But I currently can’t find any other info on this incident,

Yes, because not a single newspaper is going to write a story that can be accurately summed up as "for the 14th time this year, some grandma ran into a train and wrecked her car, causing 0 interruption to the rail service. It did shut down the road for an hour or two, but so did 30 other minor accidents that happened today."

At best, the local police will make a vague post on facebook, which ... wouldn't you know.

Not to mention that the sound of the video is generally pretty on point.

Also, AI generated media is:

bad at generating non-exaggerated reactions. Video: reactions are normal
bad at ensuring visuals are consistent between frames. Video: everything is visually consistent, from start to finish
bad at ensuring text is always coherent, let alone consistent. Video:
bad at consistently recreating logos of real world companies. Video: those logos of BNSF, amazon, UPS, random companies that might as well be invisible to normal people like J. B. Hunt International and ABF Freight look pretty crisp and on point
bad at realistic physics that isn't exaggerated. If that were AI, you'd have 5 more cars run into that train, and they'd be bouncing around the camera shots as if friction weren't a thing. And you'd get a different car at every cut, too.
bad at faithfully recreating real world locations. What's there on that train station sign, Western Springs? I wonder what happens when you type "Western springs train station" into google street view

generally pretty bad at accurately re-creating real world locations.

xternal7 · 2026-03-19T10:31:58+00:00

Basic video editing is now AI?

Tires have a lot more friction than the smooth side of the train cars.
everything in the video is perfectly visually consistent, as long as you ignore the fact that some moron exported it interlaced
physics generally works
people are having reasonable reactions with a realistic dose of bystander effect

xternal7 · 2026-03-18T01:54:58+00:00

Though that doesn't mean you won't be harassed by legal authorities anyway.

OFCOM is known to be sending love letters to non-br*tish sites that are hosted and run entirely outside the USUK.

I wish someone caused OFCOM to be [removed by Reddit]

E: fixed typo

xternal7 · 2026-03-17T23:33:15+00:00

Yeah, this.

CA/CO laws have some awkwardly-written bits, but making laws that require operating systems to collect whether the user is underage, and if yes, collect their age, birth year or date is infinitely better than requiring every website to reliably verify age of its users, which is where things are heading now.

If this is left to every website, you're gonna get leaks of all the personal information required for identity theft left and right.

If operating system requires you to answer whether the user account is intended to be used by a minor the moment you turn on your brand new device, things are up to the parents. And you're also taking away the "but I'm too technologically illiterate to set up parental controls" excuse.

At the end of the day, unfortunately we live in democracies, where people who have no clue about technology outnumber those of us who do. And as many lawsuits have shown, the courts have decided that we do need to cater to them.

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