Azul, since as previously announced we're running on a tight schedule, I will go on and open nominations for Maestro of Benito for the 59th Cosă.

The Maestro is elected by majority vote of the Assembly; as of now, a majority of Assembly seats have been assigned, and therefore a quorum is present. (Despite the tight time constraints, I still wish to wait a further week or so for any additional seat assignments to happen before moving to a vote.)

Hello, I'd like to publicly share the advice I provided to the SoS as outgoing member of the CRL. Basically -- even though none of the three positions on the Committee have been refreshed since the elections, the CRL always has an operating quorum, since:

- The position of A-X is always filled, even if by a caretaker government, and even if it wasn't, the Seneschal by default performs the duties of vacant ministries, by Lex.D.1.3;

- The Senate is never dissolved, and as such, there always is a Mençei - and even when there is no Mençei, such as right now, the longest tenured senator steps in as Acting Mençei;

- The Túischac'h is the only position that is unambiguously vacant between each Dissolution of the Cosă and the subsequent election of a new Túischac'h. There is no provision for an Acting Túischac'h either.

As such, my opinion and advice is that in no way is the ability of bills to be presented in the First Clark impeded by the current situation. @GV and @Baron Alexandreu Davinescu are the current members of the CRL, until either or both are replaced by a new Mençei and/or A-X, and until they are joined by a new Túischac'h. Bills will need both to assent in order to be included in the First Clark.

(And now I'll step down and get out of the committee room, since I'm no longer a member.)

Guess I'll do the thing myself. The following parties received votes for the Assembly (five PRESENT ballots were also returned):

FreeDems: 4
TNC: 2
NPW: 1
PdR: 1

As such, the apportionment is as follows. The Hare quota being 8/11, the following situation occurs:

Party	Votes/Quota	Whole seats	Remainder
FreeDems	5.5	5	0.5
TNC	2.75	2	0.75
PdR	1.375	1	0.375
NPW	1.375	1	0.375

As 9 whole seats were assigned, two more seats are assigned to the two parties with the largest remainders, which are the TNC and FreeDems.

The final allocation is therefore:

FreeDems: 6
TNC: 3
NPW: 1
PdR: 1

Azul, this is not technically my job, but in my capacity the previous incumbent I have been invited by the Secretary of State to open nominations for the post of Túischac'h for the duration of the 59th Cosă.

As a reminder, verbatim from Lexh.H.21:

Quote21.1. At any time between the Election Deadline and the following Dissolution of the Cosa, any Member of the Cosa shall be empowered to publish and open for signatures a petition nominating an eligible person for the office of Túischac'h.
21.2. Once a petition is published, any eligible Member of the Cosa shall be empowered to second the nomination by countersigning the petition in public.
21.3. Members may not second multiple nominations concurrently; if a Member wishes to support a different petition, he/she shall first publicly retract the earlier countersignature.
21.4. Following any number of petitions, presented as above and supporting the same candidate, being signed or counter-signed by members currently representing an absolute majority of seats in the Cosa, the candidate named in the petition(s) shall be declared by the Secretary of State to be the Túischac'h.
21.5. Petitions may not be carried over from one vacancy in the office of Seneschal to Túischac'h. Once a Túischac'h is elected as above, all petitions shall be made moot.

Right, so there was no Centraseiră this week - not that we have a regular schedule - but we did sort of record an episode while watching last Sunday's ITT together. Unfortunately it ended up being not very enjoyable to listen to (we're part describing a time trial that we can't show you, part discussing random TCAT stuff) and also the wave of retirements began a mere couple of hours later, which made all predictions moot.


We've been thinking of watching together the stage 20 climbing time trial, which should hopefully be where Giro and TCAT are decided. Except, we're planning on opening this up to everyone! No need to be a cycling expert to attend, none of us is, and besides, time trials are pretty easy to understand. There's no requirement that the chat is cycling related either, both me and Glüc are very happy to talk about other Talossa-related stuff too.

(This could potentially be a Centraseiră episode for the sake of posterity, but doesn't need to be. We're just trying to have fun and spend time together. No requirement to use voice chat either, we will, but you can use text chat to interact if you wish.)


All are welcome! The only thing is, obviously the stage is at a fixed time so unfortunately we're not very flexible. The time trial is on Saturday May 27th, in the European afternoon. Indicatively we could tune in at about 15:30 CEST, so unfortunately still pretty early in the morning in Talossa - 8:30 I believe?

Let us know if you wish to attend! (And also if you can't be there but like the idea - maybe we can stage a rewatch later that day.)

We're off! In the second episode of Centraseiră, @Glüc da Dhi S.H. and I take you through the eleven teams contesting Leg 1 of the Talossan Cycling Association Tour 2023. (And we still have pretty slides. One for each team, in fact!)

Again, make liberal use of the timestamps! (I forgot about the audio cues but they shouldn't be needed this time -- there's much less random slide switching)


In this episode:
- Glüc decides he really likes naming TCAT teams after dinosaurs, after all;
- Lüc tries and fails to get more Dutch language praise out of Glüc;
- Glüc brags about rigging episode 1's credit prediction game;
- Lüc slags his sister's sprinter pick, said pick proceeds to win the next stage;
- Glüc manages to bait Lüc with terrible pizzas even without meaning to;
- Lüc is a big fan of riders he should really be rooting against.

But mostly:
- we present the rules of TCAT and this year's Giro d'Italia;
- we briefly discuss how the first stage went (...which was last Saturday, because I'm really slow at editing);
- we look ahead at the first week's other stages (...which are mostly all done by now, because I'm really slow at editing).

We hope you enjoy!

Azul all, despite my best efforts at taking ages to edit this together, @Glüc da Dhi S.H. and I are proud to release the first installment of Centraseiră, a podcast dedicated to the Talossan Cycling Association Tour! (Also, we have slides.)

Feel free to skim through the parts you're most interested in: it's all timestamped, and I have inserted an audio cue when changing slides so you don't miss the on-screen explanations.


In this episode:
- Glüc tries to get Lüc to go do live commentary;
- Lüc accuses Giro of traveling through time to steal his Lido time trial idea;
- Glüc mispronounces Italian place names;
- Lüc is accused of being secretly Flemish;
- Glüc forgets that there was in fact no TCAT team named after a dinosaur;
- Lüc will eat a (probably) disgusting pizza if Glüc wins TCAT Giro.

But mostly:
- we present the rules of TCAT and this year's Giro d'Italia;
- we ramble on about cyclists and our 2022 picks;
- we give out free advice about your own TCAT team.

We both hope you enjoy listening/watching, and maybe consider joining TCAT when signups open this week! (it takes five minutes and you don't need to know anything about cycling!)

Right, everyone has been switched to the new version of the custom theme, featuring:

- icons that should work for everyone!
- Atkinson Hyperlegible, a font by the Braille Institute that's optimized for greater readability/legibility for low vision readers
- a few minor fixes here and there
- no more native "smileys" feature: feel free to 8) to your heart's content without it being converted to the sunglasses emoji

(This was mostly previously discussed on this thread which was actually opened to discuss post-Wittpocalypse glitches)

Feel free to use this thread for feedback and weirdness reporting, especially regarding the light version of the theme, which I haven't tested very extensively.

Azul,

as many of you will have noticed, our webpresence has been compromised throughout the last two weeks or so due to what our hosting provider defined as a "rather significant failure with (their) primary server". This began with me being unable to access our backend, continued with various DNS woes causing outages for some people in certain areas or using certain ISPs, and ended with a complete outage on March 1-ish.


What happened?

Due to the failure, as you may have noticed, we lost all data that was changed between Feb 16th and the ultimate outage on Mar 1st - Witt posts and PMs, Wiki articles, talossa.com content, and so on. Again, quoting from DoRoyal,

QuoteThe front end of our hosted websites remained online, allowing for front end edits to be made. The backend panel, however, including our backup processes, stopped working completely on the 16th, (meaning that) any edits that were made after the backup process and backend panel stopped working, would only be saved to the old server, and thus, were lost in the migration.

My possibly inaccurate interpretation is: we were on server A, then our data got moved to server B, but we still were interacting with server A. When server A finally went offline (or our address finally pointed to B -- remember all our DNS woes before the actual outage?), we were left with the data on B, which was by then two weeks out of date.

What happened *then*?
Mostly restoring all we could, recreating all subdomains and moving files to the correct places so our new server/control panel wouldn't complain anymore. This took the better part of yesterday for me and new MinTech Dan T. Most low maintenance subdomains were up pretty quickly, Witt was restored around noon TST yesterday, the Wiki took a bit longer and as of earlier today is now up as well.

Didn't we have backups?
Yes, Witt and Wiki are backed up weekly. However, due to the same frontend-backend misconfiguration issue, the backups were also unable to pick up any fresh data after the 16th.

Anything else missing?
We may have lost some Witt attachments and Wiki files. This may be related to why all avatars were reset, incidentally. I tried restoring all I could and there's more backups coming that were done by our host, I'm told. Regardless, if you had a CoA, it still can be linked to from heraldry.talossa.com , or from the wiki.

What do I (the reader) need to do?
DM me if there's anything wrong or broken, and if you had a talossa.com email address, especially an official or mission-critical one, that needs restoring.

Anything else you (Lüc) need to do before we're 100% back up and running?
Yes, some customizations are missing, such as the favicons (no biggie) and Tapatalk integration. Also, as mentioned, email redirects need to be restored. All shall be done later today. That said, you are safe to use all of our services. Even if we can restore additional missing content, we should be able to plug it back in without disrupting fresh data coming in from today onwards.



Thank you to everyone who helped restoring service in some way or the other. This was in the middle of a government transition no less, so for some of them it wasn't even their job anymore. Thank you to Txec and Miestră for interfacing with DoRoyal, Dan T for helping with the actual recovery job, and Breneir for the public-facing updates.

WHEREAS there is a large legal loophole that would permit virtually any crime, including very serious crimes such as threats of sexual assault, theft, bribery, or anything else, and

WHEREAS the problem lies with the fact that we're offering unlimited and unqualified sanctuary under terms which clearly reference the medieval Christian practice of offering church protection from secular law, thereby allowing anyone to claim the right of sanctuary if accused of crimes, and

WHEREAS it's hard to find any other way to interpret this bit of the law so that it makes sense, and so therefore this reading probably is going to be a valid one, or at the very least would be an incredible complication that might make it impossible to prosecute someone, and

WHEREAS no one has yet taken advantage of it, but there's no reason to think that will last forever,

THEREFORE the tenth section of Title A of el Lexhatx, which currently reads

Quote10. The Ziu hereby recognizes the historic right of churches and other religious organizations to offer sanctuary to individuals in dire need.

is hereby stricken in its entirety.

FURTHERMORE, the words "Except as provided in A.17," shall be struck from section 16.

FURTHERMORE, the Scribe is directed to renumber Title A in a sensible fashion.

Uréu q'estadra så:
Baron Alexandreu Davinescu (MC-TNC)

WHEREAS the Bureau of Corporations was in fact used by two corporations, but it never did its job, and that's not really their fault, and

WHEREAS it's actually good to have a place to officially incorporate both private and public entities, and "please put us on this public list" is a very minimal burden on the government, and

WHEREAS the Register of Talossan Enterprises does not appear to exist and has never even been promoted and I doubt that more than two or three people know it hypothetically exists, so it had its shot over the last two years and hasn't made it,

THEREFORE the ninth subsection of the eighth subsection of the second section of Title D of el Lexhatx, which currently reads as follows:

Quote2.8.9 The Finance Minister shall create a Register of Talossan Enterprises, available to all Talossan citizens. Any Talossan who produces goods and services, whether commercially or as a hobby, may provide a description, no longer than 100 words, of their enterprise together with their contact details, for the purposes of advertisement and information. An enterprise shall be removed from the register at the request of the registrant; or by a determination by the Finance Minister that the enterprise is no longer active, or not of a character with which the Kingdom of Talossa wishes to be associated. Such determinations shall be subject to judicial review.

shall be replaced by the following subsections:

Quote2.8.9 The Finance Minister is empowered to create the Bureau of Corporations, which body shall be responsible for the registration of all Talossan businesses, the enforcement of applicable business laws, and such further tasks as may seem fit by the Ziu.
2.8.9.1 The Bureau of Corporations shall issue business licenses in a timely fashion to all those corporations and businesses that apply for one. Application is voluntary and free.
2.8.9.2 An application for a business license must include the following information:
2.8.9.2.1 The name under which the corporation will do business in Talossa.
2.8.9.2.2 The name of the citizen that owns the business and who has applied for registration.
2.8.9.2.3 The type of business.
2.8.9.2.4 The status of the business, either profit or non-profit.
2.8.9.2.5 The name and location of the business outside of Talossa, if desired.
2.8.9.2.6 The articles of incorporation for the business, if applicable.
2.8.9.3 Official articles of incorporation may be included by a corporation when applying for a license. Registered articles shall be considered binding and may be enforced through civil suits. Registration of such articles is voluntary and free. A registered corporation need not be registered in any other country. Registered articles shall be a matter of public record, and may be amended according to terms laid out within the articles.  Sample articles may be offered at the Bureau's discretion.
2.8.9.4. All business licenses shall be issued by the Bureau in a standardized format, including all of the above information, and assigning each business its own official number. This number shall be composed of three digits to indicate the year of registration combined with three digits to indicate the order a business was registered, beginning with 001. For example, a business, registered in 2012/XXXIII, that was the seventh business registered in Talossa, would have the number 033007. Changes to this numbering scheme may be made at the discretion of the Bureau, but are discouraged. Business licenses shall be a matter of public record, and will be made available by the Bureau on request.  It is encouraged for the Bureau to provide a fancy certificate to any registered business.

Uréu q'estadra så:
Baron Alexandreu Davinescu (MC-TNC)

WHEREAS one of the many things that makes Talossa impressive and unusual among its fellow small countries is the continuity and antiquity of our government, and

WHEREAS it's good to visibly preserve that antiquity for others to see, and

WHEREAS the 2017 revisions to the Organic Law were comprehensive and excellent, and their organizer merits more credit than he gave himself,

THEREFORE it is resolved by the King, Cosa, and Senäts in Ziu assembled that the Scribe shall change the displayed title of the Organic Law to reflect its legal origin date of 1997, and

FURTHERMORE that the Scribe shall alter the Preamble, which currently reads

QuoteWE, JOHN I, by the grace of God, King of Talossa, etc., etc., etc., conscious of the role conferred upon Talossa by history, ever mindful of our inexplicable and inextricable connection somehow to Berbers, moved by the tenacity of the Talossan people throughout the many trials of the past twenty years, with renewed patriotism and the resolute will to craft a state based on justice, law, and freedom, for the peace, order, and good government of all Talossans, aware of the need for a new governing document that may serve Talossa for decades to come; and owing a debt of gratitude to Matthias Muth, John Eiffler, Evan Gallagher, Sean Hert, John Jahn, Dan Lorentz, Geoff Toumayan, Marc-André Dowd, Nathan Freeburg, and Ken Oplinger, who developed the founding principles of modern Talossan governance, and to Viteu Marcianüs, Ian Plätschisch, Gödafrïeu Válcadác'h, Dame Miestrâ Schivâ, Txoteu Davinescu, Sir Cresti Matawois Siervicül, and Eovart Grischun, who ensured the preparation of this document; do ordain and establish, by and through the consent of the Talossan People, as the supreme law of our Realm, this 2017 Organic Law

to instead read

QuoteWE, JOHN I, by the grace of God, King of Talossa, etc., etc., etc., conscious of the role conferred upon Talossa by history, ever mindful of our inexplicable and inextricable connection somehow to Berbers, moved by the tenacity of the Talossan people throughout the many trials of the past twenty years, with renewed patriotism and the resolute will to craft a state based on justice, law, and freedom, for the peace, order, and good government of all Talossans, aware of the need for a new governing document that may serve Talossa for decades to come; and owing a debt of gratitude to Matthias Muth, John Eiffler, Evan Gallagher, Sean Hert, John Jahn, Dan Lorentz, Geoff Toumayan, Marc-André Dowd, Nathan Freeburg, and Ken Oplinger, who developed the founding principles of modern Talossan governance, and to Ian Plätschisch, Viteu Marcianüs, Sir Gödafrïeu Válcadác'h, Dama Miestră Schivă, Txoteu Davinescu, Sir Cresti Mataiwos Siervicül, and Éovart Grischun, who ensured the preparation of this document; do ordain and establish, by and through the consent of the Talossan People, as the supreme law of our Realm, this 2017 revision of the 1997 Organic Law

Uréu q'estadra så:
Baron Alexandreu Davinescu (MC-TNC)

I'm proud to present you...


Available both in English and Talossan, courtesy of Sir Marcel!

If you're unsure about your vote, or you're simply curious about how your opinions compare to the parties, Talomat is the voting advice tool for you. Answer 36 questions spanning the current Talossan political discourse and see which party's positions are the closest to yours.

Note: PdR has not provided answers, so it's not included in this version. I will update Talomat if/when they do.

Feel free to share your results in this thread!

Hi. Last summer, I toyed with founding a proper provincial party, but ultimately decided I had too much on my plate already. Regardless, I'm going to vote PT for my provincial vote, which means I will probably hold at least a seat in the Assembly.

In the off-chance anyone else felt like voting PT at the provincial level, I figured I'd announce my current positions, priorities and beliefs re. provincial affairs.

1) The province needs renaming. "Benito" doesn't mean "Little Ben" and it never did. It's high time we stopped commemorating a fascist dictator.

2) We need a nonpartisan, voluntary, unicameral legislature.
- As its chief proponent and former President, the Senate of Benito was a nice toy experiment that attempted to preserve the (partisan) Assembly while incorporating independents in our political system. At best, it's inefficient, at worst, it completely breaks down when the Senate doesn't even assemble.
- Moreover, it has happened time and time again that national parties win seats in the Assembly but simply does not have members to fill them (just like last term).
- Solution: abolish the Senate, turn the Assembly into a nonpartisan body that any citizen can claim a seat into.

2b) The Maestro should, likewise, not be a partisan official (by virtue of being restricted by law to be a member of the Assembly).

^{2c) The Arvitieir Prima should really be renamed to something grammatically correct}

3) New catchment area reform is needed. Ohio is not Vuodean.
- The Catchment Area Reform Act was passed at a time where, perhaps at a fault, we believed we could give provinces even more unique identities if only their catchment areas were more geographically and culturally cohesive. I think we even wanted to make provincial real life meet-ups more likely. This, clearly, failed on multiple fronts.
- Not only it failed -- it opened a rift in our province and alienated people. I will mince no words in saying, as I've said before, that this is on me.
- On the national level, by the magic powers given to me by my upcoming Cosa seats (ie, being able to Hopper stuff), I'd really like to work towards a 2023 Catchment Area Reform Act that brings Ohio back into the Benitian fold, and makes wider adjustments as a final attempt to salvage our current subdivision in eight provinces.

Hello. First of all, sorry for not doing any of the Witt-related stuff I was meant to do after graduating. I have been very busy procrastinating and brooding. I will fix that by promising to do more stuff, so without further ado:

Some of you will remember Talomat, the wildly successful voting advice tool I published for the 53rd and 54th Cosa GEs. I would be happy to resume my work leading the project with the aim of publishing a new version for the upcoming elections.

Is there any interest from people in helping writing questions, and from parties in contributing answers? If so, I can just kick the ol' Google Doc from last time back online, so we can start editing the list to make it more relevant to 2023's Talossa.

Azul,

although not a Royal Society member, yesterday marked the official end of my academic career**, and I'd like to share my master's degree thesis for consumption by our scientific community. (The presentation was a bit less low-level and might have been more understandable by laypeople, but I don't have a full recording of it.)

Since my graduation coincided with Llimbaziuă, I'm extremely tempted to release at least some abridged version of it in Talossan. In the meantime though, here's the full stuff as submitted in English:

Streaming algorithms for center-based clustering in general metrics

Abstract: Center-based clustering is an important yet computationally difficult primitive in the realm of unsupervised learning and data analysis. We specifically focus on the k-median clustering problem in general metric spaces, in which one seeks to find a set of k centers, so to minimise the sum of distances from each point in the dataset to its closest center. In this thesis, we present and analyze efficient techniques to deal with the k-median clustering problem in the streaming setting – where the dataset is presented one point at a time and not accessible in its entirety* – by leveraging the dimensionality of the dataset's underlying metric space.

(*: not accessible in its entirety all at once, I should have written. Yay for writing it at some ungodly hour of the night :p)

(**: sike! in February 2023, I accepted a position as (non-postdoctoral) research fellow, so my academic career is not actually over yet.)

Hello all, hope the UI change hasn't thrown you off too much.

We've upgraded Witt to SMF 2.1.2, which has understandably caused our old themes, the Discord embed and some mods to stop working. This was expected and nothing to worry about -- I just need time to sort stuff out.

I need to stop and take a break now, so I'll write more later as I continue working on the upgrade. Note that I don't expect Witt will need to be taken down again so you're all safe to keep using it.

Please use this thread for questions, feedback, comment, criticism and the like.

Hello, not sure who's the current Wiki admin - would it be possible to place my account in the correct user group? Þaraþias ^^

I hereby renounce my citizenship.

Esteemed colleagues, by the powers of Rule 2.4, I am hereby appointing as Deputy Mençei the Senator for Florencia, @Açafat del Val . He will perform any and all duties bestowed upon the Chair, according to the Standing Rules, until I am back from my hiatus, or more likely, until the term is over on August 15th.

I would never have thought I would need to do this, but oh well. I'm sorry to those who I pledged my full attention when considering me as Mençei, and to my people in Benito for not being able to complete the term at the best of my ability.

One more thing... do a better job than me. Don't let this thing die.