Interesting! I was already vaguely aware some of these efforts, but that was still quite informative. Nonetheless, from what I’ve observed, it seems that these kinds of funding initiatives aren’t very popular politically. Most people don’t benefit from it enough, and then it’s only natural to ask why we are spending, néé, wasting money on them. I think better messaging is needed on these types of issues.

And education would help a lot too - most people don’t think about where the software that they are using is coming from and that is a big problem. When you present people with two pieces of software, they don’t really give any thought to where those pieces of software came from or how it’s made. So they won’t be able to understand issues like the fact that vendors can just pull the rugs from under their feet whenever they feel like it. If people don’t understand concepts like these, then obviously they won’t understand how to avoid these things from happening!

I do think there’s hope on the horizon though. If we can brand Microsoft et. al. as American companies and successfully convince people to be more and more skeptical of the USA as a whole, then maybe we have a chance in stimulating people to take more initiative in getting off these products and adopting other ones.

We should be worried about Windows as well to be completely honest. But at the very least, it’s still more replaceable.

Nextcloud is a great start point, but it’s terribly underfunded… as are all of our “alternatives” to big tech companies.

We’ve had FUCKING DECADES to do something about this. DECADES!!!

When will we ever learn…

It’s not money they want. It’s power. They want global domination. And this is not an exaggeration by any means.

It is very sad indeed. I went through the same experience when I wanted a license plate to commemorate Albert Heijn.

Not to oversimplify but a shit economic situation was a large part of the reason the Nazis were able to rise to power.

And as I look at around at our current world… Oh. Shit.

But jokes aside, I think a lot of people are just not aware enough to realize how easy it is for extremism to fester in a society where people are economically (and morally) depressed. If you want to know why Hitler rose to power, then look no further than 1930s Germany to understand that. Our world doesn’t look too different from that.

And besides, it’s not like anyone knew exactly what was going to happen as events unfolded. Nothing like WW2 had ever occurred in the history of the planet, so even if you had a perfect time machine so you could go back and tell people what was about to happen, it’s not like they would actually believe you. People were miserably, angry and desperate… so they wanted to fuck around, and eventually they found out, so to speak.

And one last point: Nazi Germany is also an extreme example of what can happen to a depressed society, and it’s not like things always turn out the same way. I’m pretty sure that things are going to end pretty miserably before the world becomes a better place, but it doesn’t necessarily mean WW3 or another Holocaust or anything like that. We can’t know any of this with certainty - all we can do is hope for the best (and prepare for the worst, as they say).

This is the thing UI designers never understand[0] - if you keep changing shit around, nobody will ever figure out how to use it. If you keep it consistent and don’t make dramatic changes, users will have a much easier time using it because they don’t have to keep relearning the damn thing. Consistency is the most effective UI paradigm.

[0] or to put it in better terms, they’re paid to not understand this so they can justify their jobs…

While I think this is a good idea (because copyright is a stupid concept in the digital age), the problem with this proposal is that Europe is also very pro-copyright. Doing something like this would probably piss off Americans, but if it also pisses off your next best ally as well, it’s probably not going to work out.

She better not go from suck to blow…

Google pays the Linux Foundation a LOT of money.

Can we push back the deadline for the apocalypse? Have we talked to the customer to see if this is a possibility?

That’s actually very easy to do and you don’t need any special equipment. Simply use a male-male 3.5mm cable and connect one end from the stereo output of the cassette player and the other end into the microphone jack of any computer you own. Play the cassette - you can test the audio quality by running arecord -f cd - | aplay - - you will have to tune the volume output of the cassette player and the input sensitivity of the microphone.

From there, if you’re paranoid, you could use arecord to save the output to a .wav file and encode it once the recording is done, but I had no problem just using oggenc directly on the piped audio. The final command looked like this: arecord -f cd - | oggenc -q 5 -o file.ogg - (change to -q 10 if you want lossless encoding).

I’m not sure if this is the best quality per se, but I would definitely recommend it over using specialized equipment like cassette-mp3 converters. The problem with those devices is that if they use underpowered hardware, you might experience buffering issues where the encoding hardware can’t keep up with the audio stream or something like that. But doing it on a computer ensures that you will have all the processing power you need to make sure that this doesn’t happen.

Good luck! I found it very easy to do - it took 5-10 minutes of setup.

For me, the most important thing is always simply understanding who has what role in the company. When I have a question, knowing whether I ought to ask my direct manager, other colleagues on the team, a subject matter expert, other management teams, our sysadmins, etc. is the most difficult thing to figure out. It can take months sometimes.

They don’t think that way. “It does not generate revenue, therefore it cannot be allowed to exist.” This philosophy is so deeply ingrained into the American psyche that it is inescapable.

Story time: American colleague and Canadian colleague are talking. Canadian says that university costs only 5000 CAD in tuition. American nearly falls out of his chair and yells, “BUT HOW DO THEY MAKE MONEY??”

And bear in mind that he was one of the most educated and successful people I have ever met, and yet he found it so difficult to fathom that a university could exist without making money. Now with that in mind, imagine convincing a large group of average people to fund public services.

This is why the USA is the way that it is.

It is so quintessentially American that they would base their entire healthcare system around the good will of for-profit companies and be shocked when they see how that turns out.

For-profit companies are perpetually locked in a conflict of interest. Inevitably, they will have to decide between what is in the best interest of their users (or other public interests such as the environment for example) with their never-ending obsession to make ever more money. No matter what they say or do publicly, they will always sell out for more profit.

In this case, a bunch of Silicon Valley investors (people who have collectively made trillions over every iteration of IT progress) are forcing “AI” to be the next thing. They have basically decided that they want all tech progress to focus on this area and are forcing every company they invest in to make that happen, regardless of the societal impact.

As a result, you can see clearly that all of these companies (Google, Microsoft, Facebook, Reddit) are basing all their business decisions into trying to make this fantasy become a reality. Even Apple now, the masters of creating a facade of privacy is falling straight into line. And the one thing they all have in common: investors.

And that is why you should always be wary of interacting with big business interests - they will inevitably sell you out someday.

Does this mean we can freely distribute Tintin in Thailand now? Outstanding piece, everyone should read it!

None of that has anything to do with the case at hand though, and I don’t understand why you would bring it up. This bad law is being abused and just because you don’t like the person being targeted in this specific instance, it will just be a matter of time before it’s used to target journalists that you like.

I understand that ultimately argued against what the government is doing to him, but I think all the other information you posted (with no sources at all by the way) is not relevant at all and just a pointless distraction.

I’m working my way through Valheim. I started last year and then stopped shortly before fighting the second boss and never got around to picking it back up. Now I’m back at it and working through the third biome. I still have a long way to go and hope that I can continue to sink at least 100 more hours into it.

I also got Metro 2033 and Last Light on the Steam winter sale. I started Metro Exodus a few years ago and also stopped pretty early, so I’m hoping that this time I can stick with it through the whole series. I also got Grim Dawn and it doesn’t play great on the Deck, but hopefully I’ll be able to get used to it with a bit of effort.

Outside of those, Wildermyth and Brotato are my main chillout games and I’m pretty sure they’ll also get 50-100 hours each this year.