Propelloni

How far along are you on the action item?

The item is all done. I'm waiting for the action.

From TFA

> The GDPR is Europe’s defence against digital oligarchy, child harm and foreign political interference.

What? No! That's not what the GDPR is for. What a dumb take! Watering down the GDPR is the wrong idea nonetheless, but for other reasons. For example, it would tell companies that malicious compliance works.

Left of center types have worked for decades on being ignored while right of center types are going through something of a resurgance right now after being rightfully relegated to the thrash heap of history and tend to feel persecuted if someone disagrees with them. For those right of center types freedom of speech seems to cut only in one way and it, unsurprisingly, evokes more disagreement. It must suck to be right of center.

The solution is even simpler. The project puts the bug report in its triage backlog. It works through it in its own time, and decides on severity and priority. That's the time-honored method.

The compounding factor here is the automated reporting and disclosure process of Google's Project Zero. GPZ automatically discloses bugs after 90 days. Even if Google does not expect bugs to be fixed within this period, the FFmpeg devs clearly feel pressure.

But it is an open source project, basically a hobby for most devs. Why accept pressure at all? Continue to proceed in the time-honored method. If and when Youtube explodes because of a FFmpeg bug, Google has only itself to blame. They could have done something but decided to freeload.

I really don't see the issue.

> Good for you, Mark! I had a nice chuckle.

Me too! Mark S. Zuckerberg seems to be a relaxed guy with a good sense of humor. Very likeable presentation!

I still don't see why you would want Apple to have a say in what you run on your device, but you do you, I guess.

That's not quite right. There are features that are only available to enterprise customers, or require proprietary plug-ins like Sendent.

Do I need them for my home server? No. Do I need them for my company? Yes, but costs compared to MS 365 are negligible.

I like the article. And I applaud any physicist trying to come to grips with our conceptions of reality AND reading up on philosophy. That being said, he's neither the first nor will he be the last, nor is "perpectivism" in epistomology a new thing. I like, however, how he is throwing in several streams (I saw James, Nietzsche, Kuhn, and even Rorty and Wittgenstein II) of thought, centered on Kant's ideas of the noumenon and its inaccessibility. I don't think I agree with him, though ;)

If I had to label him, I'd say he is mostly an anti-realist.

What works best for me is to take a book, on paper, preferably on a boring topic (depends on you, obviously) and just start reading. Usually my eyes drop in a matter of minutes. Once I wake up, startled by the book falling over, I kill the lights and go to sleep. Works every time, any time.

If I lie in bed and just think stuff, it takes much longer.

It used to be the case that the USA was very successfull in making the talent (from everywhere, not just China) "steal" itself to the USA.

I have heard that the USA has abandoned that strategy recently, but I think it is too early to see any impact.

Can confirm.

Funny that pattern recognition does not extend to the universal pattern of "things end". A stoic would be appalled--if they'd care.

Only being discontent is too easy. What do they agree upon?

Yeah, I liked it. Pretty aphorims in Goethe's style with wide applicability. If the article had another title and no "Additional" I would not have guessed he was talking about Germany specifically.

Fun fact: I used to work with lots of Chinese people, two decades ago and mostly in France, and they loved the Chinese restaurants there. If we went out, we always went to one of the many Chinese outlets. Supposedly they were so deliciously different from food at home ;)

A quick background check on digitalsociety.coop reveals that 5000 US$/year was a significant sum for them in 2024 and that opportunity costs were probably negligible. Not everybody has money to burn.

I find the article's topic interesting, but the writing style is just... no. It reads like a True Crime transcript or really bad marketing copy. Which makes a certain kind of sense, I guess.

We saw this in the early days of chat tools like Slack, too. /remind anybody? Today you, at least, get a floating help text if not a mini-GUI within the channel once you begin to invoke.

So I'd wager we will see the same with chatbot interfaces. I furthermore predict that we will get taylor-made AI applications with a GUI that triggers specific "prompts" on unspecified datasets. "Prompt engineering" will become just another skill of professionals that have to use general purpose tools to built specific purpose tools... again.

I have no special insights, but Sony's phones seem like a good fit. They are really easy to unlock [1], but there are virtually no mods but Lineage. Maybe because they are very stock Android and bloat-free?

They range from 300 to 1000 EUR. I personally am fond of the "lower end" and slender Xperia 5 and 10 lines and the customary 21:9 screen ratio.

[1] https://developer.sony.com/open-source/aosp-on-xperia-open-d...

Why?

> Anywhere in Germany? Our pre-tax income is pre-pre-taxed. Before your employer pays out your wage, they are taxed for it as well.

What? No. I'm an employer in Germany and I can tell you that's wrong.

And now look how the "virtual numbers" allow the USA to drag the rest of the world through the mud on a nosering.

The USA was the winner in all this, but apparently the people don't feel it. What might have gone wrong? (hint: wealth distribution, not manufacturing)

Agreed. We, the Linux crowd, are pretty big on understanding what our machines are doing, which is hard with LLMs. But I'd wager that a distribution that brings a local open source LLM for system administration tasks would find interest. Train it on man-pages and off you go ;)

If your target platform is MS Windows only or only supported by MS Windows like with your examples, by all means, use Visual Studio. If Visual Studio is dictating your choice of platform, I'd consider the tradeoffs.

This principle (sorry ;)) is applicable to all domains. I'd wish I would remember this more often. Thank you for the gentle reminder!

Look, you could have said "I don't know what you mean. Explain it to me." And I would have tried and we would have had a civilised discussion why we think what we think.

But you, by resorting to sarcasm, inappropriate quotational use of a term, and distorting my sentences, demonstrate that you understood what I said and what I meant. This, in turn, tells me you think it is okay to deny people liberty, equality and justice, as long as the product is swell. In fact, I think you think that's OK even if there is no product.

I could argue some more, but this is the internet. So I leave it be and remind myself of the well-known saying "all evil needs to triumph is that good men do nothing."

Yes, it does. Otherwise we wouldn't care that really great shoes are stitched together by indentured children somewhere far away.

My sympathies, I've been there, too. You are not alone. What helped me was to talk about my predicament with peers outside my company at face-to-face meetups. It changed my trajectory and allowed me to find purpose again.

That's surprising. The last time I ran a Fritzbox was in 2012 and I think it was capable of doing that. I think virtually all routers showed these kinds of statistics back then. I'm on OpenWRT the last five or so years, so I haven't kept up, has this changed?

I wonder what this does to all the people that type even known URLs into Google instead of the location bar to go to that URL. You know, people like my parents.

I'm not disagreeing with you in regards to the state of the world, I'm addressing your suicide fantasies. Please believe me, I mean this is the most respectful way: please seek help.