Propelloni

Agreed, and to add: take a look at the incentive structures. Virtually everybody anywhere is acting rationally within the dominant incentive structure they are confronted with.

I know this seems so abstract it sounds like a truism and not actionable. Considering that incentive structures come in many guises (laws, morals, money etc.) the first thing we need to figure out which incentive structure is dominant in a given situation. An employee of a bureaucracy, for example, might share the presented moral disapproval about inefficiency but is it the dominant incentive structure? Probably not.

For example, DOGE toppled existing incentive structures, emphasising cost reduction vs. effectivity and privacy. People were (maybe are, nobody is reporting anything on this anymore) up in arms because they had to abandon incentive structures they knew to navigate. DOGE was a colossal failure because emphasising efficiency over effectivity is always like polishing a turd and many people said as much "back then" but look at the incentive structure of those who didn't and don't. Many of them have not prospered in the previous structures, so they support the new ones, even if they are insane to you and me. They act rationally.

Depends on from where you enter the street, does it not?

(I kid, I know what you mean ;))

There ist a whole industry clustered around this FUBAR that makes its living by helping companies navigate this shit. It has small and big players and they have no incentive to tell you that there is anything else you could use. The monthly Service fee is too tasty.

I'm old,too. I remember when the default fonts of the web browser were good enough. Matter of fact, they still are, but today I, as a user, have to jump through some easy hoops to get the font of my choice ;)

No, there is not a lot of squatting going on in Germany. AFAIK, the only EU countries with rather active squatting scenes are Italy and Spain, but my information is probably 20 years out of date.

I agree with your sentiment, but it would really be a great step to stop calling these things "cookie banners" and use "consent banners" or "tracking banners". Call them what they are.

Because it is not the means, it is the intent that the GDPR tries to protect you from. The GDPR (and EDP) says that tracking, any tracking not just cookies, requires the consent of the tracked one.

KDE seems to reinvent the wheel here and I wonder where they are going with that. There are pretty mature "immutable" distributions out there that could serve as a foundation and offer a lot of the same features that KDE Linux is supposed to support. For example, Aeon (of openSUSE MicroOS vintage) looks like all KDE Linux is aiming for, just with Gnome as DE.

But hey, more power to them.

> Depends. What is a country? The land borders? The people? The government? The leader? If you take out all the Germans out of Germany and replace them with other people is it still Germany?

Theseus' ship? Isn't that "Umvolkung" nonsense again? Philosophy, political sciences, and law have have rummaged about these questions for the last few centuries and have developed some pretty good answers. Of course, they are mostly not simple and all too long and intricate for this forum, but I guess you can pick up any modern book on theory of the state to get your answers.

But I get the distinct notion that you have a certain idea what a country, state, or nation is, considering the conflation with culture, and it is not very embracing of pluralism. I'd wager you'd like Schmidt, maybe Zippelius, but not Böckenförde.

No, I can't because that's not what I said.

But I can expand on what I meant. What we currently have does not fulfil the common criteria for statehood [1]. Oslo-II was supposed to clear those status questions, but I guess that went down the drain a few years ago.

Palestine is currently not meeting the Montevideo criteria, therefore recognising it as a state is incoherent. It makes Belgium's government itself appear confused about what a state is and what is not, making it a mistake for Belgium to recognise Palestine as a state. Obviously it would be in good company, over a 100 states already have recognised Palestine over the last few decades, yet, unfathomably, Israel descended further into its apartheid regime. Alas, I guess most people are not as much of a stickler as I am if it comes to definitions of terms outside of math.

Of course you can say "to hell with the Montevideo criteria, it's just a convention", but then the Wikipedia article has an apt quote by the Swiss delegation, too:

"neither a political unit needs to be recognized to become a state, nor does a state have the obligation to recognize another one. At the same time, neither recognition is enough to create a state, nor does its absence abolish it."

HTH

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Montevideo_Convention

That China is a society that strives to control the lives of its subjects in all imaginable ways. It's a totalitarian one-party-dictatorship.

I do not agree with Israel's warmongering politics and leadership, but recognising Palestine as a state is incoherent at best and a mistake at worst. What actually would Belgium recognise as a state here? How will it end the "humanitarian tragedy"?

So it is a tyranny of the majority? That's not the vibe I get from China at all.

I just noticed, with the move to VPS into the "Cloud" section, there apparently are no automatic snapshots anymore. Sad. You can still make manual snapshots or activate automatic backups, which are more expensive. Backups are saved in a different location than your server, too.

Set up your Hetzner boxes in a European location so that they are in the same network zone. Activate automatic snapshots and Hetzner does 7 snapshots (a full image of your box) a day. The snapshot is never saved at the same location as the server running your box, but at one of the other locations in the same network zone.

I can't put a finger on it but that tastes like the copyright/DRM situation in reverse.

That's a bad website but an important topic. HN is talking a lot about immigration into the USA but not emigration and the punishment the USA heaves on their citizens abroad.

I think the premise is flawed. 1st, there is no evidence that programmers do invent worlds more or less often than anybody else. 2nd, while it is a cliché there is also no evidence that programmers have difficulties or don't want to integrate into their societies more or less than non-programmers.

World building may be escapism in some cases, but the common case of world building is contingency planning. Just look at investment banking or, more relatable, getting your kids to and fro school.

Path length is still a thing in MS Windows, so be careful ;)

Whatever China does is what China does. The point is, Europe and the USA care, and patents have leverage in nations under the rule of law.

> We already had a universal copy/paste in Linux: Mark with left mouse button, paste with middle button.

We still have it, at least for text. I just copied the little quote above with left mouse highlight, middle mouse paste while writing this comment in Firefox in Gnome 48 with Wayland. I use it a lot on the terminal.

What doesn't appear to work anymore (at least in Wayland) is copying a selection as a bitmap into a bitmap editor, ie. paint. Only a few decades ago that used to work, I remember that.

Hehe, agreed. In Germany there is a saying that goes somewhat like this: "A consultant is a person you give your watch so that you can ask them for the time."

> "Law" is a silly word to describe the regulation a legislative body puts to paper, in my opinion we should stop using it like that.

I understand where you are coming from, but you've got it backwards. Natural sciences adopted the word "law" to describe some "immutable" principles (that's obviously a descriptive use, ie. our descriptions of our understanding of some observations).

The word "law" comes from moral philosophy ("what is right?" and "what should we do?") and jurisprudence ("what is law?" and "what should be law?") of the ancient Romans ("lex") and is deeply rooted in the idea of norms (as in "normative", ie. that's how it should be) we, as humans, set for ourselves. Thus it is not silly to describe a regulation a legislative body puts to paper as law. That's what it means.

Note, I'm not saying you are wrong. It's just language changing and I wouldn't worry too much.

Me too! So much so that I add it to my .bashrc everywhere.

You could take a look at guix [1], it's very much like nix, but is available as a package manager for other distros.

[1] https://guix.gnu.org/

I'm going to try that, thank you!

Great post, thank you for bringing it to my attention.

I use Firefox with standard security options and the uBlock Origin Add-On on my Android phone and I virtually never see what you describe, bar the tracking consent nag screen ofc. Maybe we visit vastly different web content?

I guess if my experience was as much degraded as yours I wouldn't bother with the web anymore, so yay for AI summarizers, at least for the time being. And don't get me wrong, a summarizer is a workaround, not a solution.

Same for Waterfox.

IMHO, with your background you are going to hate MacOS ;) But since you are smitten with the M-series just give it a go and keep a close watch on Asahi [1], so that you know when most of your hardware will be supported (last I heard was that microphones are now working).

[1] https://asahilinux.org/fedora/#device-support

Trump should have a talk with Recep Tayyip Erdoğan [1], another world-leader with a firm grasp of monetary policies.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Recep_Tayyip_Erdo%C4%9Fan