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goobatrooba

405 karma · joined September 13, 2025

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goobatrooba··on We Asked Starbucks Why Their 'Sugar-Free' Drinks Have Sugar
It seems to go further. They must be intentionally adding ingredients that have a high sugar content, else they would never get to the 21g of sugar in a 21oz drink, as mentioned by the article.
goobatrooba··on Penguin Mail – open-source Rust email client for Linux with AI
How so? Any specific critique? Ive been using Thunderbird tot décades and while e-mail seems to have some inherent clunkiness I find it overall quite fine.
goobatrooba··on Treachery in the Rodin Museum 3D scan verdict
Very interesting discussion. Others here note a general question whether FOI laws are really intended to address such documents. But I have also another angle:

Generally a public preservation grant will have conditions, especially if EU funded (not mentioned but well likely as EU finances huge digitalisation efforts).

I'm surprised the author does not mention these grant documents which financed the digitalisation. I would expect these to have provisions on sharing/making available/publication. If they do you have a separate case: breach of contract (of either national or EU provisions). This would lead to financial penalties and generally wake the institutions up.

https://www.europeana.eu/en

https://digital-strategy.ec.europa.eu/en/library/basic-princ...

goobatrooba··on Court agrees with EFF: Utah's VPN law demands a technical impossibility
Easy, no one seems to care about nude men so all you need is an indication of the range of women's skin shown

* Face showing - banned in middle Eastern Muslim countries * Bellies showing - banned in south east Asian Muslim countries * Ankle showing - banned in India * Shoulders showing - banned in catholic countries * ... * Nipples showing - banned in US * Genitals showing - banned in Japan * Personal name mentioned without a personal data release form - banned in Germany * (End of list)

If necessary can be supplemented by a range of the commonly accepted levels of male nudity * Any skin showing - banned in Vatican * Penis showing - banned in US * (End of list)

So we have a binary numerical code, or a ternary if you add also practices (ranging probably from female eye contact with the camera and male-female touching over male-male intimacy up to bestiality).

(Hope clear that this is sarcasm.. do not build the torment nexus!)

goobatrooba··on DeepSeek Harness Desktop for macOS and Windows
Why else would they offer their own harness except to steal your data? Grok playbook plain and simple.
goobatrooba··on ASML says it sold 'absolutely nothing' in Europe in 2026
Strange that all make the link between AI and the low number of fabs / low nm fabs. None of the AI companies have their own production, so indeed none would be expected to buy ASML machines.
goobatrooba··on ASML says it sold 'absolutely nothing' in Europe in 2026
I dont think there is any hard fact behind your statement. EU has a number of semiconductor companies and fabs, though they tend to focus on embedded/industrial applications. Some went bankrupt (e.g. a big German RAM manufacturer) and the number dwindled, but it's not like there's nothing.

Like in anything high tech you need either massive subsidies or network effects, this is why things have built up in Taiwan, Shenzhen and South Korea, with remnants in the US, EU and a bit more Japan as all three thought they can let the market play out, fell a bit behind, and then the network effects won out.

Similarly the car industry - Germany (and Japan) rose due to massive investment and network effects, then the shareholders put in CEOs with a clear mission just to milk the cows and get wealth out of the system; this gave China a chance to go all in on investments and overtake them on innovation and price. This has nothing to do with regulation, just with short-termism and the inherent diseases of a "pure" capitalism.

That there are few new innovative companies coming up is probably more due to regulations (need to figure out how to make the product work and be legal in various regimes). In turn that they don't scale is due to less financing options and a much more fragmented market (to sell in France and Spain and Poland you need to translate everything and adapt it to local expectations and payment standards.. to sell in Florida, Minnesota and Texas you just need to throw a single English version up.

A shame that the national governments keep blocking any real integration of the financial and regulatory regimes at EU level, this would solve the startup and scale up issues to a large degree. The EU just proposed "EU Inc" as a solution, not sure this will not be ground up in 27 regimes...

goobatrooba··on Creatine uptake enhances antitumor immunity
Sorry i dont have strong views on the fact under question but 1) pointing to an entire podcast is not a very helpful suggestion 2) I listened to a few episodes on issues I know about and can just say that the guy is speaking with confidence but just making it all up. So much false info or at best hearsay repackaged as supposedly scientific advice.
goobatrooba··on 'We hacked the FBI:' Hackers say they have data on all FBI employees
While I agree in principle that sounds like incentives leading to a new economy similar to that of copyright and patent trolls. Just scan for known vulnerabilities in [commonly used software] used by [mom and pop shop] and demand a payout. The result is a dead web consisting only of big-corp-hosted sites as no one else can ever keep up with the infinite array of vulnerabilities.
goobatrooba··on 'We hacked the FBI:' Hackers say they have data on all FBI employees
Wow, Germany must be the most resilient country in the world. Russian and chinese hackers are probably too young to have ever even encountered a live fax machine.

Followed on the resilience scale probably by one of those countries where everything works by bribe (India? Pakistan? Philippines? Nigeria?) and the hackers cannot figure out who to bribe as everyone just claims they can provide access, takes the money but doesn't follow through leaking anything.

goobatrooba··on GPT-6 Sol and Luna
> This year, coding agents have begun tackling tasks with more complexity, scope, and duration than ever before. At OpenAI, our internal usage has grown exponentially. Valued at API prices, daily token usage has exceeded $600 for the median researcher and $7,000 for researchers at the 90th percentile (Research acceleration: The view inside OpenAI ). As coding agents take on longer and more demanding tasks, the cost of sustained use matters more. GPT‑6 Sol and Luna combine strong coding performance with lower API prices, giving developers more room to iterate and teams the confidence to be more ambitious about what they ask Codex to take on.

Rarely have I seen such hogwash. It seems to be a mix of virtue signalling and trying to push the perspective that being "90th percentile" (on what exactly?) requires extensive AI use. You are telling me you expect each researcher to generate USD 7000/d or USD 140k/m in AI cost? Or is that a way to abuse tax laws in some way so they can claim their own payments for tokens as expenditure on the other side of the ledger?

goobatrooba··on ChatGPT now knows what you do on other websites via ad collector
I don't see how that's relevant? Regulation might have limited some innovation in tech, but gdpr does not affect any of the dying industries. That's more from competition with china, companies with too much interest in giving payouts to shareholders than to innovate, and US financial industry buying most of the best players
goobatrooba··on US Treasuries Have Become Unappetizing for Foreign Central Banks and Governments
I think you might have misread the graphs as they clearly support the title. There are two types

One type (e.g. chart 1 and 4) showing the holdings by governments and central banks, which are clearly falling. The other shows holdings by foreign entities, which is also explained to include many US offshore funds and foreign subsidiaries, so actually still US entities that are holding these treasuries. Here the picture is more amorphous with overall foreign treasury holdings rising in the past years with a dip basically for a number of countries since last year for most countries.

I read it as clearly governments reducing treasuries with investors in some markets still absorbing some.

goobatrooba··on Mistral X Mozilla: Private, Multilingual AI Browsing
Why would it not be private? Yes data is sent to the servers but the trust that you must have that they don't keep the data is not different from the trust you must have in your password manager or encrypted email or backup storage provider.
goobatrooba··on Mistral X Mozilla: Private, Multilingual AI Browsing
I don't understand this negativity. It seems to be a fully optional separate service. No one is losing anything.
goobatrooba··on EU chief opens door for Canada to become 'associate member'
Well "Europe" doesn't meddle in the Netherlands. The Netherlands are part of the EU and the Dutch government has to agree with every single important EU decision for it to be adopted.

So when there's "meddling" it is about rules that the Dutch government has itself agreed should apply.

goobatrooba··on EU chief opens door for Canada to become 'associate member'
EU has two main legal instruments, regulations and directives. One applies directly, the other needs to be transposed into national law which indeed often ends with gold plating, but the tool is there to give uniform legislation- if all countries agree.

In addition there are plenty of technical standards which are agreed in expert committees, and these too apply directly. I'd expect Canada would join at least those technical processes and the two sides align technical standards over time.

goobatrooba··on EU chief opens door for Canada to become 'associate member'
It seems the nuance here would be between association agreement and an associate member which presumably is more integrated. E.g. EU candidate countries are joining many technical meetings and are invited to listen in to some Council meetings, can express views on important legislation, etc. I could imagine a similar status for Canada, but without the candidate label and neither the financial benefits or legal obligations to work towards regulatory alignment.
goobatrooba··on EU chief opens door for Canada to become 'associate member'
It seems every country in the world has such regimes, either publicly or in the background. You can bet no Chinese or Russian system comes without backdoors, plenty of US systems have been revealed to have backdoors, etc.

I disagree with this, but it's still somehow not an aspect uniquely horrible about EU or Canadian policy making, so not sure why this would be relevant here.

goobatrooba··on EU chief opens door for Canada to become 'associate member'
This requires likely an alignment of trade and product standards, so could still be demanding legally to get over the line. But the foundations are similar.

Maybe Canada could just join EFTA, that would be easier.

goobatrooba··on I can't stop thinking about Papua New Guinea
Even more striking there were some bow and arrow fights again just a few months ago. I would presume they have never stopped, just rarely make the news.

https://youtube.com/shorts/91moJcyiS00?si=EYzspw-B7y_J77Os

goobatrooba··on I can't stop thinking about Papua New Guinea
In fact there could be a direct link - the less reactive cultures were quickly subjugated by the colonialist cultures with advanced tech. Or the cultures that learned to strike back hard rather than welcome/integrate foreigners (see the lost American settler towns) are the ones that survived independently for longer.
goobatrooba··on Don't let anyone take away your big box of cables
While I like to improvise I'd never want to use a cut-off cable anywhere near a toddler. Whatever the savings or practical benefits, they just can't outweigh the risk of the toddler doing something that causes a shock, fire, ... Maybe for the best that you removed that light strip.
goobatrooba··on Don't let anyone take away your big box of cables
You destroyed the drives by using an incompatible cable (I.e. clear user error) and they still sent you (upgraded) replacements? That is unusual.
goobatrooba··on Cloud in a Bottle: making self-hosting accessible to everyone
That sounds like Nextcloud
goobatrooba··on Isar Aerospace reaches orbit and deploys payloads on second flight
And i as an average European just want to say - we feel with you and all the others that are suffering through this. I don't know either what I could or would do if my own government went this route. I hope your institutions and the people's resilience will overcome this dark chapter of American history and build a better foundation on top.
goobatrooba··on Statichost.eu – European static site hosting
That pixel seems to just gather standard data one might want to optimise the site display. I think display port size or http/s choice is hardly personal data.

Yes such info can be used to track people, but only if you have the database and means to - which a single small provider certainly doesn't. So unless you think this data is being sold for profiling I don't think that their claim is false.

goobatrooba··on GMails custom domain "send as" discontinues January 2027
I switched to migadu which was not too painful for a single account (basically the advice was to put both accounts in thunderbird and then move everything over, thunderbird does the work). For email very happy with the provider, notably also as it allows infinite domains.

But I miss a proper calendar which migadu is strangely mostly lacking (basic caldav only). Is fastmail better in this respect? And can you do wildcard emails and send/receive as whichever name you want with fastmail? E.g. I have it set so every email which comes to xyz@domain.com arrives in my single inbox (so not catchall but all with a certain letter combo) and use this to have custom emails for every site.

goobatrooba··on AnkiDroid: Google Play no longer allowing Open Collective donation link
Same problem here, but only for a few apps (e.g. signal)
goobatrooba··on CoMaps: The Offline App That Guided Rescuers Without a Signal in Venezuela
Best ist you can directly report the broken tap from the app. So the dates will be fixed.
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