US was built on rail, and it was way less dense and urban back then. The problem is not how “compact” a country is, it’s simply a question of priorities and budgets. China and EU are investing in rail (to varying degrees), so they get rail with all its benefits. US is wasting more and more money on financially unsustainable car infrastructure, so it is getting failing car infrastructure.

This is a really naive take - this amendment (which requires message scanning to be targeted) passed with a slim majority and could well have failed. In that case the existing mass surveillance (“voluntary scanning”) would probably keep happening at least until 2028.

The council meanwhile is overwhelmingly pro-message-scanning, and they (together with the commission) are the ones who are pushing to break e2e encryption. There will now be talks between the three institutions to decide on how to proceed. Sadly I expect that some “compromise” will be reached eventually.

I get your point, but if you actually go out and speak with women who trust you, chances are they will all have multiple stories of harassment and/or SA that will make your skin crawl. It’s not just fearmongering, there are a lot of awful men out there (in absolute terms)

I’m surprised how many (well-meaning) men are clueless about this horrible aspect of life which is so universal for women.

Good, let the nutjobs fight

It’s not the fault of consumers, monopolization and price fixing are inevitable outcomes of capitalism. Even if people somehow weren’t attracted by lower prices, amazon would do all sorts of shenanigans to drive competition out of business or agree with them to fix prices.

TikTok got its hold mainly by being extremely addictive and using predatory dark patterns to keep you scrolling. That and being less censored compared to other corporate social media. While we can try to strive for the latter (with reasonable limitations), we shall not do the former, even if that means less users overall. “Avoid success at all costs”.

Yes, fully agreed. What dummies!

– Sent from my ThinkPad

It actually does this already sometimes, especially if you chat to it long enough. Not because it’s “smart”, but because it’s just emulating a writing style of a corporate middle manager.

‘Company deliberately has control of over 6,700 robot vacuums while selling them to unsuspecting general public’

Even if that happens (which is not an inevitability, since China historically has been doing things quite differently from the US), it is no worse than status quo. Until then, unless you are an active threat to China, and are planning on visiting it, you don’t have to worry about it.

Sooo, same as right now, but with way less possibility to be used against me? Sign me up!

It still works without proxy for my family (as of earlier today), except for calls. I don’t know if this is telegram doing some block evasion or the block hasn’t kicked in fully yet.

In any case, unless they ban like 80% of outside internet, there will still be a few obfuscated VPN servers & tor bridges working. Everyone who knows their stuff will be able to access the outside, same as in China.

They tried (and failed) before the war too. Telegram has no privacy, poor security, but they are really good at evading blocks.

Ok, so this makes the most sense to me. This would indeed need to be handled, I think the best solution is for EU to come up with a set of dispute resolution procedures and pass it as a law for everyone to follow. That way, disputes would be resolved the same way regardless of what network or bank you are using, which sounds the most reasonable to me.

Aha, interesting. I never had a credit card because it would be too stressful for me to take out micro-loans for stuff. Still weird that it’s visa/MC money and not your bank’s though.

What the fuck, how is this the first time I’m hearing about this… I was thinking of deleting my account (with no phone or ID tied to it), I guess I’m keeping it for now.

Does Visa/Mastercard actually offer any protection themselves? When I’ve had to reverse debit card transactions due to fraud or otherwise, I always just called/reached out to my bank and they did it. I never communicated with Visa/MC. Since this system is pretty much SEPA in a trench coat, I’m pretty sure the same would work here.

Honestly it’s fine. LSPs are nice but you don’t need them per se. A combination of vim, tmux, entr, a fast incremental compiler, grep, and proper documentation can get you a long way there.

A lot of critically important code that’s running the servers we’re using to communicate was written this way. And, if capitalist decline continues long enough, we will all eventually be begging for vim while writing code with ed.

Personally I use helix with an LSP, because it helps speed up development quite a bit. I even have a local LLM for writing repetitive boilerplate bullshit. But I also understand that those are ultimately just tools that speed the process up, they do not fundamentally change what I’m doing.

It’s nicer to develop anything on a beefy machine, I was rocking a 7950X until recently. The compile times are a huge boon, and for some modern bloated bullshit (looking at you, Android) you definitely need a beefy machine to build it in a realistic timeframe.

However, we can totally solve a lot of real-world problems with old cheap crappy hardware, we just never wanted to because it was “cheaper” for some poor soul in China to build a new PC every year than for a developer to spend an extra week thinking about efficiency. That appears to be changing now, especially if your code will be running on consumer hardware.

My dad used to “write” software for basic aerodynamic modelling on punchcards, on a mainframe that has about us much computing power as some modern microcontrollers. You wouldn’t even consider it a potato by today’s standards. I’m sure if we use our wit and combine it with arcane knowledge of efficient algorithms, we can optimize our stacks to compile code on a friggin 3.5GHz 10-core CPU (which are 10 year old now).

You can write code just fine on 20 or even 30 year old hardware. Basically if it runs Linux, chances are it can also run vim and compile code. If you spring for 10-15 year old hardware, you can even get an LSP + coc or helix, for error highlighting and goto definition and code actions. And you definitely don’t need a beefy GPU for it (unless you’re doing something GPU-specific of course).

Editing 720p videos (which, if you encode with a high enough bitrate, still looks alright) can be done on 10-15 year old hardware.

Research is where it gets complicated. It does indeed often require a lot of computing power to do modern computational research. But for some simpler stuff - especially outside STEM - you can sometimes get away with a LibreOffice spreadsheet on an old Dell or something.

From the looks of it we will have to get used to doing more with less when it comes to computers. And TBH I’m all for it. I just hope that either my job won’t require compiling a lot more stuff, or they provide me with a modern machine at their expense.