We-ell, the position being saved was a nice feature. And I know all that.

Usually “whistleblower” doesn’t mean saying the obvious.

It’s like various “whistleblowers” proudly saying with worry that ship’s maintenance seems to not be very good, food sometimes not tasty and things stinky, while there’s water filling the passenger deck.

I think the early rounds of those trying to get people to switch to the format were motivated by the fact that tapes were easily recordable by everyone.

Tapes tear and require mechanical parts. But it wouldn’t happen were there not commercial interest.

Plastic shopping bag: lasts 1000 years stuck in a bush outside a Tesco without breaking down

I know you didn’t mean it, but actually they break down into smaller and smaller fragments very easily because of temperatures changing, so not visible after a few winters. Maybe except areas which don’t freeze, like those plastic floating islands in the Pacific.

I don’t think it will, but it will surely feel the effects.

This is not strictly speaking full-blown betrayal of Ukraine, it just seems that problems remaining unresolved and becoming bigger due to this war being in focus - have become bigger than Ukrainian war from their (that group) point of view.

The US is the only big power to condemn massacres of Alawites in Syria happening right now, some others have basically blamed the victims, so maybe not all they do is wrong. It’s just words, but at least the right words.

If Ukraine accepts whatever peace deal they are trying to impose upon it, it’ll still have much more than it would had it surrendered in 2022. In some sense it’d be a win for them. Peace works for Ukraine - their economy is less resource-based than that of Russia, thus requiring competent people and comfortable social climate, not that of war.

Backdoored devices are useful for people who can impede that.

And the way EU is approaching privacy, surveillance and all such, - oh-hoh-ho, I don’t think there will be a EU law.

The Russian web is full of that.

This language demeans all creative endeavour. It trashes our ability to communicate. When read out loud it’s infantilising too.

Yes. It makes it appear as if everything real didn’t have any meaning and were just some similar mass, like wine or garum.

While the important people and processes are the middlemen controlling the routes. Or like with USSR, where the real was subject to the administrative and the political.

Since history rhymes, I love how Denmark got absolutely thrashed by Hanseatic cities when it became too dependent on its role as a controller of a big route.

Lemmy’s user base, however, seems so addicted to outrage that outrage inevitably dominates everyone’s experience here.

Ye-es, people look for outrage. Especially people who left mainstream platforms because of outrage. We don’t have gladiator fights today, so the wish for murder should be vented out differently somehow.

I’ve gone to great lengths setting up content filters to block politics, but even when half my feed is blocked, the majority of what’s left is still U.S. politics.

Right, and wouldn’t it be much more convenient to block posts and users and whole communities by regex and logical rules?

Say, post title contains anything “federal” and “government” like - kill. Post content contains something about voting - kill. More than one third of comments involves political jargon - kill. The resulting kill score is measured against threshold.

But of course that would make communities and instances and moderators as they exist now much less useful. That would transition us back to Usenet in some sense. People don’t want to give up that kind of power, even unconsciously they’ll resist. When they are a community mod and everything about its climate depends on them, it’s different in prestige from them just cleaning up obvious abuse, and the climate depending on individual kill rules set up on clients.

She is at the very least pro EU when Orban is very much against everything.

How the hell would you know pro what she is. She’s not that transparent.

Suppose she, Orban and a few other types have a strategy of making decisions. Decisions are mostly formed by power, so when the balance of power is in favor of some decision, those who’d veto it just better not. Somehow every notable time everything is vetoed is by Hungary. Is it Hungary being so strong to not be pressured when needed, are all other EU members so moral (no such thing in politics and power)?

Compare it to how smaller countries torn between spheres of influence have different parties and factions, some pro-Russian, some pro-EU, some pro-American. Their social “stability” and general connectivity of their elites mean that people belonging to these different factions all have similar interests. Like mafia. But it’s a normal thing in diplomacy to never put all your eggs in one basket, and to present difference faces.

So the same way in a medieval town (not talking cities with guilds and all that) there couldn’t be two smiths. Competition really wasn’t a thing on such small scale, not enough work to feed two people of the same job.

Hungary fulfills the role of the “interface” of the EU with Russia and Turkey and such. For its population and the general population it’s a mistake, some Troyan horse, some disagreement, but it’s really not, otherwise the problem would have already been solved the old-fashioned way. It’s a diplomacy tool.

Also the EU and Russia are not really hostile. The war is about Ukraine and Russia deciding whether they’ll have equal weight in Russia’s energy dealings with the EU, or whether Ukraine will be treated as some intermediate colony in that. The EU kinda supports Ukraine because that’ll give it better deals too, both by having a check on Russia and weakening it. If it were really about defending Ukraine, Russia’s military could be negated overnight. But that would be more expensive (for the EU, not for Ukraine) and also they need Russia to keep its regime, which is very convenient, being immoral and spineless.

I mean, it’s obvious and has been this way for all of history, if history books are boring, read Sabatini. It’s not any more complex than workplace intrigue, but somehow people think diplomacy should be simpler than that.

Were a new Alexander present somewhere, he would be able to repeat his conquests with 1/10 of that sum.

Unfortunately that’s not the kind of people to receive it, but I think one can expect EU to be armed enough by the time Russia finishes digesting Ukraine, and the Sunni international (and Israel as a weird attachment) finishes digesting secular\Christian\Shia remnants of the Middle East.

Renpy becoming popular means there are tons of indie games, visual novella genre, with which you don’t need a beefy graphics card.

I’d also argue that nice graphics is only one component of a good game, and “nice” is very loosely tied to computing power here.

Does it flag “Notmario”?

Because “user-friendly” UIs have successfully, market-wise, killed normal computing (like under Windows 2000, or even like “advanced users” under Unix-likes do, nothing complex or hard, not even harder than the “user-friendly” way, but very scary when you’re conditioned to think it’s not normal to edit configs or run commands ; it’s very stupid, one would think editing files or entering a few words and pressing “enter” are not godlike powers).

That had the (subjectively) positive results of enshittification and monopolized Web.

Replacing the “user-friendly” UIs with mobile-like UIs mostly failed cause those are simply inferior.

But agentic AIs seem the way to go so that the typical user would never ever try to form preferences of how they use things, their own habits and processes.

And yes, the bigger the heap, the easier to hide a microphone there, and each such level of obscuring and generalizing control makes the heap order of magnitude bigger.

I suppose they can offload a lot of them into the ocean or something like that. But still too fast.

Frankly with what’s happening in Syria right now, can Hamas please convert to Shia or anything other than Sunni before I consider this wrong?

I’m fed up with Sunni Islam existing on this planet. Yes, I know that’s the majority of Muslims. Easily no Christian movement is worse than Salafism and Wahhabism, and those two together would be a lot of Sunnis and their most powerful states and factions.

^ hits the the wrong continent

fixed that for you

Oops. Me too.

I have re-read Tao Te Ching and parts of Azimov’s Foundation and parts of Vacuum Flowers and small pieces of X-Wing series, so - revisited things.

The morale being - things are moved by power, not by ideas.

But skype was really buggy and often did not even work

Could you please specify the time of such assessment? Because somewhere between 2009 and 2012 Skype seemed flawless for me (of course, with ICQ before it I just didn’t know what’s reliable offline messages and message history, so there’s that).

Voice calls worked well enough over like 45kbps. Leaving space for online game traffic (I think it was something like Burden of Crown over Hamachi, not too demanding). Of course my memory might make the experience cooler than it really was.

Skype had very good architecture and compared to things popular today was more usable.

It also worked with unbelievably bad connectivity.

Security-wise - advanced Linux users would run Skype under a different user, so that it couldn’t access their home directory. A weird decision to be honest, since an X11 client can make full screen captures and observe keypresses all the same. Security theater is sometimes just a hobby.