FortyTwo

The American government and their supporters hate modern day Europe, and yet they're so obsessed with gaudy replication of old European stuff. You see it also with all the kitchy Roman-like pillars and replicas of the statue of David randomly plonked in some room. It's just so... weird. I guess they like the idea of "old" Europe, the good old days when they still spent half their time killing each other, and the other half killing people in far-away places. They probably see it as their own origin story, so they resent that the modern versions of these countries, after all the devastating wars, have evolved into modern, peaceful countries. Maybe they see themselves as defenders against modern debauchery like freedom, peace and happiness?

From my perspective it just seems kind of hollow and desperate, can't think of your own stuff to do so you decide to copy the megalomania of dysfunctional old empires that got crushed by their own ego and inability to peacefully coexist in prosperity. There's a reason they're not around anymore, and copying them, aside from being vaguely pitiful, just means you're headed to the same end. Let's hope it won't take two world wars for America to catch on.

Kind of niche but Guitar Pro. Not sure what the newer versions are like but the one I have is great for composing and arrangement.

I know you meant it as a critique, but the changing part is actually completely right! I guess my distaste for it stems from my distaste for tribalism. I follow topics I care about, and despite largely comprising opinions I agree with through selection bias, I dislike how there's a set of agreed upon opinions that people are expected to follow, with intense backlash to attempts at nuance or compromise. Naturally everyone from other tribes is considered a horrible evil being who just wants to see your own tribe suffer, and so anything but the most vicious "anti-them" perspective is considered traitorous.

As far as I can tell, it doesn't matter much which part of the community it is, most seem to have a relatively large proportion of users who seem to delight in the opportunity to tear others to shreds if they perceive some justification. I sometimes wish we could enjoy things together without turning everything into a hateful fight (that somehow always seems to be considered justified because other tribes are supposedly even worse). Maybe I'm just in the wrong place...

I don't use Lemmy much anymore nowadays because of this. While it's important an alternative to Reddit exists, so I try to support it, it ironically feels more like a hivemind than Reddit does (ironic because you'd expect the opposite for federated services). I think it's because switching to Lemmy from Reddit requires either idealism or a Reddit ban, both of which disproportionately attract people who feel good when they verbally attack internet strangers for disagreeing with them on 1% of the implicitly agreed upon joint viewpoints. It also strangely reminds me of the feeling I got being part of an old gaming community that was slowly dying out, where eventually only the unpleasant ones who defined their identity based on it were left.

I'm always happy to see there are also people here who dislike this attitude, though, or even to see neutral posts. There is still hope!

I like HERE WeGo lately, haven't really noticed differences for public transportation with Google Maps. I only have experience using it in my country, though.

Your interactions will generally be stored and used for further training, so using their services gives them an advantage compared to European companies. I would suspect, although I have not read about this in detail, that the plan for eventual monetisation, once they have a monopoly and people are dependent and unable to switch back, will be to generate a profile and use this for targeted advertising/influencing, similar to how social network services operate. IMO it's much better not to use their services, they want the data more than they care about electricity bills.

My experience in the NL: bicycles and functioning public transportation is what gives teenagers mobility, without requiring a lot of money (especially bicycles). Forcing them to share infrastructure with much faster, much more expensive electric mopeds claiming to be e-bikes to avoid safety and licensing requirements makes this much worse. The hard-earned mobility from the infrastructure already in place gets worse, not better, from fatbikes being treated as bicycles.

It depends on what your goal is. I used to share your opinion, but find myself increasingly of the opinion that these ideals must be kept separate. Much as I like the idea of open source, not all open source applications or crowd-sourced data can keep up with companies with hundreds or thousands of people actually responsible for it. Similarly, when it comes to innovation, large resources and private investments are needed. If we focus too much on requiring every single thing related to software being open source, we risk the entire effort failing before taking off.

Open source is great, and if you care especially much about this topic that's also great, but it's still quite niche (the general public won't care), while geopolitical sovereignty is a big topic many are rapidly coming to appreciate. Let's start with this part where there's already substantial agreement within the population instead of necessarily packaging them together. Switching over from sending our money to the US for the privilege of dependence to investing our money into our own companies seems a relatively easy and well supported first step, over European and open source and non-addictive and no obnoxious ads and low energy consumption and and and. All all worthwhile causes, but insisting on all at once is doomed to fail. IMO it's better to move in steps, and start with the low-hanging fruit.

Is this feedback for devs?

My 144hz monitor randomly runs at 60hz with no way of changing it apart from restarting several times.

I have a TV connected in addition to my monitor (for lazy gaming or watching series), but this causes various small but annoying problems. I can't unlock my PC without moving the mouse over to my monitor, which invariably spawns on the TV, and I have to guess how to move it over (left/right alignment is also inconsistent). It also turns the mouse pointer massive on the monitor, presumably because the TV has a higher resolution. Despite marking the monitor as the main display, more than half of my applications launch on the TV. Except the ones I actually want there, of course. If my tv is off before booting is complete, and I turn it on later, my background disappears, and sound is routed to the terrible built-in monitor speakers instead of either the tv audio I use while it's on, or the actually good headphones I use when it's not.

At some point my kernel randomly broke because the driver of my WiFi adapter was somehow incompatible. It was a massive pain to figure out the problem and fix it.

As a causal user these are definitely points that came out worse than the competition functionality-wise, and since most of the general public will not opt for a lesser experience for the sake of idealism, this type of issue probably prevents other people who just want to use their PCs from switching.

Edit: it was also a massive pain to set up a Korean keyboard layout, in Windows you just select it and you're done. In Ubuntu, you do the same and nothing changes. I don't even remember what it was that actually fixed it, but I tried a lot of guides that didn't work.

It differs per community. Some of the more hype-y conferences I've submitted to require at least one co-author to review other papers as a condition to submission. I've not seen this at less hyped conferences or journals yet, though. But different communities tend to do things very differently, so many people will have different experiences.

I don't think this is appeasing a bully, this is actually giving him very little. Appeasement would have involved actually giving him something. The increase to 3.5% is back to around cold war levels, which seems very appropriate for the current geopolitical situation. The final 1.5% is essentially an accounting trick to make whatever expenses you like count towards the 5%, like road maintenance or technological R&D, it would be hard not to reach this target. Plus this money can now be increasingly spent on Europe's own companies instead of sending 1-2% of yearly GDP straight to the US economy, especially once economies of scale start picking up.

This is just what Europe was planning to do on its own, but framing it in a way that strokes Trump's ego and lets him claim it as his victory. Especially after a few years this will not be a positive change for the US. I'll happily sacrifice Rutte's pride if it means Europe gets exactly what it wanted.

Very good post, I agree completely! It's easy to let perfect become the enemy of good.

One thing I'd add is that many social media companies sneakily get their trackers added to random web pages or other services you might use, so doing random things on the internet could be included as extra engagement (and it also doesn't require you to be signed up to their service in the first place, though it helps them). In this case their business is the data they collect on your behaviour, even outside of their own services, and the ads they can target to you using this on behalf of other entities who outsource their advertisements. It's quite scary how ubiquitous this is.

I think what OP suggested here is a very good mindset to live by, and it will help a lot. If you wanted to go one step further, you could consider combining this with steps to try and prevent these companies from still harvesting your data when you're not even aware that you're using them, e.g., by blocking such trackers as much as possible.