I really fear that they are building the infrastructure for something much worse here: There are web blocks for “illegal” sites like piracy pages currently in place in Germany. You can totally ignore them by changing your DNS and those anti piracy crusaders are currently trying to sue DNS providers. Guess what industry will be pushing when there is a feature available in every OS which can be used to block piracy sites?

I mean, I can see that it is kind of hard to program your own accessibility tools esp. when you’re disabled. But in this case it literally is “Pay money to be spied upon by a ruthless company in bed with the Trump administration” vs. “use this free software that is not spying on you”

(and accessibility on linux is not that bad)

I really do not like such comments. Do free alternatives always have to be better than everything else? Even if people would find out that Facebook was always watching them via their cameras and were selling their nude pictures to the Hezbollah, someone will jump into the comments and say that they can’t use Mastodon, because some bogus reason. Yeah, accessibility could be better, but have you even taken a look at whatever nightmare UIs Microsoft has been pushing for years?

If they are doing it in the UK, they are also doing it in all other european countries

And we here in Germany really did a lot of work remembering and teaching about the crimes of the Nazis. We still have those far right idiots. Switzerland never had a dictatorship and they have far right idiots. Italy has them, France, too. And if you take a look outside of Europe, those far right parties are everywhere. Ignoring Francos crimes is not great, but can’t explain what is happening worldwide

And let’s be honest: Just doing a data protection audit at those 1000-15000 partners would enhance privacy for everyone. Those companies are shady as fuck

If you want to fall into an online rabbit hole, search for superyacht security. Those billionaires are spending a lot of money on security and they are totally not keen on getting kidnapped by Somali pirates:

According to a source in the industry, the website Business Insider reported that in a recent foiled plot, an armed pirate group approached a superyacht in the Arabian Sea. However, the pirates were thwarted after the captain deployed sonic weapons and electromagnetic pulse beams that caused severe burns as a countermeasure.

When it was delivered to billionaire Abramovich in 2010, the yacht was valued at 350 million pounds. However, after upgrades and the addition of many modern features, the value of Eclipse is now estimated at around 1.2 billion pounds. The primary factor driving the value of the Eclipse superyacht up is its advanced security system, which includes surveillance radar and a missile defense system along with escape submarines.

Yes, escape submarines (!)

https://scimyst.com/explore-the-ultimate-weapon-on-super-yachts-120251/

That’s a good thing - we are seeing a privatization of public spaces by private entrepreneurs. That nice town square where people could hang out? It’s now an outdoor restaurant. That lovely street? Tables full of tourists eating. The sidewalk? No way to get through, there’s now a restaurant. It might have “flair” and “outdoor culture”, but we really need to use sidewalks as sidewalks and not as restaurants

AI needs huge amounts of text to train on. Icelandic is a language with few speakers and and if there is not enough training material around, you can’t train a usable AI. If you suspect that people in the future will use more and more AI to create texts, that is a problem for those languages.

When we are in the middle of a tech bubble and one of the richest and most connected men on earth decides to cash out, then that is not “stonks crap”, but relevant tech news. Some companies stock price rising by 2% is not news, but this? Yes.

Ads do work. We have this whole surveillance dystopia to track how people behave online and the data shows that it is profitable to show them ads. All those eCommerce companies know how many sales they got via ads and yes, that’s profitable. It is the reason why there are so many ads.

I have to disagree - the robots are still working. People paid good money for them. The company is not broke, they are still alive and profitable. There is not obvious end of life here.

Yeah - many of those problems now have their roots in the Merkel era and Merkel & the CDU did nothing to solve them. Those ignored problems are now coming into the daylight and it’s ugly

Privacy and Security. You’re out there where no paparazzi can take bikini pictures of you. It’s easy to secure so that nobody can kidnap you. And take a look at the interior of those Yachts, they are not cramped. Look at this thing:

It’s bigger than your home. It has its own helipad. It is 111m long.

Those Steam Machines are just normal PCs. There should be no reason why you couldn’t dualboot windows to play those few games that do not work on Linux.

If you go to france, you will see a lot of burger and other quick service restaurants. And they are also quite popular with the natives and not only in touristy areas. The whole idea of french food snobbery really is snobbery of a small elite, but normal french people are totally in line with the rest of the world.

Yeah, that’s an issue, too. Tinted & polarized windows. Smaller windows on modern cars. Better soundproofing. There is no way to communicate with drivers.

It’s not only an issue when you hit people: Higher cars like SUVs, but also those sprinter vans, camping cars, trucks, pickups and so on are higher than most pedestrians. So if they are parking at the side of the road, motorists can’t see what is happening on the sidewalk. They can’t see if there is a cyclist or if someone wants to cross at the intersection. And that is one cause of all those deadly accidents while turning.

That’s exactly what I wanted to say: 30 is one of the most common speeds in the EU. They are not new and have been around since the 70s/80s. Cities are pushing for 30 as a default speed. You have thousands and thousands of kilometres of residential streets with T30. If you do not optimize for that as a manufacturer, you shouldn’t build cars.

<insert furious comments here why Canada is allowed to parcipitate in Eurovision even if it’s not an european country>