Also Telegram is growing shadier day by day. Signal is the way to go.

Indeed, thanks!

I’m sure you’re aware of it already, but WineHQ provides a good overview over which software runs well under WINE. :)

You go to @potus and follow him from there. :)

What a sad faith for a website named after the glorious Dodo.

But Twitter used to have a monopoly, and it doesn’t any more.

I can now follow an official white house account directly from Kbin, whereas yesterday i would have had to sign up for either Twitter or Threads. That makes a difference. :)

I guess for now it’s misleading more than anything, as they say it’s the smallest of the three major federated platforms. That’s hardly precise as neither Threads nor Bluesky is federated yet.

Bluesky should federate at the end of the month though, and a bridge to activitypub is already ready. Interesting times ahead.

While this is seems a bit incompetent, it is easier for them to make technology less available than to fix the underlying issues here. They might set out to do both, but solving the underlying issues will take more time.

At least they’re trying to do the right thing, and they’re making an effort to deal with a problem that affects real people. Good on them.

Of course - there’s a huge difference between a “real photo” and “objective reality”, and there always has been. In the same way an impressionistic painting might capture reality accurately while not really looking like it that much.

It’s not even a true statement. “A real picture of a pipe” has never once in history been interpreted as “my golly - there’s an actual goddamn pipe trapped inside this piece of paper”. We know it’s a freaking representation.

The “real” part refers to how it’s a product of mechanically capturing the light that was reflected off an actual pipe at some moment in time. You could have a real picture with adjusted colours, at which point it’s real but manipulated. Of course with digital photography it’s more complicated as the camera will try to figure out what the colours should be, but it doesn’t mean the notion of a real picture is suddenly ready for the scrapyard. Monet’s painting is still a painting.

Everyone knows exactly what you mean when you say a real picture. Imposing a 3D model over the moon to make it more detailed, for example, constitutes “not a real picture”. Pretending this is some impossible philosophical dilemma is just a corporate exercise in doublespeak.

What absolute hogwash.

Same. Which is to say I have it installed and boot it along with GNOME Web every time I need to check that my shitty web programming work outside of Gecko. Which is thankfully rare.

Vivaldi is nice though.

Well, it’s based on experiences travelling through Germany proper - for example Denmark to France or Italy, including transfers. Often the delay will just be a couple of hours, but then you miss your transfer and you’re screwed.

Also if you’re on your way to Switzerland the Swiss have no patience for disruptions in their services, so if a train is delayed coming from Germany they’re likely to just not accept it into the country at all.

I have also heard from people who were told to spend the night in the train, which DB just parked in the outskirts of the city for the night. That way they could offer passengers a place to sleep in the cheapest possible ways. Pregnant women or families with young children were asked to check in to hotels.

I have no doubt their bureaucrats perform world-class efficiency in their handing out, filling in, faxing and archiving a sophisticated system of paper forms.

I guess it’s the trap of getting complacent and stopping modernizing as soon as you’ve convinced yourself you have the best system in the world.

Oh, everyone who ever travels by train in Europe will tell you that the German infrastructure is very much broken. You’re lucky if your delay is less than a day travelling through Germany.

Only the purest are good enough for the People’s Front of Judea.

I guess the closing footnote of the blog post summarizes it well:

from the point of view of many leftists, they’re not very far left, and liberals are, in fact, right wing

Trying to place people as left/right in an international forum like this is a complete waste of time. I’m writing from a Polish instance, where communist symbols are banned and the political left/right dimension looks completely different from my Scandinavian home country. In my traditionally left-leaning home country I’m a leftist. By the minds of many Americans I’m a stupid centrist because I’m not ideologically pure enough - Social Democracy is just capitalism with a human face etc. And don’t get me started on the Russians and the Chinese.

For some people, if you reject Leninism you’re right wing.

Yeah, the adds take up some time, but I still find the overall experience less annoying than I did with Duolingo last time I used it. The push towards human interaction, which Duolingo has actively pushed away from, is also welcome.

A lot of people don’t have much food on their table
But they got a lot of forks n’ knives
And they gotta cut somethin’

- Dylan

Unfortunately I don’t know of any open source alternative. After another response in this thread I started using busuu.com for French and Italian, and I’m liking it so far. Their business model is pretty transparent, but I find it less annoying than Duolingo so far.

Viel Glück and buona fortuna with your language learning!