• 0 Posts
  • 16 Comments
Joined 9 months ago
cake
Cake day: July 1st, 2025

help-circle
  • Exactly, and some of the laws require just asking if the age is over a some pre-defined threshold, not sending the full date, for example “is the user over 18? Is the user over 15? 13?”

    And just to be clear, I do think that “protecting the children” is just an excuse to push surveillance tech that was very convenient to use after the Epstein files. I am strongly against these laws and I am supporting ($$$) activist groups fighting against them. Do consider donating or getting involved too if you can.

    But this specific change isn’t adding surveillance to Linux. It’s just a date of birth field that a parent can set. I can see why a parent would want it instead of using shady and intrusive “child control” software that takes over the computer.

    You need to store the date of birth to update the user’s reported age automatically. It makes sense and puts the “protecting the children” responsibility back on parents instead of third parties that every website is now starting to use.

    The systemd solution is not even reusable for actual verification because it can’t provide any cryptographic proof of the verification! It’s literally just a date.





  • Life pro tip that will make your IT deparment hate you: you can use Evolution and change the client id to match outlook’s one in the advanced settings. It’ll look like you are using the standard outlook client from your IT department point of view, but you’ll actually get a usable interface instead. I assume that thunderbird has the same options to override the client id, but I haven’t checked.

    Don’t blame me if you get in troubles though.



  • It might be nice to use in some very specific cases (e.g. addition-operation is a binary-operation AST node which is an AST node).

    In most of the cases it just creates noise though, and you can usually do something different anyway to implement the same feature. For example in rust, just use enums and list all the possible cases and it’s even nicer to use than inheritance.






  • The problem with the “it’ll go away at some point” is that the “at some point” might be much longer than what a few years.

    This period feels to me like some “calm before the storm” or a “slow motion car crash”. We have AI possibly disrupting a lot of the service economy, while automation is slowly eating away the manual workers jobs, possibly resulting in mass unemployment. People are really fed up with politics and electing more and more nationalistic/extremist politicians because they don’t feel represented. The economical crysis and this dissatisfaction is an environment very similar to when hitler got elected. Last time we had millions of people dying and europe being destroyed, what will it take today to remove a dictatorship in the biggest military spender of the world? Who is going to save the US if it slides into dictatorship?



  • Pyanodon changes factorio so much. The byproducts are a big issue, and you need to get in the mentality that often it’s fine to burn up items just to avoid the logistical nightmare. The biggest change for me is how expensive infrastructure is. You often need buildings that eat up 10 minutes of production just in materials. Scaling up is a challenge also because of how huge he buildings are (both a blessing and a curse) and how expensive everything is. Even conveyor belts are expensive at the beginning.

    I played py hard mode until py science 1, then later on I started what was supposed to be an easier playthrough in pyblock, but i still stopped with a few parts missing for logistical science.

    I still consider it one of the best mods out there (it’s really well balanced), but you should start playing it only with a “I will not finish it” mentality, since it’s thousands of hours long.


  • There are some surviving national circuits like PagoBancomat (as the sibling comment from Scrollone) and Dankort (Denmark) and girocard (Germany). My personal impression is that they are slowly going out of fashion in favor of visa/mastercard only (probably because they can’t offer better prices than them).

    I don’t see a solution to the duopoly, apart from lobbying politicians to support this national payment infrastructure. Especially in recent times I can also see how some governments might not want to rely entirely on two US companies for running their entire economy, so something might move on that side, so there’s hope on that side.

    The EU has already been moving on this front in the last years by forcing the banks to provide programming interfaces to initiate bank payments, and that’s why you can now see more and more options to “pay by bank” online in EU. These online payments generally skip card circuits and run over normal SEPA bank transfers.

    More info here on the last part: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Payment_Services_Directive