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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 5th, 2023

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  • Could you elaborate on this angle? I’m not very well versed in the rights of companies operating in the EU, but I’m unsure “freedom of speech” is one of them.

    I rather mean “political discourse”

    There was Twitter. Apart from advertising, the very good thing it brought was free access to information. But not only getting it, also sharing. So we knew about for example Arab Spring or Umbrella protests and more or less what is going on, before news decided to tell us and how to tell us

    Then came Musk, all in white, saying that moderation on Twitter is biased and he’s going to bring it more freedom of speech

    Some time passes and let’s say that now EU does ban X. What’s the next logical thing he’ll say?

    I think it might be something like “see? EU banned X because they didn’t like the truth. For the truth, come to me”. I’m afraid that banning would rather give him power and echo chamber, rather than fixing what is going on


  • I’m not against this angle. But IMO evangelization and conversions only really worked when backed by the state

    My approach is calmly keep using free platforms, keep degoogling, when sharing information, share the links from those free platforms, so it keeps pinging in general consciousness that these exist. So the next time everyone does suprised pikachu face to what extent our data is used against us, you don’t have to say “see? I told you”. They come to you asking how to do this, what are the limitations and realities of getting free etc

    But, of course, as with everything, diversity is a strength. Some of us should fight, some of us stay calm and keep going on
    I think


  • Maybe the solution is to put a restriction on business, news agencies, and government services from using it?

    But that opens another can of worms. A precedence for a governing body to say which platforms can be used for reaching your audience. I’m afraid the change will have to come from the bottom

    If anything, I’d phrase it “public service messaging has to operate on platforms which don’t require an account to read”. But that doesn’t solve the problem of general culture on the service










  • Gentoo unstable was a little bit tiring in the long run. The bleeding edge, but often I needed to downgrade because the rest of the libraries were not ready

    Gentoo stable was really great. Back then pulseaudio was quite buggy. Having a system where I could tell all applications and libraries to not even link to it (so no need to have it installed at all) made avoiding its problems really easy
    But when my hardware got older and compilation of libreoffice started to take 4h, I remembered how nice it was on Slackware where you just install package you broke and you’re done

    Arch looked like a nice middle-ground. Most of the things in packages, big focus on pure Linux configurability (pure /etc files, no Ubuntu(or SUSE?) “you need working X.org to open distro-specific graphics card settings”) and AUR for things there are no official packages for. Turned out it was a match :)


  • Windows (~6 years) -> Mandriva (Mandrake? For I think 2-3 years) -> Ubuntu (1 day) -> Suse (2 days) -> Slackware (2-3 years) -> Gentoo unstable (2-3 years) -> Gentoo stable (2-3 years) -> Arch (9 years and counting)

    The only span I’m sure about is the last one. When I started a job I decided I don’t have the time to compile the world anymore. But the values after Windows sum up to 21, should be 20, so it’s all more or less correct


  • Personally I don’t but my grandpa was electronics engineer by trade and hobby and I was also talking to some electronics engineers in my previous job when I was toying with the idea myself. In both cases for home projects they were etching the paths by covering the plate with laser printer ink. When you get really good at that you can even get into SMD range of path width. The higher part of the range - you can’t outdo machine ECB printing if you want to get the paths really narrow - but workable.

    1. print your paths on regular paper. The more DPI, the better
    2. clean the empty board
    3. use hot iron (like the one for clothes) to transfer laser printer ink from the paper to the board
    4. take the paper off
    5. inspect the paths, apply some marker (or wax, I think? I might misremember) in places where it’s not perfect
    6. etch the board

    Although, some of my colleagues at work were saying that at the prices you can order an ECB to be printed nowadays (for hobby better to find something local, so you have easier contact and shipping won’t cost you a leg) it’s not worth the hassle anymore. Pick the business which page looks like from the 90s. You are looking for electrical engineering veterans so they know more about electronics than webpages

    You might want to search for your local hackerspace. For sure they have it all figured out for the area they operate in






  • Is there a limit to one-time cards

    There should be something about that in the Revolut EULA or something like that. But I’ve never encountered it. The moment the payment goes through, a new card appears in the app

    Can you elaborate But how private your data really is, that might be hard to answer

    It’s a business. A closed source. They are of course bound by laws and regulations but there’s practically no way to make sure they aren’t selling transaction data/statistics under the table. Also, the cards issued by them are either visa or mastercard (IDR), so these companies have that info too. And I’d bet they sell transactions analytics
    Then there’s also the matter of telemetry. Apart from telemetry gathered by the app for Revolut, I guess there’s no way to use it without Gapps

    FWIW I did not notice an influx of spam after registering an account. But that doesn’t prove anything, of course

    We can’t inspect the code of the app. So it’s probably only as private as other bank apps