If you ever feel useless, don’t forget that both true and false have manpages in Linux.

They even have --help and --version flags in case you need them.

Looks like some people just don’t learn from history.

I remember reading a blog post about how the Dutch kept meticulous records on citizens in the 1930s, including things like which synagogues people attended. Needless to say, that information became very interesting and useful to the visitors that arrived later in that decade. When comparing occupied countries during the Holocaust, the Netherlands probably was the country where the Nazis were the most successful in rounding up victims.

I can’t find the exact blog post where I read this - I’m pretty sure it was on tutanota’s blog, but I can’t find it at the moment. Wikipedia however does include this line:

Several factors contributed to The Netherlands’ higher death toll compared to other occupied countries. The governmental apparatus was left relatively intact after the royal family and government fled to London, and The Netherlands was not under a military regime. It was the most densely inhabited country of Western Europe, making it difficult for the relatively large number of Jews to go into hiding. Most Jews in Amsterdam were poor, which limited their options for fleeing or hiding. The country did not have much open space or forest for people to flee to. Also, the civil administration had detailed records of the numbers of Jews, and their addresses.

And now, they’re making the same mistake again it seems.

First, we’ll take away the headphone jack.

Then, we’ll remove everything else!

Nah, ISO is a shit organization. The biggest issue is that all of their “standards” are blocked behind paywalls and can’t be shared. This creates problems for open source projects that want to implement it because it inherently limits how many people are actually able to look at the standard. Compare to RFC, which always has been free. And not only that, it also has most of the standards that the internet is built upon (like HTTP and TCP, just to name a few).

Besides that, they happily looked away when members were openly taking bribes from Microsoft during the standardization of OOXML.

In any case, ISO-8601 is a garbage standard. P1Y is a valid ISO-8601 string. Good luck figuring out what that means. Here’s a more comprehensive page demonstrating just how stupid ISO-8601 is: https://github.com/IJMacD/rfc3339-iso8601

Relevant (median salaries in the EU): https://www.levels.fyi/heatmap/europe/

No you don’t! That’s why we have key-signing parties!

It’s not money they want. It’s power. They want global domination. And this is not an exaggeration by any means.

This is the thing UI designers never understand[0] - if you keep changing shit around, nobody will ever figure out how to use it. If you keep it consistent and don’t make dramatic changes, users will have a much easier time using it because they don’t have to keep relearning the damn thing. Consistency is the most effective UI paradigm.

[0] or to put it in better terms, they’re paid to not understand this so they can justify their jobs…

While I think this is a good idea (because copyright is a stupid concept in the digital age), the problem with this proposal is that Europe is also very pro-copyright. Doing something like this would probably piss off Americans, but if it also pisses off your next best ally as well, it’s probably not going to work out.

She better not go from suck to blow…

A lot has been said about how shocking and awful the results are, and I do agree with them. I definitely do not condone any of the far-right parties, their representatives, or their policies.

But what hasn’t been said (and might be a bit controversial) is the fact that liberal parties are the biggest problem that the world is facing right now. It’s the parties that pretend to be an opposition force, but in reality they just keep shitting on voters, making broken promises, and saying “it’ll be better next time, just one more term!” They keep trying to convince people that the system works and that iterative changes will make things better. But in reality, things have actually been getting worse for 10, 15, maybe even 20 years… (the exact number depends on where you live and what you do for a living).

After a while, people stop believing in those broken promises. And the longer they refuse to put up any real opposition, the more and more they empower the far right.

In Canada, Trudeau needs to implement proportional representation NOW. If he doesn’t want to do that, he might as well just come out and endorse Poilievre, because he damn well knows what will happen if he doesn’t give people a real alternative (even he can’t pretend it’s any other way at this point). And no, ranked choice voting is not the answer here.

In the US, I have to be honest: it’s not a country anymore. It’s several countries, all jammed into one, and half of whom hate each other with no limit. And to be honest, this is how it’s supposed to work!!! This is how the constitution is framed! Federal government is supposed to be weak and state governments are supposed to fill that void, but the States refuse to actually work that way and keep looking to control a Federal government in a way that they’ll never be able to.

The USA really ought to break into constituent countries. The West Coast is a country. The Northeast is at least one country, maybe 3-4. And you can slice up the red states however you like - I honestly don’t care. Maybe this way, they can finally actually get shit done in a way that starts making people happy, because there’s far too much animosity between different and disparate parts of the “country” in its current form. It’s definitely not going to come from the Federal government.

I know that none of these things are going to happen, so things will just continue getting worse and worse over the next decade or two. Fair warning to everyone: we’re not even close to rock bottom yet.

Search engines are websites that people used to go to in order to get helpful information. These days, they just spam out a bunch of SEO garbage, AI-generated bullshit, and ads.

Google, probably