

Ultimately it’s because of corruption. When chancellor Kohl was incumbent it was clear that fibre optics is the future. He instead pushed for the technically inferior alternative of cable internet to satisfy his business buddies.
That being said, Germany’s not only lagging behind in connectivity but in digital infrastructure in general. Many businesses and especially the administration are still stuck in the previous century. Plus there’s a considerable lack of IT knowhow (and herhaps interest) in the general populace. Travellers from countries like Estonia or Finland must feel like having traveled back into the past 20 years.
I’m still using a fax machine to send messages to the local government cause they can’t properly handle email yet, lol. Called the hospital the other day due to some info missing on their website. Had a very confusing convo with their staff cause the lady genuinely didn’t understand the difference between a website, a browser, Google and a search bar widget and kept confounding them. That’s where we are at 🤷🏽.
Sure, a skilled human is still better at the job. But you don’t always need to capture every nuance. And AI does it at the fraction of the cost.
I see this with lots of German product descriptions on big store fronts like Amazon. They often seem entirely machine translated. It’s not great, but “good enough” and serviceable.
Machine translation also increasingly shifts the process from the sender of the message to the recipient. It used to be that the web page of a Vietnamese company was inaccessible if you didn’t speak Vietnamese or they specifically had an English version. Nowadays a visitor can choose to get the entire site translated automatically (by the browser, for instance). Is it as good as the translation by an expert? Of course not. But it costs the company nothing at all and the visitor a negligible amount. And it works for a plethora of languages.
That’s another (invisible) way that the world needs less and less translators. I wrote this post in English but for all I know someone could be reading it in French or Bengali. No further input required from my side.


Yeah, when I need to inspect lots of images I just open the folder in gwenview.
For peeking at a single picture or two through you can hold down control and click/hover on the filename when using Konsole. Love that feature. You can even listen to .wav files this way.


If you need it precise and adjustable use 2 layers and concentrate them with the alignment tool.
Using the official dock? Most of my problems were solved by updating the firmware. That does NOT happen automatically via the regular Steam Decker updates btw, need to trigger it yourself.


Always thought of the noise channel giving the Gameboy a unique character among low bit rate music. Glad to see you make use of it (I like Thunderking arena for instance).


OBS Studio should be able to to handle that. You can set up hot keys for saving the buffer too.


It’s a valid question. I originally read about it in a physical book, then wrote the (misconstrued) headline from memory before finding a digital source that people could click on. I’ve corrected it now.
Search engine optimization ruined the web. Change my mind!
¿Where is the hat coming from tho?
A lot of software is reliant on very precise timing. The world at large would notice immediately due to the many disconnects, glitches, bugs, desyncs, not to say anything of all the physical processes controlled by machines going wrong. As a simple example consider an industrial oven (or any process really) that is programmed to shut down at 4:39:20 but at 4:39:15 the 1 minute skip happens. An airplanes auto pilot that is suddenly missing the last minute of sensor data to. base its micro steering on. Any big internet service that has to deal with thousands to millions of clients trying to reconnect at once because their previous connection timed out. Bad stuff.
This would be immediate world wide chaos and likely panic as the cause for all the chaos would be unknown and forever would be. Economic crash likely.
Think of all the attention and effort the year 2k problem got, but this one is worse and there is no prep whatsoever.
Hmmm, it seems the modern way for autocracies to deal with elections is to control the information space. I don’t see election being called off, but major social media platforms boosting one side while attenuating the other goes a long way. We know Musk is all in on this and the other big players like Zuckerberg & Co seem all too happy to oblige. Tiktok is an open ended question at this point.


According to the study 37% of participants verify information before sharing it on social media.
There you have it folks.
Disinformation campaigns don’t need to be super convincing with the latest tech or elaborate fake outs, although it certainly helps. For the masses (ie election interference) it’s easy enough to to establish narratives, vibes by users simply sharing headlines to fake or manipulative reports. The people that bother to deep check and cross reference sources you typically couldn’t convince anyway. Sadly enough, most users never read beyond the head lines (75% this Facebook study estimates).
Think of your own feed: how many head lines // posts do you just scroll by w/out ever opening them? Even if you don’t share actively it still can influence the your perception of the world today and shape your mood.
Social media is eating away at the fundamentals of Democracy 🫠, change my mind!


As the saying goes: listen not to what politicians say, but watch what they do.
By his own previous public proclamation anyone cooperating with the extremist AfD is to be expelled from his party. If he had decency he would now self-expel.



It’s crazy to think that while we now live in a globalized, interconnected society with billions of peoples yet Dunbar’s hasn’t changed from when we formed tribes and harmlets thousands of years ago.
A lot of the structures and institutions of modern society essentially center around somehow overcoming or side stepping Dunbar’s number: to reliably interact with strangers, ease tensions and achieve greater things (from credit scores to spelling dictionaries to standard sized clothing to electing representatives to online wikis to opening hours, calendars and time zones; the list goes on an on).


So reportedly this guy got caught in a right-wing echo chamber of conspiracy Youtubers. That’s why his coup came so out of nowhere:


Indeed so but the power draw is very miniscule.


I like the integration of the switch, should be standard. I use many switch plug-ins just to avoid stand-by consumption (it really adds up over the year) and to avoid high pitch humming on some devices.
YSK: there’s also remote controls for these switches, very handy

You can also play this on Android via portmaster.