You’re right! But I see this as a perversion of education. Education should not be a job training programme. It should teach you how to think and learn. It should be a place where you “learn how to learn” to put it more accurately.

So if you learn how to use LibreOffice in schools, you should be able to adapt when you arrive in the workplace and use MS Office instead - especially if you are still young.

And in my opinion, having experience with two office suites makes you more productive in the end anyway. I think it helps teach you how to translate capabilities from one product to another and makes you more knowledgeable about how each of them works. At least that’s what happens to me in my experience when I learn two analogous pieces of software.

Indeed. For the Finns, the hardest part of the coronavirus pandemic was adjusting to 2m of social distancing, down from their preferred distance of 5m.

There may still be lawsuits, however. There are still many ways that he could lose a lot of what he gained.

I prefer eating fresh food, which means that I usually have to go to the store roughly every other day. If I buy more than a couple days of food, it just means more crap in the fridge and more spoilage.

And if my food did last longer than a few days without spoiling, then I’d really start to question what it was made of…

Editing to add that this is easily possible because I have several stores within a short walk or ride on the transit, as it was also pointed out in a sibling comment.

Why just 90%? Make it 99%! 100%! 150%!

It’s also important to note that Putin intentionally keeps all other leaders in Russia as weak as possible to maintain his iron grip. Unless he has a very good succession plan, things could become quite a clusterfuck before the dust settles.

I’ve never had the chance to use a functional language in my work, but I have tried to use principles like these.

Once I had a particularly badly written Python codebase. It had all kinds of duplicated logic and data all over the place. I was asked to add an algorithm to it. So I just found the point where my algorithm had to go, figured out what input data I needed and what output data I had to return, and then wrote all the algorithm’s logic in one clean, side effect-free module. All the complicated processing and logic was performed internally without side effects, and it did not have to interact at all with the larger codebase as a whole. It made understanding what I had to do much easier and relieved the burden of having to know what was going on outside.

These are the things functional languages teach you to do: to define boundaries, and do sane things inside those boundaries. Everything else that’s going on outside is someone else’s problem.

I’m not saying that functional programming is the only way you can learn something like this, but what made it click for me is understanding how Haskell provides the IO monad, but recommends that you keep that functionality at as high of a level as possible while keeping the lower level internals pure and functional.

In my opinion, it’s most important for kids to learn to use these tools above all. Schools need to take the charge on using products like these instead of corporate offerings. Once that takes place, I think (hope) the floodgates will open and that we’ll finally start breaking free of the shackles of these kinds of corporate software.

Sad to see that Ecosia and Qwant don’t seem to work without Javascript. I’ll stick with DDG, and may consider using Mojeek more in the future. The fact that DDG doesn’t have its own index does bother me a bit.

Sounds like a great deal… TORILLE!!!

Agreed, but on the other hand, maybe this could push them to be better involved in the collective defense of Europe, not just for new arms but older ones as well. The more countries that contribute to Europe’s collective defense, the better.

Right, but I don’t think it’s explicitly clear - today, the US is dominant in movies for example. Supporting alternative industries could start to chip away at that dominance, and if a day comes when nobody outside the USA cares about their movies anymore because they have their own industries, that would do a lot more damage.

I think we’re in agreement, but I just want to point it out in case anyone missed that point. By promoting alternatives, getting to the point where nobody cares about US media anymore is really the ultimate goal if you’re trying to do maximum damage.

(And to be honest, American movies are really not that good. They’re very formulaic and predictable. That’s why I wouldn’t bother watching them, even if I wanted to download them for free.)

Don’t forget that the EU Commission funded a report to document the impact of file sharing and then buried it when they found out that it was actually beneficial to the creators. So if you want to engage in file sharing, you’re actually helping them.

Do what you will with that information. If you really want to boycott, then boycott the content altogether. If you can’t hold back, then download them, but you’re helping them out anyway by doing that.

The best thing you can do is support your local art scene and find better alternatives.

I’m not sure I agree with that. Before suggesting someone wield that kind of power, consider how you’d feel about it if the opposition parties did that too.

At this point, I think the USA is better off just reforming its constitution. And possibly splitting the union into 5-10 separate smaller countries. The country is clearly not an effective union anymore, and to be honest, hasn’t been for a very long time. This isn’t the first time there’s been a north-south divide and it certainly won’t be the last, so why prolong the suffering? Just break it up and be done with it. Everyone will probably be much happier that way.

If they all weren’t a bunch of cowards, they would have stood up to him already.

What kind of programming work are you doing?

I’ve thought about situations like yours and what I would do if I were in that situation someday. For me, the plan is to try doing as much in the console as possible, which means Vim/Neovim for development and Tmux for window management.

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!

My understanding from what you’re writing (and from this article) is that the phone number is really the account number. That’s all well and fine, but then they force you to verify that the number is yours (or at the very least, one that you have access to because you need to receive a confirmation over SMS), so you can’t use something more private. And sure, it makes it a little harder to find your new contact, but I don’t think it’s really that big of a deal - just exchange your other “account number” via some other channel.

Besides, don’t think for a second that when this identifying information inevitably falls into the wrong hands that it will benefit you in any way. “What are you hiding, citizen?” and all that bullshit.

The part of it that bothers me is the sense of entitlement that these companies exhibit. The “Give us your phone number or fuck off” sentiment is something I just refuse to accept. If Google forces us to do the same and we refuse, what makes Signal think that we’ll do it for them when they’re so much smaller by comparison? Especially when you’re trying to claim you’re more secure and private to people that much more tech savvy than average, this just comes off as not understanding your audience very well. I’m sure I’m not the only one that is holding out against using Signal because of this.