USB condoms are a thing. I should get one in USB-C; mine only do A.

Well, the camera needs to talk to your onsite storage in order to store video. A simple consumer device like a Ring isn’t going to be hardwired; it just uses Wi-Fi (which every household can be assumed to have) to connect to your LAN and talk to the storage device.

The question is why the Wi-Fi could be turned off on the first place. Probably an ISP-managed router; I doubt they’d go and jam the entire spectrum between 2.4 and 7 GHz.

That’s one reason why people should use their own router and/or access point whenever possible.

We’ve been productively using AI for decades now – just not the AI you think of when you hear the term. Fuzzy logic, expert systems, basic automatic translation… Those are all things that were researched as artificial intelligence. We’ve been using neural nets (aka the current hotness) to recognize hand-written zip codes since the 90s.

Of course that’s an expert definition of artificial intelligence. You might expect something different. But saying that AI isn’t AI unless it’s sentient is like saying that space travel doesn’t count if it doesn’t go faster than light. It’d be cool if we had that but the steps we’re actually taking are significant.

Even if the current wave of AI is massively overhyped, as usual.

Of course you wouldn’t use an existing database engine as the foundation of a new database engine. But you would use an existing database engine as the foundation of an ERP software, which is a vastly different use case even if the software does spend a lot of time dealing with data.

If I want to build an application I don’t want to reimplement everything. That’s what middleware is for. The use case of my application is most likely not to speak a certain protocol; the protocol is just the means to what I actually want to do. There’s no reason for me to roll my own implementation from scratch and keep up with current developments except if I’m unhappy with all current implementations of that protocol.

Of course one can overdo it with middleware (the JS world is rife with this) but implementing a communication protocol is one of the classic cases where it makes sense.

Yeah. It’s one thing when people leave some extra money for good service or tell the server to keep the change, all while knowing that none of this is necessary.

It’s another when a 15%+ surcharge is added to the total so that the server can afford to live.

Or, for the Europeans in the audience: https://europass.europa.eu/en/create-europass-cv

These protests don’t really affect Trump directly but they do signal to the local governments that this is something people feel strongly about – and thus something that might cost them votes if they mishandle it. And that might affect how the EU deals with him.

To be fair, the caption comments on how odd it is to discuss switching to European products on an American website.

It depends. “Donald Trump wants to annex Wisconsin as the 51st state” wouldn’t be funny. Pocketpair launching a Steam store page for the Palworld dating sim (which was last year’s April Fools joke) was.

But yeah, this isn’t the time for political humor.

Not for me. In my case, the party accidentally one-shotted the big bad the first time they met him because everyone had severely underestimated the amount of firepower that system gave PCs who weren’t deliberately gimped.

It’s okay; I declared that the guy had a cloning device. From then on he died once per session and the tone of the campaign changed into “zany splatter comedy”.

Even worse. The business model was “offer a service at a loss, get investors to fund you on promises that your customer base will allow you to turn a profit if it just gets big enough, repeat”. Basically you’re funding growth with the promise of future growth. Enshittification happens when the investors stop believing in the promised future profits and force the business to generate some right now.

Certain things can’t reasonably be accelerated. Factories have a maximum output and building new ones (with all the infrastructure they need) isn’t instantaneous. Armies need to be trained to different standards. And all of that stuff costs money.

For example: Germany just took on half a trillion Euros in debt to raise “special assets”, that’s equal to 1/9 of our GDP. Those special assets will be used to overhaul our infrastructure (which has been rotting away during two decades of austerity politics) and to get our armed forces into fighting shape. Both of that is required for effective defense production.

But we can’t just tell KDNS to deliver 1000 Leopard 2A8s by the end of the week. Those need to be built. If we want them to be built faster we have to build or refit factories – which we’re actually doing; there are plans to use a Volkswagen plant to build tanks instead of cars. But even if we can build more tanks that won’t do us any good if we can’t manufacture enough shells, have enough tank crews, have the infrastructure to move everything around etc. etc. etc.

The pax americana has always been built on the premise that the USA provide military capabilities to their allies specifically so that the allies won’t compete with them on that stage. Going from that to having to be able to potentially defend against the States in a very short time is a logistical nightmare. In the case of Germany, this comes on top of our infrastructure being shit because the conservatives have spent two decades demonstrating the full depth of their economic ineptitude.

For the time being, the best we have is the fact that the EU is also a military alliance and that France has enough nukes to glass all American metropolitan areas.

It’s easy enough once you’ve tracked one down. Just don’t track someone down to inform them that you’ve turned articles upside down and you should be good.

Vereinheitlichtes Betriebssystem für den Öffentlichen Dienst, also known as VereinhBetrSfdÖD. Rolls right off the tongue.

Depends on your keyboard layout. On Macintosh-like keyboards it can be as simple as AltGr+dash. On smartphone keyboards you can just long-press the dash.

On Windows you’re expected to hold down Alt and enter some code.

Whichever one has no warnings in ToxFox¹. I am partial to Schwarzkopf’s Nature Box line but I’m the end I’m not picky as long as there’s no nasty shit in there.

¹Explanation for non-Germans: ToxFox is a mobile app released by German eco-NGO BUND. It lets you scan a cosmetic product’s barcode to look it up in an ingredients database. It will show warnings if the product contains stuff like microplastics or ingredients that aren’t entirely harmless.

Their Hysson is pretty tasty, with a slight honey aroma. I can recommend it.

The social implications of veiling are an interesting and complex topic. Unfortunately, public discourse tends to be pretty bad at handling complex topics. But there are occasional moments of lucidity. To wit:

Sometime around 2015 or so we had a big political debate in Germany. Some politicians were floating the idea of a “burqa ban” (= a flat ban on all forms of Islamic face veiling). For a while it was seriously debated but it ultimately failed as most Germans considered it to violate freedom of religion.

The media were actually helpful – at least the publicly funded ones were. One particularly interesting report I saw was when a female reporter put on full veils (and correctly identified what she was wearing as a niqab, not a burqa) and went out in public. First with a hidden camera to see how she was treated, then with a camera team to get vox pops.

Opinions were actually fairly divided even among Muslims. One male Muslim argued that face veils always are inherently oppressive and have no place in society. A young woman (who was wearing nothing indicating her religion) expressed admiration for those who fully veil and hoped that one day she’d be able to as well. An old woman wearing a headscarf who was carrying groceries said that she did wear the niqab “but not right now; I have things to do”.

That diversity of views has stuck with me, especially that last statement. I never expected someone who observes such full veiling to be so pragmatic about it. (Yes, that does go against the reasons for wearing them in the first place but everybody tailors their religion to themself.) If wearing any kind of veils can be something you can just decide not to do, then it becomes an expression of agency, not one of lack thereof. I respect that.

Of course it’s not respectable when someone is forced to wear a headscarf/a niqab/whatever. But a ban isn’t going to fix that; people who oppress their wives aren’t going to stop doing so. If they feel that nobody outside the house is allowed to see their wife’s face then the wife will simply no longer be allowed to leave the house.

Ultimately, in my opinion, people should be allowed to wear any religious garment they want, provided it’s their own desire to do so and there’s no overriding reason to disallow it. (E.g., no matter how religious you are, you do not wear a kaftan or a cross necklace or anything else that dangles while operating industrial machinery.) Anything else is useless at best.

Annoyingly, we already have fast transactions as part of SEPA. But they’re somewhat inconvenient to do and especially not available by just holding your card in front of a sensor.

If we had a harmonized standard for that we could get rid of Visa and MasterCard. And if we had a common web interface to make SEPA transactions more convenient than manually typing an IBAN into a homebanking interface we could get rid of PayPal as well.

Yes, I know services like that exist but I really hate how the current ones expect me to type the login credentials for my homebanking into a third-party website.

I find that LLMs also tend to create very placative, kitschy content. Nuance is beyond them.