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Cake day: August 22nd, 2025

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  • And to add insult to the injury they will then be asked to be “nicer” and will be blamed for not getting enough tips. I mean for heaven’s sake NL, don’t become a hellhole, even though it’d be a richer hellhole. And mind it, “overall” richer, not everybody richer, oh no, oh no! Very few will become massively richer and a lot will start becoming drastically poorer (just look at the big beautiful Gaad’s own nation).

    Then they will come for the housing and health and other benefits that the citizens and residents are entitled to, whatever there is.

    Remind me again… is the right wing (populism etc) getting a foothold in the NL (like in DE) by any chance?

    See…. when the software hub for the world is just one nation (and that too the most powerful, the most corrupt, in fact with legal corruption, and has been the single most devastating nation to this planet - indirectly and directly, with a leader at the helm who is… well let’s not get into that… … yada yada) then the risk is not just someday your banking system and emails stop working, these are far greater and insidious risks.

    This is how societies are broken and then taken apart.





  • Some companies buy other companies to let them die – strategically, some companies buy other companies to get their features/talents but remove any trace of that company or that design language, or so. Some companies buy other companies to control competition. Apple seems to buy other companies for doing nothing at all. They have so much money that they buy other companies, but they are so bad at software that they can’t figure out what to do with it after that.

    It’s sad stating this as an iPhone/Mac user (but not an Apple fan – yes, there’s a distinction), but even if Apple is able to buy Google in its entirety, they will not be able to fix search in any part of the Apple ecosystem.


  • A lot of these “privacy sensitive” service providers are actually quite user-hostile.

    Find a middle ground - get your own domain (pick a good registrar) and find a respectable mail host that has a support team with accountability who don’t treat you like a burden on this planet when you attempt to contact them (i.e not Tuta, not Mailbox-org - nope!!!, not Proton etc.). Do not go overboard with DMARC/etc in the beginning. Go about it slowly.

    Also - make sure you use a service that lets you connect via an IMAP/POP client. It pains me to say that, but if you start avoiding services based on “five eyes” and “14 eyes” and “195 eyes”, I’m pretty sure we will be looking at pigeons and corked bottles in the sea. So, if you need E2EE over email - please use E2EE in the email using GPG on your own. I’d highly recommend not falling for the privacy theatre of the likes of Proton.





  • Actually people who don’t live outside have those accents as well. His parents actually moved back when he was 1 or 2 years old. This is really on the lines of the typical accent of people from this subcontinent who are highly educated (via English), well travelled, well read etc.

    I have a friend who went to UK and came back after 13 years. Spent most of the time at SOAS. Her accent didn’t change at all. It is what it was when she left at the time of her bachelors. She did masters, PhD, and post doc there (the last one is still ongoing - not sure, some people study a lot).

    But I see people coming from America in 3 bloody months and speaking English in American accent.




  • It is actually nice when the person has better language proficiency in English. What people often make fun of on the Internet are many who either don’t know how to speak English or don’t know it well, and that’s pretty common and normal for that country of 1.5 billion. If you listen to any seasoned Indian journalist (especially a bit older), you’d hear that faint old English lilt (from the middle of the start of the last century). You will also find that in the way Pakistanis speak English. It’s very similar.


  • I like most or all of them when the speaker has at least above-average proficiency. Except American. Esp. the one that rolls a lot and for long (probably from the South of the USA, I am not sure). That’s what makes it very hard for me to watch/hear most of the American content.

    My favourite, though, is from my home country, which has a very slight tinge of (old) British accent (colonial leftover/hangover) and also the Middle Eastern accent (it’s close to home), again only if the speaker has very good proficiency.


  • The thing is most of my gold (i.e. ~20% of my portfolio) is as ETFs. Good luck to me using that when civilisation collapses, if it does (I don’t think that’s happening in the shape and form as it sounds from this article). But then it was not likely at all I would be able to safeguard that in the physical gold form either in that perceived atmosphere of tyranny and mayhem, so that’s there.

    One could, however, look to reduce or balance (whatever you wanna call it) USD exposure.


  • There is too concentrated which is bad (mac, win), and there is too fragmented which is bad (that is your Linux/distro universe). In other words, in one world, a single entity controls and is responsible for everything, and in another world, no one is. I am not getting into what is worse or better, rather what is usable for an end user.

    And then there’s the tacit wisdom of the FOSS/Linux world savants: “Uh, if something is not done or not available – you can just fork it or raise a PR, can’t you?” completely escaping the fact that almost the entirety of the users of either world are just end users.




  • This is relevant for immigrants who are trying to escape poverty, almost with no future in their own countries either for their personal or professional aspirations. I am not a China fan, but when you look at countries around the world, many of which are very poor and underdeveloped but with lots of brilliant, hard-working people with dreams and potential, they would rather go to a place where they have at least some stability, predicted living and working conditions, and a future, rather than to a place where one doesn’t know whether the potential future mayor of New York City, born and brought up in the USA and hence of course a citizen who happens to be the son of a world-famous filmmaker and a well-known academic, will actually be deported or not. I mean that’s a real possibility at this point - let that sink in. (I am not even going for more extreme examples)

    I wish things were better, and I wish we didn’t live in a world where China, yes, China – of all the countries, might become a viable alternative for people from the developing or underdeveloped world compared to the USA.