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

Agreed, and it really makes me nervous about changing jobs. If I start a job that requires using something other than Linux, I don’t really know what I’ll do. I’ll probably have to get really good with tmux or zellij or similar because window managers on non-FOSS platforms suck so badly!

Oh yeah, I completely forgot about the stupid animations. They also happen when moving a window to another virtual desktop, or when you minimize it. Complete waste of time and they just cause me to forget what I was trying to do or why.

Also, on the topic of minimizing windows, I also hate the dock concept where all the windows are grouped together. I like having a taskbar with a full list of windows so I can see how many are open. If I see too many that are open, I start closing the old ones that I don’t need anymore, which helps me stay organized. This is much harder to do with a dock instead. But once again, it’s just a matter of preference!

Once, when I started a new job, I had to use an Apple laptop until my Linux laptop came. While the Apple laptop was better than I expected, it was still one of the most annoying weeks of my life. The most unbearable part was the keyboard. I could never tell which hotkeys used ctrl and what used alt, and it just wasn’t worth the effort of remembering the differences or remapping them.

But besides that, after using Linux for 15 years, the very basic levels of configurability that the Apple window manager provides just made it look like a child’s toy compared to Linux. In Linux, there are so many different window managers that it becomes very easy to customize an environment that works perfectly for you. With Apple, you just get what you’re given and if it’s bad or doesn’t work well for your habits, then tough luck, you’re stuck with it anyway. So in that respect, Apple computers don’t work at all - you work for the computer, whereas it should be the other way around.

But at the end of the day, what it really comes down to is the fact that people just like what they’re used to, and it sucks to change. What’s best is a matter of preference; none is better objectively better than the other.

Except Windows. Fuck Windows.

Ctrl+H to open history then!

Why is it your responsibility to pay the creators? Google is a trillion dollar company and makes billions off of what people post on youtube. Shouldn’t they be paying them instead and not you?

Besides, it’s only a matter of time before Google takes more and more of the cut that you think you’re paying them.

You say that today. Give it a couple years. I’m pretty sure that by 2030, the cost will be ~100 dollars/euros/whatever per month and you’ll see 2 minutes of ads for every single minute of content you watch. (Okay, maybe the number of ads is an exaggeration, but I don’t think the monthly cost is.)

Don’t pay the Danegeld. It never makes them go away.

when it means they will not sell my data and will allow me control over my algorithm to prevent it from playing to my vulerabilities

The problem is that this will never happen. That boat has sailed - companies will never give up on their existing revenue streams. They may say that paying today will exempt you from the ads, but it’s only a matter of time before they ramp up the cost and start showing ads anyway. That’s how cable television started, and it’s how internet streaming will end as well. And as for the not selling data/controlling the algorithm, well you have no way of proving that they don’t do that so they’ll do it no matter what they say.

There’s no reason for google to do this whatsoever. They have their business model - any new revenue streams will 100% definitely not reduce the other ones at all. It’s just gonna be another giant dump into the pile of enshittification.

I’m really happy to see point #2 being mentioned. From their inception, Youtube established a social contract of providing their videos free to users without ads. I don’t think Google should just be allowed to unilaterally change the contract on behalf of all parties and force it on everyone. If they had a good reason to do so, perhaps I would humor it, but “because of shithead shareholders” does not pass that bar.

both view themselves as the one rightful Chinese government

This is a bit of an outdated view in my opinion. If you’re a KMT voter (ie. 60+), then sure, this is a common view. Younger generations (DPP voters) however don’t really view themselves as Chinese. I think this view will die out eventually.

Of course, for the most part, this is all off the official record because of the implications. Chinese nationalists will argue that this is wrong because it’s still written in the Taiwanese constitution or whatever, but the truth is that regular people in Taiwan couldn’t give less of a shit about China. De facto, most Taiwanese consider themselves their own country with no legitimate claims to China.

Not sure if jailing him is the right solution, but after his Moroccan speech, he should at the very least have been barred from public office, as well as participating in any political parties.

At least that way, there is a strong deterrent to preventing politicians from spewing this kind of hate.

Yeah, “monthly active users” does not necessarily mean “unique monthly active users”.

I would much rather see activity statistics like posts+comments or something like that. As long as those are looking good, then new unique users will continue to join gradually.

I’m not sure I would agree with that. ISO-8601 is ambiguous, and very difficult to parse. For example, here are a couple valid ISO-8601 strings. Could you let me know what they mean?

P1DT1H
R10/2021-208/P1Y
T22.3+0800
22,3
2021-W30-2
2021-W30-2T22+08
P1Y
20

Taken from here. My favorite is the last one (20). If someone just wrote 20 and told you to parse it using ISO-8601, what would you get? Hour? It could even be century (ie. 2023%100)!!

So I would argue that ISO-8601 is just a wee bit too flexible. Personally, I like RFC 3339 just a bit more…

Edit: that said, I would definitely agree that something along the lines of 2021-07-27T14:20:32Z is better than any regularly accepted alternative, and I pretty much format my dates that way all the time.

I love it when someone sends me a message like this:

Hey there! What are you doing on 4/5?

???

Jokes aside, it was Canada that liberated the Netherlands. And they took in the Dutch royal family as well. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canada–Netherlands_relations?useskin=vector

It’s actually quite a beautiful story to read about, for those who are interested.

Sure, World War 2 ended much more recently than the Civil War in the USA. But I don’t think the recency matters all that much. More importantly, I think Europe did a much better job of “healing” after the war was over than the US. Even after the Civil War ended, the bitterness of the slave states ensued, and continues to exist even today. You could probably argue that this continues to happen to some extent with WW2 in Germany/other parts of Europe today, but nowhere near at the same scale as the analogue in the US.

To me, the USA still looks like it’s a country that’s still at war with itself. It just happened to go from a cold war to a hot one in the 1800s, but there has always been a divide between slave state and non-slave states and it feels like it has never ended (and probably never will).

So yeah, I would argue that your last point is spot on. The USA looks like an inherently flawed country to me - it’s too big and too non-unified. It just looks like it would make so much more sense if it were split up into a few smaller countries that would be much more unified and cohesive.

Yeah, they don’t really have any sense of collaboration/compromise with people of other political opinions. To get something passed at the federal level, you need to have the president, senate, and house all on board, and if any of those are not politically aligned, any motion will fail. The periods in recent history where these have all been in alignment are simply a very small fraction of the time. And considering how long it takes to get something to pass, you end up with very little getting done during these precious few periods in time.

And on top of that, it is far more common that you see American politicians breaking from their own party to torpedo a large bill than it is to work with another party to get it passed.

It wasn’t always this way by the way - a lot of people attribute this to extreme right-wing figures during the 90s like Newt Gingrich, Rush Limbaugh, etc. who promoted hyper-polarisation and a total demonisation of anything that didn’t align with their anti-progress counter-culture. And this phenomenon has continued to evolve over the past 30-40 years both in far-right media and political representation that you see today.

The only party that spoke against it was the extreme right, and any mention of anti-immgration caused a massive shitstorm by any other political party that refused to touch the subject.

Yeah, this is the problem right here. If none of the mainstream political parties are representing a particular opinion, large swathes of voters will go to the fringe parties that do represent how they feel. And this is how fringe far-right parties become the new mainstream.

It sucks to admit it, because on humanitarian grounds, I’m pretty in favour of accepting migrants, refugees, etc. But if such a large fraction of the population is against it, it simply can’t happen, and compromises have to be made.