jamesbelchamber

IP on everything :D

Not at all. In fact, American sunscreens may be less safe.

Are they less safe, or _may_ they be less safe? The distinction is important, and I'm wary of overexcited editors "upgrading" titles for clicks.

(This is a comment on the veracity of the title claim only - I'm British, I have no skin in this game)

This is yet another negative article with LiberOffice/TDF at the centre of it (this time with Collabora freely dragging themselves into the muck). This after attacks on OnlyOffice and OpenOffice for, from a relatively external perspective, "existing as competition".

I appreciate that for those "in the trenches" this may be a rallying cry or a shot across the bow, but for the rest of us it is indicating that we keep the whole thing - LibreOffice and Collabora - at arms length. Which is a shame because I've recommended both to people in the past, as well as happily using both at various points myself.

The tech community has had pretty much free reign over the last few decades, and has always chosen adult convenience over child safety (and mostly profit over both). The "middle ground" probably involves a bigger transfer than this.

There's probably a much better solution than "adults vs children" but very few with our expertise seem seriously interested in solving for safer children, which essentially leads to inexpert solutions gaining popular support.

Could Project Managers start talking to me like the suggestion in Scenario 1 too please, that's clearly better.

It should be acknowledged that this was at least significantly about lobbying, and shouldn't be considered a cut-and-dry "failed experiment" (though clearly there are lessons that can be learned):

[Munich Mayor] Reiter wanted Microsoft to move its Microsoft Germany corporate headquarters to to Munich. Microsoft moved and Reiter wants to deliver on his promise to make Munich a Windows-powered city.

https://www.zdnet.com/article/why-munich-should-stick-with-l...

I used to use Curve but they became really unreliable, especially when paying for public transport, so I just switched back to a normal card.

Shame because you can get some nice watch straps with curve integration, which would neatly solve the missing payment feature on Pebble watches.

It does, doesn't it! This is basically the reason scepticism in screening has risen (amongst scientists and medics, not the general population) - research seems to show that screening catches much more cancer but doesn't save many more people.

Rohin Francis does a good video on it, which you don't have to watch because it has references underneath you can click straight through to (the video is good though): https://youtu.be/yNzQ_sLGIuA

I am frustrated by this because it seems obvious to me that "more data == better" but I guess it makes sense if you think of the scans as having high amounts of noise, and us having a poor understanding of the system we're monitoring (this never happens in tech, of course :)).

One important point is that many people die WITH cancer but not OF cancer. So even for the 1.8%, only a fraction of those people were going to die of the disease (or even suffer significant symptoms) - the rest were just going to die of natural causes anyway.

But now you've found it you pretty much have to remove it, which has significant quality of life implications.

This is incredibly cool tech built on an idea of participatory, consensus-building democracy that I want to believe is possible and sustainable.

Basic Income and UBI are colloquially synonyms, people use them interchangeably, and the Irish government are almost certainly using it to endear themselves to supporters of UBI and to get more coverage for their policy than media would give them if they just called it a grant.

This happens all the time. For example, in the UK there was a push for a "living wage" in the 2010s, which the government responded to by rebranding the minimum wage the "National Living Wage" and bumping it a little for over-25s.

This seems to be the same thing.

If they think this is good/important then fine but what they've created is a grant programme, not a UBI.

Personally I would have thought this money would have been better spent getting people on the margins the stability to retrain into in-demand skilled careers (e.g. single, unskilled parents training as electricians or plumbers). That feels like it would be a more durable, multi-generational benefit.

But again, this is just a grant programme.

Marxists don't like Basic Income and it's incompatible with Marxist ideology.

"Marxism" has just become thought-terminating shorthand for "thing I don't like".

OpenStack was created by NASA and Rackspace, both very American..

The whole post is a gish gallop of half truths and nonsense.

By the powerful oat lobby?

The wanker licensing board defected to Reform last week

I think the wisdom of "just fork it" is that in a project the power lies with the people who do the work (yes, that power is often rented out in exchange for a pay cheque), and in an open source project you have the right to do that work without kowtowing to the authority of other people who did the work before you ("just fork it").

The important point lost in many of these anti-fork posts is that forks usually aren't hostile, and "just fork it" isn't usually a dismissal of people's input - rather, it's an invitation to do the work and to stop looking for permission. Which is really the core value of open source - no need for permission, "just do it". Forks also don't generally split communities because forks live within the community (and good community leaders foster the tolerance of forks).

As an example, I have a fork going of someone else's open source project which I made to meet my client's needs. I've got an email thread going with the project owner, it's all very friendly, and one day the fork might merge back in again (probably in parts). I think this is how most forks work, with the exceptions making big headlines partly because they're juicy gossip but mostly because they are exactly that - exceptions.

Are competing search indexes (Bing, Ecosia/Qwant, etc) objectively worse in significant ways, or is Google just so entrenched that people don't want to "risk it" with another provider (and/or preferences and/or inertia).

I suppose I'm asking whether this is actually a _good thing_ in that it will stimulate competition in the space, or if it's just a case that Google's index is now too good for anyone to reasonably catch up at this point.

You might be thinking of the second "Hangouts", whereas what I'm referring to was apparently "Google+ Hangouts" and was the original. You could get 25 people on there, and for a bigger audience you could go "on Air" (which streamed the Hangout). Looks very similar to Zoom (in fact I suspect Zoom was heavily inspired by it) and I remember using it (and it's descents) before COVID and the rise of Zoom.

This video demonstrates an early version of it (from 2011!): https://youtu.be/KLf9jzFvkTA

At one point Zoom was the only one that could figure out how to video conference well.

I may be misremembering but wasn't it _Google_ who worked it out first (Hangouts was free and easy to use) and then fumbled it so badly that Zoom entered much later with a sorta-okay alternative at just the right point in time?

I truly don't understand how Google keep breaking good products but I remember Hangouts being kind-of amazing for a moment there.

(This is tangential and I don't think it undermines the article)

I used to teach with it - at classroom-scale it was really good. Unfortunately they shut all that down a little while back, and there wasn't really a good replacement. Which was a shame.

Seems to have worked out for them, mind!

It's a shame this isn't open source, since Linux users are disproportionately likely to scratch their own itches.

Regardless, great to see this come to Linux.

They could call it a banana but then everyone would be expecting a curved yellow thing.

Words and phrases have shared meanings, BSL doesn't conform to the meaning we've attached to open source.

Good practical explanation of something I felt but couldn't put a name to.

While FAANG undoubtedly have chosen profit over safety I'm not yet convinced non-FAANG social media is significantly safer, in terms of mental health, antisocial behaviour or predation.

Yeah, I'm old enough to remember when microcassette voice recorders were a fad, and pretty much everyone found they just weren't worth it.

They really were worth it if you had a secretary to transcribe the voice recordings.

People moved on from Mastodon to Bluesky because it was more responsive to user needs. I encouraged people to move to Mastodon but then watched them move on.

It is what it is - but it's worth being clear-eyed about what it is.

My first thought is to lean towards small companies that are not looking to grow. They are hard to find, and usually have no time/energy to "train" me.

If they're not looking to grow themselves then why would they invest in growing you?

I rewrote it to make a bit more sense to more people :) this was written by a friend of mine, and I enjoyed it, so I thought I'd share it.