liotier

They are relevant to me, because I often look for documents rather than answers.

I think the market segmentation is:

- Seeking documents: search engine

- Seeking answers: LLM

Save yourself the blogspam, go directly to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wave-dissipating_concrete_bloc... and enjoy the whole collection !

I ditched osmand because the interface is so convoluted. Ridiculously so

OSMand is a cartographer's friend - it does everything and more... With all the drawbacks of doing that.

CoMaps is better targeted to the needs of most people.

Are there any side effects of leaving Immich public ?

Yes: it is necessary to share selected albums through public URL.

Euro English

I call it Eurospeak, for extra outrage - though that word currently has European Union civil service connotations (cf. https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Eurospeak)

Eurospeak is definitely the language of international corporate meetings !

This French person has taken to writing in en-GB, as a token of protest against current USAian politics. I thank the USA for this step in French-British rapprochement !

Also, in the late 90's, The Register made me love British English... Local accents are great branding.

... And that is the straw that broke the camel's back - and convinced my elderly father to accept my offer to migrate to KDE.

Also, I can now shield him from most of the incomprehensible unsolicited dialogs that triggered support calls. I haven't had to field a single complaint since I tuned his desktop !

kha-euh-ro - including the "euh" impronounceable by non-French.

In French project management parlance, we use k€ all the time.

HN is an online community. Same as forums, and BBSs were.

That is the very definition of social media.

"Social media I like" vs. "Social media I don't like" isn't valid categorization.

Sorry, and thank you for noticing.

I tried posting the correct URL at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48386203 - but HN mangled the it again... So, I had actually posted it right the first time and there is a technical issue !

Mods, please ?

I entered the MANGO rabbit hole... Lots of 5:7211 lore from 1994 at https://www.africa.upenn.edu/Comp_Articles/Health_Net_Zimb.h... - satellite groundstation too !

Programming sequencers visually and with tons of help from the tooling pushes the ear sharpening later in the learning process - and I'm only now starting to realize that maybe making music is about deciding what sounds right... I suppose the trombone and violin's "sink or swim" approach ensures the early acquisition of that skill.

I suppose one's ear gets sharpened fast, out of necessity - but I recoil at imagining what the other band members have to get through meanwhile. The process for violin is the same though.

But, how can a trombone ever be better than the piano when there’s so many variables? Well, unlike a piano, where each key produces a fixed pitch, a trombone lets me subtly adjust every note as I play.

Thanks, but I'll stick to my keyboard's pitch bend control.

The trombone's great expressiveness comes at a steep learning cost.

In Harare in 1998, I remember the pleasant surprise of finding a good "internet café" in some downtown office building... Was Fidonet still active in Zimbabwe at that time, or had Internet access supplanted it already ?

Early KDE made no sense for me - I went Gnome, then migrated to xfce in disgust... I saw myself using an increasing number of KDE applications (I was impressed by Dolphin and Kate), I thought I might as well go the whole way and setup my Debian with KDE. I was immediately awed by the sane defaults and how everything is a mutable parameter... KDE Plasma is my dream desktop nowadays !

I use KDE now as a bog standard boring Linux desktop that just works

"bog standard boring Linux desktop that just works" is a low key major achievement - I love it !

Hosting a Minecraft server was pretty big for me.

This seems to have been the gateway to systems administration for a surprisingly large number of contemporary young people - just like IRC, Quake and Counterstrike servers in my teen years, and futzing with config.sys & autoexec.bat for DOS games when I was a kid... And the hacking soon becomes more fun than the game itself !

The user legitimately considers the application as hostile - hence sandboxing... Notification spam filtering is now the obvious need at the sandbox's edge, with the whole customizable arsenal we have come to expect for our inbound mail. Of course, Google will not cooperate with anything likely to reduce sacro-sanct engagement !

Forwarders work with batches: small batches (consolidate packages in a suitcase to travel as airline luggage) or large batches (up to a whole 40 feet container)... So, delay is a matter of luck - ask around if a batch is due to depart and available slots remain. Express remains the province of traditional players - though I've managed to find a forwarder to urgently ship a small blister of drugs, but such service isn't guaranteed.

Technology isn't the problem - African developers produce apps just fine. It isn't even local logistics - addresses are being deployed in major cities, and alternative processes work fine elsewhere. The problem is rule of law, or lack thereof.

Rule of law is critical infrastructure.

Also, South Africa isn't sub-Saharan Africa.

This is not how it works. My partner is Ugandan, we live in France - I'm used to ship to various countries in Africa. Never use the "regular" post - it is just as OP described. Don't use high-end couriers (DHL, Fedex etc.) either - very expensive for scant value added. Do what every local does: use one of the innumerable grey market freight forwarders. One way or the other (for a typical "line haul" example, they entrust extra carry-on luggage to airline passengers remunerated for the service), they get packages to their destination, and they are not even expensive.

They know the thicket of rules and petty fiefdoms, what rules apply and which don't, what to pay and to whom... Regular post just acts as if everything works by the book - and that doesn't fly. Use word-of-mouth to find the good couriers, trawl through your local community of people from the destination country - it is a very common service, so you'll soon find a good provider. Test it with a couple of low-stakes deliveries and you'll have a solid channel.

Meet your guy in a metro station, or find the shop in Barbès that smells like a marketplace across the Mediterranean, hand over your package with the recipient's name, destination city (Addresses ? Where we're going we don't need addresses !), your phone number and the recipient's phone number scrawled on it with a felt-tip marker (make sure they are Whatsapp numbers), pay in cash, don't get a receipt (lol) - and there you go !

Operating in Africa will soon tire you if you attempt to force European ways. Going with the flow (with appropriate caution - a nose for issues, borne from experience, is invaluable) works and makes the experience enjoyable !

Thanks to AI too - wow, it really is versatile !

Yes - it is easier than ever thanks to AI !

Is PC/GEOS (GeoWorks Ensemble) in there ? Or does it count as a DOS application ?

Not everyone wants to wear a mask in public. Free speech requires anonymity and pseudonymity to remain a possibility, but most humans are just fine with a single all-purpose identity.

With even their lowest subscription, Kagi is a very nice substitute to the old Google.

Reproducing an ASML machine is a piece of cake. Okay, not a piece of cake but definitely doable. The problem is that you cannot sell your reproduction in rich countries because the US government will threaten you with sanctions and US companies will screech "patents!".

... An argument that may not convince China and Russia, who have a track record of ignoring it - I doubt it is a significant reason why they have not achieved semiconductor manufacture tooling parity.

Competitors on the same market segment - France vs. Germany.