A server is measured by its availability. To read content from it, it has to be available. While everyone could use a dedicated always-on device, thats not really the situation you are describing. So you would run the software on your phone/notebook/PC. Those are not always available on the internet.

If you post something to your 50 recipients (as you stated in another comment), they can only read it, if both of you are online. For asynchronous communication (like a post typically is), that is a lot to ask. Especially, if you want to have features like comments, that all your recipients can see.

If you move away from the typical social media principle, then you can have truly decentralized messengers. I think, that already exists.

Another problem with any decentralized approach is how to handle content moderation. It is necessary, since humans are messy. The more decentralized a system is, the harder it becomes to moderate. For example: How would you stop CSAM to be proliferated through it? Or even stop it to being send to you? If the software has some automatic replication feature to enhance availability, then this problem gets worse. Lemmy has had its own attacks with CSAM being posted to many servers. That can get you into legal trouble very fast.

Much like the soon to be german chancellor, who told an interviewer, that he is upper middle class. All that while being a former Blackrock manager and owning (and using regularily) a personal private jet. Thats some kind of chancellor material...

Relevant xkcd: Average familiarity

You severly overestimate the average persons tech literacy even when you try to correct for it. Booting from USB is already a really advanced topic.

Though creating a lemmy account is not that complex. Typically all you have to do is fill out a form on the websiten instructions included. The problem there is not the tech literacyn but the willingness of the people to even interact with systems they don't know, like finding a home instance or understanding the concept of the fediverse. Most people could create a lemmy account, though also most people wouldn't.

I always cringe with the 7th book, where the trio is hiding and searching for horkruxes, and for some weird reason they don't have enough food and are constantly hungry. From the reading perspective I understand, that the hunger is a device to generate conflict and make their time hard to endure, but it always baffles me.

• It is mentioned, that Hermione pulled out all her muggle savings, so why didn't she think about going to a supermarket and buying all the conserved food (cans and such) she can before they got on the run? She even mentions, that food can be multiplicated, just not created out of nothing.
• When they are hiding they sometimes get to a store or supermarket. But that only brings food for like a few days max. Why not more?
• And when there where too many dementors in an area to get more food, why not going really far away. We know Hermione was at least one time in France with her parents. Why not going there? Probably the war-like situation was not spread over the complete world that seriously. At least we are not hearing any of that in the books (JKR probably didn't even thing much about international things when writing this)

Wait, since when do they give a "refund" for content that is no longer available? A while ago I bought the first season of Fringe (knowing that I don't actually own it), but I got nothing, when it was pulled. Do I need to ask explicitly for that gift card?

Wenn die Eltern die Datenschutzerklärung für Bilder nicht unterschrieben haben...

Mhh, HLI. Ist aber auch eine schwierige Falle in einer Sprache, in der so oft Wörter einfach aneinander geklatscht werden, ohne auf korrekte Syntax zu achten

What does working in a different country have to do with the US? They said they didn't want to work in the US and that CBP falsified their testimony. As they themselves admitted it was just naiv to believe germans were excempt from the administrations pullshit.

Leo Hare thought their troubles were over when their landlord’s son offered a generous interest rate for investing their $50,000 nest egg in what he described as a car import business. But they only saw one payment before he stopped sending them money and refused to return their money, Leo Hare said.

Wow, trained to believe every dumb shit presented to them, huh

Occam's razor, because it seem it is often used wrong by using it for just shutting down possible explanations. Typically noone mentions, that this is about guessing probabilities without prior knowledge and not a way to completely ignore an explanation.

Where I live in germany there is a saying: "Anderswo is auch scheiße". Literally translates to "Other places are also shit". So I'm currently not considering moving into another country. Though I often ask myself, what I would do if germany goes the nazi route again. The AfD is real scum.

The bee die-offs, that one typically hears about, has nothing to do with honey bees. Honey bees don't show any signs of going extinct. Its may of the other bee species, which are dying off. And that is bad because of the species liking different specific plants, which often rely on this bee species to be pollinated.

You are getting old, when you start specifying a whole century when talking about past experiences XD

Thats why other countries are doing it that way. The problem is, that the US system makes it very difficult to get an ID for its long list of undesireables. And with that I mean everyone, who is not white, heteronormative, cis and not-poor. If the US fixes these problems and issues IDs for every of its citizens, then requiring the ID for voting is a good idea. Unfortunately that is a big big If, carrying a lot of weight.

including those laid off, since some are still hoping to find jobs elsewhere at the WMF, and others are depending on severance pay

Am I too european to understand this? If they "get jobs elsewhere at the WMF" this is not a layoff, is it? I know the US has nearly no worker protections, so maybe that makes it a layoff. Do they need to interview for these positions again?

If this were something other than Community Tech, maybe I could convince myself it's all just a coincidence. But the WMF has been on a generally upward trajectory at avoiding decisions that will piss off the entire community. "Don't disband CommTech" might as well be the "don't mess with the pancreas"of WMF governance. The only explanation for the WMF doing this—not just reörganizing but outright laying off the team—is that they are so determined to prevent the union from becoming official that they are willing to risk the massive community blowback (which, from a corporate-brain point of view, is a greater downside than the five people left jobless).

That paragraph I don't understand. Why is union busting the only explanation?

From one of the comments of that Reddit thread:

the union was apparently formed exactly 90 days prior to the layoff announcement; under california state law (where they are located) “a termination within 90 days of protected union activity creates a rebuttable presumption that the termination was illegal retaliation”

I think that is an interesting detail here, though I have not bothered to go through the sources for this.

Wer ständig davon redet, dass wir den Gürtel enger schnallen müssen und uns sowas wie bezahlte Krankheitstage nicht mehr leisten können, dem glaub man nicht, wenn er von einer großem guten Zukunft spricht. Sogar in seiner Kommunikation failed Merz immer wieder.

Aber immer schön über Generationengerechtigkeit reden, damit auch ja nicht zur Sprache kommt, wo die Gewinne aus der (im Vergleich zu den Löhnen) überproportional gestiegenen Produktivität hingehen. Immer schön die Strohmänner hochhalten, Leute!

The important part where this scheme came from:

According to Tex Texin, the first numeronym of this kind was "S12n", the electronic mail account name given to Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC) employee Jan Scherpenhuizen by a system administrator because his surname was too long to be an account name. The use of such numeronyms became part of DEC corporate culture.[3]

So it was a technical limitation gotten corporate naming scheme.

A while ago we had an interesting situation at work. At regular intervals our team has a call with our direct boss, for communicating how the business is going and to give little talks about out current technological challenges with our customers. At that time the results of the employee survey were published and our team had low levels on the statement "My work fills me with meaning" (not sure about the translation here). Our boss was curious about why. We had a few moments of silence until one of my senior coworkers said honestly, that at least he is not searching for his lifes meaning in work. Which is also true for me. Wasn't a big thing after that. Our boss is totally fine with that.

That being said, one important thing for our boss (and also for me, when coaching new coworkers) is seeing, that we have at least some fun and interest in our work. If you don't have that, then both the quality of your work and the relations to coworkers can suffer quite a bit. Then maybe doing a different job is better for you.

You can be honest about being there for getting money AND being passionate about your job (or at least part of it) at the same time. So show that to management. If they are still pissed, then they are in fact shitty. If you have other good opportunities, it might be time to head out then.

It will surely help significantly preventing a tactical nuclear strike from russia, though it won't end the war. It is an absolute last resort trigger. Ukraine will be annihilated after they use it (Russia has way more nuklear weapons).

So somewhat good for them and OK to do so, though no solution and no substitution for western military aid.

Otherwise, you need to be some kind of freaking retro-engineering expert.

Nah, often software is stupidly easy to breach. Often its an openly accessable database (like recently with the Tea app), or that you can pull other data from the webapp just by incrementing or decrementing the ID in your webrequest (that commonly happened with quite a number of digital contact tracing platforms used during Covid).

Very often the closed source just obscures the screaming security issues.

And yeah, there are not enough people to thorouhly audit all the open source code. But there are more people doing that, than you think. And another thing to mind is, that reporting a security problem with a software/service can get you in serious legal trouble depending on your jurisdicting - justified or not. Corporations won't hesitate to slap suit you out of existance, if they can hide the problems that way. With open source software you typically don't have any problems like this, since collaboration and transparency is more baked in into it.