The spam detection works, though!

(As intended - on the ones criticising these posts.)

At my school, there was this guy in my general circle. Played in a punk band, different one than mine, hanging out at the same parties, didn't talk much, but easy to get along with. Also, looked like a punk and partied like a punk. Really good with his instrument, also did jazz on a high level.

Many years later, someone sent me a link from a left leaning forum: He was caught as a deep undercover cop. Apparently went to the police academy (~ 3 years in Germany) and got planted shortly after. He "lived" 100 km from his home with roommates who politically active, again in a punk band, participating in apparently as many political groups as he could schedule. Almost all of them were entirely legal, such as advocating for better welfare laws. He sat there, listened, didn't talk much. No contact to actual terrorist cells or anything like that. Minor vandalism and unregistered protests perhaps.

They only caught him after a few years when someone from our home town recognised him at a punk concert and called him by his real name in front of other people. He just walked away, and his fake personality disappeared immediately. From what I can find, doing low-profile police work ever since.

It's a bit concerning that they spy on entirely legal groups as well as groups who commit minor offences with such enormous resources. Must have cost like 100k per year; with deep analysis of his reports probably more. Just to get a list of people to "take care of" when we go full Trump here?

Anyway, my point: Surprising that the undercover cop in the picture makes so many mistakes. He was apparently spotless.

One insanity in the following years was how they thought people still wanted their next generation diesel.

I've been working for them in the 2010s with the department to organise the staff car fleet. We ordered many electric vehicles years ahead from production and planned it all around electric vehicles: Charging stations, operating distance, some hybrids for long distance, software to calculate trips etc.

Then a few months before we needed them, they said: We overproduced on the latest diesel generation and can't keep up with the demand for electric vehicles, so we have to sell the ones you ordered. You can either go with a Tesla (for official Volkswagen business trips!) or have the diesel for free.

It felt like there was a hysteria: Decision makers got it in their heads that the "hype" for electric vehicles was ideology-driven and not something people with buying power actually wanted today or in the near future. Bit like the republican administration thinking that "woke" is our main problem. Meanwhile, huge research and development departments did come up with the electric vehicles they sell today (and fully working hydrogen prototypes you won't see in a store, just to be safe) and must have been quite frustrated that so few were produced.

His tone is quite different with Kim Jong Un and Putin.

Couldn't that be interpreted as a confession that their air is at least as unsafe as staying with a heavy smoker the whole night, in terms of PM 2.5 and other hazards?

PHILIPS HD9880/90 Airfryer Combi XXL. I can select a recipe in the app and send it, so the settings are perfect for that.

But the downside is that it goes off like a smoke detector and blocks all controls and display until I rate the recipe or select "skip", on the air fryer display.

When pointed out, the vibe coder will prompt: "How can I stop developer tools from working on my website?"

Sad thing is that in this day and age, they'd hardly need to lift a finger to have this rephrased 100 times. But they know they don't have to. People eat up the garbage from their feed, people (often the same) know that a lot of it is Russian bots.

p. s: Still surprised how poorly ChatGPT-5 Thinking handled this. A lot of obvious bot content, such as "weeks of uncut videos and policy dives" by a Democrat, "attended a live event" etc.

At a protest many years ago in Germany, two undercover cops were beaten up pretty badly by other cops. They had a "safeword", but apparently the other cops were already in a frenzy and didn't stop.

To be fair, the (good) British cops are by far not as likely to assault an innocent person as many others. But they do love to stop you and have a chat if even the tiniest thing stands out. I once walked around London, 15 years old, with toy handcuffs on one wrist. Cop came up to me and wanted to know the whole story, like one of those super-chatty people. Where are you from, how old, name, where are the cuffs from, why am I wearing them right now at this moment, ...

He seemed happy with the answers, and we both moved on.

Well, it's still a bother, especially when you are not free to walk away at any moment.

When you are German and they read you the ORIGINAL Grim tales at bedtime, you know what's up sooner than you'd wish.

Dick Cheney was among the worst in an administration that disrespected human rights, international law, honesty, trustworthiness and set the US reputation as well as the fight against global warming way back.

Usually, that probably would have been my last thought of him.

Except, we have this crazy timeline. This timeline, in which he was able to stand out just by pointing out that he is still in favour of free elections. At least that was still a given in his time, even though the decision about the loss of Al Gore was considered controversial by some back then.

A low bar, a low bar indeed. But here we go, on this positive note: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H6Nq9SpGzic

I'm reading AI content there, and when I post, I'm getting accused of being a bot / using an LLM. Fantastic.

I remember the “big movement” when Twitter turned into a right wing cesspool.

At first, the biggest problem was that there were TWO main alternatives: Mastodon and Bluesky. So those who left split into two groups, ending up with a dead timeline, missing out on news. (I and my “bubble” use it to keep up with Covid vaccines, politics, safety etc.)

I joined the Mastodon group, because it solves the problem of a single crazy billionaire potentially buying & enshittifying it. But I fully admit that it is not user friendly at all. People who are not in IT just want it to WORK, like Twitter used to. They don’t want to “educate themselves” about servers, fediverse and networks. The user experience clearly hasn’t even been a thing. It’s techies writing software for themselves. What it needs is a full analysis of the experience from the start: Who are you, user, why are you considering Mastodon, what are your expectations, what are the experiences in the first 30 seconds after entering “mastadon” (oh, you misspelled it?) or “twitter alternative” into a search engine, etc. “pick an instance” is already the passive-aggressive demand nobody wants to hear.

In the end, my instance was shut down without a fair warning, all the reconnected and new contacts lost, no option to move. Trying Bluesky now, but many stayed at Twitter (now X), moved to Mastodon with or without success (most onto my dead instance), or gave up on microblogging.

I think we need something simple again. I remember what SUSE did for Linux in the 90s. Linux users were all like: Only debian is even somewhat useable, but if you should really do LFS. Non-techies willing to switch for “political” or other reasons were hit in the face with “Pick a distro!!!”. SUSE has been called “the Windows among the Linux distros” by those people, but it did the right thing. It provided exactly the simplification we needed: “This is Linux, you simply buy it on CD in a retail store like your other software, you run the installer.” It was a good thing.

IRC is the one good old thing that still works great. When they tried to enshittify freenode, we just moved, collectively. Many non-IT channels & servers died after 2010, though.

I think the environmental impact can be limited:

• Highest demand peaks correlate with highest solar panel output, which would be hard to use or store otherwise. Especially nice when private, local panels are available.
• Some also work as a heat pump in reverse for highly efficient heating in winter.

Not tough enough for a true wakeup call. Wipe it all off, and replace with:

• Your friends think you're stupid!
• All the other kids are staring at you!
• Mommy and Daddy fight because of something you did!
• You walk funny!

Seen them for decades, but thought it's best to keep them a secret. Until Family Guy just casually mentioned them like they were no big deal! Not as crazy as I thought, after all ...

That is a weird understanding of the law. As any elementary school kid (outside the US) knows: Doesn't matter if the suspect stole a chewing gum or killed someone - they need to be stopped and arrested with the least harm possible.

Punishment is done by the courts. Not a police job.

Point taken; I edited the post and made sure that only the beaver head is generated, and otherwise it's the authentic photograph.