Yeah, that’s what I meant with the bigger picture. They have a valid reason to deny this request but they haven’t denied other requests that they really should’ve.

I mean, I can see a case for not wanting to play dragnet at a mere request. You don’t want any random guy and/or agency to be able to have you to help them track down someone they only have a picture of, no matter how much they pinkie swear they’re doing it to protect that person.

That’s getting awfully close to sharing PII. You generally want to see a subpoena for this stuff and with good reason. Meta are, oddly enough, not being actively scummy here. (One can of course argue about all the other times when they don’t give a shit; the bigger picture is definitely super scummy. But for this in isolation they actually have a valid reason for their behavior.)

What might work would be a standardized, streamlined process where the police can ask the company and if the company says the request is reasonable they can apply for an expedited subpoena to allow legal access to the information. Agreement by both would be necessary to give more opportunities for due diligence. This process would also have to have a very limited scope in order to make abuse harder.

Things like this made the news several times when Interpol (or was it Europol?) showed pictures on social media and asked if anyone could turn them into information (things like “in which country is this backpack sold”).

When international law enforcement agencies are already openly crowdsourcing image details, an article about a group doing background detail analysis isn’t much of a revelation.

Or you could go for a tiered scheme where the device is free if the owner’s income is below a certain level. There’s always options; whether or not they’re taken is another question.

Both options are potentially bad for low-income earners. If you force them to pay for a speed limiter they lost the money for that, which they might not able to afford. If you take away their license they will have difficulty getting around and might lose their job.

So from that perspective the speed limiter might be the less dangerous choice.

More like “before easily available color photocopiers”. Most copiers could only do black and white copies, which this scheme was probably specifically designed to make useless.

Garuda has fans. A bit much for me.

When you take away the garish KDE theme the gaming spin ships with it’s pretty much just an opinionated ready-to-go gaming Arch with a bunch of convenience tools. If that’s what you want then Garuda is pretty neat.

Agreed. Oddly enough, my Meshtastic contacts are much farther away than my farthest MeshCore contacts but MeshCore seems to be much livelier.

I haven’t been on there a lot and due to time constraints I’m mostly just lurking. It seems that I can see more people on Tastic but Core seems to be more active in terms of messages.

Both are almost absurdly easy to set up, especially on an nRF5-based device where you can flash a firmware by just mounting the thing as an USB drive and copying a file over. You don’t really need to buy two devices to try out both unless you really want to use them simultaneously.

Meshtastic gives you three hops by default (and strongly advises against going beyond that, even if the maximum is seven). The furthest node I see right now is about 200 km away.

MeshCore gives you 64 hops. They can afford that because MeshCore devices send way less telemetry by default; Meshtastic assumes that you want to broadcast e.g. your GPS position regularly. The furthest node I see right now is about 50 km away.

By the way, while LoRaWAN is a thing, neither Meshtastic not MeshCore are really designed for data traffic. Owing to the low (and shared) bandwidth, they’re more like IRC over radio.

If you want a power efficient device with an enclosure, Seeed Studio make some decent stuff. I run a pair of Wio L1s (one on Meshtastic, the other on MeshCore), which cost around 40 € complete with antenna, battery, and enclosure.

Sure, more expensive than a bare V3 but more convenient for actually taking them somewhere.

There seems to be more traffic on MeshCore than on Meshtastic, probably due to its greater range. Also, the core library seems to be MIT-licensed.

Besides, given the goals of Meshtastic/MeshCore (low power long range text communication without a radio license), LoRa is a sensible choice: It operates in appropriate radio bands, is power-efficient, and hardware is readily available at reasonable prices.

Sure, something like DASH7 would be more open but it’s also much harder to find hardware for. The most ideologically pure stack in the world won’t do anything if there’s not enough users to actually form a mesh.

WiFi is useless when you’re trying to send messages over long distances without any infrastructure beyond “I tied a few battery-powered transceivers to trees along the way”. It has completely low range and high power draw.

Packet radio gets you a lot of range but may require a license for legal operation. It also has high power requirements; you’re not going to run your radio setup off a 1000 mAh battery for a week.

I fully switched to Linux in 2024, my last desktop Linux experience before that being at least five years prior.

• Windows behaves a bit more gracefully then Linux when the VRAM is being exhausted. On Linux I can get graphics artifacts and sometimes Steam crashing. That mainly becomes relevant when doing GPGPU stuff, though; gaming works fine.
• Some apps use GTK4. Since GTK3, GNOME has been moving away from a “regular” desktop experience and towards this weird pseudo-mobile thing that goes against all established conventions. That might be nice if you really like their style and use nothing but GNOME, but it’s really annoying if you don’t. I long for the good old days where action buttons weren’t crammed into title bars.
• Occasionally having to manually fix package updates. Only an issue because my distro is Arch-based and that kind of stuff is to be expected there.
• I haven’t managed to get three-finger swipe mapped to PgUp/PgDn so far but I use the trackpad rarely enough that I haven’t bothered investing time into it yet.
• Occasionally the system just shits itself when rapidly switching between different users’ desktop sessions. Again, that happens so rarely that I haven’t bothered trying to deal with it yet.

On the other hand, I’m happier than expected with Wayland and PipeWire. They just work with little fuss. Sure, I’m a KDE user and Wayland is reportedly less fun outside the big DEs, but for me it just works.

It typically doesn’t. Most countries don’t care about where your ancestors came from. Being fluent in the local language and culture will generally give you a leg up if you already qualify for immigration so I hope your family kept those alive (and not Americanized versions like Irish-Americans wearing green on St. Patrick’s Day). But your ancestry is usually completely irrelevant.

Those genetic test results absolutely don’t mean anything. If you’re culturally American with an American passport, you’re American and that’s it.

Steam tends to have massive issues with permissions for games on NTFS partitions. You might’ve run into that.

And due to social media dominance, the far-right party (AfD) is set to become the strongest power with the next election if things don’t change.

Mind you, that party has been confirmed to be radical by the constitutional protection agency; that assessment has only been temporarily retracted because they got an injunction against it that now needs to be resolved. Court procedure is the only thing keeping them from being recognized as a threat to the democratic order.

The other major parties see no reason to comment on this, especially not the conservatives. Those same conservatives refuse to rule out a cooperation with the AfD, instead wanting to “face them on content”. That means parroting their talking points and then acting surprised when this doesn’t drive voters away from them.

In previous elections I voted for the pan-Europeans who, in a saner world, would be steadily on track towards beating the 5% cutoff. Unfortunately, right now the far-right threat is too big for me not to hold my nose and vote strategically. I’m not happy about that.

But hey, who knows how long that’ll even matter? Like always in such a situation, I expect the AfD to use bullshit delay tactics to stretch that injunction until after the next election, get voted into power, and then kill the investigation. Because rules don’t apply when you have enough backing. And I’m deeply afraid of what they’ll do to the country as the governing party with a conservative lapdog rubber-stamping everything they say.

That’s what happens when you get distracted while posting. Thanks for the correction.

To put in context how much they are driving up demand: OpenAI just bought 40% of the global wafer production from two of the three major RAM manufacturers, Samsung and SK Hynix. SK Hynix Micron (best known for their Crucial brand) decided to drop out of the consumer market entirely.

Of course the other AI companies are going to try to nail down supply as well. If they get similar deals, 10 € per GB of DDR5 will look cheap.

This will increase the cost of computers, phones, and laptops, both directly and indirectly (e.g. GPUs will also become more expensive; VRAM doesn’t grow on trees). We’re already at a point where Samsung Semiconductors reportedly refused to sell RAM to Samsung Electronics. I fear we might enter into an age of 2000 € basic office PCs and 1000 € mid-tier phones if the AI bubble won’t pop first. Even when it does, the repercussions will be felt for some time.

Not really; mine was eventually too expensive and I only got that model because a) I could get it for cheaper through a leasing arrangement and b) I don’t need to pay for a car.

I must admit, though, that having a belt drive is extremely nice and worth the money. 10/10, top tier bike component.

I read that there are two “waves” of rapid biomolecular aging in the mid-40s and early 60s. Still affects everyone differently and of course a worn-out body will feel that much worse.

In general, though, our bodies start wearing out in our mid-teens, about a decade before we’re even fully grown! High-frequency hearing is one of the first things to suffer. Bodily decline is really a constant companion in our lives; it only becomes noticeable when it starts accelerating.