For anyone wondering: openDesk, the solution they’re using, wasn’t developed from the ground up. It contains standard open source tools like Nextcloud, Matrix and Collabora.

Lithuania borders both Kaliningrad which serves as an important Russian military outpost and Belarus which is very friendly with Russia and is happy to let Russian troops and aircraft through.

Not sure about the US but where I live, all medical records need to be stored for thirty years, mostly so you have legal protection in case complications arise.

Imagine that a woman has an abortion, then years later she is pregnant again, this time with a child she wants to keep. She has a miscarriage and tries to sue the abortion clinic because she thinks they permanently damaged something during the abortion.

Also in case someone claims that a medical procedure was performed against their will or they were not informed about the risks.

And this works both ways. Because the clinics (and also all other medical professionals like midwives) must keep those records, the patients can demand them to be used as evidence to back up their claim.

The major problems for me are small accessories for electronics like SD cards, cables and so on. I could go to Müller or MediaMarkt but especially for those smaller items, they often only have stuff from HAMA which is insultingly expensive for the quality they offer. Specialized online stores like Reichelt may have a cheaper option but when my 5€ cable comes with 6€ of shipping costs on top, I’m back to square one. The optimal solution would be to wait until there are multiple things that I need to spread the shipping costs over multiple products but when something breaks and I need a replacement, that’s often not an option.

Another point are niche ingredients for international cooking that I can’t get at any of the local Asian or Middle-Eastern supermarkets.

So yeah, ebay, probably…

Honest question: what do you use instead? I’ve been trying to reduce my reliance on Amazon but often find that other stores are either a lot more expensive or so shady that I wouldn’t trust them to actually send what I ordered.

Fortunately I’ve found some good stores for board games and home electronics / gaming / multimedia but often, when I just need some random thing like replacement pads for my headphones, it’s hard to find a good source that isn’t either Amazon or Ali Express.

Well, of course. They never objected to Taiwan’s existence, just to the fact that it doesn’t belong to them. Slightly different situation than all that Gulf of America nonsense.

Will they start firing back at 5:45am?

Nirav talks about that in the other video they released today. They’re working on it and in the meantime there is a DIY solution.

Remind me…

• Which country checks tourists’ social media for anti-Trump posts on entry?
• Which country regularly arrests (and in many cases deports) both their own citizens and foreigners without consulting a court?
• Which country spies on its own citizens to figure out if they may have had an abortion?

But sure, even thinking about doing something about a right-wing party that has been classified as extremist by multiple courts and explicitly lists several human rights violations as their goals… that’s a step too far…

Not really but we have Springer which isn’t much better

Deal with the real problem. Be honest about why people are upset. Let them actually speak their minds without judgement. Then, analyse it. Find solutions.

Exactly. The solution to people saying “Foreigners are taking our jobs” is not to outlaw saying “Foreigners are taking our jobs” (though the AfD has done enough other things that warrant a ban), it’s not to get rid of foreigners, it’s not even to create more jobs. It’s to make sure that people have at least their most important needs (housing, food, transport, access to information, basic entertainment) covered even with a part-time job or no job at all. Instead the CDU/CSU tries to brand everyone who doesn’t work 60 hours per week until they’re 70 as lazy. Guess what? There are way more people out there who would like to work but can’t (for whatever reason) than ones who actively try to cheat the system. And no increase of weekly working time, no mandatory Excel training for unemployed people and no right-shift of politics will solve that.

Show people that the left and center are able to provide what they need and they will have no reason to blame minorities for their problems.

Yeah, guess what? We should have banned them long before they became the “strongest opposition force in parliament”. Now that they poll over 20%, of course its tricky. Who would have thought?

My question was specifically about “the general non-technical population”. Do you expect my mom to even remotely understand what different servers are and why talking to me is securely encrypted but talking to her friends group isn’t? The point about secure software is that it needs to be secure by default or else, entry level users will manage to accidentally send their stuff in plain text and not even notice.

For nerds like us, I agree that Matrix is probably a good choice. For someone who needed to be told that “the internet” isn’t the blue “e” on their desktop… not so much. I’d rather send carrier pigeons than explain Matrix to my family.

What would you recommend as an alternative for the general non-technical population?

There were a few things that it eventually got but lacked for way too long like support for UNIX line endings.

For video editing I would highly recommend DaVinci Resolve. So far I’ve only used it on Windows because I haven’t had any need for it since my switch but it’s available for Linux as well.

So what do I do when I need to get something done on a deadline? VM? Dualboot? Just give up?

Please don’t interpret that as an attack, it’s a serious question. I would love to fully move to linux. I’ve put Arch on my laptop about a month ago as an experiment and overall it works great. But every time I need to be productive, I hit a wall. Especially with photo editing but even for software development (mostly C# and C++), Windows 10 + WSL feels like the better choice.

Well, are you a developer?

I am. I have written software, both open source and commercial, for almost twenty years now and the most important lesson I have learned in that time is that developers alone don’t write good software. You need to listen to UI/UX experts, testers and user feedback to make something that people actually want to use.

Just for maybe an hour or so, haven’t had time for more. It seems a bit better but still too different from everything else to assume people can „just“ use it instead of the solution they are familiar with.

Gimp really needs the kind of in-depth UI/UX redesign that blender got with 2.8.

I tried again and again to do the things I need to do with gimp but it still lacks many features and the ones it does have are hard to use. Sometimes it’s not about ideology but about needing to get shit done.