76SlashDolphin

But they haven't. They only changed them once in the past decade, it's not like it's a thing that budget airlines pull every year. Changing them sucks but it's not really a problem now.

Not really, with a little discipline it can work for the vast majority of scenarios. 90% of my flights are backpack only and that includes travel where I needed to be dressed formally and travel with my SO. The only scenarios where it's actually necessary I see is if you need health equipment (which most people don't), if you have toddlers (which I'd argue you shouldn't be flying with anyways), and if you are moving a lot of stuff (where paying for luggage is still cheaper than shipping in many cases).

It just requires a little planning which I think most people my generation and younger are getting used to.

Not all of them but I have flown between destinations for 10€ shortly after Covid that were easily between 300-400€ on old-school airlines 15 years ago. While those are exceptions there are cases where budget airlines even with all the bells and whistles are still substantially cheaper than legacy carriers.

But it's not that bad. You need to do research about your travel destination anyways, like how are you going to get around, what places you want to visit, and some basic phrases in the destination language if relevant. Spending an extra 2-3 minutes checking how much stuff you can bring and whether you need any "dark pattern" options shouldn't be too hard in comparison but maybe I expect too much of the average traveller.

The old-school airlines never swindle you and they're still around. I'd much rather avoid a few dark patterns and save a significant cost of my ticket, and it seems like most of Europe agrees.

The thing is you can't do proper layovers with budget airlines. Those third-party sites that try to make it happen are incredibly dodgy and if something goes wrong they have no legal obligation to offer proper rebooking since they are not required (and usually don't) have any sort of partnership with any of the airlines.

If I wanted to make a connection with a budget airline I would always allocate at least one night at the intermediary stop since you need to leave the duty-free area anyways, just in case something goes wrong. It's just not worth the risk.

But you can't even get to the gate if you haven't checked in, at which point you get an assigned seat. If you somehow managed to get past the entry point and security without checking in then something went wrong at the airport, not with RyanAir.

On budget airlines you almost always only get a backpack included which goes under the seats. They usually bundle the small onboard suitcase option with "Priority boarding", usually because people with suitcases board slower and splitting up those with suitcases and those without speeds up boarding. And if you don't have Priority but come in with a suitcase you will 99% of the time be stopped and forced to pay a fee.

IMHO it isn't a terrible policy per se since it allows for savvy, usually younger, and usually poorer travellers to get even cheaper plane tickets and travel more but I do think there needs to be a cap on the price of "Priority" since during busy times the budget airlines, especially WizzAir in my experience, jack up prices substantially. I had to fly in my suit for a wedding once because the "Priority" charge for both ways was 130€.

Battery plants at the scale of conventional nuclear power plants are very few so it's not as proven as a technology. Ideally we should build both since we don't want the EU to be dependent on a single material for its base load (i.e. lithium or uranium).

Because it's the greenest and safest form of base load power we have right now. It may be more expensive but the loss of human capital vs burning coal and the reliability vs renewables makes it more valuable, and that's on top of diversifying Europe's fuel sources which is a good thing.

China will (and does to a certain extent) care about the environment because they know it will eventually be a massive problem for them. Their single-party state has only managed to stay in power because it's been very good at driving up the standards of living. And you can only pollute so much before those standards stop going up and people start to get displeased, which is why they've been trying so hard to move up the value chain and export their pollution to other countries (via cheap loans).

But the good thing about the EU and a lot of its programmes is that the future generations in each are more and more well-travelled and more and more accepting of other members' cultures. Even nowadays the attitude towards, say, Poland in most younger circles in the West is much more positive than it used to be 20 years ago. Give it enough time and the people of the bloc will learn how to deal with their neighbours' cultures.

All MEPs from my country voted in favor of both of those. Really wish I had a choice for the upcoming elections :/

Then why are you using a Macbook in the first place? There are plenty of Ryzen 7000 and Intel Ultra laptops with similar performance out there. The key benefit of a Macbook is the battery life and sane sleeping when portable.

And this line of thinking is exactly why we can't have M1 Macbook levels of battery life on Windows laptops. Believe it or not but a lot of people like to be able to have a light device they can just take without a charger and use for a solid day or 2 of work.

Because there are already users with Apple devices and those users might have been locked into using Apple's ecosystem for other reasons (already purchased apps, already owning Apple accessories that don't work with other devices, etc).

As an anecdote myself, the main reason I haven't switched to a Galaxy S24 is because my Airpods work amazingly with my iPhone and Macbook, and my Apple Watch only works with iPhones. But very often I sorely miss having Termux, NewPipe, Tachiyomi, a non-gimped version of GBoard, Syncthing, a sensible launcher, and probably other things that I can't remember off the top of my head. I've decided that I value the Apple system more than the value I get from those apps but this regulation means I get to have my cake and eat it too.

If you don't want that choice you don't have to enable the feature. Installation from Unknown Sources in Android is off by default and requires a user to explicitly go into the settings and find the obscure toggle, which in recent times has proven to be a big enough deterrent that there don't appear to be any recent mass-scale attacks using this vector. On top of that Android and Windows both have fairly comprehensive parental controls, which can disable the entire option of installing non-approved software, so that point is moot.

And the resources needed to make an app installer are not nearly as high as you make it out to be because iOS already has the mechanism to install signed .ipas. All that's needed in theory is a check to disable signing (which they already have implemented in MacOS) and to add a few pages to the Settings app, which surely shouldn't be an issue for a tech company of Apple's size. And if you argue that it might break some spaghetti code then maybe that should be fixed anyways and it's doing them a favour.

False equivalence - a manual gearstick complicates the design of the car, making each unit cost more, while allowing sideloading is a one-time development cost with marginal maintenance costs. Also my car manufacturer doesn't get a 30% cut every time I fuel up because I use an automatic transmission. If it were like that I can assure you there would be a much bigger uproar than in this sideloading debate.

Do you think sideloading hurts indie developers on Android? I believe that over time the situation on iOS will become identical to the one on Android - Google Play/the App Store will be the primary way to install apps for 99% of users since it's the default and has the biggest catalogue; some companies that are unhappy with Google Play/App Store fees will have an alternative store just for their apps (see Epic games), and advanced users will have an "advanced user" appstore with apps that either Apple/Google don't want to support or developed by people who don't want to pay a Google/Apple developer fees (i.e. mostly open-source hobbyist apps), along the lines of F-Droid. It appears the iOS equivalent of that will be AltStore.

If that's what happens then I see no way for this to be bad for indie devs - the ones who want to write a paid app and can afford the upfront capital to publish can still do so on the store with 99% of users, while those who don't have the capital or don't want to publish paid apps now have the option of going with AltStore.

This is what I hope happens at least, as I am a big fan of Apple hardware but absolutely despise how its software treats me like a baby. If Android can allow for more freedom without compromising security by hiding advanced features behind several scary menus and parental controls then I don't see why Apple can't have the same.

Most of these is why I prefer travelling from B-tier smaller airports. Security queues are usually shorter, there's few to no shops on the other end and you can go from airport entrance to gate in less than 15 minutes if only bringing carry-on, which is not difficult to do with a bit of discipline. It also means you can arrive at the airport an hour - hour and a half before departure. Of course that isn't always an option but I'm lucky that my most common travel route is between a B-tier medium-sized European airport and a tiny airport that sees less than 2 commercial planes a day on average.

You're greatly over-exaggerating how much effort it takes for a power user to set up Windows. I had to do it the other day on a Dell MiniPC (sadly couldn't use Linux since I needed HDR) and it's just the following.

1. Set up USB stick in Rufus with all the setup skips enabled 2. Select install options, skip key, next next next 3. Wait for it to install 4. Say no to MS account, put in username, password, and security questions 5. Wait for a reboot and setup 6. Connect to internet, run Windows update, reboot when done 7. Uninstall the few bloatware apps in the start menu, most of them are UWP so the uninstall button does it immediately, takes no more than 5 minutes 8. Disable web search from group policy 9. Install Windows Terminal, Powertoys, and another web browser.

I could easily automate steps 7, 8, and 9 through powershell and winget if I wanted to. The total install time was less than 10 minutes plus the time it took for Windows Updates to install and I have a pretty clean environment.

In comparison, with Fedora running on Gnome I'd have to spend a solid amount of time messing with dconf settings to get fractional scaling to show up and for my touchpad to scroll at the correct speed + installing extensions to get a UX as good as Powertoys has by default, and on KDE I would need to spend the same amount of time messing with settings and installing KWin scripts to get functional tiling (although that might have got better since I last tried it).

Oh and on MacOS I would be up and running in almost no time, because there's no way to fix the absolute dumpsterfire of a UX it has so I don't even bother.

So all options kinda suck, Windows just sucks in its own ways.

Back in the day it was alright because Microsoft gave you a fairly good dev environment in the form of Visual Studio, with the focus of it being squarely on desktop application development instead of tinkering with the system or running web services. It didn't stop people from doing it anyways but it's part of the reason why everything is so janky. Then the web took over and Microsoft tried for ages to make .net and Windows Server work until they realised they can't tune an OS that was never meant for backend development and just put all their focus on WSL. In the year 2024 there is almost no reason to be doing any non-desktop dev in a Windows environment unless it's on WSL. And you get the benefit of having an actually sane window management system and external display handling unlike MacOS, not to mention how nice PowerToys is.

I wouldn't generalise an entire continent like that. Both my Bulgarian and Austrian bank accounts have SMS-based 2FA on online transactions and logins. Some banks in Bulgaria allow to use eSignatures as 2FA but afaik that has seen tiny adoption in the consumer space.

FYI, Kindle has supported ePUBs for a while now. You can even send them to your Kindle over email.

But the tradeoff of cost and convenience vs quality is everywhere in life. Most people (including me) do not have the time, money, nor (in my case most importantly) workspace to build their own furniture. IKEA and other budget furnishing companies are a perfect solution for people in this situation and I can buy a handmade piece of furniture if I ever feel that something is not up to quality.

But in the case of budget airlines you don't have to pay any extra fees if you can correctly manoeuvre around the website. As someone who can easily travel in a shoebox with just a backpack 99% of the time, I appreciate the fact I can save some money by foregoing extras I won't need. The only dastardly move they pull is when they use dark patterns to get technologically inept people to pay for extra stuff they don't need.

Recently discovered an arcade in my city with a ton of Asian rhythm game cabinets, mainly Dancerush Stardom where you have to dance to the song. Kinda like DDR but a lot more flexible. I've always been a very stiff person so I hoped that learning to dance can help with that and what better way to learn to dance than with a video game with very exact goals.

Plus, there's an awesome community around the game and the arcade so it's been nice to meet new people that way.

Location: London, UK; EU citizen Remote: Yes (Hybrid / Full-remote)

Willing to relocate: possibly to an EU country

Technologies: C++, Python, CUDA, GLSL, ThreeJS, C, Unity/C#, NodeJS, React, Golang, Rust

Résumé: https://1drv.ms/b/s!AtSte25GWe3og3xRaTiOGrZzHaze

Email: iliammanolov at gmail dot com

I'm a backend engineer who has a deep interest in system optimization and computer graphics. My last position was at FinTech on improving infrastructure throughput to exchanges. Academically I've specialised on GPU compute and enjoy finding its appropriate use-cases. I've also delved into developing for VR with a 3D Constructive Solid Geometry modeler with a custom BSP-based renderer in Unity.

Open to any comparable positions to my previous one or alternatively to anything related to GPU programming.

Location: London, UK; EU citizen

Remote: Yes (Hybrid / Full-remote)

Willing to relocate: possibly to an EU country

Technologies: C++, Python, CUDA, GLSL, ThreeJS, C, Unity/C#, NodeJS, React, Golang, Rust

Résumé: https://1drv.ms/b/s!AtSte25GWe3og3xRaTiOGrZzHaze

Email: iliammanolov at gmail dot com

I'm a backend engineer who has a deep interest in system optimization and computer graphics. My last position was at FinTech on improving infrastructure throughput to exchanges. Academically I've specialised on GPU compute and enjoy finding its appropriate use-cases. I've also delved into developing for VR with a 3D Constructive Solid Geometry modeller with a custom BSP-based renderer in Unity.

Open to any comparable positions to my previous one or alternatively to anything related to GPU programming.

Air conditioners are actually remarkably efficient at what they do, doubly so if used for heating as well. Washing machines are also a lot more efficient than the alternative, that being people manually washing clothes. And commercial airlines don't emit THAT much per capita since most people don't fly all that often.

What the US had during WWI was a lot of domestic manufacturing which is now outsourced and the replacement CO2 emitters are probably mostly cars and animal farming.