Nitrolo

That is incredible. In the literal sense of the word, I thought you were joking until I was halfway through your post.

Do you have any more links? I'd love to learn more.

I have backups enabled actually. Sure, it's a pain to manage compared to WhatsApp, as you have to manually download it off your phone, but Signal has an option for automatic daily backups.

They are encrypted with a key you have to note down somewhere though, so if you don't prepare for it the messages are, in fact, gone forever.

I believe this is the full text of the law:

https://ec.europa.eu/info/sites/default/files/1_1_200090_dir...

>For instance, my IP changes when I travel, but I’m an American who speaks English, and yet YouTube insists in showing me local ads in different languages when I’m in foreign countries, despite having my home address (verified with my credit card no less!!!) That’s just laughable.

Funny, my experience with YouTube is the opposite. I'm Italian, but I've emigrated a decade ago. I've tried to purge my Google account of all traces of Italian, changed my languages in my Google profile, settings, and all the places I could find. Google also has my credit card through Google Pay.

And yet they keep switching my YouTube interface to Italian at least once a week. I set it back to English every time but within days it's back.

The Italian interface is perfectly fine, mind you, but they insist on auto-translating the titles of English videos, which a) often results in barely coherent titles and b) the videos are still in English!

My first ever computer was a laptop with a first gen Atom and 1GB of RAM. Single-core, no hyperthreading. I was super excited and loved it, but it was so slow that it felt unusable even to me as a young teenager that didn't know any better.

Guess I should be thankful though, in trying to get it to be faster I discovered that some Linux distros can be very lightweight, and it started me down a rabbit hole I'm still going down.

I've just taken a look and if stories aren't your thing, there's a toggle to just turn the whole feature off and it disappears from the UI.

I love this! I wish WhatsApp had such a toggle, since nobody in my contacts uses the "Status" feature so I just want to hide it somewhere.

I'm not sure if I'll use it much, but giving me a simple setting to decide for myself makes me much more optimistic towards this.

As a non American, what problem does the US have with SMS?

I can confirm essentially no one in western Europe uses iMessage. I've seen people use FaceTime to call friends, but I've yet to even see someone open the iMessage app in person.

That's why I was really surprised about the content of the article (to be honest I haven't made it past the TL;DR yet), I would have guessed that the problem would be too little egalitarianism.

Kids here are sorted into career paths at age 10 by sending them to Gymnasium, Realschule, or Hauptschule. To even attend higher education you need to have an Abitur, which means going to a Gymnasium or putting in extra years of study after your Realschule.

The argument is that this division allows every kid to learn at a level appropriate to them, but the reality is that an overworked teacher of 20+ kids is supposed to accurately assess everyone's level and then give a recommendation for one of the schools.

My impression is that a lot more weight is put on formal qualifications here than in the US, so in practice this choice sorts you into your future social status for most kids.

My N=1 annecdote is a friend of mine who recently finished his PhD at TUM, the teacher wanted to send him to a Hauptschule. If his parents hadn't intervened his life would probably be very different right now. Annecdotaly I know a couple of engineers who went to Realschule and then had to work hard to get an Abitur before going to Uni. Who knows how many smart people were discouraged from pursuing higher education because it would mean two more years of high school just to even start.

The system seem arbitrary at best to me, and at its worst is just reinforcing class status through generations. Parents with university degrees will fight to have their kids go to Gymnasium, or the teacher might send them because they know they come from an Akademikerfamilie, and the others better hope their teacher likes them.

Do you have a good writeup of how WSL2 works?

As someone who codes a fair bit at work without having a CS degree, is there any such course online you could recommend?

Like a coursera course titled "How not to be dumb at coding"out something of the sorts.

I'd just like to point out that Italy has been a net contributor to the EU budget for 20 years straight, and was the third biggest net contributor as of 2020.

If someone has more up-to-date numbers I'd like to read them, but I don't think describing Italy as getting "bailed out for 30 years straight" is accurate unless I'm missing something here.

Your use of the word gross income is interesting, what wasthe difference to the net income in that time period?

Were salaries taxed? I assumed you'd get a net income only becauae if everyone's already working for the state, what would be the point of an income tax?

I'm curious if someone here is a bigger history nerd than me and might be able to help me out:

The claim that San Marino is the world's oldest Republic links to a Wikipedia list which cites 301 as its transition date to Republic, however digging deeper that seems to be the founding date of the settlement of San Marino, with the earliest date relating to a Republic I could find being 1243 (the establishment of the Captains Reagent as the heads of state).

Does anyone know more about the transition to republic? 1243 would still make it several centuries older than any other extant Republic, but significantly shorter lived than my personal favourite the Republic of Venice (697-1797, 1100 years of uninterrupted Republic).

I understand that train of thought, but does this really apply to Anna Karenina? It's a pre-soviet work from well over a century ago, from a time when the Russian state and society were very different from what exists today.

If the goal was to attract EU techies this is almost entirely useless.

There's only 3 EU universities on the list in the first place, and the only German one (LMU) is known for humanities, while the other Munich University (TUM), which ranks much higher for computer science and engineering, doesn't even enter the list.

And this visa is still almost 2 grand in fees and "health surcharges", in addition to "maintenance funds".

I'm not convinced this will change much at all, but I don't think that was the purpose anyway.

I just figured iut that I can enable dark mode for windows apps globaly (Srttings -> Personalisation -> Colour), thanks!

On firefox you can use uBlock Origin, if you activate the EastListCookies filter list it blocks consent banners as well.

Can't remember when I last had to click one of those away it's great.

You could use uBlock Origin and disable javascript by default, it's availavle on mobile. When necessary you can also reenable it for specific sites, works pretty well for me.

Also neat: you can disable media elements over a certain size (default is 50kb I think), which is a godsend if like me you have limited mobile data.

For those that are interested, Behind the Bastards did a two part episode on the Elan school last year:

https://omny.fm/shows/behind-the-bastards/part-one-elan-scho...

His Wikipedia article claims that the Russians were trying to "match his voice signature", which implies being able to listen to the call itself somehow.

Out of curiosity, where did you move to?

I have to say those prices still seem very high to me, that's 10.000$ a year. Maybe salaries are just outrageously higher in Australia than where I live, but I find it hard to believe most artists can comfortably pay back 1000$ a month. At least in Germany that would be a big ask even for a fresh engineering graduate (source: I'm a fresh engineering graduate).

For comparison, student loans are a problem in the UK as well to some extent, where tuition is ~9000£ a year. Student loans get forgiven after 30 years and most graduates will never pay backtheir loans in full because they won't be done after 3 decades.

I'm Italian, but I live in Germany and my language is set to English on all my devices and software.

I haven't lived in Italy for about a decade, but I created my Google account when I was still in Italy. To this day YouTube will randomly switch to Italian and machine-translate some (but not all!) titles and descriptions of YouTube videos.

I've manually changed the language setting back to English a dozen times and tried to nuke any reference to Italy from my profile but Google keeps thinking "This poor user must have accidentally switched language and not know how to go back! Let me help and serve him half translated websites" every two months or so.

I have a fairly keyboard centric workflow as well, and I didn't notice this until a few months ago I got a laptop with a US keyboard.

Suddenly all those key bindings and symbols made sense, or at least were somewhat reachable without contorting my hands. I never noticed how terrible DE keyboards are for programming before but I don't want to go back.

I can't speak for American schools, but in Germany we were taught little of what happened after 1945, so I wouldn't be surprised if the situation in the US would be similar. It's a shame, I would have loved to learn more about why the world is the way it is today.

On mobile i.reddit.com is probably a better fit.

That calculation is correct if you assume that by "boil water" they mean to bring the water to 100°C (which is what you'd use a kettle for usually).

However to go from liquid water to water vapor you need to add even more energy [0]. The enthalpy of vaporization for water is 2257 kJ/kg, it takes much more energy to boil water at 100°C than it takes to get there from room temperature.

Warming by 75 degrees + boiling = 2570 kJ/kg -> enough to boil 23 liters of water

I'm guessing in reality the energy needed to operate the kettles would lie somewhere in between, as a small part of the water will be boiled and most of it kept around 100°C. For 2L kettles the value seems in the right ballpark.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enthalpy_of_vaporization

Another factor might be that actually kidnapping and torturing someone is a very intense thing to do. I don't think a lot of people in the crypto space would have the stomach to do this (and that's a good thing!).

I guess all intervals are sets (they are a collection of numbers after all) but not all sets are intervals. Any mathematicians here to tell me if I just said something stupid?

Thank you for the clear explanation! Pretty sure we talked about open and closed intervals in my first week of undergrad but as a mechanical engineer we stopped there and never took a look at the more general concept.