pluma

FWIW in Germany we have PostIdent, which consists of taking a printout to the local post office, showing your ID card and then having the clerk fill out and sign the printout and send it to the organisation you're trying to authenticate with. This is typically done for age restrictions in online delivery services (e.g. being able to order goods marked as 18+ on Amazon -- not signing up for porn sites or stuff like that), for example.

The ID card technically comes with a PIN and there were supposed to be special readers that could be used with a handful of authorized online services to verify your identity but as far as I can tell not much came from that as end users would have needed to buy special hardware and services interested in using that would have required special licensing or something.

That said, SMS is less secure than e-mail, so this seems like an odd choice these days (much like magnetic stripes rather than chip and pin).

Also last I checked he didn't shoot at agents, he tried to set their (empty) cars on fire and was shot for refusing to disarm himself. This is technically arson, but different from the "he tried to burn down a building with people in it" narrative the authorities tried to push for a while.

As an addendum, also compare recent nationalism in Turkey and Kurdish nationalism:

Turkey is an established state. Nationalism in Turkey is a social movement for increased conformity (resulting in a rise of Islam, slowly converting it from merely a widespread religion into a state religion, and cultural homogeneity, rejecting e.g. Greek shared history and ethnic minorities). It has also fueled rhetoric strongly suggesting expansionism (though currently restricted to depopulating Northern Syria to create a "security buffer" and relocating a different, more trusted, ethnic group there).

Kurdish nationalism for decades was a struggle against Turkish nationalism (as well as Iraq, Syria and Iran), fighting for cultural and ethnic recognition of the Kurdish minority in Turkey. The stated goal was to create a separate Kurdish nation state to define and protect a shared Kurdish identity.

More recently, Kurdish politics have moved away from the idea of a nation state. Rojava, although predominantly Kurdish, was explicitly created as an autonomous territory rather than a state and as multi-ethnic, multi-religious and with all central power devolved to the lowest level (i.e. all power is granted directly and explicitly by households forming neighborhoods forming communities). They explicitly aimed to find common ground with Syria, aspiring to become a mere autonomous territory in Syria, rather than a separate state. They eschewed both nationalism (i.e. creating a homogeneous identity) and full statehood (i.e. full political sovereignty and independence).

In reverse order, these are an example of the absence of nationalism, nationalism to create a new nation state (empowering a minority in an existing state) and hypernationalism (refining an existing nation state through increased homogeneity and militaristic expansionism).

Relevant video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9ce_nNAfVq0

Synopsis: there's a distinction between hypernationalism and nationalism; nationalism has become normalised for a long time, so any "nationalism" that sticks out tends to actually be "hypernationalism", which is destructive and dangerous.

This is funny to read as where I live (Germany) banks have been slowly migrating away from SMS-based verification to app-based code generators that in turn require one-time authorization via physical mail.

And we're generally lagging behind when it comes to digital solutions, so I would expect other countries to be ahead of the curve and no longer using SMS for anything important.

Somehow people who think "toxic masculinity" is a man-hating slur tend to miss the fact that I may be a man (I am, btw).

I don't "hate men" either. I neither hate myself nor do I hate other men for being men. I do however hate that some people (including men) have very harmful ideas about what it means to be a man and that they mock and bully men and boys who don't conform to these ideas for "not being real men".

Just FYI, mocking the term "Toxic Masculinity" shows you either don't understand what it refers to or think those things are good, either of which makes me much less interested in anything else you might have to say because it sets a bad precedent.

Toxic Masculinity does not mean being male is toxic (i.e. harmful). It refers to specific ideas about what it means to be male or how men should act that are toxic. Like not sharing emotions other than violence, not asking for help, never admitting weakness, etc. If you think those things are silly and we shouldn't be doing them: great! But many people (especially men) hold onto these notions and that's what the term refers to.

Most of the time, yes. But if you've ever been in a mountainous region, you'll know that it won't be stationary all the time and that it's most dangerous when it's not.

He misrepresents the GDPR a bit.

At least in theory, the GDPR is meant to restrict collection, not just how the data is used and stored. It has a big loophole in allowing for vague "business interests" to be taken into consideration whether collection is legal or not.

More than that, the GDPR clearly establishes ownership of PII and asserts that owners have the right to request information about how their data is handled as well as demand that data be destroyed, exported or corrected.

You can make money of it. You just can't use it to run a SaaS based on Sentry. This is a lot narrower than a general "non-compete" with a very minimal "non-commercial" restriction.

You can provide Sentry-as-a-service but you can't do so commercially.

You can use the Sentry code commercially but you can't use it to provide Sentry-as-a-service commercially.

"source available" but with a built-in mechanism that converts the source to "open source" after 36 months, hence "eventual open source".

Because the BSL flat out bans the use of the source code for a specific purpose for 36 months and mostly behaves like Apache-2.0 for most other intents and purposes, whereas the AGPL affects all users (commercial or non) and requires them to publish source code for all publicly accessible services using the AGPL licensed code, regardless of purpose.

If MongoDB were AGPL, both a company providing MongoDB-as-a-Service and a non-profit web app using MongoDB in the backend would equally need to publish their source code.

The BSL just says "you can't do this one specific thing for 36 months".

The AGPL is a more viral version of the GPL, which basically says "if your code uses this code, your code is now GPL licensed" and also "for all GPL licensed software you distribute, you must also make its source code available" (with the AGPL just redefining that "distribute" as "distribute or make accessible as a service").

That seems to be how most people do it in the wild if they don't have any reason to try to stick with a pure REST/HATEOAS API. Frequently when people say they do "REST" that can mean as little as "we use different HTTP verbs for the same endpoint to distinguish between calls rather than putting those verbs in URLs" (e.g. POST to a collection rather than to a route "/new", DELETE to a resource rather than POST to a route "/delete").

GraphQL was developed at Facebook and Facebook has a massive backend API used by many different teams for many different purposes. In this scenario the trade-offs were apparently worth it because purpose-built endpoints for each feature were likely not scalable and would have required deep knowledge of the full stack to implement.

In teams of 1-10 people with an API that serves a single app controlled by the same team, I'm not convinced GraphQL adds much apart from adding a layer of complexity to the architecture.

This is most likely aimed at Enterprise customers. The main benefit of this seems to be rapid scalability, compared to provisioning each laptop individually, setting up VPNs, etc.

It's similar to how cloud hosting is often considerably more expensive than a full server with equivalent specs. You pay a premium for flexibility.

> I tried WSL but didn't like it to due problems with paths but at this rate with which they're moving

Docker Desktop for Windows seems to still be a bit iffy and WSL is sometimes painfully slow (especially when compiling native code) but overall I'm quite happy with it now thanks to the Remote VSCode extensions.

I'm really looking forward to WSL2 though.

Not necessarily the programmers. There'll always be some people who are easily enough to manipulate to write this kind of code. But those making the decision to ship this and sign off on it definitely should face criminal negligence charges.

For those who think "well, pedestrians don't belong on the road so this wasn't much of a bug" (because I'm sure there are some of those): just imagine the "other" was a large chunk of debris, or cargo fallen off a truck. The car would have crashed right into it.

There can be many obstacles on the road, stationary or non-stationary.

AI can get away with requiring humans to take control in emergency/unusual situations, but not when it is supposed to be "self-driving". The software at least needs to recognise problematic situations and request a safety override or come to a safe stop, it can't just shrug it off and move on.

When I trained for my driver's license in Germany, the scenario "people may run onto the street" was one of the most frequently recurring scenarios in the theory part.

Anything from "children run onto the street to chase after a ball they were playing with" to "pedestrian jumping out between cars because they didn't see you" or "tram stops in the middle of the road and people exit onto the street".

Legally pedestrians must use marked crossings when available and are told to check both ways, but if a driver hits a pedestrian, it's always the driver's fault (though the pedestrian might share some blame in some circumstances but never the full liability).

I think you mean left shift. The Enter/Return key is also different, though looking at different layouts I have no idea why, as the extra key on that side seems to be present in different places regardless of the actual shape of those keys.

It's more "fend it off, then crowd source enough ammunition to hunt it down and murder it", though. Everyone can expose trolls to sunlight, it just doesn't do all that much if you don't have the resources to fight them.

Companies don't innovate, people do. The patent may be filed by a company but the discovery must have been made by one or more human beings. So you might as well argue that it shouldn't be possible for legal entities to hold patents if patents can't be transferred.

That said, the obvious flaw with that point in isolation is that it would still be possible to license a non-practicing entity to sue people on your behalf and then have a revenue sharing agreement between the holder and their employer at the time where the employer reimburses the holder for all expenses related to filing and in return receives all licensing revenue -- effectively recreating the current system but with more layers of bureaucratic indirection.

The problem is patents. If you try to fix them, the market will simply adjust to work around those fixes. Much like with actual nuclear weapons, we need to get rid of them, not just write more laws about when it is okay to use them. But unlike actual nuclear weapons, we can get rid of patents without changing the laws of physics -- we can just ban new applications and let the existing patents run out.

How do industrial secrets, which can safely be reverse-engineered, inhibit progress more than patents, which often intentionally omit important details and can be used to actively prevent reverse-engineering by competitors?

Patents encourage monopolisation by harming smaller companies more than large conglomerates. Small companies either take their chances and risk being sued out of existence or actively avoid patent infringement, wasting resources and limiting innovation.

If anything, patents discourage knowledge sharing because showing your work opens you up to liability for violating patents you may have been unaware of. The only form of "knowledge sharing" patents seem to encourage is filing patents, which only becomes "knowledge sharing" when they expire many years later.

EDIT: The most frequently cited counter-example is historical: guilds keeping trade secrets to prevent outsiders from just copying them. But this is meant to associate all the negative associations we have with that time and its level of technology with the absence of patents without doing the actual work of establishing anything resembling a causal relationship.

Note that they explicitly did it with the intention of clamping down on informal breaks, socialising and other "distractions". The founder heavily suggested he decided on this solution because he wanted to cut down on on-the-clock use of Facebook, private conversations, etc. They basically enforce a rather strict work focus during those 5 hours and justify it by offloading that overhead into leisure time. Also the 5 hour cut-off is socially enforced with a strict "countdown".

Our company is in the same region of Germany and we independently started experimenting with our work time but our focus was employee well-being via stress reduction and encouraging our employees to use the extra free time for self-care.

We ended up with a flexible 25-40 hour work week (or similar 60-ish % adjusted for non-40 hour positions). The goal is to keep each employee's work hours as close to 25 as possible but allow for "overtime" (up to the full 40 hours) if necessary. If we notice employees are working "overtime" over a longer period of time, we rebalance the work load or adjust timelines as possible to get them back to 25.

Despite the reduction of work hours by 30-40% the effective work output only shrunk by 10-20%. But the real benefits are social.

So someone making £100k can afford it more than someone making £99.999k?

Means-tested only makes sense if you have a progression instead of a hard cut-off, otherwise it creates these pits of despair.

It's similar with welfare in Germany: if you have an extremely low-paying job, welfare will "top up" your income up to the same level as someone with no job. So until you break even, working an extra hour or taking a job that pays slightly more is economically pointless because it has no effect on your bottom line: every extra Euro you earn gets deducted from the welfare benefits. This encourages undeclared work, losing the government money via taxes.

Alternative take: it is about making money but paid labor is an exchange in return for money and what you put in is more than just time and effort.

If you like your job, your cost looks very different from doing an equally demanding job you hate. The emotional cost is real and can have long-term effects on your health.

Plus of course clicking stuff on your computer is something you can do in your time wherever you are as long as you have an Internet connection. Working for 1-2 hours at a gas station (or McDonald's or whatever) requires a fixed schedule and commuting, not to mention that you'd likely need to agree to a minimum number of working hours and are unable to just skip it whenever you want.

"Why don't you do this other form of unskilled labor for minimum wage instead" is a legitimate question when the current alternative is time consuming and they're struggling to make ends meet. Not so much when it's something they do for fun every now and then while already holding a job that pays above minimum wage.

No, a lot of hoops are barely even legal.

Many services don't even allow you to delete your account, just to disable it and have it hang around in their database as long as they want. That's a blatant violation of privacy.

Germany has a reduced rate for certain goods but in practice it is pretty arbitrary and mostly the result of lobbying.

Note that even if it were applied entirely consistently and without bias it would still only reduce the regressivity, it wouldn't make it non-regressive.

If a person with low income buys a gallon of milk they pay the same VAT on it as a person with high income would. If they buy cheap off-brand cheese they pay the same VAT rate as they would pay for expensive luxury cheese (except they likely can't afford the latter).

VAT doesn't account for income inequality, it just makes everything more expensive for everyone. Income tax OTOH impacts high income households more than those with low income. At least in theory: in practice income tax (especially in the US) has massively gone down for high income households, again just affecting everyone equally like VAT does.

Ironically most spam I've been getting recently is from Gmail addresses.

Contracts are designed in such a way that they remain in place if any parts of them are voided by law but they don't take precedence over the law even if the law changes after the contract was signed.

If slavery were legal today and abolished tomorrow, you couldn't keep your slaves just because they were signed into indentured servitude before the law came into effect.

Well, Microsoft used to offer its cloud services under license via German Telekom in Germany. They've sunsetted that offering though while announcing a Microsoft-owned GDPR-compliant server infrastructure in Europe.

They've yet to deliver on that announcement but that seems more like the usual delays than willful obstruction.