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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: July 1st, 2023

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  • Not sure if “bands” is necessarily the right word here. Most of the artists are solo producers, and them touching anything acoustic for their music is a rare sight these days.

    There’s definitely still a huge scene out there for the Early Hardcore stuff, with most of the crowd going into their 40’s now. And a lot of the originals are still performing to this day. Most of the scene is concentrated around the Netherlands though, as loud, obnoxious music is definitely in our collective DNA. But we are seeing increasing amounts of tourists traveling from far away just to be part of the larger events like Thunderdome, Masters of Hardcore, Ground Zero, Defqon.1, Dominator and so on.






  • I hate the fact that none of the big names support CalDAV natively. DAVx5 is cool and all, but app developers really need to step up their shit and support CalDAV already. Not just Microsoft Exchange and Google Calendar but CalDAV as well. It’s not like they need to rebuild their apps from scratch.

    At this point you might just be better served using a web app instead of a native mobile app. Maybe K-9 Mail transformation into Thunderbird Mobile might bring some good news, but I’m not holding high hopes.

    Maybe we should, under the EU’s DMA, force anyone that bundles a calendar/note app with their phone OS to support CalDAV as well as any proprietary protocol of their choice.


  • As others are sure to point out: welding bad for health.

    UV radiation that will give you a near-instant sunburn. Combined with IR radiation that will literally burn your retinas if you don’t protect them properly.

    Then theres the fact that you’re dealing with upwards of 1200°C/2200°F molten steel. And depending on your process you also have argon/CO2 gas leaks to worry about. That or the flux fumes or vaporized oxides and various metals will get you.

    But welding is also fun as shit, and surprisingly accessible as long as you’re not doing structural stuff without proper training.


  • Even at 25% off, a $70 game is still a ripoff.

    Which is why you only buy games at 90+% off or through game bundles. Unless the developer proves the game is worth the money through all the positive things the community has to say about it.

    Chances are good that your backlog is large enough that you can just wait for newer games to be priced reasonably, even if you’re buying games at sensible discounts.

    Especially for single player games there is no real reason to play a game on release, other than the hype cycle. You might even be better served waiting a while and not be punished by issues that are patched after release.


  • My take is that our ancestors definitely fucked up bigtime by leaving several parts of the world with arbitrary borders that have no regard for existing ethnic groups. Just take a look at any ethnic map of africa, eurasia or the middle-east and you’ll see.

    Turns out that colonizers have little interest in local culture. Who would have guessed?

    Adding insult to injury: When colonizing land where people mostly lived in tribal social constructs, you actually force them to adapt to your own developments. Essentially skipping the feudalism and micro-states step that has taken Europe literal centuries to get out of.

    So you have all these ethnic groups that should have found their way to modern societies without outside interference, and you subject them to slavery, the introduction of guns, mining operations and you crush any form of revolt by committing various atrocities.

    Development of nations is never going to be fair, with the strongest group eventually elbowing out the weaker ones. The current status quo definitely doesn’t help in finding stability. Foreign interests are still meddling, financial and food aid is causing ridiculous population numbers that can in no way shape or form be supported by the local economies, and as you said, slavery is not truly gone.

    Africa can only be an unstable mess as long as we’re still fucking around. Ideal (though not particularly empathetic) solution is to GTFO, use magic to disappear all firearms and modern weaponry from existence, redistribute all wealth truly equally and go from there. The actual way this will play out is that we’ll see war, instability, destruction of natural resources and a lot of pain and suffering until everything stabilizes or until the land is no longer habitable, whichever comes first.


  • NATO was originally founded so that we’d stop invading each other, which should still hold true today.

    I like to think of most developed nations as young adults. All of us are supposed to be mature, which means no more war. We can just talk about things like responsible adults.

    Sadly, some of these younger fucks still haven’t grasped the concept of “don’t be an idiot”, and we now need NATO for a strong message of “no, you’re not going to touch us, there will be consequences”. It’s a sad thing that we still need to do so, but I’d rather have a large group of friends that I’m sure will have my back if someone would start shit.

    So yes, Sweden joining NATO is a good thing. If anything it will lead to better cooperation and coordination between our countries. Not just in the event of war, but just sharing defense resources and intelligence as well. But the best argument is that we just like you Swedes, and we want to keep hanging out together.





  • I have this habit where I try to squeeze every bit of use out of a device until something forces me to get a new one.

    My latest two phones have both lasted for 7 years, and I’m still not planning on upgrading until someting breaks.

    In all those years I have never encountered a situation where I would have benefited from my phone being more waterproof than just basic ingress protection. Higher IP ratings are only helpful for those who don’t want to be conscious of their possessions and want insurance in case of accidents instead of preventing the situations outright.

    If we truly want to reduce our impact on the use of natural resources, we should start with eradicating the mindset that things being disposable is somehow fine.


  • Unfortunately we still see too many people push the “but my IP rating” narrative without realising that engineers are perfectly able to design gaskets for all kinds of applications.

    Some phones with removable batteries even had them and were (to a certain degree) waterproof.

    The ONLY reason phones are no longer servicable is profits. Why extend a product’s lifespan if you can just frustrate the consumer to the point where they will just buy another one?


  • Not necessarily a bad thing though.

    Think of it this way: There’s value in having access to a list of curated content others have deemed “worth reading or looking at”. But there is just as much value in engaging in some banter, provided it doesn’t lead to outright war in the comments.

    I admit, it is tiresome trying to seriously discuss a topic when people haven’t actually read the article, but there is still an upside to a topic triggering at least enough interest to where people actually want to engage.





  • From personal experience working in a Microsoft ecosystem, it’s mostly a matter of being able to hire the right people.

    There is a near-infinite source of IT workers that have some expertise with Microsoft software and services. And those kinds of numbers simply don’t exist for the Linux world, especially with all the different configurations out there.

    Medium-sized organizations have to employ a strategy of throwing enough idiots at a problem in order to keep things running. This also creates some of the issues they need the idiots for because no one has detailed knowledge of how things work.

    My attempts at proposing a linux-based application server have been met with all sorts of “but our domain policy”, “we can’t guarantee continuity”, “none of my people know how to admin this stuff” type responses.

    It definitely is a matter of mindset, but there is also a big commitment to make if switching systems to Linux. And that is a choice managers will only make if the benefits are clearly illustrated in a businesscase.