Jajcus

We have the same about a shit whip – „z gówna bata nie ukręcisz”

In Poland it is „nosić drewno do lasu” (bring wood to the forest). Similar, but a bit different (pointless not just by being pointless, but by being impossible): „nie zawrócisz kijem Wisły” – ‘you won’t turn Vistula (our biggest river) with a stick’.

Non-toxic glue would be starch or gelatine - both used as base of some ‘real glues’, both with valid culinary use, including exactly this use case. We just don’t call those ‘glue’ in this context.

Those would be different kind of regulations. Not just ‘you need functioning brakes’ kind, but also ‘you must serve this route that hardly anyone uses and and you cannot make any extra money from’. Or ‘no extra fees, even where some people would pay them’.

If that means proper regulations (as it should) I bet they would hate it.

And that is the problem with this idea.

Subscription to a software is not mutually exclusive with self-hosting. Developers deserve to earn money, especially those who do not rely on collecting data, showing ads and enshittification of their cloud platform.

When using the English word ‘floor’ counting ground floor as ‘first floor’ makes sense – ground level still has a floor and it is the first one, but it is still counted differently in different English-speaking countries. Other languages (at least Polish) have separate word for ‘non-ground level of the building’ so those are counted.

In Polish we have the word ‘parter’ for the ground floor (lowest non-basement level of the building) and ‘piętro’ for any level above it. So it is: (‘piwnica’ (basement), ) ‘parter’, ‘1 piętro’, ‘2 piętro’… This makes complete sense… but I still remember it being confusing when I was a kid. A ‘floor’ (the bottom of a room) is ‘podłoga’.

So, answering the question: there are three ‘podłogas’ under the second ‘piętro’ here.

This is were habit stops and addiction starts.

Also not a fan of #16 since it sounds to me like forced labour for the poor

That is how actually that worked in some (if not all) communist countries. No unemployment, but people (mostly those ‘undesirable’ for various reasons) would be sent to hard work in bad conditions, which would often cost their health or life. The other side of the coin was: everybody had a job and little fear of losing it, so people rarely treated the work seriously enough. There were factories full of workers, but so inefficient, that nothing was produced in sufficient demand. People had money, but little to buy with it.

‘Pay to show a link’ is the way Google wants us to see this legislation. But linki are not what the news sources are fighting. The problem is Google presents the news and other information in the search result in the way that users often do not need to leave Google and foll9w the link.
Someone produces content so people visit their się and make them money, but those users get the information they want (sometimes incomplete or broken) straight from Google and only Google gets the money. That is not fair and that is what laws like this try to fix (better or worse). But Google and such have powerful propaganda and here we are.

Another thing is: users of services like Reddit or Lemmy also do similar thing (posting content in a way that preventing monetization at its source), so they have extra reason to take Google side.

…and if you are interested in the sound of static rather than the image, then the Polish word is: „szumi”. This can be approximated in English as: ‘shoomy’. The ‘sz’ sound does sound like static.

The funny thing is that our ‘sz’ (in „szumi”) and ‘ś’ (in „śnieży”) usually sound exactly the same to English or French speakers, while for us they are quite distinct sounds.

I am not even able to write it phonetically in English. Ask Google Translate - its pronunciation is close-enough.

In IPA it is: /ɕɲɛʑɨ/

In Poland it was „śnieży” (snowing).

As long as we are not paying for the services the service providers will do what they can to show us ads and frankly… rightly so.

The problem is there is no other established way for paying for services. One that would be widely use and fair. Current state of things is ‘we say it is free, but we will get the money from advertisers or by selling your data’. Yes, some people are often able to avoid some of the ads and privacy loss, but that means the service gets no money from those people, so the service is built and being run for the rest of users – those who cannot install ad-blockers or who don’t care or don’t know how to care about their privacy. This is one of the reasons of enshitification – any ‘free’ service needs to be only as good as required to keep the users who watch ads and give away their data. Catering any more conscious user is just a cost.

When enough of people will be using ad-block then the ad-block will stop working on many sites or the sites will disappear or become paid service. No one will provide commercial services for free and not everything can be a public service founded by a government or a community. I am not even talking about ‘corporate profits’ – even in the worst corporations there are normal people working and they should be paid for their work. Whether they are paid fairly and whether the corporate profits aren’t too big is another topic…

Slightly off-topic rant:

I hate how the ‘VPN’ term has been took over by companies selling services using VPN technology.

VPN was initially ‘Virtual Private Network’ – used to securely connect own (as belonging to an organization or person) devices over a public network. Like securely connecting bank branches. Or allowing employee connect to a company network. And VPN are still used that way. They are secure and provide the privacy needed.

Now when people say ‘VPN’ they often mean a service where they use VPN software (initially designed for the use case mentioned above) to connect to the public interned via some third-party. This is not a ‘private network’ any more. It just changes who you need to trust with you network activity. And changes how others may see you (breaking other trust).

When you cannot trust your ISP and your local authorities those ‘VPNs’ can be useful. But I have more trust to my ISP I have a contract with and my country legal system than in some exotic company in some tax haven or other country that our consumer protections or GDPR obligations won’t reach.

Back to the topic:
I do not believe that all VPN services are owned/funded by governments, but some may be. I don’t have much reason to trust them, they are doing it for money and not necessarily only the money their customers pay them. In fact I trust my government more that some random very foreign company.

It probably seems extra complexity for you, if your language does not use it. For native speakers it is just natural and not using it would be at least weird.

We could ask the same question about articles . Those ‘the’ and ‘a’, why use them? It only makes English language harder to use! ‘Apple is apple’ why add another meaningless word?

Of course after learning and using English for years I see the meaning of ‘a’ and ‘the’ and thy feel quite natural for me to (though sometimes they still make little sense to me – all the fights whether ‘The’ can be used with some proper name or not). The point is: a lot of features of a foreign language will fill alien and unnecessary.

Maybe more on topic, that is how/why gendered words work in Polish: noun gender is usually linked to how it ends (but do not confuse that with suffixes of grammatical cases). Virtually all Polish women names end with ‘a’, so any other noun ending in ‘a’ sounds feminine and would be used in similar way. And sometimes it just ‘rhymes’ – like in ‘to jabkło’ (‘this apple’ – neuter), ‘ta gruszka’ (‘this pear’ – feminine), ‘ten banan’ (‘this banana’ – masculine). Of course thing get much more complicated than that (like in every language, just in different parts of the language).

People were just talking in the way that it was convenient for them. And thousands years later scholars called this feature of particular set of languages ‘gender’ because words used seem to be related to genders.

If your browser or your OS insist on only trusting $1000 certificate, blocking access to most of the internet, then change the browser or OS. There is no grand authority telling which root certificates can be trusted. Yes, Google or Apple could scam their users this way if they wish to, but it would not make much sense for them. People would use something else.

I joined a local maker space and met great people, sharing similar interests. Surprisingly (to me when I joined) most seem to be over 40, like me, and there are as many women as men here.

Have you ever worked with a computer with modern general-purpose OS like Linux and no RTC? It sucks. It is not strictly necessary, you can live without it, but you need workarounds for basic stuff timestamps in log files or in the file system. At least for a minute until NTP connection is established, but may be longer when internet connection is not available. And when routers are rebooted most often? When troubleshooting broken internet connection. This is also the time when properly timestamped logs could be useful.

And battery backed RTC is cheap. It doesn’t fit on a Raspberry Pi board, but can easily fit into a router case. No excuse for omitting it.