I was already posting on web forums (also wikis) before Facebook or Twitter became popular, when the Internet was not yet very established and posting things on it oneself was something only few people thought of doing.

I was outright excited when I saw “social media” becoming more mainstream. I thought at the time, at least more people are using the Internet, even if it’s “just” Facebook or Twitter (which I didn’t and still don’t see much value in), at least it’s the Internet, that’s a good thing because the Internet is a great and exciting thing for society and a wonderful source of entertainment!

Now we live in a world where the general public mostly only knows how to operate social media apps, otherwise has no tech proficiency at all, doesn’t even know what else is out there on the Internet, and doesn’t know or care how the social media apps they’re using are designed to manipulate them. And politicians are busy working to make it harder for good idealistic people to solve those problems. :(

From some things maybe. Plenty of recent “online safety” style laws around the world have no exceptions based on platform size.

This is precisely the point of literally all the recent new laws regulating online platforms, including this.

To kill smaller ones that can’t comply with those laws, so that only large ones remain (if at all) and it is easier to censor and surveil the users there.

I just hope that at some point, people will figure out how wrong politicians of the 2020s were to do all of this, and a new free and open Internet will rise from the ashes as long as any remain.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hashtag#Origin_and_acceptance

I still remember, in the late 2000s and early 2010s, finding that somewhat weird too. I was already regularly using the Internet (including forums) well before hashtags were invented and when I started to see hashtags in all kinds of contexts, I on the one hand found it great that the Internet was apparently arriving in more people’s lives, and on the other hand somewhat disappointing that they weren’t using forums or wikis or anything like that that I was already highly familiar with, but this weird new thing called Twitter… oh well…

https://xkcd.com/887/

So how is it the best times if the last generation had it better.

The sentence was “one of the best”, not “the best”, so it’s not a contradiction at all.

There are ways to store office formats as single XML files, look up “flat XML ODF”. Those are more suitable for repos than ordinary zipped ODF or OOXML files.

If you’re reasonably good at using computers (you probably are if you’re posting here?), you should be able to find office jobs where your job is to enter information into computers or do similar “secretary”-like tasks. But I don’t know what it’s like in your area.

Lots of toilets in Europe have a “poop shelf” which makes splashing a complete non-issue.

Does this apply only to Chrome or all other browsers (e.g. Firefox) too?

Except for the fact that that would be completely ineffective; OpenStreetMap dumps are available from many sources.

What do we want?

Autocorrect that doesn’t make mistakes!

When do we want it?

Nor! Not! North! I mean…

I was taught to always look at and focus on the spot I want to drive to when driving.

“No, you can’t accelerate when your head is turned to the right to check for traffic! First look where you want to drive, then start driving!”

Also somewhat useful advice for racing (or generally driving) video games.

France: wants to switch to open source software

also France: wants to ban social media for young people

Do they, in all seriousness, not see exactly how fundamentally contradictory those things are? Open source software development depends on it being possible and relatively easy to host websites that allow the general public to participate so that they can collaborate on open source software development on such websites. Banning “social media” (not endorsing that term) for young people means requiring such websites to implement age verification systems, making it much more difficult and expensive to start such websites and make it possible to collaborate on open source software development. I cannot believe that this is so hard to understand for politicians.

I only heard it about Germany under Hitler.

Oh come on. I dislike copyright law as much as anyone, but this just makes the case against it look stupid.

See also: Windows Live, Surface, 365

The German cognates of these mean the same as in Spanish, and I think that’s also true for most other languages, so English is the weird language here.

Doesn’t “Handy” come from Swabian dialect “hen di koi Schnur” or something? /s

Surprising absolutely no one. What is newsworthy about a copyright holder DMCAing copyright infringement?