TBH, that’s the best way to deal with the Trump administration. Try to get away as far as possible. Try to get out of those dependences. But do not talk loud about it, because if so, the demented orange will totally attack you.

I sometimes have something to do with people from SAP in my job and they really are a special bunch. I mean… half of them trust the management? Are they crazy? You never trust the management

Yeah - they’ve abandoned so many products that I really do not want another new Google product in my life that will be abandoned in the future. And their track record with banning accounts for no reason while providing no support at all doesn’t help

That’s a perfect example:

• There is the general alcohol tax
• There is this sparkling drinks tax introduced to finance the Kaisers navy. Which really is stupid to have and maybe should be abolished
• There is the “Alcopop” tax which totally managed to kill this category of drinks as intended

So yeah, a little bit mixed. And i kind of disagree that this is too complicated. If you’re a supermarket or some kiosk, your supplier will provide you with the necessary information about the product. The Schaumweinsteuer, Biersteuer and Alcopop-Steuer are taxed directly at the producer level. Yes, you may need to deal with the beer tax when operation a brewery, but that really is not that complicated.

Check out the apps from your local public transit authority. In my region what Google offers in regard to public transit is utter trash and the “official” apps are having the correct shedule

What kind of framing is this? The number of taxes really doesn’t matter and it also makes sense for a country to have a lot of taxes in its books. Taxes can totally steer people into a desired direction and it makes sense for a country to have a lot of taxes. Not to finacne the government, but to make undesired stuff like cigarettes or alcohol. Maybe you could finance your country with VAT only, but that would also mean that cigarettes would be dirt cheap and that your citizens will die of cancer

It’s also a vital motorway for Austria

That’s the problem with Berlin for the rest of Germany: All foreign correspondents are there. Many of the big media houses have their offices there. And it’s in the middle of fucking nowhere somewhere in the sands of Brandenburg. People from Berlin also really, really like to talk about Berlin.

Most Germans do live somewhere else and Berlin really is overrepresented in the media.

It’s kind of like this right now, people just haven’t noticed. When the war ends, Russia will be in shambles. They have broken their military might and destroyed the old soviet stockpiles. The black sea fleet does not exist anymore. Their air force is gone. They have no tanks left. They have taken 1.3 million casualties. Nearly all oil refineries were bombed together with a lot of the other oil infrastructure. Key factories are gone. Millions of people have fled the country.

And then there are the things they did at the start of the war: Does anybody really think that they will be able to lease modern civilian aircrafts after the war after having stolen hundreds of them? Will Europe really start to buy russian gas again after having found other suppliers that do not threaten them and having ramped up renewables? Will international companies really go back after having had all their current business stolen?

It really does look like Ukraine has gotten an edge here - it was crazy seeing all those burning refineries this month. That has to hurt the Russians. And those videos of the drone strikes on the logistic lines are also crazy. There is no way that Russia can keep this up for long - those long range strikes are systematically destroying key industry and those strikes in the back of the front lines will also have quite the effect. I can imagine a situation where the front lines will run out of ammunition and collapse - without fuel, trucks can’t drive. And when those trucks are destroyed by drones, you can’t deliver what’s needed to the front.

You really should read the article before posting comments.

Here in my country football matches, but also many concerts and so on come with a free public transit ticket.

Yeah - you really do not want to be a customer or an investor with a company doing these stunts.

People really underestimate how much money other people have. $950 is expensive, but there are so many people out there who can afford that.

Which is an interesting dilemma: Those AIs are already trained. That power and water was used. If you use them, you will not pollute anything. But you may encourage those companies to train another AI

Yeah - stuff like this really shows that computing went in the wrong direction. You shouldn’t install every crap software on your computer. You shouldn’t install every crappy app. Browsers have too much access and are therefore a security risk by themselves. So we are left without any sensible way to run small programs like the one you are using to flash some firmware or to configure your mouse or whatever. Install it on your computer and it will spy on you. Flash the firmware from your browser and you are totally fucked, because your internet-facing thingy can flash a firmware

I think that technology can really help us here. OCR on images is mostly solved. If you know what PaddleOCR can do, those people on Mastodon who are whining about others not including an image description for a screenshot seem really annoying. It is possible to do this directly on your computer without any costs, without the need for beefy hardware. So no need to try to force everyone else to include transcriptions for screenshot, no need to attack other people, just do it yourself and enjoy the text on the screenshot. Technology can really help us here.

This also does kind of apply to AI image descriptions. Try it and put an image into Gemini and ask it to describe it. You will be surprised. AI can totally give you a workable description of an image. The problem here is that those AI tools can get quite expensive when you are using them a lot and that many disabled people do not have much money. So in my opinion it totally is ok to include AI image descriptions.

I think that there are too many people in the fediverse who do not know the current state of the technology and hate AI for maybe the right reasons, but who are missing out how it could help them.

• US military is using starlink to target weapons
• There is no way that they will stop doing that
• In every conflict from now on everybody who has to fight against the USA and wants a chance to survive needs to disable Starlink
• We saw with Russia that every major power needs its own network under its own control. You can’t wage a war when the USA is able to shut down your access
• In such a war, the USA needs to destroy the enemy constellation
• Kessler syndrome will happen in our lifetime

Since AI is a buzzword with no actual meaning behind it covering several technologies: What do you actually want to ban here?

• AI-generated images and memes?
• Bots posting AI-generated posts?
• Mods using machine-learning to search for posts containing slurs or racist attacks?
• Posts about AI at all?
• What about communities discussing using LocalLLMs on their devices?
• What about users using LLMs as a fancy autocorrect to correct their spelling?
• Or would non-english users using some translation engine for their posts be banned?

If you pay attention to your pet and maybe read a little bit about them, you can already guess what they want to tell you. No need for AI here.