Well, not too long ago there was a part of Germany where people learned Russian instead of English. The French just hate English I guess.

I tend to think that’s kinda intentional. Drives up engagement by people telling them how to play in the chat. Also makes people think that they can do better and buy the game.

My router has a great wireguard integration, that makes it pretty easy to tunnel into my home network. I don’t open it to the outside in any other way. But yeah, it does require some maintenance and a backup strategy. I bought an unraid license back when the lifetime ones were still cheap, that makes it pretty easy to work on overall.

Have you thought about getting a homeserver? Immich is great service to selfhost for photos, paperless ngx is a very nice selfhosted document management system and there are several options for notes. If you use a VPN to connect you phone to your home network you don’t even have to expose any service to the general web.

I know. What’s unique to Cologne is the fact that the people deciding the budget and the bosses of the construction companies share a table at some carnival events, drink some Kölsch and make some deals. And the people of Cologne enjoy this as part of their tradition. And once all the tax money is gone and the rest of the city collapsed (as long as it’s not the Dom) they’ll simply say “Et hätt noch immer jot jejange” and carry on as usual.

Come to Cologne, where people are proud of the corruption and nepotism, affectionately called “Klüngel”, that directly turns their tax money into profit for some clever Jeck. For example via an opera house that was supposed to cost 250 million and is currently projected to cost about 1,5 billion.

The Digital Silkroad is an interesting read, if you want to learn more about China’s surveillance and data ambitions. Also covers Hikvision quite extensively.

I doubt you could find a laptop made in or after 2015 that won’t run N64.

I was around 12 or 13 and saved all my money for a PS2. Found one on eBay (using my fathers account), won the bid, transfered the money and just never got it. No PS2, no money. But I learned very early not to trust people on the internet. Guess that was worth the price in hindsight.

Same boat for me, works great! I got the NFC Yubikeys which work fine with Android.

Did you, by any chance, ever wonder, why people deal with hunger instead of just eating cake?

Do you put a spoon in it though?

Can you link me to what model you are talking about? I experimented with running some models on my server, but had a rather tough time without a GPU.

Shockingly, several things can be bad at the same time. What do you think will happen to places that already tend to struggle with heat (like quite a few places in the middle east), if they get even warmer? What will happen to the people that live there? Will they be able to move to colder places? Or will they simply run into borders? Borders, which are protected by more and more money and weapons (and drones controlled by AI, funny, huh?)?

Haha nope, they will of course blame Mexico and Canada in that case. Or the people who prefer to go there. I think they are completely immune to any thought about the consequences of their own actions.

It was a thing in Germany as well :)

My NAS encrypts my Backups and transfers them to some hetzner webspace on a server in Sweden. For email and day to day cloud usage I use mailbox.org. They are from Germany and put a focus on privacy and security, yearly payments are no problem.

Put looting the east via Treuhand on that list…

I think you are missing the point I’m trying to make. Glorifying a system can never be the answer. It isn’t for the US (as we can all prominently see right now) and it isn’t for China. Or any system, country, whatever. There will always be drawbacks and things you won’t know about. Keeping a critical eye on the status quo is the only way to develop a better future in any system. By just blindly praising it, it will turn sour at some point. The relatives you visited too will tell you about their daily troubles living within their system, if they have the feeling they can do that. Not american by the way. From a country that has a history of quite intense surveillance, if that gives you a hint. Maybe that’s part of what makes me critical after seeing the billion electronic eyes of Shanghai. A system that afraid of it’s own citizens can’t be perfect.

My washing machine is around 25 years old. Not giving it up till its absolutely done haha. But since parts are relatively available, it might just be a few more years.