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InitialsDiceBearhttps://github.com/dicebear/dicebearhttps://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/„Initials” (https://github.com/dicebear/dicebear) by „DiceBear”, licensed under „CC0 1.0” (https://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/)SI
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2 yr. ago

  • Ukraine successfully defends against Russia because the rest of the world sends them tons of weapons. And because the famous 'second best army in the world' turned out to be a paper tiger. Poland does not want the same thing to happen. They don't want to have to get weapons after invasion, they want to have the weapons beforehand to hopefully prevent the invasion from ever happening.

    You are also thinking logically, like look at our military and look at their military and figure out if we can beat them or not. Dictatorships don't always work that way. If delivering bad news to the great leader has negative consequences, everybody's going to come up with good news whether it's real or not. 'Oh yes great leader, of course great leader, yes our military is strong sir, we stand ready to crush them like a small insect and there is nothing they have that can possibly stand up to your glorious military sir.'. It works until Great Leader actually orders a fight, and then when said fight goes to shit some people accidentally shoot themselves twice in the back of the head before tripping and falling out an unlocked window in tragic freak accidents.

    Point is, Russia has shown that logic is not feeding their decisions. So when faced with an illogical enemy, Poland wants to arm up to dissuade any attempts from being made and fight them off if they happen anyway.

  • Yup this is the answer. Without Putin keeping him in power Lukashenko won't last long.
    Also hilarious that we haven't heard much from Belarus about the recent Russian Duma comment that 'all neighbors are up for grabs, the ones that cooperate like Belarus will just be last'.
    'We're gonna conquer you, just not today' is the sort of thing that SHOULD be turning allies into enemies...

  • TL;DR that everyone seems to have missed:

    Poland isn't sending weapons to Ukraine because they are arming up themselves instead.

    “We no longer transfer weapons to Ukraine because we are now arming Poland,” Polish Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki

  • For me it'd be Don't Even Reply: E-Mails from an Asshole.

    Bunch of funny ones. Like someone offered a ride in a Prius for a long car trip between cities, he said he'd have to stop at a river to pour out some motor oil because he doesn't support the environment and had to make up for the environmental damage the Prius wasn't doing.

  • Not surprising given than it's Wyndham, and reinforces my policy to never stay in one of their hotels again.

    I went to one in Florida, good location, nice area, near an attraction. Sign and lobby were new. Prices were premium given their location near the attraction. But the building with the rooms--- ho-lee fuck. It was worse than a tenement. Flickering fluorescent lights in the hallway. Paint peeling off every surface including walls and doors and ceiling, both inside the room and out. Carpet in the hallway was filthy. The people doing the room had tried to clean it, but it was still awful. More flickering lights and peeling paint in the bathroom. Loud music from both next door rooms. And half the parking lot was cargo containers. No bed bugs fortunately, so I got like 5 hours sleep (arrived at 2am ish) then checked the fuck out. At least they had no problem refunding me.

    I emailed the hotel manager and Wyndham corporate basically saying what the ever loving fuck. I was polite and respectful, but was quite clear that if they value their brand they need to close this hotel until it can be seriously rehabilitated. Both the hotel manager and Wyndham sent back a generic 'sorry we didn't live up to your expectations thank you for your feedback we will consider it'. AKA- we know and we don't give a fuck.

    So yeah.... Wyndham never again.

    I now have a simple rule- Hilton or Marriott, Hilton highly preferred. They cost more but at least you know you're going to get a clean building and a decent nights sleep.

  • Assuming the cost is stupid low like a $1/year, low enough that almost nobody will think 'is this really worth it?'-- every required click or tap after hitting 'subscribe now' costs you 25-50% of the people who are still there.

    Make it 1 penny for a lifetime subscription. Just having to thumbprint for Google Pay will still cost you 25-50% of the people who hit subscribe. Make it a credit card form with card/exp/cvv/address/tel# and your purchase rate is down to maybe 1% of the people who hit subscribe.

  • Oh don't get me wrong, I love the idea too. I remember back in the early 00s there was a watch that was like 3-4" wide, only single strap, but had a big display that, while segmented, still showed a lot of stuff. I just don't think most 'normies' would go for it though.

  • I dunno. I think it's the same issue with Google Glass, AR kits, and Bluetooth headsets. The vast majority of people aren't interested in being quite so openly nerdy as to wear that constantly, and then a lot of the people who do wear it act like douchebags so then nobody else wears it because they don't want to look like douchebags. That happened to Bluetooth headsets- what SHOULD have been an easy 'wear always' thing became a 'I'll act like a douchebag and yell into my headset in public places' thing and then nobody wants to wear one when not on a call lest they be grouped in with the douchebags.

    I like the concept of a 2-strap watch/phone, but I don't see it having common appeal. That will also be heavy, and even a basic phone's current weight will be felt a LOT more on the wrist than on the belt / in a pocket. Plus a watch gets exposed to a lot more damage as the user goes about their day so it will need to be a lot better armored (increasing bulk and weight) and also easy to repair.

    You may though be right about the device makers wanting us to have two gadgets rather than one...

  • That was a fairly famous situation. The reporter was very anti-EV, and trashed the car's crappy range and said it ran out of power on him with no warning.
    Tesla released the logs showing that it popped up low power warnings and suggested places to charge several times, all of which were ignored. When the car reported 0% it was then driven to a parking lot where it drove around in circles (the whole time, suggesting a nearby charger) until it finally shut down.
    The reporter was then fired.

  • It's an interesting thought, but he misses the #1 problem with online subscriptions- sign-up friction.

    If you could just push a button and instantly be charged something, an awful lot of people would do it.
    But when you go from $0 to $0.01, you will lose 99% of people, because most people can't be bothered to fill out a form, put in their credit card number, etc. Even if the amount of money involved is absurdly small, it's not the price, it's the friction.

    Now if he integrates the app with Apple Pay or Google Wallet that will help, a little. But only a little.

  • Screen and battery weren't there for it. Still aren't I don't think unless you significantly increase the size of the watch to either be a real hockey puck, or more likely stretch it out to be both thicker (probably about 1/2" to 3/4" thick) and wider (I'm thinking 3-4") it's gonna be an option anytime soon.

  • I've been saying this for a long time.

    There are use cases for the cloud. I put e-mail in the cloud- ain't nobody got time to deal with providing reliable SMTP or Exchange while keeping spam out. If you have a web app that needs to scale quickly, cloud's the way. If you're a startup with limited capital and you don't want to blow it on a bunch of servers when you're not sure if you'll survive more than a year or so, cloud's the way.

    But Cloud ISN'T the end-all answer for everything.

    If you have a predictable workload, especially one that relies on more expensive cloud services, de-clouding can save you a bundle. Buying hardware can be cheaper than renting it, if only because (think about it) the cloud provider has to buy the same hardware and rent it to you AND make a profit. If you're going to be around a while, and you expect to use a piece of hardware for its full service life, that makes a lot of sense.

  • This is exactly it. Their young population is heavily overworked and underpaid. There is no work life balance, there is only showing dedication to the company. And for this you often aren't even paid enough to move out of your parents house.

    To put this in perspective- in Japanese offices there is a thing called hanko. It's a small stamp that is unique to each person. Memos are often printed on paper, then circulated, then each worker stamps it with their hanko to indicate they've read it. This caused huge problems during COVID and many offices refused to close simply because the management didn't want to try any sort of 'digital hanko'.
    The obvious answer to a Western culture is 'that's fucking stupid, replace that with any sort of e-document manager that tracks access and save a ton of time and paper and money'. But in Japan, the gray-haired manager gets respect and is not questioned so the hanko continues. The worker does not stand up and say 'I demand more money and better working conditions' because that is not how things work.

    So of course the overworked, underpaid, 20something year old who is just scraping by has no time to go out and try to meet a partner, let alone start a family they won't have time for.

    As a nation, they will reap what they sow. The nation is turning gray and there will be nobody to care for them, or replace them. I think they will come out stronger- perhaps in 10-20 years when more of the older traditional people die, some of the younger folks can make serious changes. But for now they need radical reform if they want to avoid a very unhappy decade.

  • Um... no fucking shit.

    Transporting millions of people dozens of miles twice a day OF COURSE has resource costs, in carbon and pollution and energy consumption. This shouldn't be rocket science. Sadly it is for people who are afraid of change.

    It also saves the workers money (as they don't have to pay for fuel or public transit), it saves the company money (as they don't have to pay for office space), it saves the environment (as you don't have pollution from commutes), it reduces traffic (as you don't have as many commuters at rush hour), and it's generally good for just about everybody except commercial real estate developers renting out overpriced office buildings and Starbucks that's paying absurd rents to be in the bottom floor of those overpriced office buildings. And of course middle managers who think that hounding their employees in person somehow accomplishes something.

  • Trust is hard to build and easy to break and even harder to rebuild.

    To truly rebuild trust, they'd need to commit to never doing this again. That would mean 1. a change to the legal TOS that a developer who licenses for a project at a certain pricing level may remain at that price level for that project / that generation of Unity for as long as they wish, 2. a public commitment to never require per-install pricing, and ideally 3. the resignation of whoever came up with this brain dead idea.

  • Yeah, this 100%.

    To truly restore trust, it should be 'we're sorry, our mistake, it won't happen again, our new TOS will guarantee the right to remain at a current license price structure for a given generation of the engine, we hereby promise to never ever require per-install pricing, and the person responsible for this change is no longer with the company'.

  • And that really bugs.
    I keep all my media sorted in folders (old school I know). I went to try Plex once a few years back. It launched right into making an account and setting up remote access. Never was clear what if any access Plex mothership has to my media library- does that include filenames, file contents, everything? Sorry but do not want. I VPN back home, don't need the cloud BS.

  • Yeah I agree. It seems brain dead- you're making a $1200 book-flip phone that opens up like a laptop to a giant screen, so you have tons of space for ports, and you can't re-add the headphone jack? Seems overly focused on profits rather than usability.