I don’t mind injected podcast ads so much, especially for smaller podcasts that need some financial support. What I tend to do is use a VPN, that way the podcast is in my local language, but the ads are in another that I don’t understand. I get my podcast, podcasters get paid, and I avoid tracking and brainwashing. win-win-win

This is one of the points that a French MEP brought up during the meeting. If this is pursued it could as a side effect open up space for digital “orphaned works” which would be fantastic.

Some parts of this bill, increasing the places where vaping is not permitted in line with smoking, are very welcome.

But bans of addictive substances only result in criminalising people who are addicted and putting them more at risk of harm, because now in addition to lung cancer they’ll have black market goons to deal with as well.

It may be waiting to enshittify, but as it is still DRM free, that’s not a huge deal breaker (as long as they don’t change this policy). Plus, they’re still doing Bandcamp fridays, so it’s still the best way to financially support a musician at the moment.

Thankfully no microsoft, but I do have to use google workspace.

at least i can sandbox it to a web browser? small wins…

The drivers run OK, but because they were not built for my distribution with the right flag, when I sleep and resume my system, I need to log out and back in to the desktop or else it bugs out.

Is this the drivers fault for not having that be a default flag? The maintainers fault for not using the correct flags? Waylands fault for not interfacing with the driver right on resume? My fault for having the audacity to want to use the sleep function?

I have no clue, but it doesn’t happen with the open source nouevau drivers, so I’m inclined to place a fair bit of the blame with nvidia.

It’ll be cancelled before it even launches

“Envisioned as an important connecting vein that will one day see trains running from Helsinki, Finland, to Palermo, Sicily,”

Surely the important connecting vein here is a link to Finland, on the other side of Europe and across the sea from Italy, but then I’m not a rail engineer so what do I know.

Labour were voted in on a mandate of “change” specifically. Literally, their one word slogan used during campaigning. Now, obviously they’re the single transferable party, so nothing was actually going to change, but I do want to make sure no-one forgets that was their one promise.

There’s something I’m really struggling to understand when talking about things like Taler, and the “Digital euro” idea which has come up recently as well: What is it actually doing that’s new?

Money is distributed digitally already. When you get a paycheck, no-one is actually moving physical paper and metal cash from a business account bank vault to a customer account bank vault, it’s just numbers in a spreadsheet. So what’s actually new when we’re talking about digital currency like this post?

There must be something I’m missing here.