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A better place

The most interesting thing is that he wasn’t the only one. A guy who called himself Victor Lustig did the same thing with the Eiffel Tower.

I just made it 62.

The bakery down the road from where I grew up used to hold the Guinness world record for the largest version of a local specialty.

I’d finally finish some of my personal projects.

Over the last few years, I’ve had so many ideas for stuff, both video games and just basic useful software. This is where the curse of being a professional software engineer kicks in. I know that I’m experienced enough to actually make those things but after a full day of work, preparing dinner and getting the apartment in order, there is just not enough time and energy left to get my ass in front of an IDE again. I’d love to have the opportunity, even if just for a year or so to pause my day job and spend my energy on something that is actually mine and has emotional value for me.

On top of that, I have a couple of hobbies that would benefit from having more time. Photography, HEMA (fencing with proper swords), board games, 3d printing and painting miniatures… one thing is for sure, I wouldn’t get bored any time soon.

My first OS was most likely DR DOS 3.41

For my daily driver desktop PCs that was followed by

• MS-DOS 5.0
• Windows 3.11
• Windows 98 SE
• Windows XP
• Windows 7
• Windows 10

On the linux side, I got started with Gentoo, experimented with several lightweight distributions for an old laptop and had a Mint VM for a few years. These days I run Ubuntu on a couple of servers and in WSL. Never got around to using it as my main desktop OS.

For university I had (in order) an iBook G3, a MacBook and a MacBook Pro, so you can add most of macOS 10.x to that list.

Learned that the hard way. Within less than a week went from happily living in the house that I had grown up in, that I was renting from my father and that I was planning to eventually buy or inherit to having to look for an apartment because he sold it. The worst thing? That he never gave me a reason or even acknowledged how much he had hurt me. Quite the opposite, he later asked me to help the new owners set up their tv as if it was nothing.

I got hit really hard by 2048. I didn’t even play it that much but my brain started looking for groups of identical things and imagined how they slide into each other to create something new. Plates on the kitchen table, seats on the train to work, identical cars…

English:

• Lateral
• Darknet Diaries
• Artifexian
• Exolore
• The White Vault (caught up on old episodes)
• World’s Greatest Con

German:

• Geschichten aus der Geschichte
• Geschichten aus dem Altbau
• Darwin gefällt das
• Mord auf Ex
• Bayern 3 True Crime
• Weird Crimes

All in no particular order.

It’s the IT department’s job to make sure you have all the hardware you need to do your job. While not being able to track your time is something that affects you more than it affects the company, it’s still part of the job.

It is certainly not your job to buy new devices with your own money. Also, I would highly advise your IT department against letting you use a private device that you carry around in your free time and even on vacation as your second factor. Anything that can be used to access your work data should never be with you when you’re getting drunk in a bar.

If you’re financially stable enough that getting paid a few days late doesn’t hurt you too much, I would recommend you ask IT for a new phone (that you will only use for work!) and hand in your time sheets in whatever form is the least convenient for HR until the problem is resolved.

Don’t get me wrong but I just don’t get all these „why do you use messenger X and not Y?“ threads that occasionally pop up. The answer is almost always „because the people I want to talk to use X“.

I use messengers to talk to specific people. Friends, family, the people I game with. It’s not like lemmy or reddit which are more about topics than about people. I can join a community about my favorite hobby on any platform and get more or less the same experience. But with messengers that doesn’t work. Matrix can be a thousand times better than Discord or XMPP but if the people I need to reach aren’t there, it’s absolutely useless to me. And convincing them to switch over with me isn’t really an option. They rightfully ask why they should get yet another messenger just for me when everyone else they want to talk to is on one they already have.

It’s almost a miracle that so many people switched from IRC to Discord when that came out but I guess they just had a bunch of features that people wanted.

I think you misunderstood. I didn’t mean that I wouldn’t want to support family-owned businesses.

I would LOVE to support small businesses. But there are almost none left where I live and the few that are still there are so important to me that I‘m basically friends with the owners.

The only real choice I have left for most things is between Amazon, the German Amazon equivalent Otto and a few big chains like Müller, Kaufland and MediaMarkt-Saturn. Neither of them are small businesses by any definition. Between those and only those I pick the cheapest because in those cases my wallet matters more than which rich asshole I dislike the most.

And no, that’s not because I ruined small businesses. For the longest time I’ve made an effort to buy as much from small businesses as I could. But that option is gone.

No, I wouldn’t support someone’s family. I would support a large national or international chain. Where I live, family-owned stores have disappeared way over a decade ago. I’ll gladly spend a bit more to support a small store but if I have the choice between three different soulless and faceless corporations, I’ll put my own financial interests first. There’s exactly two things that I can still buy from independent stores: vinyl records and board games. In the game store I’m a regular to the point where the owners greet me by name and offer me a drink as soon as I walk through the door.

The sad thing is that at least here in Germany they are becoming the only option for more and more products. Most of the things I ordered in the last few years I couldn’t have gotten locally. Often my only other option is a different soulless and ethically questionable online retailer that asks a 30% higher price, uses the worst delivery service in the country and is just as much of a threat to family owned stores.

This mainly applies to movies on DVD and BluRay but I even had to order some semi-exotic cooking ingredients from Amazon because nobody in my medium sized city has them in stock.

I think you misunderstood my point. That’s on me though, I could have phrased it better. Props to @Zak@lemmy.world, their comment did a better job at explaining what I meant.

Definitely not a strict rule and I wouldn’t want to force anyone to do it the way I do (maybe I should have marked my comment as a joke) but as far as I understand, downvotes were originally meant for spam or low-quality/low-effort comments. Stuff that just doesn’t add anything to the duscussion and isn’t worth reading. Fortunately, that doesn’t happen very often on Lemmy.

Downvoting comments that you disagree with just to bury them, especially without even leaving a comment that explains why you disagree, just feels petty.

Overall, I’d rather upvote a well-written comment even if I disagree with its contents and downvote ten “yeah, same” comments that agree with me but add nothing to the discussion.

On second thought, maybe I do want an “us vs. them” with “them” being people who use downvotes as an “I disagree” button.

Disclaimer: this was meant as a joke.

Anything that doesn’t devolve into “us vs. them”, doesn’t matter who “us” and “them” is.

The fediverse was designed to let every instance or even every user decide for themselves who they want to interact with. There is no need to persuade others to use the fediverse the same way you do. A few months ago I wrote a blog post about why my personal single-user instance wouldn’t defederate from corporate-run instances as long as they play by the rules, with the clear intent to defederate if they do things that harm the way I interact with the fediverse. People got outright vile, called me names and tried to convince me that any tiny interaction with anyone they don’t like would inevitably lead to the death of the free fediverse.

Personally I would rather have federated social media based on an open protocol where every user can decide what’s the best way to interact with content than being forced into proprietary platforms just to get updates from my favorite video game studio, streamer or artist. It may well be that there are people on the fediverse who exclusively want to interact with vegan FOSS communist hippies and that’s fine. But I’m not one of those people and I don’t see why they should decide how I run my instance or get mad at me about something that doesn’t affect them at all.

Let’s all be as tolerant as we claim we are and treat people (and instances) based on their deeds and not based on how similar they are to ourselves.

Some national governments in Europe run their own instances. For example Germany runs https://social.bund.de/ and the Netherlands run https://social.overheid.nl. The EU itself has https://social.network.europa.eu/.

All of them have accounts for government organizations and elected officials.