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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 23rd, 2023

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  • Also not a fan of #16 since it sounds to me like forced labour for the poor

    That is how actually that worked in some (if not all) communist countries. No unemployment, but people (mostly those ‘undesirable’ for various reasons) would be sent to hard work in bad conditions, which would often cost their health or life. The other side of the coin was: everybody had a job and little fear of losing it, so people rarely treated the work seriously enough. There were factories full of workers, but so inefficient, that nothing was produced in sufficient demand. People had money, but little to buy with it.






  • My experience with C++ was when C++ was a relatively new thing. Practically the only notable feature provided by the standard library, was that unholy abuse of bit shift operators for I/O. No standard collections or any other data types.

    And every compiler would consider something else a valid C++ code or interpret the same code differently.

    I am little bit prejudiced since then… and that is probably where the author is coming from too.

    Then things were just getting more complicated (templates and other new syntax quirks), to fill the holes in attempts to make C a ‘high level language’.



  • As long as we are not paying for the services the service providers will do what they can to show us ads and frankly… rightly so.

    The problem is there is no other established way for paying for services. One that would be widely use and fair. Current state of things is ‘we say it is free, but we will get the money from advertisers or by selling your data’. Yes, some people are often able to avoid some of the ads and privacy loss, but that means the service gets no money from those people, so the service is built and being run for the rest of users – those who cannot install ad-blockers or who don’t care or don’t know how to care about their privacy. This is one of the reasons of enshitification – any ‘free’ service needs to be only as good as required to keep the users who watch ads and give away their data. Catering any more conscious user is just a cost.

    When enough of people will be using ad-block then the ad-block will stop working on many sites or the sites will disappear or become paid service. No one will provide commercial services for free and not everything can be a public service founded by a government or a community. I am not even talking about ‘corporate profits’ – even in the worst corporations there are normal people working and they should be paid for their work. Whether they are paid fairly and whether the corporate profits aren’t too big is another topic…



  • Slightly off-topic rant:

    I hate how the ‘VPN’ term has been took over by companies selling services using VPN technology.

    VPN was initially ‘Virtual Private Network’ – used to securely connect own (as belonging to an organization or person) devices over a public network. Like securely connecting bank branches. Or allowing employee connect to a company network. And VPN are still used that way. They are secure and provide the privacy needed.

    Now when people say ‘VPN’ they often mean a service where they use VPN software (initially designed for the use case mentioned above) to connect to the public interned via some third-party. This is not a ‘private network’ any more. It just changes who you need to trust with you network activity. And changes how others may see you (breaking other trust).

    When you cannot trust your ISP and your local authorities those ‘VPNs’ can be useful. But I have more trust to my ISP I have a contract with and my country legal system than in some exotic company in some tax haven or other country that our consumer protections or GDPR obligations won’t reach.

    Back to the topic:
    I do not believe that all VPN services are owned/funded by governments, but some may be. I don’t have much reason to trust them, they are doing it for money and not necessarily only the money their customers pay them. In fact I trust my government more that some random very foreign company.