Maybe those are imperial seconds and the ohers metric?

The thing with the Control panel (speaking as a former Windows user up until a year ago) was its consistency. Since the Aero era things have remained in more-or-less the same place. Sure, some things got added, some renamed and some deleted, but the basics I needed (mouse sensitivity, battery settings on the laptop, the Add/remove software page, search indexing, printers) has all stayed in more or less the same place.

Then 10 happened. And sure, Settings was great for a lot of stuff. But when Settings didn’t have the option (or I lost my nerves trying to find it), Control Panel was the way to go. I’d find what I needed pretty much instantly, since was always one of the same 20-odd things I need.

Even then, everything just seemed faster in Control panel. Was it more responsive? Were there less animations? Were more things crammed into one screen so less clicking and scrolling was involved? Is it just my imagination?

Honestly, I don’t know.

By the time I got used to the new Settings app, one of the big Windows 10 makeovers happened and jumbled up about 10% of Settings. Objectively not much, but just enough to irritate.

And now with 11, they not only made Settings unrecognizable, they also cranked the spyware up to, well, 11. And there’s no Control Panel to default on when in doubt (or fuming with rage).

All in all, while Control Panel wan’t what kept me on Windows, 11 losing it did ease the transition, since it meant having to learn a new way of doing things either way. Might as well make it a way that hopefully won’t change once a random design exec decides “this is ugly and it has to go”.

Honestly, KDE Plasma’s Settings are where it’s at. It’s right between the functional and informstional density of Control panel and the simplicity, visual appeal and saner structure of Settings. Shame it uses Qt, which from what I hear, is god-awful as far as UI toolchains go.

There is/was a new Windows 10 Control panel? I thought that was just the Settings app.

Yeah.

The 30 cm is ubiquitous for officework or drawing, while this is for tiling floors, doing plumbing, measuring walls, roofs, etc. etc… There are also those retractable coils (usually 2 or 5m), but they tend to break easily and collapse under their own weight, so they’re not as useful for some things.

I can find one like this in basically any hardware store with few exceptions (Austria). They’re almost exclusively 2m in length (I literally haven’t seen a longer or shorter one ever in my life)

Also, a meter stick sounds workable, but borderline impractical.

Yup. There are like 3 types of rulers: normal (a stick), foldable (this) and those retractable metallic strips.

Sticks are usually either 15 or 30 cm, while the foldables are literally always 2m.

The coils are the most ubiquitous, but I orefer the foldavles for most things since they tend to fall undet their own weight when measuring longer distances. These sre either 2 or 5 m I think.

Sorry for being pedantic, but those foldable work rulers are exactly 2 m long (at least in MetricLandia), which is, incidentally, the span of IQ values (0-200).

So yeah, it literally can be mapped one-to-one to a (common type of) ruler.

I got my lenses for a realistic amount (~8€), but the frames are (were) expensive af. That’s mostly on Luxottica (and the state not reigning her in).

Although, that was years ago, way before “covid-induced” inflation, and the healthcare system is being dismantled bit-by-bit for a very long time, so I don’t doubt lenses got at least 3-5x more expensive in the meantime.

When your job suddenly rolls out G-Workspace or Office Online without you knowing and you come to work to a Google account with all your personal data, already out of your control, is it really a choice?

Have a job or your data. The stakes are becoming increasingly high.

“If it’s useful, just use them” is an option, in some circumstances. In some, unfortunately, that doesn’t apply. Is keeping your job a “convenience”?

Don’t mean to attack you personally, just want to share my thoughts on the level erosion of privacy to Big Tech.

Ah, the third option.

Is that Motorola’s EULA or buying throug a carrier?

Cloased source does for privacy and security what sweeping problems under the rug does: it mitigates them, a bit, but then when they inevitably do hit, they hit hard.

About that. I heard somewhere wordpress.com and wordpress.org are seperste entities, one for-profit and the other not, but Wikipedia doesn’t mention why they share the same name.

Meh. CTU means stuff comes into e.g. Rotterdam and then easily wherever it needs to go from there, and complaining about “evading sanctions” seems to me like an exercise in futility.

About the Ribbon: Apparently M$ has a patent (or multiple ones on) it, so they ultimately have the last say on what is and isn’t allowed. They did make a licence availiable royalty-free, but I assume that that licence didn’t cover enough of what LibreOffice needed, so they probably struck a deal with M$ about having the option, just not as the default.

I haven’t researched this all that much, so mostly speculation. Although the M$ having a patent part of someting so true. And that patent (apparently) explicitly states that use in directly competing software with M$'s is forbidden, at least for-profit.

Idk, maybe it’s a case of patent restrictions, or LibreOffice being LibreOffice.

Honestly, a really interesting rabbit-hole.

AFAIK At least one user of the other instance has to be subscribed to the community in order for the community to be “synced” with the other instance (for lack of a better word).

Thank you for the correction!

The english word “free” actually carries two meanings: “free as in free food” (gratis) and “free as in free speech” (libre).

Ollama is both gratis and libre.

And about the money stuff: Ollama used to be Facebook’s proprietary model, an answer to ChatGPT and Bing Chat/Copilot. Facebook lagged behind the other players and they just said “fuck it, we’re going open-source”. That’s how and why it’s free.

Due to it being open-source, even though models are by design binary blobs, the code that interacts with them and runs them is open-source. If they were connecting to the Internet and phoning home to Facebook, chances are this would’ve been found out by the community due to the open nature of the project.

Even if it weren’t open-source, since it runs locally you could at least block (or view) Internet access.

Basically, even though this is from Facebook, one of the big bads of privacy on the Internet, it’s all good in the end.

Sometimes, refilling an empty cup with coffee is a good fix

“Propaganda” comes from “propagate”, so the word inherently isn’t bad. The suffix “anda” basically means “thing of”, so in a literal sense, “propaganda” is any “object of propagation”, although this reading of etymology isn’t widely circulated.

Propaganda is thus inherently a very all-encompassing term. Any poster, flyer or brochure is propaganda, whether it advertizes a product, service, lost cat, or wants you to join the army. Anything “mass media” is propaganda. Anything spreading “a message” that is meant for wider propagation, regardless of the message content is propaganda.

At least that’s according to my rudimentary knowledge of high school latin. There’s the more “mainstream”, “official” etymology on Wiktionary: the word was first used in the name of an old Catholic Church department from Latin times for “spreading the faith”, so that’s where the more loaded use and connotation comes from. However, I doubt that this department name is the first ever use of the ablative feminine gerund form of the verb propagate. That’s like saying the first use of the term “World health” is in the name World Health Orgsnization. If anything, someone had to discuss the name beforehand.

So, there’s this Overton window-esque aspect to the word.

Wikipedia has a good overview of propaganda, although it is itself loaded onto the “must be loaded (i.e. what you called ‘bad’ propaganda)” definition of propaganda. And they like usibn the word “loaded” a lot.

No, “giving away” means giving something for free. A better way to say it would be “practically or as if I’m giving it away”.

Of course, in daily discourse you might say “I gave it away” instead of “I got rid of it” or “I sold it” since it sounds nicer and is probably more informative when someone asks you “What happened to your car?” and you want to mean I gave it to someone else and didn’t take any money for it, not when you post it for sale on Facebook Marketplace.

The fact that people list “giveaways” where you pay for anything other than shipping, tax, etc. does not change what the words mean.

And even if we’re cutting it close with “practically giving away”, the max price I’d give on such a “given away car” is $500. Anything more is cutting your losses.

$90k is 180 times that amount. Does that mean he wants to give the car away 180 times?

It’s the same underlying wordplay.