namingthingsiseasy

I have no words for how stupid of an idea this was. Pitching your browser as a privacy-friendly alternative (which few people ever cared about), and then doing the exact opposite thing and integrating a service like this which nobody asked for, and also making it unremovable was just a hilariously stupid move.

Good riddance, but the damage done by this chapter of stupidity is basically irredeemable.

Can you put some milk on the algorithm please?

You're right, but I think the main reason companies like it is because it's easier to get rid of contractors than full-time employees.

Vim when I can, and when I can't, Neovim with plugins (LazyVim). Both are fast. I have had troubles with Neovim and configuration, and it does some things that really annoy me (like autoclosing parentheses - it just messes up everything). Honestly, the only feature that I really need is Go To Definition.

But vim - I absolutely love it. I started using it nearly 20 years ago and it still does everything one could want if you're willing to learn the keymaps and commands. Macros, ci), block indentation and so on. It's even great for editing XML. If the codebases I'm working on these days weren't so large and complicated, I would still be using it with very little configuration in my .vimrc.

I don't like systemd mostly because it gives Red Hat too much power over the Linux ecosystem. For example, udev and logind used to be independent components that were eventually merged into systemd, and the onus was put on the community to maintain their independent derivatives (eudev and elogind). systemd's original developer (Lennart Poettering) has been very open about his intention to make life difficult for anyone that doesn't adopt systemd (source and original quote).

To me, systemd is the Google Chrome of Linux - it tries to make life easier and does a good job of that, but it's also explicitly designed in such a way to push out all competitors. So I avoid it at all costs and prefer other distros like Devuan, Void, Alpine, Gentoo and so on. That said, I don't do enough to contribute back to those projects, so I wish I were more helpful about it than I actually am :-(

Regardless, this doesn't mean that you need to do the same thing. If you're new to Linux, use whatever makes you happy and your life easiest! Practically none of the non-systemd distros are particularly easy to set up and use (Devuan may be an exception, but is likely the only one). And besides, a lot of this stuff is very old, and Poettering hasn't even worked at Red Hat for multiple years now.

But do keep in mind that systemd was a very political topic and still poses a threat to the Linux ecosystem - anyone could take over the project and leverage it to make life difficult for anyone that doesn't want to do things the Red Hat way. And since many of the major distros have made it the only option at this point, they'll have no choice but to be dragged along with it. Keep that in mind as you gain more experience with Linux and think about trying alternatives.

The bigger problem in my opinion is more about the fact that all elections that select a single winner will always end up in stupid degenerate systems like this where flaws and imperfections exist.

The best thing to do (again, my opinion) is to abolish all single winner races and have multiple winners with proportional representation. Get rid of directly elected presidents and have a prime minister selected by a proportionally representative parliament instead. All presidential systems suck, and the larger the number of people voting, the harder and harder it sucks. It's not just a USA problem - you also see it in France and Turkey, where they also have an all-powerful president that is elected nationally and the election is a complete shit-show every time without fail. On the other hand, having a prime minister selected as the head of state from a proportionally elected parliament is a much fairer and more stable system in my opinion. It has downsides too of course, but nowhere near as bad as nationally elected presidential systems.

In any case, the example you pointed out is a potential flaw in approval voting, but I don't think it's very likely to happen. First of all, it would require all those voters in the second round to conspire a particular way, which isn't very likely. Secondly, there's the fact that the numbers would have to line up in a very particular way which has a very low probability of happening - tweak a few numbers here and there, and the spoiler effect vanishes. Sure, the scenario you point out is a hypothetical flaw in approval voting, but I think it's a much smaller effect and probability of actually influencing anything - definitely nowhere near as much of a strategic voting effect as in plurality voting systems.

And this is why platforms that only grow for the sake of growing is a bad thing. In order to grow unbounded, you have to cater for the kinds of users that you described - no self-respect and no awareness of the platform that they're using. The kinds of people that will happily let themselves be abused by technocrats like Mark Zuckerberg or whatever Reddit's CEO is.

Is that the kind of average user that we want on Lemmy? Hell no! If that means that we can never have more than 1 million monthly users, then so be it. Quality over quantity. Reddit has plenty of quantity, but garbage-tier quality.

Spain seems to have a digital nomad visa option that seems pretty easy to obtain: https://movingtospain.com/spain-digital-nomad-visa/

However, it seems that you need to have a job for at least 3 months before applying from a company outside Spain. Maybe you would have to obtain a job for a short period outside Spain and then obtain the visa to move back in. Another potential difficulty is that your employer would have to be willing to keep you employed in another country and possibly pay you in a different currency. There are contracting firms that can help with this, but it's not guaranteed and ultimately your employer could just say no and let you go. Still, it's a possible avenue.

Also worth looking into whether your wife's student visa allows you to work, but I'm guessing that you probably looked into it already and it doesn't. But just mentioning it in case you haven't already thought about it.

unfortunately they never make it to mainstream media

Sounds like this "mainstream media" is not doing its job. This might have some kinds of implications for the current state of affairs in the USA. Can't put my finger on exactly what though.

B-b-b-but my convenience!!!

Daniel Stenberg (author of curl) has written a little bit about his journey working on curl: https://daniel.haxx.se/blog/2020/10/26/working-open-source/

I now work for wolfSSL. We sell curl support and related services to companies. Companies pay wolfSSL, wolfSSL pays me a salary and I get food on the table. This works as long as we can convince enough companies that this is a good idea.

The vast majority of curl users out there of course don’t pay anything and will never pay anything. We just need a small number of companies to do it – and it seems to be working. We help customers use curl better, we make curl better for them and we make them ship better products this way. It’s a win win. And I can work on open source all day long thanks to this.

On the other hand, there are lots of bots scraping Wikipedia even though it's easy to download the entire website as a single archive.

So they're not really that smart....