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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: July 15th, 2023

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  • If you have to say it often, it might indicate you have trouble formulating your initial advice in a way that is acceptable to people.

    Nobody likes to be told they’re wrong, so it helps to be empathetic about it. Packing your advice or instructions into a tactful and diplomatic approach doesn’t cost you much, but makes it much more likely for your advice to be accepted and implemented. And the recipient will usually end up being grateful for having avoided a mistake. They might even start to look for your and ask advice in the future. And if you keep doing that, he might even consider you a nice person or even a friend.

    An arrogant and condescending approach will only do harm, even if you are factually right.


  • What’s your source on the reverify thing? I use matrix a lot, and this hasn’t been an issue I ever experienced anymore since they introduced cross-signing a couple years ago.

    Same goes for the common clients such as element. It has been clunky in the past, but after the past major overhauls ( also years ago now) everything has been silky smooth for me, if not better than others. The one thing left I prefer from Signal is the one-time photo share.

    Matrix is great, clients are great too, only the server part still is annoyingly complicated and messy. Would only recommend that for tinkerers, on that case it’s a great path to learning about the complexity of addressing lots of security concerns that others gloss over.

    Edit: to add - there’s a reason why the French government and the German military decided to build their secure internal IM infrastructure on Matrix. Obviously they are hosting their own private network, but if the concept is good enough for European government and military, it is an indicator for quality especially in terms of security and privacy.



  • You are swapping correlation and causation to some degree. A country does not become industrialized by people starting to have kids at a later age. Rather, people start getting kids when their circumstances allow it: in industrialized countries, you rely less on children to provide for you when old, as there hopefully are social systems in place or you can save up on your own. Downside is, without social systems you also have to provide for yourself at old age, meaning people need to build up more savings before they feel ready for the financial burden a child is for around 20 years.

    In developing countries, children often get little support above bare necessities and start contributing to the household income at a much earlier age, even before hitting their teens.


  • I’ll still use the opportunity to voice my opinion clearly on this: Yes, forced circumcision on infants is only a very small step above the also still common practice of female genetic mutilations at birth/infancy. It does not matter what reasons you claim, only medical necessity should matter. Society should protect its infants from any religion or tradition demanding body modifications of infants.

    Leave people’s bodies alone until they can decide on their own what to do when there is zero proven medical benefit to doing it before without their informed consent.

    The common “improved hygiene” argument is nonsensical. You know what improves hygiene? Washing, and teaching kids how to wash themselves.

    Otherwise you could cut off ears using the same logic. No ears, no need to wash behind the ears.



  • I’m curious, why are you “happy it’s been done”?

    I live in a country where we don’t perform this procedure out of tradition/religion, or at least not in the majority. I’m only aware of it being done for specific medical pathologies such as phimosis.

    Because I kind of agree with the sentiment that performing unwarranted surgeries on someone that is unable to voice his (non-)consent is an ethical problem. Even more so with excisions, which always are drastically and usually irrevocably diminishing the body.




  • As a bonus fact: because multiple embryos are implanted at once, IVF has a much higher chance of having multiple embryos take hold at once. So while getting pregnant is hard on the first place, if it works, there’s a higher than usual chance to get twins ( or even more, though much less likely).

    This “risk” is clearly communicated in the preparation phase and the potential parents have to ok and accept this for IVF to go ahead at all.


  • During IVF, you don’t prepare a single embryo. You prepare dozens at once.

    IVF is used when for whatever reason the natural process fails. This can be due to had sperm, bad eggs, trouble with the path to the womb, hormonal imbalances, and a large number of illnesses that fuck up this delicate process. So IVF has to fight a steep uphill battle, and you want multiple fighters in the ring to increase the odds. Why do it all at once and not over after the other? Extraction of the eggs requires intense, weeks to months of hormonal therapy. The extraction is also a surgical procedure, requiring a surgeon to access the ovaries. This is painful and has health risks, you don’t want to this every week. Less time and less procedures also help reduce costs. IVF is expensive, quickly costing many thousands of dollars. Last but not least, IVF is an intensely stress- and painful time for the couple on a psychological level alone. Every failed attempt weighs heavy, every miscarriage is a huge loss. Those emotions should not be toyed with and it’s clearly ethical to follow the medical process with the highest success chance and least suffering.

    Explaining the process: You extract many eggs and fertilize them with sperm at once. Then you wait for them to do their first couple cell divisions, usually until they are a count of 4, 8 or 16 cells, varies by nation and its laws. The more splits, the easier to qualify the health and success chance of the embryo.

    Even during this early stage, multiple of the embryos typically fail to divide properly and are then discarded.

    Then, the most vital and hopeful embryos are selected and implanted during another surgical procedure directly into the womb. Again, always multiple. This is because some embryos will die during the process, others will not attach. In the end, you only need one embryo to attach and get supplied by the womb, then you’re on track to getting pregnant.

    All the other good candidates are frozen, so you have them ready for possible future implantation attempts. It’s common that the attachment process doesn’t work at first try.

    Once your pregnancy is carried out (miscarriage is always a big risk up until the end during IVF) and you are certain you don’t want more kids, the rest of the frozen embryos are discarded.

    With this new interpretation of the law, doctors and lab techs would be mass murderers.


  • Sanctions have been shown to be a very ineffective, but low risk tool to apply external pressure. There is no way to apply sanctions in a way that truly hurt the responsible rulers without affecting the general populace. As the rulers by definition have power, they will simply be able to force lower, non sanctioned ranks to do what they want, circumventing the sanctions.

    In addition, the hope of blanket sanctions is that the populace looks their economical suffering to the bad decisions of their leaders and speak our act against them. This rarely ever works, as state propaganda easily spins it to blame the international community being influenced by the state’s enemies. The first to suffer will always be the lowest strata of society, which usually is least involved in international affairs.

    It’s the same reason any kind of external punitive action against civilians (e.g. city bombing in ww2) doesn’t work.


  • Unless you live in a slightly more evolved country, where a simple ownership transfer is not enough to kick out the renters and you actually have rights. Here you need to prove that you either want to use it for yourself ( 2 years minimum, government checks up on that) or it is somehow damaged beyond repair.

    It’s rather common here that people get paid 10-100k euros just so they move out of an apartment ( this is per flat/apartment, so numbers can get huge for bigger buildings) and the owner can sell the empty old building to an investor/developer. Shows what insane profit margins are still to be had, if they make profits despite that.

    This usually happens with old and cheap buildings in now gentrified, suddenly fancy neighborhoods.



  • Depends what you expect. On a pro tournament level, nobody will use a vertical mouse. Usually they are a little bit heavier than regular mouses, plus they have a slightly higher center of gravity. This makes them a little bit more “wobbly” during ultra fast movements.

    However, for regular playing, they work just fine. I don’t play on pro level, but okay competitive shooters almost daily, and I haven’t noticed any real disadvantage. And it helped my wrists enormously, because I’m a full time office worker as well. I decided a couple years ago that the small theoretical disadvantage is not worth the risk of RSI and have been using the cheap CSL/Anker/whatever vertical mouses since. Only very recently I boughta second, regular mouse with more thumb buttons, useful for some sim games I play. I now tend to switch fairly randomly between the two, which probably is even better for hand and wrist.

    Additional info: getting used to a vertical mouse takes much less time than most people expect. Yes, it’s weird at first, but start working or gaming and you’ll stop noticing the different posture very quickly.





  • Which still is based on Firefox, like down if other great derivatives. All of those are great, and mostly up to personal preference.

    The important step is to get people out of the chromium universe in the first place. Sadly, Google puts their poison in at the well (=chromium), so a lot of formerly fantastic chromium-based secure and private browsers are now failing.


  • There are many special versions of torrent tools that allow disabling uploading. If course you still have to upload your requests “please give me block 1234 of file XYZ”, which some tools include in the transfer rate shown and others show separate as overhead or meta transfer rates. However, no actual file contents will be uploaded. This is important for some jurisdictions/nations. While both downloading and uploading content is illegal, uploading causes more “damage” ( it’s legally easy to claim proliferation of the uploaded content, multiplying the financial damage). Also, in some countries, it’s either but legal to track user downloads at all or not in a manner that would provide court-proof evidence. Proving illegal uploads is very easy: the legal company will simply use the p2p network itself, but record which blocks were received from what IP address at what time. This list in many countries is sufficient to get a court to order the ISPs to share info on who owned that IP address at that time, opening you up to a lawsuit.

    Thus example is how it works in Germany and must other EU countries. The exact approach obviously differs, because everyone has variations of privacy laws. E.g. not every country makes isps store IP assignment history for longer than necessary for billing purposes ( usually a month), whereas in other countries isps hand out that info even without court orders…

    Educate yourself and act smart. There is no magic protection when doing p2p piracy. Luckily, most companies do not care to pursue pirates. Others ( like kalypso media) are infamous for having partnered with legal companies whose sole purpose is to generate income by chasing pirates with intimidating and expensive “pay 800€ now or we sue you in court for millions” letters.