One on my self-hosted Lemmy, one on my self-hosted Mastodon and one on a different Lemmy instance for stuff where I want to be a bit more anonymous than with a nickname that I use on so many platforms.

Only rich studio bosses and investors are allowed to exploit Hollywood.

As said: it’s not just the current government. As soon as the data is on a government server, it’s every single government for the rest of my life. And that’s a gamble I wouldn’t be willing to take.

And there’s a big difference between a police agency spending lots and lots of time and money to get to the people they’re interested in (gestapo, stasi, whatever) and them already having the data and being able to filter by whatever criteria they want at zero extra cost within seconds.

When it comes to my data, I treat everyone like they’re my enemy. Some of those enemies I do have to trust with parts of my data, otherwise I couldn’t live a normal life but I still would want to avoid giving a single entity (especially one that literally has power over people) too much at once.

Also, I do live in a country with plenty of public services and a more or less functioning government. Still, 20.8% voted for literal Nazis in February and no matter how often I vote for someone more sensible and how many protests I join, that probably won’t make those people less hateful.

Explain to me how running the registry office gives them nearly as much info about people’s preferences as a dating app does. They may know who people are married to and if they have children. From that they might have a rough idea if someone is straight or not and that’s about it. They don’t know if some who’s in a heterosexual marriage is actually bisexual or even uses the marriage as a socially accepted front to hide being gay from their family. The state has no idea where an umarried person lies on the spectrum from aromantic-asexual to bouncing from orgy to orgy on a daily basis. They don’t know if someone is into BDSM, roleplay, doing it outdoors or threesomes. They also rarely know much about non-sexual hobbies.

All those things may show up in dating site profiles or if not there, in the private messages sent between users. And this is not even about a government not being trustworthy now. Anything that gets put in such a site will stay there for the foreseeable time and even the most stable democracy might be just one freak election away from having a weirdo in power who thinks that people who like sex with their socks on don’t deserve health insurance.

Of course that’s also a risk with private dating platforms but at least for those the government would have to subpoena this kind of data from them instead of having it always available without the public even knowing if and what they’re analyzing.

I would rather not have the state sit on a huge database of people’s sexual orientation and other preferences, thank you very much.

Remind me… is that the same UK that currently tries to force apple and google to include governement backdoors into their encryption?

My old manager sent out invitations to the bride‘s family before telling me I was the groom.

(he publicly announced the new product‘s price and release date before telling the dev team that there will be a new product)

That as well

Just saying, this is not the fault of a single engineer but of a whole company that didn’t think “try all common cable types” should be a required testing step before a network switch goes into mass production.

How did that not get caught in the prototype stage? Like, did nobody ever test that thing with that type of RJ45 plug?

Wait, what were the arguments for electrons not existing? And by whom? It’s generally accepted that electrons exists and neither of their fields would work if they didn’t. You’d have to go really deep down into “well actually, everything is a wave” terretory to even get that idea and even then it doesn’t make sense.

I wrote both my bachelor’s and master’s thesis to Watch The Skies from Skyrim on loop. Yes, the same track all day for weeks.

Important note: this is about quantum teleportation. They transferred data between two quantum computers without a cable or wifi. Teleporting matter, let alone matter in useful quantities is far off.

Here in Germany, we celebrate mostly on Christmas Eve. I have a couple of hours left to get ready before my stepdad picks me up. We’ll visit my grandma who sadly has to spend the holidays in hospital because she fell and hurt her knee. After that, Christmas dinner at my mom’s and stepdad’s house with most of the family, gifts and a relaxed evening. I’ll stay over night, have breakfast and then go home to finish packing everything I need for my winter vacation which starts on the 26th.

It’s been an exhausting year and I can really use the downtime.

With the trend to make ever larger but thinner phones, we’ll eventually end up with an A3 sheet of paper. I just want the 5/5S/SE1 or Mini form factor back. I don’t care about thin phones, only about being able to use the whole screen with one hand.

I have a wishlist that I share with my family and close friends. People follow that list unless they have an idea that they’re 100% sure about. I think the only times I got an unwanted gift was things I already had. Either because something went wrong coordinating between people (rare, everyone knows they can contact my partner to ask what’s still available) or because they accidentally bought the wrong thing (like the first book of a series instead the second one).

The only exception ever was during a single https://givin.gifts/ secret santa exchange where someone at the same time a) completely ignored my profile, b) gifted something below the stated minimum value, c) didn’t wrap my gift, d) didn’t include a card and e) didn’t include any packing material. They just threw a random 5€ item from the supermarket into an unpadded box and called it a day.

German here, we have the same thing (du vs. sie). Our rules may be slightly different than dutch but probably similar enough.

Police: definitely formal unless the officer is someone you know privately.

Shop: usually formal though some hobby-related shops (think GameStop or board games) might prefer informal.

Campsite: probably informal

As a general rule of thumb: informal is used with first names, formal is used with last names. Think about which name you would use in English and go with that. If in doubt, use the formal version or ask.

Never said that, never meant that.

When I said “inner child” I meant his own capability of leaving his adult responsibilities behind for a while in favor of doing things that society as a whole deems childish. Indulging in certain hobbies, acting a certain way. I can’t find the right English word right now. In German we might call it being “unbeschwert”, so maybe “unburdened”.

I was specifically replying to the passage that he should have spent those 13 years in age difference growing as a person to an extent that he shouldn’t have much in common with a 16-year old anymore. And to that I ask: why? Must every adult be a joyless, mindless worker drone who can’t enjoy the things they enjoyed when they were 16? I’m happy to discuss if the relationship OP described might be problematic because of a power dynamic and that’s been done to death in this thread. But saying he isn’t allowed to feel connected to someone younger than him based on shared interests or a need to escape his adult responsibilities for a while feels bitter and judgemental.

None of this has anything to do with me labeling anyone as an actual child.

Edit: Maybe a picture says more than a thousand words so let me link to my favorite XKCD: https://xkcd.com/150/

From my personal experience this “ought to be” is the problem. Once you get your first job, everyone expects you to drop everything that you’re passionate about and start behaving like an adult. That can be overwhelming and I wouldn’t judge anyone for wanting to keep that cozy feeling of being young for a bit longer. And as long as all important responsibilities still get taken care of, why not let adults be as childish as they want, whenever they want?