I disagree. Let people learn in their pace and do not set unrealistic targets. It’s not really possible to complete e.g. the french course in 3 months if you have other stuff to do like work or family. Took me longer, but now I’m able to be in France, read what is written on the signs and also able to communicate with the locals.

Kind of funny how they are totally not posting in this thread

If you think about it: The GDPR applies to all data of EU citizens regardless of where they are or where you are. There is no way that this app is not having some EU guy in New York in it and therefore totally in violation of GDPR

Let’s be honest: We are talking about several billions of dollars of ad revenue over the years. Meta has the resources to work within those rules and earn billions. If they do not want to do that, there is something really shady going on.

Look at the Fediverse, which is nice, but about as complex for an average Joe as a fusion reactor.

I know that this is repeated over and over, but I really do not see it. Go to join-mastodon.org. Pick a server, it really doesn’t matter that much for starters. Start tooting. You’ll notice that usernames work like mailadresses, so you can have jon@server1.com and jon@server2.com, but you know how that works from your Mailadress.

Go join-lemmy.org. Pick a server, maybe the one local to you? Start posting. You’ll notice that there might be several communities with similar names, but you know that from Reddit where there are also similar communities or from your local town where there might also be two soccer clubs or so.

Go to Instagram.com. Register. Get instantly blocked for suspicious activity unless you provide more data. WTF are “reels”? WTF is “Threads”? Those words do not mean anything! What is a “story”? Wasn’t there something that you could post pictures?

The fediverse might have its complexities, but lets be honest: If you can read, you can manage. And if you can’t read, you shouldn’t be on a text-based social media like Mastodon or Lemmy.

Yeah - GitHub is an extreme risk for the software landscape. It’s owned by Microsoft. Microsoft owns too much of the dev pipeline. They own GitHub. They own VS Code. They own npm. They own Azure. They are pushing the whole Copilot thing.

You really do not want that kind of dependency on a single company. And you really do not wish to be sanctioned by US government and lose that.

Everybody can move really fast when ignoring safety rules, compliance, ethics. The problem is that all those pesky rules are in place for a reason and if you ignore them, people will die.

Great news for americans: Having a mad king who ruins the states finances in order to built tacky castles for himself totally will pay for itself in the future!

This is russias gas infrastructure. It is built to serve Europe and not China.

Given enough time and no sanctions they might be able to built additional pipelines to China, but currently the “Power of Siberia 2” seems to be on ice at least until 2028. And China is also currently rolling out renewables on a big scale as Xi is smart enough to not get too dependent on Putin or an unstable Russia after Putin

All they had to do was nothing. Do not invade Ukraine. Keep everything as it is. Make enormous profits. Do not kill hundred thousands of people.

Yeah, my in-laws have such a book and it honestly is great. They live in their own flat where nobody can access the book without breaking in. They do not save their passwords in their browser, so anyone hacking into their PC can’t grab them. If they want to login into an account, they take out their book, put in the user name and unique password and that’s it. Quite the good method and I really do not see many problems there.

We’re in a strange situation right now, but there will be court judgements killing the illusion of all those privacy shield constructions. It’s currently illegal to transfer personal data into the US and everybody is still cruising on inertia. The landing will be rough.

The problem here is, that at least in Germany S-Pedelecs are not allowed on bicycle paths at all. Which makes city driving a nightmare and is also preventing S-Pedelecs on many other paths. Around here there are many paths through nature reserves and woodland, where it totally makes sense that motorcycles are banned, but since S-Pedelecs fall into that category, you are screwed.

A regulation like “feel free to drive there, but do not even think about going faster than 25km/h” could work.

Which is actually a really crap regulation as each city has to check all of their bicycle paths and allow S-Pedelecs. Which means that there are many cities which are simply not doing that.

I really can’t see this in the traffic accident statistics. Yes, there are a lot of motorcycle accidents, but if you look deeper into them, those are in most cases “real” motorcycles and not those slower variants. And if you take a look at those eScooters, most accidents here are people driving those rental scooters while drunk. That’s a problem, but that’s also a problem you won’t solve by regulating the dude going to the train station in the morning.

and regulations have evolved out of need

That’s not totally correct. Here in Germany we have so called “Mofas” which translates to “motorized bicycle”. Those are different from eBikes and heavily regulated. There are age limits, drivers licence, insurance requirements, regulations where you are allowed to drive and so on. And yes, they are also restricted to 25km/h. Why are there this heavy regulations which are not in place for our pedelecs? The reason is plain racism in combination with “old people hate young people”. Those Mofas were popular with young migrant workers back in the 50s and 60s. And therefore they were regulated as fuck. You will see stuff like this with modern eScooters where the whole class will be restricted because they are popular with younger people.

What I wanted to say was exactly this: There is a rule in place that basically created artificial differences between the same thing. A 25km/h vehicle with a motor and pedals is heavily restricted, another one is totally free. Which makes no sense.

There’s a whole class of electric vehicles being held back by regulation. We can slap electro motors on wheels and bicycles are not the only vehicles you can build with that tech. Many EU countries are e.g. banning throttles on eBikes, but why are we forcing all those delivery drivers to pedal the whole day? Just give them a gas throttle. For many eBikes uses it really doesn’t make sense to include the whole bicycle complexity of gears, chains, shifting and so on. Just give them a motor and a throttle.

Killing the eBike with additional rules, insurance, mandatory inspections and so on would be absolutely idiotic and a good business model for insurances, car companies and so on, so I’m really afraid that this could happen

This really puts the insane propaganda about alternative clean energy into perspective: 22,1% solar and 15,8% wind energy for a whole continent is a lot of fossil energy not being bought from the Saudis, Quataris, Texans and other nice people. Nice people who would totally do nothing to protect their profitable business model

There’s a reason why Firefox is almost non existent on mobile.

And the reason is monopoly abuse by the big tech companies. Apple is banning other browser engines from the app store and does not allow Firefox onto iPhones. Google is shipping its own Chrome with every Android device and they are breaking their own sites like YouTube or Gmail on purpose for Firefox users and push them to install Chrome. Microsoft is bundling Edge with Windows as a default browser and will aggressively enable it as a default browser during updates.

Your post just shows how normalized alcohol and tobacco are. “Greece passes law to jail people for selling harmful drugs to children” would also be a correct headline.