Overspark

Astounding mental gymnastics. Not that it really matters in this case, although it does demonstrate a willingness to run away from facts that are staring him in the face. It sounds like he’ll never admit he could have feelings for you too, whether that’s true or not.

Obviously fuckheads are responsible for their own degenerate behaviour. But there’s a lot more to this then just some random fuckheads being fuckheads. The reason this night was worse than any other we’ve had in history was because the perfect circumstances were created for maximum fuckery. And those circumstances were created by our government. They were warned countless times by many different groups that this was the worst possible way to go about doing things and they stuck their heads in the sand and did it anyway.

The whole existence of fuckheads is one of the reasons we have a government in the first place. It’s their job to keep our society functioning as best as possible even though fuckheads exists. And they definitely failed to do their job this time.

Fireworks are only legal on new years eve over here. And there are a few countries in the EU where insanely powerful explosives are also legal (basically hand grenades), so they very easily find their way into our country, even though they’re not legal here. The police do what they can but it’s impossible to make more than a dent.

Fireworks used to be a fun way to have a great party. But as they got harder and louder, and the country got more and more densely populated, the problems also started to pile up. So the tone slowly shifted from a big party, to a rowdy night, to eventually a largely lawless night where it’s more and more outright vandalism and rioting, instead of having a party. The past years it’s been “normal” to have several deaths, thousands of wounded and scores of cars, houses and other buildings (from bus stops to supermarkets) burned down on new years eve. So even though the Dutch as a people are very resistant to changing their culture, the call to outlaw all fireworks got larger and larger. So large that even the last right-wing parties gave up their resistance last year and admitted that the only way forward was to do away with it altogether. But instead of banning it immediately they wussed out and said they would ban it after one more year with fireworks, even though everyone in law enforcement, the fire departments and medics begged them not to.

So naturally, everyone wanted to go out with a bang, and they basically succeeded. At half past midnight every mobile in the country got an emergency text to only call 112 (our version of 911) in life-threatening situations, since they were completely overwhelmed. Even though they doubled their normal capacity and every policeman, fireman and medic in the country was working as hard as they could to keep things under control. In my opinion political heads should roll for this but it seems the general opinion is to shrug your shoulders and keep on keeping on. Ironically the rest of the year the Netherlands is a very tame country, with less than 100 murders a year in the entire country for example. It’s just this single night that got completely out of control.

As predicted. If only the cowardly government we still have would have had the balls to outlaw firework sales a year earlier, we wouldn’t have had this “final blowout” and things would have been less bad. Still not good though, the culture around new years day has been insane for a while now.

Nothing, I just never browse All. Being subscribed to the right communities is enough.

It’s not a particularly realistic show, even for the spy thriller genre, but it has hilarious characters and very amusing hijinks. Would definitely recommend.

JavaScript is actually a beautiful language. It’s what people have done with and to it that’s the problem.

Didn’t know about the fees, that is indeed a shame. Probably needed to provide meaningful consumer protection though. And I don’t really care that providing that protection is a downside for sellers, for them it’s just part of doing business, for consumers it can be quite catastrophic when they’re swindled.

Wero is going to be better than iDeal. One of the biggest downsides of iDeal for consumers is that the moment you hit the pay button your money is gone from your account and there’s no easy way to get it back, even if the webshop never gave you what you paid for. This meant that it was safer to use credit cards for most online purchases, unless you knew and trusted the webshop. Wero is supposed to have similar consumer protection to credit cards, so it should be much safer to use on random-ish webshops that aren’t big brand names. I can’t wait until everyone supports it!

Agreed, hence the “very often” and not “always”. You are always trusting the VPN provider to not fuck you over, and there probably are a few who don’t.

Your post suggests you’re operating under the assumption that advertising itself is a valid activity. The example about a new small business seems totally legit.

But in reality most advertising money is spent by companies like Coca Cola, that we all already know. And they know that too, which means they know for a fact that continuing to spend money on advertising pays off.

This can only be true if advertising isn’t about awareness of your brand, but about directly influencing buying decision. In other words, it’s brainwashing.

A small business should get known through word of mouth, through endorsements in pillow-related media and communities (in this example). If their product is a good one and they get the right people talking about it, no advertising is needed to succeed as a business. Only line-must-go-up companies that are not content with what they can achieve with an honest way of doing business need advertising to sell even more crap.

IMHO it is entirely valid to reject all forms of advertising, and most of it should be outlawed. As a species we’re wasting a colossal amount of effort and energy on something that shouldn’t even be a thing.

5. It means you’re letting a different company (VPN provider instead of ISP) see everything you do. In countries with sane privacy laws (i.e. not the US) this is very often a net negative for your privacy, as your ISP will be bound by your country’s privacy laws and most VPN providers are foreign (and often based in the US).

Good blog. You touch on this point in the blog but IMHO it should be one of your main talking points.

Yeah this. Python was already popular with the early adopters, and it’s a fairly easy language to learn and use. After that it became a network effect thing: all the best tools were already written in Python so people continued to do so.

Why not switch to LibreOffice?

Absolutely. And I’d go so far as to say that anyone who doesn’t like it is watching the wrong show. They’ve clearly telegraphed from episode 2 onwards that this’ll be a slow moving tale, mostly about Carol. It reminds me in a lot of ways of The Leftovers. If you want answers that was the wrong show to watch, you only watch for the crazy shit and how people respond to that. Plur1bus is a lot tamer in that regard (and gives far more actual answers), but it’s a broadly similar experience.

Yet another nail in the coffin of client-side anti-cheat. If you’re seriously affected by people using these kinds of cheats on their PCs (this one requires specialised hardware) then no amount of client-side anti-cheat is going to make a difference anyway.

Met een griepprik.

Guild Wars 2! It’s been improved quite a bit since I last played it over 12 years ago.

Nee hier zaten we op te wachten…

Podman explicitly supports firewalls and does not bypass them like docker does, no matter whether you’re using root mode or not. So IMHO that is the more professional solution.