The digital euro, as a digital central-bank currency, is the last thing we want from the perspective of privacy.

About time. When I was there last year, I did what I usually do in such places: stay near the train station and walk everywhere. Greece is getting better but it can’t go fast enough. Mediterranean cities often have amazing potential for livability because they tend to be super dense. But alas only a few of them are actually livable, because of the car scourge.

Thessaloniki was also suffering from the second-city problem. Emerging countries will splash out on a prestige metro for their capital, which is invariably a huge success and thus makes their other cities seem car-choked and horrible. Istanbul and Taipei spring to mind. In Athens the metro still needs a few more lines but it has already made such a difference.

Yes the washer wastewater should be easy in theory. But to filter the really small particles you’d need an expensive HEPA-equivalent filter that has to be regularly changed. Needless to say, none of this is happening in practice.

Filtering tyre dust is always going to be a haphazard proposition. This interesting contraption notwithstanding.

ive heard people say

So, literal hearsay.

its not perfect against if the signal servers where malicious (btw said servers are not open source).

The server is centralized so it’s irrelevant whether it’s open source or not, we have no means of checking.

$1 from the cia funding it is $1 too much.

Seems you’re referring to initial funding from the Open Technology Fund. That’s a US government body that promotes technologies that undermine authoritarian regimes. Signal fits the bill perfectly. In any case that was a decade ago. Since then there has been far more money from various do-gooding individuals and foundations. In particular the Freedom of the Press Foundation, which (I just checked) is vouched for by various whistleblowers including Edward Snowden. So, hardly a stooge of US imperialism.

Yes but the difference with every other messenger is that they can’t even see who your message is going to. Due to E2E encryption of contact data.

What remains is the phone number issue. Verifying a phone number is by far the simplest and most effective way to prevent abuse, which is obviously a major issue with any messenger. There’s no reason to disbelieve them when they this is the reason for it.

So: yes, they know who their users are individually. But they cannot know who is talking to who, let alone what is being said.

This is consipiracism-adjacent.

It’s E2E encryption and the source code is public. Uniquely, the E2EE includes the social graph.

They’ve got money from a bunch of people and organizations, That’s also all public. As for any organization, to have a wide variety of stakeholders with different interests is the best possible guarantee of independent.

But I agree that the ideal destination is to fully federate the protocol.

Agreed. Great idea.

Yes I’ve seen this factoid too, but I struggle to see how it could be true. We’re comparing theoretically non-disposable kit from individual boats with the output of a large number of massive rivers in countries with populations of hundreds of millions (in particular Indonesia and Philippines) and a terrible habit of dumping trash in waterways. The amount reaching the ocean must by definition be huge.

Of course, the main problem with discarded fishing nets is not that they are plastic but that they destroy the ecosystem by design. Maybe the two harms have been conflated.

The problem is that everyone seems to have a different workflow. I’ve used AntennaPod every day for years and I have a bunch of problems with it that are all different from yours! I’ve also got a couple of others fixed and features added by lobbying for them on the issue tracker BTW.

I suspect there are better commercial options out there

Not so sure, I’ve tried a bunch. Used Doggcatcher for years: not as advanced. Also PocketCasts for years at one point: this had better UX but when I tried it again recently I was underwhelmed and found it was missing things I wanted.

The main issue with the commercial clients is that they’re all desperately trying to become platforms, with obligatory sign-in and data harvesting. Typically by using cloud sync as the bait.

But there’s no massively powerful industry that is legally pushing drugs on kids. That’s the difference.

Bear in mind that the denominator is plastic pollution. Most plastic waste does not directly pollute the environment. If it is not recycled then it goes to landfills or incineration. Not ideal, but at least the damage is contained. (The bulk of ocean plastic comes from the rivers of poor countries without proper waste management.)

The issue with tyre microplastics is that it’s all but impossible to channel the waste. It’s the same with synthetic fabric: just washing it creates pollution that’s really hard to control.

A bit confusing. Presumably you mean “after giving an upvote”. In other words, to disincentivize upvotes.

Sounds like exactly the opposite of what would encourage friendly civil discourse: disincentivizing downvotes.

Slashdot got this right decades ago. No upvotes, no downvotes, just tags. Such as “informative”, “insightful”, “funny”, and a couple of more negative ones like (IIRC) “provocative” or “controversial”, which at least force you to say why you’re promoting or hating on someone’s good-faith contribution. But apparently that was all just too complex for the simpletons we really are.

So the answer to the 27-step question is Yes. Alas. Still nowhere near as easy as installing Linux on an Intel laptop. Which of course is already way too hard for most folks.

Still, well done for doing it.

U: downvoting facts does not make them go away. This was not a personal attack. I want this solution to to be more viable than it is, that is all.

Did it come installed or did you need to complete a 27-step process involving cables and obscure commands and fiddly key combinations and the risk of bricking the thing?

Airplane mode here! Blocks all tracking and saves battery too.

Unpopular opinion: Federated or not, life is better without social media in your pocket.

Interesting anecdote. Though to judge by your username, it seems you may have an agenda yourself.

So you end up having situations where companies hire agencies to improve their image by changing the wikipedia article about them and their products, same thing for celebrities

This is a major problem that takes up a lot of time for the editors. It explains some of their trigger-happiness.

That said, you have a valid point. I once tried to water down what I considered to be excessively POV language in an article about diet. This earned me an official warning for “extremism” or “conspiracism” or whatever. My impressive account pedigree also counted for nothing. So there’s definitely a bit of the political bias, the power-tripping and gatekeeping that you see in any online community. But it’s a bit of a conundrum too, because they are fighting an uphill battle against people with strong incentives and sometimes money too.

There’s an obvious reason for that. Wikipedia is owned by a nonprofit foundation and does not accept advertising.

A developed country is not where the poor have cars, it’s where the rich use public transit.

Tangentially, this cracker of a quote is from the mayor of Bogotá IIRC. It is very accurate and I’ve often used it too.

Sound advice.

PS: punctuation and capitalization are conformist and bourgeois but they do make it easier to read.