I appreciate these comments saying the tech hasn’t degraded and it’s been standstill, or that it was never great in the first place, all of which is true but I would like to interject my own Model 3 experience. When we first bought the Tesla in 2019 the self driving functionality on the highway felt safe and functional in nominal conditions. When we sold the Tesla 2 years ago (2022) the self driving felt noticably more finicky. It struggled to switch lanes, recognize when lanes started and ended, and had noticably more issues with maintaining proper speed and distance with other cars.

It probably wasn’t significantly more dangerous, but it felt like it was. What was a feature we used for the first year or two without much complaint turned into something we never used and our driving time when down in that third year not up so it wasn’t exposure time I don’t think.

It’s worth it. I’m almost two years in Germany. Wouldn’t move back for a million dollars (although at 3 I could be bought). Work on the local language, volunteer or other community involvement activities, treat it like the new home it is. We’re fortunate to be able to move to a new country, try to be a part of improving it and earning your spot there. I’m even more fortunate to be white, male, straight etc - assuming you’re at least some of those things, do your best to counter the anti-immigration fear mongering that comes out of the political right. It effects you now, but more importantly it’s ramping up and it’ll effect people less fortunate far worse.

Hope you love it and welcome to Europe.

I’ve read it, I read the discussion around it, idk man. One guy’s thoughts on a company and it’s founder isn’t enough to move me off of something without better proof, better alternatives, and worse crimes than maybe having a bad long term vision.

Hopefully every company outgrows it’s founder and becomes a system. We’ll have to see, right now I’m satisfied and that gets me off Google and signals to others I’m willing to pay.

I recommend Kagi, I’ve been using it for about six months now and results - especially small web results like blogs - are so much better. I also have a pretty good time image searching compared to when I was on Google.

Yes it’s paid, but that to me is the price of resisting enshittification. Find a company that isn’t a publicly traded for-profit world-burner and pay them for their service. Is the idea of paying for email and search an alien concept to me? Yes. But I’m either paying Google whatever €120 a year in eyeballs on ads and an increasingly worse experience, or I’m paying €80 a year and getting a markedly better experience.

Now it’s up to Kagi and Proton to not turn into shitty companies while other competitors catch up and we have a thriving ecosystem again.

Kagi seems to surface great independent content and I’ve been loving it.

He’s saying what you’re attributing to “a specific lack of willpower” now has scientific backing that disagrees. Your take is old school and misinformed if the current science is correct. I personally haven’t done research on the subject or read many studies but Adam Ragusea, a YouTube food science journalist covers this concept in one of his vids and several podcasts surrounding food science and (in my case) the drugs coming down the pipeline to regulate body weight touch on the research as well.

If housing is an investment (“a nest egg”) then the people and policies that support it as an investment will stand directly opposed to people and policies that want housing to be affordable and a right.

Housing cannot be an investment vehicle akin to stocks in a society that meaningfully values housing for everyone as an objective to strive for.

Yes, of course. I wish you and everyone stuck there luck.

I am paying taxes and am able to vote, but because I make less than the required amount my taxes are essentially zero to the US because we have joint tax agreements between the two countries.

I don’t know if I’ll renounce after earning German citizenship or not but the exit tax is something I have to consider.

Ya, that’s rough. That feels like a very immature take. The two parties are not the same, voting does matter, and I’d even argue that there are people so awful that assassination does make sense but I’m happy Trump survived because I think the Republican party would have been stronger without him.

I left the US, I’m between a millennial and gen z, and I left explicitly because I was worried about the future of the US and because moving abroad is akin to time traveling 20 years into the future. I have healthcare now, I live in a walkable city with great public transit, the crime rates are lower (although most places in the US aren’t super violent, the probability of getting murdered goes way down when you leave), I have 6 weeks vacation, essentially unlimited sick time, and I’m not allowed to work overtime.

Both parties are not the same but if Democrats won in a landslide in every single election both state and federal in every chamber and every seat, how many years would it take to achieve all of those same things. I have no doubt these policies would happen with the right people in office, with radical change to the party they could even happen quickly and I believe it’s what half the people want. But the two other outcomes are 50/50 with the parties and little gets done in a timely manner and worse the corrupt judges continue to error the system, or the Republicans win one big election just one more time and project 2025 starts getting a percent complete tracker and we slide back into the dark ages.

So I left. I believe if things go bad in the US historians will look at Trump’s first victory as a period of brain drain from the country. But that’s my two cents to go with this article.

I’m swapping to Linux finally because of it. Few things are black and white but these things do have effects and some additional percentage of users are shifting over because of it.

Is there a guide or any educational material on this? I’m about to swap to Linux (some fedora distro focused on gaming) and I’m interested in potentially one day swapping to arch after I’ve gotten my toes wet. Doing a bit of extra work and planning ahead to make that easier sounds nice.

The whole of Spain. I grew up with a lot of people who loved Europe but had never been to it or really anywhere else. Spain for some reason got a lot of love and attention in my social circles but I didn’t engage with it meaningfully so I didn’t understand it. I started my international travels in “the east” and had a wonderful time. By the time I visited Spain I expected a normal travel experience but definitely not the elevated grandeur my highschool years would have had me believe. I had average expectations.

Then I got there and every meal was bomb. Madrid, Valencia, Barcelona - I couldn’t go wrong I loved the local food. Worse, I loved at least Madrid and Barcelona’s ability to recreate other cuisines too. Some of the best sushi I’ve ever had was in Madrid and I make a point of getting quality sushi where ever I go (including practically gorging myself into a food coma in Japan).

Then I went to an art museum and it moved me, found some artisanal stores, got fresh orange juice at multiple grocers, saw a movie in a decent theater, you know the normal like “show me what it’s like to live uniquely here” stuff. Ya, Madrid stole my heart for what it was and Spain as a whole surprised me.

Ya, I live right next to where this happened. It’s an immigrant heavy area. These guys planned, and a similar group the following day, to protest right next to the people they hate and want evicted from the country.

I agree, no one should be stabbed for their beliefs and free speech (to a degree) is important. But if someone came to my neighborhood and spent the whole day shouting out of a loud speaker that I didn’t belong, my family didn’t belong, my neighbors and friends didn’t belong, despite some of them living here for multiple generations - I’d be upset, I’d feel threatened.

Now couple that with doing it in a poorer district against a specifically marginalized group who has been historically treated poorly for decades with talking points that are clearly racist and easily disproven - idk. No one should get stabbed but even if I believed those awful things I wouldn’t do what they did unless I was looking for trouble.

Idk, my roommate and I have been talking about it all weekend. Yes we believe you should be allowed to punch Nazi’s, no we don’t think we should be allowed to stab anyone, yes 20% of the German population roughly hold dehumanizing beliefs that are dangerous and we should be educating them, no the government isn’t doing enough to better everyone’s situation and therefore racism and fascism are growing at an alarming rate.

I’m currently deciding between nobara and vanilla arch, coming from windows (but am a software engineer). I like arch because, as I understand it, its lighter and more customisable. I also like that it’s not corporate driven which potentially has conflict of interests (which I’m to understand red hat might). My biggest worry though is how much time I may spend maintaining an arch desktop and the possibility of hitting fail states too frequently. Obviously I can overcome some of that with good a good backup system, but I’d like to spend less nights working on my desktop and more time working on projects my desktop should enable. So I’ve been recommended Nobara as still cutting edge but more stable.

If anyone has some strong recommendations or thoughts I’d appreciate it. I think sticking as close to main is important and if fedora really does introduce issues I can always jump ship to arch or Debian after I’ve gotten my feet wet - but I’d like to not for as long as possible.

I just switched to Kagi because I liked the idea of a paid search engine who’s aim was to remove the internet’s clutter, not use any profile besides the one I create to show me results, and where I could weight certain sites that produce good content.

Reading the blog post the issues allegedly are:

1. Privacy is not guaranteed, like with a 3rd party audit
2. AI usage is growing not shrinking
3. The business seems to be poorly run and could have a short lifespan

Is this correct?

This video was fantastic and I hope they keep this series up. I’m switching to Kagi from ddg because of this vid and I’ll spend time this weekend looking into ente/immich and all the DNS options highlighted here.

Super excited. It’s weird paying for email or search engines given they’ve always been free in my lifetime but the services have been noticeably worse as of late and I miss an Internet constantly bombarding you with things you should believe or buy.

It’s not about capitalism vs something-other-than-capitalism, it’s about all the small systems that make up our way of life. As a simple example, housing shouldn’t be a vehicle for profit seeking. It should be illegal or so greatly discouraged that owning an unhealthy amount of properties is non-viable because if house prices must always go up and everyone needs a place to live - the cost of living must always go up. A subsystem of capitalism that needs fixing, not “a new system that isn’t capitalism”.

And I’m not suggesting people not have 401k’s or not invest or not save money, I’ve got my retirement fund too. But we have to realize that that system isn’t doing it’s job and it’s harmful to society and the more we participate the more incentivized to keep it harmful, to keep it around. So participate like an intelligent person and then leverage your power and position to better the systems for everyone - eventually at an expense to yourself.

You got to remember, most of the wealth is still in very few hands. So telling yourself “the stock market also benefits the people who are retiring” makes it sound like there’s a good side to this when really it’s only a silver lining to an otherwise meaningless and arguably downright hurtful event.

The economy is as bad as it is, we’re seeing fascism rise as much as we are, partially because our major economic systems aren’t designed to actually benefit the people they’re built on sucking value out of.

So no, I don’t care that everyone currently cashing out of the system just got a little bit more money or more time out of the recent layoffs and the recent COVID profitteering and the recent inshitification. I think we have to be careful defending bad systems even minorly, despite that being rational and logical, because it feels like we’re coming to a tipping point and minor defenses like that make it seem as if we can extend the shelf life of these systems a few more decades, a few more unnecessary deaths, a few more degrees of warming, etc. Idk, only politics is weird. At least you’re participating, so thanks for that.