I can’t prove it but I think there is a real sociolinguistic phenomenon where Americans are unusually obsessed with “safety through temperature”. Like they hear “fire = no germs” as children and somehow internalize that steaks should be somewhere between well done and burnt beyond recognition, and dishwashers should boil your plates like you’re sterilizing a hospital gown that’s been thrown up on by an Ebola patient.

Soap, bitches. It works. Even at 40 °C (with modern detergent and washing cycles). Good thing too because I don’t want to know how y’all are having sex if you think boiling water is the only decent cleaning procedure for putting things in your mouth.

If only.

Should America one day go back to something resembling a functioning democracy, his legacy will be “who could have seen it coming” “no-one I know voted for him” “voter fraud” “we were too afraid” “at least the trains ran on time” “it was China/Russia’s fault”. I’ve heard most of those already.

Variations on all these lies and more were peddled by the Germans after the war and believed by the world. Even by American judges right after WWII who acquitted the overwhelming majority of Nazi War Criminals tried at Nuremberg despite mountains of evidence.

Anything but a society, culture, and individuals holding themselves accountable for easily predictable and predicted failures to govern.

GIMP apologists are what Adobe users think FOSS apologists are like. The principled refusal to even consider fundamental UX principles is astounding.

Being able to assign a nameserver per interface with a domain wildcard is a fucking godsend. I use it every day with a hook script because my job uses some private domains but I don’t want to send my entire DNS history through the VPN. Now ~job.com goes to tun0 and that’s the end of it.

systemd-resolved is not perfect but with libnss’s overly rigid nature the only alternative for my use-case would be to recreate similar functionality to resolved with dnsmasq – which is just objectively worse especially when you want to use DHCP sometimes but not always. Why reinvent the wheel? resolved does its job and does it well. I had some issues with it a few years ago but have been using it for the past couple years without complaint.

My dad’s Mercedes indeed beeps incredibly loudly (anyone sleeping immediately wakes up in a panic) if the blind spot sensor goes off… which it does as soon as you put your blinker on.

Guess what that wonderful bit of tech taught my dad to do? That’s right, don’t use the blinker to change lanes if you don’t want your eardrums blown out.

The fundamental problem is that car manufacturers aren’t being held liable for the accidents caused directly or indirectly by these “safety” systems. There is zero oversight and no mandate to investigate false positives of these systems, even when they cause an accident. The end result is that for the manufacturers the point is not to improve safety but to do obnoxious safety theater so regulators look away from rising pedestrian deaths. “Sure our cars are one ton heavier, but they have automatic braking soooo we’re good right?”

Who knows if these gadgets actually do anything or even if they don’t decrease overall safety. The manufacturer gets positive marketing, throws the regulator off their scent, and isn’t held liable for shit when the “safety” system fails or encourages bad habits. Win-win-win. Except the general public loses. But who ever cared about these schmucks?

That’s treading dangerously close to a specific kind of conspiracy theory there.

The EBU has pretty strong financial ties to Israel, not least of which their main sponsor Moroccan Oil. But at the end of the day you can count on the ghouls in charge to always find the coward’s way out and follow the money. It’s the exact same pattern of behavior they had with Russia in 2022, which they initially allowed to compete before backpedalling.

Pretending that this is an issue solely because of some conspiracy is not only baseless, but it also unfairly lets most European broadcasters off the hook for refusing to uphold the set the same hard lines with Israel that they set with Russia. Israel competed because European broadcasters were happy enough to include Israel. Simple as.