techcode

That definitely happened with Serbian students in year 2000 - proven (as much as it can be) link between CIA & Co, and the funding and training of the Otpor movement, B92 TV station ...etc.

So far there's been no indication that this time it's been anything but an actual grassroot movement.

Also - having Vučić around was probably better for basically everyone except people living in Serbia.

No one outside had enough interest to see him gone - hence no abroad supported the students. And he's been fucking up lives of people in Serbia long and bad enough to cause an uprising.

While I'm no longer a student, nor living in Serbia anymore. Still having there both older and younger family/cousins that are students and were part the protests - I had a bit of a glance of internal functioning.

It was literally kids/students from a city where rallies/protests were happening - self organizing food and accommodation for other students coming in from other cities.

Other people and business also pitched in with bringing out food/water/etc to the streets for students/protestors.

There are a lot of assumptions in that general observation, right?

Not just that you need experience in order to deal with these unsavoury/dishonest/crook characters.

But that you even need to deal/compromise with them at all, that doing so would lead to a better outcome ...etc.

And also not to mix up the other meaning of "dealing with".

The biggest thing that the Student movement rallied around was dealing with previous government and various public and private sector corruption that it instigated/facilitated - in the bringing them to justice/rule of law sense.

While in absolute terms things can almost always get worse.

Situation has been so bad with Vučić and his political party SNS - systematic corruption, private profiteering with iron grip on media and legislation, security services... etc.

So in that sense - even doing nothing would probably turn out better than continuing with the previous levels of intentional corruption.

And while there might be some things done by previous government that (accidentally) turned out good and are worth keeping.

For a lot of things (e.g. various institutions that lost their independence in the last ~20 years) - the rough WIP roadmap/plan can be as simple as "Undo or do the opposite from what the previous government did".

Do numbers go completely out the window due to inflation?

While the price of gas, real-estate, groceries doubled or tripled over the last 10-15 years (here in NL).

It also seems that Stocks/ETFs also did the same, right?

Some of the Tech/IT/AI (and hence to some extent also S&P500 that's heavy on those) increased even more. But even if we consider it an artificial bubble - loads of other more traditional industries/ETFs also grew similarly to inflation, didn't they?

I think the two of you are thinking/talking about two different things.

In most workplaces before ~2020 individual teams had designated desks/islands - all team members were sitting next to each other, actually every individual had their own permanent desk.

And you could have a quick chat, pair program, and even adhoc whole team meeting by just removing your noise-cancelling headphones and talking to each other.

Though of course bigger/longer meetings would still be better in a meeting room because of big screen, not being nuisance to other people ...etc.

Most workplaces now do some variant of flexi-desks. At best a group of teams is allocated some specific area/desks, at worst it's completely random which desk you get.

And to have a chat/meeting you often need to still do it via conference call, or get into a meeting room.

Between that, and usually having some people from the team still WFH on that day (many workplaces don't even have enough work desks or cafeteria - for everyone to come into office on the same day) - you now need more meeting rooms than before.

And for some reason they didn't add more meeting rooms, even when redesigning office buildings.

Yes - literally just pick the right Caddy (or similar) image with Let's Encrypt client included - and you can simply add a tag/label to your docker compose files for each of self hosted services to get a real SSL, that auto renewed ...etc.

With one of self hosted services being Adguard-Home can do both ADs blocking and internal DNS... The public DNS records for your "internal use only" domain remain empty.

> "By the time Yahoo stopped controlling webring.org in 2001, search engines had become good enough that web rings were no longer as useful."

Given how those good (enough) search engines work these days ... I wouldn't be surprised if we see more of the old social/discovery things things (DMOZ and such) start coming back.

That description sounds like every New Years Eve in The Netherlands.

Few days ago a law that forbids non professionals to set off fireworks started applying... We'll see if that makes any difference.

While I agree with you on ideally having a dumb TV - being able to install TailScale on your TV and then using your exit node in another country (to watch that other countries local IPTV) is a really nice convenience. And you can no longer buy a dumb TV, at least not in typical living room sizes.

The dishwashing machine being able to notify you ahead of time that you're low (but not already out) of softening salt or rinse aid liquid is also convenient - but indeed also solvable with display on the machine itself.

But the automation like lights, or blinds/shutters... Being able to open/close shutters from your bed (or automatically in the morning as part of waking you up), or turn on/off lights based on motion/presence detection - is actually useful.

Of course you shouldn't need Internet to operate it. And many people use Home Assistant exactly because they don't want their "smart devices" to talk to the cloud.

Expat/kennismigrant here - it's same "ends up late and over budget" for literally every country (and private businesses).

What Dutch government/politicians seems to be "ahead" compared to other countries - is combination of narrow or short sightedness and (over)correction trough rules, laws and regulations.

Like giving subsidies and tax breaks for electrical cars, rooftop solar panels and mandating household switch from gas (LPG and such) to electric heating and cooking. And ignoring industry professionals for decades saying the distribution network won't scale.

More of the same with stuff like 30% tax rule for expats, which was originally introduced as cost saving measures because actually doing bookkeeping for expatriate expenses was costing government more money. But then more recently expat tax breaks have been reduced and phased out "because cost saving". Meanwhile employers have trouble finding highly skilled workers. And we're limiting numbers of foreign students in universities (by forcing them to do it in Dutch instead of English).

Some Bulgarians cheated/defrauded Dutch tax returns or such - and "solution" was ML/AI reviewing things - but it turned out to be broken/biased and (ab)used for other things - leading to the whole toeslag scandal and government resigning.

Same for nitrogen vs lack of housing... And many more.

ADHD brain just recalled that similar concept was used for traffic jams being sent along FM radio signal.

Not talking about stuff that would automatically change the FM station to the one with traffic announcements.

Our ~2012 Škoda Octavia had typical Volkswagen Audi Group navigation built in. It would receive data about traffic jams in the background, and incorporate it into route/navigation decisions.

Not sure if switch from FM to DAB carried that over too. Kind of doubtful since mobile phones took over navigation even before Android/iOS Auto stuff showed up.

I recently learned that captions on BBC are teletext based (page 888) so I turned them on and got surprised that it's still working that way - especially considering I'm watching it basically via IPTV (using Dutch KPNs Android SmartTV app).

If you're thinking about Linux/Gentoo - but don't want to spend a lot of time for maintaining/updating and most importantly not need time to fix stuff that broke because you didn't update it in months...

I would suggest Calculate Linux.

It's 100% Gentoo, with additional customization (e.g. profiles presetting not just sane defaults, but also things you usually want on desktop [e.g. samba, network printers ...]), there are pre built binaries for all profiles and basically all the software (but you can still override some and get it compiled with or without specific features) ...

And perhaps most importantly - there's extra tooling/automation around the Gentoo/portage updates and such.

With vanilla Gentoo - beyond regular PITA to update packages due to various package/use-flags conflicts (which would make me do it even less often). I was also regularly (every few years) having to reinstall Gentoo because my glibc/bintools/python/etc were so far behind that during system update something would break and fixing it was basically reinstalling Gentoo from stage3 tarball.

It's been ~10 years that I've "switched" to Calculate Linux - and it's "cl-update" was automatically solving even those things that would've left me with world update broken system.