Brewchin

The US$75 Lifetime price has traditionally been their Black Friday deal, regardless of the usual price.

Anyone’s guess if that deal will still be a thing, given their recent behaviour, though.

This is what FAFO in public looks like. Gold!

You may be right, but I worked around this using https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/NetworkManager#Network_services_with_NetworkManager_dispatcher

I added the CIFS shares to my fstab with the _netdev option and created /etc/NetworkManager/dispatcher.d/30-nas-shares.sh containing (got the WiFi UUID using nmcli con show):

#!/bin/sh
WANTED_CON_UUID="UUID-OF-MY-WIFI"

if [ "$CONNECTION_UUID" = "$WANTED_CON_UUID" ]; then
  case "$2" in
    "up"|"vpn-up")
      mount -a -t cifs
      ;;
  esac
fi

This waits for my WiFi to come up, ensures it’s my home WiFi, and then mounts my shares.

There are probably other and better ways to do it, but it works.

I don’t mind it with companies that produce multiple products, as nesting them does make sense.

But for one-hit-wonders it’s a bit… 😬

I was thinking more of one product companies using a $XDG_CONFIG_HOME/Boop Snoot Partners, Inc/<Software Name You Remember Installing>/ convention, which seems to be the norm inside %APPDATA%.

But I take your point. 😊

So much this. It’s like these clowns don’t read the XDG directory spec and think $XDG_CONFIG_HOME and $XDG_DATA_HOME are interchangeable, and even that cache files can be in either or both. No, one directory you need to backup for when things go sideways, and the other can go to /nev/dull.

I’m not a fan of ~/.local/share/ being the data directory (two directories deep seems stupid), but it’s definitely where regular data belongs.

Never mind developers who, in 2025, still think their project is special enough for a $HOME dotfile/dotdir or - somehow worse - those who put $XDG_CONFIG_HOME/<weird-name>/subdir/[subdir/]. The latter strikes me as well-meaning Windows developers trying to follow best-practice-like-Microsoft-does, but it makes my teeth itch.

Rant over. :)

If you’re going back that far, I remember hearing a story about the Australian military experimenting with immersive AI during a typical “give us money” event where a helicopter was flying over an area and the kangaroos scattered at the sound, disappearing over a hill…

Then reappeared with RPGs and fired them at the helicopter, taking it down. Lots of red faces and mumbling about working out some kinks. 😄

tl;dr: I’m old enough to remember when “AI” was a benign comic novelty. 🙃

Calibre (Kindle) and Libation (Audible) are essential backup tools.

Y’know, in case their servers are down…

Every serious person in law enforcement, who doesn’t have an agenda, acknowledges that the old fashioned policing methods make all of this redundant.

It just takes longer (and so costs money), which is what this is about.

These people would destroy the security of the world’s protocols just to save a few quid. It’s deplorable.

I get what you’re saying, but I’m not sure greedy pigboy is doing that. Everything changes.

It won’t be what it was, and the grift will grow be off the charts, but I think it will evolve into a mix of what it was and grifters grifting. Just delineated by subreddit.

"I don’t like it…

• “…so it should be banned” (for everyone) is never the right approach.
• “…so I blocked it” (for me) is.

It’s a simple heuristic that works in almost every situation.

You don’t know what value something you don’t like provides to others.

The algorithmic feed and the low barrier to entry, including UX familiarity.

Aside from the headache of understanding what instances are and choosing one, and finding a decent mobile client, a lot of people care about unique usernames - especially those in the business/professional sphere.

I see their point, when @trustedname@genuine-instance can have all their effort and goodwill destroyed in a day by @trustedname@malicious-instance. While the Verification option exists, more needs to be done in ActivityPub and client developer guidelines to prevent or intuitively mitigate this kind of impersonation. But mentioning such shortcomings get sneered at or waved away, which keeps serious well-meaning people away.

Why would they go through that hassle when Bluesky’s shortcomings are ideological and potential future direction?

I’ve worked with both in my career. Tell me more…

Email? So its just encrypted SMS?

Might come down to the metadata, then, like SFTP vs FTPES or GET vs POST.

Your original question was answered by numerous people in the spirit of the community, so you have got best answers it can provide at the moment, but your follow-up comments suggest that you don’t think so.

But I may have misjudged your intent, as looking further I can see you’ve been replying to comments individually. My initial impression was that you were masquerading statements as questions. If I have that wrong, then my apologies.

Yes, but what’s your point here? “Oh no, someone preserve us from… *checks notes* a group of subject matter experts!”?

If that annoys you for some reason, you’d best not learn how the overwhelming majority of products and services see the light of day. Rage aplenty awaits.

Have you seen the list of safety features on UK plugs and sockets? The sockets have shutters in them that prevents anything being inserted into the live or neutral sockets unless the (longer) earth pin of a matching plug is inserted first.

Having said that, I agree: seems to be a belt-and-braces approach. No downsides.

And it allows you to cut power to an appliance without having to remove the plug.

Safety and convenience versus the cost of including them, I expect.

The Wikipedia page for BS 1363 says they’re optional and weren’t added to the standard until 1967. I can’t recall having seen a domestic socket without one.

But it seems the only legal way to read the actual standard is to pay for it, and even the HSE website isn’t much help.

It’s a pretty common and wildly successful marketing strategy to put something on social media with one or more intentional errors to force everyone’s inner Reply Guy to fight the urge to do the thing.

But it also works with unintentional errors. My less well-thought-out replies attract responses like flies. 😄

Whether it indicates the success of your thesis or not depends on how you measure it, I suppose.

Christ, this image is like a 50-post long thread on Mastodon, etc: the worst possible choice of format/platform for that type of content.

“I have an essay to share, and I’m going to send it in snippets of a few hundred characters!” Why?

(Looking at you, Doctorow… 👀)