Yeah.

The 30 cm is ubiquitous for officework or drawing, while this is for tiling floors, doing plumbing, measuring walls, roofs, etc. etc… There are also those retractable coils (usually 2 or 5m), but they tend to break easily and collapse under their own weight, so they’re not as useful for some things.

I can find one like this in basically any hardware store with few exceptions (Austria). They’re almost exclusively 2m in length (I literally haven’t seen a longer or shorter one ever in my life)

Also, a meter stick sounds workable, but borderline impractical.

Yup. There are like 3 types of rulers: normal (a stick), foldable (this) and those retractable metallic strips.

Sticks are usually either 15 or 30 cm, while the foldables are literally always 2m.

The coils are the most ubiquitous, but I orefer the foldavles for most things since they tend to fall undet their own weight when measuring longer distances. These sre either 2 or 5 m I think.

Sorry for being pedantic, but those foldable work rulers are exactly 2 m long (at least in MetricLandia), which is, incidentally, the span of IQ values (0-200).

So yeah, it literally can be mapped one-to-one to a (common type of) ruler.

I got my lenses for a realistic amount (~8€), but the frames are (were) expensive af. That’s mostly on Luxottica (and the state not reigning her in).

Although, that was years ago, way before “covid-induced” inflation, and the healthcare system is being dismantled bit-by-bit for a very long time, so I don’t doubt lenses got at least 3-5x more expensive in the meantime.

When your job suddenly rolls out G-Workspace or Office Online without you knowing and you come to work to a Google account with all your personal data, already out of your control, is it really a choice?

Have a job or your data. The stakes are becoming increasingly high.

“If it’s useful, just use them” is an option, in some circumstances. In some, unfortunately, that doesn’t apply. Is keeping your job a “convenience”?

Don’t mean to attack you personally, just want to share my thoughts on the level erosion of privacy to Big Tech.

Ah, the third option.

Is that Motorola’s EULA or buying throug a carrier?

Cloased source does for privacy and security what sweeping problems under the rug does: it mitigates them, a bit, but then when they inevitably do hit, they hit hard.

About that. I heard somewhere wordpress.com and wordpress.org are seperste entities, one for-profit and the other not, but Wikipedia doesn’t mention why they share the same name.

About the Ribbon: Apparently M$ has a patent (or multiple ones on) it, so they ultimately have the last say on what is and isn’t allowed. They did make a licence availiable royalty-free, but I assume that that licence didn’t cover enough of what LibreOffice needed, so they probably struck a deal with M$ about having the option, just not as the default.

I haven’t researched this all that much, so mostly speculation. Although the M$ having a patent part of someting so true. And that patent (apparently) explicitly states that use in directly competing software with M$'s is forbidden, at least for-profit.

Idk, maybe it’s a case of patent restrictions, or LibreOffice being LibreOffice.

Honestly, a really interesting rabbit-hole.

Thank you for the correction!

The english word “free” actually carries two meanings: “free as in free food” (gratis) and “free as in free speech” (libre).

Ollama is both gratis and libre.

And about the money stuff: Ollama used to be Facebook’s proprietary model, an answer to ChatGPT and Bing Chat/Copilot. Facebook lagged behind the other players and they just said “fuck it, we’re going open-source”. That’s how and why it’s free.

Due to it being open-source, even though models are by design binary blobs, the code that interacts with them and runs them is open-source. If they were connecting to the Internet and phoning home to Facebook, chances are this would’ve been found out by the community due to the open nature of the project.

Even if it weren’t open-source, since it runs locally you could at least block (or view) Internet access.

Basically, even though this is from Facebook, one of the big bads of privacy on the Internet, it’s all good in the end.

Sometimes, refilling an empty cup with coffee is a good fix

“Propaganda” comes from “propagate”, so the word inherently isn’t bad. The suffix “anda” basically means “thing of”, so in a literal sense, “propaganda” is any “object of propagation”, although this reading of etymology isn’t widely circulated.

Propaganda is thus inherently a very all-encompassing term. Any poster, flyer or brochure is propaganda, whether it advertizes a product, service, lost cat, or wants you to join the army. Anything “mass media” is propaganda. Anything spreading “a message” that is meant for wider propagation, regardless of the message content is propaganda.

At least that’s according to my rudimentary knowledge of high school latin. There’s the more “mainstream”, “official” etymology on Wiktionary: the word was first used in the name of an old Catholic Church department from Latin times for “spreading the faith”, so that’s where the more loaded use and connotation comes from. However, I doubt that this department name is the first ever use of the ablative feminine gerund form of the verb propagate. That’s like saying the first use of the term “World health” is in the name World Health Orgsnization. If anything, someone had to discuss the name beforehand.

So, there’s this Overton window-esque aspect to the word.

Wikipedia has a good overview of propaganda, although it is itself loaded onto the “must be loaded (i.e. what you called ‘bad’ propaganda)” definition of propaganda. And they like usibn the word “loaded” a lot.

Well, WhatsApp is owned by Facebook. They are a large player, so they are under a bunch of scrutiny.

But at the end of the day, WhatsApp clearly states it takes all this information. They only claim to keep your messages end-to-end encrypted.

I wonder if this applies to text messages only, or to things like voice memos, images/videos, gifs, etc. as well.

WhatsApp doesn’t let you send documents if you don’t give it full access to your files. Sure, maybe they pinky-promise don’t do anything but this is Facebook we’re talking about.

The same caveat goes for photos and videos - you can’t even send a photo if you don’t give it the camera permission and gallery access, something it clearly doesn’t need just to send a single picture.

Additionally, WhatsApp loads previews of websites. Sure, on the privacy violations list that’s pretty low-priority but I’d still like to not have a link contacted before I can take my 3 seconds to look at it and decide wether it’s worth clicking. Especially since a lot of my contacts send obvious scams (“send this message to 10 contacts for a chance to win a free iPhone” type bullshit mostly).

Revoking WhatsApp’s contacts permission will not show peoples’ nicknames - it will only ahow numbers. Yet you have to give yourself a nickname on WhatsApp, so they clearly have some interest in your contacts. Otherwise they wouldn’t block it outright when it’s an already implemented feature to show nicknames for numbers not in the contact list.

All quite suspicious if you ask me. Although I don’t work in cyber security so it’s clearly just incoherent rambing from me.