yes I’m using my regular email and messaging family members using theirs.

It’s working fine, except for the occasional issue like I mentioned, i.e. sending multiple emails for one message.

I don’t know what it’s doing about encryption - it seems to use it when it knows the other party supports it, but that’s not my priority at this point, my aim is to encourage people to move off WhatsApp (this is what all my chatting takes place on). I’m kind of using the family chat as guinea pigs really.

Nice, I’ll give it a whirl. Their their website says, “ArcaneChat is a Delta Chat client” so maybe it deals with the issues I’ve had better.

bug reporting

I’m looking for projects I can contribute to in some way, so definitely not averse to bug reporting. From some discussions on the forum, the way I’m using it isn’t really supported and they’re really aimed at people who want to chat securely without being tied to proprietary networks. But I’m certainly not the only one who would prefer not to use proprietary chat protocols like WhatsApp, but there’s just too many other people I’d have to convince to switch to yet another chat app. Delta Chat / ArcaneChat really seem to offer a way forward for people like me, but the chat experience for people using regular email clients has to be very good - people get annoyed quickly if they receive 5 emails in a row each containing a single picture followed by a 6th email that just contains text (which is how my attempt at a message sharing some photos came through for email users)

what is this, is it anything like Delta Chat? (i.e. the UI of a chat app but using email for sending/receiving messages)

I’ve been trying out Delta Chat for messaging my family. It’s a bit kludgy and messy though, at least when interacting with others who are using regular email clients. For instance, it sometimes sends multiple emails rather than bundling it up as one.

No need for “AI”

whisper is AI, it’s even made by the Big Bad, OpenAI themselves <cue boos and hissing from the peanut gallery>

These types of predictable comments don’t normally have to wait long before some insufferable ass pipes up with a comment about how China has had an experimental thorium reactor running for over a year, and recently accomplished the important technical step of refuelling it without shutting it down. This makes China the current world leaders in Thorium reactor technology.

How many people listed in the credits of your favorite show do you truly think own one, much less multiple Porsches?

I don’t think those people are responsible for pricing. The Porsche comment was a flippant way of pointing out the whole parasitic machine that sits atop the actual creatives - the actors, the set designers, the script writers, all those people that you and I do want to support. All those people are not involved in pricing decisions or exclusivity contracts, and they’re mostly paid a salary so by the time a movie or series is out, they’re already on to the next job. By refusing to subscribe to all the myriad streaming services, you are mainly putting pressure on those executives to make a more appealing product.

I think you’re right in that it’s very reminiscent of US tipping culture (I’m not in the US), in that the people at the bottom are the ones who do the real work and yet they don’t get a fair share of the profits and instead have to take on unfair risk (i.e. the risk of not being tipped).

That said, I need to confess that I’m partly playing devil’s advocate, I pay for Netflix and just the other day I paid YouTube to “buy” a digital copy of a movie - for the exact reasons you said, I want to support the creative people behind the shows & movies I enjoy. I just don’t think it’s accurate to say that there’s a moral requirement to pay for entertainment, especially given how unfair the system currently is.

what would happen if nobody paid and everybody pirated

they wouldn’t just slowly starve to death you know. they’d start making the price more competitive and the service more user-friendly before they’d even had to pawn a single Porsche.

The right wing’s interest in this seems to be climate-change-denialism - or at least the opposition to “green policies” that the right seem to have latched onto. I suppose it’s a cheap way to get people riled up and angry with current government policies because no-one who’s paying attention can surely think that the likes of Marine Le Pen or Nigel Farage would really make government less intrusive or authoritarian if they were to ever get any real power.

I’m not sure what the solution is, when so many of the electorate are so prone to emotional manipulation such as this. Trying to second guess what the right are going to jump on next is surely a fool’s errand, as it’s much easier for the Le Pens and Farages to spout off new rhetoric at a rally than it is for incumbent governments to change policy.

The only real solution is for the electorate to become better able to think critically and more able to assess issues rationally and holistically. What chance is there of that ever happening?

Sharing knowledge. Lots of people are not primarily motivated by greed.

Some paragraphs from the article:

The “Green Claims Directive” would require companies to provide hard facts to back up claims that their products are carbon-neutral, biodegradable or “less polluting.” Businesses would need to submit evidence for environmental claims for approval by independent verifiers—with fines and other penalties for failure to comply.

But the center-right European People’s Party—parliament’s biggest force, which is now pushing to roll back parts of the EU’s green agenda—was not satisfied with the [directive], and asked this week for the commission to withdraw it. EU chief Ursula von der Leyen, who hails from the EPP, has pledged to make life easier for businesses in a bid to re-launch the European economy.

But fellow lawmaker Sandro Gozi, of the centrist Renew group, called the decision “shameful.” “It is unacceptable that the EPP, in tandem with the far-right, is trying to undermine a fundamental piece of legislation to protect European citizens from corporate environmental fraud,” he said.

I thought we switched to libre

Maybe some people did. Thing is there’s a whole rest-of-the-world out there, and they didn’t necessarily get the memo or are happy with the existing way.

Cute pic, but what is going on with those cat biscuits in the background? At first I thought that cat must be spoilt if the monks are shelling out for those fancy cat-bix. But they look like supermarket shelves - did the monks meditate in a supermarket? I even did a reverse image search hoping to find the original image, but just found lots of the exact same, with that same background.

Your downvotes make me wonder if I misunderstood your post, but you seem to be saying that Spain’s Airbnb regulations make it harder for people to buy flats with the intention of using them as short-term holiday lets, while not really stopping people who just want to rent a room in their own house for short periods. Which does sound good to me, given that those empty rooms in grandma’s house wouldn’t otherwise be on the market.

So is your point that this is “anti-tourist” in the sense that it does make things more difficult for tourists, but that should be expected given that tourists are generally indifferent to the long term negative effects of tourism on a city?

While true, why are you linking this comment in almost all the other comments?

I’ve been stuck repeatedly asking myself this question ever since reading your comment 😩 Please be careful about throwing infinite while true loops around! Now I need someone to Ctrl-C me.

I’m probably misunderstanding as I rarely use word processing software, so I apologise if you talking about something more than the system’s own handling of touchpad scrolling! here’s the settings applet for XFCE, I think every DE will have similar options (it does even offer circular scrolling, but I know you aren’t looking for that):

Gesture scrolling? You mean like making clockwise or anticlockwise circles to scroll up or down? I’d have thought that kind of functionality would be handled by the touchpad driver, not individual programs.

You live in a fantasy world if you think “Don’t go” is a feasible alternative. If I don’t go, someone else will, and all I’ve done is deprive myself of something that I want to make a point

Come on mate, you could say this about any kind of protest or boycott.

all I’ve done is deprive myself of something that I want to make a point

Yes that is exactly how boycotts work. You make a personal sacrifice as a protest against something that’s unfair or immoral.

If you’re not prepared to make a sacrifice, that’s OK, but at least have the honesty to admit you just don’t care enough about this particular issue.

Such a cop-out. Every boycott is a personal sacrifice, and every individual participating in a boycott knows that their one purchase isn’t by itself going to make a difference.

There’s really nothing special about Jesus, if you accept that the voices he heard in his head were not really “the all-powerful creator” speaking to him.

What I mean is that Jesus did not say anything more remarkable or ground-breaking than say Socrates, Marx or … I don’t know Iain M Banks or any other story teller. Way less remarkable in fact.

There’s this persistent idea that Jesus was some wonderful caring hippy, and before Jesus everyone was just a callous exploitive bastard. But there’s nothing new about the share-and-share-alike philosophy Jesus espoused. It’s basic game theory and has been present in society since before our species even evolved. Even chimps grasp those ideas.

Jesus was just a poor Jewish common person who thought he was the messiah. Just like his compatriots of the time, he believed the Jews to be the “chosen people”, and his message was only directed at his compatriots. He had no more grasp of humanity as a whole than any other common person of his time. As the messiah, he believed - as did his followers - that he was going to usher in the end of the world.

It’s complete nonsense, and if you truely understand what a scam the modern church is, you would stop promoting him as some kind of revolutionary.

Here’s a list of well-supported USB WiFi adapters - https://github.com/morrownr/USB-WiFi/blob/main/home/USB_WiFi_Adapters_that_are_supported_with_Linux_in-kernel_drivers.md