philpo

@philpo@feddit.org

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨N the digital age, it's going to be harder for ICE agents to hide their identities than it was for Nazis trying to evade justice post WW2.⁩ ⁨⁨6⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago⁩:

  Thankfully I don’t have to. Not my apes,not my circus - but living in totalitarian and (various) post totalitarian societies over the last decades (my first protest was still again the Iron curtain) and decades of activism I am fairly sad for anyone in the US but feeling also relieved that this shitshow is reasonably far away.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨N the digital age, it's going to be harder for ICE agents to hide their identities than it was for Nazis trying to evade justice post WW2.⁩ ⁨⁨8⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago⁩:

  Glashouse it is, isn’t it?

  Same to you and your faith and not fact based approach,mate.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨N the digital age, it's going to be harder for ICE agents to hide their identities than it was for Nazis trying to evade justice post WW2.⁩ ⁨⁨9⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago⁩:

  And you fundamentally misunderstand how post- totalitarian societies work. It’s not about data availability but will to pursue these things. Which to some degree can be necessary to avoid final decomposition of civil cohesion.

  Besides: Crowd sourced data collection is rarely viable as judical evidence. Very rarely. And then it becomes either a witchhunt or a nice to know thing but nothing more.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨N the digital age, it's going to be harder for ICE agents to hide their identities than it was for Nazis trying to evade justice post WW2.⁩ ⁨⁨11⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago⁩:

  We have meticulously kept personal records for the majority of all SS,SD,Gestapo and for a fair share of Wehrmacht soldiers. And due to the way German records work (mamdatory resident recording offices) and the fact that almost everyone was “involved” (almost all men were either with the SS, the Wehrmacht or other organs or belonged to the small number of people in jobs though important enough to be needes on the home front)the chances for people to actually evade were rather slim. Claiming you were not “not doing anything” wasn’t feasible and claiming you were with a unit that was “not doing anything wrong” was rather hard as well and could easily be disproved when none from that unit knows one. (Not to mention the SS tattoo)

  The issue never were the few guys that made it to South America. The issue was never that people did not know who was a member of the SS or the Gestapo. The issue was that none fucking cared. The US couldn’t care less as long people were staunch anticommunist or helped them otherwise,the UK were a bit more involved but mainly wanted to get their own economy back up so the empire didn’t fall in shambles. The French did have a bit more vigor,but not for long. And the Germans just wanted to “leave shit behind them”.

  And unlike the US we are talking here about a post -facism occupation period. This won’t happen. It will be, if the US will be able to overcome it within the lifetime of the current perpetrators(which, given the technology advances in mass suppression is not necessarily a given) a democratic revolution more like what happened in Spain or Chile. Look how it went there.

  And… unlike paper which is harder to get rid off than people think, data can be deleted within short notice. Just as the last Trump administration did.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨People in the office who don't take used K-Cups out of the machine are the new equivalent "you kill it, you fill it"⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  I simply fire them if they do that.

  The problem is that I work in Home Office exclusively…

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Security without submarines: the military strategy Australia should pursue instead of AUKUS⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  And 8 subs that might not ever make it to Australia defend a coastline of 25.000km against the biggest navy in the world? With over half of it(and the important parts) are to shallow for nuclear subs to operate in?

  Very possibly without US support because the orange got a wire transfer by Xi? Or another “cheque didn’t clear”?

  And no, they won’t be able to limit the chinese navy go the south/east chinese sea - which are sea areas which again are hard for subs to operate in, especially hunt surface targets. And which are,by all means, very likely to be very very well guarded against subs via various installations. I would bet the chinese have something like SOSUS in place there - it’s their home turf after all that has far less ingress channels as the GIUK Gap.

  So… tbh: While I don’t follow the conclusions of the author nuclear subs are still a bad idea.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Self-hosted PDF manager?⁩ ⁨⁨6⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  Contrary to the others here,while I love Paperless,using it for textbooks and notes only worked “somewhat” for me - it becomes quite clunky after a while.

  Personally I would rather go with Calibre if I were you if you have more textbooks than notes. Even for notes, they can be attached as well and better organised than Paperless.

  (And don’t get me wrong paperless is awesome and I use it heavily)

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Stepping up from Tinkercad but to what?⁩ ⁨⁨6⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  There are two sides of issues with FreeCAD: On one side it has usability issues. The comes largely from the “workbench” concept, so often you will be missing a tool unless you change workbenches which in terms leads to another tool missing. Furthermore the UI is not really consistent in how things are named, how things are done,etc. Same goes for the actual step of editing things. So while you eventually “get there”, especially as a newcomer, it will take time and a bit of try and error. Parametric solutions are also very clunky and often not as feature rich. (Which is a pain if using it for woodworking) Another thing that is the whole “derivate” thing most professional CAD solutions offer - e.g. build plans, CAM, BOM, simulation,etc. You can do them with FreeCAD, but it takes some plugins and is nearly as good or comfortable as the professional solutions.

  The other side is performance and stability. FreeCAD is a nightmare when it comes to importing thing with a lot facets or large files, is unstable as fuck when working with large assemblies and generally is slower compared to other solutions. (Even the otherwise not very fast Solidworks is faster)

  In the end I would recommend you to try all three of them (and a few others from the list) and then decide if you can be bothered to use FreeCAD or find another solution worth it more. (Personally I would avoid Fusion,btw. due to the fact that it gets more enshitified daily)

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Stepping up from Tinkercad but to what?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  There are two more alternatives, sadly for Windows only.

  • Solidedge Free for non-commercial makers, relatively easy to learn. But fucking expensive when you want to go commercial.

  • Solidworks Relatively cheap for makers and students,really expensive for commercial. The maker version has a reduced feature set,but that’s not that relevant for most purposes (more towards simulation and things like that) Personally I would prefer it over Solidedge, but that’s more of a personal view.

  BUT: Both are Windows only(more or less), and of course commercial.

  Sadly FreeCAD is not even close to most professional products - while it can be used for a lot of things,these things will take longer, be often more unstable and less “straightforward”.Nevertheless for most non-professional uses,it will suffice.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨What is the best Sea based game out there in your opinion?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  Definitely not the best, but still worth a mention is “Stormworks: Build and rescue”. Basically a Lego like “build a ship/plane and do missions on the oceans” game - missions nowadays are also including far more than rescue.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Suggestions for mouse only games?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  Btw: There are USB foot keyboards on the soulless online marketing platform of your choice. They can usually be programmed to different keys or combinations. While it is not something I would use for FPS gaming, it can come handy in situations like yours. I have one with three different switches that are programmable which is quite handy.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Adobe Gets Bullied Off Bluesky⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Yeah, it’s a real pain, sadly. Tbh, I don’t think we will ever find a major CAD company support Linux again - even Siemens, who supported NX on Linux for ages have stopped.

  From my POV we have two choices: Either we make FreeCAD a viable alternative that beats the competition or at least is on the same page as them - which I find highly unlikely with the current system, so a fork+someone who finances it would be needed- or we find ways to optimise/enable Windows based CAD on Linux*. The former worked for the other tool we regularly use: QGIS. That has become the de facto standard in a lot of fields and has sometimes even pushed out commercial competition.

  The later is imho the better way for CAD as it is really really hard for companies to change their CAD (even within windows and with a commercial product) - I have a business estimate for an medical product company who estimated 30k € per employee under ideal conditions, possibly more if something goes wrong(Training, loss of production, licencing, converting of files, integration of external databases,etc.). We have done it for games (tbf,with a lot of help from valve) and surely can do it with CAD (which in theory should be easier).

  The last option is a bad one: In theory we could use FreeCAD as a backengine and develop themes that replicate the workflow of other products. But for that FreeCAD would need to improve on so many points beforehand…

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Adobe Gets Bullied Off Bluesky⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Photoshop is a professional level software that is used by hobbyists as well - we compare affinity to this level as well and that’s okay.

  So we should compare FreeCAD on this level as well. And from that perspective it’s sadly exactly what I called it.

  The roughness from a commercial perspective is an issue as it costs money - because it takes people much more time to do things,even when they work.

  And there are still way too many issues with it that sometimes are a result of infighting within the development community and exist for5+ years. To name a few:

  • More complex imports are basically a nightmare especially with more complex facets

  • Large file handling is unstable as f***. Our CAD files are commercial building size or “complex medical product” sized and despite having more than enough resources allocated FreeCAD crashes frequently without even proving any hints to the user why. The issue behind it is known for years, though.

  • We had multiple issues with using older files that were saved on different OSes - really great if you can’t access files that are 16 months old. Also a known issue.

  • Standardised rollout is still basically impossible.

  Just to name a few… It’s simply not on the level even Solidworks has in that regards (which has it’s own issues,yes, I am on the same page with you there). While I don’t really like Siemens NC (or Solidedge for that matter) it’s indeed a reasonably good software - but me disliking them might be the result of them dropping Linux support more or less unannounced. AutoCAD and it’s sister products are imho worse than Creo,but again: More of a personal thing. In the end they sadly (!) beat FreeCAD in all aspects. By far. Which is pretty much a catastrophe as FreeCAD is the only Linux alternative atm.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Adobe Gets Bullied Off Bluesky⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  But we are talking about a commercial level here - Adobe Photoshop is primarily a professional software that is also used by prosumers/hobbyists,not vice versa. We all judge e.g. Affinity on that level (rightfully).

  And seen from that level FreeCAD is,well, what I said. Sure,it might do for some hobbyists and even some small companies, but even then it shows it’s massive structural flaws. Which partly, and this is why I am so openly critical of it, exist for 5+ years and are there due to the ongoing infighting in the development community.

  The problem with is roughness is also a problem in terms of commercial use. When I do things as a hobbyist it’s just my time that is consumed. Not ideal,but it is what it is. In a commercial setting my staff takes more time due to this roughness and that costs money - much more money than commercial solutions cost. Which is bad - especially as it forces people to stick with Windows as there are no properly working alternatives on Linux.

  And yes, onshape and fusion are horrible to hobbyists in that regard, but Solidedge(free) and to some extend Solidworks(cheap) are decent.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Adobe Gets Bullied Off Bluesky⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Sadly FreeCAD is absolutely shit compared to what commercial CAD products offer - and sadly even 1.0 didn’t change their problems.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨am i insane?⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  This post is incredibly well written and I can second this, both as a patient and as a healthcare professional. @Mods: We should have a wiki/halloffame or something to point people to posts like this.

  !Lemmysilver

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨How chaotic gang of British 'geeks' launched one of most lucrative gaming franchises of all time [Grand Theft Auto]⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  TBF: There was GTA London

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Retirees 'stunned' as market turmoil over tariffs shrinks their 401(k)s⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Leopards ate my face!

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Selfhosting Sunday - What's up?⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  That’s a bit below the level of reliability I need,sadly - before doing that I could also go for a non ECC solution.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Selfhosting Sunday - What's up?⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Debatting with myself and to a lesser degree what to do in terms of our homeserver situation. While the proxmox node has more than enough CPU and RAM capacity left, the NAS, an older Synology, is full to the brim, EOL and needs replacement.And sadly being a mini PC the proxmox node is unable to get the HDs connected.

  So something new is needed and I would rather have my setup streamlined and combine the two.

  But that is… More difficult than anticipated. I really would like something power saving with ECC ram that can take at least two PCI-e (SFP+ and a potential graphic card for AI later on). That can take 4,better 6 HDs. And at least one,better two NVMe. …that basically means self building which I am happy with, but all current builds I calculate come out somewhere south of 2000€ (including two new HDs, as two old ones need to go). And that’s sadly out of the financial possibility at the moment.

  If only the fucking Ugreen (DXP6800)would support ECC. While not ideal in terms of PCI-e it would be enough to do the trick.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Selfhosting Sunday - What's up?⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Don’t go to Proton or Tuta - both are impossible to get out of basically, do not support free standards and Proton is scumy in terms of their marketing.

  Mailbox.org Infomaniak Fastmail Posted

  Just to name a few.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Sketchy social media post gives BlackBerry fans hope for the return of the smartphone brand⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Yeah, that would be favourable.

  But: Blackberry has acquired multiple companies that deliver government grade android devices that are fully degooglefied and heavily secured. They are the de facto market leader.

  Even if they bring out a properly secured and degooglefied Android that would be a huge step in the right direction.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Windows 11 is closing a loophole that let you skip making a Microsoft account⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Yeah, Blender is one of the few points where it works. QGIS is the other.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨What's so important about keeping military operations secret?⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  To add a more recent example: The Serbians shot down a F-117 Nighthawk with a obsolete air defence system from the fifties. How? They knew the aircraft were coming, when (both due to spies), where (as they used the same routes) and that they had no anti radar escort.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨What are some slow acting poisons?⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  You could go for Paracetamol/Acetaminophen. The lethal dose is quite low and in theory low enough someone could poison someone else with it. And once symptoms set in people’s livers are often beyond rescue and they die a very gruesome death unless we find a transplant organ in time.(And even then survival is not guaranteed)

  And it’s relatively save to use in writing as it is coated/mixed with enough bittering agent these days that it actually wouldn’t work that well to secretly posing someone.

  If you need something with a shorter timeframe Methanol is an option.

  And of course there’s always Dihydrogen monoxide-everyone who has even had one drop of it will die eventually but the time range depends on the dose. With very high doses people die in minutes,with medium doses (this is actually sometimes used by inmates to kill themselves) they die within a day, with lower dose after decades, but some die mere days after they ingested the mere last drop of it. Nasty stuff and very available.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨how do they decide where to put bus stops?⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Yeah, actually some companies like IKEA which often are located “on the outskirts” even pay for lines from train stations to their shops - which are for public use and often it’s a mixed deal, like the company (or sometimes a few companies, sometimes even competitors) subsidies the line during business hours and the local government pays the remaining hours.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨What phones are the government people using that are supposedly secure enough to discuss war plans? iPhone? Android? Some special custom-made phone specifically for the government?⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Actually they kind of still do. Secusmart is very popular in most industrial nations for that and they are a division of Blackberry nowadays.

  They are based on specialised Samsung devices afaik.

  The other big alternative is iOS at the moment, they also offer highly secured MDM solutions but they are less trusted by non-US countries as they do not allow code review.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Windows 11 is closing a loophole that let you skip making a Microsoft account⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Yeah. Gaming isn’t the issue for a long time. Productivity is. Rantmode

  Proper CAD for Linux? Nonexistent, even worse, some manufacturers intentionally make sure you can’t use a VM either until you massively pay extra.(Looking at you Dassault) FreeCAD is a shitshow (and that is entirely the communities fault) and no professional competitor has shown any incentive - even though there is a increasing market for Linux in some professional capacities. And the current projects to get bottles/wine/etc. to work are maintained by a single guy (bless him) who tried to do it for multiple systems at once and seems to have given up mostly.

  Graphic design? While the situation is a little bit better,it’s still a shitshow. No, GIMP and Inkscape are not sufficient replacements for Adobe or even Affinity. They are “good enough” for most things,but they are not nearly ready for production use in any professional capacity.

  Office? Yeah. Sadly equally bad. I really really really hate Microsoft and Office. But: They are inherently good at what they do. Not because people get used to it - but because they work. I used LibreOffice since back when it was still StarOffice. (And have used Lotus before that) But we as the open source community still rather fight about ribbons (even though they became the standard everywhere) than get LibreCalc halfway production ready or make proper collaborative working possible. Or get a proper fucking search into thunderbird.

  And this is the problem: OSS is so damn up its own ass, that it does not see the bigger picture. We can fight about the kernel allowing Rust, having Ribbons, which is the proper workbench in FreeCAD or about packet managers, distro flavours,etc. In the end what will happen is that the other side will be alienated, excuse themselves from further contributions and, and this is even worse, a lot of possible future contributors will also not contribute. And wow, someone was right and can think he (and it’s almost always a he) thinks he knows the only truth.

  While the actual truth is held by the others. The ones that don’t even are bothered by the whole fucking discussing because they make the money, they influence millions and they are the ones setting de facto standards. And yes, that will mean we will need to adapt.

  Including adapting market standards. When 95% of the world does a thing “that way”, it’s simply preposterous to claim “your way” is the right way, even it’s for historical reasons. (Easy example: CTRL C / CTRL V)

  Same goes for adapting software. If 10% of the development power of Libre Office,GIMP, etc. would have been used to further Wine/Proton to get people to be able to use their industrial standard software we would have seen much much much larger adoption rates,both professionally and for private users.

  Because that is literally what happened in gaming. Once Valve basically put massive efforts into allowing Windows games to be played on Linux - and not into developing native Linux games all of a sudden Linux gaming went ahead. Because it is a advantage for your game to work natively and well on a steam deck.

  This is even more relevant for production software. If a CEO/CIO has reached a point where his main production software runs on Linux and he has deployed Linux in his company his next software contract for other software will go towards the company who runs better in their environment.

  Rant out

  (Nothing personal,mate, I just spent the last two days to get fucking CAD to work on Fedora…)

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Organic Maps migrates to Forgejo due to GitHub account blocked by Microsoft.⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Or if the US fucks up enough for the rest of the world to put a UNO reverse card on the US. If China and the EU do that, the US is fucked within a few months. A “you can’t trade with either of these markets when you trade with the US” would be interesting.

  And tbh, from what I gather it’s absolutely a option that is being discussed in diplomatic circles. The main reason it’s not on the table is the huge amount of debts the USA has in China. And the EU will use it as a backup arrow for “further escalation”. Maybe someone should tell Trump who actually delivers the machines for the factories he wants to “bring back”. Hint: It’s not the US.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Organic Maps migrates to Forgejo due to GitHub account blocked by Microsoft.⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Yes,you understand how sanctions work.

  A person living in a sanctioned country can also no longer buy certain things, travel to certain countries or use certain services. You couldn’t buy a Boeing Plane during WW2 in Germany as well…

  And considering that Russia is waging a fucking genocidal war and a hybrid war in Europe and a majority (according to relatively independent statistics) of the population stil supports that shit and has done so for a long time (when they still could have changed course) it’s god damn right these sanctions exist.

  BTW: Cuba is being sanctioned by the US for simply nationalising US held companies (Fidel Castro wasn’t that much of a communist in the beginning) since 1960 and basically none gave or gives a rats ass.