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Joined 11 months ago
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Cake day: August 7th, 2023

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  • Meh. I have a cabin in the countryside 130 km away from my apartment and I can cycle the whole way, or take a coach with a foldable bike and pedal the 30 km left.

    It’s actually in the region where I grew up so I have to get there frequently to see my family. It’s a hassle sometimes but it’s only because my government can’t adequately fund and maintain a decent transit network.

    I also bike to national parks nearby, and sometimes haul my inflatable kayak with a bike trailer.

    People overestimate distances and think the country side justifies a car but it’s usually just excuses. I did move in a big city eventually but I lived in small towns and cities for a decade before that. I still hated cars and didn’t have one.

    For example, my mother lives on a rural road outside a village of less than 2000 people. And she works in the next town that is 7 km away. Meanwhile I live in a city and work in the same city but I have to bike 9 km to get to work.

    So sometimes distances are shorter in smaller cities and towns but people still insist they need a car. People will give any excuse to use their car. It’s like cocain.

    Also, here Uber is only available in major cities where it’s competing with public transit anyway. AFAIK you can’t take an Uber to a small town or a rural road.

    EDIT: Also, most people DO live in a city anyway. And they still have excuses to use a car.

    Today, some 56% of the world’s population – 4.4 billion inhabitants – live in cities.




  • That’s excellent for their clients. I’m guessing it set a precedent and the industry stopped trying anything else.

    I didn’t follow the most recent developments here in Canada but AFAIK, a decade ago the industry tried to sue individuals that were “pirating”, and lost because they couldn’t proof that an IP could be associated with a single person, or something like that. Then the industry pretty much stopped trying to sue individuals from that point. They still send the threatening letters, but they don’t do anything else because past experiences with our courts didn’t go well for them.

    Of course, there is a very very slim chance that the industry will try to sue a few individuals to scare others and create a new precedent, but it’s going to be a civil suit because it’s not even criminal here.






  • If you own your music, you can have it in a digital format and copy it somewhere else.

    I’m an old millennial that started with dial-up and downloaded MP3s from IRC/Napster/Kazaa/torrents.

    Eventually I started to buy what I could on CD then ripped them, then bought MP3s when possible. Otherwise I don’t mind using yt-dlp.

    Those MP3s have been played by a portable CD player, then a Samsung MP3 player, then 3 or 4 phones. I’m still playing that collection on my actual phone, using Poweramp.

    The device that plays the files may not last but you can certainly copy those elsewhere and do what you want with them, for as long as you want.


  • I work in the tech support field and Microsoft is making me want to quit and find a work that doesn’t involve using Teams. I’ve never liked them very much and been a Linux user for over 20 years, but I still have to deal with them for work. However they’re becoming increasingly difficult to tolerate.

    They really really want Windows users to have a Microsoft account. I avoid that and prefer local accounts. But Microsoft likes to link my local account with my Microsoft account anyway, because I need to give it to them to play Minecraft on Windows. So now even if I didn’t want to, my Windows account is showing the picture of my Microsoft/Windows Gaming account profile because I must have passed over a box to uncheck somewhere while logging into Windows Gaming to play Minecraft… mildly infuriating Microsoft.

    I used a personal laptop for work a few times and accidentally connected my OneDrive to my corporate account. Again, I must have misunderstood the configuration and login process because it synced (more like moved) all my personal files on my work’s OneDrive. Mildly infuriating Microsoft.

    Same personal laptop used for work sometimes. I use Edge specifically to separate work from personal browsing and somehow, again, I logged in somewhere with my work account and it synced all my personal browsing history and saved passwords from a different browser, into my “Edge for business” online thigny. So when I was using Edge at work, on my work computer, it was suggesting me logins and passwords from my personal browser that I use on different computers. Mildly infuriating Microsoft.

    Teams, OneDrive, Edge for business, their subscription model, forcing Microsoft accounts… individually they are mildly infuriating but combined together, let’s say it’s a powerful generator of rolling eyes.