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Cake day: July 5th, 2023

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  • The issue is that as someone already mentioned i doubt something like that was ever truly on the table.

    I think you can’t give assurances like that in a vacuum. If a nation e.g. the US would grant them, they’d only do so while simultaniously building up a physical presence in the territory and possibly also do deeper integrations military wise. You wouldn’t give such strong assurances while weakening your own ability to act on them.

    For Russia that would have never been acceptable.


  • Since I see this claim constantly: where in the Budapest memorandum did they promise protection?

    Looking at the Wikipedia summary nowhere does anyone give security assurances similar to NATO article 5 or the even stronger worded mutual defense clause article 42 TEU of the EU. The closest it comes to is in the fourth point, but that is only in the case of nuclear weapons being used. Which obviously hasn’t happened yet. Beyond that it is just a promise not to attack, which Russia has broken, but every other singator has kept. And as far as I can see it does not contain anything that compells others to act on someone else’s breach.


  • (disclaimer that this is purely my impression from what i’ve seen mentioned online, not firsthand knowledge)

    Which isn’t necessarily mutually exclusive. I was under the impression that the problems have more to do with high workloads and work environments that are chronically understaffed, not necessarily because of low salaries. Not claiming that all nurses are payed well, but it seems like that at least in the US there is a somewhat reasonable path to making good money (assuming you are willing to switch jobs and maybe continue to get sought after qualifications along the way).





  • I actually think all the posts talking about the size of communities, amount of memes on the frontpage and so on are wrong, since those will naturally change over time and are not fixed.

    Every platform will see changes in their user base to some degree. Reddit now is very different to Reddit 10 years ago. The same thing will happen to Lemmy: If growth continues we will see more engagement in niche communities, but also more low effort posts and reposts.

    Considering it doesn’t do anything fundamentally different to reddit in the way of being a content aggregator with comment section it will be a similar experience. It would be different if it e.g. had a function to make older posts resurface and stay relevant longer to foster longer conversations, or structure comments differently since right now the further down a chain you go, the less people will engage with it.


    Even if the average user doesn’t care about open source or federation, they’ll still benefit (and suffer) from the consequences.

    On a centralised platform like Reddit you are beholden to their will for better or worse, and incentives might change over time such in their case with taking investor money and going public. This can have consequences such as forcing out third party software (one of the events that brought a lot of people here), but also censoring specific content or taking away powers from moderators.

    There are downsides to it, since smaller, less professionally run instances might disappear at some point or have less reliability. But The upside is the option to choose and the resilience that should things change at one instance/community, you can switch without having to leave the whole ecosystem. And for that you do not have to be a moderator or volunteer

    The existence of different instances also to some degree helps identify users to some degree, the obvious choice being political instances like hexbear.


    The average user is not looking for NSFW

    That’s an assumption i’ll challenge. Looking at the amount of porn on the internet, the average person most definitely is looking for it. But that is probably a bit offtopic.


  • Is YouTube doing it with small creators actually in mind? Who knows, other than them?

    I am pretty confident in guessing that they are not doing it for selfless reasons. Imo the reason is that the less information they give the user, the more you are beholden to the algorithm choosing for you.

    But depending how they hide it it actually might not just be users, but also companies that e.g. buy ads from them. The less information they get, the more they need to trust whatever metric google offers them


  • I recently read a plausible reason that I hadn’t thought of yet:

    Apple would need to include a specific flexible cable rated for continuous movement with the mouse. If the port was in the regular spot, then people would ofc also use it wired at times. However if buyers would use regular charging cables, then the experience would both be worse and the cables might get damaged over time from bending.

    I still think the main reason is simply that they value form over function, otherwise the shape would be more ergonomic, but it’s another interesting factor to consider.



  • That was my initial thought aswell, but after thinking about it I changed my opinion to preferring the simple majority.

    Imo one of the deciding factors is how you think about it. Do you see it as a choice between two conscious actions (acceptance or active rejection), or is only the “yes” vote an active choice and “no” something of a “natural” state?

    Also if you set hurdles for change to high, then you are potentially hindering progress and systematically favoring conservatism. Which isn’t always bad, but the status quo and how things were done in the past aren’t always sustainable and worth the advantage.




  • Well i aswell hope that this isn’t just my bias speaking :)

    Unlike France or GB, which recently had elections substantially changing majorities, here in Germany it’s still the exact same people in charge since the start of this war. With the only major change being the defense minister, and that was for the better. So the people deciding here are the same that (based on this article) doubled this years support budget. And as far as i am aware there really hasn’t been any major event that would have shifted the sentiment in foreign politics from what we’ve experienced until now.

    On the side of internal politics as mentioned it is basically a self-inflicted struggle to balance the budget and limit new debt. Because for some reason we chose to write that into our constitution, restraining our options. So everyone is fighting for their share and by the looks the winners are the usual: more money to secure pensions for old people and the automotive industry. While not only the budget for Ukraine is on the chopping block, but also other stuff like a reform of welfare for children or infrastructure projects for railroads.

    Might sound bad, but it’s nothing really new and so far lack of funds hasn’t been an issue delaying German support. So i don’t expect it to be going forward either. We’ll just keep moving in lockstep with what others provide, slowly build out capacity and react to new developments. Which would be no change to how we’ve seem to have handled it so far, and not like “the slashing the budget by half” would imply.

    And as mentioned above i am sure there are plenty of additional ways to support Ukraine that don’t hinge on the budget. Like telling Ukraine to direcly purchase through the manufacturers and giving security assurances for loans. Might be a worse deal on paper for Ukraine, but in the short/medium term wouldn’t make a practical difference. And things can get sorted later.


    But regardless of how this plays out we won’t have any type of deadlock like the one delaying US aid until recently. And the largest party in the opposition is also in favor of supporting Ukraine, despite taking any opportunity to take shots at whatever the governing parties decide.


  • Personally as a German. while disappointing at facevalue, i wouldn’t read too much into it in respect to any shifts in the commitment to supporting Ukraine (but i might also be wrong here).

    To me this very much is an internal self-inflicted struggle about balancing budgets and we’ll only be able to tell whether it actually affected things in retrospect (if it’s even possible).

    In the end maybe more purchases will be directed through EU funds (of which Germany pays a substantial share) or instead of direct aid things are financed through low interest rate loans (that later might even get forgiven). Or you have some other kind of schemes where aid indirectly goes towards Ukraine.

    And who knows how the conflict will change, promting adjustments in deliveries. Like the recent airstrikes probably leading towards more air defense systems being delivered than originally anticipated (with a single Patriot system being worth as much as 1 billion if i understand it correctly)




  • HDR vs no HDR makes a big difference in colours to me. And if you compare compressed low Bitrate footage vs higher Bitrate there will often be artifacts or color banding, particularly in darker scenes or wherever you have gradients.

    It ofc also depends on what device you are watching it on. But I would say that yes if you have a movie (made up example) that is compressed to 5gb total size vs 25gb vs 70gb for the uncompressed Blu-ray quality, then the first jump will be a very noticeable difference assuming you have capable hardware. Whereas the second one will be much much less noticeable and also come with other drawbacks that need to weighted off, e.g. storage requirements.