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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: July 5th, 2023

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  • Yeah, I guess it depends on what kind of work. I thought that for demanding office stuff the 8gb RAM might end up mattering after all.

    But your $700 with warranty are an amazing deal that make this irrelevant. That really only leaves the single external monitor (without using workarounds) as downside.

    Where I am in Europe however I don’t think I could find the better specced models anywhere close to that price


  • Honestly agreed. For the majority of users that just do light office work and browsing it is a great piece of technology. Although i would say it is less about performance (because those people would be fine with even less) and more about build quality, battery life, fanless design and good screen.

    The one issue i have with it is the 256gb non-removable storage. More actually than the 8gb RAM, which tbh for many people is enough for casual use.

    I am still waiting for anyone not named apple to release a similarly priced fanless laptop with good build quality. With lunar lake it should finally be possible imo.





  • 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 am also from Germany and get payed for donating thrombocytes at my university hospital. The compensation is actually quite substantial imo at (up to) 75€ per session, which can be done every two weeks. The money is however mean to offset the time required, not the thrombocytes donated. So it is correlated to how long it takes.

    You get 15€ (?) for up to 15min (if they have to abort very early for some reason or at your first visit where they just draw blood to test), 50€ for up to 1h (which equals to 1 instead of 2 pack of thrombocytes, usually done at your first real donation or if you maybe dont have enough for 2 on this particular day), and 75€ for anything over 1h (which is the norm).

    Timewise the hospital is on the outskirts of the city, so most will have to travel a bit, then you have to fill out forms, have a quick talk with the doctor, and finally depending on your parameters it takes anywhere from ~55-70min to extract, during which you are tethered to a machine (which takes out some blood, then seperates out the thrombocytes with a centrifuge, pumps back the rest, and repeat).


    One could get philosophical about the topic, but from a practical perspective the money makes a lot of sense imo:

    • It costs them a lot of money to investigate new prospects, so you want reliable repeat donors

    • Each donation already has other costs associated with it. Like for example the kit used during extraction, the staff handling everything and so on. So even those 75€ are just one more expense among many, and from donation to usage probably vanish in the overall costs.

    • For the donor it is quite a substantial time commitment, especially when done regularly every two weeks. Unlike for example full blood donations you’d maybe do twice a year. And you should be reliable and not randomly cancel at the last second, so ideally it also has priority over some other things in your life.

    • the small amount of blood that remains inside the machine is sometimes used for other research (if you agree to it, which i do)

    From my own experience i can say that i might still do it without, but certainly not at the same frequency. And considering the time and effort required i don’t think anyone could be blamed for doing it less frequently without the incentive. So at least in this case it imo is a fair trade and net positive. Although it does also help that this is a university hospital that directly uses it themselves, rather than a for profit company.


  • Italy, a member of the G7, emerged as another opponent because of the large number of Italians living in Russia, diplomats said.

    Rome has argued that it would not be able to offer consulate services across Russia if the Kremlin responds with tit-for-tat bans on diplomatic movements.

    Its government also voiced support for maintaining “open diplomatic channels” with Moscow and there were other tactics to fight Russian intelligence agents, a diplomat said.

    Feels like you could have also included that part of the article. Because while the headline ofc isn’t technically wrong, it does imply that it is only Germany blocking the proposal. However the article itself also mentions Italy being against it (and who knows how the rest of the countries are leaning), including other reasons than just wanting to trade again. So it feels like they just wanna bash Germany specifically.

    A more neutral headline would e.g. be “Europe still divided about Czech proposal to limit movement of Russian diplomats to combat spie activities”.


    Personally i think as a layman it is kind of hard to judge who is right in this debate. My first thought would be that you know who you give those diplomat credentials to, so while they might be spies, at the same time it makes it easier to track them.

    The proposal of limiting them to only the specific country they are stationed in only makes sense to me, if it is a problem keeping track of them when they change countries (which would be a problem that should be fixed in general I guess).

    I do like the part with requiring a biometric passport, that seems like an easy enough and sensible requirement. But ofc who says that spies would come with Russian passports in the first place. Couldn’t they also come with passports from other contries like Kasachstan or Usbekistan for example?

    We also shouldn’t forget that we most certainly are doing the same with our diplomats. At least as far as spying goes, maybe not so much the sabotage part.