Okay. I could spend hours and hours criticising GNOME for a lot of things, but this is not one of them. It is not removing functionality, as the article implies; as others here highlighted, it’s simply changing a default. That’s completely fine.

No need to apologise - you didn’t come off as a pedant, and the stuff you said is completely relevant.

Plus as I mentioned my German isn’t exactly stellar, and I only realised there was an English audio after @[email protected] pointed it out. That increases the odds I got something wrong, by quite a bit.

Thank you for pointing out corrections and clarifications. (I fixed the party’s name.)

I called it a “spiritual successor” because it’s basically the same right “appeal” to the masses, but I’m aware it isn’t a direct successor to the National Socialist Party. If I understood its history correctly, the process AfD went through is similar to the one of the Lega Nord, in Italy: the party starts gathering people for one cause (for AfD it was euroscepticism, for LN it was independence), but internal composition changes and so does the ideology, going further and further onto the right.

That [lower income people are easier to rally into supporting fascism] is a simplification.

Yup, I’m aware. Or rather, a generalisation, that applies better elsewhere — the trashing of their companies is zbs rather specific to East Germany, but elsewhere you still see fascists trying to gather support from poorer demographics (e.g. rural Southerners in USA, Protestants in Brazil, etc.) I love that you went into the specifics though, this is actually important to contextualise it.

I couldn’t find English subtitles, but here’s some quick rundown, it’s partially from the video and partially from info I got about the topic from elsewhere. Discretion is advised, my German is getting really shitty over the years (and it was never good to begin with).

They’re talking about the spiritual successor of the Nazi party in Germany, called Alternative für Deutschland (AfD). Currently it got ~1/7 of the German parliament, it’s specially popular in Eastern Germany (lower income people are easier to rally into supporting a fascist party by using immigrants as scapegoat for their poverty), and it’s getting stronger.

Currently the party is legalised but people like those two are [IMO rightfully] trying to get it banned as anticonstitutional. And at this rate the AfD being a problem isn’t just a theoretical matter, they’re already threatening and killing people, right-wing violence is exploding there acc. to the video. Check the graphs around 6:40 and you’ll see (Left: criminality split by political ideology; right: criminality in comparison with the share of the parliament the AfD has).

So they’re gathering evidence of all that shit, and pressing politicians to ban the bloody party. There’s a site gathering all this evidence, afd-verbot.de. They’re also using the fact property rights are non-negotiable in Germany to rent the property facing the AfD hall and doing stuff like projecting Hitler’s Young into the AfD hall, since a lot of the AfD modus operandi is to say “nooo~ we walk like ducks, quack like ducks, do salutes like ducks, but we are no ducks”.

Later on they talk on how fascism’s path to power goes through conservatives, so in order for the AfD to seize power it’d need a coalition with the CDU (Christian Democratic Union), and they’re trying to prevent this. Then they mention a regional CDU president, Walter Lübcke (Hesse); he was strongly opposed to the AfD, and got killed by them, so they’re trying to build a memorial to him etc. to warn against a conservative/fascist alliance.

Comments linked this TikTok video. Here are a few key points from the video, generated by artificial intelligence organic stupidity:

• If you aren’t careful, OneDrive will spontaneously delete all your computer files, without warning you in plain language beforehand. No confirmation, pop-up or anything.
• You’ll notice the bandwidth waste, then look up how to stop it, then as you turn OneDrive off everything in your computer is gone, deleted by Microsoft. Then you’re forced to redownload all your data back into your computer.
• When you eventually get your files back, and try to delete the OneDrive copies, the local copies also get deleted. The only way to avoid this is following detailed tutorials.
• The issue is that people are familiar with cloud backup, so they assume it’s what OneDrive is. But it isn’t; the copy within OneDrive is the primary version, and when you work on files in your local machine, it treats them as temporarily accessing those files.

Here’s my take. It’s based on the video, given I don’t use OneDrive (or Windows).

If you trust Google, Amazon, Facebook, Apple or Microsoft, then you’re a moron. I understand sometimes you need to use their services and/or software, in this case Windows, but be aware you can’t trust your own machine if your OS is Windows.

As such, backups are essential. And by backups I mean offline copies, under your complete control. “The cloud” is just someone else’s computer, dammit, once they deny you access the copy is gone.

Odds are Microsoft will never fix this OneDrive mess. It doesn’t look poorly designed; it looks perfectly designed, in a way that is hostile towards the user. I think Microsoft’s idea is to force users to incorrectly believe they need a paid OneDrive subscription, because otherwise they won’t be able to store their files. Rain falls down, fire is hot, and your files are in OneDrive, simple uh.

It’ll likely get worse over time as they refine the design further. Odds are they’re doing everything possible while barely avoiding OD to be classified as plain ransomware.

Some users here are talking about revkas PEBKAC (problem exists between keyboard and chair = problem is the user). Personally I wouldn’t say so; users should not be blamed for not being tech-savvy, when the software is made by hostile clowns actively trying to mislead them.

From a link within the page:

Restoring democracy in Venezuela must respect its people’s will, EU countries say

I wonder if someone said the same regarding the Nazi invasion of Poland in 1939.

I believe the cockroaches invaded Venezuela as “testing grounds” of sorts, but the goal is to invade somewhere else:

• It’s a small and politically isolated country. Even “centrist” (i.e. right-wing, but LARPing as fair) governments controlling nearby territories, like Brazil*, don’t want to deal with it. China gave up because of the corruption.
• The local population understandably hates Maduro, so the odds they’ll spread roach poison is lower.
• Nothing fucking works properly here in Latin America, so reactions are delayed.
• Trump is basically doublethinking all the global warming issue: “no, it doesn’r exis!” on one side, but beelining for countries that would become more livable in a warmer world. Venezuela simply doesn’t fit the bill here.

But unlike the article, I believe the roaches will try to infest Canada next, not Greenland. Greenland, thus Denmark, thus EU, is like poking a wasp nest. The roaches would need a very specific context to try overtaking it, probably in coordination with Putler.

* yes, I’m saying it. PT is right-wing LARPing as centre-left. It doesn’t fucking matter if the party’s name has to do with labourism, policies are pretty much neoliberal. No wonders they snuggled so comfortably alongside PSDB, another party with a misleading name. The only reason this crap is in power is that it’s less worse than literal fascists.

Although not from Venezuela, I’m from South America. I’ve been avoiding to talk about this topic here because, once I do, the sheer amount of slurs and dehumanisation I’m going to voice will be nasty. And it’ll attack people who are not to blame for this.

I don’t know. I’ll say what I think.

“Elegance” is a symptom that the structure of the text allows the text to convey lots of information, while still keeping the cognitive load from that information under control. In other words: pretty text = structured text = text that is meaningfully informative and easy to digest.

Dissecting the examples shows it.

An ice cube melts with quiet discipline, surrendering its edges before its core, shaping the drink long before flavor has a chance to speak. Even in something so small, form decides outcome.

At least for me, the second sentence sounds ugly — because the first sentence sets up a metaphor (“everything has human-like attributes”), but the second one doesn’t use it. But note how the first sentence is crammed with information: the edges of ice melt first, this is quick enough to happen before it impacts the flavour of a drink, and its consistency is akin to the behaviour of a disciplined person.

Climate change is killing people. I am upset when people die. I want polar bears to live longer.

This is not meaningless. It’s shallow — devoid of info the reader is likely to benefit from. The first sentence is such a basic and well-known truth that the reader will either say “no shit” or deny it; while the other two talk about things that don’t matter, the author’s personal attitude towards events.

Are we incapable of making mental breakthroughs if the text does not give us a hint of sophistication? Presented a meaningful topic, we should not need linguistic beauty to care. Yet we do.

Based on what I said above, I think this rhetorical question is going the wrong way. The “sophistication” / “beauty” itself doesn’t matter, but it shows something that matters (structure). The lack of such structure makes mental breakthroughs less likely.

Is tradition what binds us to painstaking formality when writing an email? If the conventions of emailing vanished overnight, would I write “wassuh Karen, may you give me an extension on the project, thanks” and hit send? Or would the lack of polish itself feel like a violation, independent of the request?

That formality would show “this is a formal conversation, thus there’s some implicit distance between you and me, and I expect this distance to be respected”; or “this is a formal conversation, I acknowledge the distance between both of us, and I’m respecting it”. It isn’t empty babble.

This essay is half self-disgust, at how easily I am seduced by beautiful nonsense, and half a complaint against a culture that mistakes elegance for truth.

Stop hating yourself, author. You’re seduced by something that actually matters.

And while the connection between elegance and truth is by no means direct, there is one.

Elegance is makeup that hides the scars of battle. // Sometimes it hides the battle entirely.

It’s the opposite: elegance is the zoom that makes you focus on the battle.

[inb4 I know I write ugly in English. Can’t genuinely say I care.]

What I’m going to say here is mostly how I do things. It is not the only True Way® to do things, nor I’m pretending it is, I just think it might be good reference for some people.

Also, all software I’ll mention is Linux software. I have no idea on Windows or Mac equivalents.

My strategy regarding music boils down to four steps: collect, standardise, share/access

1 - collect

From CDs/DVDs I had lying around, YouTube (discouraged; quality is often meh), torrents (often great quality, and full discographies!), whatever. Remember: if paying is not owning, piracy is not theft.

Useful software to do so:

• abcde - it’s command-line but it does it job: to rip off CDs
• transmission-gtk - a simple GUI-based torrent client
• Video Download Helper - Firefox extension, useful to download tracks from videos online, already in MP3.

2 - standardise

I like to convert everything into high quality MP3, because even a toaster runs MP3 files. Other formats you’ll find are

• FLAC - lossless, but takes huge amounts of space. I’m not going to pretend I can hear the difference between 320kbps MP3 and FLAC.
• OGG Vorbis - I’d love to use it, if compatibility wasn’t tricky.
• BIN/CUE - urgh… those are a pain, because all tracks get lumped into the same pair of files.

After converting the files, I check their tags, and fix them as needed: artist, track name, album name etc. should be all present and consistent. Ah, if there’s no album art I download it from the internet and add it. It’s a lot of work but it pays off, the result is nicer and I get less headaches later on.

Useful software to do this:

• SoundKonverter - it converts sound. Wow. But it does a damn great job.
• easytag - to fix MP3 tags

3 - organise

Repeat with me: “don’t be smart, be predictable”. Follow whatever organisation scheme you feel comfortable with, but it needs to be consistent and make sense for you. Ah, resist the temptation to organise tracks by genre; I tried it and it gets messy really fast, human art laughs at your attempts to box it.

I work well with hierarchies, and I like listening to full albums, so I use the directory structure and filenames to organise them. Like this:

• música/⟨artist⟩/⟨album year⟩ - ⟨album name⟩[ - ⟨album number⟩]/⟨track number⟩ - ⟨track name⟩.[extension]

Album number is only added when necessary.

Albums with multiple artists can get a bit tricky. If it’s just a pair of artists co-creating an album, I create an ⟨artist⟩ folder for the pair and that’s it. But if there’s an artist per track or something like this, I dump them into música/AADCTS. “AADCTS” is an acronym for “aleatório, artista desconhecido, trilha sonora” (random, unknown artist, soundtrack), I use it for the sake of the collation order. So, for example:

• música/Kayah, Bregović/1999 - Kayah i Bregović/02 - To nie ptak.mp3
• música/AADCTS/1994 - The Glory of Gershwin/15 - Somebody Loves Me.mp3

Note the artist name (Meatloaf) is missing from the path of the second track. But it’s present in the tags. Remember when I said standardisation saves you headaches later on?

Different writing systems can get a bit tricky, too. My approach depends on if I can read it or not:

• música/Ария/2006 - Армагеддон/05 - Мессия.mp3 (I can read Cyrillic)
• música/Onmyo-Za/2011 - Kishi Bojin/03 - Ubugi.mp3 (I don’t read kanji yet)

The mess people do with Japanese transliteration drives me crazy, and it itches me to convert everything into Kunrei-shiki. But I’m not fixing it, perfect is enemy of good.

“But what about library software?” — personally? I hate those. But if you like them, just be extra cautious with your tags; otherwise the library software will do dumb stuff like showing “Camisa De Vênus”, “Camisa De Venus” and “CAMISA DE VENUS” as three separated artists, and refusing to play the whole album because of that.

4 - share/access

Part of the sharing is seeding whatever I’ve downloaded. I make sure to keep the files, as I downloaded them, available for others for at least two weeks. If I need to convert files I do so separately.

Additionally, my files are also shared across my SMB network, read only, with anonymous login. That means I can access them from anywhere at home — and my guests too. (My BIL often uses this.)

Since I use MP3 usually I don’t need to install additional software in my devices, but if you’re using something like OGG Vorbis you might need to do so. VLC is typically enough for me.

For some people, it might be also useful to create a few playlists, in .m3u or a similar format. How you organise them is up to you, but if I were to do so I’d probably create some directory just for them.

Yes, prompting an LLM to phrase it is a good idea. Just be careful if the LLM you’re using isn’t “dialling home”, I’d definitively not trust OpenAI/Anthropic/Google/etc.

It’s possible. I’d argue it’s less effective than it looks like, but you’re right, at least some would do it.

I’d certainly do the same if I were in that position.

Speaking on that. It’s a bit off-topic, but PSA:

In case anyone here is ever in a position that you need to publish something anonymously, pay close attention to your own writing style. This is essential to hide your identity; we leak a lot of info about ourselves not just by what we write, but how we do it: vocab, spelling, grammar, even discourse structure. Here are some good albeit slightly sensationalised examples of that.

Also, keep it as short as reasonably possible; the more you write, the more you tell others who you are.

I wish I saw this guide before messing with my anime collection. I mostly did three things when messing with the video files:

1. Resize from 1080p to 720p. I actually tested it, and it reduced file sizes quite a bit.
2. Rencode (if necessary) into H.265/HEVC.
3. Remove non-Japanese audio tracks, and most subtitle tracks (only full subs in IT/PT/EN left).

…granted the third one wasn’t to reduce size, it was because it’s annoying when VLC or some other software picks the wrong sub track.

For comparison:

Freshly downloaded, 1080p. 314MiB.

Resized file, 720p. 91MiB.

I feel like I reached a decent compromise, specially given my really poor sight: I can barely notice the difference, but now I can cram ~four times more anime episodes into my hard disk. But if I knew about this guide, it would be probably better, and I would not have needed so much trial-and-error to reach decent results.

(And yes, I had to use the same scene as the guide for my own example. Fullmetal Alchemist: Brotherhood, ep02, around 8:15.)

“I put in my two weeks yesterday” = “I submitted my resignation letter in the 1st of January”. Any delivery business that fits what they said, and concerned about NDA violations, could use this info to narrow down the list of potential suspects.

It could easily be aabout any food app anywhere in the world.

There are plenty clues around the text that he’s from USA. You could even narrow it down further to general area + age range.

I’d love to dig further into this due to linguistic curiosity, but in the chance the text is genuine, I’d rather not, I’d be potentially helping a corpo against a worker.

It looks fishy to me because they claim to be “under a massive NDA”, while leaking info. In that situation, you’d probably avoid mentioning any fluff that would help the business to identify you. I’m not sure though; it’s also possible they genuinely give no fucks about it.

TL;DR: universal, human readable, no special software required, small.

I gotta agree with the author; sometimes you do need fancier text, but often you don’t, and the simplicity pays off.

The two weeks thing makes me think it’s fiction, but I don’t have grounds to claim it is fiction. It doesn’t really matter — the fact it sounds believable already shows how shitty things are in the 2026 world.

The comments in both Reddit and “Reddit LARPing as H4x0rz” are making me cringe.

Grammar of broken is funny part.

Title: Happy New Thursday
[Powerpuff Shinji] Hello?
[Misato] Shinji, you must pilot the EVA
[Powerpuff Shinji turns phone off]

Yeah, because holier than thou behaviour would totally make someone say “if I were to do the same, I also expect others to call me out.”, right? …right?

…look, I don’t really care if you block me or not, but please do everyone else a favour and shut up, okay. There’s Twitter, Reddit and Facebook for people like you, you’d feel at home in any of them.