Previous account: https://lemm.ee/u/Thymos
What’s also frustrating is “al” is a word in Dutch, meaning although or everything. It’s often used at the start of a sentence, thus capitalised and indistinguishable from AI. After reading too much about A.I., which is unavoidable nowadays, it messes with reading everything, because every now and then a sentence starts with “al” and your brain messes up and you have to go back.
Oh, is this why even opening folders in windows is so slow? Explorer at my work computer shows a message like “still working” for multiple seconds before showing something like 12 files. It’s really shitty.
From The Royal Tenenbaums:
“Why did you specifically have to point out I’m not a genius?”
“I just don’t use that word very lightly.”
It seems like they’ll do the exact opposite. The EU is preparing a change to the GDPR to exclude A.I. purposes and the commission has agreed to adopt American car safety standards (which are way lower) during the tariff negotiations.
I always thought it was a made up name too, but apparently it’s an archaic Dutch name. German version is Jost, which I imagine sounds like the Dutch version Joost, which is fairly common (I now one).
The English version is Joyce, which became a female name, which could explain why they didn’t want to use that and chose Jonathan instead. Maybe other languages just followed that choice? I don’t know. I much prefer Jodocus though.
Yeah, he is called that in Dutch as well. I got the English name from the Dutch page, but there’s no source mentioned.
Oh, I copied the English name from Wikipedia, suppose that’s wrong then.
It really is. I wish I could rewatch it, but it’s not on anymore unfortunately.
Growing up I really loved the animated series Alfred Jonathan Quack or Alfred Kvakk in Norwegian. It’s about a duck, his farther (I think) is a mole and the antagonist is a nazi-styled crow called Dolf. My favourite episode was about this island they visited which turned out to be the shell of this gigantic turtle.
Another favourite was The World of David the Gnome. It’s about a gnome who lives in or under a tree and has all sorts of adventures with animals. The books it’s based on are also great, I still have them.
I don’t know if you can still find these series since they’re pretty old.
Bon Jovi. Apparently they’re not a one hit wonder.
Sorry, can’t help you there. There’s nothing less funny than explaining jokes, except maybe this joke…
Dutch: Er liep een man in de woestijn en die vond een kameel, maar de kameel vond van niet.
English: A man was walking in the desert and he found a camel, but the camel found he hadn’t.
I don’t know, maybe it works in English too.
It’s from a TV commercial, really annoying, with four guys sitting around a table talking about how cheap the hotel they’re at is. One guy says something like “yeah, only 300 bucks” and the others start laughing and repeating “you didn’t check trivao?”
Not sent but spoken on the phone.
I worked for the tax services on the phone and received a call from a woman who needed to pay back some money, more than she could afford. Before she spoke to me she had been given advice by someone from the tax office she had met in person and they had told her she wouldn’t need to pay back anything. This was wrong, but we were not allowed to say that someone from the tax office made a mistake, even if it was obviously so.
She blamed me, personally, for making her pay back the money and then threatened to kill me. So I guess a death threat for fixing someone else’s fuck up is the stupidest reason yet.
From what I’ve read there’s a way to export a list of installed packages (apps) and import them into the package manager again, but I’ve never tried it. Different distros have different package managers though, so that might not work. And even if they have the same package manager some distros name the package differently, so yeah. I don’t usually switch distros, but if I did, I would definitely start afresh.
Thanks, that’s good to know! If I do ever decide to release an app, I’ll definitely look into this.
This is something I worry about all the time as well, especially since I’ve started to learn how to code and experienced how easy it is to mess up and send a list with all registered users to everyone opening a page. (This was in a test environment.)
As a user, there is no proper way I know of to verify an app’s security. Most apps are closed source, but even if you could view the code, what would you look for?
Both Apple and Google have a verification process for apps that are published in their app stores, but if these worked, we wouldn’t see this happening.
There are academic researchers working on apps and privacy as well, but it’s not like you can ask them for a report on an app you’re thinking of installing.
I think it basically comes down to trust. Check if a developer has messed up in the past and how they dealt with that, that sort of stuff. And for dating apps there is this interesting article: https://www.privacyguides.org/articles/2025/06/24/queer-dating-apps-beware-who-you-trust/#reducing-the-risks-when-using-dating-apps
It’s a long read (haven’t fully read it myself yet) and it paints a bleak picture, but that’s the world we live in today.
From the article: “Even after completing the tasks with AI, the developers believed that they had decreased task times by 20%. But the study found that using AI did the opposite: it increased task completion time by 19%.”
I’m not saying you didn’t save time, but it’s remarkable that the research shows that this perception can be false.
Oh boy, there is political drama here in the Netherlands right now.
The most right wing party in the coalition stepped out of the government because the other parties refused to sign its “strictest immigration policy ever”, so we’re heading towards elections again. Meanwhile parliament approved a law making being an illegal resident or helping one a crime. It needs to pass through the senate yet, but still. The minister of agriculture was found by a judge to abuse her power to obstruct freedom of information. There’s still no plan to solve the nitrogen pollution crisis, leading to building projects being on hold throughout the country. Against their promise of not drilling for gas in the northern province of Groningen anymore they’ve allowed it again, leading to more earthquakes. A singer was accused of antisemitism by politicians because he refused to play at a gig that had posters promoting Zionism, which led to him having to flee the country with his family because of death threats. Don’t speak out against Israel here either. There were border patrols done by a group of “activists” looking for illegals (“we found no brown people or anyone looking like that” they said), which were small and luckily stopped, but still. Then there are the government cuts in all social sectors, killing all services slowly over the years. Public transport, education, healthcare, municipal services, welfare, it’s all going downhill. And while the government still has to pay back thousands of parents it had wrongly accused of daycare fraud, the next screw-up was discovered a few months ago and they now also have to pay thousands of people on welfare for being sick because they had underpaid them for years.
The election campaign is probably gonna be a bunch of screaming matches about immigrants and refugees and name calling again even though there are far more pressing issues going on. It’s not as fascist here as it is in the US yet, but that’s only because we have a more reasonable electoral system.
Someone like @kimvsparrentak@eupolicy.social maybe? I don’t know if she’s a member of the technology committee, but she does work on tech issues.