Yeah, crippling your website in order to force users to download an app that may be able to access for of a user's data, is a clear sign that there are people you don't want to do business with.

There are several sites I use regularly for which I refuse to install the app. There are a lot more sites that I visit only occasionally because someone links to it, and that site immediately wants me to download the app and refuses to show me the content that was linked to. Fuck off with that.

Yeah, *asterisks* for italic has always felt wrong to me. I can understand underscores if slashes cause confusion with file paths.

*bold* and _italic_ would have been better.

I agree that using *asterisks* just feels wrong for italics, and are much better suited for bold. However, surely the _underscore_ is just perfect to visually indicate underlining?

As for /slashes/, which would visually be perfect for italics, the only reason they conflict between italics and filepaths is the fact that in both cases they are expected to be used at the beginning and end of a word. Maybe using an unnatural placement of )parentheses( could have worked as a non-conflicting indicator of italics.

_underscore_ for italics conflicts with most identifiers in most languages.

Markdown was created in an era before the web had easily used components for structural syntax highlighting (tree-sitter) and where reliance on regex-based approaches was more common.

> Maybe using an unnatural placement of )parentheses( could have worked as a non-conflicting indicator of italics.

Using different delimiter for opening and closing is a good idea on its own, too. I think it makes parsing simpler and unambiguous wrt nesting.

I've imagined something like this:

  `(monospace)
  _(underline)
  /(italics)
  ~(overstrike)

Probably looks a bit more distracting, though.

Like Typst does ;-)

Why would that not be a bad sign? The US declared victory several times, but clearly Iran still has plenty of firepower to shoot down planes, and probably also ships in the Strait. If the US is incapable of preventing Iran from shooting ships and planes, how do they intend to win this?

It's absolutely a bad sign. One among many.

At the moment carbon is still getting subsidizes for 100 billion per year. I'd love it if they taxed it by that amount.

They really should end fuel subsidies. We're paying taxes to promote fuel use. That's a really bad use of our taxes. (Some are apparently already being phased out, but others are not, from what I understand, and they've gone up dramatically in the past couple of years.)

As for digital rules, the EU should definitely stand firm and invest in its own tech sector, instead of caving to the US. Same with everything else where our standards are higher than theirs (food, human rights).

There are no subsidies, gas and diesel are the most expensive in the world, and most of the cost is taxes. But apparently, for the EU politicians, that is still too cheap, so they want even more taxes on top of that.

> Notably, more than 60% of all fossil fuel subsidies granted in 2023 were spent in three countries: Germany (EUR 41 billion), Poland (EUR 16 billion), and France (EUR 15 billion).

This is another one of those cases where people say "Europe" when meaning something much more country specific.

I can't find any detailed breakdown of this; I'm guessing it's something to do with coal mining in Germany?

France has absolutely no excuse, though. Largest nuclear power generation in Europe and subsidizing fossil fuels? I bet it's something to do with farming.

Your bet is right, but it's based on a misunderstanding. Those are not real subsidies, those are tax exemption on farmers, fishermen, trucker and traveling nurses.

And airplanes. They also pay no fuel tax, as far as I'm aware. Or at least it's rare; it requires bilateral agreements to tax fuel.

You are thinking too logically. In EU fuel is expensive because it’s heavily taxed AND there are a lot of fuel subsidies.

Or to quote an old TV show: Hacker: One of your officials pays farmers to produce surplus food, while on the same floor, the next office is paying them to destroy the surpluses. Maurice: That is not true! Hacker: No? Maurice: He is not in the next office, not even on the same floor!

At least in France, the fuel 'subsidies' are not real subsidies, but tax exemption for different kind of people: farmers, truckers, fishermen and private nurses (I don't have a good translation, basically health workers who go directly to patients homes instead of working at a clinic or hospital). There was also a one time relief for people with fuel heating who earn less than 40k (I'm simplifying) in 2022 because of the Russian war, but it was extremely limited.

Maybe next time you imply my government is incompetent on a specific subject, do your research first. It is incompetent on a lot, don't get me wrong, but no one here need more disinformation hidden as a quip.

I didn't even mention France, but if you insist:

I am using Fossil Fuel Support dataset from OECD. Latest available year is 2024: Specifically for petroleum there were 5228 million euros in tax exemptions and 586 million euros in direct budgetary transfer. For all fossil fuels there were 5 656 million in tax exemptions and 2579 million in direct budgetary transfers. So real, direct subsidies definitely exist.

In 2021 Europe provided $135 Billion in subsidies to the petroleum industry. A net increase of about 30% from 2015.

https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/fossil-fuel-subsidies-per...

Why is JavaScript running in a page even allowed to know what extensions I have? Is this also what sites use to see I've got an ad blocker?

Just run everything in a safe environment that it can't look out of.

The page isn't allowed to know what extensions you have, instead LinkedIn is looking for various evidence that extensions are installed, like if an extension was to create a specific html element, LinkedIn could look for evidence of that element being there.

Since the extensions are running on the same page as LinkedIn (some of them are explicitly modifying the LinkedIn the website) it's impossible to sandbox them so that linked in can't see evidence of them. And yes this is how a site knows you have an ad blocker is installed.

Page can know what your chrome extensions are, even when your extensions don't interact with the site, by fetching `web_accessible_resources`: https://browserleaks.com/chrome#web-accessible-resources-det... . uBO mitigates this partly by generating internal secret tokens for each request: https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock/tree/master/src/web_access... .

However, there are other proof of concept of another attack vector to bypass this by using timing difference when fetching those resources.

I help maintaining uBO's lists and I've seen one real world case doing this. It's a trash shortener site, and they use the `web_accessible_resources` method as one of their anti-adblock methods. Since it's a trash site, I didn't care much later.

Anti-cheat systems that rely on rootkit-style undermining of your OS will indeed not work on Linux.

Doesn't Cachy support all of the DEs? Use it to try them all. (I don't know how CachyOS handles it; EndeavourOS lets you pick the DE on login.

yeah, on install you select a window manager, I didn't bother trying any others, just opted to go to Debian instead

Unless it's a very limited nuclear war, it would probably destroy the world as we know it, but that's a vague and flexible concept. It would likely destroy countries, societies, our way of life. Many people would die, but humanity would survive.

Some countries might survive. If the war takes place on the northern hemisphere, the southern hemisphere might be much less affected.

I agree. My much more limited point was that we don't actually have enough nukes to glass the planet; but I could probably have made that more explicitly.

We have enough nukes to sterilise large areas of the planet.

But most of them are tac nukes, and they don't come with the support hardware needed to deliver them to large areas of the planet.

Reality is that Europe, Russia, the US, the Middle East, India, Pakistan, and parts of the Far East could have a really bad time.

But most of South America and Africa would likely survive with only economic and political damage rather than physical destruction.

Not sure sterilisation lasts long on earth: life re-claims sterilised areas.

See your favourite massive volcano outbreak, or look at the Chernobyl exclusion zone.

(The impact of the disaster at Chernobyl is much smaller in area than a nuclear explosion would be, of course. But life has re-conquered everything there.)

In any case, I largely agree!

It might be worth noting that the number of direct deaths caused by Chernobyl is very low (2 perhaps?). But there have been hundreds of thousands of birth defects in its wake.

The survivors of nuclear war would have a really bad time, but humanity would survive.

None of this is to suggest we should be careless about it; it would be a massive disaster. But not the end.

Most hunter-gatherer tribes had exactly that: time to just be. Their lives weren't governed by this rat race to always move up. Except for the harshest circumstances, they probably worked only 15 hours a week. Of course their play was partially training for that work, but I think in many ways, they lived more relaxing lives than we do.

Work, disease, etc only really became a thing with the agricultural revolution. It was great for population numbers, but is increasingly seen as bad for individuals. People lived shorter lives, had shorter bodies, and were more subject to disease after the agricultural revolution.

I mostly agree, but the whole worked only 15 hours a week stat is almost certainly not correct. It came from a paper that only counted time outside of camp as work, so time spent in camp processing food wasn't counted. The actual number of hours varies massively - seasonally and geographically - but probably closer to 30-40.

I'd bet that a lot of that in-camp work didn't feel excessively laborious when it was done while socialising within your group, and without a sense of "wish I was playing video games". Sitting around a camp fire now whittling away at something is more mucking around than chore.

Exactly. I don't think there really was a clear separation between work and not-work back then. It's just life. Consider wild animals: do they work?

Yeah pretty much, it’s a pretty tough to pinpoint what work actually is without paid labour.

Sure sitting around a campfire and whittling away at something now feels more like mucking about than chore, because it is. You don’t actually need whatever it is you’re whittling. It would probably be less relaxing if your survival depended on your handiwork.

I have friends who handweave clothes, blacksmith tools, and of course garden for food for their families.

The stakes are lower, but not the work level required, and they all do it for funzies, essentially.