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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: July 11th, 2023

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  • It helps if you can treat it as a hobby. My partner’s hobby is music, which is a perfectly sensible thing to do in one’s spare time. I always feel a bit weird when people ask me what I do in my own spare time and my answer is basically fixing my shit, then pushing it just hard enough that it breaks again.

    To your question, the unfortunate reality is that those of us who care about privacy and software freedom are a small minority. Why overhaul your business model to suit us when they can continue to milk every other consumer out there who frankly doesn’t give a shit?

    Phones are, of course, the worst of all for this. People do great work developing FOSS solutions but it is an uphill struggle and I worry that the hill is getting steeper.



  • Repost bots (which repost contents from other sites) might be to blame for a lot of this. Or the fact that, because there are loads of (for example) World News communities, people will post the same links on multiple communities, but most people will only comment on one of the submissions. Which pushes the link-to-comment ratio up.

    Beyond that, it really depends on the community I think. I see far more of that when browsing All than when browsing Subscribed.




  • One limitation that games like Civ suffer from is that diplomacy is ultimately pretty shallow because there can only be one winner, so even when you’re building alliances or trading relationships it is generally to gain some temporary benefit until you are in a position to defeat your partner later on (whether militarily, scientifically, etc).

    What I would love to see is a multiplayer game like Civ but where each player has independent win conditions (so that a game could have multiple winners, or no winners). The condition could even just be to attain a certain level of happiness or wealth. And if you achieve that then you win even if other nations are bigger or stronger, and conversely if you don’t achieve it you lose even if you are the last nation standing. So decisions to go to war, or focus on technological development, or build alliances or trading relationships, etc, are driven by the wants and needs of your own people and not just a need to dominate others.




  • Other people have covered the main reasons, which are time and expense. I will just add:

    • Lawsuits are public, and a lot of dirty laundry can get aired. They have the potential to be embarrassing for both sides.

    • They are also stressful, particularly if you are cross-examined which must be an awful experience.

    • Finally, they are risky: even if you think you have a very solid case, there is always a significant chance that the judge will rule against you on the day.

    Basically litigation is a bad experience, whether you are plaintiff or defendant, corporate or individual, right or wrong. So both parties have a strong incentive to settle.


  • GnuCash user here. Have been using it for almost two years. I never even tried to get bank sync to work, I don’t think it works in Europe. But the process isn’t entirely manual - it usually just involves uploading bank statements. Many banks (or credit card providers, etc) will let you download statements as QIF or OFX files, which are supported by GnuCash. Those that don’t will usually at least let you download as CSV files which you can also import into GnuCash (and tell it which columns it needs to look at for transaction amounts, etc). GnuCash will then try categorise the transactions for you. The first few times you do it you’ll need to manually categories everything; after that it will get better at guessing where things should go but you’ll still need to review, and fill in the gaps.

    I usually set aside 30-45 minutes a week to do this will all my accounts (I have multiple bank accounts, credit cards, brokerage accounts etc). If I do it weekly it rarely takes much longer than half an hour. Though I’ve been quite neglectful recently and probably have about a month of transactions to add which will be a bit of a pain.


  • sol@lemm.eetoNo Stupid Questions@lemmy.worldWhy GitHub?
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    1 year ago

    UI and pricing aside (I don’t have much direct experience of either on GitLab), GitHub is, AFAIK, by far the most popular and therefore it’s easier to get your project discovered and get other developers to contribute.

    I do kind of think that by centralising so much stuff on a website owned by Microsoft we are running the risk of another Reddit-like situation where GitHub turns sharply anti-user in an attempt to monetise in the future. But for the moment, the network effects are real and significant.