Skip Navigation
Visa requirements for German citizens
  • The point I got from it was that Germans can go basically anywhere with low effort. The similar shades reinforce that, as concepts like “Visa not required” and “Visa on arrival” are pretty closely equal in burden.

  • U.S. Rejects Putin’s Latest Call for Ukraine Negotiations
  • These are confirmed and identified casualties using 3rd party evidence. From the source you linked,

    However, these figures represent only a partial account and do not reflect the full extent of the casualties. […] This week, CIA Director William Burns penned a column in Foreign Affairs estimating the total losses of the Russian army—killed and wounded—at 315,000. At first glance, this figure might seem significantly different from our own count, but in reality, it’s not, and we regard Burns’ estimate as close to the truth.

    The reality is that we will not know for a long time the true numbers, but this 43k is the absolute minimum number of dead Russian combatants.

  • Bilinguals, does chatGPT sound different in other languages?
  • If you ask ChatGPT to communicate to you in a different writing style it can do a decent job of doing so. It will also respect requests to decrease verbosity and formality. The default writing style is some kind of specific configuration they have made for it, it’s not a fundamental characteristic of it.

  • Bilinguals, does chatGPT sound different in other languages?
  • If you ask ChatGPT to communicate to you in a different writing style it can do a decent job of doing so. It will also respect requests to decrease verbosity and formality. The default writing style is some kind of specific configuration they have made for it, it’s not a fundamental characteristic of it.

  • Peertube's moment might come soon
  • 150MB per 10min video, and that means it's 390,000Mb (or 380.86TB) for their collection.

    Your overall point is fair, but your math here is off by a factor of 1000 - it would be around 380 GB.

  • Desalination system could produce freshwater that is cheaper than tap water
  • No I do not underestimate profit incentives. I just realize that these things are not always so nefarious and there’s plenty of money for people to make by bringing things to market.

    Regardless - cost effective, portable desal devices will be dramatically more profitable than sitting on a patent for 20 years (if even enforced!). Most people buying imported bottled water due so because they are lazy not because they are without access to potable water.

  • Desalination system could produce freshwater that is cheaper than tap water
  • Jeeze you guys are so cynical 😂It’s true that many innovations from academic research fail to be commercialized or scaled. But it’s also true that many many successful technological innovations come out of academic research and impact the lives of millions.

    The biggest barrier here will most likely be whether it can scale, not patent litigation.

  • Removed
    From December 1, foreigners in Japan who are refugees from conflict zones, including Ukraine, will be able to obtain long-term resident status with a work visa
  • It’s a step in the right direction, regardless. Refugees are not all in the same situation and not all of them “only want a permanent solution”. The article cites “refugees from conflict zones”, and many people in such situations are indeed considering returning home if it becomes safe. Many other people may be in a location for several years before choosing a more careful plan to settle somewhere.

    Lastly, it’s a lot easier for a country to normalize the long term status of temporary residents when they are already in the work force, speaking the language, not an outsized burden on social services, etc.

  • Google killing Basic HTML version of Gmail In January 2024
  • Email is a collection of different protocols: SMTP, IMAP, POP are all different protocols that serve different purposes. Oversimplifying a bit, but - SMTP is used to exchange messages between mail servers. IMAP and POP are used to synchronize mail between a mail server and a mail client.

    In other words, they absolutely can shut down IMAP and POP but still send/receive for gmail.com addresses. The main reason reason they wouldn't do this is that their larger clients on Google Workspace need that functionality, but it's the type of thing you might imagine them taking away from the unpaid version of Gmail to nudge companies over to Workspace.

  • Mali, Niger and Burkina Faso sign Sahel security pact
  • Niger is ditching ECOWAS for the security from other states that recently underwent coups. It’s hard to see how this is in the interest of the common person.

    Just because France is against the coup doesn’t mean it’s good for Nigeriens.

  • Node.js 20.6.0 includes built-in support for .env files
  • They are most useful during local development. It’s useful to have project-scoped config that your app interacts with in a manner identical to how it works in prod.

    Generally you don’t commit to version control because you want to keep secrets out of there. However, it can be sometimes useful to hold non-sensitive config that you may want to commit but also to customize on prod. For instance like NODE_ENV, so you’re not building multiple mechanisms for configuring your code. But this is less useful and generally solved with a sample config that is copied to the .env file that is never pushed to VC.

  • Antarctica Is Losing a Flabbergasting Amount of Ice
  • I share your concern over the risks posed by the loss of sea ice. However, per the Thwaites Glacier Collaboration, even if the entire glacier were to collapse it would amount to around a 65cm rise of sea level, and the majority of that would come in the 22nd and 23rd century.

    https://thwaitesglacier.org/about/facts

  • Workation - nice or stupid?
  • I’ve spent most of my adult life working remote (also in tech) and have had some trips like this that were fantastic and others that were big hassles. The determining factor is whether the location you go to is conducive for actually working, otherwise you spend way too much of your time trying to sort out stupid logistical things (where can I hold a call? How flaky is the internet? How do I sync hotel checkout to work schedule? Etc). But some locations are designed for remote workers.

    Look on the map specifically for coworking and read reviews and look at pics to get an idea. Consider getting a Spaces membership, which is a very large network of coworking through most of Western Europe and some other countries , where you can drop right in and everything “just works”.

    I have a wife and kids now so it’s not as easy for me to float around as much, but I’ve had some excellent week long trips or even just long weekends through much of Western Europe. There are many places with budget flights and you wouldn’t necessarily go to on serious longer holiday, but are awesome destinations for this kind of travel. You get a chance to have a taste of those places and don’t use up your PTO.

    A recent place I went like was to Taghazout, a cool beach town with a bunch of surfer tech nomads and lots of coworking spaces. I went in April on a $50 Ryan air flight (in/out Agadir). It was a great trip.

  • dinner menu suggestions for a difficult crowd?
  • I would suggest “custom spinach pesto”, where you serve a base of plain spinach pesto made from lightly cooked spinach, onion, garlic, salt, pepper, and lots of olive oil. Blended, then mixed with spiral pasta in a very large bowl.

    Then, you provide your guests with a very large selection of mixins: halved cherry tomatoes, bacon, fried mushrooms, steamed broccoli, grilled zucchini, olives, capers, Parmesan, grilled chicken breast, rucola, chili flakes or oil, pine nuts, pumpkin seeds, anchovy paste, sun dried tomatoes, baked tofu, etc etc.

    I’ve made this numerous times for a crowd that was a mix of allergies, vegans, picky eaters. The spinach pesto base can be either mixed into pasta initially or also placed on the side. The most picky of guests eat basically plain noodles and the others are experimenting with different combinations with each serving.

    Serve with a very simple classic salad (lettuce, tomato, cucumber) with a bright acidic dressing, which complements the pasta in both flavor and simplicity.

    You may optionally offer whole pieces of grilled chicken or something on the side to make it feel like a more complete meal.

    Another simple dish we made numerous times for this crowd was Levantine mujaddara, which is lentils, rice, and caramelized onions with warm spices. It’s a superb dish for a vegetarian crowd, but your picky eater might find lentils and cinnamon off putting. I serve this often with baked chicken on the side. To match the Levantine theme, just bake chicken thighs kind of plain and after pulling from oven coat in olive oil, lemon juice, salt, fresh garlic.

  • InitialsDiceBearhttps://github.com/dicebear/dicebearhttps://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/„Initials” (https://github.com/dicebear/dicebear) by „DiceBear”, licensed under „CC0 1.0” (https://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/)KE
    kefirchik @lemm.ee
    Posts 0
    Comments 15