I don’t think capitalism is necessarily at fault, nor must the working/middle classes be struggling for fascism to emerge. If anything, quite the opposite. It is the better off countries that end up turning fascist. All fascist countries are/were first world countries, in various states of advanced development.

That’s not right, at least not for the fascist regimes in Europe that emerged prior to WW2. The countries where it happened (specifically Germany/Italy/Spain) had all seen civil unrest or even civil war in the recent past, they were hit hard by the global financial crisis in the twenties and had high unemployment and widespread poverty. This was the very thing the fascists used to ingratiate themselves to the public at large, by creating jobs through massive public building and rearmament projects.

By the way “first world countries” is post-WW2 terminology and didn’t originally have a connotation of superior economic status, but was referring strictly to ideological alignment. Whether a country belonged to the capitalist/communist/unaligned block in international politics during the cold war.

Not yet, but you probably will be able to in the future.

Right so WhatsApp and messenger are gatekeepers and they must allow interoperation with who anyone who wants to ie me running my own signal instance?

There are several stipulations on interoperability in the new regulation (Ctrl+F “interop”). To my understanding it is stipulated that they have to make interoperability possible for certain third parties, but how to go about this is not exactly specified on a technical level - meaning the specific way to implement this is left to the gatekeeper. So your Signal server may or may not be able to depending on how exactly they go about this.

They also need to interoperate with signal hence if a works with b and c works with a why wouldn’t b work with c?

No they need to enable interoperability period. Says nothing about Signal (the software) per se. Meta has announced they plan on implementing it based on the Signal protocol (not Signal messenger software, not Signal server software).

Cos if thats hoe it works or if im not allowed to interoperate with WhatsApp or messenger in the first place then this juat seems like its handing the monopoly away from the companies to the government and giving the people fuck all.

To my knowledge the aim of the regulation is exactly that, to allow anybody interoperability with these “core platform services”. The status quo is that the regulations has been announced by the EU, it has gone into effect, and Meta has announced how they will implement interoperability to comply. Once the implementation is available and then found lacking in regard to the regulation it would be up to the affected third party to sue Meta over it.

Not with Signal messenger, the company running it hasn’t been designated as a gatekeeper under the DMA rules. You can see which services will be affected on the Wiki page (only WhatsApp and Facebook Messenger currently).

Signal protocol ≠ Signal messenger

AFAIK you could always have selfhosted a Signal server, you just can’t interact with the “normal” Signal messenger and its network.

No, the DMA has nothing to do with RCS, at least not directly.

Yes, WhatsApp and Facebook Messenger were initially just XMPP servers, but have since had proprietary expansions.

In the context of the DMA both of them will be forced to make interoperability with other third-party messengers possible, since Meta has been designated a “gatekeeper” under the new regulation. Meta has announced they plan on doing so via an implementation of the Signal protocol.

There are some provisions in the Digital Markets Act that go in that direction. It only took effect roughly 3 months ago though, so remains to be seen if it works out as intended.

Do the lights provide the same info as the beeps?

Yes, but whether you have lights or just beeps depends on your board. I think yours does not have the lights, just the speaker pins.

So the circle is where a little speaker should be attached:

Sometimes these come with the case, but in your case not apparently or the PC guy would have attached it. You can buy these pretty cheap (one or two bucks) and they look like this:

When you have one attached and start the PC the mainboard will run some tests, and if it detects a problem there will be a pattern of beeps coming out of the speaker. You can look up what this pattern means in the handbook somebody linked above.

(not actually everything, but I get your hyperbole)

How is it hyperbole? All artificial neural networks have “hallucinations”, no matter their size. What’s your magic way of knowing when that happens?

What the fuck kind of argument is this? Courts aren’t supposed to play politics, they are supposed to enforce the law. And if you want to do that in a genocide case you have to prove intent. Gallant made several public statements that can interpreted in that way.

It seems like it would be a bit confusing, though, if you had to relearn times whenever you travel somewhere (edit: and dates could flip over in the middle of a work day). But maybe you’d prefer that.

I’d prefer that over having to change clocks when you travel, and having to have knowledge about the location and possibly having to flip the date when you encounter a reference to a specific time, yes.

Before they were invented, it was literally just anarchy. People set it to match people they knew. That’s what I was thinking of, but it could also just be one place where noon is at 12:00 PM.

Yes, you would obviously do the latter. No sense it going back to the bad old days.

Well, there’s not a round number of second in a day, or days in a year, for example, since they’re all naturally occurring and arbitrary.

Days in a year ok (except leap years). But seconds in a day are round (discounting days with leap seconds). 24 * 60 * 60 = 86400, which is divisible by two. Did you mean they are not based on the decimal system? I’d be up for a decimal based time system and a reorganised calendar, but that wasn’t the topic of discussion here.

And then the Earth turns at a subtly non-constant rate, and people have settled on a seven day week.

Yeah but none of that has much impact on the timezone debate.

If you do have timezones, it doesn’t make sense to be inflexible with them when they run up against geography or trade and cultural ties, so they’ll be curvy, and geopolitics will itself change over decades and someone will want to change which one they’re in.

Fair enough. I acknowledged this point in my other post, that there are historical reasons for timezones mostly rooted in administrative requirements. But I don’t think this is a good reason to not adopt a better system per se.

All of this is a headache if you just want to do a calendar calculation.

Exactly! So out with the old, in with the new. Sure this will create some other headaches, especially given how deeply rooted some of the relevant nomenclature is in most languages, but the sooner we change this the less it will hurt. I see that it might be a non-starter given the inertia and disunity of globalised society working against it, but it still seems desirable nonetheless, to me at least.

Cool, so sunrise is at 8 PM now.

And the problem with that is… ?

Or maybe there’s just no consistent relationship between what a clock on the East and West coast of America say, and a call can’t be scheduled between them.

If you get rid of timezones they all say the same time, no? If you want to schedule a call you just say the time and save the timzone offset fiddling.

The real problem with time and date is that it has to fit social and natural systems as well as actual passage of time.

Can you give any more concrete examples? None come to mind beyond habit, which is not an immutable thing.

there must be a bit more to it than that. AIM, Skype, and several others were viable options with existing userbases.

Once upon a time in a messenger landscape far far away there lived a king called XMPP. It had a lot of powerful children, WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger, Google+, and even Skype amongst them. And they all worked together in a big federation towards the commonwealth of all, freely sharing their metadata. But then some of the children grew greedy, jealously guarding their own gardens behind higher and higher walls, breaking down the federation. And thus the era of the warring messengers began. But prophecy foretells of a prince to unite all the disparate standards in one big Matrix again, completing yet another revolution of the XKCD 972 wheel of time.

For real though it was phone numbers. WhatsApp always worked based off of phone numbers, which is an identity confirmation method that was immediately familiar to most people at the time, even more so than email.

UN source: https://news.un.org/en/story/2024/03/1147931

The UN Security Council on Monday passed a resolution demanding an immediate ceasefire for the month of Ramadan, the immediate and unconditional release of hostages and “the urgent need to expand the flow” of aid into Gaza. There were 14 votes in favour with the United States abstaining.

Timeline of discussion in link.

Oh you are right, I misread that. Thanks for pointing it out.

it’s definitely more pro-privacy than Brave or FireFox. I’ve never had to jump through a captcha to use Google in those browsers.

You have this backwards. Google showing you captchas is basically them saying they can’t match your browser to any know (shadow) profile they have already stored. So they aren’t sure you are a human and if so which one specifically. Getting harassed with a captcha is essentially like a badge of honour for your browsers privacy settings.

Firefox has no extensions so no Adblock.

That’s because so far every browser on iOS had to use WebKit as it’s HTML rendering engine, meaning that even if you installed another browser manually you were basically still using Safari under the hood. IIRC the new DMA rules include allowing other browser engines like Gecko, so Mozilla is probably already working on making addons available. I mean they are available on Android, so why wouldn’t they make them available on iOS now that they finally can?