I don’t think this is possible without alt codes on standard Windows configurations. MacOS has shortcuts for them and Linux has them too (if you have compose enabled, which is disabled by default).

Works on phones through the special character input. Sometimes. Depends on your language, location, and keyboard of choice.

Seems rather unnecessary and pedantic to tell others to use it, though. This is a forum, not a thesis.

I see. In that case, I don’t really have any good advice to give you, good luck with your endeavours!

I don’t really know what people are doing to enrich their vocabulary and fluff up their language to be honest; my vocabulary and writing all stem from high school. However, my experience is that in order to write well, you need to read a lot. Learn what works for others, consider why it may not work for you, and pick up the good bits. If all else fails, open a dictionary, pick a word every day, and try to use it in a sentence before going to bed, just so you learn more synonyms and specific terms.

I’m pretty sure that when it comes to job applications, most people are probably using AI these days. Unless you think you can beat AI, it doesn’t hurt to let the some kind of AI go over your text and steal some or the good bits.

That screenshot again proves that this person is extremely cringe, presumably a troll, but there’s still no threat. At worst that’s racism against Americans. Should obviously be removed by moderators from any normal online service that wants to encourage pleasant conversation, but that’s not necessarily illegal.

As for the PDF, that’s not a legal definition by any kind, it’s a quick explainer for a law that only applies to hosting providers receiving complaints from European authorities. So yes, if the Belgian police sent a takedown notice regarding terroristic content then it does apply.

However, that regulation is mere instruction to EU states to draft compliant laws. It’s not actionable legislation in itself (similar to the GDPR).

The full text of the Regulation does include this instruction for EU countries, which I haven’t seen before:

In order to provide clarity about the actions that both hosting service providers and competent authorities are to take to address the dissemination of terrorist content online, this Regulation should establish a definition of ‘terrorist content’ for preventative purposes, consistent with the definitions of relevant offences under Directive (EU) 2017/541 of the European Parliament and of the Council (6). Given the need to address the most harmful terrorist propaganda online, that definition should cover material that incites or solicits someone to commit, or to contribute to the commission of, terrorist offences, solicits someone to participate in activities of a terrorist group, or glorifies terrorist activities including by disseminating material depicting a terrorist attack. The definition should also include material that provides instruction on the making or use of explosives, firearms or other weapons or noxious or hazardous substances, as well as chemical, biological, radiological and nuclear (CBRN) substances, or on other specific methods or techniques, including the selection of targets, for the purpose of committing or contributing to the commission of terrorist offences. Such material includes text, images, sound recordings and videos, as well as live transmissions of terrorist offences, that cause a danger of further such offences being committed. When assessing whether material constitutes terrorist content within the meaning of this Regulation, competent authorities and hosting service providers should take into account factors such as the nature and wording of statements, the context in which the statements were made and their potential to lead to harmful consequences in respect of the security and safety of persons. The fact that the material was produced by, is attributable to or is disseminated on behalf of a person, group or entity included in the Union list of persons, groups and entities involved in terrorist acts and subject to restrictive measures should constitute an important factor in the assessment.

However, the Regulation also refers to human rights such as freedom of expression. One can be of the opinion that it’s better for the USA to stop existing without any plans or support for actual genocide. Someone expressing hate for your country isn’t immediately a terrorist.

Do you have a copy of the actual threat? Because “you are a settler” is stupid but not an actual threat.

I don’t know where you got that picture from, I can’t find the legal definition for a terroristic threat within the EU. The best I could find is:

For the purposes of this Convention, “public provocation to commit a terorist offence” means the distribution, or otherwise making available, of a message to the public, with the intent to incite the commission of a terrorist offence, where such conduct, whether or not directly committed.

That’s just a convention, though, not direct law. The definition by the convention does require proof of intent, which I haven’t found about the cringe hexbear user.

Shouting non-credible threats (that, based on the screenshot, I can only assume are ironic in the first place) into the internet void isn’t making “terroristic threats”. Feeding the trolls and name calling isn’t conductive either.

Most of the internet is kids and people with nothing better to do with their lives.

Could be gig jobs as well. With seasonal work you can easily get four jobs or more in a year without even doing anything unusual.

While that works pretty well, I find it strange how little people use the ability to tap an NFC tag to instantly connect. Getting the camera pointed at a code only takes a second but tapping a sticker is even quicker.

I guess most people don’t know about that feature.

This was much less of an issue back when you couldn’t open a bank account in someone’s name from halfway across the world. Phishing and identity theft were impossible to pull off until companies started trusting phone services and later the internet. You needed to show up in person with a realistic fake ID to do anything malicious. What else would you do? Spend (converted into modern currency) 25 bucks a minute on an international call to scam someone?

Now that nobody meets face to face for stuff like cashing a cheque or even ordering a large quantity of groceries anymore, the few bits of personal information we can use to prove our identity are the only things protecting us.

Because you’re not paying extra for those problems to get fixed. And no, when you receive millions of forms per day, not every piece of feedback makes it back to someone to actually fix the issue. Especially when half those issues are “when I don’t have internet I don’t receive new emails”.

Software, like hardware, is a balance between supply and demand. People would rather pay less for a phone crammed full of ads than pay for a service. Just look at YouTube for that one.

Also, those clunky interfaces are there for a reason. Maybe the interface element that’s a lot better doesn’t work in right to left languages. Maybe the information overload of too many buttons and labels made the old interface impossible to extend. Maybe the prettier solution doesn’t work with screen readers or with the font size and colour cranked up for people with low vision. Maybe the feature redesign worked great but SomeCorp Tweaker Software will bluescreen the machine when it finds the word “checkbox” in a settings page for your mouse. Maybe the design team had a great idea but the feature needs to ship next week so whatever needs to happen to make that works happens, and the five other features planned for the month already eat up the rest of the dev team’s time anyway.

But most of the time, things are suboptimal because there are seven teams of people working on features on the same screen/system/application and they need to make do.

If you have serious issues with some software, many companies will let you partner with them. In exchange for hundreds of thousands or millions, you can directly get support for your use cases, your workflow, and the stuff you need to get done, over the billions of other people that also need to use the software. And sometimes, that means your super duper expensive preference/feature/demand means someone else’s workflow is entirely broken.

If you know what you want, there is a way out: going the way of open source and self hosted. Within a few years, you too will grow resentful of dozens of systems made by different people all interpreting standards differently and not working together. You have the power to fix each and every feature, bug, problem, and design flaw, but none of the time or the detailed knowledge. You don’t have the money to pay experts, and even if you did, what they do may not entirely suit you either. Trying to fix everything will drive you absolutely mad. And that’s why companies and people often don’t try for perfection.

All the terrible quality and human rights violations also apply to any other Chinese shop as well as Amazon or whatever your local Amazon equivalent is. I’ve found the exact same shit sold on Temu in physical store shelves for those cost-saving stores. The entire supply chain is fucked.

I do order shit directly from China, but only if I need something specific like phone parts or electronics that I see “local” shops carry with the exact same photos, descriptions, and pictures, for twice or triple the price. I’ve fallen for that trick too many times, I’ll go straight to the source now.

At least the Temu shit isn’t as bad as buying chocolate or clothes…

I’ve had similar issues with getting CSS tables to lay out properly in Chrome. Worked fine in IE/Edge/Firefox/WebKit but Chrome just randomly threw a fit and rearranged items for no reason, even the Javascript engine agreed with me that the tables should look like they were supposed to but they just didn’t when rendered.

My experience with SVGs in Firefox is that Firefox supports pretty much every basic features, but it expects the SVGs to be up to spec. As it turns out, a lot of SVGs on the web rely on quirks and side effects and you only find out they’re technically invalid when digging deep into the spec. Them behaving differently whether or not there’s an img tag around them also doesn’t help, and I’ve run into a few files using SVG features that only worked in some Adobe product and Chrome (only on desktop, IIRC) .

Getting browsers to work consistently still sucks, even when it’s not nearly as big a problem as it was fifteen years ago. I totally get why people don’t test for Firefox. We didn’t use to test for Safari for the very same reason; practically none of our end users used it and there are no usable cross platform browsers to test with even if they were, so we’d probably tell them to download Chrome anyway. Safari mostly worked well enough that if someone decided to pull out an iPad during demos it didn’t completely fail and that was food enough. Firefox only worked because devs preferred its superior web development tools.

If there are obligations, Firefox is such a fringe user agent these days that they can probably go without supporting it. The 3.8% of Swedes not using Chromium or Safari will fall off any serious compatibility requirements.

I doubt anything will break in Firefox, though. They just don’t want the burden of having to support a few hundred people when Firefox implements a feature slightly wrong/non-standard/not at all.

This looks pretty good! Hope someone hacks support for the KDE Connect protocols into this because I don’t really feel like installing yet another app that runs in the background permanently.

The UI looks very slick compared to what KDE Connect has to offer on Windows and I don’t think screen casting is even an option there, so both apps could do with borrowing some code from each other.

Pro: it’ll probably work well enough to get your notifications and maybe even your heart rate and stuff.

Con: it probably won’t arrive. If it does, it probably won’t look like in the pictures if it does, it probably won’t work like described. If it does, it probably has done kind of cheep, toxic chemicals it’ll leave in your arm. If it doesn’t, it’ll probably come with an app that drains your battery. If it doesn’t, it probably sells your live location and notifications to data brokers. If it doesn’t, it’ll probably never receive software updates. If it does, it’ll probably be broken by the end of the year.

There are actually a few relatively cheap smart watches that some people like to reprogram with open source firmware. You can get a Colmi P8 or a Kenboro K9 for less than $30 and flash WaspOS onto it. You have to get lucky and buy the right hardware revision but flashing new firmware onto those things can be as simple as downloading an app and loading a file into it. These devices are underpowered and software availability is limited, but at least with the open source stuff you can rest easy about your data not being sold.

Exactly. Everyone wants the cheap and easy solution when something breaks, but nobody wants to pay the price for the cheap and easy solution to be available upfront, because what are the chances they run into a problem like that?

In this specific case, there is a credible ulterior motive for the company not to make cheap repairs available: the government will pay the bill if they sell a new expensive product and all the training/rehabilitation that comes with it. On the other hand, there is a very valid reason why things like batteries are so expensive to replace and why you can’t find replacement batteries for a lot of products a certain amount of time after production ends.

How do you stuff a 18650 into a smart watch controlling the device? Because that’s what the article implicates is the problem. For the exoskeleton itself there are no excuses.

But people don’t want that. They want small, sleek devices that don’t weigh much. Imagine what smartphones would look like if they still had to be powered by AAA batteries.

From what I can tell the battery in question wasn’t the one powering the exoskeleton itself, but the battery inside watch controlling the device.

Because there is little difference when it comes to passively degrading components like batteries. You can’t produce a battery and leave it in storage for a decade, the battery will degrade on its own. The only way to keep reserve batteries is to keep producing them, and maintain a production line for all that time. That’s prohibitively expensive for small markets like these.

A relatively simple solution is to stick with batteries that have a standard shape and size, but it’s not like you can just stuff a button cell in there, you need more power to operate the controller chip.

It’s pretty shitty that the company didn’t produce a backup controller box that works without having to stick to the wearable watch form factor that just takes a bunch of rechargeable AA batteries, but you can’t expect what is essentially a smart watch to still have accessible replacement batteries in twenty years.

This isn’t exclusive to medical devices, either. Computers running DOS or Windows 95 are still operating millions of dollars of machinery and are slowly failing and collapsing over time. The amount of affordable replacements (even at an industrial level) is slowly starting to dwindle. Nobody is producing floppy drives anymore, nor new floppies for that matter, so if that industrial controller you bought in the early 2000s dies you have to hire a computer greybeard to fix your hardware or replace the entire system.

In my opinion, it should be put into law that once a company stops supporting their bespoke hardware, the copyright and patents protecting them should expire immediately, so that once a company drops support anyone else can pick up where they left off.

However, anything with a computer in it has a limited lifespan, and that lifespan is significantly shorter than that of a human being. Even with the code and blueprints publicly available, someone still needs to find the compatible hardware, alter the designs to operate on modern commodity hardware, or pay a factory to ramp up a production line if they have the million(s) to do so.

Obviously China’s meddling with academic discourse is troubling, but what universities accept busts for random political activists? I don’t think I’ve ever seen any bust in universities that weren’t of people of great importance to the university itself.

I also completely get universities not wanting to deal with the anger and outrage of nationalist Chinese expats. They can get real angry when you go against Chinese propaganda, probably a result of many years of brainwashing by the Chinese government in their youth. It just takes one weirdo to deface a statue and suddenly you’re in the middle of a massive controversy and need to either file charges (and deal with angry Chinese people) or not (and deal with angry people opposing China’s dictatorial regime).

I’m anti-CCP but that doesn’t mean I’ll accept a bust it a Chinese human rights activist.