Thanks. I suppose I should add I’m not American. Perhaps the takeaway is no two-party political system, such as in the US, can have a “political center” because the respective “left” and “right” parties seem inevitably to become opposed to each other on every issue? Things are different in Europe, where multiple parties can support the same policies, but to different degrees or funded differently.

Plenty of EU political parties which are labelled center-right on Wikipedia aren’t completely dead-set on destroying the entire social safety in the same way the Republicans are in the US, for example. Although they simultaneously might call for reduced benefits and lower taxes.

Also, many EU countries have what I would consider actual left-wing parties in parliament. On some issues I would consider myself slightly right of Germany’s “Die Linke” for example.

Being in favor of mixed economies, with stock markets, venture capital firms, but also universal healthcare and protection for unions. Being against American style basically unregulated firearm ownership (which seems quite popular on both the far left and far right, yet maybe not so much in the middle). And I feel free to criticize the actions of parties or politicians across the political spectrum, not just those on one side. I understand many people, especially the political left which I sympathize more with, are very angry these days. Justifiably. So am I. But being accused of being dishonest just for having a different point of view is annoying.

On the other hand, the kneejerk of labeling every even remotely centrist viewpoint as inherently dishonest is pretty annoying. My own views lean SocDem and I’ve found voicing any opinion which is neither solidly left-wing or solidly right-wing, especially if it does not align with very American-centric views of the political spectrum, often elicits unpleasant reactions. Nuance is hard, I guess.

~$10/mo currently but since I recently switched to Linux, and it’s working very well for me, I feel like upping it a little.

I’ve long considered donating to Mozilla since Firefox is by far my most used open source software. But they don’t seem to lack money. So, huh.

Yeah, same. Previous years it was cars driving around with flags, posters for events, etc. This year I saw absolutely nothing. Feels a bit glum tbh.

I never really used Skype as a VOIP platform, but it was a great tool for many years for calling international phone numbers affordably. I’m sure it helped many people saving a lot of money calling their friends and relatives. For that I remember it somewhat fondly.

Moving from C to C++ would also not solve any real problem. C++ of course adds OOP which I think can be nice (not everyone agrees with this!) but it also adds an insane amount of language complexity and instability. Mentally reasoning about C code is hard, reasoning about C++ code is nearly impossible.

Rust however brings a novel solution to classes of problems like ownership and mutability with the borrow checker. It’s now accepted to be a great tool for writing high performance code while preventing a substantial amount of common, but often subtle, bugs from slipping through. It’s not arbitrarily the first non-C code to be accepted in the kernel. And it’s used in other operating systems like Android and Windows already.

Fresh clear water when you’re alarmingly thirsty.

That was hilarious. I totally get it, kid.

Beer-drinking European living in 'Murica here. For certain styles, the US has fantastic beers available. In particular IPAs (which don’t always have to be mega hoppy!), pale ales, pilsners, amber ales, and stouts. Plenty of great choices to be found here, if you discover the right breweries. That’s key, because there are a lot breweries with imo questionable taste.

What’s harder to find are good beers of other styles, such as Belgian or German beers. US breweries try, sometimes, but they aren’t succeeding.

Ok, sounds cool. So I downloaded a .xdc file and… now what? I think they should’ve started with a paragraph on how to actually run one of these files.

inoreader seems very ergonomic, thanks!

I’ve been interested in trying out RSS again but I don’t want to self-host. Can anyone recommend a RSS client (hosted, local, or whatever) that they like?