If you want to do business with the US (either directly by selling/buying to/from them, or indirectly by using US equipment) you need to comply with US export control regulations as they apply internationally. Even if you are a Dutch company wanting to make chips at TSMC you need to make sure your chips are US export control compliant. TSMC may be a pure play foundry in reality they can't make anything nor sell to anyone. Don't get me wrong, it is messed up but that's the reality. The EU has similar regulations but they only apply to the internal market which makes more sense.

Scrobling used to be huge back in the day of mp3s and last.fm practically invented it.There are also alternative APIs implementing the same idea. Unfortunately for them they never caught up on the age of streaming.

Ubuntu was a fantastic distribution to start early on. Especially in the pre-10.x days there weren't many beginner friendly ones. Your alternatives were Debian with very outdated software, SuSE which was kind of OK, Fedora which was also quite unstable and lacking packages (remember hunting RPMs on the old RPMfusion?) or Ubuntu. At some point I'd outgrown Ubuntu and moved on to greener pastures. Nowadays I'm not sure I'd be recommending Ubuntu to new users, Fedora is quite good and without all the snap store shenanigans. Even Debian installation experience is not too bad and it's not lacking too much in software.

Unfortunately what's going to happen in reality is that any non-standard ad consumption (including non consumption) will be flagged as fraudulent. "We cannot verify your activity, please disable your add-ons to continue".

It literally lists countering ad-blocking as a use case.

Users like visiting websites that are expensive to create and maintain, but they often want or need to do it without paying directly. These websites fund themselves with ads, but the advertisers can only afford to pay for humans to see the ads, rather than robots. This creates a need for human users to prove to websites that they're human, sometimes through tasks like challenges or logins.

I run a small server for my family on a cheap VPS. We've been using it for about 5 years now and it's chugging along. It's simpler and lighter than Matrix (at least from the server's point of view) but the user facing side could use some polish. It's perfectly fine for one to one chat. I wish it was more popular for group chatting.

Here's a list of good servers if you want to try it out. You will also need a client. Check one with E2E suppo ort (called OMEMO in XMPP).

While I'm not opposed to paying for YouTube (it is a service after all) the only way to do so would be by being logged in to YouTube with whatever black box algorithmic tracking and curation that entails. There is no "proper" way to anonymously access YouTube without ads.

Early on when Google wasn't shit and Facebook was just coming out of the startup phase both of them had chat platforms based on XMPP (the OG federating protocol). For a few glorious moments everyone could chat with anyone through the corresponding XMPP endpoints. At some point they decided they can't be arsed anymore and shut off federation on their servers. They captured enough market and siloed their users.

There's 1 million % this will happen again. It's textbook EEE.

Well done on Mastodon admins for not cooperating with Facebook's strong arming tactics. Facebook's server will evolve into another walled garden, Mastodon federating with them will only help them.

Fuck them

It's trivial to self host. I'm running a server on a small VPS for the family. Best part is they don't even know they are running XMPP, just installed Conversations and that was it.

My previous house was like that. Top floor flat, western facing, drowned in sunlight 14 hours a day. Nice and bright but during moderately sunny and warm weather it was minimum 28°C all day long.

Never again.

You search for anything slightly niche, everything past page one is just rubbish. It's especially jarring when searching for something programming related and 80% of the results are auto-generated stuff scraped from Stack overflow. It reminds me of Amazon where you search for a product and almost all results are chinese-made clones of what you are looking with randomly generated names.

Baldur's Gate 3 that's (finally) coming out of EA in August.