It's surreal and dismaying to see such a bogus comment at the top, especially since the BBC video about the North Korean phone is free of judgement, while they (and many other Western news) do report on Western surveillance critically, e.g. they called the Microsoft screenshots a "privacy nightmare" right in the headline...
I don't mind captchas to protect forms and such, but given that so many sites want captchas solved for the first GET request, I really wonder how much more CO2 this is going to produce. And when I see "invisible mode", I'd really like to ask the authors if they think their work is a net-positive for the world.
"invisible mode" in CAPTCHAs are great for login forms. In the background the captcha runs. If it passes, the user doesn't need to be bothered with it. If it doesn't, the user is presented the standard captcha.
I agree I hate the CF captcha popups, but I think this is a result of AI scraping. GET requests can be expensive on dynamic sites with infinite paths — like a git host.
I think German poetry can be very elegant and English poems feel dull in comparison. At the same time, the plainness of English makes it much better suited for songs. Lyrical German quickly sounds pretentious.
One of the things that helped me improve German was Poetry Slam contests, they are still quite popular over here in many regions, you get poetry coupled with another German property, plenty enough sarcasm.
I'm a disagreer and I have to disagree with the authors: disagreeing is not trolling, it's countering trolls. Trolls usually flood the zone with comments that seem elaborate but are ultimately low effort. They know persistence is key, so they don't bother much with replies that counter their claims; rather, they focus on those in agreement to manufacture consent.
It might look sinister if someone drops a reply and leaves, but that alone tells you nothing. In my experience, there is always Brandolini's law at play:
> The amount of energy needed to refute bullshit is an order of magnitude bigger than that needed to produce it.
If a reply takes a lot of effort and if you suspect the other side isn't arguing in good faith, one reply already feels like a waste of time and there's no reason to go for round two.
I think they should cast a wider net. Toxicity might discover trolls in the original sense, i.e. individuals seeking a dopamine rush. The trolls I have in mind try to steer the narrative on certain topics with comments that aren't rude or inflammatory per se and, like I said, even seem elaborate on the surface.* But if it's done for spin, it's still toxic nonetheless.
What the researchers say about disengagement also applies to these type of trolls. I mentioned persistence, it's what ultimately makes countering these users futile. Anyone who realizes that tomorrow there will be a new thread with the same narrative eventually disengages.
*) More often I see accounts posting long comments in such a short amount of time that I doubt a human was naturally engaging in an online conversation. I would be ashamed to admit how long it took me to write my two comments in this thread and then I see accounts posting much longer comments back-to-back in under two minutes.
Germany does not receive Russian pipeline gas and has banned Russian LNG from its ports. It receives a tiny share of Russian gas from Dutch and Belgian ports, but to my knowledge Germany has no control over this. France on the other hand is the top destination for Russian LNG in the EU, sharing the lead only with countries that refuse to support Ukraine.
Germany became a net importer of electricity in 2023, but it took the vast majority of its nuclear power plants offline long before that, when Germany still was a net exporter of electricity. Even in 2022, during the gas crisis with barely any nuclear power left, Germany net exported records amounts of electricity to other European countries, with France at the top of the receiving end because half of their nuclear reactor fleet was offline.
Lastly, Germany has one of the most stable grids in the world, while France does issue blackout warnings when demand peaks.
Rust is no panacea and rewriting a web application in Rust should not lead to any performance gains per se, unless your web application is doing number crunching in the mouse move handler. In most cases, you should be lucky to see no performance hits after a rewrite, because pleasing the borrow checker makes things unnecessarily more complicated.
A valid reason to switch to Rust should be a better developer experience, but it will require lots of upfront effort to realize the benefits. I doubt that it's worth it for small to medium-sized web applications.
Also, React itself is very much lightweight and fast, it's the developers who use it to program slow websites.
Contributed what? Their nuclear exit caused two nuclear power plants to shut down, which were the oldest and smallest in Germany. They had a combined capacity of a just 1 GW - utterly meaningless in the grand scheme of things.
Even when the conservatives pulled the plug on nuclear power plants in 2011, Germany just stopped decreasing emissions of its electricity production for a year or two. And this was at a time of higher gas prices, so it's even up for debate how much the nuclear exit contributed to that short stagnation.
Given that Russia had troubles supplying gas via pipeline (remember the five NS1 pumps that failed and the sixth pump that had to be shut down?) and given that Baltic infrastructure is constantly being damaged, the more expensive LNG should be considered a risk premium. It's harder to attack and can be diverted in times of need, one of the reasons Europe got so unscathed through the gas crisis.
And if pipeline gas is cheaper is also up for debate, because gas is gas to the markets and the long-running supply contracts (which turned out to be worthless because Russia was suffering a conveniently-timed force majeure) had indexed prices.
