This article is terrible.

In less than three months’ time, almost no civil servant, police officer or judge in Schleswig-Holstein will be using any of Microsoft’s ubiquitous programs at work.

Instead, the northern state will turn to [an unnamed, gaping information hole] open-source software to “take back control” over data storage and ensure “digital sovereignty”, its digitalisation minister, Dirk Schroedter, told AFP.

“We’re done with Teams!” he said, referring to Microsoft’s messaging and collaboration tool and speaking on a video call – via an [unnamed, gaping information hole] open-source German program, of course.

What will they use instead? Who the fuck knows! The article omits this crucial piece of information.

And don’t say it’s TBD; they’re not going to say they’re “done with Teams” without knowing what they’re switching to. Or, even if they haven’t put the final nail in the decision, they have a short list.

I think there are several servers that don’t try to match any particular dominant player.

It’s really down to the follow-person or follow-community model. AP supports both, but I’ve seen few servers or clients that support both. Which should be possible; it’s something that frequently annoys me about every Lemmy client I’ve tried: sometimes, there are people I’d like to follow, and get everything they post, regardless of community, in my feed.

Oh, yeah. Bias to action is often cultivated, and considered a positive trait. It can be really bad, especially in people who are bad leaders.

I’m sorry you’ve had that experience.

You are conflating awkwardness with poor communication skills

You believe that social skills aren’t dependent on communication skills?

It really doesn’t matter that is fantasy, I think that makes it a more powerful as a teaching tool not less.

The claim was that it taught social skills. I claim it will only do that if the teachers have excellent social skills. Not all teachers are good, or are good at teaching social skills.

Also eeew no, almost all the managers I have had that were in the military (ESPECIALLY men) have trash leadership skills

You’re conflating social skills, and military experience, with management ;-)

I didn’t say the military made people good managers. Management is a very specific skill set, and you don’t have to be socially fluent to be a good manager, although it helps. And being a good communicator, and having good social skills absolutely does not automatically make you a good leader!

You seem to be reading things in my comments that I’m not saying. For example, that I had a bad time gaming; or that the military makes good leaders. We have a communications gap here; how can I be more clear?

I’m not sure how to read your last paragraph; it seems to be an expression of frustration with men, in general, and I don’t know what kind of response I can provide. You haven’t had positive experiences with ex-military (usually male) managers? How many of those have you had?

I have a GoToSocial server, which is pure AP, not Mastodon. Misskey is still a microblogging platform, right? One of the people I interacted with a lot when I was trying it ran a Misskey server, and she used it like a microblogging tool.

It’s the modality of it. There’s a category of servers that follow the Twitter model: people follow people, and posts are usually short and frequent throughout the day. Then there’s the Reddit model: people join communities, and tend to do more periodic binge browsing.

Misskey - as I understand it - is a follow-the-person, shorter post model; the Twitter model. Lemmy models after Reddit.

I prefer the community model.

Fast food is cheap. It’s part of the reason why we have an obesity epidemic in the US: it’s cheaper to feed a family at McDonalds than buy fresh groceries and cook. And, yes, it’s far more convenient.

But if they had money, they wouldn’t be eating fast food for convenience; they could get Uber Eats every day from a local restaurant. Even a cheap local restaurant. I suppose going whole-hog and eating every meal at fast food joints would prevent you from ever having to shop and keep food in the house, but even so many people at my last job got food delivered for lunch from local restaurants. That’s more convenient than running out to grab Burger King.

I didn’t say I had an awful time; I loved it. I said it doesn’t improve general social skills, which was the OP claim.

Not only did I play AD&D from 12-18, I also played a lot of Traveler, a bit of Runequest and Cyberpunk, and a smattering of other games like Phoenix Command. And I’ll say that my observation is that not only did it not improve my social skills, it didn’t measurable improve those in the various friend groups, some of whom, 40 years later and still gaming, are just about as awkward as when they were in high school.

It’s because it’s fantasy, and the reactions you get from NPCs is what the DM comes up with; they’re not real people, they’re all one person. The gamers in your group could be just as socially awkward as you; all you’re going to learn from them is how to interact with other socially awkward people.

Now, if your party consists of a bunch of extrovert players, you could learn from them. But IME gaming only made things worse: it exacerbated the inside joke, us-vs-the-jocks, we’re skater because we play intellectually stimulating games mentality that contributes to social awkwardness.

Building an echo chamber of friends, most likely much like you in headspace, doesn’t expand your ability to be socially fluid.

You ever been to a convention? There are some really great outgoing people are those. There are also a large number of folks who are just plain fucking awkward. I was one of them.

You know what guaranteed helps with social skills? The military. Enforced, constant interaction with a bunch of people of all personality types that you don’t get to choose.

I am pro-gaming. I think it’s a great pursuit. It might even help improve your basic math skills, but I don’t think it cures cancer, and I don’t think it at all helps with improving general social skills.

I started AP with Mastodon (well, GoToSocial). Microblogging is not my thing. I’m more comfortable in long-form, conversation forum than ADHD spasm posting.

That doesn’t mean they support fascism.

This is very true, and I wasn’t implying they would. It’s an anecdote to support my claim that there are more conservative gun owners than liberal gun owners, and the source of “they have greater numbers.”

It’s circumstantial, and not proof that there people who do conflict are going to be unbalanced in being armed, but I suspect it based sheerly on the gun saturation in conservative vs liberal circles.

Also, I suspect the worst of the fascists aren’t the diligent ones going to the range for practice, so I’m not claiming they’ll be better shots; only that more of them will be armed.

I completely agree with the rest of your comment.

That you eat fast food enough for it to be a key fact says a lot.

I did not find that role playing improved my IRL social skills.

They’ve certainly proved capable of shooting reporters in the back.

If they ever roll out plugins, or whatever. There’s a lot of functionality piled up behind that.

Edit: I was wrong. It’s going to be in core. It’s just been “in progress” for two years because (a) there have been prerequisite blockers slowly getting implemented, (b) it’s hard, in part because of other Helix features like multiple cursors, and © the guy implementing it (and who can implement it is, in his words, limited to a couple of people with deep Helix knowledge) hasn’t had time.

Mint eschews all of the Snap crap, though, doesn’t it?

Jesus, please tell me it does. I’ve been recommending it to beginners. I thought it was sanitized.

Yes? How else would you look up anything if it hadn’t been uploaded somewhere?

Yeah, if you know part of a fingerprint you can look up keys, but I don’t know of a way to look up keys from partial keys.

Void is rolling release IIRC

That’s what I thought, but the main website says Void focuses on stability over being cutting edge, which would imply some sort of release cycle. Or, maybe they just update packages less frequently.

I still hold Debian in higher regard since it’s slightly easier for a novice to get used to

It’s hard to beat Mint as a novice distro, for sure.

Did you look at Pelican?

I have not, but I will. I may also look at Zola, although it, too, appears at the surface level to be tightly coupled with markdown.

the template language is buggy and inscrutable

It’s just Go templates, which are pretty solid; I’d be surprised by any bugs, unless they’re in the Hugo short codes. The syntax is challenging, even if you’re a Go developer and use it all the time. It’s a bespoke DSL, and a pretty awful one: it’s verbose, obtuse, and makes some common things hard.

Go is my language of choice, but my faith gets shaky whenever I have to use templates.

I’m not a huge fan of Python; despite its popularity, it’s got a lot of problems, not least of which is the whole Python 2/3 fiasco; which, years later, is still plaguing us. However, if I can containerized it so it isn’t constantly breaking in the background when I do a system update, I’m not opposed to using a project written in it. At least it isn’t Node; I won’t let that crap onto any server I admin.

Edit: Zola has the same problem as Hugo.

That makes sense

The fascists absolutely do not have the numbers.

I was specifically speaking about the percent of sub-population that’s armed. There’s pretty good evidence that the average conservative (and particularly the conservative base) is also a gun owner than the average liberal base. Gun violence is a liberal plank.

As for who has the guns, you’re probably grossly underestimating how well armed non-republicans might be.

I don’t think so; I’ve been a gun owner since I’ve been an adult, and I’m pretty progressive. I’ve spent a lot of time at ranges across the US, and it’s pretty clear that that population leans right. And if liberals own guns and aren’t going to the range to practice… well.

Furthermore, we’ve seen how ineffective the US military was at handling insurgency in Afghanistan and Iraq.

Quite effective in Iraq; Iraq was both unjustified, and concluded. Major combat operations coincided within 3 months, and we pulled out in 2011.

But the major factor in Afghanistan is that Afghanistan were a generation of trained insurgents with a decade of history of fighting insurgencies against invaders. We trained them; we trained and funded them, and helped them set up a robust cell-based insurgency. It was essentially a core component of Afghan culture by the time the US invaded. Are you trained, lean, and have a cell network set up? Anyone you know? How many people do you know, personally, who’ve ever had to suffer from anything more inconvenient than a temporary internet outage? If the US government cracks down on major carriers and network providers, can you even contact any of those people?

The US public is not the Afghan public. We’re nowhere near as hardened and tough. As importantly, we’re divided, and there’s a vast swath of the center of people who mostly don’t give enough of a shit. Even if there were voting shenanigans in 2024, enough people voted for a guy who explicitly said during campaigning that he wanted to be a dictator that it was close. When the left rises up, they’re not only going to be fighting the government, they’re going to be fighting other right-wing fuck-jobs, and worse, their uncommitted, lazily leftist neighbor is likely to turn them in because an uprising might upset little Crumpsnatcher’s soccer practice.