Not sure if “bands” is necessarily the right word here. Most of the artists are solo producers, and them touching anything acoustic for their music is a rare sight these days.

There’s definitely still a huge scene out there for the Early Hardcore stuff, with most of the crowd going into their 40’s now. And a lot of the originals are still performing to this day. Most of the scene is concentrated around the Netherlands though, as loud, obnoxious music is definitely in our collective DNA. But we are seeing increasing amounts of tourists traveling from far away just to be part of the larger events like Thunderdome, Masters of Hardcore, Ground Zero, Defqon.1, Dominator and so on.

those shitty anticheat platforms that just assume you’re a cheater if you use Linux. Cause, you know, Linux scary.

To be fair, the people at the cutting edge of modern computing are statistically very likely to be Linux users. Therefore it’s not entirely unreasonable to have some prejudice against Linux users.

But as a sweeping measure these anti-cheat measures are absolutely unacceptable. The only other explanation is that they just don’t want to bother with the market share still being low compared to Windows.

Personally, if a game requires anti-cheat, it’s probably not a game I’d enjoy playing. Not a big fan of competitive gameplay. But for those that are, this needs to stop. Especially with all the new bullshit Microsoft has been pulling in Windows lately.

• Laughs in Dutch EDM * 🤣

(Hardcore/Gabber starts at ~160 BPM and goes all the way up to ~300 BPM). Definitely too fast.

Honestly, yes.

More information available at once, more fine user control, less chance of fucking up. If you’re going to be spending big, at least make sure what you’re doing is the thing you wanted. Desktop sites are still superior in that regard. Until the mobile-first trend turns everything into an enshittified mess, that’s the way I’ll keep doing things.

I hate the fact that none of the big names support CalDAV natively. DAVx5 is cool and all, but app developers really need to step up their shit and support CalDAV already. Not just Microsoft Exchange and Google Calendar but CalDAV as well. It’s not like they need to rebuild their apps from scratch.

At this point you might just be better served using a web app instead of a native mobile app. Maybe K-9 Mail transformation into Thunderbird Mobile might bring some good news, but I’m not holding high hopes.

Maybe we should, under the EU’s DMA, force anyone that bundles a calendar/note app with their phone OS to support CalDAV as well as any proprietary protocol of their choice.

You’re absolutely right, it’s seats, not percentage of votes.

Still a big increase from the current 23.5% of votes mandate netting them 37 seats.

Yeah his bid was never realistic. We count on the prime minister for international diplomacy and representation. For which you need to be pretty much undisputed internationally.

I can’t imagine Geert traveling to Qatar to broker a ceasefire between Israel and Hamas when he is well known internationally for his anti-muslim stance.

Being a proper prime minister requires you to set aside your convictions and your interests and stepping up for all citizens, muslim or not. There’s a lot of doubt he will be able to take on that role.

We’re in an interesting political stalemate right now, with current polls showing Wilders’ party (the PVV)* at around 50 seats (out of 150)*, while his current mandate is only around 23% of votes. He would likely be best served by repeat elections. Which is why we’re seeing things play out this way. So far none of the current parties that are set to form a cabinet have proposed their leader take on the role.

Which is understandable because we’re heading for a historical form of government where there is no real coalition. Meaning the PM will be under increased pressure as backing from coalition partners is not guaranteed. We might up recruiting someone with an impartial political stake as PM.

NATO was originally founded so that we’d stop invading each other, which should still hold true today.

I like to think of most developed nations as young adults. All of us are supposed to be mature, which means no more war. We can just talk about things like responsible adults.

Sadly, some of these younger fucks still haven’t grasped the concept of “don’t be an idiot”, and we now need NATO for a strong message of “no, you’re not going to touch us, there will be consequences”. It’s a sad thing that we still need to do so, but I’d rather have a large group of friends that I’m sure will have my back if someone would start shit.

So yes, Sweden joining NATO is a good thing. If anything it will lead to better cooperation and coordination between our countries. Not just in the event of war, but just sharing defense resources and intelligence as well. But the best argument is that we just like you Swedes, and we want to keep hanging out together.

Especially Germans, and your cousins who live in the swamp next door.

We can’t help the fact our languages just arent’t that elegant, no need to apologize for it.

Minority is exactly right. With Brexit they managed to sway enough floating morons with promises of golden palaces and full autonomy.

In the real world, where you have to cooperate to get anywhere on big issues, we quickly find out that throwing a tantrum because you’re a grown-up that can determine its own bedtime just gets you discredited and tasked with “all right, let’s see you manage all this stuff on your own then”.

Putting this into perspective: The PVV won dutch elections recently and did so with 23% of the vote. It is well known that a significant portion ot those voters don’t support all of Wilders’ policy, they just want to see change. And Wilders’ main argument for leaving the EU is “migrants bad, we want border control”. Not exactly fully thought out.

The exact percentage of people that will actually vote to leave the EU if it even comes that far is likely not much higher. Combine that with the fact that everyone can see the UK doing just great, and the cances are slim any of this big talk actually leads to Nexit.

We’re seeing the power of stupid people in large groups at work, but there are simply not enough of them to do any significant damage. Our political system makes it so that anyone has to cooperate to get anywhere, and Wilders needs support of at least 27% of the elected officials to get anything done. It is highly unlikely any of his more radical policies will survive that process.

There is a strange drop-off where train travel gets significantly worse for longer distances though.

Commuting within the Randstad, and to a certain degree the provinces of Flevoland, Gelderland and Noord-Brabant is pretty compelling because the network is well connected. Need to get anywhere else though and the benefits of train travel over commuting by car start to disappear quickly.

This also ties into the fact that our public transit is by far the most expensive in the EU (and possibly even worldwide). Which makes traveling by train really only a viable option if you have the money to spare or your employer covers your travel expenses.

A pretty standard daily commute can cost upwards of €20 per round trip, which comes down to nearly a fifth of a minimum wage budget after taxes. That doesn’t well with a housing crisis.

My goal is not really to turn this into a discussion, but I feel like your concerns might be based on common misconceptions about nuclear energy.

Chornobyl (Ukrainian spelling) was such a big disaster because it was the first major nuclear disaster. The reactor was built without hands-on experience with the consequences of a nuclear disaster driving the design of the facility itself. We have since learnt a lot about proper design of nuclear reactors and about how to respond to any incidents.

The Fukushima reactor was designed with that knowledge in mind, but the event was a perfect shitstorm consisting of both an earthquake and a tsunami hitting the facility at the same time. And even though the local population might disagree, the disaster was arguably less serious than Chornobyl was. Due in large part to a better design and proper disaster response.

We’re more capable than ever of modeling and simulating natural disasters, so I’d argue we acutally CAN plan for most of those. Any disaster we can’t plan for nowadays is likely to also fuck up an area even worse than the resulting nuclear disaster would.

But probably the most important thing to mention is that nuclear power is a lot more diverse in the modern world. Gone are the days that uranium fission reactors are the norm. They were only popular because they serve a secondary purpose of creating resources for nuclear weapons, in addition to their power generation. With molten salt reactors, thorium-based reactors and SMR (small modular reactors) there’s really not a good reason to build any more “classic” nuclear reactors other than continuing the production of nuclear weapons, which I hope we can just stop doing.

The best way to prevent large scale incidents is to prevent large scale reactors, which is why there’s so much interest in SMR lately.

All in all, we likely can’t fully transition to renewables fast enough without the use of nuclear power as an intermediary. But the actual dangers with modern designs are far fewer than they used to be and we should take care not to give in to irrational fears too much.

To put things into perspective: We currently have no way of stopping a major solar storm that would thouroughly disrupt all modern life, nor can we stop large asteroids heading our way. Both are potentially planet-ending disasters, but the possibility that they might occur doesn’t stop us from trying to build a better earth for the future, right?

You can do both though. Lots of high-profile software is both open source and available as SaaS.

The beauty of that strategy is you can ensure the software will survive your service provider going bankrupt or otherwise suddenly disappearing, leaving you without a solution.

By not being locked into a specific vendor, competition will be centered around providing the best service, which is in my opinion exactly as it should be.

Wow that’s a cool setup, I’ll definitely steal some ideas.

I’m used to slinging lots of data around and one of the more helpful tools for general purpose automation has been n8n. Though it might have limited use if you’re not trying to glue all kinds of services together. I also host actualbudget to keep track of finances. Both are running comfortably in their own little docker containers.

I’m currently looking into setting up Nextcloud and experimenting some more with presence detection for Home Assistant. I’m considering CO2 sensors, which will either tell me my home is ventilated properly, or which rooms are occupied.