BananaTrifleViolin

Or maybe lower RAM models to try and have entry level machines that are at least tolerably priced since AI distorted the RAM market?

No, it has better frameworks to regulate local companies but seems to give a free pass to international conglomerates that come in and avoid tax by off shoring it in other EU states. The EU has allowed the US tech companies in on an uneven playing field and they have obliterated EU tech companies, with Ireland in particular taking the proverbial by enticing them with low taxes to benefit it’s own economy.

This was also perhaps tolerated as it was believed the US and EU were close and Europe benefited in other ways from the open trade with the US. Now it looks very short sighted and foolish. When Europe does try to regulate the big US tech companies, the US - not just Trump - objects and undermines it.

I agree it’s a hyperbolic headline and article; more of an opinion piece than news. It’s subjective but I think I would describe it as “sneaky” to add a 4gb AI component to a browser. The AI features were added as a default feature, opt-outs were only added later, and the users are not asked for permission before the download of the 4gb file to support the AI service. This doesn’t benefit users; it benefits Google in it’s quest to try to dominate the AI space by pushing it’s own AI features and integrations.

Which “British research firm” labels them a loophole?

The paper is from the European Parliament Research Service, which is an in-house EU Parliament service. And the “briefing” they published has a section titled “A loop hole that needs closing” that starts “Some argue that this is a loophole in the legislation that needs closing and call for age verification to be required for VPNs as well”. The words “Some argue” are a hyperlink to a South African news article / opinion piece by some random journalist who writes in a slightly snarky way about VPNs allowing people to bypass the Online Safety Act.

So the TomsHardware article is nonsense - it’s an EU briefing paper which seems to think a random south african opinion piece counts as “research”. No British research firm, and in fact no real research at all - just crap layerd on crap and making it’s way into a crap briefing paper. If this is the quality of the information been given to MEPs, EU citizens should be worried.

Links:

• The briefing paper: https://www.europarl.europa.eu/RegData/etudes/ATAG/2026/782618/EPRS_ATA(2026)782618_EN.pdf
• The linked article that is being called “research”: https://htxt.co.za/2025/08/the-uk-seems-to-have-just-realised-that-vpns-are-a-loophole-in-age-verification-measures/

Do you have basic security like 1 email is a unique account, and the email needs verification before an order can be placed? Because that simple step will be rate limiting for the attackers but normal and expected for real users.

Also could be worth considering using a dedicated payment processor to handle things. It adds overhead, but so does fraud.

And Music? But they’d still need subfolders to keep the content organised and then it begs the question why hide it all away a whole layer lower down from the Home folder?

Honestly, having been shadow banned before on stupid social media platforms, I self censor now. No accountability in social media - they can censor people and don’t even tell you they’ve done it.

Sort of. You do get an increase in death rates decades later as people from a baby boom eventually die. However births tend to be in relative sync (closer together anyway) during a baby boom say over a period of a few years, while deaths are much more spread out maybe over a decade or more. That’s because other factors come into play such as individual health, and the differences in people of the same age’s health depending on economic state and lifestyle etc. In otherwords, lots of people may have been born in say 1945 but their deaths will be spread out over years because not everyone dies at the same age.

Many western countries are going through a period of natural population decline due to low birth rates and increasing death rates as baby boomers from 1945 onwards start dying. But those deaths are spread out, and somewhat offset by immigration. So yes more people are dying but populations are overall stable or even growing as immigrants flow in.

Interesting but the absolute figures are not helpful due to the way the survey is conducted. But the macro trend over a long period is clearly up; we just don’t know where is actually lies as a true %.

Valve will have far more accurate idea of actual numbers as they will be able to correct the raw survey data using other information and data they hold and collect. But they’ll never release that as it’s a commercial advantage to them to know so much about the PC games market.

Yeah, his videos are interesting but I must admit I do find the somewhat fake “lecture” style off putting. It made as if he’s lecturing to a class of people and there are even fake western “students” asking questions at the end. But the guy is in China, and these are clearly produced for a new audience but dressed up as if it is educational. I can see why he does it - it lends an air of authority to the videos, and it is engaging, but the conceit of it being a real lecture undermines it.

Windows is in no way free. Every new Windows Laptop and PC comes with a license; when you pay for the PC part of that money goes directly to Microsoft.

Microsoft made upgrading to Windows 10 and 11 “free” for those on older hardware who already had paid for a license because they wanted to move people onto the latest versions and stop supporting the old versions. At the same time they’ve been harvesting and selling users data to make even more money.

They are not trying to “kill” Windows, they are trying to change it into a cloud based system too so that you do have to pay a subscription to use it. They want new PCs and Laptops to be essentially nothing more than thin terminals, using your hardware to support their cloud based system but not actually owning any of the software at all.

But they are less bothered about the absolute revenue Windows makes now, and more bothered about making it a walled garden they control and which up-sells you to all their other subscription services under Office, and Xbox.

Honestly I’m so impressed with how many new features and QOL improvements KDE adds with each update. Keep up the great work!

I donate monthly to the KDE project and strongly recommend others do too; it’s a great open source project.

Tortoises are Turtles, but not all Turtles are Tortoises.

This isn’t an English thing, this is a taxonomy thing. It should be the same in any language, just with different words used.

And we were right.

For comparison, prices near me in the UK are £1.55 a litre which is about $7.45 a gallon.

Yeah, it’s inconsistent. KDE / QT apps should reliably restore to the right desktop / activity and position. But non-KDE apps like GTK & Electron apps are not consistently restored depending on the app. Instead it depends on work arounds on Wayland and apps can still erroneously open on the current screen / desktop instead. This can be still be managed with Kwin with more workarounds - for example specific rules can be applied in Kwin for really problematic apps if users want - but its faffy.

So this is definitely a welcome change to wayland.

On KDE the key combination Alt+Tilde tabs between the windows open for one program. E.g. if I have 4 firefox windows and 2 Konsole windows, if a Firefox window is active Alt+Tilde will tab through only the 4 Firefox windows, while Alt+Tab will tab through all the Firefox and Konsole windows.

Libre Office is maintained by The Document Foundation which is based in Germany. So from a governance point of view it’s already a European hosted open source project.

Also for online collaboration platforms, Libre Office isn’t really a good option. It is an old, sprawling codebase which doesn’t lend itself to being ported to being a server based collaborative platform. It has actually been done but hasn’t flourished, hence alternatives like OnlyOffice.

Also this is more about OnlyOffice’s issues - the lack of transparancy and true collaboration with contributors, the proprietary code used for mobile apps, and it being based in Russia which is geopolitically problematic especially if part of the idea is “Euro sovereignty”

True but at the same time bees help spread pollinating plants - it’s a two way relationship. They may be commercialised for crops, but they will go to any plants in range and contribute to their spread.

So a method of increasing bee populations may also be helpful in spreading wildflowers and speeding up rewilding efforts.

In addition dramatically increasing bee populations may help resolve issues with pollination such as in some regions of China where damage is so bad that hand pollination is needed for crops. Restoring bee pollinators in those areas may increase crop yields, which in turn reduces the general pressure globally on expanding the use of fertile land for farming.

So while crop/pollen diversity is certainly very important, this kind of research still has potentially big benefits for the environment both in the fight to rewild and slow the spread of land use being moved to farming.

Its an interesting build and cool, but this seems overpowered and overspecced to me?

From his reddit post he’s hosting: Immich, Nextcloud (file sync across all devices), Frigate NVR (Coral AI detection + Home Assistant integration), Plex (with full *arr stack), pfSense (firewall, DNS, DHCP, WireGuard VPN, ntopng monitoring), Vaultwarden and Pfblocker. He says on the Youtube video: Plex, Home Assistant, Pi-hole, Immich, Nextcloud, Frigate, and more.

Does this really needs 4 Lenovo PCs (1 used as the router) to run all this? Maybe he has multiple users and is going hard on the Immich and the security camera set up (including video processing?). Even then I just can’t see how this would make full use of all this hardware?