I’m quite hesitant to use Ecosia. This whole planting trees while searching sounds good, but if we are honest, it only works if I disable my ad blocker and occasionally click on the ads being shown. And this is something I really do not want to do. And if I use Ecosia with an ad blocker, I’m kind of planting negative trees because I’m only producing costs and no revenue.

I’ve seen a lot of people in my social circle switching over to Signal. Some groups have moved and some of my private chats have switched, too. That might depend on your social circle, but I see it in mine

I remember it and it was awesome. Bought a cheap second battery and doubled the battery life. So if the phone was empty I just switched over to the new battery. Which is better than working with those stupid USB powerbanks. If the battery was broken, you simply bought a new one. Or if you needed additional capacity, you bought one of those big battery packs. It was great.

The EU is also working on forcing manufacturers to provide updates longer - 5 years after they are stopping selling them. With easier repairability, changeable batteries and longer updates the phone you buy might really last half a decade

And what is the fundamental difference between the background music styled songs from the YT Audio Library that were done for a small penny in a short time by some underpaid performer vs. something a computer created?

Yeah, about that: In most jurisdictions copyright lasts until 70 years after death. So that means in 2026 that both composer and all performers must have died before 1956. Using such old songs from old recordings is simply not feasible for most companies.

There are also good reasons for people to use AI music. If you just want some music as background in a video you want to post somewhere, that totally is a legal nightmare here where I live. If you’re some small business, that is even more nightmarish. Licensing songs is expensive and hard to do, so just generating some ok tune is the best way forward

Yeah, it’s totally crazy to let your cat roam around. They are killing birds, are killed themselves by cars or will simply be missing, are fighting with other cats and get injured all while pooping on your neighbors yards and balconies.

For everybody who is not aware:

• Stalin made a pact with Hitler to split Poland between both countries
• After they attacked and occupied Poland, the Soviets murdered thousands of Poles in Katyn (and at other locations, we are talking about tens of thousands killed)
• The soviet union denied the crimes and tried to frame them as a nazi massacre
• They stopped after the fall of the soviet union in the 1990s, but nobody was ever prosecuted for all those crimes
• Now the regime is crying about “russophobia” at the site of their own crimes

Always funny that they are crying that Germany is buying some electricity in a european grid from other countries, but ignore where the fossil fuels come from

We lost everything when governments hesitated to implement mandatory vaccinations during covid and did not prosecute all those people who were faking their documents.