Rant

Digi is a new ISP who recently drilled into façades of people’s homes without notice or consent. Anyone registered with BIPT as a telecom operator does not need consent for the act of attaching their cable to the façade, but they are required to inform home owners before the work and obtain consent on the way that they run the cable.

Digi simply showed up unannounced with workers in plain clothes who drilled into façades spontaneously. Digi also neglected to say anything about it after the fact.

Proximus and Digi both neglected to give advance notice when they did this. Proximus at least left a letter in mailboxes stating what happened and offered free installation of service.

Both Proximus and Digi are also exclusive services. That is, they do not accept cash payments and thus exclude unbanked people (~3% of the population). It’s extra evil on the part of Proximus because they have physical shops all over which obligates cash acceptance and could serve that purpose.

There is in fact no law obligating Belgian telecom operators to offer service to those whose properties involuntarily host their cables. They can be as exclusive as they want.

And worse, home owners who renovate their façade have a legal obligation to send bPost registered letters to each and every cable owner who uses their façade -- currently a hit of €10 per letter. So if there are 7 cables attached, you are effectively legally obligated to spend €70 to give advance notice before working on your own façade.

Does it have to be this way?

No, because they can run their fiber under the sidewalk. They choose to uglify people’s façades to save money. As such, the law effectively strips the people of their bargaining power. In principle, the ISPs should need to entice consumers with a deal that passes some of the savings of using façades onto them. If you have a strip of terraced houses and one house does not take the deal, then it’s not a problem. The sidewalk just needs to be dug up for the house that refuses the offer.

If you look around, sometimes you will see a terraced house that has buried the cables, perhaps because they want a nice looking façade.

This could even be fixed going forward. In principle, every sidewalk will eventually be dug up again, by Vivaqua doing what Vivaqua does. Such moments would be a good opportunity for telecoms to move their cables under the sidewalk, coordinated with whoever digs up the sidewalk for other purposes. Thereafter, homeowners would not have to send 7+ registered letters every time they need to renovate their façades. But our rights and that opportunity has been squandered.

Front-desk receptionists installed in the buildings of gov agencies, news offices, and large companies sometimes have (or act like they have) a strict protocol of tasks that they can or cannot do. If I ask them to page/call relevant staff for something, or to sign for a delivery, they answer to the effect of:

“That is not in my job description…”

or

“Nope, not on my list… I have no scripted process or procedure for that…”

Some receptionists will say “do you have an appointment?”, to which I answer “if an appointment is needed, please make one for me”. They can never handle that. They say call or email, which of course excludes¹ people.

It’s increasingly more common for the outsourced security receptionist to be dumbed down to know nothing about the org they are keeping a gate for, to have no visibility on schedules and no ability to page people. These “people” typically have no capability beyond writing a call center phone number or URL on a post-it note.

I have to wonder, if these unskilled people are going to be so stripped of basic capability, unable to cater for the needs presented in a situation, why even have them? They are good candidates to be replaced by robots, or even just a sign-posting with a QR code on it².

It’s in everyone’s interest for that threat to be looming, and for such receptionists to come to realise that their own job security relies on being customer oriented (not their boss as a customer, but the ultimate customer, who won’t give a shit if a robot replaces a human that acts just like a robot anyway).

Consider the insideous #forcedBanking dimension to this. Making the front desk helpless enables the org/agency to essentially maintain a non-physical presence, which they use as an rationale for refusing cash payments. The outsourced recepionist can be passed off as someone who does not represent the org/agency and thus cannot handle cash payments.

¹ Calling excludes people because call centers have a limit number of languages they can handle, and even if you’re lucky enough to get someone with a compatible language, you lose the possibility of body language, a bad quality signal makes rough language rougher, and if one side gets tired of speaking a non-native language it’s easy enough to just hang up. Calling also is not free. And email is also exclusive

² (in fact I’ve seen it happen.. a gov office receptionist got replaced with a QR code pointing to a dysfunctional website)

Call to action

Maybe print this rant on a flyer that starts with “Dear receptionist…” and keep a copy when you approach a front desk. If they turn out to be a human acting like a bot, give them the flyer. Suggest they read it and share it with their boss.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.sdf.org/post/38191434

High-level EU courts apparently assume all those who read their acronym-littered opinions and judgements are Subject Matter Experts (SMEs) who already know what the acronyms stand for.

I’m not a lawyer but this seems sloppy from a legal standpoint because an acronym that is never expanded is ambiguous. It creates room for confusion and misinterpretation in the worst case, and in the very least wastes the reader’s time on investigation.

Have lawyers and judges not been trained on this? As a technologist, my training included the good practice of expanding every single acronym the first time it appears, as I did above with “SME”, as well as the extra diligent but optional practice of including a section at the end with all expansions.

I realise that the whole legal industry is made up of mostly tech illiterates. Geeks have the advantage of being able to use LaTeX with the acro package¹, which enables us to write acronyms without thinking about where it first appears because the software automatically expands the first occurrances (or as we specify). Legal workers have probably limited themselves to dumbed down tools like MS Word which probably does not automate this, but nonetheless it’s the writer’s duty to see that acronym expansion happens.

Abbreviations:

SME: Subject Matter Expert

¹ In LaTeX, the preamble would have \DeclareAcronym{sme}{short=SME, long=Subject Matter Expert} and throughout the document each instance would be written as \ac{sme}.

It’s worth watching; interesting.. insightful. But it’s very disturbing that they concealed the most important fact: how she was caught.

Most printers secretly print a concealed unique code (typically a serial number) on every printed page using small faint yellow dots. The naked eye overlooks them but under magnification they can be seen. Reality Winner printed the classified document from a shared office printer. Then she simply mailed the paper doc to The Intercept.

IIUC, the Intercept was not smart enough to do any further processing. They simply published an exact copy that was high enough quality that the tracker dots were reproduced. (really? Hard to believe). The leak was thus easily tracked to the shared printer used by Winner. Then it was trivial to narrow down to Winner.

The omission in the documentary is disturbing because that is the one fact that touches everyone. It’s a missed opportunity to inform consumers, who buy printers with an expectation that the printer will serve them - the owner. Printer makers have no legal obligation to surreptitiously fingerprint every page printed. They voluntarily decided to conspire against the hand that feeds them, the consumer, whose trust they should have lost.

Initially the EFF was tracking the models of compromised printers. Then they decided one day to end the project stating that so many printers do it that there is insufficient value to keeping track of them.

This is why I will not buy a color printer. No, it’s not paranoia (neither sensible paranoia nor crazy). It’s ethics. I have enough dignity and self-respect to refuse to feed my oppressors and buy something that is designed to deceptively work against me. Omitting the widespread existence of tracker dots from the video strips consumers of information about the insideous extent to which they are buying anti-consumer products.

The documentary itself is another instance of a supplier disservicing the paying consumer, by witholding useful information.

I literally can't win in society...so many issues, and additional issues. No one to work with to address as my few friends are isolating me for obvious reasons. Life overall sucks, but I'm thankful my mother is still around. I fear the day she passes.

Treat everyone nice folks..

I worked the night in Budapest, and stayed longer. My father tried to call me thrice, twice of which did actually get to me (loss of signal), but I didn't pick it up. Apparently he also sent me a few messages, but I didn't retrieve those*.

When I got home, of course that was the first thing I heard of, along with the stupidest reason yet.
(approximate from memory) "Why don't you pick up phone or reply to messages? We were really worried about you. There's pride over there right now desbite Orbán banning it. It's full of LGBT perverts, anything could have happened to you."

And the first time I told them I'll work the night (I don't know if I can use "nightshift" when it isn't shift work ¯⁠\⁠_⁠(⁠ツ⁠)⁠_⁠/⁠¯), they were very strong on disagreeing with that, stating that if I'll be outside at night, I could "get raped by a homosexual".

* Calls are forwarded to my current number, but that's not an option for SMS. I updated my current number where relevant, leaving out just my family, which is basically just my parents and aunts spamming me with christian stuff or telling me to tell my mom to call them (why?). Retrieving SMS thus refers to switching the SIM card for like 2 minutes (switched to eSIM for convenience).

Its just an instance where tankies can exist in an echo chamber without having to critically think.

If you want you can read some of my comments here and watch these morons make fallacious argument after falacious argument, put words in my mouth, and project some person who makes similarly bad takes which exists inside their head onto me: https://lemmy.today/comment/17304484

Edit: there's also this thread: https://lemmy.today/post/32415724/17304693

Back in the before times, of the long long ago, there existed cable TV. We paid exorbitant rates for hundreds of channels, of which we watched but few. Clicking through endless channels for hours, only to find nothing. I often fantasied of a world in which we could pick and choose the channels, paying only for those we wanted.

Then, like manna from heaven, streaming services arrived. At last, video Xanadu had been realized. On demand, uninterrupted entertainment Bliss through my PC!

But it was not to last. Once the the streaming services' cable and broadcast competitors were crushed, the profiteers looked down from atop their overflowing money-bins and saw an opportunity for more profit through enshitification. Unabashedly, they reintroduced adds, before, during and after every on-demand episode. First Prime, then Netflix, and the rest.

We had many glorious years of unadulterated entertainment. They're gone now, fallen to corporate greed. Offended by Hulu's lengthy adds and Amazon's "Go add free" button, and the data scrapping voyeurism of online services, I've walked away from the lost paradise. Back to the simple & private shelter of books and DVDs.

I like UPS because the workers have a union, they take care of their drivers, and it seems like USPS is having some problems lately, which makes sense because the people in charge of it are actively trying to destroy it along with everything else.

So, I tried out UPS recently. It costs a little more but whatever.

I tried to ship a package to Canada. In addition to the tariffs, which are fun, UPS tacked on a "customs brokerage fee" which they attempted to charge to the recipient. Basically, as long as that person is paying tax and tariffs and God knows what else, we might as well collect $17.95 from them at the same time, because why not.

The person receiving the package told the UPS driver more or less "Get fucked, I'm not paying that. I'm not the one shipping the package, getting it to me is your problem not mine." I can sympathize. He said that he's had experience with doing that before, and the delivery company caved and he eventually got the package anyway. IDK what that's about, it sounds unlikely, but that's what he said.

Anyway, I talked with him, and eventually he agreed to pay this bullshit. I have spent half the morning at this point on the phone with UPS trying to get them to attempt redelivery of the package.

Actually, before that, when I was trying to sort everything out, I had some fun conversations where they explained this "customs brokerage fee" to me. I asked the guy several times if any other carrier charges this fee, and several times he responded to the question with long explanations without answering it, simply pretending that I had asked some other question. Because, as I now know, the answer is "no." It's just some random bullshit that UPS and only UPS does to international shipments. I think it's just an opportunity to snatch money from people while they're distracted and don't know what's going on, and don't have a lot of other options. If they presented to me this fee they were collecting when I was choosing to ship the package, I could say "fuck that I don't want that" and choose some other shipper.

Anyway, now that we've sorted out what's going on, I've been on the phone with UPS trying to get them to attempt redelivery so we can finally put this issue behind us and I can avoid UPS in the future for international shipments. The phone people just can't get their act together. Every person I talk to is surprised that I have an international shipment, and tells me I should have called worldwide shipping. I ask them for the phone number, and they give me the phone number I called. I point this out and they react with confusion and skepticism.

The first guy that I managed to get through this whole process with said that they can't find the package, took my email address (which took him four attempts to replicate even when I spelled it out very slowly), and said they would send me an email. The email I received was inviting me to set up a claim for a lost package. That's clearly not right, so I called back.

The second woman asked about transferring me to worldwide shipping, since I know now to ask about that first. I said fine but pointed out that I had called the exact same number she was giving me. She became very confused by this, and then launched into trying to help me anyway (?). She eventually told me back a bunch of information about the package that I had just told her, seemed to be reading to herself from some information she was looking up, and then told me to have the shipper contact UPS and create a MyChoice account. I asked her if she could just mark it to attempt redelivery, since I was already on the phone with her and she was UPS. In keeping with how the UPS people generally behave on the phone, I had to ask her this several times before she was willing to answer the question instead of just starting to talk about random stuff in a sympathetic tone of voice. It turned out that the answer was, no, she can't help me. I pointed out that UPS people had lied to me a few different times about how things would work, so I was a little skeptical. I realize this probably isn't a productive line of conversation for me to go down.

Anyway, she successfully attempted to pass me off to someone else as quickly as possible, so now I'm on hold. While listening to the music on speaker, I decided to make another attempt at setting up a ups.com account for myself. It didn't work the first time because it only works on Chrome, apparently, and browsing with Chrome is becoming a painful and insecure way to traverse the internet.

Anyway. Success! Now it wants me to set up my account.

I cannot possibly emphasize enough how little I want basic benefits like tracking notifications. I have the tracking number, I will check if I want to know what's going on with my package.

Wait! The person has answered the phone. I've now been on the phone, just for this call, for 34 minutes, just to reach the initial person who is apparently able to help me with this fairly simple issue. He is at least concise and seems to be able to understand the issue and what I want ("redeliver package pls") with a minimum of extraneous bizarro-world conversations where he repeats lots of details about my shipment back to me. He even knew the tracking number and asked me if he was looking at the right shipment, without me having to read it to him slowly and him fucking up taking it down multiple times as some other people I spoke to did. I feel like maybe that's just entertainment for them, if they're having a slow day, to make simpleton errors in the tracking number and see if they can get the customer wound up a little bit.

Update: After an extended hold, during which I got nowhere with the web site, he got back on the phone and reported that he had solved my issue, and they're planning to reattempt the delivery tomorrow.

I also am entertained to learn that this interaction was the only one that was followed up by a phone survey inviting me to indicate my level of satisfaction. I took the survey. I suspect that this segment of the operation somehow actually does care about their phone support people functioning at anything above "surly toddler" level, and so is following up about it, and that's why this man was competent. I suspect the rest of the operation mostly cares about saving money, not about anything competent happening to any person's package, and so that's the result they're getting.

I hit the button requesting to leave a voice comment at the end of the survey, but something fucked up in their system, and I wasn't able to. Oh well.

Don't use UPS for international shipments. Maybe not for other shipments.

Usually they're tolerable, just annoying.

The screenshot is from one I found installed outside Lidl (supermarket) now, above the entrance. Probably loud enough to "cover" the entire parking lot. Loud enough to get painful after a few seconds. Sweeping between 15.5kHz to 18.7kHz. For comparison, a CRT TV is around 15.7kHz.

I wonder if not caring about loudness of these higher frequencies contributes to hearing damage among people.

Lower frequency, but also awfully loud buzzers can be found in trains near doors, working as a warning when the doors are closing. Thankfully, this probably annoyed some of the staff enough for them to start taping these over.
But those are loud enough to sound distorted.

Anyway, I just hid behind a corner where I couldn't hear it that much while waiting for the manager to call us in.

Racism, genocides, discrimination, war, none of it. She would gladly watch people die and get hurt and I know she would because it doesn’t hinder or even “affect” her (it does).

How can people be like this and watch people suffer? Abuse people and hurt minorities and not care if they get mass killed? What is wrong with people? Why?? There’s no hope for an adult like this IMO.

I cannot believe that in this the year of our lord 2025 we still have two separate clipboard buffers on desktop Linux.

There are very few cases where I will execute a paste (whether it is with middle click or Ctrl-V) and I will want the resulting paste to be anything other than the last thing I copied. Whatever X11 subcommittee came up with the idea that users would want to juggle stuff between the two buffers, or whatever the fuck the thinking was, needs to be punished physically. It's not enough to tell them: They need to remember, so that they will know what they did was wrong, and get fearful in the future if they ever think of doing anything like that again. Their names should be made public, so that people in the future who might want to hire them will know what they did. (I tried to find out who it was, but Google is drunk again and couldn't really tell me all that much.)

I am already aware that the X11 people spent a lot of time huffing glue in between creating overly complicated standards documents. So maybe the fact that they made some baffling and wrong decisions for literally no reason isn't surprising. It was a long time ago, a lot of bad things happened back then. What I really cannot understand is why Wayland looked at that decision, and the long history of pain and suffering it had caused over the years, and decided, "You know what? Let's keep that around. What harm could it do? And anyway... it's compatible!"

Having two clipboards is literally just worse. Even if we go back to the pre-Wayland days, before the singular clipboard each app chooses to interact with became a mutually incompatible happenstance that depends on the toolkit and historical lineage of that particular tool, so that it's often simply impossible to copy and paste between two extra tools before you do the standard ritual of installing some "make my clipboard work please" incantations into your system setup that don't fully work but close enough to stop you complaining, it was still worse. Even back in the X11 days, when all the users just ignored the Ctrl-C clipboard and used the middle-click clipboard, it was still just extra work for no reason. Now, it's become completely unforgivable. I want to take away these people's car keys and replace them with a pair of identical keys and tell them that one or the other will randomly work, each morning, and they have to try it and find out, every time. I want to replace one of their morning yogurts with Elmer's glue, and tell them they should install a Yogurt sync tool if they don't want the glue, because it's important to be kind and accommodating to the people who need glue in the morning and that's what's important right now.

If anyone knows of something I can run that will just do a simple bidirectional sync between the two clipboards, so I can just pretend to myself that all of this isn't happening, please tell me. I tried to find a solution for half the morning so far, because I finally just got enraged by it, and I couldn't find one.

If I imagine hard to myself, I can maybe imagine a scenario where I might want to hit Ctrl-C, then I would accidentally highlight something right after, and then I would want to paste the thing I did Ctrl-C for. But surely that use case isn't the one that we need to wrap the whole desktop Linux clipboard situation around, to make sure that Fat-Finger Freddy can still get his pasting done, all while the rest of us have to go around saying things like "wl-paste -p -w 'wl-copy'" and everyone has to do a bunch of extra work whenever they want to do the already difficult task of making pasting work in an editor over SSH or something.

I literally can't believe how bad it is. It's like a prank. It's like one of those imaginary programming languages where someone invented a deliberately malicious feature and then implemented it to a T to be funny.

I do not like it. Not one bit.

Also: Did you know the are three clipboards? The third clipboard is called the "secondary selection," in keeping with the impeccable human logic that runs all through the X11 codebase like cordyceps through a staggering, dying ant.

Emacs is only editor in history that does anything with the third clipboard. Hold down "alt" and drag with the left button to highlight something, and that thing will go into the special top secret clipboard, where nothing will ever see it.

OH HOW USEFUL

SAID NO ONE EVER

equifax/transunion: we're going to hold all your personal information in a database to "determine your credit worthiness." don't worry, it's totally secure- WHOOPS, we got hacked! guess everyone has your personal information and phone number now

me: *uses a separate phone number for various purposes to manage spam and potential identify theft from data breaches

equifax/transunion: oh, look! we don't care why, but there are "too many different phone numbers" being reported for you. we're lowering your credit score

me: sigh 🤷

Not just once, but during at least 3 steps of the process

Every post about Iron heart on Facebook, people are bitching and moaning that Marvel had the nerve to make a show they don't personally approve of.

What is this entitlement people have about movies and TV where it's not enough for them to just not watch the thing they're not interested in, they have to make sure to loudly proclaim their disapproval of it. I have no interest in The Bear. Know what I do? I just don't watch it and it has virtually no impact on my life.

Some people refuse to just not watch what they aren't interested in, they demand that everyone know how displeased they are with something that hasn't even been released yet. And they insist that EVERYONE, or at least everyone who matters, feels the exact same way they do. I don't know if they're so self-centered they legitimately don't understand that other people have different tastes or if this is just a big cope because they can't handle that people are watching and enjoying things they aren't. It's not enough to just not watch it, they have to try and convince themselves and others that nobody will like the thing they don't approve of. If they really believed nobody was going to watch it, then why does its existence bother them so much? If what they're saying is true, then nobody will watch and the show won't have any impact. They're throwing a tantrum because they can't handle the possibility that the show will have an impact on other people.

Such passionate hatred for something that isn't even out yet. They don't know if it's any good or not and already they can't handle the idea that anybody will watch it. And they wonder why people think their hatred might be racially motivated.

Religion:

• You have to Follow the only leader, you shall not have an Opinion, and you must convince everyone to have your opinion

Democracy:

• Have your own opinion
• Understand others arguments and find a compromise
• No Leader

Now why the actual fuck are people still saying that religion is less than a threat to Democracy? Like, everyone who just even mentions that he got their opinion from the bible should get a lifelong unpaid vacation from Europe straight to Dubai.

if im mean, u deserve it. im not gonna say bad things for no reason. and im not a bad person for saying my opinion.

Honestly annoying af like if you order some shit then just pick it up yourself or consider yourself lucky if other people do this service to you from time to time. Pick a mailman if you are too lazy

Seriously, why is it so hard to set static IPv6 addresses? My router’s hard drive recently failed (just a month after buying it) and I’m trying to recall how I ever got this configured.

The “documentation” in the configuration file is trash, the software is trash because it doesn’t work. Why is this considered the standard for DHCP on Linux? It’s infuriating. If they can’t fucking figure it out just leave it out and leave it up to other software.

All I’m trying to do is keep IPv4 and IPv6 addresses semi-uniform like OpenWRT does.

New Windows 11 release comes with a new Windows 11 bug: middle click on explorer icon on taskbar doesn't open a new window anymore.

This taskbar shit seems so hard to do for microsoft, they took 3 years to fix the combined icons bug

same for "reopen explorer windows at login" which was broken for more than one year

If all their 100k devs are unable to fix it, why don't they open source it and rely on some amateur hobbyist to fix it for free in their spare time?

It also feels yucky on the whole, and usually means more wiping is involved in the aftermath.

it doesn’t mean i can’t be taken care of just because im autistic.

it’s not my fault i got hurt for years as a child.

i’m not less than human just because im bi and autistic.

i know you say “people” hate me, that my friends don’t like my interests and see me as lesser. it can’t be that EVERYONE IN THE WORLD, EVEN MY CLOSE FRIENDS hate me. this is why no one likes you. they like me and told me they never said that so thanks for dying to make me feel bad. EVEN ADULTS.

i know it’s YOU WHO FEELS THAT WAY. WHAT A SHAME. truly sick how people act toward those who are different.

you don’t deserve an ounce of my respect, love, or sympathy.

you hurt me for so long for years and triggered my ptsd. i hate you and people should stop sympathizing with you and feeling bad for you.

I HATE YOU. I NEVER WANNA FUCKING SEE YOU AGAIN. PEOPLE ALWAYS TALK ABOUT HOW HARSH I WAS TO YOU BUT YOU FUCKING SUCK. YOU VILE SCUM OF THE EARTH.

YOU DON’T DESERVE THE SMALLEST MEASUREMENT OF MY KINDNESS OR MERCY OR ANYTHING.

YOU SEE ME AS LESS THAN HUMAN AND WANT TO HURT ME. YOU MAKE MY DISABILITY MY WHOLE IDENTITY. YOU SAY I’M RETARDED. YOU CALL ME TOO DISGUSTING TO BE ATTRACTIVE OR HAVE PHYSICAL AFFECTION SHOWN TO ME.

YOU’RE FIXATED ON INTERACTING WITH MY FRIENDS AND TRY TO BRAINWASH EVERY SINGLE ONE OF THEIR OBLIVIOUS BRAINS. YOU SAY NICE PEOPLE ARE EASY TARGETS BECAUSE THEY’RE STUPID. YOU SAY I’M TOO NICE. YOU PRAISE ME THEN DISCARD ME.

I’M TIRED OF TRYING TO SEE THE GOOD IN YOU. I. DON’T. CARE IF YOU HAD A BAD FUCKING DAY BECAUSE YOU’RE ABUSIVE AND YOU DON’T’ ABUSE PEOPLE ON BAD DAYS. WHAT IF YOU BEAT ME TO A PULP. “BAD DAY” HUH?

I get it, it explains your behavior that you were abused. that your father screams at you and you have substance abuse issues, ptsd, and were bullied since age 5. i completely understand, but to beat up and bully/insult others because of it IS NOT OKAY.

i believe there’s good and bad in everyone, and potentially you could let out your good side, but im also hypersensitive and hate when people let out their bad sides intentionally regardless of stuff like this.

hating people because of their skin color or disability or sexuality, you should be fucking ashamed.