The few times I’ve used AliExpress I’ve had expectations met in terms of product quality, exceeded in terms of customer support and disappointed in terms of promised delivery speed.

I don’t get the sense most people are any different.

I’ve literally given you a way to feel more confident, all you have to take it. But no, you’d rather live in ignorance it seems.

lol. I AM the source. DM me with your LinkedIn handle, I’ll connect with you to validate my identity and you can tell anybody else watching that the story is legit. I don’t want to spill too many details in public as I don’t want to involve my old company in it.

And in terms of “state controlled VPN” services, it’s not that the Chinese state runs honeypot VPNs for companies (though they most definitely do for their own citizens), but that to have a license to operate a cloud service in China, you have to enforce CSL and that means they get private companies, western too, to do their bidding. If you encrypt data, you’ll get a stern call (as we did).

Of course China uses encryption. So an obtuse, direct reading of that statement allows you, correctly, to say the commenter is wrong.

But what the commenter probably meant was “China bans the use of encryption that prevents the Chinese state from reading what is being exchanged” and that is confidently right. I’ve operated teams in China where we had a secret category 1 incident when it was discovered a couple of our devs had set up a VPN between a Chinese and a western service that didn’t go through the official Chinese-state controlled VPN services.

They absolutely do not want data they cannot read.

The difference is that there is SOME accountability in the West and we can, to an extent, influence who leads us, especially in Europe.

So if flagrant misuse does appear, there’s a much higher risk of it being discovered and of heads rolling in the west.

Think of the number of exposed scandals in the West and compare that to China.

And I’m not throwing shit China’s way and thinking the West infallible. I’ve been to China plenty and worked with awesome Chinese people plenty. There’s a lot to love in China.

But let’s not get lost in whataboutisms. Where would you rather raise your children?!

We know that decoupling growth and fossil fuel is possible. The US and EU has had declining fossil emissions since the 2000s yet still achieved growth, also if you include outsourced emission.

It can be done.

Whether it’s done in time, or without large scale impact, is another question. But it’s possible.

100% Micro. Unless you’re only - and mean ONLY - living in the terminal, why would you want all your desktop and terminal shortcuts different from one another?!

Azure don’t give a shit what it runs. Windows is on its own these days; if they succeed, good for them, but honestly I think the days of Microsoft just pretending to give a shit about Linux are long gone; it’s an important OS to them too.

I’ve worked for Microsoft for 12 years, still have lots of friends there so I get some of the vibe from that.

Never really have gone full Linux.

I run MacOS, Windows, Ubuntu, Fedora and BSD depending on the need of the box.

The one thing that lead me onto Linux, however, was the full hardware access in Docker.

But that’s not how carbon dioxide works. It isn’t individual poison - our bodies don’t give a shit whether it’s 350 ppm or 450 ppm. The planet does though.

You can vote and march. Those are the only small actions that will make a huge impact.

“Evolution had given a bit more thought to species survival”.

… that’s not how evolution works, unfortunately. It requires us to do the thinking.

Combat (1977) for the Atari 2600. Tbf it was some time in the early eighties, not straight after release when “that kid on the road that had everything” finally also got a console.

I know, back in the day when you had to find websites and the web felt vast and hidden and mysterious. Search engines sucked and a lot of word of mouth. Loved that shit, before the money and the idiots arrived.

Safety Not Guaranteed

I’ve got so many of those “could be interesting” semi-indie flicks that just always get pushed to the side for popcorn-faire when I do have some rare time to watch a film.

You can milk anything with nipples!

Yeah I mean, if I don’t run a mail server then it’s pretty easy to run a mail server 🤣

Well you’ll soon be able to subscribe to the big accounts on Threads, even from Mastodon, provided your server allows it.

I personally wonder if the time for this kind of microblogging hasn’t come and gone now. A lot of media on Instagram but my teenage kids don’t use Twitter, don’t want to use Twitter and don’t care about what happens to Twitter. Pry TikTok out of their hands, though…

Running the server itself is fine (I have done and still do run a mail server), but getting the large email providers to not flag your message as spam can be quite tricky.

Love Fastmail, been a customer for years. Lightning fast web interface, decent app, rock solid and, for Darwin’s sake, a paid product so they leave your email alone instead of mine it endlessly.