Your lamps aren’t LED but CFL (think old neon signs), and the small black box is not a transformer but an inductor.

In short, your lamps produce light by an electrical current flowing through a gas in a glass tube. To make the gas conductive to electricity, a very high voltage is applied for a short amount of time. That’s what the thing in the plug does.

I don’t know that particular model of lamp, but my suggestion is to use intact lamps and bin the broken ones. There’s a considerable risk of electric shock, fire or (in extreme cases) high-velocity glass shards if you try replacement parts at random and don’t know exactly what you’re doing. As the lamps haven’t been working beforehand anyway, I suspect they’re generally beyond repair.

I’ve been to Argentina and have family there, and sadly have to lean towards advising against visiting at the moment. The political and economic situation is one reason, and it pains me to say this, but if our friends & relatives there are anything to go by, the constant whining would be a total showstopper for me.

Having said that, if you have to go, do consider Bariloche, Puerto Madryn, Salta (book a tour to Jujuy if you don’t mind the altitude) and Iguazú (both the Argentine and Brazilian half are fine). Be extra careful in Buenos Aires - read up on all the ways tourists are scammed beforehand, only use official taxis and avoid La Boca after 17:00.

Be aware that your credit card may or may not work, and that cash withdrawal at banks and ATMs is both severely limited and hugely expensive. Currency exchanges were also routinely out of cash at least until a couple years ago. We’ve found the best way to obtain cash is to send yourself money by Western Union.

You can tell the ‘now’ screenshot is fake because in reality the ground after the spikes would have been part of some pricey ‘premium’ DLC package.

s/noticeable/avoidable

I don’t know about other countries - in Switzerland there’s something called ‘tactile sign language’. It’s a variation of sign language where the ‘listener’ is holding your hands to track your movements, and it’s commonly used by/with people with impaired hearing and eyesight.

A more universal (and much easier to learn but much slower) variant is the Lorm alphabet where you use your right hand to draw letters on the ‘listening’ person’s left hand. E.g. the word ‘hello’ would be: run finger down top half of pinkie, tap tip of index finger, run finger down middle finger to wrist (twice), tap tip of ring finger.

The closest one to true FOSS that I’m aware of is Apertus. Not sure whether it’s feasible to build anything meaningful from scratch without your own GPU farm though.

It’s what they should do really. Make the consequences of the law as visible as possible.

So long, Elon…

Trade-in deals mostly suck around here. I hand my ‘old’ phones down to friends and family, who hand theirs down to their kids. Their kids usually get a ‘new’ phone when their old one has stopped working or is really, really showing its age. I assume this system is representative of a quite sizeable part of society, so I’m not sure how much to read into those trade-in statistics.

+1 for Jitsi. Works well, user-friendly, lots of features without looking complicated, not too resource-hungry, lots of ways to extend it. All the other person needs it to click a link, enter a name and allow microphone/camera usage one time. There’s also an app for Android and iOS, though you can just as well use a mobile browser.

Well the half-good news is, judging by Palantir’s track record of managing large public projects elsewhere, that project is bound to bankrupt the US once and for all so people can build something new. The bad news is, it’s probably only going to happen late within the first fifteen years of the ‘two-year’ contract.

The knowledge is still there, it’s just that the LLM has been instructed not to divulge it, and these instructions are often imperfect and can sometimes be circumvented accidentally or on purpose.

There you go. 🤗

I know most people find it unrealistic that underpaid sweatshop-style manufacturing could ever be moved to the US, but considering the rate at which social safety nets, employee rights and unions are deconstructed, the idea might not be that far-fetched. Already many people work two or more jobs to make ends meet, jobs such as waiting are already grossly underpaid and borderline degrading in many cases, and people are still eager to do that work because the alternative would be for them and their families to go hungry or homeless. Who’s to say sewing cheap dresses 12-14 hours a day is such a bad pospect in comparison?

Well, Nvidia plans to move manufacturing to the US, and Swiss pharmaceutical giant Roche has pledged a 50 billion investment in US facilities, so there are at least some ass-kissers.
What happens after these announcements remains to be seen.

Going great so far - as the work week has started a day late, today’s practically already Wednesday!

It’s finally warm enough to work outside most of the day, so that’s what I’m doing. Loving it. Behind the PC monitor I see mountains, a small forest and the dogs wandering around in the garden, trying to secretly dig holes where they think I can’t see them.

On a personal level, I find myself (finally) growing increasingly indifferent to various things that I can’t influence. If the world stays its current course, there’s a good chance I’ll lose some of the luxuries in my life, but in the grand scheme of things we’ll likely still be okay. Let the world burn if it wants to - I’ll save the rest of my sanity for the problems that affect me personally if and when they arise.
This mindset brings an immense sense of freedom. I’m much happier already.

Besides that it’s a pretty normal week, just busier than usual as there’s a lot to do in the garden and around the house. I still need to fix the holes in the lawn, get rid of a metric ton of weeds and paint some walls. It’s a lot of work but totally worth it.

and people like me are why Linux has even gotten to where it’s at today.

Not true. There are tons of nice developers out there. And I for one wouldn’t want to work in a team where an attitude like yours is prevalent.

You know, downcasting and/or insulting people just because they don’t live up to your personal standards is a pretty shitty thing to do.

To answer the question in the title: my money’s on an old white man with homophobic and misogynistic tendencies.

FWIW - as a person guilty of sometimes not texting back: most of the time it’s not because I don’t want to talk to that person, it’s because I don’t have the time and/or energy to write something worthwhile, make a mental note to text back something witty ‘later’, and you can probably guess where this is going.