C is a terrible language, but it's at least reasonably concise and readable when you need to punish it into doing what you want without crashing.
VBA is clunky for just about everything it does, because it tries to be as readable as SQL but fails miserably. I've never found out why all it calls all of my variables dim but it sure doesn't provide reasonable code.
You don't get the memory corruption you get when writing C code (though you can make it happen) but it's just not a very suitable language for just about anything. It tries to take the easiest thing in programming, the syntax, and optimising on making that easy.
The biggest problem with VBA is that it's abused by office workers that need a real application but can't and won't get any time and budget to make or acquire one. You end up with the world's shittiest code imaginable, written by people who aren't programmers, driven to desperation. Opening someone else's VBA code is like opening someone's browser history, no matter how good your opinion of them is, you'll find something that'll make you question your view about them if you scroll long enough.
The "real programmers" that like writing code full of memory corruption and null pointers have a hate boner for everything that tries to make their job easier, probably because they feel like they're only valued for being able to write code and afraid of being found out. Visual Basic 6 allowed Junior programmers to write applications that worked fine for literal decades in a week, while any "hardcore" developer would've taken a month getting the string validation right.
The same senseless hate is also present with PHP, where the arguments against the language usually come down to "I don't like the syntax" and "this ten year old code base I used it in once was super bad". VB also has the downside of being slow, although with VB.NET you can write powerful VB applications that perform as well as their C# counterparts.
I tried to go back into VB after learning other languages but I just can't think of any way in which it's a better choice than something like C#. The Basic ecosystem Microsoft set up, where you can throw together an application in minutes and it just works, is absolutely amazing, and something I still miss on Windows every day. The language itself, with all of its quirks and stupid syntax structures, I don't.
One thing I'll give VB is that it has the most hilarious but sometimes quite practical error handling statement I have ever seen (ON ERROR RESUME NEXT) that will literally ignore any error and just keep on trucking. Whenever I see three levels of methods try/catching each other and passing error objects along at the very end, I long for an ON ERROR RESUME NEXT that would just let me do all of the error handling at the very end.
Apple does actually build quite a few privacy preserving technologies into its operating system. The only unique identifier they intend to provide is the ID that the "we want to stalk you" prompts are referring to.
Tracking companies have proven to find new ways to track users, unfortunately, but they are trying their very best. Something you can't say of Microsoft or Google.
As far as Apple has been capable of so far, the only unique device identifier apps on their platform can get access to is the one that you need to accept a prompt for. However, they know damn well that there are ways of fingerprinting devices that they can't prevent (without fucking up the user experience) so it would be dishonest to pretend that saying "no" blocks these attempts.
Apps requiring accounts to be useful, for instance, can be tracked by the user ID on the app's end. That's not something Apple can ever prevent through technical means.
I've got my Mastodon and Lemmy servers hooked up to a postgres server that's running separately, and the CPU usage between the two is now about the same.
That actually proves that Lemmy is more efficient, because it's handling a hell of a lot more data. I don't follow a lot of big accounts, and I'm the only user on my server, so I rarely get more than 40 posts + metadata through Mastodon. On Lemmy, however, each post can easily produce hundreds of events to process because of comments and likes all federating out.
In total, Lemmy seems to be heavier, but only because it does more. Mastodon is super inefficient, especially with things like RAM. I think it has something to do with the framework and language it's running on; Gitlab seems to be using the same runtime and that eats through RAM like crazy as well.
You need to ask because Apple can't enforce on an API level that apps don't track you. Less vague language may lure people into a false sense of security. In theory Apple should be safeguarding you from malicious apps, in practice they regularly turn a blind eye once an app is big enough that an app not working becomes a problem for Apple rather than for the app developers.
I also think the language in that prompt is very much intentional. Apple doesn't want apps to track their users, so I think they've added an ick-factor to the prompt. On Android, buttons are labels with things like "allow" or "deny".
The only way to get rid of the tracking system is to make it interesting for companies to stop tracking you. 1 star rating + uninstall + switch to a competitor is the best you can do.
It just shows them as normal messages in the channel they're in. On one client, images seem to disappear in threads for some reason. Bit weird. Could be a quirk of my setup, though.
When you puke, you get rid of the alcohol in your stomach. However, if the alcohol is already in your system, puking won't help.
If your body is continuing to make you puke, you've probably poisoned yourself. Your body is desperately trying to get rid of the toxic substance killing you, but it's too late to eject it out through the mouth, so it just has to tank the damage by sacrificing liver cells and brain cells, which are both things your body Does Not Like.
If you're still drinking after your body triggered its poison response, well, it's trying to stop you from poisoning yourself.
If you regularly drink until you puke, something may be wrong with you medically (making you sick after one or two glasses of alcohol) or you're killing yourself (by drinking way too much alcohol). Either way, you need to get yourself help.
Given your "it becomes like I drink water", I think you have a serious problem.
I use the mautrix one in self bot mode. May get my account banned at some point but it seems to work well enough. No idea how well it works to merge a Discord server with a Matrix space, though.
Replies and emoji reactions work. Media uploads work too. It seems to ignore the file upload limit, though, so large images + non-nitro accounts may cause confusion.
It doesn't support some features (threads, notably) but I don't think many people will be sad about that.
Is there a database of "this IP belongs to this state" these companies use? Or do they just use GeoIP stuff? I don't want my Lemmy server to accidentally violate American laws and get in trouble/banned, so I may need to start doing some IP filtering myself.
In theory you get the benefit of them banning your Drive Google account and leaving your email Google account alone. Google will probably link the two, but I don't think the ban will cross accounts automatically.
These companies typically use AI analyses of uploaded files to prevent people from doing stuff like upload child porn. Unfortunately, they can't distinguish between "pedo shit" and "picture of naked child with a nasty rash emailed to a doctor".
Several people have lost years of email because they uploaded pictures like those to OneDrive. By separating accounts, you can keep your files and your email separate.
There have also been instances of people attacking others by inviting them to WhatsApp groups (which still isn't disabled by default) and spamming a bunch of illegal shit. If you have WhatsApp set to auto backup, you may just end up sending that illegal shit to Google, who in turn detects it and kicks you out of your account.
For this reason, I think it's a good idea to separate any cloud storage accounts from your email accounts.
Google will typically ask you to add a DNS entry, or an HTML tag to the home page. This will usually prove ownership. If you lose access, I think this mechanism should automatically kick you off at some point.
They used to offer free domain services, I think, or at least very cheap subscriptions. I think they've moved away from those since.
Same with Microsoft. I have a Microsoft account for a Gmail address, but Microsoft doesn't realise that they should disable Outlook, leading to the funny weird situation where you can log in to Outlook.com with a Gmail address and enter a completely useless empty mailbox. I bet Google has the same quirk.
Alright, I guess I could enter IMAP or POP details and use Outlook as some kind of email client by proxy, but that's an even worse idea.
Apply the steps on https://dontkillmyapp.com/ to Google Play Services and Google Play Messaging, that may help. Also check if you have an app running in the background that eats all of your RAM and forces the OS to clear up scheduleable tasks.
Thirty minutes is way longer of a delay than I've ever seen. You may want to try a factory reset in case it's a ROM issue. Fairphone has had its ups and downs over the years when it comes to the built in software.
I've heard a lot of people about how much they enjoy working fully remotely. Almost all of them have a separate home office room to work in.
Stress lowers your immune response (as does smoking, which many people do to combat stress). Any natural healing process will go faster if you cut out stress factors. The stress itself can't cause the ulcers to appear on their own.
It's also possible to get ulcers from certain medication (including over the counter painkillers) so if the cooks are lacing the food with medication they could still cause them, I suppose…
Oh, I definitely wouldn't go near that stuff, too easy to mess up and die. Every dose is a dance with death (unless you're an experienced doctor and/or pharmacist, maybe). I do like the concept, though, just boosting passive energy consumption during times when it's easy to get rid of the excess heat. Seems less addictive and long-term-death-y than the ones messing with the already-messed-up glucose regulation systems.
Now that's interesting! I can see why they took it off the market because of hyperthermia risks, but that would kind of be the perfect weight loss pill for me in the winter months…
That's the point of VPNs, isn't it? Do you trust the companies that sell your location information to shady people like bounty hunters or some foreign VPN company?
Personally, I trust Mullvad more than I trust many ISPs. It all depends on how good your ISP is and your country's laws are. ISPs here in the Netherlands used to collect the IP addresses and other metadata of all websites you visit, as well as location information, for six months or more, because the law forced them to, in case the police ever needed that information. The law got overturned (though that doesn't mean ISPs can't track you anymore, they're just not forced to) but this definitely feels like a reason for an always-on VPN to me. The government also pushed for IPv6 not because it's not 1980 anymore, but because they foolishly thought that it would give every device a unique IP address so they could track people better.
Not that I want to evade the police, but when crazy religious people get in power, I don't want to get convicted for contacting porn sites at some point. VPN providers that you don't trust not to log anything are still better for privacy than that.
Some VPN providers lie and say they will never log anything (only for lawsuits to prove otherwise). You can't trust those. I consider every VPN that pays for YouTube ads to be untrustworthy. Mullvad, and some of its competitors, however, seem to be relatively trustworthy.
With VPNs, you move your point of tracking to another company or country. Whether that benefits you depends on who you are, where you live, and what your priorities are.
I remember a long blog post about it on f.lux comparing it a bunch of competitors with actual measurements rather than pure RGB values.
Of course LCD doesn't turn on any pixels, it just stops blocking the white light from behind the panel, but the result isn't any different.
Unfortunately I can't find the link right now, I must've read it a decade ago. Perhaps it's been lost to time.
The end conclusion was that a bunch of free apps/cheap software thought they could get in on the blue light fad and turned the screen redder without significantly reducing the amount of blue light transmitted. At the time, there were one of two kits of software that actually showed a significant drop in blue light because their colour mixing algorithm/colour profile adjustments were done correctly whereas the competition just implemented it wrong.
