Notices by Thorwegian ❄️ (thor@berserker.town), page 24

if you don't want to see Norwegian language posts in my feed, just mute @thor@snabelen.no because i'll be posting my Norwegian stuff there and boosting it here.

how helpful

yes, hello, we are from Jehovahs Witnesses and

@Kerosene if you're as brilliant as Oppenheimer was, and you have a few scientific papers published, you might get away with it.

Oppenheimer was so unhappy with his situation at his university that he tried to poison one of his professors with an apple.

the university wanted to prosecute it criminally, but he had rich parents who talked them out of it. they didn't even kick him out of school.

later, he was put in charge of the Manhattan Project.

the world isn't fair. not even remotely close.

Norwegian/Swedish slang for "gay person"

"rompis"

"rompe" = butt, rump, arse

-is = like -ie or -o in English

buttie
butto
rumpie
rumpo
arsie
arso

you probably don't want to use that word around gay people, but i'm sure they use it jokingly among themselves.

a more poetic slang term for gay person is "skinkerytter"

skinke = ham (butt, rump, arse)
rytter = rider

also

ridder = knight

forget Knight Rider. embrace Arse Knight. 🏇

when reflecting upon how the world works, people usually have some point where they draw the line, and say to themselves "if i went further with that line of thinking, the world would seem more absurd than i'm prepared to accept without collapsing mentally. i'd lose too much."

in other words: "let's not go there"

personally, i'm at "i think this world is a bit of a joke" and am acting accordingly.

@thatguyoverthere i kinda know why it's like this. i'm just not sure the FOSS community is fully aware.

"why don't they like our tools?"

every FOSS developer who wants to make a GUI ever:

"i somehow believe i have better ideas for a GUI than everyone else, so i'm going to make it weird."

@thatguyoverthere eh, then make them rounded rectangles. just make it close enough. also, most of these Linux GUIs? the corpos don't give a damn. it's a small space and no one's making money.

i'm not super happy with Evolution as a calendar app. it's not like Google or Apple's calendars. why can't they just copy what they're doing? it would be better. those companies spent a lot on UX research. just copy it and you won't have to do your own R&D.

tipping isn't customary in Scandinavia. but would you tip if a meal with a soft drink cost $30, and a draft beer routinely cost $12? waiters have little incentive to suck up to you. the "tip" is already included in their paycheques.

@rzasharifi in the United States and some other places, they underpay the waiters, and tips are how they make enough to survive. you are meant to tip extra if the service was good.

Trondheim streets

i'm liking this city because it's got actual old buildings in it that look Scandinavian. Oslo looks very generic European by comparison.

when i return from Trondheim, one fretless bass guitar and reeds for my saxophone should be ready to be picked up. playing a plucked string instrument without frets is going to be an interesting experience.

the data protection agency of Norway is now of the opinion that Facebook's very business model is illegal according to EU privacy laws, and is threatening them with daily fines if they don't stop tracking users.

EDIT: more specifically, they appear to believe Meta is in violation of the GDPR, because they're not asking for explicit consent. Meta claims it is. for a service like Facebook, more explicit consent than usual might be what the EU expects.

Norwegian article:

https://www.nrk.no/kultur/datatilsynet-mener-metas-bruk-av-persondata-er-ulovlig_-truer-med-millionboter-1.16481851

debunking the myth of light bulbs as the origin of planned obsolescence:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zb7Bs98KmnY

there was this GIF that circulated some years back, with white people in robes, kind of dancing awkwardly while holding drinks, and it was all pastel coloured, and the caption was "white people... 🙄"

it looked vaguely like a toga party or some kind of Celtic thing.

i need that GIF now but Google isn't helping me.

my perspective on this is nuanced.

generally speaking, if you are rendered a service, it incurs a cost to render it, and you're either paying for it in cash, or you're getting it for "free" in return for seeing adverts. if Mastodon was ever to scale up its 1 million active users to the level of Facebook, with 3 billion active users, costs would probably go up orders of magnitude.

as it is right now, individuals in the tech community provide this service for free, and the costs are relatively small. if the general public ever starts using it, non-techie users are going to grow quicker than techie-users, and expenses per server/techie are going to go up.

there is a possible model where everyone holds Wikipedia style fundraisers, but this, too, is technically speaking a form of advertising.

you've got to ask the users for *something* ultimately.