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Cake day: June 16th, 2025

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  • I suspect you mean this one

    As an EU national, a trader cannot charge you more when you buy a product or service just because of your nationality or country of residence. Some price differences can be justified if they’re based on objective criteria and not just on nationality. For example, differing postage costs may mean you pay more for delivery in one country than in another.

    But they aren’t discriminating by your country of residence. The PRICE that the vendor charges is the same regardless of where you’re from. Your own country charges VAT, through the vendor. That’s on top of the price.

    Well consumers don’t pay it to the tax offices, nor do they do the reporting

    Yes, but it’s a direct line item when they buy something. And only consumers don’t get it back. It is a tax on consumers specifically.



  • to build capacity and out perform them (even at an economic loss)

    Good one. The average salary difference between most European countries and China is so big that we’d need slavery and we’d still be doing it at an economic loss.

    We’d need our own Shenzhen. Where do you propose we build a city of millions, ideally 10, 20 million people that’s entirely focused on tech and manufacturing?

    what China has done for cars and renewable tech

    We’d then also need to own the entire supply chain for batteries from mining to refinement to ready-made batteries. If we tried making lithium batteries for even twice as much cost as China incurs, it wouldn’t be enough.

    20 years ago you could’ve done this. Now that ship has sailed. Europe will never catch up to China in manufacturing. We don’t have enough cheap humans. Ironically a place where automation could help us a ton… by putting people out of jobs.


  • boonhet@sopuli.xyztoLinux@lemmy.worldLinux saved me today
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    1 day ago

    Well that would depend on what you use to run that mod manager, as that’s probably a Windows application using wine (or proton, which is still based on wine). If you always just launch it from bash, .bashrc is the easiest. Launchers like Bottles or Steam will let you configure launch options per program/game. e.g ENVVAR=value %command% (%command% is a standin for the actual launch command, you leave that as is - it’s necessary because you can add things both before and after the command)

    But yes, overall, running Windows software is still the most annoying part of using Linux. At least usually for games run from Steam there’s not much tinkering needed assuming the game works (so no kernel level anticheat games)








  • There are rules and regulations set into place in the EU that the prices including VAT should be the same for consumers. Which means that there shouldn’t be a difference in price even though there is a difference in VAT rate

    Hetzner definitely shows different price when you change VAT rate. So does Netcup. OVH just shows price without VAT. How would you keep the price same regardless of VAT rate anyway? Then you’d instead have to charge businesses of different countries a different amount essentially, meaning you’re the one discriminating by country. No, you have one price and then different countries add VAT differently to it. Do you have a link to those rules and regulations?

    There are, though, cases where it’s OK to just charge your local VAT rate for everyone, rather than the customer’s local VAT rate. I only sell within my own country anyway so I’m not up to date on that - I believe it’s physical goods rather than digital services?

    It is also not the end consumers problem that the VAT rate is higher

    It sorta is, we’re the only ones paying it in reality?

    Between B2B and B2C sales I’d get the same amount of money for the same invoice and have to pay VAT on it either way, which the customer pays to me, but the B2B customer gets a VAT refund and the B2C customer does not. Similarly, on any B2B purchases I make, I get a VAT refund myself. Nobody refunds VAT to me if I buy things as an end consumer.




  • And yet people are in denial about it being a hoax.

    It’s always “oh Grindr went down in the city where the RNC held an event”. Why do people think Grindr has servers for each city and not a proper load balancing setup agnostic of the users locations?

    Much more likely that cell towers get overwhelmed in that area. Or that they pull Grindr down in general. But the claim that always gets made is that they bring it down in the exact city where the convention happens lol


  • boonhet@sopuli.xyztoTechnology@lemmy.worldDating Apps Are Dying
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    3 days ago

    Some ~8-9 years ago when I first used Tinder, that was already quite gamified, much worse than what you describe. They had a subscription for infinite swiping and no ads, clearly aimed at men because there are fewer women and they find matches more easily.

    A year ago, it was much, much worse already. You’d see as many bots as real women, and that’s in a small country - go to NYC and bots probably outweigh real women tenfold. Fewer and fewer swipes. You don’t get shown to women outside of your “elo” range (which isn’t a number you actually see, but everyone has an assigned “value” it seems), even though they get shown to you - no real point in swiping much of the time.

    I hope people find a way to connect in real life.

    If you have access to third places where people are open to meeting new people, that’s indeed the best way. I’m lucky enough not to live in a super car-centric city in the US or anything like that. Some people don’t have that going for them :/


  • 20 years ago internet was a whole different place anyway. You’d set up a useful website as a hobby, it’d be monetized with either ads or a subscription if it was truly game changing, but it wouldn’t be invasive, if it makes you a living that’s great, if it doesn’t then you still have a day job. They were hobby projects. Now all the easy niches are filled already, you need to put a lot more effort into building something that people would want to use. That costs money. You start off by amassing costs, meaning you either sink a ton of your own money or investor funds into it. Now you truly do have to ‘acquire users at any cost’ and then monetize the shit out of them.



  • Hi, I’m from the EU, I have the right to get all of my data removed from a centralized service using GDPR. How do I do it on a decentralized one?

    Leaving aside the whole issue of those companies not being trustworthy about the data deletion, at least my profile won’t be public when its’ been deleted and I’ve got someone to make a complaint about if I have reason to think they’ve lied about it. The fines can be pretty high. With federation, actually getting all copies of your profile deleted is nearly impossible. With torrent style decentralization, it seems completely impossible. Everyone will have access to everyone else’s data and it’ll be trivial to make backups.

    Presumably most people would be using this on their phones with mostly their mobile data. An issue with the bittorrent protocol is that to open a connection, one peer has to have a port forwarded. Is this different with webtorrent?

    Federation is simpler than true P2P here, but you then still need to trust the instance admins. It’s fine for Lemmy/piefed style media for me because I don’t put my real name, face and other details here.

    My personal opinion is that a centralized alternative owned by a foundation rather than a for-profit company would be best of both worlds: No profit motive, just like decentralized. A centralized entity that holds liability in case there’s a data leak or someone starts spreading CSAM. And ability for said centralized entity to moderate said CSAM, scams and other reports.


  • I suspect you’ll have one big pain point to address that most apps other than the few big ones struggle with: The network effect. How do you get enough people on your app that it’s worth it for people to get on your app?

    Suspect you need either a really visible feature you can advertise (“we’re not enshittified” alone isn’t necessarily enough to sway people), or a ton of advertising budget.

    I toyed with the idea of building an app myself, wanted to build something similar to what OKCupid used to be, where you could optionally answer questions about yourself and calculate compatibility based on those. Building an actually good algorithm to find you people you’d most likely truly like seemed interesting. Then I realized I don’t have the time to see it through as a project to the point I’d get a truly active userbase and I’d have to run it at a loss for at least a few years so I can’t quit my other work. Hope you do better, match.com truly needs some competition.


  • They’ve gotten worse by the year. If you’re married and have 2 kids, you probably were on them long enough ago that it was quite different. You might also be conventionally attractive.

    I’ve been single a couple of times in my life and some of those times I created a Tinder (and/or Bumble, OKCupid) account.

    First time must’ve been about 8-9 years ago now after I got broken up with. Got an okay amount of matches, tons of interesting conversations. Met a few people IRL. Found a girlfriend after about half a year, ended up not being very compatible, broke up, made another Tinder account. 3-4 years on Tinder, getting fewer matches by the year. Increasingly few interesting conversations, met maybe 4-5 people IRL over that time (some of whom I’m still friends with). Ended up meeting the person who would become my baby mama and ex-wife. After I divorced her, created a new Tinder account and… near-zero matches. I saw TONS of bots. Like super obvious bots, all the same-ish profile archetypes (my favourite one being random letters for name with a weird blurry photo of a red building, saw hundreds of those). Half a year and two dates with one woman later, I just… deleted it and embraced being single. An average looking woman makes an account and in a few hours they have 99+ likes (where it stops showing the exact amount). Not quite happening for me or any men I know.

    I’m not super attractive, kinda average looking face and a bit overweight, but I’m quite strongly built and masculine which some women seem to find, I dare say, irresistible, but many do not. But I’ve never (in my adult life - middle school was different) had problems holding a conversation with a woman, I’ve always had creative bios and decent photos compared to many I’ve been shown from other guys’ profiles. My ability to get matches on Tinder, Bumble, whatever, has gone down over the years, whereas I feel off those apps I’m better than ever? I’ve joked that I have the exact same thing with jobs and women: Once I get to the interview, I’m in, but getting there rarely happens.

    And like… it’s not just the quantity of matches that went down. Quality too. By match quality I don’t mean “I matched shit people”, that would be quite arrogant of me to say. I mean I used to match more people with whom I felt I had things in general. People with whom a conversation would just flow until 5 AM. That just stopped happening over time.

    Oh and you get fewer swipes than ever, no longer get any free superlikes on a free plan (you get 5 a week on gold I think, used to get few on free…), etc. The gold plan is like 20€ a month which I got as a bonus through my Revolut plan and… they still keep upselling you on both a more expensive sub, and consumable boosts.

    Most other apps belong to the same company and seem to have degraded similarly - but none of them are used much here anyway, there’s 100x fewer people on Bumble and OKCupid would just show me people from other countries only.

    TL;DR: Used to get more matches. Used to match people who I’d actually enjoy talking to (and vice versa). App itself is trying to upsell you more and more while you get about as much on paid plans now as you did on free plans back in the day.