The EU is a horribly intransparent and dubiously democratic institution.
As a normal citizen you have no real possibility to hold MEPs accountable other then writing an angry E-Mail.
In an actually democratic system politicians would be in their position only by mercy of the people and can be voted down from their position anytime if enough people petition for it. (and not just maybe be called back when elections at home plummet)
Politicians should be afraid of the people and not the other way round.
Afraid of what exactly? Someone starting a Change.org petition that gets a few random signatures and is quickly forgotten? Losing a couple of votes? The consequences are almost nonexistent, so there's nothing to be afraid of.
Same thing in Austria, everyone in mainstream politics basically ignores the topic and when pressured parrot something like "Israel has the right to defend itself" or "It is very complicated"
Repression against students and demonstrators is happening regularly
People in the town square only see my face, they do not automatically have my name, birth date and ID available unless I give it to them or they go to lengths obtaining those (il)legally.
LLMs produce slop far to often to say they are in any way better than cold fusion in terms of usable results. "AI" kind of is the cold fusion of tech. We've always been 5 or 10 years away from "AGI" and likely always will be.
That's just nonsense. That they produce slop does not negate that I and many others get plenty of value out of them in their current form, while we get zero value out of fusion so far - cold or otherwise.
I made my account on a server that a personal friend span up. Said friend deleted it on a whim after a few months after not using it much, not really aware of the implications. Personal connection was not the issue here, ownership of my digital identity was.
Second that, even though it seems that there is nothing happening yet, many companies and government agencies in all of Europe are aware of their hard Microsoft dependency and are looking / coordinating to leave.
Same with Atlassian Confluence / Jira.
(Source: Working in a state owend company in a EU member country)
Everyone in the American IT world has been trying to leave Microsoft and Google for decades. In that case, the problem isn't IT push, it's that users refuse to learn new software. I can guess it's the same in Europe.
It's maybe harder in Europe, because you also have fragmentation. For example, Californians are fine using software from New York. Same, same. But Germany prefers to use German software, so far. This makes it even harder, I would guess, for EU developers to establish a thriving standard.
Apart from the UI which is crap since their last major update. There are menu options everywhere, two ribbons on the top, a hamburger menu on the right and another on the left. For a long time you opened Thunderbird and it didn't default on the last message that you received but somewhere in the middle of the heap.
> Apart from the UI which is crap since their last major update
But when they updated the UI, they
- Added options to use to make it very close to the old layout
- Set those options for you if you had it customized like that in the previous version
Which is IMHO much better than how Mozilla handled the redesign - you can get the old style in a GitHub repo thanklessly maintained by one person[0], enable userchrome support in about:config (until they decide to take it away one day!), and enable compact mode (also gated behind about:config and called "Compact (not supported)". Oh, and remember to update the userchrome every few updates because they keep breaking it.
That's the difference between user-centric and not user-centric.
It's hard to be in charge of a project like this. You're criticized no matter what you do.
The old UI was criticized by some for being outdated, a mix of old and new styles, didn't fit well with new OS/app styles, etc. It was crap. So they update the UI and it's still crap... for other users. Damned if you do and damned if you don't.
Both outlook.office.com and mail.google.com use much more memory and CPU than any "fat" client, and are constantly changing little things about the UI. Safari now often closes outlook automatically on an M5 Mac because it's using significant amounts of energy.
And I use a fat client because I like having all of my email addresses aggregate to one place, and I like it when that software gives me a modern look and feel ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
All your mail in one place does not require a 'fat' client, something like Claws mail [1] (not in any way related to the recent LLM claws craze) can handle it without problems. Modern looks, well... it looks the way it looked about 25 years ago give or take a few iterations of GTK. Compact, efficient, to the point. If that's not your thing and you'd rather have large amounts of empty space and unrecognisable buttons it can be skinned to look 'modern'. In my startup sequence I launch 4 communications tools on one screen: gajim, telegram-desktop, signal-desktop and claws-mail in that order. Even though Claws gets launched last it appears first on screen because it is lightweight while the other three are anything but - Telegram is a native QT application, gajim is Python (nothing more needs to be said) and signal-desktop is Electron (even less needs to be said).
As a longterm thunderbird user I find this annoying. I appreciate it being maintained more actively again but I really liked the fact that the UI stayed stable for years. Changing things to make them "more modern" is just annoying. No one asked for this.
When you delete a message after that the old message remains selected and so if you hit delete again thinking the last time didn’t do the trick, you deleted another message and now go to deleted messages and try to find what you deleted.
The app has a phantom message even in empty folders that it keeps selected. Unread bubble and nothing else, an empty message. You can’t even delete it. Sometimes it persists between app restarts.
It shows unread count on a folder just because it feels like it.
You must be joking. The Supernova UI redesign is an unmitigated disaster. They unnecessarily butchered the look and feel of Thunderbird to the point where people are switching to forks.
Well I like Supernova better, it made me switch to Thunderbird from em Client. (I always wanted to switch to Thunderbird, but until Supernova I never liked the UX enough to keep using it)
The previous UI made no sense. Having the email viewer on the bottom and the list on the top instead of side by side makes absolutely no sense when most emails are designed for viewing in portrait.
What are you talking about? Thunderbird has barely any progress in the last years. It's more busy with breaking and fixing things. Sure, there are reasons for it, but as a user, all I see is stalemate, while one addon after another is dying. Thunderbird Mobile is nice, and I hope Thunderbird Pro will be something good, but so far none of them are the big breakthroughs.
Also what I like about C is that is has mature tooling, very portable with multiple implementations, and that is is very stable. I would not use a language for any serious project hat does not offer all this.
Honestly, I do not think that the problem is C is o big that one needs to jump ship. There are real issues, yes, but there are also plenty of good tools and strategies to deal with UB, it is not really an issue for me.
As a normal citizen you have no real possibility to hold MEPs accountable other then writing an angry E-Mail.
In an actually democratic system politicians would be in their position only by mercy of the people and can be voted down from their position anytime if enough people petition for it. (and not just maybe be called back when elections at home plummet)
Politicians should be afraid of the people and not the other way round.
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