Being whistleblower and being involved in such legal proceedings sucks and I can imagine that one might give up (like Barnett in March) or that it takes a huge toll on your body (like Dean now). But then again … two such incidents around the same company … reminds me a bit too much of russian windows.

In general anything less than killing or maiming someone should be the utmost priority.

But as I said: also a taser can kill and also tackling someone and pinning them to the ground can. So I would put less focus on the methods and more on the intention. Cops should neither have to act out of fear (that’s what training is for) nor out of pleasure. And some cops just seem to get off on being in control. If cops generally would want the best not just for themselves and other civilians but also for the perpetrators, a lot of the problems would solve themself.

The comment I answered to was quite generic. If tasers get sold as safer guns, they will also be over-used.

That’s why I explicitly told about escalations and the taser was still part of that escalation chain. And yes, in this particular case, a taser could have been a good approach. Although cops with shield and tonfas might have done the job as well. But to be fair: I don’t expect cops to pull out a shield everytime they leave their car and I don’t think they anticipated such a quick escalation here. If a tonfa alone (by two cops, however) would have done the trick … hard to say. Against a knife: yes. Against that large-ass gardening tool … maybe not.

So yes: in this case, a taser would have been good. In general: I would still prefer first going with far far less risky approaches.

Random martial arts in plain cloths against a knife… yeah, bad. But cops have equipment and numbers. They don’t have to do this alone, they can have shields in their car, they can wear tonfas, etc.

If the primary goal was to deal with attackers non-lethally, I am sure that would be possible. At least to a certain degree.

… and proving it. In the end he could likely have been in plain cloths, no badge, in a bar after work and could still somehow claim to have announced himself and tried to prevent some bad perceived crime and it would be fine. Or if he got killed they would likely pull out is glorious career and what good cop he was to argue that he MUST have acted rightfully.

If I encounter a professional boxer in a bad mood, I would shit my pants. If another professional boxer encounters a professional boxer in a bad mood, they would shrug it off and deal with whatever happens.

Cops get trained. Being prepared for dangerous situations is essentially the core of their fucking job. Apparently, that preparation seems to be often simply “if shit gets ugly, shoot the shit out of whatever frightens you”. Cops should be better at dealing with this than random citizens with a gun.

Tasers are also quite risky.

What they should have is some proper martial arts training so they can deal with most problems in closer encounters. Fucking shit, they have better equipment and bigger numbers. There should be zero reason to pull a gun unless the other party also has one.

Then maybe escalate to tasers if the other party has a knife and seems to actually starting to attack. If they are just standing there (in a defensive stance or whatever), they should still not be tasered.

Don’t fuck with the French.

But what if I … oh, you meant that as a figure of speech. Got it.

Even on mobile they are asshats. I have my password manager registered as the passkey wallet in iOS, so creating a passkey in PayPal for example fails.

If only companies wouldn’t be patronizing ass hats about it. A few sites deny storing passkeys in software wallets because of “security”. So what, keep using my password is safer now? Fucktards.

With the work that Valve is doing on Wine, and Proton, it’s really becoming easier and easier to justify the switch deck.

FTFY

I don’t think the venn diagram for people relying on pro-audio and using 20 year old computers has a large overlap.

I am a senior software engineer. I refer to my current project as a chain of side quests.

All I wanted was to optimize a batch operation in our system. That needed a feature of a new version of our database. So I upgraded the database. But to utilize this, I needed to use a newer version of the db driver/sdk. The one we use is tightly coupled to the object mapper. So I needed to start upgrading the object mapper first. That is a major version change which breaks a few different spots in our system I then tackled one by one. I am still not done.

I need transaction codes (essentially OTP). Even if I used their website. For that alone I need a supported phone.

Might be worth a shot, but typically they even refuse to work on rooted androids, so I assume whatever security mechanism they expect, it won’t be there.

Doesn’t fit “small”. It was also just an example, my actual requirements are longer. I need my banking apps to work too, for example, which likely automatically limits me to Android/iOS. No idea how good they work with Sailfish for example.

True, and that’s why you can only marginally change anything on the market with that. If no player on the market offers what you want, your only choices are to punish everyone (which they won’t notice) or reward one of the least-bad players.

Both can set the wrong incentives for companies to change or continue.

So it’s ok to bitch a shitty choices.

I would also like a great camera, a non-locked-down bootloader and a non-customized OS with updates for at least 5 years. I can’t vote with my wallet aside from “not buying any phone”, which isn’t a vote.

Oh I would also like small smartphones back. But there are simply no good ones on the market; nothing I could vote for.

“Vote with your wallet” only works if there is a good enough set of choices on the market.

A volcano also happens to be anti-climatic.

Prime Video was nice, but I don’t like the move with including ads. Since they fucked me over as a linux user by using dumb DRM, I don’t really miss it.

Shipping: same as the author. I will likely get used to increased wait time. Shipping was never my main use case.

I will miss my free monthly twitch subscription. So I will likely not support my favorite streamer anymore (via twitch sub at least).

I’ll see how it goes. But fuck the industry for their ad-ridden shit tour. I will rip any service out of my life that tries that bullshit.