I think the two of you are thinking/talking about two different things.
In most workplaces before ~2020 individual teams had designated desks/islands - all team members were sitting next to each other, actually every individual had their own permanent desk.
And you could have a quick chat, pair program, and even adhoc whole team meeting by just removing your noise-cancelling headphones and talking to each other.
Though of course bigger/longer meetings would still be better in a meeting room because of big screen, not being nuisance to other people ...etc.
Most workplaces now do some variant of flexi-desks. At best a group of teams is allocated some specific area/desks, at worst it's completely random which desk you get.
And to have a chat/meeting you often need to still do it via conference call, or get into a meeting room.
Between that, and usually having some people from the team still WFH on that day (many workplaces don't even have enough work desks or cafeteria - for everyone to come into office on the same day) - you now need more meeting rooms than before.
And for some reason they didn't add more meeting rooms, even when redesigning office buildings.
Actually, you both misunderstood what I wrote: the team is spread across multiple locations in three countries. They all work from their respective offices, but for meetings we still have to use Teams. That's especially galling: my company is more than ready to embrace remote working tools when it's to its advantage, reassigning people as it sees fit, but it now completely denies the advantages of remote working/home office to its employees. Actually, because of budget restrictions, I have never seen any of the team members (except the one I'm in the same office with) in person. My company is one of those typical multinationals that grew through mergers and acquisitions and now has offices all over the world - but I'd bet it's not one of those that come to your mind, somehow it managed to fail to build any sort of brand recognition, mostly because it's a B2B company.
Yes - literally just pick the right Caddy (or similar) image with Let's Encrypt client included - and you can simply add a tag/label to your docker compose files for each of self hosted services to get a real SSL, that auto renewed ...etc.
With one of self hosted services being Adguard-Home can do both ADs blocking and internal DNS... The public DNS records for your "internal use only" domain remain empty.
> "By the time Yahoo stopped controlling webring.org in 2001, search engines had become good enough that web rings were no longer as useful."
Given how those good (enough) search engines work these days ... I wouldn't be surprised if we see more of the old social/discovery things things (DMOZ and such) start coming back.
While I agree with you on ideally having a dumb TV - being able to install TailScale on your TV and then using your exit node in another country (to watch that other countries local IPTV) is a really nice convenience. And you can no longer buy a dumb TV, at least not in typical living room sizes.
The dishwashing machine being able to notify you ahead of time that you're low (but not already out) of softening salt or rinse aid liquid is also convenient - but indeed also solvable with display on the machine itself.
But the automation like lights, or blinds/shutters... Being able to open/close shutters from your bed (or automatically in the morning as part of waking you up), or turn on/off lights based on motion/presence detection - is actually useful.
Of course you shouldn't need Internet to operate it. And many people use Home Assistant exactly because they don't want their "smart devices" to talk to the cloud.
Sceptre still sells dumb TVs, and there are always computer monitors with HDMI in. I'm typing this on a 43" one. You'll still pay more, especially for the latter, but not hugely more.
Expat/kennismigrant here - it's same "ends up late and over budget" for literally every country (and private businesses).
What Dutch government/politicians seems to be "ahead" compared to other countries - is combination of narrow or short sightedness and (over)correction trough rules, laws and regulations.
Like giving subsidies and tax breaks for electrical cars, rooftop solar panels and mandating household switch from gas (LPG and such) to electric heating and cooking. And ignoring industry professionals for decades saying the distribution network won't scale.
More of the same with stuff like 30% tax rule for expats, which was originally introduced as cost saving measures because actually doing bookkeeping for expatriate expenses was costing government more money. But then more recently expat tax breaks have been reduced and phased out "because cost saving". Meanwhile employers have trouble finding highly skilled workers. And we're limiting numbers of foreign students in universities (by forcing them to do it in Dutch instead of English).
Some Bulgarians cheated/defrauded Dutch tax returns or such - and "solution" was ML/AI reviewing things - but it turned out to be broken/biased and (ab)used for other things - leading to the whole toeslag scandal and government resigning.
Same for nitrogen vs lack of housing... And many more.
> ignoring industry professionals for decades saying the distribution network won't scale.
Who says that? The British National Grid says the opposite. Or is it specifically the Dutch network that would not handle the changing requirements? If so what makes it special?
The Dutch electric grid is owned and operated by a few companies that are heavily regulated by the ACM (Authority for Consumer and Markets). Those companies have been wanting to invest in upgrading the grid for many years, but the ACM refused them permission as they considered it unnecessary investments that would drive up the costs for consumers.
Now we’re fucked because the government has been stimulating electric cars, heat pumps, etc. to meet climate goals, which increases the load on the electric grid which is now unable to keep up with demand. Something everyone saw coming except for the ACM.
Are your heat pumps replacing gas? Because if not then replacing resistive heating with a heat pump results in less load on the grid not more. My heat pump outputs 7 kW for an input of less than 3 kW.
ADHD brain just recalled that similar concept was used for traffic jams being sent along FM radio signal.
Not talking about stuff that would automatically change the FM station to the one with traffic announcements.
Our ~2012 Škoda Octavia had typical Volkswagen Audi Group navigation built in. It would receive data about traffic jams in the background, and incorporate it into route/navigation decisions.
Not sure if switch from FM to DAB carried that over too. Kind of doubtful since mobile phones took over navigation even before Android/iOS Auto stuff showed up.
I recently learned that captions on BBC are teletext based (page 888) so I turned them on and got surprised that it's still working that way - especially considering I'm watching it basically via IPTV (using Dutch KPNs Android SmartTV app).
The 888 in the top right corner back in the day: https://youtu.be/rAk94cq23HQ?si=JLJMSqbUjKUsFcdQ just amazing that teletext was understood and ubiquitous to such an extent that just putting three numbers was important and clear enough to share in these very sparse idents.
If you're thinking about Linux/Gentoo - but don't want to spend a lot of time for maintaining/updating and most importantly not need time to fix stuff that broke because you didn't update it in months...
I would suggest Calculate Linux.
It's 100% Gentoo, with additional customization (e.g. profiles presetting not just sane defaults, but also things you usually want on desktop [e.g. samba, network printers ...]), there are pre built binaries for all profiles and basically all the software (but you can still override some and get it compiled with or without specific features) ...
And perhaps most importantly - there's extra tooling/automation around the Gentoo/portage updates and such.
With vanilla Gentoo - beyond regular PITA to update packages due to various package/use-flags conflicts (which would make me do it even less often). I was also regularly (every few years) having to reinstall Gentoo because my glibc/bintools/python/etc were so far behind that during system update something would break and fixing it was basically reinstalling Gentoo from stage3 tarball.
It's been ~10 years that I've "switched" to Calculate Linux - and it's "cl-update" was automatically solving even those things that would've left me with world update broken system.
In most workplaces before ~2020 individual teams had designated desks/islands - all team members were sitting next to each other, actually every individual had their own permanent desk.
And you could have a quick chat, pair program, and even adhoc whole team meeting by just removing your noise-cancelling headphones and talking to each other.
Though of course bigger/longer meetings would still be better in a meeting room because of big screen, not being nuisance to other people ...etc.
Most workplaces now do some variant of flexi-desks. At best a group of teams is allocated some specific area/desks, at worst it's completely random which desk you get.
And to have a chat/meeting you often need to still do it via conference call, or get into a meeting room.
Between that, and usually having some people from the team still WFH on that day (many workplaces don't even have enough work desks or cafeteria - for everyone to come into office on the same day) - you now need more meeting rooms than before.
And for some reason they didn't add more meeting rooms, even when redesigning office buildings.
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