These are two very different things. Significant parts of the German government and many German members of the European Parliament are proponents of Chat Control. The general population, however, still has a strong desire for privacy and a deep fear of surveillance and data collection, shaped by historical experiences with two dictatorships (the Nazi era and the GDR).
That said, there is a substantial disconnect between the substantive preferences of the voting population and the actual policies and decisions of the parties they elect. This is partly because promises like “internal security” gain much more traction in times of growing uncertainty and global instability, while only a relatively small portion of the population fully thinks through, or is willing to think through, the consequences and concrete legislative changes behind those promises.
Nevertheless, looking at both public attitudes and court rulings, it is still fair to say that data protection in Germany, even compared to other EU countries, currently enjoys a particularly high status.
In practice the average German voter is still supporting the coalition against the AfD despite that the coalition is implementing Soviet-like policies. They talk constantly about banning the most popular political party, for example, and they regularly imprison or fine people for anti-left political opinions. Germans who aren't actively supporting the AfD should feel no sense of moral superiority, there simply isn't anything in the historical context to feel proud of there.
> and they regularly imprison or fine people for anti-left political opinions
Do you have any sources to substantiate this claim? In particular, including under which law a prison sentence or fine was imposed for the expression of a constitutionally protected political opinion.
Nice try. The German constitution is a poor document and doesn't protect political opinion, so your "constitutionally protected" political opinion caveat just makes it useless. You'd just defend every example with "our constitution allows that" rather than recognizing that it just means the constitution itself is wrong.
Example: the American author CJ Hopkins has been repeatedly prosecuted in Berlin despite being acquitted the first time, because in Germany there's apparently no constitutional prohibition against double jeopardy. His "crime" was criticizing COVID authoritarianism. You're now going to tell me why the German constitution allows this, and incorrectly use that as a moral justification.
Any source showing people being imprisoned or fined merely for expressing an anti-left opinion then? Which specific law were they convicted under?
The claim that Germany has "no constitutional protection against double jeopardy" is false. Art. 103(3) of the constitution embodies ne bis in idem. The German criminal procedure allows legal remedies (appeals), including Revision (appeal on points of law), which can be brought by both parties before a judgment becomes final. That’s what happened in this case.
In the CJ Hopkins case, the issue was not "criticizing COVID authoritarianism" as such, but the use of a banned symbol under 86a StGB. One can freely say "the government acted authoritarian during COVID"; that kind of political criticism is protected speech under Art. 5 GG.
> and incorrectly use that as a moral justification.
I’m not interested in moral justifications. Morality is a matter of opinion, and you’re entitled to yours just as I am to mine. The same applies to your view of the German constitution.
However, backing up claims about concrete cases with sources helps me (and others) understand which cases you’re referring to and whether they actually support your argument in a way that lets me learn something new (preferably) or whether we'll simply end up acknowledging that we have different opinions on the matter ;)
It's only people criticizing the left who get prosecuted under such laws. That's deliberate.
> Which specific law were they convicted under?
Germany forbids insulting politicians, and German politicians use it extensively. Habek has filed criminal complaints against over 800 people. The German Chancellor has probably filed thousands of such complaints given the numbering of the case files.
From a German court order:
At a time that cannot now be determined more precisely, in the days or weeks before 20 June 2024, the accused published an image file using his account that showed a portrait of the Federal Minister of Economic Affairs with the words “professional moron” … in order to defame Robert Habeck in general and to make his work as a member of the federal government more difficult.
The public prosecutor's office affirms the public interest in criminal prosecution.
This is punishable as defamation directed against persons of political life in accordance with §§ 185, 188 para. 1, 194 StGB. ...
I'd be interested in how you arrive at that conclusion.
> Of course it was the issue. German media puts swastikas on things without any legal problems when they are government aligned.
Are we talking about the use of swastikas or your statement that people are imprisoned or fined for voicing anti-left opinions? I'm happy to do both, but it feels like those are two different things.
The use of swastikas (and other symbolism of banned organizations like the NSDAP) is prohibited in Germany if there is no clear rejection of the NS tied to it or if the rejection cannot unequivocally be derived from the context.
Using swastikas is therefore somewhat risky in any context, since it is a matter for the courts to decide whether a specific case qualifies as allowed use or not. It is far more probable that the use of a swastika in an anti-left statement will not qualify, since it is challenging to add value to an anti-left statement by using a swastika while still clearly rejecting the NS at the same time.
Again, happy to talk about § 86a StGB, but I would first be interested in how you come to the conclusion that this is being used to suppress anti-left opinions. I.e., how is using a swastika necessary or even helpful when voicing an opinion?
CJ Hopkins said he wanted to warn the public of a 'newly rising totalitarianism'. He posted a picture of a corona mask with a visible swastika and the caption 'Masks are symbols of ideological conformity' and a quote from the then minister of health stating 'Masks also always send a signal'.
Pretty much all of that is legal, also when looking at § 188. The only real issue is the use of the swastika. Using common symbolism like 'OBEY' instead would immediately remove any legal doubts.
> Germany forbids insulting politicians, and German politicians use it extensively.
True, Germany also forbids insulting anyone. This is not restricted to politicians, and there is no difference in which insults are punishable for politicians and non-politicians. This is very different from how things are in the US, where insults are not punishable offenses per se. § 188 mostly refers to the degree of penalty possible when directing an insult towards any politician and what's necessary for a different degree of penalty to apply.
However, this is used by politicians across the whole political spectrum alike, including the far-right. The same reports you mentioned with regard to Robert Habeck exist for Alice Weidel, who filed hundreds of complaints under §§ 185 and 188. This is regardless of ongoing criticism of this paragraph voiced by the far-right, liberals, and others alike.
How is this specifically targeting anti-left opinions?
> You're doing exactly what I said you'd do. Zero shame.
Meta: Reading this, it feels like you don't particularly enjoy this conversation. So let me say this: I'm really happy we are having this discussion. It is something completely different to read about other opinions in the paper versus actually talking to someone with a different perspective. I'm genuinely interested in your opinion, and my questions are serious questions, not rhetorical ones.
I don't feel any animosity towards you, and I hope you can also gain something from this. If you don't share that sentiment, I'm completely fine with leaving this thread as is and accepting that we won't reach any agreement right now.
- GNOME removed all UI controls for setting solid color backgrounds, but still technically supports it if you manually set a bunch of config keys — which seem to randomly change between versions (see: https://www.tc3.dev/posts/2021-09-04-gnome-3-solid-color-bac...).
The pattern here seems pretty clear: a half-baked feature kept alive for niche users, rather than either properly supporting or cleanly deprecating it. Personally, I’d love to simply set an RGB value without needing to generate a custom image. But given the state of things, I’d rather have one solid, well-maintained wallpaper system than flaky background color logic that’s barely hanging on.
I checked in KDE, since I'm generally confused as to why it's not more popular now: in the wallpaper settings you choose `wallpaper type: plain color` and it gives you a color picker to set it.
It also shows you the screen you set it for, and a boolean to set it for all screens at once.
KDE used to be the "bloated" desktop way back when (I know, pretty silly and laughable now given the current state of things).
That cemented Gnome/Mate into a lot of major distros as the primary DME. Ubuntu being the most famous.
The QT licensing situation is also a bit of a bizarre quagmire. There are certainly people that don't like KDE for more ideological reasons.
Personally, none of this bothers me and it's what I use for my personal computer. KDE is just so close to exactly how I'm used to interacting with computers anyways growing up through the Win95 era. It is so close to the Windows experience you want to have.
That’s not my recollection. I believe that the non-free license you mention was the major factor, in addition to the fact that KDE was written in C++ at a time when the free software community still preferred to write software primarily in C.
GNOME was written using a free software toolkit, and it was written in C, and it was associated with the FSF.
C++ is definitely a drawback for a long time. Not because it is 'bloated', but because of how ABI changes were handled. It is all history now.
Nowadays the major problem with KDE is that by the time it is stable a new QT major version gets released and along with that it essentially gets a major rewrite, which takes years to stabilize and once it does a new QT version is released, etc etc etc.
It's not bloated, it just has lots of options. If you like someone else to decide everything for you: buy a Mac or use gnome. But KDE is not for you then. Don't try to make it into something it was never meant to be.
Yeah cinnamon is basically a remake of Gnome 2, from before the devs went batshit crazy and went more opinionated than Apple. It's not bad but I really prefer KDE, also because I think Qt is a much better desktop framework than GTK is.
I rather think the right word is clunky: one of the dev is attached to Server-Side Decoration/against CSD for some reason (none of his arguments make sense), so every stock app are difficult to read and taking unneeded screen space. It's just bad UX.
Are you being purposefully controversial (to not say trollish)?
To the exact contrary to what you assert, one of the prominent argument against Gnome that I've been seing times and times again in DE debates, is the "dogmatic" opposition to SSD from the Gnome project.
They're not arguing with you, they're yes-anding you. Read as "ah a one word opinionated description...let's steelman that. here's my one-word opinionated term: clunky. Here's what smells make me get that vibe. What smells contribute to the bloat one? :)"
Doubling down on short judge-y stacatto contributes to an aggressive "I don't need to tell you" vibe that would be sassy and fun, maybe, if in person. In writing online comments, it just means we need to get a 3rd comment from you before we get to anything I'm interested in (I don't particularly care what your one word description is, I don't know you)
Funny, I used to think it was bloat but then I got to use it to store passwords for remote servers accessed with ssh, and now it's a nice 'batteries included' for me, as GP mentioned. It has become so because it is nicely and seamlessly integrated.
If you think that then don't install everything under the sun or choose a better distro. You can just install only Plasma Desktop, Doplhin and the handful of utilities you actually use, you know?
Gnome is a acquired taste, but it is also a lot less work to keep working then KDE or other desktop options.
There are a lot of people that bitch about it, but that is only because it is the most popular one and they think that Linux desktop is a zero sum game. They don't use Gnome most of the time and arguments tend to be parroting somebody else and probably out of date for years or just kinda made up conspiracy theories about Redhat or something.
The whole thing is pretty confused. Gnome being popular doesn't make KDE not be popular.
I'm a recent convert from Gnome. Mostly cause Gnome seemed to have too many mysterious crashes—waking from sleep, switching between windows when video was playing—so much so that it was just easier to switch to something modern (as opposed to sway/i3) and not have to learn/rewrite keybindings.
No, KDE is KDE. Awesome is awesome. You can use awesome as the window manager for KDE (I have in the past), but you can do that with GNOME, Xfce, or LXQt as well.
This, sometimes it's enough for things to just work as you expect so you can do your actual work. I don't really understand why so many people are unpaid part time evangelizers.
Personally, I want projects I like to survive, and drawing attention to them is one way to attempt to contribute to that, for not-exclusively-but-primarily egoistic reasoning.
Last time I used an Android (Galaxy) phone, to have a solid pitch-black background (which I thought made sense for modern phone displays energy-wise, besides looking pretty swell), I had to download — yes, D-O-W-N-L-O-A-D — some black image from some "Galaxy Store" thing or whatnot to achieve that. It was free, but it seemed like an exception there.
Something that should be a default option, or a single-tap switch in settings, turned into a chore consisting of a period of agonising disbelief, doubt, denial, search, and eventually bitter acceptance.
I don’t know if that would do it or just return your dark current image.
The best thing to do is just take a file same as your screen resolution into your favorite image editor and fill it with actual true black. Save as png and send to phone.
Was not sure if sensor in pitch dark would catch some other radiation and output some pixel "grain" seen from high ISO or not, but from what I tried, visually the photo seems pretty black, so the method seems to be surprisingly usable.
As for "same image as your screen resolution": screenshot sounds like the exact fitting thing here. As a challenge, tried making screenshot black using stock Samsung "Gallery" and it seems that repeated Edit - Brightness: -100 - Save as copy, then open the copy and goto back to Edit can do the trick as well, after four or so copies. (Copies, because there is no way to re-apply same effect on the same photo, apparently.)
A black background on an AMOLED display (something Samsung Galaxy phones tended to have) would use less energy because “pitch black” on AMOLED is literally turning the underlying pixels off- with LED displays, that’s not possible.
> GNOME removed all UI controls for setting solid color backgrounds, but still technically supports it if you manually set a bunch of config keys — which seem to randomly change between versions
My analogous gnome experience was that on my tv-computer I was using 4x scaling, because TV and because my distance vision stinks.
At some point they decided 2x (3x?) scaling was enough for anyone and took away 4x, I didn't notice because I was already set at 4x and it continued working. Somewhat later they took away the backend, and then my system crashed with no error message immediately at login.
After much troubleshooting replaced a movie night, I inquired about the functionality being removed and was berated for using an undocumented/unsupported feature (because I was continuing to use it after the interface to set it had been removed, without my knowledge).
However, I've noticed, there's not much point in changing it. Showing the desktop is a waste of screen real estate because of the generations of abuse of desktop shortcuts. Even if you are careful, it becomes a cluttered wasteland (on Windows anyways). I just learned to never use the desktop for anything and always have windows up on various monitors.
My windows desktop remains pretty organised, occasionally there might be an app appear. My mac however I gave up on, it's just a mess of screenshots and files you have to drag n' drop from somewhere and the desktop is just where that ends up. I used to have a script that moved the screenshots but it's easier to just live in chaos.
On Mac I disable icons from appearing on the Desktop and instead add one of those fan-out folder links to my taskbar, sorted newest first. I just checked and I have 547 Screenshots dating back to around this time last year. Maybe it's time for a purge. :)
I would love to store documents in the My Documents folder if applications actually had respect for me. Windows should never allow an application to just dump stuff in the Documents or Desktop folder without my permission.
Don't get me started... Office these days adds friction if you want to save documents anywhere but the Documents folder (where they get uploaded to OneDrive if you have it set up).
They've also disabled auto-save if you don't have the documents backed up by OneDrive, which is the most egregious for me.
Office has never had auto-save for local documents; it only had (and still has) periodic recovery saves. The primary reason they added auto-save for cloud documents is to facilitate multiplayer online editing.
Just create and use any other folder you like under %USERPROFILE% (usually C:\Users\username)? My Documents is a default location, but you can ignore it. Simply use your user folder as you would under Linux or whatever.
Not always. It's up to their installer. And the installer doesn't have to ask (it can just do it).
The situation is better these days, with windows store apps. Still, I developed the habit of just never using the desktop in the XP days when things were really bad.
There was a war over your eyeballs, which had shady software vendors warring over desktop space, start menu space, taskbar space, even fucking file associations. I recall for a little RealPlayer and Windows Media Player used to yank back and forth file associations each time they ran, even if you tried to make them stop.
No one of my biggest complaints about windows is the sheer number of apps that add an icon without asking. Sometimes it's even worse than an app, and Nvidia or AMD will add one in a driver update. Drives me nuts.
I’m one of those people who can’t abide having desktop icons stick around. I don’t even use it as a staging area since I discovered Yoink. I kind of miss dragging disks to the trash to unmount them though. And the Oscar extension where he sang a little song every time.
I also ran into it with 15.4.0 and worked around it by creating an image that's the solid color I like to use. It turns out that the system-supplied solid color options are themselves just 128x128 pixel PNG images too:
The number of times my solid color preference has been replaced with all black over the last 10 years is absolutely astounding. I have no understanding of why this seems to be so difficult.
You know, I bought a MBP as a personal machine 6 months ago - my first Mac - and this post made me realize that I couldn't even tell you what its desktop looks like. I'm sure I saw it a few times when I was doing initial setup, but I don't remember anything about. I used to do things like set custom wallpapers, but probably around 10 years I pretty much stopped using the desktop entirely.
macOS will re-open the programs you last had open, and reposition the windows to the same locations as before (though with dubious success at actually opening the correct files) upon restart, so it's entirely possible to have a perpetually-buried desktop that never becomes visible.
Maybe I'm still living in the 1990s, but isn't the graphics API call to paint a solid 2D rectangle infinitely faster than the call to blt a 2D image to the screen, with possible arbitrary scaling and clipping? Or is everything just natively textures now and we don't even have 2D drawing hardware?
No, not really. Everything is just rasterized triangles now, but whether they're textured or not is up to the shader your using.
A non-textured triangle will be faster than a textured one as it can just return a literal in the pixel shader instead of wasting time sampling a texture for each pixel.
However a single texture sample is so cheap on modern hardware that a specialized path for solid colors wouldn't be worth the complexity in a 2D setting. It's fast enough.
When you say it that way, it's actually baffling that there's still separate code paths for solid background colors.
Just offer a background picker, and have it generate a 1x1 PNG, for the color selected. Just like that, you can use the image background code path for everything; and the code for generating the image almost certainly exists in the OS already. Maybe add some metadata to the generated image to filter it from the images picker, and you're done.
It feels like a lot of these non-sense features is what you get after years of fixes and releases, it's hard to envision a full system 10 years out and get it right, and there's almost never time to clean up unless it's a greenfield project or something.
I recently acquired a ThinkStation P910 dual CPU Xeon E26xx with 64GB RAM and 1080GTX
Quite a capable machine for my uses.
Not supported in Windows 11. Maybe with some additional config? Can’t be bothered with something hat might turn out to be fragile and need more maintenance than I can be bothered with. That’s a young man’s gane.
Ok, I’m about due to give Linux another tickle anyways.
Hmm, which distro… can always give a few a spin.
Keep it simple, Pop!_OS.
Installed fast, no issues, runs fine, stable. Seems entirely usable.
I wouldn't go with Pop_OS with that hardware. The Nvidia GPU isn't supported by the new Nvidia driver and because System76 is hard at work writing Cosmic, their repositories are quite outdated. Support for things like Wayland is quite mediocre in the old drivers.
Switching to upstream (Ubuntu) with KDE would probably be more your speed.
As much as I'd like a machine like that, my 5 year old random Lenovo 10500 desktop is probably more useful as a daily driver machine than an older workstation class machine at the sacrifice of no ECC RAM. I bought it when it was 3 years old and will use it for 4 years then get rid of it before it hits the tail end, the power supply dies or something else goes wrong. You avoid all the weird problems, the depreciation, the energy costs running like that. And you gain things like relatively competent NVMe slots, USB-C and other luxuries. And the single core performance is better than Xeons of the era and earlier.
win11 ltsc works perfectly on it. With a solid background :D
Regardless of political opinion, I can't get my head around how basic education and a safe space for children can be frowned upon - no matter their social circumstances, color of skin, nationality or descent.
Did something give you the idea that it is frowned upon? The exponential growth of homeschooling and growth of private schooling in the past 15-20 years is a direct result of government run schools failing to do just that. In spite of ever increasing spending on education.
Homeschool and private schooling advocacy is driven at least as much by a desire to control curricula (usually fundamentalist christian stuff, but sometimes crunchy lefty stuff) as by a concern about the general quality of public education.
The article says: "Some families wonder if the shutting of the schools is related to his D.E.I. retrenchment." My comment is directed towards: is basic education and child safety a D.E.I. matter (which in some political views are frowned upon)?
Serious question: where is this spending going? Also other commenters mentioned the increasing public spending on schools, with failing results. I keep hearing and reading stories about teachers having to buy their own pencils or bringing some food to school... is this a similar situation like the US health insurance system?
Partly. There do seem to be a lot of administrators.
Part of it is also schools spending millions on sports facilities that only benefit a small portion of the students. 99.9% of whom will never play a team sport again after high school. My own kid’s school just did that. Meanwhile they don’t even have a pair of $200 choir mics so parents can actually hear the school choir singing in the auditorium.
I read that there are basically 2 types of people that voted for Trump. People who wanted him to improve the economy and people that just enjoy the cruelty.
I am not here to judge who voted for Trump and why.
All I can say is that I know people that vote for extreme right wing even when those policies will make their lives more difficult, only because it will hurt people that they dislike even more.
It is a bit weird to watch happening, but it is hardly surprising that those in power will capitalize on the frustration and spite of people.
An uneducated populace is generally easier to control - the easier it is to threaten their livelihood, the harder it is for them to rise up. Further, there's a clear correlation with education and what political ideologies you're likely to vote for. And, of course, if you long for the "good old days" when society was run by white christian men, then why would you want to help anyone else?
Why would a racist care for anyone of a race they despise and vilify? Being a child has nothing to do with it. Children become adults and soak up the values around them; so if they hate the adults, of course they hate the children. Why would they want their perceived enemies to be safe and have basic education? That just gives them more resources to fight for revindication, which is a threat to the ones who hate them in the first place.
None of that is right, but it’s not difficult to understand either. Don’t try to find some complex logic behind it, the reasoning is incredibly basic.
> Children become adults and soak up the values around them;
If this is really what they are afraid of, wouldn't depriving them of basic education reduce the amount of common values around them and make matters worse?
Fair point, if hate is the ulterior motive. Do you think that hate strong enough it extends to children is widely present in the population and the public opinion?
Eschew the thought that children are somehow special. They’re not. They’re simply a younger version of a person, not a separate being worthy of special reverence. A racist doesn’t hate another race and then hate their children on top, they just hate the race as a whole.
I don't agree. Children are special in that there are several psychological effects like baby schema, innate caregiving response, etc. which one would have to overcome. Seeing children as younger versions of adults is a very technical view which I'd be surprised if it was in any way prevalent.
You're absolutely right in that a text-book racist might not distinguish between children and adults. Imagining that this is so common it dictates decisions on this level is hard to grasp for me.
I'm using KOReader with the PocketBook Era. The integration is top notch. Installation is simply done by copying the KOReader folder to the right directory on the device. After that you can set KOReader as the default reader, which means that you keep on using the original system software and library, but books will automatically open in KOReader.
This lets me use "Mail to PocketBook", Dropbox sync etc. or the fantastic Push-to-Kindle browser-plugin in combination with the fantastic KOReader. No flashing or jail break required.
I don’t. The plugin syncs to the PocketBook system software and KOReader is simply used as the reader application which opens the article. There is no need to sync to KOReader since it accesses the books present on my device and those are managed by the PocketBook software.
Ah okay, so you're using PocketBook for the syncing. I'll have to check it out. The send to kindle functionality is what keeps me coming back to the Kindle app.
As a German native speaker, it's surprisingly hard to read the code examples. Seems like all common concepts of programming languages like access modifiers, types etc. are hardwired to their English terms in my brain.
Rost also did do extra work to have maximally diverging naming.
- struktur could have been strukt
- umstz could have been impl as in Implementierung was added to the German language
- nutz would be a more realistic replacements of use
- Mutieren is a German word so mut would stay mut
- unsafe is better translated as unsicher, not gefährlich which is dangerous
- hinein is a translation for into but .into() a short for "convert into", which in German is "konvertiere zu" so `.zu()`, similar "convert ... from .." would be roughly "aus ... erstelle ..." so `.aus()`.
- etc.
in general authors do choose language keywords, syntax and acronyms so that they flow/read reasonable nicely and that isn't true here in many ways. If we don't just try to translate by word but by what we mean with the word in given context then verhalten would be a better choice for trait and you can definieren (define) behavior so `impl Behavior for Thing` become `def Verhalten für Ding`. Similar static wouldn't become statisch but instead global.
When I first read the examples, besides my laughter, I felt a similar disconnect im the semantics of the chosen German words. Thank you for you suggestions, I agree with all of them, they are better indeed IMHO.
I've never been able to even use localized UIs on anything that goes on my computers and my phone. My native Romanian looks either foreign or silly when it's on the "File" menu.
It's probably what you got used to when you first learned it though.
Because I am also slow at reading math / the theoretical part of IT in English because I learned it ... in Romanian.
Edit: to the point that I didn't remember the "theoretical part of IT" is "Computer Science" when posting in a hurry :)
With me it goes so far that I switch everything that can be switched (e.g. Android on my phone) to English. It's not just the terms, it's also the frequent translation errors. One "oldie but goodie" example is a Windows utility (I think it was Registry Editor, but not sure anymore) that translated "key" with "Taste" - which means key on a keyboard, not key as in a thing that opens doors or allows you to uniquely identify a bit of data, that would have been "Schlüssel".
I do the same thing. When helping friends with their computer problems, having to translate words in a menu is such a hassle, especially when the translations aren't obvious.
When it turns out they were using a different version and didn't have that option, we still had to figure out what translates to what – if the option even is there at all.
As an English native speaker, that makes sense to me. When I read code, I don’t really think of keywords as being related to the English word that inspired them; they’re just their own distinct symbol to my brain.
If file system level isolation is enough for you, take a loot at schroot (https://linux.die.net/man/1/schroot) which allows root-less chroot. You can use something like debootstrap to get a complete userland into a user controlled directory and use schroot to chroot into it without root level access.
> it seems that for creating a chroot you still require root.
You actually don't as long as you have user namespaces.
One thing I am working on I use chroot (rather unshare --root=) to minimally sandbox a subprocess. At the beginning of the script I have this little snippet:
if [ "$(id --user)" -ne 0 ]; then
exec unshare --map-root-user --mount -- "$0" "$@"
fi
Though you can probably just do something roughtly as `unshare --map-root-user --root=<PATH>`.
One of the most impactfult things I ever picked up was to put a rough estimate on every task I'm doing and then plan my day/week according to it. In its essence, its just timeboxing. But I kept getting better at estimating the real effort necessary to complete a task which in turn made me a lot better at prioritizing.
An important side effect is that it changed the way I work: I focus on the outline first and use the remaining time in my timebox to gradually refine my result. At the end of the timebox, I have the best working result I could achieve within my estimate.
The combination of timeboxing, better prioritizing, and outlining / starting with an end-to-end prototype did wonders for my productivity and stress levels.
That said, there is a substantial disconnect between the substantive preferences of the voting population and the actual policies and decisions of the parties they elect. This is partly because promises like “internal security” gain much more traction in times of growing uncertainty and global instability, while only a relatively small portion of the population fully thinks through, or is willing to think through, the consequences and concrete legislative changes behind those promises.
Nevertheless, looking at both public attitudes and court rulings, it is still fair to say that data protection in Germany, even compared to other EU countries, currently enjoys a particularly high status.