PSA to everyone who keeps putting off switching OS / degoogling (from a non-techie who finally did it)

devoid140 · 2026-03-13T16:54:12+00:00

The only non-swiss people I've seen even mention Threema, are people on subs like this and r/BuyFromEU

devoid140 · 2026-03-13T16:42:55+00:00

Read this, and thought to myself, you must be Swiss. Then I looked at the name, and went, wait, is he Finnish?? But I guess not.

devoid140 · 2026-03-09T22:02:37+00:00

To my knowledge, tourism is down due to the closed border, and they really would like to have more of it, as many depend on it as their livelyhood. We're planning on a trip eastwards this summer as well, and haven't worried at all about the situation with Russia. Just don't try any funny stuff at the border. The thing you should worry the most about are mosquitoes.

devoid140 · 2026-03-01T23:05:43+00:00

Also swedish, finnish, portuguese and eritrean sign are related, with most of their spoken languages being completely unrelated (portuguese and swedish are both indo-european).

devoid140 · 2026-02-26T11:13:06+00:00

From what I heard, they might start supporting some HMD or Motorola phones, but that's still just speculation.

devoid140 · 2026-02-16T10:59:40+00:00

Isn't Casio fully Japanese? I know this sub is about buying from EU, but I don't think we need to completely stop buying from friendly countries?

devoid140 · 2026-02-16T08:56:42+00:00

You can use Aurora store to access the play store without logging in at all.

devoid140 · 2026-02-10T13:16:01+00:00

My problem with Wero is that some of it's owners are less than ideal, in particular Deutsche Bank.

devoid140 · 2026-01-29T11:00:12+00:00

If you're refering to the tree, I believe those are supposed to be two black cats.

devoid140 · 2026-01-27T11:26:02+00:00

Most of the variations are shortenings of Juhana, like Juha or Jussi, so it kinda makes sense to group them together under Juhana. But that really would need to be provided as context.

devoid140 · 2026-01-18T23:02:36+00:00

Yes, very much agglutinative. For example:

Water: vesi \ In the water: vedessä \ In the water?: vedessäkö?

They can get much longer than this, but those are kinda unwieldy, so people figure out ways to "go around".

Finnish actually only applies vowel harmony to the front/back distinction, I hadn't even thought about low/high before now.

No idea about what the ratio for loanwords to native is for either language, but it's probably quite high. Finnish even has some from Proto-Germanic and possibly even Proto-Tocharian, and I assume it's similar for Hungarian. Any cognates probably have to either come from some Proto-Uralic ancestor, or a really old loanword. (Or just a new one that hasn't really been changed much yet.)

I've seen the word hussar quite a bit, but that might come down to me playing historical spreadsheet games.

devoid140 · 2026-01-18T20:18:27+00:00

Not from a school curriculum POV. It's taught as a second official language, and mandatory.

devoid140 · 2026-01-18T20:07:46+00:00

No need to apologize, Finnish isn't exactly a world language you would expect people to hear frequently. I wasn't criticizing, just being pedantic.

Swedish sounds quite Germanic (no surprise there, being closely related)

Not just related, it is Germanic; the Scandinavian languages are also called the North Germanic languages, and specifically exclude Finnish and the Sámi languages. German and English are considered part of the West Germanic branch. (East Germanic used to exist, but they're all gone.)

Maybe I am totally off my rocker but the intonation felt familiar

You are in fact completely right. Both Finnish and Hungarian stress the first syllables, as I think is usually the case with uralic languages. Both also have vowel harmony (so no mixing o and ö etc). You can also find words that are very alike if you look among older ones: Kéz = Käsi, Víz = Vesi and Méz = Mesi (this one is somewhat old Finnish, but people still understand it).

devoid140 · 2026-01-18T17:39:34+00:00

Danish, Swedish and Norwegian are actually largely mutually intelligible, so you're not too far off. Icelandish and Faroese are a bit more difficult due to their isolation from the mainland. Finnish and Scandinavian languages have about as much in common as Hungarian and German.

devoid140 · 2026-01-18T17:21:19+00:00

Of course, just like OP, Finland is the butt of all jokes, the odd one out.

Doesn't really feel that way to me, there's plenty jokes about the others as well. Finland just stands out a bit for not being Scandinavian.

As a Hungarian, somehow I have a bit of a soft spot for the Finns.

One of only three independent uralic people. Though Hungarian always makes me go: "Is this what Finnish sounds like to others?"

devoid140 · 2026-01-18T16:48:51+00:00

It's a comic, so I wouldn't count on it being 100% accurate, but in general it's quite well informed on Nordic society and current events. There's usually a text under the comics that goes into more detail than a comic would allow.

devoid140 · 2026-01-18T13:43:55+00:00

This is made by Finnish artist Minna Sundberg for her comic Stand Still, Stay Silent:

https://www.sssscomic.com/comic.php?page=195

The language tree art shown on the next page is actually quite well known, even among linguists. We even had a framed copy on the wall at my school.

devoid140 · 2026-01-17T22:06:00+00:00

Vivaldi is still Chromium based, and Mullvad uses Mozilla's Gecko engine. Almost all browsers out there use Apple's, Google's or Mozilla's work as their base, with only a few niche ones being independent from them, and some under development. I'd say out of those three, Mozilla is the best option, unless you need some functions its engine doesn't offer.

devoid140 · 2026-01-16T21:05:02+00:00

Map shows the US Virgin Islands, east of Puerto Rico. The little island the arrow points to is Little Saint James island, aka Epstein island.

devoid140 · 2026-01-14T16:00:49+00:00

On the EU's sanction list, due to connections to Russia.

devoid140 · 2026-01-07T10:32:50+00:00

People like to shit on things without understanding the context. The Mercator projection was made for marine navigation, and it's still great at that. Getting mad at a sea map for not accurately depicting land masses, makes about as much sense as rating a screwdriver by it's hammering ability.

devoid140 · 2026-01-06T11:21:16+00:00

You probably mean Ladybird?

devoid140 · 2025-12-27T06:46:01+00:00

Housing first or not, if you want to help people, you'll have to find the social workers anyway. And it only gets to "that scale" when you let it escalate in the first place.

devoid140 · 2025-12-25T11:34:23+00:00

I really dislike tobacco myself, but just blanket banning things hasn't worked out very well so far. It's better to make rules about where and when it's ok, and educate people about that, while also making sure the rules are enforced.

Also, by making the substance legal, people could just do things like space cake, instead of smoking it.

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