I'm aware of places where this is done because the law sets prices and policies for 'copies' in terms of physical papers and has never updated their laws to reflect the past half century of information technology. Definitely the fault of the local legislators.
I'm guessing he's talking about a BIOS update causing bricked mainboards, to which they responded somewhat slowly. A descirption of the problem with Frameworks eventual response is here: [0] A charitable take would be that, because of the low number of affected customers, it took them a while to confirm that it was actually a problem for them to address. My personal issue with it was mostly that, as a company who is so much about repair and upgrades, that even their eventual response was to replace bricked mainboards, rather than offering the tools necessary to recover (even better would have been design decisions like having a backup bios chip to recover from botched upgrades).
As a framework owner, the situation is less than ideal, but given that they did eventually commit to replacing even out-of-warranty main boards, I very much wouldn't agree with calling it "debacle". Of course, maybe he's talking about some other issue that I'm unaware of.
Could very well be apophenia. Germany was just one of the countries visited, and we all get spam in a variety of languages all the time, including German.
I've never received a spam email in German in my entire life. This spam email actually looks to be a legitimate email as after translating it the contents were basically to verify the email address. I don't think I've ever received an email in another language in my entire life and certainly not while I've been at Fastmail (10+ years).
The only foreign language spam I got was from Pokemon Go after I played it while visiting France & Spain. I received French and Spanish emails from them for years.
Desktop is taking a bit to render after a reboot (which I need to do very rarely, admittedly), apps definitely got slower to open, a small delay in actions here and there - it started feeling a bit sluggish compared to before and it felt like it's deteriorating over time - but slightly.
I think it's very likely due to OS updates, like other people are commenting on. It probably doesn't happen to everyone, and maybe doing a clean reinstall helps (I tried all the standard stuff - rebuild caches etc).
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