Hemingways_Shotgun

When reached for comment, ABBA replied.

“Take a chance on me.”

Free market, bitch.

I’ve had this discussion with friends because I’m the crazy “privacy” person in my peer group. I always have trouble putting it into words, so this might not make the most sense, but I’ll try.

The most fundamental right that we have as humans is the right to present to the world the person that we want to present to the world.

Everybody has something about themselves that, if it were known, would change the way other people look at them. Maybe it’s something silly and stupid like you’re afraid of spiders. Maybe you’re into some really freaky porn. But whatever it is, if you don’t want people to know about it, that’s your right and it’s sacrosanct.

People will say, “who cares if people know that you’re afraid of spiders, it’s a small price to pay if it means that we also catch the people with something illegal to hide, like CSAM or other stuff.”

But what about the battered wife who has been secretly searching for support and planning her escape from the situation on the internet. But she shares a computer with her abusive husband and google, knowing her search history, starts showing him ads about furniture and moving companies?

What about the scared teenager who has realized that he is gay and have parents who would disown him if they found out. When he’s searching for support and fellowship online, the only place where he can feel like he belongs, he can be as careful as he wants, but his search history will eventually betray him before he’s ready to come out himself.

Maybe what you don’t want people to know about is just that you’re afraid of spiders, sure. But what if it’s something far more important.

In terms of how you interact with it day to day, no. And that’s because the Distro in that sense matters less than the desktop environment. Since DEs are fundamentally distro agnostic, most distros give a person the option for multiple choices in that regard, so it doesn’t really matter if you’re using Ubuntu, Arch, Fedora, etc… what matters from a usage perspective is if you’re using KDE, or Gnome, or XFCE, etc…

Under the hood there’s a lot of differences in how each one chooses to do things, but I wouldn’t call one of them better or worse than any other and for the most part can be ignored.

My advice would be narrow it down to one choice; and that’s your package manager. That’s really where most of the difference lies. Find the one that you find easiest to use (Apt, Pacman/Pamac, DNF, Zypper) and that’s where you land until you’re comfortable.

My previous Motorola also has an e/OS/ spin. But sadly my current one does not.

Any Google app that would have Gemini baked in has long since been disabled on my phone. I’m presuming it’s bullshit isn’t going to be able to access my Fossify Messages or Dialer or Gallery or every other app I’ve replaced and disabled, especially since I’ve also disabled the Assistant and Google Apps.

(If I’m wrong please correct me.)

Trump: Putting the “fat” in “fatwa” since 1946.

That’s good to hear. It’s been many years since I’ve stayed in touch with either my extended family or my friends who live down there. (Most of my family moved from Portugal to Canada, but a couple of distant cousins moved instead to Brasil…around Niteroi if I remember correctly)

I last spoke with them in the early 2000s, and back then it was a pretty crazy contrast between the rich and the poor. Almost no true middle class. You either were wealthy enough to have servants, or you WERE the servant and went home to your favela that (if you were lucky) had electricity.

Sure. That might end up being a socially healthy place for adults to end up.

But it will never work that way for young teens. Their brains aren’t done baking yet. They don’t have the emotional maturity to understand that enough to be “okay with it because it’s just a fake”.

That’s why we protect kids rather than just telling them “hey it’s okay…it’s only a fake.”

I’m not even going to begin describing all the ways that what you just said is fucked up.

I’ll just point out that online deepfake technology is FAR more accessible to the average 13 year old to use on their peers than “porno mags” were in our day.

You want to compare taking your 13 year old classmates photo off of Facebook, running it through an AI and in five seconds creating photo-realistic adult content featuring them, and compare that to getting your dad’s skin-mag from under his mattress when he’s not home, cutting your classmates face out of a yearbook, taping it on, then sneaking THAT into the computer lab at school so that you can photocopy it and pass it around in home room, and then putting the skin-mag BACK under the mattress before your dad finds out.

Is that right…is THAT what you’re trying to say? Are those the two things that you’re trying say are equivalent?

When a stock price is all that matters, everything gets reduced to line items on a spreadsheet. That includes humanity.

This is unquestionably a good thing. But it’s also kind of weird that it’s Brasil of all places in on this, since the inequality there between the super wealthy and the folks living in the favelas is just an accepted part of life…kind of like the caste system in India.

I’m not saying that that’s a good thing. I’m just saying that I wouldn’t imagine the Brasilian authorities would actually give a shit considering the state of their own inequality and how it’s just kind of taken as a “reality of life” down there.

That game shaped my gaming life in a thousand ways. It still stands as one of my most memorable experiences.

I don’t know if the emulation is the problem or not, but I’ve tried replaying it on multiple Genesis Emulators and found it almost impossible due to something imperceptible that makes firing the gun just a millisecond too late after pushing the button. And the group you’re fighting moving just slightly faster than you. Combining to result in very quickly getting beaten to death in your very first encounter with gangers.

I’ve tried multiple settings on multiple emulators and I can’t solve it.

That really depends on your definition of “holds up”.

For example, to me the original Final Fantasy VII is still a better game than the remake because what was a well thought out RPG combat system got turned into just another button mashing combat experience with a Final Fantasy VII wallpaper applied to it.

Is the remake better graphically? sure. Does that matter to you? Than yeah…the original isn’t going to hold up for you. But if you prefer the classic design from those times, the game holds up great from a gameplay/story/character perspective. And I personally would take it over whatever mash-fest modern games use for combat systems.

I just use Syncthing. No cloud, just keeps any folders I choose on any devices synced with one another. Never had a problem, and while the files yes accessible on the internet technically, they’re not stored anywhere except the devices that have access to them. Works like a charm.

I usually move to Lineage once my two year warranty is up, just in case.

I know that by law hardware manufacturers can’t deny hardware warranty based on your software (at least where I’m from…I worked in for one of the big three telco’s up here in Canada)

But I’d rather not have that argument with the manufacturer, so I wait for it to run out. If my phone has a rom available I run that until the hardware dies and then I upgrade.

In the absence of being able to switch to Graphene (Don’t own a pixel), I’ve done everything I can to replace Google Apps with FOSS alternatives, and disabled Google Assistant on my device entirely.

I know none of that will stop a determined Google eventually fucking with me, but at least I’m trying.

I’m so damned tired of the modern corporate world.

How was tiny little Serbia a factor triggering WW1?

Little things spiral into bigger things, which then spiral into yet bigger things.

It’s been a long time since the six-day-war. Most states in the middle east are more technologically capable than they were in 67. I’m thinking it’s time for that coalition to form up again and gang bang Bibi and his buddies. We’d see some different results.

Most regular people just use what came with their computer, unfortunately.

So this is a case of a company that made a browser to appeal to techies that didn’t see widespread adoption, is pivoting to a new browser that is focused on the central conceit of a product that most techies decry…

Read the room, Arc. Read the room.