When I get in the car and Tupac starts rapping about how I am going to the grocery store, the bank, and the liquor store and narrating every little thing that happens along the way only to realize that he narrated my entire afternoon in song… I’ll know it’s time to stomp on my phone and snip my internet.

Right, it should be crippling enough to give a company that DOES respect the law an opening to gain ground. Screw up big enough or often enough and your evolved competitors should replace you.

Yeah, $10m is chump change for a country and even most states. Pretty sure that’s how much it costs to repave a mile of my street nowadays. 🤣

We may have given money to other countries, but the US has also used it’s influence to shape the world in it’s favor to a much larger self-benefit than few million dollars.

Yeah, I sure could use some cheap SD cards now. I feel like a lot of the more privacy conscious gadgets use SD cards to save you from the menace of manufacturer-controlled cloud storage, rightly so!

I remember USB thumb drives hitting crazy lows at one point too, to the point where I was getting some decently sized drives as promo items. I think I paid $40 or so for my very first 250MB USB stick, maybe it was even smaller than that. I also distinctly remember buying a 128GB USB stick for a very similar price in the last decade or two and seeing them even cheaper than that. You do notice a build quality difference between them when you hold them side by side. The old Sandisk feels solid, the led, the cap, the enclosure are all solid and feel super sturdy and like they’re one single piece. The newer 128GB PNY is cheap, rattly, trashy plastic wrapped around a circuit board with a goofy retractable usb connector, but obviously outperforms the old one by miles. Would love to have cheap and quality. :-)

That’s why I think we should start teaching FOSS Linux as the first operating systems Kids are exposed to. It’s neutral ground in the sense that no one company owns and controls it, and the things they learn will help them understand why things are the way they are, not just what the latest marketing-hype “feature” is.

Someone I know went to a university that ran off Linux and I’m jealous of the comprehensive Linux 101 they got. It took me years to learn some of that stuff.

Some dynamic text under the toggle that reads “AI Anti-Feature ‘X’ is on/off” could ensure absolute double-certain clarity.

Did you have any exposure in Linux before eventually switching, or did you just step straight from the Windows world into the great Linux unknown?

Windows 3.1 has a bit of a fond spot in my heart. Even though we didn’t have 3.1 at home, the school computer lab used it. We used to scare the teacher by typing “dir stat” or something like that into the terminal to make the text scroll like we were hacking stuff in a movie 🤣 (she didn’t know anything about computers, just there to make sure we didn’t run off with them). I also recall those colorful all-in-one Macintosh computers making an appearance at a different school.

I want so badly for an actual consumer and environmental agency to start laying down the law and shutting things down. I thought public opinion would reach the point of effecting change by now, but instead the sheep are just screaming “baaaaa” and the people who get it are vegging out to a YouTube video about how plastic is killing us or the risks of overfishing. Houseflies are less shortsighted and selfish than a distressing number of human beings. Props to the dedicated MVPs out there networking, shining a light on corruption, protesting environmental racism and classism, etc, especially the independent journalists.

I’m a year or so longer on my self-hosting journey than you, but also get humbled like a noob on a regular basis. I was a Linux user for over a decade when I first started self-hosting but I knew nothing about networking because I always lived places where someone else managed the internet. I’ve learned a lot since then, but I have a lot left to learn. It really does take time to get a comprehensive understanding of what you are doing and why, but the good news is you can learn a lot through osmosis and we are already doing it just by being here.

I think “$hell-shocked” might work.

Waterproof ≠ Heatproof, and it also doesn’t guarantee chemicals and other impurities won’t wreck your phone. I took my old phone into the ocean a few times because we didn’t have lockers on the beach and no rental car to leave stuff in. It was rated waterproof and it survived, but it didn’t want to charge for quite a while and getting the salt and sand out of the usb-c port was tedious.

My fitness watch is as happy in the pool swimming laps as it is anywhere else. I do take it off in the shower though because I don’t want to clean soap scum off it or have water trapped between the watch and my wrist. It sounds like I may be inadvertently saving the battery!

Hell yeah! Whats the point in having ~2k resolution if everything in the UI gets blown up bigger than it was in the days of 640x480? Do your letters look that much smoother? Do you like only being able to fit a single sentence on screen at a time? If I’m paying for that screen real estate, I want to use it all!

My god this is brilliant! I don’t use Gemini and I’m not going to do it just to test this, but I spent years chasing the golden age of search results.

I was driving south of Frankfurt in Germany a few years ago and the freeway has pantographs so the electric trucks can charge on the fly. When will dino-burners get the same treatment? :-D

Yeah, it’s a shame this didn’t come 1-2 years earlier before discord got its claws in more stuff. Discord really caught on in my corners of the internet in the last 2 years. Before that, it was just my Minecraft pals. Even creators who freed themselves from the advertising machine by going fan-funded on Patron style sites still use discord to communicate. I hate to see them hit by boycott action against Discord, but if you stand on an archery range, don’t be surprised when you have a bunch of arrows sticking out of your noggin. ¯\(ツ)/¯

I wonder if someone could trigger it by sitting on the controller or tapping it against someone’s wallet pocket. Doesn’t matter, because I’m done with PlayStation and Sony, despite having never owned one myself.

My first home server did something like this. I didn’t understand permissions very well yet (still not 100%, but certainly much more capable now). I think I used /var and maybe /etc to hold my docker compose folders.

I agree, it’s not a tool, it’s a compromised and dangerous device and I have to carry it with me carefully. I have always turned off my location from time to time and carefully managed permissions, but nowadays here’s what I do:

• Graphene
• no biometric login
• no stale data on the device. If I won’t need it while I am mobile, does it need to be on my phone?
• location off, BT off, and airplane mode when going into grocery stores or any surveillance a happy retailer.
• factory wipe or alternate phone before traveling internationally, especially to countries with questionable rule of law, including my own
• minimal non-FOSS apps (getting less every time I redo the phone)
• any app that has a usable web portal or can be accessed on desktop only (Facebook, reddit) does not get installed.
• no pairing with cars or other BT devices that are known to be sketchy.

If I controlled the software on a deeper level, I would set it up to have a toggle where it will only connect to the cell network every 30-60 minutes. There is little in my life that is more important than a half hour response time, so why am I continuously broadcasting my triangulated location? I would have that toggle turned on 90% of the time.

People might reconsider if we give them a 30hr work week, but still pay the full salary. Some jobs are just harder and time worked doesn’t equal effort. I’ve had 2 day stints that should have paid me more than the entire preceding month!

What I’m trying to say is that the people who run America are unwilling to pay to do it right.

True, that’s also why we stopped valuing education the same way we used to. The wild part is that we can’t even think 20 years out. Hopefully most of us will still be alive 20 years from now. We should plan like that is the case.