Taylor Lorenz is actually a pretty solid journalist that has dealt with some lousy personal issues. Her coverage of privacy and freedom of speech issues online has been good. But she also has to earn a living producing online content.

Slight sarcasm - I’m also a Mint user, and it was like a recursive reference to this meme from forever ago. Maybe it was too specific and dated, but the point is that since Macs were so easy to use, the Windows people back in the 8.1 days treated Mac users like kindergartners as they paid for their $1,000 facebook machines (also a meme from that time).

All the “Yeah, I use Arch, BTW” people that love the struggle and the hobbyist tweaks of their distros seem to look down on Mint users because it doesn’t require a struggle to use Mint. I used to see it all the time when I first jumped over to Linux.

For the most part, it works well without needing too much tinkering by the user. It’s the Fisher Price My First Distro.

I tried it out with a 21.3 dualboot with Windows 11 and within 2 or 3 months I hadn’t gone back to Windows other than to push files over. Sure, there were a few “learning opportunities” with tweaks or weird driver issues that were because of the particular hardware I’m using, but they were manageable. At this point I’m running 22.1 only on this machine.

The nice part is that being Ubuntu-based, if I run into a problem, I can search for both the more widely-documented Ubuntu version of the issue, or look for a Mint-related version. Claude does a great job with small-to-medium troubleshooting rather than me dig through forums. It’s low-risk, low-work, high-reward.

I also truly hate “family groups” where phones and accounts commonly associated with you get just pings on a topic to make you more malleable to the idea when you finally get the ads.

Domains cost like $1 if you’re flexible. Email hosting is what costs money.

Most people have absolutely zero idea how much data they put out there, what’s done with it, and why any rational person would be horrified if they knew the extent to which individuals were tracked. Simply put, short of showing them how their lives are made worse, they don’t care, and can’t be made to care.

For friends and family, you can do things like give them books or send articles explaining it slowly in parts. For everyone else, just ask them if they know how Google tracks what they do in Incognito windows and see what they say. If they say that Google can’t or doesn’t, they might as well say the Earth is flat. You can’t argue with that, even though it’s provably false.

Ah, the possibly Chinese-originated propaganda pushing for the Republic of Cascadia.

As a former resident, here’s a few reasons why not.

First, there’s already a looooot of rednecks and racists in every single state you talked about. In large numbers in rural areas. Simply smothering them with the numbers doesn’t mean you simply can’t represent them unless you just want someone else’s dictatorship. They’re still going to end up electing people you don’t like, and the ratio won’t be all that far off from now.

Second, Cascadia can’t sustain themselves with water, power, or food. Where are you getting wheat from? How about ethanol? How about EV production? It’s a guaranteed huge importer of lots of staples, severing infrastructure optimized over decades. So the first day you’re stuck trying to import from farther away at the same cost as no tariffs overland from 1000 miles away.

Third, your top trading partners will totally abuse your desperation during the secessionist era. Putting you in a terrible place to start.

Fourth, you’re now fully capitulating to the whims of the Broligarchs. WHY? Why do this? They can literally sink the whole country if 2 pull up stakes from Silicon valley.

Finally, last I checked, there isn’t some secret sauce to either political party. No one is actually living in some utopia besieged by nasty conservatives from Iowa. There’s no grass is greener situation here other than in your imaginations.

Huawei and their HarmonyOS would disagree with you on how many users there are on an AOSP variant. It’s a meaningful cost to Google, which is probably what is motivating them to lock down their phones now.

https://medium.com/huawei-developers/what-is-harmonyos-how-it-differs-from-android-e5ea3fc50acc

Next week, imma be all about this.

I understand what you’re saying, but AOL had the opposite problem. The internet at that time was hard to use in general, so it was more about trying to provide enough of anything to get commercial viability for regular people. At one point, AOL was 30% of the entire internet. Seriously, it hosted almost a third of everything online. The alternatives were CompuServe or Prodigy or simply not being online at all. But you paid for it up front as an ISP. AOL didn’t provide anything for free up front.

The Web 2.0 walled garden approach is about preventing you from wandering out onto the wide open spaces of the rest of the internet out there and not seeing the content curated to make the platform provider money. And making the 10% of daily internet content composed of idiotic FB comments and posts seem like it’s worth all your time when you can easily use one of 5 or 6 search engines to find alternative content. Making staying in the garden so cost effective and frictionless that even using a search engine seems “hard” to do.

The day I wiped all partitions from my dual boot and started fresh with no windows on the machine was a revelation. My heart sang and my soul wept with joy. Windows lives in a caged state now, a neutered monster I rarely demand dance for me because it is ugly and awkward and on an external drive I don’t care about.

Not the only one, but it’s the walled garden platform approach.

The idea (from around 2010ish) was that every platform is an app and every app is everything. A company buys up other smaller companies until you have a payment system, a marketplace, a VOIP system, advertising, job posting boards, 4 different waya to share media, etc. etc.

While the tech world sold this as, and actually viewed this as, some organic online super village, it wasn’t. It was a series of shit stripmalls adjacent to a Walmart in a shitberg town on a big freeway linking other shiberg towns with Walmarts. Sterile, restrictive, one size fits all dipshits kind of garbage. There’s a kind of person that thrives in the parking lots of Walmarts and stripmalls in shitberg towns, and they thrive on social media, too.

Lemmy reminds me more of early internet as well, but also refined by the common language of those platforms as a common starting point. It’s a niche, and it’s not for everyone. But it is for you, welcome.

A lot of areas that seem like only pedestrian areas in Europe are still roads. Cars regularly drive on tiny streets, especially in Italy and France, nearly clipping people eating dinner.

Still to this day I hum Black Sabbath when I drive fast or do any fancy weaving.

TIL there’s an arcade version of Ghosts n Goblins

Thanks for the links!

I feel it. I feel the cosmos!

Earthworm Jim

Atomic Robokid (Genesis)

Tempest (Atari 2600 version)

Ghosts and Goblins (NES)

The game where it’s a rich guy that sends a trained assassin out onto a island with nothing and hunts him for 24 hours, and if the assassin kills the rich guy he gets his freedom and like $20K.

Rock n Roll Racing (SNES)

Beyond All Reason/Planetary Annihilation

Doing OSINT is exactly what converted me into a privacy advocate.

I saw some retiree earlier today trying to take a pic of something. Opened his phone holding it up for all to see, and has only stock Android and bloatware apps. Like he just set it up yesterday. Worn cover and screen indicates, nope, not a new phone. I sighed a heavy sigh of sadness. Old guy has no idea. And would be pissed if he actually knew how much data he sprays all over.

“OK, so, I want a Honda Civic, but for up and down instead of forwards and backwards.”

Funny how it had to happen in that order.