Do timezones have anything to do with the problem at hand? They’re a shift of the clock to sync the clock with the Sun visually rolling across the sky. The inherent time is the same on the entire planet. Since it doesn’t really make sense to track the Sun’s relative position in the sky far enough away from it, they’d either default to UTC or the time on Earth of wherever in the US the death took place.

Error at or around “the”

I"m with you on copyleft, but if I had any connection to the project and felt the need to add a reaction emoji, it’d probably be a “thumbs-down” as well.

It’s not because I’m against the GPL, but because of the way the GitHub comment is written.

It doesn’t even say “you should use the GPL”, it says “you MUST say GNU doesn’t agree with you”. I’m perplexed.

Now, I respect the idea of GNU, but the way GNUers in general go about behaving themselves is perfect to alienate people, and this GitHub issue is a prime example. I don’t get it.

If people don’t know about GNU, tell them. Nicely.

If people have misconceptions about GNU, there’s nothing wrong with fixing them. Again, nicely.

The problem is, whenever I encounter GNU and however much I agree with them on key issues (which is at about 90%, my main gripe with them being Freedom 0), they just have a knack to get me, someone who is with them on most issues, annoyed at them. I can clearly see how someone who isn’t as alligned with them as I am gets equally annoyed and avoids GPL and GNU like the plague just to fuck with 'em (while fucking over everyone, including themselves). Not to mention ones into the libertarian stream, since you yourself covered that pretty well.

What the GitHub issue you linked that I keep coming back to shows is this GNU herd mentality of fucking over others unintentionally and in turn fucking over everyone. While they’re clearly better than the “libtards”, they still end up doing the same mistake.

They’re not that few and far between, as declining must be as easy as declining per the GDPR. Just report the transgressors to the national watchdog.

Yup. For me it renders fine (Thunder)

He clearly needs his mornings to contemplate and relax so he can be infinitely more productive than the average peson.

If only everyone got to choose their schedules as freely and arbitrarily, everyone could be a billionaire like him.

Linux Mint is the obvious “newbie” choice, and not just because everyone says so.

Now, I’m no Linux expert, but Mint is great for the huge amount of tutorials availiable. The catch is: most of them aren’t aimed at Mint itself, but Ubuntu or Debian, from which it “inherits” a lot. So, if you have a problem and can’t find a fix for Mint specifically, chances are one aimed at Ubuntu (or even Debian) will work flawlessly.

Additionally, GenAI chatbots impress me with how helpful thay are. Just by asking them how to do stuff will teach you a lot.

I highly recommend you save the info which seemed most useful somewhere for future reference. In my experience I had to do a few dozen things repeatedly and ended up remembering them. They’re mostly simple commands like apt install, apt update, apt upgrade, cd and my favourite <app_name &> which opens the app invoked without “hijacking” the terminal.

As most in the Linux community say, some things are lightning-fast to do in the terminal once you know the proper incantation.

As others said, the Mint install is incredibly simple, and much faster than the Windows one. You don’t need a guide, just reading the on-screen prompts and instructions will guide you through it. During the install I highly recommend checking the “Install proprietary drivers” box because depending on your exact hardware, some things (especially Nvidia) may not play well without it.

You will be able to do almost everything without the terminal, although many tutorials do utilize it, so using it is pretty much inevitable at some point of your Linux journey.

Now, some hearsay: I’ve heard that Windows doesn’t play nice with dual boot (although I’ve never experienced it fist hand), so you should back up your files just in case.

But, before you do that: For starting, if you’ve got the time, I’d recommend getting an old machine to dip your toes into Linux on it first without fully committing. I’d recommend you do this even though you have the Steam Deck since there are some differences between SteamOS and Mint, so it wouldn’t hurt to try.

A cause for conCERN

How exactly do you expect every single privacy “enthusiast” to inspect source code?

A privacy “enthusiast” is not the same as a privacy “expert”. And even then, a “privacy expert” doesn’t need to be a genius programmer - or even one at all - they can be lawyers, historians or journalists.

Knowing how to code is hard. Knowing reading someone else’s code is even harder. Vetting code for security is even harder than that.

Not to mention the fact that the Firefox source is enormus, dwarfing kernel.org, a huge project with an incredible amount of contributors.

Expecting every privacy “expert” to be able to fully understand every single line of code in a project is divorced from reality. Expecting it from anyone merely interested in it is asinine.

Not even a genius security researcher would be capable of vetting the source of something as giant as Firefox on their own. Sure, it’s a great passion project which many have taken up and learned many things from it, but it just isn’t practical for literally anyone.

The Open source community is just that - a community. And any good community sticks together. A deeply rooted interst of this community is to spread its message and accomplishments to everyone, “experts”, “enthusiast” or “neither” alike.

Any community benefits most from active members who wish it good. It also benefits from members being varied, and thus able to give their own, unique perspective on community issues. As I said, many privacy experts aren’t security experts, but rather people of a legal, journalist and historic background. Some are vloggers. Nothing wrong with that.

If the community is healthy, things will balance out. The vloggers, bloggers and Mastodon posters’ backlash (among others) would force Mozilla to capitulate on the issue, or create a fork if the situation asks for.

Now Benjamin and Jackson are already common. I assume 100k and 401(k) will enter the mix too. Maybe even Doge and Bitcoin. I assume Bit is already the name of a not insignificant number of individuals. .

They don’t need the data perpetually to train their AI. Just dump it once into the black box and be done with it - no need to save it for even a second. Of course, if they want to train and re-train, and perhaps build ad profiles, that’s a different matter.

Dark mode can be recreated using extensions, although the colors most likely won’t be as legible as “native support”.

I don’t see why a similar extrnsion couldn’t change the timezones of clocks.

Additionally, I don’t see why the server should bother with either (pragmatically) - Dark mode is just a CSS switch and timezones could be flagged to be “localized” by the browser. No need for extra bandwidth or computing power on the server end, and the overhead would be very low (a few more lines of CSS sent).

Of course, I know why they bother - Ad networks do a lot more than “just” show ads, and most websites also like to gobble any data they can.

The brain is, basically, a think-machine, even though it’s “just” a lump of meat. The brain tries to make sense of stuff and piece everything together “logically”.

Oftentimes the braim makes stuff up - your brain is very good at lying. Take for example vision - the eyes contain a relatively hole in the retina, yet you see a perfectly clear image. This is the “intended” purpose, but the core mechanism bywhich this is done is much more deeply rooted into the brain’s main “function” - it’s one of the core things the brain does. Its “thinking” is very malleable.

This can cause smaller “misinterpretations” of reality: Here’s a personal example: when my grandfather died, I periodically saw his reflection in the front door of his house. It would be visible only for a second, and then disaopear almost immidiately. I had to be moving relatively fast for it to appear, and couldn’t cause it to appear at will. 15 years later, I noticed it was actually my reflection, but since it was only visible in the exact same spot, from a certain angle, only in the evenings, with the porch lamp on and on a wood-textured PVC door, it took me that much time to piece all the puzlle pieces together and deduce the root cause. Me not having to visit his house all that often certsinly didn’t help the situation.

The other is plain hallucination: Take arthritis. You have pain which is proven not to be caused by anything external. Your nerves just send the “pain signals”, and you feel pain.

Additionally, sinesthesia isn’t just something someone either has or doesn’t, but it’s a spectrum, and, all the senses are in fact connected on a quite deep level.

What you describe definately falls somewhere on this “misinterpretarion-hallucination” spectrum. Maybe there was nothing to smell, yet you felt you smelled something, caused fully by your unconscious influenced by past experiences. Or maybe there was a totally different smell that got turned into this smell, but you couldn’t pick it out - as is the case with my grandfather and I.

This spectum can also be taken as the “physical-psychological” (cause) spectrum.

Maybe it’s a one-off thing for you, or maybe it’s a chain of conditions that’ll get fullfilled again every now and then. There’s most likely a logical explanation since the brain is inherently a logical machine, but chances are it’s not. There are just too many variables at play as far as outside factors go.

Checked the site quickly and didn’t find the information, but judging by the top-level comment, they don’t charge you if you want to use their cloud service, but if you want to “unlock” the ability to use someone else’s.

TANGO HOTEL ALFA TANGO INDIA PAPA ALFA INDIA SIERRA SIERRA TANGO INDIA LIMA LIMA BRAVO ECHO TANGO TANGO ECHO ROMEO TANGO HOTEL ALFA NOVEMBER TANGO HOTEL INDIA SIERRA INDIA PAPA ALFA

Question about the years if someone knows: is “years hence” a fancy british way of saying “years in the future” or is it some antiquated large non-SI unit of time since I find any of the species described in shorter timeframes, the Vacuumorph beimg an egregious example (“200 years hence”) very hard to imagine “evolving” only 200 years in the future, even with the 90s outlook on technology (since it seems they said these earlier examples at least are engineered species in the book).

Historically, I have a vague memory of knowing the fact that some places did actually do that, although I should check.

Honestly, I’m fine with Google being the default search engine (since they pay a lot for the priviledge and it’s trivial to remove). What I acrually have a problem with is Firefox using Google Firebase for analytics and Google whatever for “safe search” queries, etc. These are a lot more hidden, which I find borderline malicious. With the search engine you at least get the notification of “fuck I’m on Google” whenever you search for something, so it doesn’t do all that much harm since it’s very opaque, unlike having to refer people to ffprofiles to purge google completely.

On that note - if you want to get rid of Google from Firefox as much as possible visit ffprofiles. It has it all nicely explained. You just tick some boxes and apply the profile as per the ~5-step instructions. You’ll be done in less than 20 minutes.

Maybe those are imperial seconds and the ohers metric?

The thing with the Control panel (speaking as a former Windows user up until a year ago) was its consistency. Since the Aero era things have remained in more-or-less the same place. Sure, some things got added, some renamed and some deleted, but the basics I needed (mouse sensitivity, battery settings on the laptop, the Add/remove software page, search indexing, printers) has all stayed in more or less the same place.

Then 10 happened. And sure, Settings was great for a lot of stuff. But when Settings didn’t have the option (or I lost my nerves trying to find it), Control Panel was the way to go. I’d find what I needed pretty much instantly, since was always one of the same 20-odd things I need.

Even then, everything just seemed faster in Control panel. Was it more responsive? Were there less animations? Were more things crammed into one screen so less clicking and scrolling was involved? Is it just my imagination?

Honestly, I don’t know.

By the time I got used to the new Settings app, one of the big Windows 10 makeovers happened and jumbled up about 10% of Settings. Objectively not much, but just enough to irritate.

And now with 11, they not only made Settings unrecognizable, they also cranked the spyware up to, well, 11. And there’s no Control Panel to default on when in doubt (or fuming with rage).

All in all, while Control Panel wan’t what kept me on Windows, 11 losing it did ease the transition, since it meant having to learn a new way of doing things either way. Might as well make it a way that hopefully won’t change once a random design exec decides “this is ugly and it has to go”.

Honestly, KDE Plasma’s Settings are where it’s at. It’s right between the functional and informstional density of Control panel and the simplicity, visual appeal and saner structure of Settings. Shame it uses Qt, which from what I hear, is god-awful as far as UI toolchains go.