A pigeon is strictly better than Trump because they don’t destroy the environment, societal and scientific progress, or other people. Now that I’ve thought about it 1 second more, it’s not even a fair comparison. Because Trump existing means active harm and destruction in many areas.

First they came for the Communists
And I did not speak out
Because I was not a Communist

Then they came for the Socialists
And I did not speak out
Because I was not a Socialist

Then they came for the trade unionists
And I did not speak out
Because I was not a trade unionist

Then they came for the Jews
And I did not speak out
Because I was not a Jew

Then they came for me
And there was no one left
To speak out for me

— Martin Niemöller

Adapted for the fascist regime in USA today, it should probably go like this:

First they came for the illegal immigrants
And I did not speak out
Because I was not an illegal immigrant

Then they came for the legal immigrants
And I did not speak out
Because I was not a legal immigrant

Then they came for the political opposition
And I did not speak out
Because I was not in the political opposition

Then they came for anyone not loyal on social media
And I did not speak out
Because I was not on social media

Then they came for me
And there was no one left
To speak out for me

—Someone who survived what’s to come

Always saw it as white/gold first but after a few seconds I perceive it as blue/black and then it stays that way.

Yes. Unfortunately, these systems are also a great gift for any upcoming fascist regime (like the Trump junta currently) which will not only happily continue using the existing infrastructure but also extend it like mad.

Maybe humanity’s greatest weaknesses overall: the lack of foresight and the lack of wisdom learned from historic precedents (e.g. Nazi Germany? Forgotten by now). Everything’s always about short-term goals, ignoring any long-term disadvantages. See also: climate disaster.

Its popularity.

Currently playing Talos Principle Reawakened (the UE5 remastered version). For anyone wondering whether it’s worth it, yes if you have the hardware for it. Because they also massively improved one of the most complex but also most frustrating mechanics in the original game (with the recorder thingie). So there are very useful improvements overall. Also, it has an entirely new DLC I think, which is again noticeably harder than the 1st DLC Road to Gehenna. Game looks great as well, but you need serious hardware for it. It’s not very performance efficient anymore. :) The Talos Principle series are probably the biggest and best 3D first-person puzzle games out there, together with the Portal series. Absolutely recommended.

Other than that, I’ve played The Ten Bells and Exit 8. These are great small anomaly-hunting games. I’ve never played this genre before so it was a great discovery for me. If you’re curious about this genre, start with Exit 8. If you liked that and prefer more horror elements in it, as well as a bigger “map”, play The Ten Bells. Awesome small games, needing only like 2-3 hours to finish.

In other words: Users of proprietary OS like Windows have so little control over their own devices that it’s newsworthy when the vendor allows you to uninstall 2-3 bundled things out of many more. But only in some countries! It’s pathetic.

Yes, but that somehow doesn’t change anything ever. They do horrible thing A, world is shocked about A, then they do horrible thing B, world is shocked about A+B, then they do horrible thing C, world is shocked about B+C (A has already been forgotten by that point). And so on. We don’t really have proper checks & balances in place against malicious politicians with too much power and too many loyalists in key positions. So they can do whatever and get away with a ton. I mean I thought there should be checks and balances working to correct this in any modern democracy but then again checks & balances also fail regularly in other areas, e.g. in anti-corruption or in pro data protection. Everything’s conveniently broken in some way and can be exploited. The key people from the Trump administration and/or Heritage Foundation should already be behind bars for lifetime.

I prefer FLAC. Don’t know if there’s an option in whipper for that. But the Arch Wiki has an article for converting: https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Convert_FLAC_to_MP3

Corrected, thx.

Thanks, didn’t know. It’s indeed a well-established myth then. Corrected my post.

It’s inherited from a historic convention from the UK. Historically the rationale was that the month was more important than the year, so they put it first, although this has no useful consistency or order to it.

Unfortunately, kind of dumb decisions from the past tend to stick and keep existing for an unnecessary long time because people get used to them and then never change them. Popularity or habit can beat reason, objectivity etc…

I use whipper. It’s a command-line application but it’s easy to use and works great every single time. At first you should let it analyze your drive which is the only step more involved. Here’s a mini tutorial for that I wrote for myself but you can also read it on the project page where it’s probably more up to date:

2. Analyze the drive’s caching behavior: $ sudo whipper drive analyze

3. Find the drive’s offset. Consult the [[AccurateRip’s CD Drive Offset database|http://www.accuraterip.com/driveoffsets.htm]] for your drive. Drive information can be retrieved with $ whipper drive list. $ sudo whipper offset find -o insert-numeric-value-here. If you omit the -o argument, whipper will try a long, popularity-sorted list of drive offsets. If you can’t confirm your drive offset value but wish to set a default regardless, set read_offset = insert-numeric-value-here in whipper.conf. Offsets confirmed with $ whipper offset find are automatically written to the configuration file. If specifying the offset manually, please note that: if positive it must be written as a number without sign (ex: +102 -> 102), if negative it must include the sign.

4. After that you just rip any disc by running: $ whipper cd rip

And just as an example, here’s my ~/.config/whipper/whipper.conf:

[main]
path_filter_fat = True
path_filter_special = False

[drive:<drive ID>]
vendor = <vendor>
model = <model>
release = <release>
read_offset = <my offset>

[whipper.cd.rip]
unknown = True
output_directory = ~/music/_ripped
track_template = new/%%A/%%y - %%d/%%t - %%n
disc_template = new/%%A/%%y - %%d/%%A - %%d

That’s only true up to a certain size. If Ground News ever grows big, they’ll still retain enough of a user base regardless of what they’re doing. Compare it to e.g. Meta, Google, MS services. Or even X. Many people just never leave once they feel at home there. Meta could do even more disgusting stuff and people would still use WhatsApp, Instagram, and the likes.

I also almost skipped it. Glad I didn’t. I enjoyed season 1 very much so far, haven’t yet started season 2. Andor is great because it’s much different from “normal” Star Wars. It’s simply a great story with good acting and doesn’t have much of the “cringe” or high fantasy stuff from Star Wars and is full of great writing with lots of relatable references to today’s political issues. It’s also much more mature than classical Star Wars which appeals more to kids. It kind of stands on its own as a great sci-fi story of the beginning of a rebellion against an evil and almighty empire. And even if Andor should become worse over time, season 1 at least is very good and can be watched in isolation from the rest. “The Mandalorian” is also decent but I enjoyed Andor even more. I’d say Andor is the best output from Star Wars in existence today, by a big margin. Trailing behind that are “The Mandalorian” and the movie “Rogue One”. If you normally don’t like Star Wars, you can still safely watch Andor and/or these two and just ignore everything else from the franchise. IMHO of course.

• Tor browser for anonymous/private regular browsing (without logging into personally-identifiable accounts)
• Vanadium (GrapheneOS’ Chromium-based browser, maybe it’s usable on non-GrapheneOS as well?) in combination with a good crap-blocking DNS server
• Brave is decent but has some bad default settings, can probably be configured to behave well (similar to regular Firefox)
• Firefox + forks are generally not that great (at least on Android?) because their sandboxing capabilities (and maybe other security features) are weaker compared to those of Chromium-based browsers. See also: https://grapheneos.org/usage#web-browsing
• Proprietary browsers like Chrome, Edge, Opera, and so on all contain loads of on-by-default-spyware and should never be used

An easy analogy that common users can understand is e-mail. E-Mail is also decentralized, everyone has an e-mail address but everyone uses a different e-mail host (the domain name after the “@”). So e.g. “[email protected]” has an account at gmail.com but “[email protected]” has an account at mailbox.org. Both are completely different, yet they can communicate with each other. There’s not one company controlling or storing every single e-mail account or inbox. It’s spread out and everyone can choose the mail provider they like or trust the most.

Then you use that as a bridge to explain Lemmy, or Mastodon, or other Fediverse social media platforms. And remind the listener that single companies having full control over everyone’s accounts is generally bad and opens the door for all sorts of abuse and manipulation or arbitrariness.

Sure.

• https://www.scss.tcd.ie/doug.leith/apple_google.pdf
• https://www.scss.tcd.ie/Doug.Leith/Android_privacy_report.pdf … and when you use for example Samsung, Xiaomi, Huawei made mobile OSses, it’s even worse of course, because then their own telemetry comes on top of that from Google as well. They want to have pieces of the cake too.
• https://www.kuketz-blog.de/google-play-services-die-ueberwachungswanze-von-google/ (you might have to translate that page. That guy is a well-known privacy and data protection researcher, white hat hacker and also a data protection official in a federal state in Germany. He’s very objective)

Just for reference, this is what the Google Play services app transmits roughly every 20 minutes to Google if it has network access:

Phone #
SIM #
IMEI (world-wide unique device ID)
S/N of your device
WIFI MAC address
Android ID
Mail Address of your logged in Google account
IP address

And that is when you have disabled ALL telemetry in ALL of the options, even the most hidden ones. So this is the minimum amount this app is always gathering from every Android user using the Google Play services app, no matter what you selected. Other Google apps (like the Play store app) could then contain additional telemetry on top, this is just the common base of all Google proprietary apps. Or the minimum amount of privacy violations you get when using proprietary Google apps on your phone, no matter what.

If you use GrapheneOS, I’d recommend not installing/using ANY Google apps at all (not even Play store or Play services). To get apps, you should use (roughly in this order of priority): 1.) GrapheneOS’s app store for the built-in apps 2.) Accrescent app store (has several good open source apps, is intended to be more secure than F-Droid) 3.) Obtainium (for getting open source apps directly from their source repos) or if you really can’t get into Obtainium, use F-Droid instead 4.) Aurora Store (for getting apps from the Google Play store without sending too much data to Google. Only do this if there is no open source app available for doing the same thing).

To fully mitigate the removal of the Play services app, you also should probably install/configure something like ntfy with UnifiedPush to get battery efficient push notifications and ideally use apps which also use that, e.g. the Molly fork instead of Signal. It’s quite easy to do, just something to be aware of. Otherwise your battery drain might be a bit higher. Then you’re also independent from Google’s push notification infrastructure. But you need a UnifiedPush server to go along with it, either self-hosted or use a public one. There are some privacy friendly ones public ones out there.

A fascist-run country does not care about allies or friends. In doing so, it becomes vulnerable and disadvantaged.