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)

I remember the day they said they’ll never implement lives. Technically they’re not wrong, since they call them Hearts, but I never used their service since they broke their promise.

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

Honestly, the red dot is larger than I’d have guessed, and I would’ve expected the 40% to be a bit larger itself.

Still not livable, though, with a population density of around 61.243 people per square kilometer, which is only 25% more than the current highest population density present in the world (Croix-des-Bouquets City, Tahiti). The gross area of the dot (c. 2221 km2) is incomparable with the area of the record-setting city (2 km2), but is comparable to Karachi (2147 km2).

Of course it’s the owner that loses out. Maybe he even has to attend the funeral!

Imagine how much that must cost!

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.

Just as believing in a deity gives you a 50% chance of salvation.

It ain’t plain if it’s with butter

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. .

Isn’t ‘Legitimate interest’ a EU thing?

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.

I don’t know where they got their quote from, since, historically, democracy has almost always died in broad fucking daylight.

No need to cry!

Let me reiterate it - it’s not inherently a bad idea.

The wheat tax wasn’t inherently bad (well, other than taking food from the already-starving population, but that isn’t the problem of the way the tax inherently works, but of how it is used): the main problem was: it was too successfull. The wheat tax was meant to provide the Church with bread. The church took 10% of every household’s grown wheat and they got way too much, so the wheat spoiled. Then they switched to a monetary tax, since money doesn’t spoil as easily, and they could use it for more stuff than just baking bread.

These two reasons are why the tax isn’t used anymore. But, again, it’s not inherently a bad idea.

This model can easily be adapted to work properly. Medical procedures aren’t things that “spoil”, and there’s steady demand for them. It could also work for stuff like housing (anyone building a hotel or an apartment complex for-profit has to make, say, the same 10% for the government), and even retail (if stores had to give even 1 item for every 100 items sold to a public kithen, the kitchens would be overflowing nationwide).

Honestly, this is the way to go. The capitalists just don’t want that. They’ll be the first ones to point out how it was a feudal-era tax, how people weren’t free, and how it wouldn’t work in reality (when itsure as hell would). They’d say it isn’t practical: foodstuffs spoil, for example - but we’re not living in the Middle ages anymore - we have bookkeeping, abd the government could decide to “take” their “fair share” to the kitchen when the demand, well, demands.

The first option is very close to this, but the money is a problem. Once we achieve a near-moneyless, near-classless society where inflation isn’t a concern, even that model would work. But, for now we’ll have to stick to this, sincethis is implementable in the current society.

That’s still a lot.

1. They know what videos you click (obviously)

2. They know when you click them

3. They know how much you watch each of the videos

4. They know how many times you click on the videos

5. Depending on the platform/client/browser/search engine implementation, they see what videos are shown to you before you click on them (thumbnail gets fetched, autoplay, pre-loading, etc.)

6. If someone sent you the link, they most likely know who’s sent you the link (through a reference ID)

7. The person who’s sent you this is probably logged in, so they know them by name, DoB, interests, etc. From here on out they can guess your own membership of certain statistical cohortsa bit better then through yourown clickinglinks alone.

And a host of other things - where you’re located (IP address), what type of connection you’re on (IP address + bandwidth), what type of device, what browser/client, etc.

This is just of the top of my head.

Don’t mean to scare anyone with this, but it is inherently spooky at the very least.

Your idea is kind of sound, but it really depends on how you implement the “negative” money.

You can just choose not to pay off the public debt. That will, effectively, make you print infinite money, and we all know how much corpos like to use and very much abuse inflation. Your idea’d fall quick.

An alternative is to charge the provider for the service they’re providing, or someone with deep pockets who could. This seems much sounder of a wax to go to me. For example, if someone is building a hotel with 500 rooms, say they have to build an additional 30 apartments meant to house a 4-member family. Or, say you keep the asinine US health insurance system, but for every procedure they charge, they have to make one for free. Who they give it to is chosen by the government. This is effectively a form of “negative” taxation. Shame it’s basically a revive of the feudal-era “Wheat tax”.

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.