Didn’t he already do that in his last term? I still remember the jokes people made back then, like “how can it be a terrorist organization if it’s not receiving weapons shipments from the US government!?”

The reason they don’t want you to unlock your bootloader is because of security…

…security of their revenue stream, that is.

This comment was removed incorrectly. What exactly is the “disinformation” here? This guy was literally just giving his interpretation of what happened to me, not making any assertions about fluoride and its efficacy in general. They even affirmed that it’s ANECDOTAL evidence right in their reply! Stop reading conspiracies into everything!

I doubt that dentists conspire for us to have bad teeth.

People with bad teeth is literally their main revenue stream?! I wouldn’t put it past them.

I once tried brushing my teeth with baking soda instead of toothpaste for a few weeks. From what I understand, they have about the same level of abrasiveness, so they should be about as good at scrubbing the gunk out of your teeth. The key difference is that toothpaste has fluoride in it. After a while I started having pain/irritation in my mouth and gums. It went away when I went back to toothpaste. So if anyone was looking for anecdotal evidence of fluoride being good for your teeth, there you go.

You know this is the good shit because when it first came out a few years back google was running a huge disinformation campaign against it. You’d search for “adnauseum” in google and the first result would be an article from some weird advertising company calling is “insecure” and “malware” without any actual argumentation behind those claims, while no other search engine returned that article (I lost the screenshots, so yall are just gonna have to take my word for it). They also delisted it from the chrome store for not discernible reason. They were afraid.

But nowadays I’m willing to bet that they figured out how to detect adnauseum’s fake clicks and filtering it out. Stuff like that needs a talented development team to keep it up to date.

Yeah this is the way. Debian stable has outdated packages, debian testing has broken packages. Ubuntu is difficult for beginners because of snap. Linux mint is the perfect just-works debian-based beginner distro. Same for DE: Gnome is hard to use, KDE is bloated and unstable, and XFCE is too minimalist/diy/quirky for beginner users (you need to add a panel applet in order for the volume keys to work? Huh??). Cinnamon is the perfect middle ground between resource usage and features.

Make sure during installation that you create a 4 GB swap partition too

Or at least as large as your RAM if you want to be able to hibernate.

How well do the signal and whatsapp bridges work? Have you used them yourself? I tried setting up a discord bridge years ago and it was terrible. Is it better now?

hmm havent heard of this one yet. Looks promising, gonna try it later. Thanks!

For people seeking an interface similar to signal, I suggest Session. It’s a fork of signal that onion-routes the messages (they have their own onion routing network, not TOR). There are no user IDs stored anywhere, you message people through their public keys. From the user experience side of the coin, it’s a little on the slow side tho.

Whatsapp to messengers is what internet explorer was to browsers lol. Slow, bloated, unfree, universally hated, but still somehow universally used

There are many things you can complain about when it comes to signal, but overall it’s a huge improvement from unencrypted messengers like discord and definitely a step leap in the right direction

Thanks! That explains it! Here’s the image you linked for people who don’t want to visit MSN

I really dislike it when people slather AI upscalers onto images for no reason. Very rarely does it improve the perceived quality of the image, most of the time it just changes your reaction from “wow, this is a low-res photo” to “wow, someone tried upscaling this low-res photo”. Here it somehow made the image even worse

Yeah, what’s up with that? At first I thought it was a weird camera/filter, but the more I look the worse it gets. What are those… powerlines? in the background on the right? Why are they next to a building/tree hybrid? What is the flamingo looking thing behind him? What logo is on his cap? Am I paranoid!?

From Wikipedia:

These were defined by October 2010 as part of the Unicode 6.0 support for emoji, as an alternative to encoding separate characters for each country flag. Although they can be displayed as Roman letters, it is intended that implementations may choose to display them in other ways, such as by using national flags. The Unicode FAQ indicates that this mechanism should be used and that symbols for national flags will not be directly encoded.

I don’t think you’ll be able to find a source that specifically says “yeah, they did this to avoid having to make a decision about which countries are important/independent enough to have flags”, but like… why else would they go with this more complicated system over just defining separate codepoints for each flag?

This reminds of how when the unicode consortium had to add flag emojis, instead of opening the can of worms on what countries are independent or not, they just noped out of it and let the implementers decide which combinations of regional indicator letters render as country flags.

If GRUB is too confusing, just uninstall it? You said you have a UEFI system, you don’t need a bootloader. You can just put the vmlinuz and initramfs onto the ESP and boot into it directly. You can use efibootmgr to create the boot entry, something like this:

efibootmgr \
	--create \
	--disk /dev/sda \
	--part 1 \
	--index 0 \
	--label "Void linux" \
	--loader /vmlinuz-6.6.52_1 \
	--unicode " \
		root=PARTLABEL=VOID_ROOT \
		rw \
		initrd=\\initramfs-6.6.52_1.img \
		loglevel=4 \
		net.ifnames=0 \
		biosdevname=0 \
		nowatchdog \
		iomem=relaxed \
		"

• --disk /dev/sda: What disk is the esp on?
• --part 1 What partition number (counting from 1) is the esp on?
• --index 0 At what index in the boot menu should the boot entry appear?
• --loader Path to the vmlinuz file. These are normally in /boot, you have to move it to the esp yourself
• root=PARTLABEL=VOID_ROOT this is the linux root partiion. I’m using PARTLABEL to identify mine, but you can use pretty much anything that /etc/fstab supports
• initrd=\\initramfs-6.6.52_1.img Again, you have to move the initramfs file from /boot into the esp. For some reason this uses backslashes, not forward slashes as path separator (double backslashes in this case are to prevent the shell from interpreting it as an escape sequence)
• The rest of the arguments are just misc kernel parameters that I use

Just search for EFISTUB for more info.

You need something to download Firefox with.

modular daemons

A message bus won’t magically remove the need for developers to sit down together and agree on how some API would work. And not having a message bus also doesn’t magically prevent you from allowing for alternative implementations. Pipewire is an alternative implementation of pulseaudio, and neither of those rely on dbus (pulse can optionally use dbus, but not for its core features). When using dbus, developers have to agree on which path the service owns and which methods it exposes. When using unix sockets, they have to agree where the socket lives and what data format it uses. It’s all the same.

It can even start the receiving daemon if it is not yet running.

We have a tool for that, it’s called an init system. Init systems offer a large degree of control over daemons (centralized logging? making sure things are started in the correct order? letting the user disable and enable different daemons?). Dbus’ autostart mechanism is a poor substitute. Want to run daemons per-user instead of as root? Many init systems let you do that too (I know systemd and runit do).