Captain Aggravated

Not sure he does.

The “and prop your monitor on top” thing: I kinda wish there were more modern PC cases that could stand being horizontal. Most are designed to be towers.

Here’s how I think about it:

I deleted Samsung Health from my phone not long after getting it. I started realizing that it’s a VERY network intensive app, it wanted a lot of questionable permissions, etc. I fully see the purpose of a Health & Fitness app in the lives of everyday people, I think it can be of legitimate help for encouraging people to exercise and whatever, the health features of that app were definitely developed with the same attitude a hunter baits a trap. It was what they begrudgingly did to get me to step in it.

I ditched Samsung Health because I had visions of them selling that data to my health insurance provider who would then use it as an excuse to make my coverage worse and therefore more profitable. So I’m pretty sure if I was a jew in 1930’s Germany I’d delete Synogogr from my phone.

Elsewhere, I’ve seen women tweet or Tumbl or whatever about refusing to discuss their periods with their doctors. “When was yoru last period?” “It’s regular, that’s all you need to know.” Where’s that energy when it’s a cell phone app?

I’m changing my vote in the Agora from “yes defederate” to "Hell fucking yes defederate.’

Excel?

“Socialism is about leading horses to water whether they fucking drink or not.”

I’m willing to bet it uses something resembling an SQL database on the back end, so ignoring or deleting data or entire user accounts that signed up in November 2024 should be a matter of a query or two.

I would also like to point out that, much like the Republicans, you’re painting your enemy as both dangerously competent and hilariously inept, whichever is most convenient at the moment. “They have a database of menstrual data, they can use data science and pattern analysis to detect changes in a woman’s reproductive cycle and use that information to make decisions to harm her!” minutes later App developers are rock chewing morons, there’s no way they could detect a pattern of strange data entering their database all at once, figure out what it is possibly by googling the name of their app and finding a Tumblr post about polluting the app, and then cancel those suspicious accounts."

probably won’t be hard to spot all the accounts that sign up en masse, send 3 data points then stop forever because they got bored or forgot.

“A bunch of new accounts posting obviously worthless data joined about the same time. Disregard them.”

What is the actual goal here and will this behavior achieve that goal? Are we…

Adding a bunch of bullshit fictional data into a database that contains and will continue to gather legitimate data.

It strikes me that this would make the entire dataset less useful for legitimate medical research while not really doing much against targeted attacks. I could see some women’s health researchers using anonymized data from something like this, and noise from people vomiting into it in protest would destroy it for that use. Or, you’d notice a bunch of accounts all join at about the same time making nonsensical data and just ignore the data from the accounts that joined around that time. Meanwhile I doubt this will stop the Gestation Gestapo from correlating genuine data with the actual identity of its owner.

Are you going to try to input obviously fake data? Make an attempt at realistic data? Try to trigger a Gestation Gestapo death squad, trying to make the service useless via false positives?

Or run up the service’s data bills and maybe take up some of their cloud storage with fake data?

Start adding bullshit fictional data coinciding with women genuinely leaving the service

What would this accomplish that just having women stop using the thing do?

I’ve been trying to make that point for over a decade now. I think I get to unironically drop this xkcd. The alt text mentions diaspora, lol.

Statistically, yes.

I’ve seen a cable lift that worked basically like that. It transferred ore down the mountain, so heavy buckets going down lifted the empty buckets back up.

The Democrats offer nothing at all.

Awhile back I saw a political cartoon that said "Hey, can we get healthcare, living wages, housing and affordable groceries?

Republicans: No.

Democrats: No. Black Lives Matter.

Same shit, different lip service.

Difficult to concisely explain what Wayland is.

Software in the Linux ecosystem tends to be built on earlier projects. You may be aware of the various Desktop Environments like Gnome, KDE, Cinnamon, xfce, etc. Something they all have, or had, in common was they all used a truly ancient piece of software called X11. This is the Windowing server. Most of the look and feel of a desktop environment comes from a configuration file that sets up X11 to work a certain way.

X11 has been a standard for longer than Linux has existed, it dates to the early 80’s. It is quite old and isn’t capable of keeping up with some newer technologies like multiple monitors at different framerates, HDR, there are problems with things like Freesync, etc.

Wayland is a project for replacing X11 with a newer system designed with modern display technology in mind. It works a little differently, and it breaks compatibility with a lot of long-standing systems, but it’s now in use by several DEs by default. At the moment there are technical reasons to use Wayland and technical reasons to use X11.

Yes, I’m aware. Basically I don’t see life on the Arch family tree as preferable to what I have enough to redo my settings menu preferences.

There are basically 2 things that can tempt me away from Fedora KDE right now:

1. I’ll return to Mint Cinnamon if Wayland support and the GPU features it enables are robustly added to Cinnamon.

2. Equal or better support for my hardware with better and easier package management. The main gripe I have about Fedora compared to Mint is the repository is a lot emptier. The long if now gone era of Ubuntu being THE distro for desktops means a LOT of stuff is packaged as .debs or when you do have to go to Github there’s almost always “Debian/Ubuntu” instructions. Arch’s AUR has a reputation of having literally everything in it, but my understanding is being bleeding edge it’s liable to break, and it’s yet another source of software in addition to the standard repos and Flatpak. Yes I think I would install things from Flathub rather than the AUR if available in both because I see Flatpak and Flathub as either the de facto place for the publishers of software especially commercial software to officially release for Linux, and if it isn’t yet I’d like to encourage it to be. The AUR being Arch-specific is as much of a non-starter for me as Snap is.

No direct experience with it, I’m kinda meh on Arch in general, largely earned by Manjaro.

Over the last ten years, the number of distributions I would recommend to beginners has narrowed to basically Linux Mint Cinnamon and Fedora KDE. Mint if you want good UX and easier time managing packages, Fedora KDE if you want Wayland to actually work.

Here’s my rule: Anything in my Chevy S10 that you control by turning a knob, moving a lever, or momentarily push a button? That needs to be a physical control in a car. Anything where you push and hold a button, or mash a button multiple times (like setting the clock or turning off the DRLs respectively) can be moved to a settings menu in a touch screen. These things shouldn’t be done while moving.

And no, touch sensitive single-function panels like the climate controls in my father’s Avalon are not good enough, it needs to be a mechanical control that you can feel for without activating.

Emoji have done something that emoticons never did: Emoji have become hieroglyphs.

:) :o :D XD This tells the story of a happy person being surprised and then starting to laugh. Emoticons were crude depictions of facial expressions and never took on abstract meanings beyond those.

Emoji, partially because a lot of them are Japanese, are badly designed. On most systems I’ve seen Emoji on, they’re too small and the details are too fine to really make them out. There’s 1,000 facial expression ones, all of them are mostly just yellow circles. Why does there have to be a slightly frowning and a frowning face? Why do we have “woozy” and “dizzy” as separate glyphs? 😵‍💫 Which of the two is that? Trick question, neither, that’s “face with spiral eyes.” Emoji are stage IV emoticon cancer. So teh youthz don’t actually use the facial expression ones, they use a skull for laughing, because that one is white and easy to tell apart. Apparently the etymology is “died/dying laughing.”

Trying it on Lemmy’s emoji selector, “skull” and “death” both return the skull emoji, but “laugh” or “funny” doesn’t. So the skull emoji, along with others, are like hieroglyphs. They’ve taken on abstract indirect meanings of their own independent of what the glyph literally means.