coffeecat

On a societal level, I think the endgame should be to eliminate the subsidies which make seed oils so cheap, and to design a subsidy/tax structured to reduce the cost of healthy foods and increase the cost of unhealthy foods.

He's obnoxious, but also funny and entertaining. It's a guilty pleasure, not an alternative to intelligent commentary. Enjoyable for the same reasons as South Park.

Very interesting. The current state of tray icons is one of the most painful aspects of desktop Linux, in my opinion. Where are these discussions happening, and what kinds of plans are in the works?

It's well-known that Google search prioritizes newer content over older content, and history-related content created over the past few years tends to focus pretty overwhelmingly on race, gender, etc. So a sensible null hypothesis, is that Google's just showing you a representative sample of the new-ish content that's out there.

It's relatively uncommon nowadays compared to the number of cars that don't backfire. But I certainly hear cars backfiring more frequently than I hear gunshots.

There's always a trade-off between security and convenience, and similarly, there tends to be a trade-off between different forms of freedom. If you want the freedom to choose any bank without any inconvenience, then you'll have to sacrifice software freedom. If you want the freedom to fully control your computing devices, then you'll have to be selective about the bank you use.

Having used ID.me before, I thought their email was a phishing attempt at first, before I looked into the situation and found that it was legit. Government services should never ask users to provide personal information to third parties which lack .gov TLDs; it's very problematic from the perspective of a cautious user.

It's worth pointing out that 5G is just a protocol which can, in principle, be operated on any of the frequency bands currently used for LTE. For instance, T-Mobile is currently providing 5G and LTE concurrently on their 600 MHz band.

Does your phone support band 71 (600 MHz)? This band is only a few years old, and T-Mobile has been deploying it as their primary long-range, building-penetrable band. It's unsupported on phones made before approximately 2018.

Band 12 fulfills the same role in some areas, and is supported on most phones, but T-Mobile doesn't have a nationwide license for it.

The value of a deed is that it's recognized by a legal system, which is backed by a police force, who you can call if some guy shows up claiming that your house actually belongs to him.

With an NFT, you don't get that. It's equivalent to your county clerk's deed registry, including the $100 filing fee, and excluding the legal machinery which gives the deed registry its value.

> I keep feeling like I’m missing something.

Nope, you're not missing anything. NFTs are the world's most convoluted and expensive way to store a bookmark.

If true, that's a violation of the fair housing act, for which you can and should sue. But taken in conjunction with your other post in this thread, I'm a bit skeptical.

The parent post argues that cryptocurrency is most useful, in practice, for illegal activities. It does not argue that this is how it's perceived by the general public, by the NYC municipal government, or by Eric Adams. The perception is that it's a sexy new technology of the future, whereas the reality is that it's mostly a playground for "investors", fraudsters, and criminals.

Search for "Encyclopedia dramatica" on Google, and then on Bing or Duck. Search for Rise of the Moors on Google, and then on Bing or Duck. You can repeat this for other controversial content, and you'll notice a trend: Google suppresses the controversial content entirely (e.g., Encyclopedia dramatica), or shows it after at least one "authoritative" result about it (e.g., Rise of the Moors). Whereas Bing and Duck have no problem identifying the original content and showing it as the first result.

I'm not here to be a Google apologist, but in the 10 or more years that I've used gmail, I don't think I've ever had an important email go to spam.

I'm curious if you've ever worked out a ballpark "hourly pay" for your crypto mining operations. By that, I mean:

(hours spent on research, hardware acquisition, setup, and maintenance) / (net profit, after accounting for hardware depreciation and obsolescence)

If you're worried about that, you can go with Purism. But, because their employees make San Francisco salaries, and they lack expertise and connections within China's supplier/manufacturer scene, Purism can't even come close to competing with Pine64 on price.

This is a good point. When people talk about the "usefulness" of math/science, they tend to assume that learning math/science is analogous to being trained in how to operate a forklift: it's thought of as a "skill" that's useless if one never needs to directly apply the content.

But learning math/science encourages certain cognitive habits which are useful in practice. For most people, I expect that these cognitive habits are where the value of a math education lies.

As an example, in math, you often need to define a new object out of thin air, and then think about whether the definition is useful (e.g., let u=log(x), then rewrite the integral in terms of u and see if it gets you anywhere). I hypothesize that even after you've forgotten the math content, this cognitive habit (constructing a new mental object ex nihilo, thinking about whether it's useful, and perhaps giving it a name if it is useful) sticks with you, and contributes to general intelligence in other contexts.

That is true for some subset of wealthy parents, and if they want to pay extra for exclusivity, that's their choice. But I think it's reasonable to assume that the parents of the 90% of K-12 students who attend public or charter schools [1] are prioritizing cost over exclusivity.

It's true that many families will pay more to buy a house in a good school district, but I suspect that the school itself isn't the whole story: rather, many people interpret the school district's reputation as a proxy for the safety of the neighborhood and socio-economic status of its residents, as well as a proxy for their own socio-economic status.

Ulimately, I suspect that with the free market voucher system I described in my parent comment, legacy private schools would continue to charge outrageous tuition. But I think we'd also see some new, possibly virtual "bang for your buck" schools which would compete on price and which would be exclusive due to entrance exams and high academic expectations for enrolled students.

[1] https://www.edweek.org/leadership/education-statistics-facts...

I'm not sure I follow. Many students/families choose community college for the freshman and sophomore years to minimize cost. Many opt for state universities over out-of-state/private universities for the same reason.

Every child must either meet some government-mandated educational standard, or enroll in a program which brings some threshold percentage of its students to said standard. $VOUCHER_AMOUNT is adjusted on a per-region basis based on the average tuition within each region. If the institution's tuition is higher than $VOUCHER_AMOUNT, the parents pay the difference out of pocket. If the tuition is less than $VOUCHER_AMOUNT, the parents keep the difference.

Parents obviously want to minimize the amount they're paying out of pocket, and they'd like to keep some of the voucher money, so high-end schools as well as low-end schools are incentivized to keep their costs down.

> don't tell me that "self-promotion" falls into the same category as "spam/scams"

The issue with humans, is that whatever policy you come up with, there's going to be someone who reads the policy and skirts just around the edges. For example, they could say "no unsolicited marketing" and "no impersonation", which seems like a reasonable enough policy. But then you can imagine a user who habitually responds to support question on the forum with: "Great question, I can figure that out for you, email me at paid.consulting@vivaldi.com for a quote." It's not unsolicited per se, and not impersonation per se, but I can see why Vivaldi would want the discretion to ban this hypothetical user and disable his email address.

They also say "We will warn you for most first-time misconduct", which is presumably what would happen if you type in ALL CAPS. They have a list of offenses which may result in instant bans: "Spam, scams, harassment, pornography, copyright-infringing material, self-promotion, and/or any other language that is offensive or in violation of local or international laws".

I agree that many of those items (harassment, copyright-infringing material, self-promotion, offensive language) are vague and could be abused by Vivaldi if they were out to get you for whatever reason. So it comes down to whether or not you trust Vivaldi to enforce their policy reasonably and fairly. If you don't, then you shouldn't use them.

At the end of the day, any service provider needs to have some discretion on these things, because the line between malicious and legitimate usage can be too blurry to express as a precisely defined policy.

If your email provider doesn't ban you for sending spam, phishing emails, etc, then you better switch providers. Otherwise the service will attract spammers and criminals, and your outgoing emails will end up in spam folders.

> All new android phones are mainlined, it’s been years, even before either phone existed.

Can you cite some sources for this? I believe, for example, that Qualcomm Snapdragon SoCs have a degree of Linux support which literally allows you to boot up a mainline kernel on most of their boards. But to the best of my knowledge, only a handful of devices have anywhere close to full support for sensors, cell modem, wifi/bluetooth, buttons, suspend, etc. In general, obtaining support for these missing hardware features requires someone to carry out unpaid reverse engineering work. Even the PinePhone, which was specifically designed around the goal of being easy to mainline, required quite a bit of reverse engineering work from the community, and isn't yet fully mainlined.

> Do you use them PPP daily?

I don't; as far as I'm aware, the dev units haven't even shipped yet. Its device drivers are still a work in progress, and that will probably be the case for the next month or two. But I've pre-ordered one, and I plan to use it as my only phone starting early next year. (To be clear: I'm a very abnormal phone user. I never owned a cell phone until a few years ago; I now own an iPhone, which I literally use for nothing except texting and calling.)

> Everyone is selling their L5 or getting a refund

Much of the Librem 5 criticism is totally justified; they over-promised and under-delivered. They accepted payments on orders that they weren't able to ship, and they promised an unrealistically polished product which they weren't able to produce.

On the other hand, Pine64 has been unambiguous in their messaging: the PinePhone is a phone for hackers, not for average consumers. Some people ignore the messaging, buy it with unrealistic expectations, and then complain about it on the internet; but that's life. If you need Android apps, if battery life is a high priority for you, or if you want iOS-tier polish, then Linux smartphones are the wrong choice for you. It's the right choice if you value software freedom, enjoy hacking, don't mind getting your hands dirty, and don't need Android apps or multi-day battery life.

> Just try to look up any topic on YouTube, and you'll have to get past the hundreds of mainstream media channels covering the event, before you actually find the original video.

I find this problem extremely frustrating. Does anyone have suggestions for how to easily find primary video sources, instead of the massive heap of commentary that a youtube search yields?

* Avoid the use of plastic containers for food/drinks if you can.

* If you must use a plastic container, definitely don't heat it up, don't use it for oily foods, wash it before putting your food in it, and try to avoid mechanical stress/deformation while your food is in it.

* Avoid canned food if you can, unless you know that the can doesn't have an endocrine-disrupting liner.

* Avoid touching receipts if you can.

* If you must touch a receipt, make sure your hands are dry while you're touching it, and wash your hands afterward.

* Don't buy a new car (outgassing plasticizers are what give it that new car smell).

* Don't use scented candles/soap.

* Clean up dust in your house regularly.

I also recommend switching to Bing. It shows me the results I'm looking for pretty consistently, whereas Google/Duck will sometimes give me Google's home page or the Washington Post's home page instead of anything even resembling the query I'm searching for.

What exactly do you mean by "phone-shaped devices"? People can and do use the Librem and the original PinePhone as a primary phone. Calling, SMS, mobile data, and even MMS work at this point (however, MMS support is very recent). The original PinePhone's hardware is slow, but users of the lightweight SXMO UI report getting good responsiveness. The maker of Librem has software developers on their payroll, and their price reflects that - unlike with cheaper Android devices, you're subsidizing the development of userspace software when you buy a Librem. And you're subsidizing kernel-level development that's done "the right way" (mainlining), as opposed to the cheapest-viable-kernel-with-no-updates approach that most Android devices take.

At $450, the PinePhone Pro with Pine64's keyboard attachment has roughly comparable hardware specs to the Gemini that you link to in the original post. The Gemini sells for $680.

The state of hardware support in regard to the OnePlus is exciting - nothing wrong with going that route if you want more bang for your buck on hardware specs. Personally, I've opted for the PinePhone Pro because I don't need state-of-the-art hardware, and I value the community and the option of using FOSS firmware on its cell modem.

Unfortunately, upstream IceCat appears to use the FireFox 60.x ESR branch, which is three branches behind the current ESR and is past its end-of-life date. It's also a few security updates behind the 60.x ESR branch's last release.

The GUIX package is more recent, but its description states:

> WARNING: IceCat 91 has not yet been released by the upstream IceCat project. This is a preview release, and does not currently meet the privacy-respecting standards of the IceCat project.