I don’t know, but I would have thought that the key task of the OS is to provide an abstraction that allows apps to run on supported hardware. So it takes care of file access and creation, outputing to the screen, interacting with external devices such as keyboards, webcams etc.

If you already have a browser running, you already have some kind of OS taking care of those low level details.

All power to you friend. Nevertheless it’s best to be informed, especially when attempting to make a better alternative.

Yes they should, however often they are not allowed to disclose such information. Over the last couple of decades, governments have realised that they can sidestep onerous legal principles such as innocent until proven guilty by requiring financial services companies to enforce KYC rules and the like. These rules were sold to us as a way to prevent the mega rich from dodging tax and organised crime from freely spending and moving their money, but surprise surprise governments have no qualms using them against people who are not so clearly in the wrong.

Unfortunately there is a significant security advantage in using Google Pay or Apple Pay which no one has yet mentioned. When you make a payment with chip-and-PIN using your physical card, your real card number is exposed to the merchant. The proprietary wallet services on the other hand use a device-specific token in place of the card number.

In practice, this means that if a retailer is compromised, there’s no usable card data to steal or clone, which removes a large class of fraud that still exists with physical cards.

stop it in physical games as well

I think the connection to physical cards is pretty weak really - the crucial difference being that if you want to get some physical cards, you go out and buy them (or stay in and buy them I guess). You start with nothing except some cash, and you end up with some random cards, which may or may not be valuable.

Loot boxes in F2P games are not like that - you play a free game, have fun and then end up with this “loot box” without having done anything to ask for it. It’s just there in your inventory, and it stays there until you fork over some cash and see what’s inside.

It’s way more of a temptation than physical cards that you won’t encounter until you buy them.

yes indeed - I had a go at decompilation a little while ago (wanted to get a mod working on linux) and while it was hella geeky fun, it was very slow and I could tell I didn’t really have a hope of achieving my goal. I can really see how an LLM could turbo-charge that process.

there’s nothing in this article that makes me think it’s LLM generated, no idea what that guy was on about. It’s very well written and readable, which I don’t think LLM can really achieve, not that I’ve ever seen anyway. And it wasn’t easy but I did manage to find a minor typo - “All my thanks to bmdhacks for keeping me informed through and of every step he took” 😁

I agree with you. I always take sensible steps to minimise my energy consumption, but even at current sky-high electricity prices, some things simply are not worth worrying about. Putting TV in standby is one for instance. When my parents moved house, my dad paid an electrician £200 to have a switched power socket installed by the TV, just so he could easily “turn it off at the wall”. Modern TVs use less than 0.5W when in standby, so it would be decades before the savings from this expense made up for the energy costs of manufacturing and installing a new power socket.

I close before systemctl hibernate is my browser. That saves sone wear on the SSD.

I haven’t heard of this, curious to know what you’re referring to?

For me the advantage of keeping it in sleep is having all the apps open and exactly where I left them. “Session save” type features never keep things quite right - some apps just don’t reopen, they’re often not on the right workspace etc, not to mention documents and so on have to be saved if you power off.

You can of course use hibernation to get the best of both worlds, at the cost of long start-up times, and so I do often do that, when I’m not expecting to turn back for a while.

Maybe it would need to draw on experiences of moderating chat rooms and forums - these are very often done by volunteers who put a lot of time and energy into it because they believe in it.

There is also the “Web Of Trust” concept, where, given that everyone can prove their identity, people can then vouch for each other.

needs to quickly get past two network effects: the global network effect […] and the local network effect

Sounds like a job for Fedi-date! If you could somehow hook a dating app into the fediverse, then maybe it could survive long enough to get sufficient users. If it also offers more general IRL meet-ups (like meetup.com but without the corpo rent-seeking), then it could perhaps begin to get popular that way too.

Germans and their luften man, they’re fkn crazy 😂 it’s like some weird superstition they have where the air from the street has magical properties or something

I think their focus is America. America’s racial problems are quite unique to America, because slaves were just part of normal life in the US up until slavery was abolished. It was part of the fabric of society in ways that it just wasn’t elsewhere. Even in the UK, where many black people can trace their family trees to slaves in the West Indies, there were never slaves actually held on the island of Great Britain.

Things like segregated school systems are still very much in living memory in the US. So there are unique issues in America that Americans must heal from before they can really consider such problems in the past.

traffic statistics (through creepy location tracking, even in the background unless opted out)

yes it’s definitely creepy when Google does it, but it provides invaluable data to other users - advance warnings of tailbacks whilst driving, and accurate ETA for public transport when using bus or train. Would be great if a privacy-respecting way to do this could be found for OSM & its ilk.

even if no one actually says anything, you have to deal with the shame of knowing they can see your inadequately-filled mug.

It’s great that you believe so strongly in it. It’s obviously frustrating for you that others don’t see it as clearly as you do!

Maybe it would help you resolve your current issue if you consider what your objectives are - what do you want to accomplish by being vegan? What is the long-term result which you think we should aim for as a society?

Then think how you can work towards that. Is it something it will be easy to persuade people to join in with, or would it involve some sacrifice on their part, or at least some degree of effort?

Most people don’t react well to being lectured at or preached at. If you want to influence people, you will need to be thoughtful and willing to accept compromise.

Not easy coping when your own dad abandons you to die painfully over 3 days, especially when your dad is the actual boss of the whole universe and could’ve saved you with a click of the fingers.

my point was that currently the government is very sensitive about antisemitism and less sensitive about islamophobia

Your “point” makes no sense given that Islam also carries out male circumcision. In fact, the vast majority of non-medical male circumcisions in the UK are carried out by Muslim parents.

Does this change your view? Now you know this, do you now think that the government will actually implement a male circumcision ban after all?

I’ve been using Zoho for about 6 months and have no complaints. I pay about $12 a year for a couple of gigs of storage - not a huge amount, but enough for personal email as long as you delete stuff fairly regularly.

You can create up to 30 email aliases, which I use a lot. For instance, I have an email address for newsletters, a couple for generic web logins, and then some specific ones for important accounts such as banking.

It’s easy to make filters to sort email as it arrives. This is how I handle the “priority inbox” situation. Any email from my family or other important senders is all put into a single folder, and I have an email app on my phone which checks this folder and notifies me of new mail. All other mail is either moved by other filters e.g. newsletters or just left in the inbox.