It can look professional when you aren’t posting a gmail address and the domain isn’t poopypants.net

Pick something neutral that isn’t your name. Try a band name generator. JupiterEvolition.net or IdealMachine.XYZ,.which sound better than herpderp common gutter trash Gmail.com

Having a custom domain means you get things like me@IdealMachine.XYZ and also chosen.one@… And bestcandidate@… Etc. So you can make something for professional stuff, and then chocolate.starfish@IdealMachine.xyz to be funny.

Ah, yes, Republika Srbska. The most dangerous game.

Wait…

Oh, no thank you. I’m good as is.

No, really.

No.

NO!

NOoooooo! Stahp it!

Buffy the Vampire Slayer. The hardest part of life is the problems you can’t just decapitate with a sword.

I recently tried using the Google Translate image translator. Totally locked up now, requiring Play Store and Google App. Still didn’t work, but is was seriously just “if you don’t give us everything now, we won’t do basic shit for you.”

Slight sarcasm - I’m also a Mint user, and it was like a recursive reference to this meme from forever ago. Maybe it was too specific and dated, but the point is that since Macs were so easy to use, the Windows people back in the 8.1 days treated Mac users like kindergartners as they paid for their $1,000 facebook machines (also a meme from that time).

All the “Yeah, I use Arch, BTW” people that love the struggle and the hobbyist tweaks of their distros seem to look down on Mint users because it doesn’t require a struggle to use Mint. I used to see it all the time when I first jumped over to Linux.

For the most part, it works well without needing too much tinkering by the user. It’s the Fisher Price My First Distro.

I tried it out with a 21.3 dualboot with Windows 11 and within 2 or 3 months I hadn’t gone back to Windows other than to push files over. Sure, there were a few “learning opportunities” with tweaks or weird driver issues that were because of the particular hardware I’m using, but they were manageable. At this point I’m running 22.1 only on this machine.

The nice part is that being Ubuntu-based, if I run into a problem, I can search for both the more widely-documented Ubuntu version of the issue, or look for a Mint-related version. Claude does a great job with small-to-medium troubleshooting rather than me dig through forums. It’s low-risk, low-work, high-reward.

I also truly hate “family groups” where phones and accounts commonly associated with you get just pings on a topic to make you more malleable to the idea when you finally get the ads.

The mitochondria.

Domains cost like $1 if you’re flexible. Email hosting is what costs money.

Most people have absolutely zero idea how much data they put out there, what’s done with it, and why any rational person would be horrified if they knew the extent to which individuals were tracked. Simply put, short of showing them how their lives are made worse, they don’t care, and can’t be made to care.

For friends and family, you can do things like give them books or send articles explaining it slowly in parts. For everyone else, just ask them if they know how Google tracks what they do in Incognito windows and see what they say. If they say that Google can’t or doesn’t, they might as well say the Earth is flat. You can’t argue with that, even though it’s provably false.

Musk probably heard about “synthetic data” training, which is where you use machine learning to create thousands of things that are typical-enough to be good training data. Microsoft uses it to take documents users upload to Office365, train the ML model, and then use that ML output to train an LLM so they can technically say “no, your data wasn’t used to train an LLM.” Because it trained the thing that trained the LLM.

However, you can’t do that with LLM output and stuff like… History. WTF evidence and documents are the basis for the crap he wants to add? The hallucinations will just compound because who’s going to cross-check this other than Grok anyway?

Prepare for Grokipedia to only have one article about white genocide, then every other article links to “Did you mean White Genocide?”

Ah, the possibly Chinese-originated propaganda pushing for the Republic of Cascadia.

As a former resident, here’s a few reasons why not.

First, there’s already a looooot of rednecks and racists in every single state you talked about. In large numbers in rural areas. Simply smothering them with the numbers doesn’t mean you simply can’t represent them unless you just want someone else’s dictatorship. They’re still going to end up electing people you don’t like, and the ratio won’t be all that far off from now.

Second, Cascadia can’t sustain themselves with water, power, or food. Where are you getting wheat from? How about ethanol? How about EV production? It’s a guaranteed huge importer of lots of staples, severing infrastructure optimized over decades. So the first day you’re stuck trying to import from farther away at the same cost as no tariffs overland from 1000 miles away.

Third, your top trading partners will totally abuse your desperation during the secessionist era. Putting you in a terrible place to start.

Fourth, you’re now fully capitulating to the whims of the Broligarchs. WHY? Why do this? They can literally sink the whole country if 2 pull up stakes from Silicon valley.

Finally, last I checked, there isn’t some secret sauce to either political party. No one is actually living in some utopia besieged by nasty conservatives from Iowa. There’s no grass is greener situation here other than in your imaginations.

Second Art Nouveau. Art Deco is nice, but I think over played as a throwback.

Also a fan of a neoclassical Italianate style. Square columns, low flat roofs, towers and tall thin windows. It can vary, but when done in a clean and simple style, it’s very nice IMO.

Child soldiers are not Brave New World. More like shit old world.

Huawei and their HarmonyOS would disagree with you on how many users there are on an AOSP variant. It’s a meaningful cost to Google, which is probably what is motivating them to lock down their phones now.

https://medium.com/huawei-developers/what-is-harmonyos-how-it-differs-from-android-e5ea3fc50acc

Oh yeah, for sure.

https://duckduckgo.com/?q=cute+puppies&t=fpas&iar=images

In other news, water found to be wet, puppies cute. More at 11.

I have a 250MB in aluminum container HD from 2005ish. Still works AFAIK.

Might be fun to stress test it, but I expect the discs inside would shatter from shocks before the case ever showed signs of wear.