No quantity of counter-content can overcome the person who controls what posts are actually seen by other users. Staying on X can never lead to any kind of balance. Staying there only serves to prop-up the false sense of legitimacy.

Chrome is already spyware on its own. That’s basically the reason Chrome exists.

Is Brave the one with the built-in crypto scheme and its own ads?

That could force a change in the DNC, but the change would be to push them further to the right. The issue is that the right-wing party won the election. They got more than 50% of the total votes. So the democrats aren’t going to see splitting their own base as a viable pathway to victory. If a left-wing faction splitters off, then the DNC will be forced to try to capture more votes on the other side instead.

If the democrats won the election then we’d be in a situation where we can talk about pushing them further left. But when they lose, that’s not really an option. (Most of these strategy problems disappear with ranked choice voting… but I doubt the current government has any interest in pushing for that kind of change!)

Yeah, and although it will be painful for Mozilla in the short term - it would be a good outcome. It was always bad that Mozilla’s main source of funding was from their most powerful competitor. It’s an obvious conflict of interest. And obvious way to skew decision making. … But that money is just so addictive.

There will be some pretty severe withdrawal symptoms if the money gets taken away, but everyone will be healthier in the long run… unless the overpaid CEO continues to suck in all the remaining money and leaves nothing for the people actually doing the work. That would be bad. In that case, if the corporate structure chokes the company to death, I suppose we’d be hoping for Ladybird, or something like it to take Firefox’s place.

And as I understand it, the existence of an inner planet (Vulcan) was a reasonable explanation consistent with Newtonian gravity. (The only problem was that the planet wasn’t there.)

Unfortunately, USA doesn’t have ranked choice voting. So voting for someone who doesn’t have a chance of winning is basically the same as throwing away your vote.

I mean yeah, subscription services are shitty, but what’s wrong with lifetime purchases?

This thread is about subscriptions. So I’d assume that when people talk about ‘rent seeking companies’ etc, they are referring to subscription payments rather than lifetime purchases.

By default there is a shortcut to the terminal shortcut on task bar. From memory it is one of three default shortcuts. (File browser, Terminal, Firefox.) You can also find it by pressing the menu button (the ‘start menu’). From there the terminal has a prominent special position where it is always accessible. And if you don’t notice it there, you can always start typing to search for it - as with any other installed app. I find that if I type ‘t’, then “Terminal” is the top result; and obviously I can kept typing to eliminate the other results if I want.

So if your difficulty in finding the terminal is your main complaint about about Mint… I’m not sure what to tell you. Do you want it to auto-launch or something?

Mastodon isn’t a person. So I don’t know who you are talking about when you say ‘mastodon was attacking people’. I certainly didn’t see anything like that. Perhaps you have an example link for context?

I’d say mastodon is a better choice, mostly so that you’re not beholden to yet another profit-focused tech corporation. I’m sure Bluesky is fine right now, but once they have their userbase they will shift to monetization - and you may regret letting yourself become entrenched in the world they control. They’re not doing it for your benefit.

That said, I’ve come to understand that a lot of people kind of like having their content feed controlled by others. When they only see what they ask for, they get bored. So I’m expecting Bluesky to always be bigger than Mastodon.

And this is why it is ludicrous to believe that ultra-rich people earn their fortune with hard work or good ideas. Being rich generates its own money. Being poor is expensive. There should be no billionaires, for any reason. Such concentrated wealth is very bad.

While I disagree that “billions is beyond being halved”, there is some truth to the idea that numbers can get so big that halving doesn’t make much difference. That seems very very counter-intuitive, so I’ll try to briefly explain.

Consider (10^10 + 2). That’s 10000000000+2. I think it’s fair to say that the +2 doesn’t make a lot of difference. It’s still approximately 10^10.

So then, consider 10^(10^10)×100. That’s a huge number, too big to type here, then multiplied by 100. So the result is 100 times bigger than the huge number. But… writing it down we see this:

10^(10^10)×100 = 10^(10^10+2) ≈ 10^(10^10).

So although ×100 does make it one hundred times bigger… that just doesn’t really make a lot of difference to a number as big as that one. As numbers get bigger and bigger, they start to take on properties a bit like ‘infinity’. Addition stops being important, then multiplication, then for even bigger numbers exponentiation doesn’t huge much of an impact either.

Mathematically, I think this is really cool and interesting. But I don’t think 1 billion is that big. 10^9 is big enough that +2 doesn’t matter much, but not so big that ×2 doesn’t matter.

[edit] (I’m struggling to get the nested powers to look right… So hopefully my meaning is clear enough anyway.)

At the same time as Pink Floyd singing the same line?

Yeah, especially given that so many popular vegetables are members of the brassica genus

Nar. A statement and its converse are not equivalent.

I’d say this comic is more relevant:

I find it amusing that they “use cookies to give you the best possible experience”, but then ask you to pay to not have them.

Yeah, cars suck.

Stay safe.