Someology

Desperation is often the cause of stupidity. Walking into an invading army while unarmed is never a wise survival strategy. Show me one single time in History where this went well for most of the people involved.

Buy DRM free music instead of streaming it.

"‘I’m going to Gaza City. It’s enough. We need to go back to our homes and lands. We are tired of displacement… we heard people saying we can go back, but no one official told us. We’ll leave it to God,’ Majd El-Aqqad said. "

That was a phenomenally stupid thing to decide to just walk into an invading army based on gossip. Predictably horrible outcome.

This is why they will not release the 90s shows on 4k BluRay. They don’t want anyone to actually own copies.

Nowhere did OP say anything about a desktop. I thought they meant “what’s the current laptop equivalent to a Thinkpad back in the day?” If they meant a desktop, they should have used the word desktop. “PC” is not exactly specific.

“You can cross the veil at will” makes me think about Medium.

Convenience.

I have a loved one with permanent nerve damage from chemo. We’re very happy the chemo was successful, but imagine a combo of numbness and constant pain for the rest of your life in all your fingers, which becomes dramatically more severe with exposure to cold. It makes make simple daily life tasks from driving, to cooking, etc. far more difficult. They do not tell patients in advance they are going to continue the treatments until the point where permanent damage happens. You only realize after going through it that this was the plan all along. It makes medical talk about informed consent feel ridiculous. The severity fluctuates, but it has already been like 7 years, and this is never going away. It is not for “a while”.

Gotta say that it boosts my confidence in the Hugo Awards to see Babel NOT get nominated. This has zero to do with the author’s nationality and ethnicity and everything to do with Babel being a poorly written novel (with the ending obvious a long way off) and horrific character development. It would be shameful to award a novel where all characters are stand in caricatures of their cultures of origin instead of actual individuals. It just comes across as racist in itself, promoting stereotypes, instead of merely showing the reader that racism existed.

In the USA, you can’t even use a landline or a office voip phone. Must use an active cell phone number.

One of the first things I do on a new Samsung phone is disable Chrome and install Firefox. You’ve just saved me from ever buying a Redmi.

Lucky you, to live where there is a passenger train.

This sounds like it should be the premise of a Doctor Who episode.

There are also millions of people with intellectual challenges and horrid childhoods who do NOT go out and murder people.

That was a great little mp3 app. It worked better on a low-resource, low-memory system than all the competition at the time (late 1990s). This is instead referring to the chat protocol that Google Talk ran on. It was formerly called Jabber.

I knew nothing about inter-Lemmy-instance-politics when I made my account. I simply made it on a server that was actually not SO overwhelmed that it couldn’t make new accounts. I would imagine the same is true of many new users of late.

My Lemmy exerience: We’re (heavily) advertised to on Reddit during the pre-blackout mess that we should try Lemmy. I go to try Lemmy. Server is broken. Server is broken. Server is not allowing new users. Server is not allowing new users. Ah! This one actually functions, so I can try Lemmy! Start following and posting, and finding nice communities. Then start finding out that some of these only federate in one direction, so I’m posting to people on another instance who can’t see it, because of Lemmy admin bickering and politics. Great, now I need to start over with a new account again, just when I was feeling settled in? Leaves a bad taste, and I was lucky enough to not end up on one of the MOST hated instances.

I hate politics. You can’t escape them anywhere involving humans.

Yes, I do think they are, but by choosing a Samsung smartphone, I’ve already decided to be OK with that on some level. I turn off features that connect to outside companies for the most part, and I’ve chosen to believe that Samsung does what it claims with the settings that users have available to them on the phone. It doesn’t mean that I’m just fine with handing everything over to any other random company. Samsung states that they use Branch for searches inside their Galaxy Store. Some claims have been made that Branch powers the Finder (search) function on Samsung phones (althugh I can’t find confirmation), but this Finder Customization Service is a feature you can disable on a Samsung Galaxy phone. You can also turn off search suggestions for Finder and disable it’s ability to open links. You can disable Google and Samsung’s browsers and Internet searches as well.I am the sort of user who checks permissions of apps before downloading them (and disables everything I don’t use), and I don’t want my launcher (which I paid for) on a device I paid a not small sum of money for, to send every single tap back to a marketing firm directly.

:( I used Nova Prime for many years, and I don’t like this one bit. I hope that the devs got a good payout, and best wishes to them, but it makes me uncomfortable. Luckily, while it’s definitely no Nova, Samsung’s launcher has finally on the most recent version gotten to a point of usability. Everything is more awkward to do, and you have to install extra Samsung apps (Good Lock with applets) for a lot of the customization, but most of my favorite features from Nova are finally there. So, for the first time in many years, I’m running the Samsung default OneUI 5.1.