You should tell Germany to stop arresting and banning people who post anti-genocide stuff on social media

For documents I started learning Typst and LaTeX a while ago and now I greatly prefer either of them over LibreOffice. Being able to write comments that don’t render in the PDF is also very useful (i.e. when I do my homework in LaTeX/Typst I’ll put class notes there as well)

Not too long ago I would have agreed with you. But at some point, I realized I grew up in the same environment they did, surrounded almost entirely by Republican Christian nationalist propaganda, and I saw past it by listening to the people it was targeting. They might be brainwashed, but they can still choose to listen to other people also, but they don’t, so their ignorance is their own fault.

I used to never close tabs and they would accumulate as I kept doing more web searches and other activities. Now when I need to do stuff I usually open a new window instead for different tasks and if I need to free up RAM then I start closing other windows for tasks I’m not doing anymore so it closes all of the related tabs at the same time

I just did my first ebike ride in moderately light rain and so far so good

Center right? You’re giving them too much credit

Insurances don’t like paying people, if Cybertrucks become expensive to insure then they’ll charge more to Cybertruck owners

There’s a lot of fake versions, the real one is on Telegram and YouTube

Good thing InstaFlow exists

While AI offers transformative potential, significant criticisms highlight its drawbacks. Current systems often perpetuate biases embedded in training data, leading to discriminatory outcomes in hiring, law enforcement, and lending. The environmental cost of training large models—like massive energy consumption and carbon emissions—raises sustainability concerns. Automation driven by AI threatens job displacement, exacerbating economic inequality, while opaque “black-box” algorithms undermine accountability in critical domains like healthcare or criminal justice. Privacy erosion, through pervasive surveillance and data exploitation, further fuels distrust. Though AI’s capabilities are impressive, its unchecked deployment risks deepening societal inequities and prioritizing efficiency over ethical considerations.

Being waterproof is probably the biggest thing I miss from upgrading to an ebike from an old acoustic bike

Nowadays with Apple, the bigger issue is the ARM Linux ecosystem being neglected in terms of support rather than the hardware compatibility (that is for M1/M2). The hardware for the most part works except for USB-HDMI and fingerprint (which didn’t work on my HP laptop either).

I hope California succeeds at seceding

They should tariff Israel a lot more

Maybe, but threatening your customers who are buying your exported goods doesn’t seem like a good strategy, and US-based corporations already dominate in the US, so it’s not like they’re helping the US become more powerful unless they’re preparing for WW3.

Domestically, this is what will happen, but those corporations are also multinationals and get a large amount of money from doing business outside the US. What Trump is doing with the sort of threats he’s making to US allies is causing their reputation to plummet abroad along with their revenue. This can only go so far before competitors from EU and China take their spot and they lose all international relevance. Additionally, the tariffs will put them at a disadvantage in the global market compared to corporations outside the US which is further contributing to their loss in revenue. So if Trump’s main interest was in helping those corporations, I doubt he would be doing this.

“The corporations own the government” made sense for a while, but Trump has done enough to hurt said corporations lately that I’m actually starting to question that idea (it’s definitely true for the majority of Democrats though). The only real reason I can think of where it would make sense to do stuff like this is to cause a crisis making it easier to abuse power later on.

The most important part is balancing your own safety with limited time and resources. Perfection is not achievable, getting as close as you can is not practical in most cases, and prioritizing safety a lot of times limits what you’re able to do. So you need to do a cost/benefit analysis on these sort of solutions and decide whether they’re worth doing, which is very contextual (and in the end, you’re going to need to trust something somewhere unless you reinvent everything on your own).

For instance, in the US if you’re a middle class cishet white male citizen who ignores politics, you’re biggest problem is probably ads, companies knowing your financial info, and tools being more locked down, so the reasonable response would be to use an ad blocker and switch to open source/self-hosted software when it’s convenient, but not to the point where you have to program all sorts of things yourself unless you really enjoy that. If you’re working class, time and finances is more limited so the extent to which self-hosting, paid services, and CLI tooling becomes impractical might be sooner. If you’re a minority, there’s not really much that can be done that doesn’t severely affect quality of life (like living in the middle of the woods with no technology if you know you’re being hunted by the government, which sounds fucking terrible but probably better than being sent to a concentration camp in a remote country). If you’re an activist or an immigrant or doing something illegal, compartmentalizing data that would probably get you in trouble onto devices (that you can afford) with a strong security setup that doesn’t touch anything else you own and doesn’t cross borders while verifying that the people you communicate with are also on a similar setup and doing other “paranoid” security/privacy measures (while being careful not to draw suspicions) is probably a good idea. If you’re trying to be private for the sake of advocating for privacy, then do what you want to do.

Spotube is decent for playing Spotify playlists you come across or people send you

It still requires a phone number to make an account though iirc