Right, but isn’t Lemmy itself a bit of a “less features” version of Reddit? I’m not here for features, I’m here to get away from toxic Reddit mods because fuck spez.

I’ll admit, I might have taken the bet that “reddit but not reddit” would hold at least some interest.

Don’t let perfect be the enemy of the good. You can cut a lot out of your life without even significantly harming your leisure.

That’s one of the main things to me. The argument jumps directly to drivers license / DOB collection, but makes no conclusions about how it would protect children. It is OVERTLY, 100%, about feeding lists of targets to the pedophiles that run the biggest tech companies.

Some distros’ discord servers and sites have actually set up AI assistants to handle that clippy concept of being able to ask questions without judgmental users responding.

I stayed with Windows largely because their guidance to those actions was generally good, and left when it started sucking - when a Start search for some normal desktop action instead gave a website article that got an automated “Try restarting” answer from an MS volunteer.

I still don’t think Linux guides people all that well (better or worse depending on the distro). These days, I think it does get better than Windows if only because Microsoft got so lazy with their own product.

The “suckyness carryover” isn’t as natural as you think when people can fork distros so easily.

I think this experience is possible, but it’s a bit lucky; requiring every piece of hardware to match, and no software needs to represent hurdles.

I’ve fought a few of those hurdles and they haven’t been so bad. I think your experience is great when it happens, but it’s hardly a guarantee.

Case in point: Typing from a spare Surface Pro that I installed Ubuntu and some support drivers on for the touchscreen. Some update broke the touchscreen drivers, and I needed a keyboard and a lot of googling to repair them.

If this had happened on Windows, someone likely could’ve taken it to their repair shop or to Microsoft. Sadly, these days even Microsoft might’ve dropped any user aid.

As is the typical pattern.

“So you see, the lesson is that Gatsby’s pursuit of wealth only kept him further from-“
“Dude, that guy’s parties were AWESOME! He had like a freaking circus there and all! What minority group do I have to brutalize to be like him??”

Lose, not loose. Loose uses a soft S, and means uncoupled, held in a less firm grip.

For much of my adult life I’ve been very careful and considered with most big purchases. I have a friend that is not though, and it worries me. He is definitely not in a life situation where he can afford random impulses, and it can take him less than a day to regret an impulse buy, even before it’s shipped to him. I keep trying to ask for reasoning, and it offends him each time.

Fits pretty neatly with the word “humble” - it should only be said externally.

Burn Notice, at least the first 2-3 seasons.

It has an overarching plot, but it only spends about 5 minutes an episode on it. To serve that plot, Michael Westen, ex-spy, must solve a problem each episode for ordinary victims across Miami using trickery and con tactics.

It always evoked a bit of Macgyver-style creative feel in me. Sadly, the story and the actors went downhill with time. (For that matter, Macgyver is a lot of fun in spite of being an oldie. There’s some kind of remake which I never bothered with)

Funny! Outer Wilds was exactly the OP question for me.

Utterly frustrating realistic space controls, unguided exploration that leads to reentering the same planet for the 8th time and still not finding anything new, annoyingly specific timing-based puzzles…

I’ve had games in my wishlist now that I see “It’s like Outer Wilds!” and I start to think twice about them.

As a web dev: Remember IE6? The stagnation, self-prioritization with nonstandard features, laden with spyware? That’s Chrome now. They’ll egg websites into enabling proprietaryBullshitStandard() when it’s still just webkitProprietaryBullshitStandard() and give little room for discussion. Their “move fast and break the web” attitude is why Edge, which used to be a unique browser maintaining a third competing rendering engine, gave up and became a Chrome fork. The team at Microsoft couldn’t even keep up with Chrome’s bullshit, and now 90% of the browsers people list just use their engine.

I think one very scary thing to admit is when a mother has this feeling towards their baby. Sometimes, the movie magic just doesn’t hit; and it feels like an annoying, parasitic burden rather than a precious living human.

But to be in any way vocal about it makes one seem like a horrible or evil mother, and could lead to intense ostracization.

Jedi: Survivor. The game maintained a high price and performs terribly on PC, so I wasn’t so interested. But the story is pretty darn good, especially for a premise of “The Empire is winning, and we’re basically spitting in the wind. What’s the point of resisting?”

I admit to falling bait to some of the cameos, but they were pretty well executed.

I got pretty annoyed at the chorus of “People only say they like it because of the Zelda title”. I hadn’t cared about Zelda for decades at that point. It was just a well-done, well-paced open world game that I found myself openly devoting dozens of hours to.

My favorite bit of that game is, after two games of developing tons of movement abilities in the air, including various forms of extra jumps…

If you don’t want your info (whether you are an adult a teen or a child) to be shared with “owners of apps that are on the Epstein list”, then don’t install those apps. There is nothing in this law requiring you to download any particular app.

Linux, as well as any decent system of security, operates via varying levels of trust. If I install a game on Steam, that does not get root access with permission to rewrite my kernel. Similarly, if I have banking info on my device, it doesn’t get to view that, or anything with my face or name. You can install and even run something without trusting it with your life.

If an app were sending this data to a third party, like palantir, then they would be in direct violation of this law.

We have seen time and time again that courts do not provide adequate protections for these types of data breaches. The law does not matter. At the most, software companies get slapped on the wrist, but more likely they get away with it, as “programming is hard, and it’s easier to just send everything”. It is far, far easier to assert that a malicious app is not submitting marketing, or “fuckability” information on your child if that device does not denote itself as a child’s device in the first place. That’s only possible if the law isn’t hammering the OS into openly exposing its own user data to anyone that asks for it.

Your last point about personal responsibility is an important one. It’s why, if you happen to be using an old insecure device running Windows XP, you can toy around on the web with it, but you should disconnect it from your personal network, and should not enter personal info on it. Any device software that is forced to keep an open “Would_President_47_Seek_To_Rape_This_User” flag, available to every application, is removing that option for personal responsibility.

Does it even allow for user privacy protection? Nothing I’ve read of the bill suggests that an app could ask whether the user is of a fuckable class by its Epstein-list owners, and allow the user to block the prompt. Every other app has to ask for permission to use the camera, to write to certain directories, they can even be firewalled to prevent network access. The very idea that an OS must code in a form of user information that must be provided to any app, trusted or not, is a warped, Palantir-driven approach to (in)security.

Most practitioners of data security are aware of the severe dangers of fingerprinting users, and that is a hardline issue. Thus, in order to maintain their security practices, their only choice is to not collect this sort of info on users at any level. If they’re delivering a security product with a built-in vulnerability, they’re not delivering a security product. It’s much better to just surrender one state until it invents sanity.