nelblu

THIS. My comment is somewhat tangential but I thought still relevant. I used to work for huge financial investment company with over a trillion dollars of assets for over 10 years. I never thought I was making positive difference in people's lives. However, my job offered me so many opportunities to volunteer and I would jump on every single one of those, and that made working there totally worthwhile. I still work for another huge company these days, which offers similar opportunities to make a difference in the community and that is what keeps me going here too.

There is something to be said about building tools out of kindness and not for greed. Thank you for your contributions to OSM and Thank you OSM developers too - big fan and user!

> We’re introducing more helpful ads in AI Mode

I always chuckle when ad companies say that. I have never seen a helpful ad in google search, but well I have been using adblockers forever so I would not know.I am honestly curious though, for those who don't use adblockers - what percentage of ads that you see are actually helpful?

caste system will likely never die in India. I once even joked to my friend that one day when Indians will start accepting gay marriages they would post a matrimonial ad something along these lines - "Looking for an intelligent, well-behaved, educated, fair coloured gay groom for our son (Brahmin only)".

tangential comment, but if anyone is interested in one of the best (imo "legendary") audio books on LOTR look no further than Phil Dragash : https://archive.org/details/tlotrunabridged.

As much as the UI was fluid, smooth and probably best for a touch interface, I distinctly remember I hated it and frantically wanted my Start button back on my PC. It is kinda funny reading all the comments about its nostalgia, when all I could think was how annoying it was. I guess to each their own :-).

> Also, sitting around doing nothing feels so much better when it's either before work or after work.

This comment reminded me of a book I read recently - Dopamine Nation by Dr. Anne Lembke. She talks about how pleasure and pain and experienced by the same region of the brain and they need to be balanced. I'd highly recommend reading that book.

This is correct, but it is still a slippery slope. At some point the dev ends up adding internet permission (might be for legit reasons too), and lo and behold you are sharing your data. For something as sensitive as notifications, I really can't trust anything but open-source app which is vetted by a few seasoned people and hosted on F-droid.

I really enjoyed reading this. I can totally see where the author is coming from. I have a dog, and this holiday season my wife went away to her parents for a month and I was all alone with my dog. My daily routine was to just take him for a hike in the morning, workout in my basement gym, cook some breakfast then do some mundane activities at home then prepare cooking for lunch (always prepare extra lunch for the neighbours or the random friend that shows up at my door), then again take the dog out to the dog park and enjoy conversation with regulars and or new ones. Come back enjoy lunch, read some book, then around 4pm before it gets too dark, take the dog out again for a hike. Stop by at a friend's house or just come back home watch a Disney movie then read again until you fall asleep.

All this time, I would intentionally forget my phone at home and all my notifications except calls were turned off.

EDIT: I must say having a dog made a lot of difference, I don't know if I would feel the same being just alone. That might be an experiment for another time :-).

> and use a wireless keyboard with integrated touchpad to control it.

Which wireless keyboard do you use? I've pretty much exact same setup - TV + Linux Mint + Logitech K400+. I'm just looking to see if there are better options for K400+

Long time ventoy user. For someone who loves to flash or try out different Linux distros all the time, this is a godsend.

I would also highly recommend iventoy, if you want to just boot using network device : https://www.iventoy.com/en/index.html. It came in very handy when I had a machine which only had a CD/DVD ROM, floppy and netboot option. I didn't want to waste a DVD-R so just booted via network.

During my college days (2000~2004) KDE (I think it was Fedora/RH 8) was hands down my favourite desktop. After that when I joined the corporate world, I lost touch with Linux. Few years ago (thanks to a ton of dark patterns in Windows), I moved back to Linux. This time I chose Linux Mint with Cinnamon / XFCE. When Linux Mint (officially) starts supporting KDE, I would love to try it again. Until then I am really rooting for YOU KDE developers, I have really fond memory of your tools (especially Konqueror browser/file manager it was way ahead of its times then!)

Another happy mailbox.org user here who dumped gmail since a little over 4 years now. I'd highly recommend them to anyone who prefers more control on the client app they can use to access emails, calendars etc. Their web interface may not be the best/fastest, but their video conferencing web app is really good. I rarely use their office suite, but good to know it exists.

> I’d like to believe there’s a market for smaller, simpler, EV-based “retro-inspired” cars that aren’t jam-packed with modems and sensors to phone home. Maybe someday I’ll be proven right.

This might come close: https://www.slate.auto/en

> LLMs should also use citations.

Mojeek LLM (https://www.mojeek.com) uses citations.

> “It is regrettable that we now have to spend time and resources strengthening the security of a popular service rather than further developing functionality for the benefit of our customers.”

Based on all the data leaks that happen constantly on cloud connected, data harvesting services, I have zero faith that these companies care about security. These companies couldn't care less if they leak personal data online, but god forbid someone is trying to root our device or flash another OS, now suddenly we need to strengthen our security. Fuck these people frankly.

This really saddens me. The fingerprinting even works when using Mullvad browser with VPN. I am so tired of this new internet, I hope someone is working on figuring out an alternative to this type of fingerprinting. I understand it is a cat and mouse game, but whatever, this is absolutely shitty.

I was wondering why can't browsers just fake the hardware (assuming that is what it is using to recognize)? I understand sometimes these javascripts run some type of algorithm to detect how fast it was processed to fingerprint, but even those could potentially be faked by the browser. Is anyone working on such stuff?

This is all nice while the AI overview has no ads in it. Wait until it gets enshittified, and I have a feeling AI overview would be so infested with ads that people would rather block it and proceed to reading the actual links.

All this said, I am guilty of using this a lot these days - while it is still ad-free. I just ask chatgpt.com to give me a recipe of "XYZ" and it gives it immediately without any annoying repetitive content.

Happy GrapheneOS user here since 3+ years now. What's next now? People can't fucking use Linux because Microsoft or Apple can't spy on it?

Love it :-). Do you also need to log the gps co-ordinates as you are flying? I would love to see how you avoid the airspace in the war hit areas.

Technically you are right, the SIM card isn't roaming, but I am physically roaming outside of my home network (internationally).

Some phone plans in my home network do not support international roaming, or if they support then it is ridiculously expensive that it doesn't make any sense to take the phone roaming.

Some of the comments pointed out that this is hostile behaviour for people roaming as well, and I completely agree. Here is my solution for this : When I am roaming internationally, I leave my SIM card in a spare android at home plugged into a charger. Android has an app that forwards SMS to API : https://f-droid.org/packages/tech.bogomolov.incomingsmsgatew.... Every time I receive a SMS I forward it to this API. The API in turn emails me the whole message.

I have been using this setup for a few years now without any issues. Even when I am not roaming, I still have this setup on my primary phone. So when I am on my computer and need a SMS OTP I don't need to go find my phone, I receive it in email :-).

(Note : This doesn't work with MMS but I don't need them anyway)

Same. This is why I am rooting for Slate (https://www.slate.auto/) to succeed. I hope everyone in this ridiculous software war loses and in the end they realize that there is a huge market for just basic no-frills car.

> can't fathom how huge it is not just geographically

I grew up in India but I don't agree that people in the west can't fathom how huge it is geographically. Geographically speaking India is the 7th largest country, and every country larger than India (Australia, Brazil, US, China, Canada and Russia) is at least 2 times to up to more than 5 times larger than India. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_and_dependen...

That said, I do agree a lot of westerners might not be able to relate to the cultural diversity of India.

That is not true. There is a popular mod of Signal called Molly - https://molly.im/. It allows multi-device access, which I find very useful. I have been using this on Signal network for a long time now.

I'd give credit to the Hobbits, they were great farmers!

Agreed, this shouldn't be surprising at all, on the contrary it is sad that today's urban generation will never appreciate what it is to look up and only see stars. When I was a kid we used to sleep on the terrace during summer season. My uncle and I would stare at the stars, constellations, meteors etc. and he would tell me their names in both English and in my native language. It was quite fascinating how the mythologies of the constellations were different in different languages. Ex: The great bear (ursa major) was known as the seven sages (when translated in English). The pole star was a mythological diety, Orion the hunter was actually a deer. Sometimes we stayed awake well into the early dawn. Those were some of my best childhood memories.

A little tangential question, but what is up with the "Distilled" logo on their blog site? I don't think I ever noticed this earlier, and I can't seem to find anything on their blog explaining it.

Interesting you say "seeing ads", because lately when I am volunteering with legally blind population as their "tech-mate", I can't explain them why technology isn't doing what they want it to do. It's a million times worse when we put ourselves into their shoes.... My strategy has changed from helping them learn technology, to helping them avoid how to use technology. One of the person I help, who is legally blind but can see font size 50+, asked me to teach him how to search for lyrics of songs so that he can play his guitar. I tried to teach him, but it was pointless because of how the websites were full of ads. I did install an ad blocker which helped a bit but in the end, I gave up and now I just print out lyrics for him.