Using json for IPC but a binary format for log files sounds insane to me, but alright.

Nuclear war has been mentioned a couple times but i feel it deserves elaboration: We’ve been real fucking close a couple times. There was a Soviet “nuclear counterattack station”, or whatever, that got the “nuclear strike detected, fire retaliatory missiles” signal and the person responsible simply refused. The signal was due to a glitch, there was no attack. That guy probably saved millions and millions of lives by refusing to carry out his duty.

If you consider (potential) timelines being “close” to ours in terms of only a small number of things needing to change to get us there, the one where everything went to nuclear hell is very close to ours–but we’re not in that one.

Yet both liberals and conservatives (in your sense of the words) say this.

For running applications: in addition to Flatpak (which is “cross platform” in that it works on most/all distros) there’s also Appimage. Appimage is the most like downloading a Windows application (technically it’s even more Mac-like) because you download a self contained program that just works. Not every application has a Flatpak or Appimage option, though.

I believe Xbox One controllers work if wired or fully Bluetooth out of the box, but if you use the dongle you need some software to handle it. I use “zone”, it’s kind of a pain to set up but honestly no more than (say) the Windows software to get PlayStation controllers working.

Protondb is primarily concerned with Proton, Valve’s customized version of Wine, so by default that means games run through Steam. (Of which there is a native Linux client.) If you want to use other games, ex ones that require EA’s launcher thing, then a tool to help make that happen is Lutris. It will help manage your games and launchers and customized Wine installs, including some automatic tweaks to make things work better (or at all). Steam gets official developer support for Linux so it’s generally the easiest experience.

Blue check on Twitter… Someone who’s paying $10/mo to the world’s richest person has an overinflated sense of importance… well… What’re you gonna do?

Technically i think the worst they could do would be to record your screen. (Barring some extra fancy exploits or something.)

That depends on how you speed it up. For example, the Covid vaccines were “accelerated” compared to normal vaccines but they did that by spending additional money to run the steps of the process in parallel. Normally they don’t do that because if one of the steps fail they have to go back and those parallel processes are wasted. For the Covid vaccines, the financial waste was deemed worth it to get the speed up of parallelization.

Communal housing world solve many problems.

One of the originators of the idea of “planned obsolescence”. Even after the cartel got killed the manufacturers never extended the life of the lights into (to an extent) CFLs and then moreso the days of LEDs.

They’ve been sabotaged by design. LEDs should last 10+ years if built even half away reasonably, but unfortunately the manufacturers basically got together and agreed to build them in such a way they would fail. Same as regular light bulbs, they just have to work harder.

I still have some of the earliest modern LED bulbs on the market–old Philips ones, the AmbientLED (i think) with the yellow casing and large heat sinks. They’ve been running for like 15 years now and not a one of them has failed. I spent several hundred USD replacing all my bulbs with those back in the day and they’ve done me well.

Modern bulbs are trash by comparison. Not because the technology is limited in some way but because they refuse to make anything to that quality anymore.

We need an alternate solution to this planned obsolescence bullshit. Light bulbs hit 50k rated hours long ago and they were talking about making ones that went 100k+ but these days you can’t find anything above 25k. And that’s setting aside the fact that a lot of these rely on apps that could be dropped at a moment’s notice.

It’s still actually pretty sketchy, depending on exactly what you want to do. Strict regex still won’t be able to match correctly if you want to match what an HTML parser considers the opening tag, though fancier regex will. If you’re just looking for the tags in the HTML document as a flat document it’s doable, though. (Mostly.)

I would say it’s more like: “How can I do X?” “Here are some reasons you can’t do Y.”

The answers should have been “Here are some reasons doing X is hard, but here’s an attempt at it anyway and also some more robust alternatives to doing X.” That would have been an excellent answer. (If you go down far enough you do start to see things like this but they’re hindered by people still responding that you can’t do Y or downvoting because they don’t understand what’s happening.)

I’ve already addressed this but i guess i’ll expand on it.

Signal would not be able to add backdoors to all its users. Security researchers would see pretty quickly (more below) and that would be pretty big news because Signal is quite popular with people who care about their privacy.

They could in theory backdoor an individual’s Signal app but, again, that’s pretty inefficient. If anyone ever noticed it would be a big black mark against Signal, though they may not have much choice in the matter if it really came to it. However, we know that big governments and other sophisticated attackers usually prefer to just stick spyware on your phone. It’s easier, more comprehensive, and doesn’t require collaboration with Signal.

In contrast, you don’t need to do any of that with Telegram because it’s not E2EE. Your argument is basically “security features can be defeated by a sufficiently advanced attacker so use this other service that doesn’t have them to begin with.” This makes no fucking sense.

I don’t know what you’re talking about with FOSS stuff. Yeah, Telegram is open source. Signal is too. Some Signal forks (particularly the ones with “Signal” in their names) have been killed but others still exist, ex molly.im.

Signal client does have reproducible builds and has since 2016, as far as i know. This is another point against Signal being backdoored.

Beyond that, Signal has gone through a number of formal security audits. As far as i know, Telegram has not.

Finally, Telegram itself. Telegram could simply enable E2EE for all chats. They choose not to and that is concerning if you care about your privacy or security.

Yeah Signal could be better but that isn’t a case to use Telegram over Signal when Telegram is worse in almost every respect.

(Properly implemented E2EE is too difficult at the moment but those are some big caveats. Still: didn’t use Telegram.)

No, they cannot do it. That’s what E2EE means. It means they do not have the technological ability to do it. It is not possible.

Yes, even if a judge orders. You can see instances of that on their website: https://signal.org/bigbrother/

Yes there are weak points (the huge one with Signal being: requiring your cell phone number as a part of authentication) but that’s far beyond the level of technical expertise required to, say, just intercept clear text communications, ex from Telegram. If a government is wiretapping you then you’ve got problems that neither Signal nor Telegram can solve.

Now maybe you will suspect that a three letter agency will force them to do something bad, like send a suspect a hacked/backdoored version of the app or something but by and large i don’t think they would do that. They’d just go to Google or Apple and put a keylogger on your phone, or some other solution. Realistically, though, this is a level of effort far beyond what >99% of all humans need to worry about. Choosing Telegram over Signal because you’re afraid the government is manipulating your Signal app is a sign of incoherent paranoia.

A more serious concern would be, for example, the government capturing all data sent across the Internet and then holding onto it until some hypothetical future computer is developed that can just break the encryption. That’s still pretty silly but it’s something the US (at least) is doing. Still way beyond what they would need to get your Telegram messages because, again, they don’t need to decrypt those. They can just look.

The difference being: Signal cooperates as they’re legally required to buy do not have the technological capability to betray you. Telegram has the technological capability to betray you (and governments can spy on Telegram, with or without Telegram’s assistance) but refuses to cooperate.

Signal is much better and more reliable in this.

Heinlein’s “all you zombies” is an early version of this.

In terms of biology, it’s extremely rare for humans to have fully functioning sets of both reproductive systems. The reproductive physiology develops from the same parts so it either develops “male”, “female”, or (more common than people think) somewhere in between but not “both”. A clone may or may not even develop in the same way.

One other possibility, though also very rare. is near-identical twins. If twins have the same genetics (in other words, they’re identical twins) but have intersex conditions that result in different reproductive development it’s conceivable that they could reproduce with each other. It’s uncommon to be fertile incongruous with your genetics, though, so again: this would be extremely unlikely.

That said, in a sci-fi context there are some options. Biological hermaphroditism is possible in animals, though there aren’t any vertebrates on Earth, so conceivably an alien species could encounter this problem.

Advanced medicine could also build people a new reproductive system and implant it, giving them the counterpart they lacked.

Of course, in that case, advanced medicine may also be able to give you someone else’s reproductive genetics (ex, implanted sperm or eggs) and thus effectively sidestep the genetic problems. I’m imagining a particularly narcissistic person getting a gender-flipped clone of themself and using someone else’s genetic material to have a kid with themself but also avoid the shallow gene pool problem.

Of course, you don’t need to go that far. If you’re female (or have those parts anyway) you can just do IVF. Don’t even need to clone yourself, then.

Anyway, this is getting a little silly.

As well as the package manager (and release type/schedule as mentioned in a different reply) you might want to look at the overall structure.

Does the distro use selinux or app armor (you probably want at least one)? Does it follow traditional distro structure like Ubuntu/Debian or is it weird like atomic (ex Silverblue) or declarative (ex Nixos) distro? Is it a minimalist distro (Arch is the big modern one) it maximalist (Suse)? Those kinds of things can also be informative.

It’s about Marxism, but yeah.

They can order Signal to turn over data (and the have) and signal has complied when it was legally required of them to do so, handing over all of their no data.

That’s the difference.

If that weren’t true they wouldn’t be so constantly upset about E2EE.