I’d also consider myself pretty tech-savvy, but that came from plenty of mistakes growing up including putting malware on the family computer at least twice (mostly ads for these “Pokemon MMOs” back in the mid aughts that were too enticing for my kid brain to refuse 😅).

It’s very easy for me to forget how much of an outlier my tech experience is among most folks around my age. I had an acquaintance in the first year of college I helped by giving essay advice, and was very surprised to see that the only thing they really knew how to do was basic use of apps on their iPhone. They got a laptop for school, but no computer experience, no keyboard typing experience, and even just the iPhone Settings app was a scary place to be avoided for the most part. To this person, Microsoft Word was a new thing they had to learn on top of everything else. In college. It was also in the South so I don’t know if I should be that surprised unfortunately.

Regardless, it was pretty wild to me, but a very real reminder that not everyone has access to the same resources education, and/or experience to draw on.

Aren’t there still massive issues with the Colorado River running dry? Hopefully they’re not too dependant on that water source for their chips

Why not just put up a Moonlight Tower?

The Inuit/Eskimos are some of the more self-sustaining peoples on the planet. They don’t depend much on imports from elsewhere, at least not to my knowledge. They had to figure out many adaptations for the area but they make it work and have done so for a long time.

To compare them with a city representing the pinnacle of mankind’s hubris is a bit of a reach imo

Wow, please tell me you’re trolling

tl;dr the signal appears to have been from a cold hydrogen cloud “resonating” off of radiation bursts; namely, those emitted by neutron stars. The stronger the burst through the cloud, the louder the signal on equipment. The WOW! signal appears to have been the result of a particularly powerful event, but by observing the same/similar (?) gas cloud(s), they’ve been able to spot signals with the same signature, albeit weaker due to being hit by less rare (and less powerful) phenomena.

Some clarification might be needed on whether it’s a specific cloud that produces this signal, or if any cold hydrogen clouds are capable of it. I couldn’t seem to find any in the article itself. Maybe there’s something in the published research paper that provides further information.

I’m pretty sure the traffic for the ads still gets sent to your device over the Internet, it’s just that the ad blocker keeps it from rendering in your browser.

I wonder if Fedora would have a toolchain for networked credential management, with its connection to RedHat and everything

Initial public offering

Imo their issue was in not forming a broader union coalition before picking their workplace

Perhaps they are bad examples, but my point was more that I think those ecosystems thrive in spite of the company that owns the upstream at this point more than because of it. They did tremendously useful work getting the projects off the ground but it ostensibly seems like they get in the way more often than not; that said, I haven’t done any open source work on either of the two. I’d be interested to hear your take, I could be pretty far off the mark.

Honestly my main examples I’d point to right now are situations like manifest V3 and Android nitpicks like the recent Bluetooth 2-tap change; don’t get me wrong, they are easy to fork and have thriving ecosystems in terms of volunteer dedication, but those forks still primarily targeted towards technical users (with some exceptions) and companies selling devices like the Freedom Phone (and other, actually neat, useful, properly privacy focused devices which is awesome!). By far, however, most users are on the upstream branch due to “default choice” psychology and have to deal with the bullshit that’s increasingly integrated into the proprietary elements that Google seems to be making harder and harder to separate from the open source ones. I suppose that’s why education and getting the word out are all the more important though.

Could be the sensationalist end of the tech news cycle getting me spun up on an overall inaccurate view of things.

There is also the point I have to raise that security update support is always a very valuable asset that can be worth dealing with some downsides to get ahold of. I’m hoping a lot of those can be pulled into open source projects on more of a piecemeal basis where applicable?

I’d be happy to be proven wrong about my rudimentary assessment. I have enough things to be doomer about and honestly it would be nice to have one or two fewer!

Chromium is still open source, as is Android to some extent. I get that the two companies (Google and Proton) are in completely different size classes, but something being open source doesn’t necessarily mean it stays healthy. Sure people can fork it, but the issue tends to lie in continuous maintenance by volunteers against continuous maintenance by a large company that’s constantly adding in anti-features along with desired ones.

I’m not necessarily saying Proton will go down that route, but trying to become big and bundled as a value proposition opens the door for that behavior once they get enough people locked into the ecosystem.

A “privacy” company acquiring and centralizing various projects to be under its umbrella seems kind of worrisome to me even if it’s done with pure intentions.

Same thing

I forget what the launcher is called, but for BE I had really good luck with one of the ones you can find on Lutris via the search function

I’d love a stting where the windows just casually wobble more and more until your entire screen is just triangle artifacts

Y’all are crazy, I like to know where my window is with decent precision when I move it around. Is there a way to have the windows wobble by default but turn off/tighten up while holding shift or something? I might try it out if this is an option

Limitations inspire creative solutions