Aesthetics, plus the seductive appeal that pre-modern, pre-liberal-democratic societies (when the governments were authoritarian, the women were submissive, and the men “were men”) have for reactionaries, incels, and cryptofacists.

All true, but that doesn’t disprove my point. The risk was non-zero, so it was still worth investigating.

Yes but the difference is that there were reasonable grounds to suspect that prolonged exposure to RF waves might possibly cause some harmful effects. The WHO didn’t categorize radio frequency radiation as a potential carcinogen based on no evidence at all:

https://www.iarc.who.int/wp-content/uploads/2018/07/pr208_E.pdf

The possibility of there being a link was not absurd, per se.

To be fair, the evidence about a link between cell phone radiation and cancer has been inconclusive for quite some time. After all, a series of inconclusive or null results doesn’t mean there is categorically no link – it could equally mean that more research is needed.

That said, I do agree that if there were a casual link in this case then it would have made itself apparent by now, given the huge increase in cell phone usage over the past few decades.

As someone who has lived in Thailand, I get why Thais were pissed. The hotel, the taxi, the public transport all look like they’re from 30 years ago. Yes, you do still find run-down buildings and tuk-tuks in Bangkok today, but it’s generally a lot more developed and modern than westerners expect on first arrival. Instead of showing the reality, the creators of this ad went out of their way to portray an outdated caricature.

To an outsider it might seem like nitpicking, but Thais are fed up with being presented this way to an international audience.

Being profoundly ignorant on a topic has never stopped him from tweeting about it.

Because he is the owner of the very platform that helped to stir up the recent neofascist riots in the UK that led to POC being attacked and terrorized and properties looted and burned. His tweets are seen by millions of people, and greatly contribute towards online extremism and polarization.

Like it or not, Twitter is still the de-facto place for breaking news stories. You just have to sift through the dross.

As much as Mastodon is a far nicer and healthier social platform, it has a long way to go before it gets anywhere close in this particular regard.

More frequent kernel updates.

• requires a fair bit of post-installation configuration (suboptimal OOTB experience for newbies)
• Uses btrfs by default but comes with no snapshots or GUI manager pre-configured for system restore
• Less software availability compared to Ubuntu or Mint
• More likely to break than Ubuntu or Mint

But isn’t this something you can tweak within your DE configuration? I’m on Gnome and don’t have this issue.

This sounds like a DE thing than a Wayland/X thing.

Ok, thanks for the heads-up. I’m running it in a local VM and for some reason my host Arch system is significantly faster at downloading and installing packages than the blendOS guest. Not sure why, but just thought I’d mention it.

Edit: never mind, I messed up the first installation so had to do-over, and the slow download speed seems to have recovered this time.

Follow-up question: I’m in the US and the initial installation is taking forever. Pacman seems to be running at just 60-80 KiB/s when I normally get 5MiB/s. IS there a way to have the installer choose a local mirror before downloading all the packages?

Cool. Will definitely be giving blendOS a spin in a VM.

Very intriguing. Is there a wiki or support forum in the works, too?

I’d be interested in buying a Nothing phone if they weren’t all so huge.

Possibly, lol. Although going from Samsung’s to their own completely custom silicon will be the best chance of seeing some actual improvements.

Right, but these new benchmarks don’t speak to that, do they?

I though G4 was supposed to bring a big improvement to the modem, or is that going to be G5?