Just a reminder, the “major questions doctrine” is bullshit, used by the partisan conservatives to ignore the plain text of a statute whenever they want to engineer an outcome. Don’t pretend that this is anything less than make-believe judicial bullshit.

I just want to tip my hat to Elizabeth Lopatto’s writing in this piece. I miss following her on twitter and had forgotten how spicy and on-target she can be. Good stuff.

The current Indian government has prosecuted or detained employees of foreign companies in the past for actions taken by the company. There is a real risk here.

I do think the Indian government has a point if you read the lawsuit. This is a ongoing lawsuit and the page taken down had info on it and a discussion page where people were talking about the ongoing lawsuit. The lawsuit says that this “…Complicates and compounds the issue at hand.”

Hard disagree. Ongoing lawsuits often have complicated issues, but are nonetheless topics of public concern. It’s sometimes inconvenient for governments and large corporations to have the public aware of the lawsuit and the underlying facts and issues, but that’s no reason to impose a gag order.

Frankly, whenever I hear a court give vague rationales like “complicates the issues,” I assume they judge just doesn’t like the criticism. That’s what it sounds like here.

Mint

I see Mint as the more reasonable option that keeps 98% of the advantages of Ubuntu, with less of the crazy. I was a xubuntu user a decade ago, but have been very happy with Mint xfce since I switched.

Thanks for the rec! I also love that you presume that there will be a next time, cuz, uh, that’s accurate. These little boxes are powerhouses, I probably want one for a TV set-top box now that all the TV boxes (Roku, Amazon Fire, even Android TV and soon Apple TV) are riddled with ads.

Beelink and Minisforum are legit

I wish I knew a lot of this when I first started shopping for a mini PC. I ended up with a Beelink model that I’m quite happy with, but it seems almost luck that I didn’t pick another one, and I would have liked a “reputable brand” search function.

Not a surprise, but still somehow crushing. It’s a loss for us all.

But really it’s just stealing with extra steps.

Accurate.

yahoo

Nowadays, I don’t know that they could, but more than a decade ago they still had enough mail and search users to be somewhat relevant, and Marissa Meyer had just taken over after she left Google. There was a real thought that Yahoo! could so something new. It obviously didn’t pan out, but for a hot minute, people really talked about Yahoo!

What sort of stuff do you like? Maybe some folks can make some good recommendations to jump-start a more interesting experience.

Recommendations and boosts from other users are how I’ve discovered interesting people there, and at this point, my feed feels just as full as my old twitter feed.

If you like news, a lot of breaking news is happening on Mastodon much more accurately and faster than on Twitter. There are a LOT of publications on there now, here are a few off the top of my head:

• Polygon (@polygon@mastodon.social)
• The Conversation (@TheConversation@newsie.social)
• The Intercept (@theintercept@jouna.host)
• Voice of America (@VOANews@mastodon.social)
• Ars Technica (@arstechnica@mastodon.social)
• Semafor (@Semafor@flipboard.com)
• Kotaku (@Kotaku@flipboard.com)
• The Christian Science Monitor (@csmonitor@flipboard.com)
• Fast Company (@FastCompany@flipboard.com)
• The 19th (@19thnews@flipboard.com)
• Vox (@Vox@flipboard.com)

There are a lot more local news sources too, so depending on where you live, you can probably follow news for your specific area. The account @FediFollows@social.growyourown.services regularly bundles up follow suggestions for different regions, interests, and topics. If you go that account and search for a hashtag (i.e., #texas) you’ll get a lot of active and high-quality local accounts to follow.

Like, two owners ago. Wordpress took Tumblr off Verizon’s hands for $3 million USD, ~six years after Yahoo! bought it for $1.1 billion.

This is even more impressive when you realize that in some regions of the country, power companies are adding zero renewables. TVA, the biggest power provider in the country, is all-in on natural gas, allegedly because its board members get incentives from natural gas providers and refuse to expand predicted demand with solar, wind, or forced geothermal.

Sounds like the beginning of a supervillain origin story.

I don’t have much sympathy for the McMansions, but there are huge sections of Pacific Coast rail line threatened by coastal erosion, and it sure would be nice to get some nice high-speed rail along there.

our Search Choices might be of use here

Thanks, I think that’s a valuable option! It’s probably not what I was looking for. As I understand it, the “bang” use is just a way to use the search on a specific webpage, and is just a nice little hack to speed up searches on commonly used websites (i.e., Wikipedia, YouTube, BBC, etc.) I can probably get used to going straight to those sites, but it was a feature that got me using DDG at first and broke my reliance on Google.

Mojeek

Thanks for the rec, I’ll give Mojeek a try for a while. So far the results seem better than Brave (which I didn’t seriously consider using regularly anyway) but I miss the bang options (!w, !yt, etc.) that DDG has.

Extremely hardcore.

Anti-Cheat is a bitch

Seriously, I don’t know how this one is solvable, to be honest, without major investment and support from the game companies themselves.

performance issues are definitely not universal

Agreed!

Don’t @ me too hard, but I think @luciferofastora has some good points on sound and anti-cheat. They don’t affect me, mostly because I don’t like PVP games that need anti-cheat, but they represent a huge chunk of the market and I do wish they worked better on Linux. I’m fully on Linux for my daily driver and generally have good experiences, I’m not even considering going back to Windows, I just wish things worked better for everyone.