there are some good guys out there

I know that. But it's just a general rule at this point: I just don't give money. It's rarely satisfying to give money (and yes, the person doing the donation needs to feel good doing it too) and I just don't want to find out who deserves to get mine and who doesn't. I understand your sentiment too, but that's my personal rule. One has to draw the line somewhere: I'm not Mother Theresa and I reckon I contribute more than the average person to my local community. But I'm also free to donate what I want to donate, and money isn't part of what I want to donate.

I'm a programmer. I have created, maintained and contributed to many open source projects over 40 years. That's my donation.

I never give money: I give my time - like for example I'm a volunteer at our local association for the blind - and I give non-commercial things like my blood, used clothing, used toys or food. And to repay the other developers whose work I enjoy everyday, I donate code that I strive to make as good as possible.

The reason I never give money is because the money - part or all - invariably ends up in someone's pocket other than the intended recipient. When it's legal, it's called "overhead". Still, legal or not, and justified or not, I'm not interested in paying for that.

Doing anything online that requires you to break strict anonymity... breaks your anonymity, hence your privacy. The two should be separate subject matters, but the corporate surveillance model ensures that if anything can be traced back to you, your privacy is as good as gone.

You say you do Facebook... There's your answer.

Yeah... Whoever agrees to meet with Kim Jong Un clearly is a despicable world leader.

So basically it's UserLAnd with accelerated graphics instead of VNC.

Conclusion of this thread:

It took a mightly long time, but the company eventually coughed up the source code. They sent me a big ZIP with an large git repo full of uncommitted changes and a bunch of comments and temp files that really shouldn't leave the company 🙂 Clearly some engineer just zipped up the local repo on his hard disk without doing any cleanup.

So they complied with the GPL in the end. Just the bare minimum - i.e. providing the source code on request and nothing mode. I wish they put it up in their Github but they don't want to do that apparently. I'll clean up the embarrassing files and comments and put it up in mine.

I rock a Fairphone4 running CalyxOS. Apart from the hardware switches on the Purism phone, I don't quite see what I'm missing out on privacy-wise.

I gave $20 to the friendly wino who lives in the dumpster down my street. He's reported a income growth of 1000% for today.

Thanks! I'll do that if my last-ditch effort to knock some sense into them doesn't work.

It's time to stop thinking phones are anything but commodity hardware with variable degrees of shittiness. There are no such things as premium phones, just premium prices.

Wow... If even Best Buy figured out those repair programs are designed to appease the regulators who ask for the right to repair but never actually be used, it should tell you how unappealing they are.

There's a lot to love about the Reform - not least of which is the chunky form factor, which I like better than thin stuff too, and the replaceable cells. But... I need a trouble-free machine as my daily driver first and foremost, and I know the Reform will fight me right out of the box. I mean as a secondary machine explore and play with, it totally makes sense. But I don't need that. I have enough projects to play with that take all my free time.

I did not. There's not enough of a community behind it for support. Meaning I have a feeling this one will be mostly trouble.

Privacy isn't a cutesy. It's absolutely necessary. Unfortunately, just like not doing stupid shit when you're a teenager, you get to find out how important privacy is years later when the stupid shit you did years before comes back to haunt you and it's too late.

The problem of course is that Big Data has made it exceedingly difficult and painful to maintain your privacy. Because of course the last thing they want is for you to have any. It hurts their bottom line.

Because of the corporate surveillance collective, in 2024, if you truly want to maintain your privacy, your life becomes significantly crappier than if you didn't bother. But that doesn't mean privacy isn't as important today as it's ever been.

Ain't you glad you gave Reddit content for free and they're reselling if for millions?

During his first campaign, most people with common sense simply dismissed Trump. "Who in his right mind would vote for him?" they thought. Boy! were they in for a surprise.

Now this is his second campaign. Trump is still the same Trump as the first time but on steroid this time. He tried to stage a coup, and he's now sitting in a courtroom trying to defend his ass in a really shameful scandal.

And most people with common sense, again, dismiss Trump. Because really, this time around, who in his right mind - including the most staunch ultra-conservative bible thumping republican - would vote this guy in again?

Well, brace yourself because many, many people will inexplicably say "Watch me. Hold my beer..." on election day. It will truly boggle your mind that not only anyone voted for him at all, but in fact a sizeable portion of America has.

From TFA:

their advanced decay made it impossible to determine the cause of death

Even if the exact cause is not known, I'm pretty sure they died of a bad case of WW2.

Three of the countries forced to be in a union for 69 years take measures to avoid being attacked by the country that forced them into that union after seeing it attack a 4th country that was also forced into that union. Gee, I wonder why they're hostile...

We have zero insight into the longevity of flash memory because it doesn't matter: whatever it is, it's a lot longer than the phone's planned obscolescence.

That's why you've never heard anybody complain about their saved data getting corrupted: their device has long since hit the landfill before that happens.

I don't know about that.

I've been hearing society is bad and getting worse from a variety of people since I was born in the height of the Cold War, and I've come to believe it's only a perception. It's no better or worse than it's ever been: it's just that as people get older and the standards of their youth change, they feel alienated by a world that is increasinbly not theirs anymore.

I'm old enough to be a grumpy old man but I keep reminding myself that this isn't my world anymore either. And if I'm honest, I don't see how the world of today is significantly worse than when I was a kid and we were all preparing for nuclear armageddon any minute now. And I always remind myself how my grandparents and my parents constantly told me to stop listening to "removed n*ger music" and quit wasting my time with those damn computer things and pursue more "manly" endeavors. I don't want to become bitter like they were because I have no real reason to: the world of today really hasn't done anything to me, it just feels weird.

However, I will say this: social media brings the worst out of people. It's like reality TV of the 80's and Usenet, but turbocharged. I think the utter social mediocrity that is social media contributes a lot to the perception that society is worse: it isn't, it's just that the worst of it is a lot more visible and more vocal.