Which leads me to the question: would you find visual genAI more acceptable if it weren’t commercial?

For sure. I couldn't tell you where inspired, but new, work ends and theft begins, or how model training would be funded without commercial incentive. But I would be more comfortable knowing that companies have not ripped potential profits straight from every artist the model had been trained on.

And I like this kind of discussion. What's bothered me before have been the jabs at the mere presence of AI without deeper discussion as to what qualifies as theft. I haven't found myself buying art even before such AI models. I wouldn't buy or sell images that I know are AI generated. And I pay the electric bill for locally-generated ones as if I were doing any other novelty activity like gaming on my PC. I'm curious, what would you think of local models that can be acquired for free?

For anonymity alone, no. You ought to at least aspire to live the nomad lifestyle first and put up with its challenges, then enjoy whatever anonymity comes from it as a bonus.

If you don't mind apartment living, you could consider the arrangement I had at one point. Private landlord who didn't run background checks, accepted payment in any reasonable form, many tenants, communal mailbox without apartment numbers or names required. Internet, utilities, etc. all rolled into rent and not individually metered. Might be harder to find but they exist.

Can't wait for one that'll work on Android so I can maybe root some otherwise useless old phones

Another common mozilla L

Several popular graphing calculators from Texas Instruments, including the TI-83 and TI-84, have a display resolution of 96*64, but only 95*63 pixels are used for graphing.

However, the earlier TI-81 did use all 96*64 pixels. The rationale for this change was to establish a central row and column for the axes and a central pixel for the origin. The cursor could only move pixel-by-pixel, and since the axes and origin would end up "between" pixels on the TI-81, they were inaccessible by the cursor.

Up until 95, Windows was mostly a desktop environment for DOS. From 95 to ME, Windows was an OS that used DOS as its bootloader and compatibility layer. Not sure how to put it, but it was simplistic and fundamentally different from Linux.

The thing with NT-based Windows (including modern editions) is that the underlying system is joined at the hip with the GUI. Whereas Linux with your choice of coreutils is a perfectly capable OS without the GUI, many features of Windows are only accessible through the GUI.

Given enough time and resources, pretty much anything exclusive to Windows could be ported to Linux and vice versa. A lot of the difference just comes down to history and the ensuing conventions, workflows, and file hierarchies.

Even if we stripped out all the cruft and spaghetti code from Windows, there would be lots of nasty idiosyncrasies in its design, informed by its OS/2 and VMS (see Dave Cutler) heritage, profit maximization, revolving door of devs and interns, and years of bending over backwards to accommodate legacy programs.

Every day I feel more justified in keeping my 1990s car running.

(I'd also like to walk or take public transit, but the infrastructure here is car dependent)

A few years ago, when I cared little about my privacy, I would fancy buying a new car. Thanks to privacy concerns, I became proud to have my old car, which also happens to be highly repairable.

Of course

• Accrescent: Store run (edit: advocated) by the GrapheneOS team for third-party apps
• Aegis: 2FA TOTP code generator
• AirGuard: Scans for persistent AirTags in the vicinity, notifies if I may be victim to AirTag tracking
• AntennaPod: Podcast manager, also supports importing local folders of podcasts
• AudioMonitor: Measure sound level
• Binary Eye: Support for many types of 1D and 2D barcodes
• ByeDPI: routes internet traffic through the DNS port to bypass certain types of filtering
• Canvass: doodle app, useful for mid-conversation diagrams and clarifying things visually in the absence of pen and paper
• ClassiCube: Minecraft Classic clone
• Conversations: XMPP client
• Editor: raw text editor
• Elementary: periodic table
• SimpleEmail: minimalist e-mail app that does not automatically fetch linked images. Refereshes in the background every 15 minutes and sends notifications without need for Play Services or equivalent
• FakeStandby: for edge cases when I want something to keep running in the foreground, but don't want to keep the screen on
• Feeder: RSS client
• Fintunes: Jellyfin client optimized for music
• FlorisBoard: customizable keyboard
• Fruity Game: Suika but with MS-Paint art style
• Graph 89: Graphing calculator emulator
• Invizible: Tor and DNS client
• Kiwix: Offline Wikipedia (you can download just the parts useful to you, e.g. medical articles without storage-hungry media files)
• Lemuroid: GBA emulator
• LocalSend: instant P2P filesharing over WLAN
• Markor: notes app with markdown
• Material Files: files app with SMB share support and various handy features
• Molly: Alternative Signal client
• Fossify Messages: I use it over the default messages app since it is easy to block numbers by pattern
• Notally: notes app with nice checklists
• Open Camera: as easy to use as the regular camera, but with a bunch more features below the surface
• OpenContacts: saves contacts as individual .vcf files to a directory for easy backup and allows dropping unknown callers without bothering me with a notification
• Organic Maps to be replaced with CoMaps later
• OSS Document Scanner: best FOSS scanning app I've found so far. Includes auto-cropping (given enough contrast) and adjustable B&W filter to eliminate off-white background colors.
• phyphox: view output of sensors like the barometer, magnetometer, accelerometer, etc.
• PipePipe: NewPipe but better (except for the occasional memory leakage)
• QDict & QuickDic: offline dictionaries and bilingual wordbooks
• RadioDroid: IP radio client. Can tune in to international news, music, sports broadcasts
• RHVoice: TTS app
• RiMusic: NewPipe, but for Spotify, etc. YT Music
• SecScanQR: QR scanner and generator with history, useful to save QR addresses for later use since I don't want to fill out forms or read documents on my phone
• SuperTuxKart: the only [edit: other] game on my phone
• Symphony: Music app with a slick UI
• Trail Sense: Compass with various goodies useful for outdoor activities
• Breezy Weather: weather app and homescreen widget with a slick UI
• MicroMathematics: Math engine, but I never learned how to use it

There's always the risk of spying if a game requires an internet connection, no matter who published it, but unless you plan to be in China later on, there's not much that Chinese companies (or authorities, if that is of concern) can do with the data collected on you.

I suppose some company could sell that data back to a US firm in a roundabout way. Anyway, take what I say with a grain of salt since I've hardly played or looked into any games requiring an internet connection.

Github now reports to Microsoft's AI division directly

Until substantially more people join the fight for privacy or something else fundamentally changes, I think there is a very real possibility of Google completely clamping down on Android while governments and workplaces mandate apps that only run on phones with all of Google or Apple's bells and whistles.

But the folks at GrapheneOS, Calyx, and Murena seem to be a devoted and resourceful bunch, so I am hopeful that they can give something for us to work with, even if Google pulls the plug, whether it's a fork of Android or rebasing to mobile Linux.

If that all falls through, I'll look for whichever phone supports Linux best and eventually move everything over. The vast majority of the apps I use regularly on my GrapheneOS phone aren't very demanding and have a decent alternative on Linux. And whatever apps are forced on me by other people will reside on a dedicated Android phone, ideally with a removable battery.

For this year, I'd still recommend a secondhand or reseller Pixel with GrapheneOS. Everything just works on it.

Debian. Truly the universal operating system. Runs on all of my laptops, desktops, servers, and NAS with no fuss and no need to keep track of distro-specific differences. If something has a Linux version, it probably works on Debian.

Granted, I am a bit biased. All of my hardware is at least 5 years old. Also came from Windows, where I kept only the OS and browser up to date, couldn't be bothered with shiny new features. A package manager is already a huge luxury.

YouTube being YouTube. It's aggressive enough that I occasionally get blocked even with a residential IP address.

Some form of lentil or bean stew. Best if served over (brown) rice and vegetables, which are also easily prepared in a rice cooker / steamer combo.

States like New York, California, etc. have been subsidizing states like West Virginia, Oklahoma, etc. for some time. If we split it up in perhaps the most likely way (along political groupings) the poorer states would not be in for a good time.

Addendum: if we were to do the split right now, we might also see the rise of a few virulently and openly fascist countries.

• Phones on contract payment plans
• New monitors: Maybe my eyes suck, but my set of two 21-inch LCD monitors from 2005 is still going strong
• Third-party meal delivery: I'm fine sitting down with a microwaved meal or some canned soup if I don't feel like cooking
• A new car every x years: My car of choice is old and relatively cheap, so I could afford to pay in full in cash. Bonus of being spyware-free, so I'll just maintain it for as long as I can.
• Stuff from Aliexpress, Temu and the like: the user experience is horrendous, customer service is nonexistent, and discount codes are pure gimmicks

Makes me wonder how far the closest alternative, glim, could be upgraded to match Ventoy given the confines of GRUB.

Someone had mentioned that Fedora fails to verify when booting from Ventoy. Now I'm thinking if I could dd the media loaded via Ventoy and compare with an original copy to see what changed.

People who modify their cars to be obnoxiously loud. Makes me wish they'd get sand in their engines and grind their gears down.

There are various schools of feminism, some of which have conflicting opinions. But the common feminist standpoints, like equal rights, seem to be just common sense for me, especially in this day and age. I'm not sure where the requirement for equal physical ability fits into the equation.

At least for me, going out and saying that you are feminist carries a sort of special connotation, and since I haven't participated in any explicitly activist events related to feminism, I wouldn't readily emblazon myself with the feminist label even though I stand by those ideas.