If you really need it to be secure and private, and are communicating mostly with known acquaintances within a reasonable radius, with low bandwidth requirements, LoRA with encryption is the best bet.

It is a higher bar of entry but at least you can be confident your messages won’t be intercepted in any useful form.

This sounds awesome. It uses the native YouTube app? Or YouTube in the TV web browser?

Superman 64.

Weeks and months of hype (the era of print gaming journalism), Blockbuster stocking 100 copies on launch day for “guaranteed availability” etc.

Then I finally popped the cart in, and this thing was so bad it just defied all logic. Horrific controls, shitty graphics, unclear user interface and objectives, terrible draw distance. Timed level segments and insane difficulty.

There might be “worse” games but I have never been more disappointed in a release than Superman 64.

Turns out making everything into a subscription service doesn’t make it better, it just makes it worse.

Sit down, we are gonna watch this 2 hour Wendigoon video essay on cryptozoology.

Gonna give it a shot. Can’t be any worse than the default Android Keeb

This summarizes it pretty well. Two things can be true at once. Reddit sucks ass and I haven’t gone back since the API changes. Simultaneously, the default Lemmy experience is extremely offputting to all but certain subcultures. Not everyone is a antiwork activist, Arch Linux evangelist, open socialist, or actively transitioning. Totally fine that all these groups have their communities, but it gets kinda old seeing 90% of the feed filled with these topics.

An alternative way of saying you don’t enjoy subtext.

What did you think of No Country (same year, similarly dark, more action and different theming)

Spoon is an awesome band that mostly flies just below the radar while still quietly releasing awesome records. They have been active since the 90s and they don’t have a single bad album.

There are one or two accounts on Lemmy who seem to show up in every privacy or graphene thread and shit-talk GOS.

I say if there is something wrong with GOS or the code itself, identify it and prove it. The founder may have been “problematic” or whatever, but it doesn’t sound like that person is even associated with the project anymore.

I have personally daily-driven GOS for a year. It has worked well for me. I use a lot of FOSS apps. I use some traditional Play Store apps and avoid logging into Google and I manage permissions closely. I’d say GOS gives you options. Maybe some people would like other customized degoogled OS better, and that is fine. Just… for the love of all that is sacred, don’t use vanilla Googled Android.

Right, they need close air support, infantry support, scouts, supply chain logistics etc. all working together to be peak effective. If you just give some dudes an Abrams and a crash course in driving it and firing the main gun, they will be better off than the same crew of randos in a technical made out of a Toyota Tacoma, but they will still be vulnerable to modern threats.

It’s easy to understand why the modern drone threat is uniquely game-changing if you think of war like chess. Most advanced powers have now figured out that having a developed drone program is like giving yourself infinite pawns. You keep trading pawns for the opponents more valuable pieces. If Russia is able to spend a few thousand in drone hardware and explosives and destroy a multimillion dollar tank, they’ll make that trade any day.

Looked at the list and did a bit of searching as well as checking the reasons they were defederated. Looks like the top one is basically a trolling group akin to GNAA or some of the proto 4chan or SomethingAwful shit for those who remember back that far.

I can understand why overt trolling and possibly illegal content would be defederated.

That said I would like to see more diverse opinions and sources on my Lemmy feed though. There has to be a base somewhere that isn’t literal nazis but isn’t open socialists either.

Is that the most toxic instance? I got blocked or banned or whatever from hexbear for simply posting a slightly different opinion from whatever the current orthodoxy was there. Do curated echochamber communities really provide any value?

I have used the Chris Titus debloat tool before and it works pretty well.

Really the fact that this is necessary at all is disgusting. Start Menu ads are straight up AIDS. Not to mention curated news feeds in Start and other places. Why not just tell me what my opinions and purchasing habits should be, and eliminate the middleman?

I feel like even novice Windows users would be better off with Pop! OS and Wine at this point.

You saying this has the same practical significance as pro-Trump people who think Biden “didn’t really win” in 2020.

Which is to say zero.

I once paid for gasoline after I finished filling up, with a personal check for $18 and I remember thinking “Damn, this is expensive.”

Another option- Kindle paperwhite or even an old Gen 1 / gen 2 Kindle keyboard or other e-ink model. The old models can be battery swapped with only a guitar pick and a Philips screwdriver.

DNS ad blocker like PiHole, to block all the ads and telemetry while connected to WiFi. Keep WiFi off if not actively transferring books, as it wastes battery.

Sideload all your own books via whispernet free WiFi transfer or just plain USB.

Get free books from Gutenberg/Libgen/IRC/Usenet.

This is very workable and results in being able to read almost whatever you want for $0/year.

Also from the same year, There Will Be Blood.

He drank their milkshake.

I know Google Fiber generation 1 setups were Fiber to the home (to a “Fiber Jack”) with a provided router that had 1 gigabit Ethernet port and a coax/MoCA output. Then each TV receiver box got its connectivity via MoCA from the router (most of the customer homes were already set up for cable to any area there was a TV) and put out 100mb ethernet from each of those endpoints (these also doubled as Wifi APs).

What I’ve never heard of is an ISP offering a MoCA coax to your house and you having only a MoCA receiver. Supposedly the max distance between MoCA devices is about 300 feet.

Seems more likely the person asking the question actually just has a cable modem and could put their own router downstream of it if they wanted?

Pixel 7 with GrapheneOS is looking like a good long term choice right now.