I’m getting closer and closer to either leaving the US as a tech-refuge or moving to the middle of nowhere and living off grid with my data horde that has more offline media than one could consume in a lifetime.

Not sure which is the best option. My bet is that Trump will start dropping nukes to prevent himself from leaving office and wind up cooking the planet alive before I get to choose.

In Seattle, during the summer solstice, sunrise is @ 4:30am with full daylight by 4:50.

Starting things an hour earlier is cutting into sleep time.

<insert almost live sun skit>

It’s 2026. Are people still that puritanical that they care about somebody else’s sexual activity?

The places I’ve lived in the last 15 years have been extremely sex positive, which was a slight shift in mindsets from where I grew up, which was slowly coming this way.

Is there a sudden resurgence in this behavior? Is it part of the man-o-sphere bullshit?

I’d recommend CachyOS over SteamOS on non-valve hardware. As much as I love SteamOS on my Deck, it’s highly tailored to the hardware, and has some limitations. But that comes with caveats I’ll cover later.

I also find Bazzite to be too locked in, and complicates how to do things that aren’t managed, for a general gaming desktop. If it’s a media center PC Bazzite can be great, but can easily feel locked in if you want to start adding TV apps or Kodi.

That said, for a beginner friendly Linux distro I’d point most users towards Mint or Pop!_OS depending on their use case. If the user has a high technical knowledge and capability, but lacks Linux experience, I’d point them towards CachyOS, their docs, and the Arch Wiki. Maybe Garuda if they want to additional bundling and update management tooling.

Vista was overall “ok” when paired with hardware that could actually run it. Biggest perk was that for a small window of time, it was the only OS that had DX10 support outside of community patches to emulate DX10 in XP & 2K

UAC was implemented in an extremely overbearing way that trained users to ignore any critical system pop-ups.

Aside from that, many of the core systems were unoptimized, and when added on that many hardware partners under spec’d the entry level machines that were being sold with it, the OS performed far worse than it’s predecessors.

I don’t have kids, but I had heard that people with kids and dogs had noticed that their dogs were watching Bluey too. So I started putting on episodes of Bleuey for my dogs when I’d have to go run errands. Yep, I’ve now watched quite a bit of Bluey, and it’s a damn good show.

I hate bottle episodes. After watching “Fly” I came away still hating bottle episodes, even if they are done well.

Best bottle episode ever, imo, was done by Community. And still, fuck bottle episodes.

Thankfully, I don’t use Tidal for music discovery. I luckily have a lot of people I’ve met over the years that love music, perform themselves, work for venues, or are crew for artists. That plus indie radio like KEXP and NPR’s Tiny Desk Concerts has kept me exploring for new music via recommendations from those areas.

I use Tidal for high fidelity music with a more acceptable artist payout than Spotify.

That said, I’m slowly working towards going back to the old days where my massive CD collection rips (i still have those binders too), direct purchases of high fidelity content sitting on my network share, and records aremy primary source of listening pleasure. The only problem here is acquiring the hardware to scale thanks to the AI boom buying up all the production lines of consumer grade hardware, and business class storage drives having gone up in cost. Technically I can afford it, but I could also spend that same money and buy tickets to several local shows for both my wife and I, which will support the live music industry and artists more directly.

You also have to remember that Google has been switching their search tools over to AI search tools and the results have degraded as a result.

Even before then, there was manipulation of the search algorithm by content creators, even on the YouTube side.

It’s probably a combination of all factors tbh.

• Google is slowly pushing on the scale of authoritarianism.
• Search changes being a degradation in results.
• Search algo manipulation.
• Google intentionally showing divisive content due to the higher revenue opportunities
• And the sheer breadth of right wing grift content.

You just described a sizeable portion of the FOSS community.

As somebody that loves FOSS, the community around it can come off like a morally superior vegan/christian/other-commilunity-known-for-this-attitude quite often. “I DID IT, WHY CANT YOU!?” Is an attitude I’ve encountered frequently, and it’s hard to get them to understand that not everybody has the same tech knowledge level, or use cases, or can manage the loss that comes with stopping/moving away from corporate solutions.

So fighting against this new understanding of the term is either pedantry for the sake of it, or you have some sort of stake in Google perhaps?

Great use of a bad reason fallacy with a touch of ad hominem in an attempt to discredit.

Your claim is that the term has been used to mean something negative. You present no evidence to back this up other than your feelings.

I don’t discredit that major corporations do evil shit.

However, I presented you with the experience I’ve had with the term dating back nearly 30 years where I, and the people I talked tech with, was sideloading files onto our PDA and Rio MP3 players.

The term started out as a technical distinction in the circles I ran in (Detroit area) back then.

Aside from your feelings on the term, I see no valid justification to stop using it when I’m trying to clearly communicate something. I work in tech (and no, it’s not Google or Apple. Fuck publicly traded companies) as a lead on the platform support group, and I need to be able to clearly communicate with my peers and reports. Sideload is a widely recognized term in the spaces I have worked in.

I’m not going to stop using a precise technical term because some internet strangers have unfounded negative feelings about the possible marketing connotations.

Present me with evidence that it actually means what you’re saying and maybe I’ll consider working on making the language change. Just like I’ve done with actually real problematic industry terms (master/slave, black/white lists. Etc).

I’ve been using the term side loading since the late 90s/early 2000s for installing software or files to a device via a transfer cable. And by the time Android came along, the early app development community was using the term to push the app to your device via ADB. And from there it’s expanded from transfer cable push to download and install from an unmanaged 3rd party source on a mobile computing device.

So the term has existed in some form throughout the tech/power user community before modern mobile computing. Now did Apple and Google usurp the term? Ehhh, possibly? I’ve yet to encounter somebody that uses sideloading to mean something negative, but I’m sure there is a group out there that does. I’m not convinced that group is large enough for me to stop using language I started using nearly 30 years ago to mean something specific. “Why use more, less precise, words when this single term says it already?”

There is.

It’s called Parental Controls.

It also does a fairly good job at preventing stuff from getting through.

One of the big issues right now is that there’s a lot of sexualized content on social media right now that’s bypassing parental controls because the social media services are doing a poor job of limiting that content when encountering a parental controlled device.

You don’t need a native mobile app to use the Progressive Web App (PWA) installation.

https://web.dev/learn/pwa/installation

Federation of self-hosted servers is on the Fluxer road map.

However, the team has had massive growth in the last two weeks and pulled enough visibility that assholes being assholes decided that it would be fun to DDoS them while also dealing with sudden growth.

Fluxer’s majn benefits are that it is so close to discord that it, in theory, supports existing Discord bots with minimal effort, and the kid behind it is obsessed with the tech stack and FOSS.

To add on about using a knife for defense that you lightly touched.

You never want to be in a knife fight. Nobody wins in a knife fight. Especially if it’s a pocket knife.

I have a bright neon orange & green bush/field/combat knife that I take with me when I go camping. It’s largely a tool for managing my camp, but I have practiced defensive fighting with it, but I am no knife fighting expert. I see it as a last-ditch effort of defense against a wild animal or human where my life is already on the line. And wearing it on my hip around camp advertises “this person is armed” to any human that has ill intent that comes across my camp during daylight hours. I’d still rather grab my walking stick for a good head bonking and sternum busting, and I would do my best to do that before pulling the knife for defensive combat use.

So, to be abundantly clear. There are no winners in a knife fight. The “winner” goes to the hospital.

Sweat plus the scent of sexual fluids.

We don’t? Says who? You? Your bubble?

I live in the PNW and am surrounded by progressive people and hear “Zionist” used as a perjorative for fasciast frequently. Hell, I could easily go into a local coffee shop or bar and find a sticker that will have a “fuck zionists” message on it. Hell, one of my best friends is of Jewish heritage, and is the biggest critic of the Zionist movement I know, to the point where he even attends a moderately sized local synagogue that’s also critical

So obviously there are US citizens in the PNW that use that language. But I’ll be sure to tell them that according to some random internet gate keeper of the American English dialect says they don’t talk like an American.

I know this isnt cannon, but it my personal head cannon. I’ve always thought of Han as somebody that “the force” is using as a pawn to maintain balance and as a result, has a shit ton of “luck”.

I’ve always wanted to see media in the SW cannon to explore this kind of concept minor force users that either unknowingly use the force, or the force uses to maintain balance in the universe/galaxy.