A frog who wants the objective truth about anything and everything.

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XMPP: prodigalfrog@slrpnk.net

Matrix: @prodigalfrog:matrix.org

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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: July 4th, 2023

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  • Quite damning of Proton, but unfortunately isn’t too surprising after the CEO’s pro-trump comments.

    I would say they have proven themselves untrustworthy and mostly concerned with profit-seeking, and would suggest moving to alternatives if you use their services.

    Mullvad is a solid VPN (Tor is better), and Posteo, Tuta, or Disroot are good email providers (don’t use email for anything sensitive, private providers only give protection against survailence capitalism).

    EDIT: With more context provided by @artyom@piefed.social, this recent action by them was, perhaps, not as cut and dry as it seemed. (Though I still am skeptical of their integrity, personally)


  • We have some known factors we can work with here:

    1. Climate change is happening, and it will have devastating effects.
    2. The richest people/corporations polluting the most don’t care if you sacrifice or not, they often don’t care about climate change at all, or acknowledge that it exists.
    3. The biggest polluters will not stop polluting unless the profit incentive for them is removed, or they are forceably stopped.
    4. Reducing emissions by any means possible is crucial in the time window that we have.
    5. There are methods that regular people can do in their personal lives to help reduce the total emissions being emitted, but require some sacrifice.

    With these known factors, does it make sense to collectively not try to reduce our own emissions just because the biggest emitters won’t start first? I would think if the goal is lower emissions to reduce the horrific and deadly effects happening globally, than we should do what we can to minimize them.

    It would be amazing if all the big polluters lowered their emissions along with us, but we know that won’t happen, so if we wait to lower our own emissions until they do, it will never be done and could very well reach a point of no return.

    To survive as a species, we will ultimately have to deal with capitalism and those big polluters by more forceful means, which in itself will require collective, mass effort on a global scale.

    We don’t know when that mass global effort will take place. It could be in 3 years, or a decade, or even two. In the meantime, the climate continues to get worse. The best thing we can do is give us a little bit more time by collectively reducing our emissions, which requires far less effort and sacrifice than it will to fully solve the problem.

    If someone from a more affected poor country who lost family members to climate change (wildfire, drought, famine, etc) asked why someone decided to wait so long before joining in to lower their emissions, do you think they would find “I didn’t want to sacrifice until the billionaires did” a compelling response?

    We simply do not have the luxury of time to wait until things are fair. It is unfair, but any and all action is direly needed now. I would plead with you to help regardless of how fair it may be, if only to give us a little more time to get our collective shit together so that our species may live long enough for things to become more fair in the future.



  • To be fair, Windows 10 has some meaningful upgrades compared to 7.

    1. Windows 10 can handle radical new hardware (such as swapping a drive to a totally different PC) much more gracefully, where as Windows 7 could sometimes freak out and crash or not boot.
    2. Windows updates were ungodly slow to install on Windows 7, but were much quicker on Windows 10.
    3. Windows 10’s ability to automatically download drivers was very convenient, bringing it more in-line with the experience of Linux, which generally has drivers out of the box.
    4. Windows 10 was generally quite stable, even more stable than 7, in my experience.

    But with all those advantages, came many downsides as well:

    1. Windows 10’s system settings interface is an absolute clusterfuck, making changing simple things like the refresh rate of a monitor difficult to change or find due to being buried behind so many sub-menus. The Windows 10 settings are usually a dumbed down version, with a small easy to miss hyperlink somewhere on the page to bring up the older Windows XP/7 era settings panel that actually adjusted the thing you needed.
    2. Windows 10 has a lot of annoying pop-ups for features that barely anyone uses or wants, but likely helps monetize the OS.
    3. Windows 10 incorporated ads into the start menu. Fucking ads!
    4. Windows 10 was a privacy nightmare compared to 7, and the privacy settings were in a constant state of flux after an update
    5. Windows 10’s automatic driver installer had a downside, in that it would automatically download an outdated version of your GPU driver automatically before you could beat it to the punch with the proper up-to-date one from the GPU vendor’s website.

  • Your part isn’t being undone by a private jet, you prevented your own emissions to compound with the jet’s, the factory’s, and the deforestation’s emissions.

    It is abundantly clear that few meaningful laws will ever be enacted, as most governments are corporate captured. That effectively just leaves collective individual actions on the table, which are still very beneficial in giving us more time for society to organize against the powers that be. Every 0.1% of a degree we can mitigate helps the survival rate of populations most effected.

    Tossing aside our collective action because our ineffectual governments continue to be ineffectual is giving up one of our most actionable tools, short of revolution.

    I think it can be hard to stick with it because no one wants to feel like they’re depriving themselves while others continue, but at large scale, it really does help massively for each of us to use less energy for heating/cooling where possible, eat less meat (red meat especially. Impossible Meat is an incredible plant-based alternative), drive as little as possible (e-bikes and public transport are excellent alternatives if your area is conducive to them).

    Also @SinAdjetivos@lemmy.world












  • My first tech was a Sega Genesis and the family’s 486 DX2 computer running Windows 95.

    While I had access to new genesis games by renting them, getting new games for the 486 was a rare event due to how expensive software was back then, and there were few places we would visit that sold it (mostly what Costco had available). That meant rotating through a lot of the same games for quite a while, which meant I would eventually get bored of them for a while until I would try them again a month later.

    The effect of that is it seemed to encourage me to find other ways away from the tech to entertain myself, like play with legos, or head outside to invent games with the neighbor’s kids.

    I don’t want to assume that type of exposure to tech is ideal just because it’s what I experienced, but I wonder if an artificial software limit may be a good idea today for young kids to encourage them to find new ways to solve boredom with their imagination instead of it being done for them exclusively.

    I’ve also seen parents start their kids off with 90’s tech and games, and slowly introduce them to newer tech/games each year, which is an interesting idea.

    I think I’d start them off with a raspberry pi running a retro emulation os and a small selection of the best games from the 90’s, a small camera, an mp3 player, and a Linux PC without internet access, but with access to some edutainment games (humongous entertainment, some point’n’clicks, etc), and programing tools with kids appropriate teaching material.

    Once they’re old enough, I’d give them internet access, and eventually a phone so they can keep in touch with their friends.