I’m not gonna try and tell you it’s perfect. But as someone from Québec who needed an emergency surgery mid-lockdown, I was able to see multiple doctors, spend a night at the hospital, got examined in every way necessary and received said surgery, along with morphine for the following days… And basically didn’t see a damn bill. I had to wait a long time in the ER at first. Until it got worse they just told me to be patient. But from the quick estimates I did, this would’ve cost me maybe 10-15k$ in the US. Best case scenario. Scenario in which I then have to deal with an insurance company that bitches and moans about having to fulfill its part of the deal. And then of course they’d increase my premiums.

I’m sure it’s not much compared to what many here experienced, but it took me a long time to properly recover from this.

A couple years back on Christmas Eve, a few of my then friends, or at least acquaintances ripped apart my friend group. Doxxed me (I’m told) and slandered me for days. Basically out of nowhere from my perspective. No fights that I can recall were had shortly before and I was still having friendly conversations with the perpetrators that same day. I tried asking the “leaders” what I might’ve been accused of and I never got a single answer. Not even a “you should know”. Just a message from my girlfriend telling me I should go offline for a while and beyond that, radio silence for a solid day.

Some time later my girlfriend told me one of them had been trying for weeks to convince her I was toxic. Manipulative. Untrustworthy. We’re engaged now, somehow. She brings way more to the table than I do, but I do my best to make her days more interesting and I’m happier than I’ve ever been. I hope I bring her a similar comfort. I also got back in contact with a few of those old friends a year later.

But for a whole year and out of nowhere, I had to cut contact with essentially everyone I talked to online. And let’s not kid ourselves, I’m an introverted nerd somewhere on the spectrum, that was basically my whole social circle. I’m told their… whatever this all was for ended up imploding, but I learned that day how easy it is to get exploited and mislead by those we trust.

If I’m not wrong, it’s already illegal to even depict minors in a sexual manner in much of the world. I do think we should have specific laws against the impersonation of someone through high technological means; photoshopping their face on someone else’s nude body, using generative neutral networks to make it look or sound like they did something criminal or immoral… But do you trust any current government to write such a law in a way that would be effective and wouldn’t cause ridiculous amounts of collateral damage?

That one’s in part because cruelty is by design I imagine, but also because the people giving those injections aren’t medical professionals and can’t legally obtain those substances. Guess that also explains how they can fuck up finding veins this bad. From what I’ve read and heard (In Last Week Tonight among others, I believe) they basically just use toxic crap that chemically burns the inmate from the inside and makes them asphyxiate while conscious. And of course they turn out to be undeserving of an execution around 5% of the time.

Is this a German thing? I’ve traveled many times between Canada and the USA and never had to fill any customs form.
Edit: Boy oh boy. I thought Reddit was the toxic place, but can’t ask a damn question in here without getting slammed with downvotes?

Crime… Et c’est bien lui qui s’était saoulé dans un avion avant de pisser en public, non? Je ne crois pas avoir entendu grand chose de bon à-propos de lui.

Hmm~ I would say that the bottom right one caught my eye, but I would go with the top left one as the default wallpaper. It looks sophisticated and clean. It depends on the first impression you want to give.

Thanks a lot! Yeah, it’s on Android and everything I could hope for. The sleek UI, the drag-based shortcuts and properly separated user accounts.

Is anything similar Apollo? I’m on Android, but if there was one app that made me miss the few months I spent with a borrowed iPhone… It’s Apollo.

Yeah… For years I already suggested anything good but Ubuntu to those interested in trying Linux, but now I’m going to directly tell them not to touch it. Sure, you’ve got lots of online discussions from the past 20-ish years of people teaching each other how to install PPAs for up-to-date versions of programs or drivers and that’s sweet. But how about a distro where that stuff is just available out of the box and one that doesn’t force you to use snaps as if they didn’t cause issues left and right?

It was almost scarily smooth for me. I laid down on the operating table, they started prepping me up and I was out before I realized it. When I woke up minutes after the end of my short surgery I had clear memories of the moments before. There was no period of time where I felt confused or realized I was passing out or waking up. I went from being conscious, to unconscious, to wide awake pretty darn fast. The only numbness I had came from the painkillers. Or at least it’s how it felt to me. Modern anesthetics are amazing.

It went hard right almost immediately when Reddit banned a couple subreddits like/r/fatPeopleHate and other similarly cheerful places. At least on Lemmy we can just let those kinda servers be in their own little septic tanks.

I did that for a while and it does kinda work if you bring your mic threshold way down, but there is a modded client called “discord-screen-audio” which tricks Discord into almost working properly. The one limitation being that you can only stream your main monitor and not another one, or a specific app. But the audio does work!

Écoute, voyons-donc. Le gars s’est fait accuser de produire une forme de pornographie juvénile. Imagine le scrutin avec lequel il va devoir vivre à partir de maintenant. Je comprends bien qu’il dépose sa plume. D’un côté, je peux comprendre l’impulsion. Vouloir interdire la distribution d’écrits encourageant ou banalisant la violence sexuelle, sincèrement. Surtout envers des enfants. Mais tant qu’il ne s’agisse pas de propos inflammatoires, diffamatoires ou cruellement révélateurs, c’est littéralement juste de la fiction. Et juste du texte en plus! Pas même des dessins.

Personne ne saigne quand on écrit le mot couteau. C’est parfaitement dans les droits de quelqu’un de dire qu’un livre est dégoûtant, révoltant et détestable. De le brûler! Mais si on devait emprisonner quiconque possède un livre avec dû contenu sexuel impliquant des jeunes personnages? Tabarnouche… Au secondaire, en français et en anglais on m’a fait lire des romans où des adolescents se masturbent, ont des relations sexuelles, parfois même avec des adultes bien plus âgés qu’eux, parfois en inconfortablement grand détail. Mais personne n’a été abusé pour créer ces récits là. Aussi “fucking bizarres” que j’aie pu les trouver à l’époque et encore toujours. Ces livres qu’on m’a fait lire avaient quelque-chose à dire. Un message. Godbout écrivait des romans d’horreur et a écrit une scène “horrible”. Que ça ait été horrible de lui en tant qu’auteur ou de son personnage fictif, je ne crois pas que ça devrait être considéré un crime. Sortez son livre de la bibliothèque scolaire ou municipale si vous le voulez. Que les librairies refusent de le vendre! Mais ce n’est jamais bon signe quand le monde commence à brûler des livres.

Je n’ai pas non plus lu le livre en question et si étonnant que ça puisse paraître, personne n’a publié en ligne une copie de la dite scène. Je ne peux donc pas vraiment donner mon propre jugement mais son éditeur, son imprimerie et un jury semblent d’accord sur le fait qu’il n’est pas un criminel et ne mérite pas ce qui lui est arrivé. C’est vraiment ridicule. J’espère que sa poursuite pour dommages va réussir.

I decided I preferred dealing with issues caused by the limited resources of a well-meaning community (And often largely corporate contributions, I know) rather than issues caused by some giant company’s malice and greed. Goes without saying I don’t use Chrome either or any Chromium-based web browser. It’s not just Linux. There’s no surprise “Now you gotta pay a subscription to get the next updates!” catch when I get up in the morning and I never have to figure out how to disable anti-features.

Basically every non-game program on my home computer I don’t strictly need for work is open-source, often worked on by volunteers or crowd-funded and that just kinda feels good, y’know? I decided to completely switch to Linux around 12-14 years ago and I sometimes laugh when I hear of the deliberate nonsense Windows users have to deal with at every major update. Or when installing basic software.

To install any program I want, it’s just a matter of opening a terminal, or GUI package manager like Pamac and typing its name or often a related keyword. It gets installed along with anything it requires. No need to cautiously find the proper website (Anyone remember when SourceForge messed with Gimp’s installer to put ads in it?), download an installer and launch that. All my programs get updated for me through that very same GUI, along with my desktop environment, drivers and the kernel. Don’t gotta think about it or wait for some popup in each and every program to tell me “Click here to update! 😌”. And my computer doesn’t randomly reboot or slow down on me.

And Edit:
Last thing, but the Windows basic desktop utilities, like the file browser, text editor and such are all so much worse than the most common Linux alternatives that it’s kind of sad. I don’t know how people function without tabs and split-view when moving files. And I haven’t even touched on how ridiculously customizable Linux desktops are. Nothing compares out there.

Probably never. They’re my third option after native packages and built-from-source packages/installs either manually or using the AUR. They’re convenient and the only option I tolerate of those newer package styles (Flatpak/Snap/AppImage), but seemingly having to download a new 800+MB runtime for small 32MB applications is ridiculously wasteful and I wouldn’t touch them if I didn’t have at least a TB of storage.

Pretty much my only nitpick is that we have no “Commenting as:” and “Posting as:” warnings. It blurs the line between accounts a bit too much in a platform that already adds lots of complexity by splitting the communities and accounts between various servers. Beyond that, its search function is everything I could ask for and it looks great! I’m sure it’ll only keep on getting better over time.

On Android I like Jerboa and Liftoff. 👀 Just my random suggestions.

There’s a line right at the end of an extremely obscure animated film from when I was a kid. It ain’t a great movie. And I didn’t fall in love with it even at the time, but that line somehow stuck in my mind to this day and I re-discovered it a couple months ago. I’ll just hint that it takes place in a sky world and Mark f*ckin’ Hamill does the narration. “Comme des anges” is the line in question (Since I saw it in French as a kid) but it probably translates to “Like angels” in English. I tried to find it and it was impossible to stream or buy that movie in any form nowadays.

You can make use of the operating system’s own text-to-speech systems, either as an accessibility feature or to create old-school voiced games. https://docs.godotengine.org/en/stable/tutorials/audio/text_to_speech.html It apparently should work out of the box on Windows and MacOS, but not all Linux distros will have the proper packages pre-installed.