To this I’d add that it is very common, and very easy, to install either MicroG or the real Gapps (Google Play Services, Play Store, etc) on LineageOS.

GrapheneOS has another added bonus of allowing you to install Google Play Services only in the “work” profile, leaving your main profile Google-free.

Personally, I think everyone should be at least a little worried about their phone potentially being seized by malicious state-sponsored actors. Whether it’s a power-tripping cop, airport security, or the New American Gestapo, this kind of thing is only becoming more common as time goes on. GrapheneOS has repeatedly been shown to be resistant to attacks that stock ROMs are vulnerable to, sometimes for months or years after Graphene patched the holes. LineageOS with an unlocked bootloader is likely to be less secure against any USB attack than stock.

Just my two cents. I love LineageOS but I would never feel comfortable traveling with an unlocked bootloader. Then again, it might be better to take a burner phone when traveling anyway.

Lemmy is a federated platform. That’s a new (or at least newly popular) term, but it’s not a new concept. It’s a lot like email, and the answers are going to be the same, for the same reasons:

Can you be banned from lemmy email ?

Not really. Your specific email provider might ban you, in which case you’d need to get a new email address from a different provider. Same deal with Lemmy; your Lemmy instance’s admins might ban you, but they have no power over other instances.

Where can i find the rules?

Your provider will have their own rules. Most email providers will have rules about not spamming, or conducting illegal activity, etc. etc. Most Lemmy instances will have some basic rules that boil down to “don’t be a jerk” listed in the sidebar on the main page. I see that your instance does exactly that.

why do need picture every time i post

I’m not sure what you mean. Can you elaborate?

Hmm, maybe I’m thinking more iPhone 3G era than original iPhone era? I recall a time when there weren’t many apps yet and you could put out anything marginally-functional for 99¢ on the app store and get some quick cash from it. I don’t remember $10-20 being the norm but maybe that was before I was onboard.

I’ve certainly been burned by apps either breaking with iOS updates or no longer being available to download on the App Store (so you could keep using them, but only on existing devices that already had them installed).

I blame Apple for setting the standard of $1-$3 for an app with lifetime updates. And also for making it so old apps stop working on newer OSes after just a few years. The business model was broken from the start. It was great at first but the bubble burst in record time.

That was nearly unheard of just 20 years ago.

Also, people’s goals change and “secure” means something different.

When I was making half as much as I am now, I felt fairly secure. I could pay my rent, I had no credit card debt, and I had a few months’ worth of savings. Money was not a day-to-day worry. Most of my peers were in debt and/or living paycheck-to-paycheck so I felt like I was living large.

Now I am objectively more secure but I feel less secure because I am thinking about retirement, childcare, college funds, and elder care. I have nowhere near enough savings to retire in the foreseeable future. I honestly don’t know if I’ll ever get there.

Canadian police seem pretty level-headed here.

“There was not a ding on the bus. He did a great job,” said McKenna said. “It’s comical but at the same time it’s serious. We’re thankful nobody was hurt.”

“We didn’t want to spook him,” he said. “We didn’t want to make this a tragedy.”

The problem here is education.

And I’m not just talking about “average joes” who don’t know the first thing about statistics. It is mind-boggling how many people with advanced degrees do not understand the difference between correlation and causation, and will argue until they’re blue in the face that it doesn’t affect results.

AI is not helping. Modern machine learning is basically a correlation engine with no concept of causation. The idea of using it to predict the future is dead on arrival. The idea of using it in any prescriptive role in social sciences is grotesque; it will never be more than a violation of human dignity.

Billions upon billions of dollars are being invested in putting lipstick on that pig. At this point it is more lipstick than pig.

Locals are crazy about these regional chains because their frame of reference is the national chains — namely McDonalds and Burger King. They are usually MUCH better than McDonalds (which is not saying much) at about the same price, with no other direct competition in the local area.

Everything seems great compared to McDonalds.

I think it’s just that Mastodon posts in Lemmy are weird.

Toots don’t have titles so it just duplicates the content, and then you have a mess of @ and # tags that don’t make sense in Lemmy.

Cross-ecosystem federation is cool but also leaves a lot to be desired.

Debian Stable staying true to form!

Thanks for the writeup. Good stuff.

I’m a software developer first and a gamer second. Being a “gaming” distro does not detract from anything else, really. It just means that getting proper GPU acceleration is easy, and you’re likely to want that for development too. That was actually why I chose Bazzite. I was tired of wrestling with CUDA and ROCm.

It’s not “gaming” vs “developing”. That’s a false dichotomy.

The real choice is immutable vs traditional. And I’ll admit, immutable distros have a big learning curve. But it forces you to learn techniques that will make your life easier no matter where you go. The time I spent wrestling with dependencies on Debian or Ubuntu or OpenSuse just because I didn’t know about Distrobox…

Unless your needs are very narrow and unchanging, you’re likely to run into something that’s a giant pain in the ass no matter which distro you choose. I used to use Ubuntu LTSR so I could install a few big things in easy mode, but it made everything else harder because it was so outdated. Switched to OpenSuse Tumbleweed and everything was modern but those few vendors don’t support it so I had to wrestle with dependencies.

The answer to this problem is Distrobox. It’s the answer on Ubuntu, it’s the answer on OpenSuse, and it’s the answer on Bazzite. I’m never going back to dependency hell because I can just run everything the environment it is specifically designed for.

If you’re wondering “should I use distro X, Y, or Z”, the answer is simply “yes”. :D

On bazzite, your search order for apps/packages should be something like:

1. Flathub
2. ujust. This is more for general configs than specific apps, but take a look at what it offers.
3. Homebrew
4. Distrobox
5. Podman/Docker images
6. rpm-ostree

rpm-ostree is a last resort because it compromises the “atomic” principle of the system, but in a pinch it will give you access to anything you could get with dnf on a regular Fedora install.

Don’t sleep on Distrobox. I have a Debian box so I can run Signal from its official repo and install Geany with both GUI and CLI support. Once you export applications from distrobox they behave like first-class citizens within your desktop.

I strongly recommend trying Distrobox. If you instead hop distros, you’re going to find yourself in a similar situation eventually, where something is unreasonably difficult. That’s why Distrobox exists; so you can get the best of all worlds.

It makes sense to me IF it actually works.

Having extra capacity when a device is brand-new isn’t a huge boon, but having stable capacity over the long term would be. At least for me.

Of course this will depend on your habits. If you replace your phone every year, then it doesn’t matter. If you’re a light user and only go through a couple charge cycles per week, it’ll matter less than if you go through 1-2 cycles per day.

Personally I’m at around 1 cycle per day on my current phone, and after nearly 3 years (over 1000 charge cycles now) the battery life is shit — much worse than just 80% of its original battery life. Performance also suffers. With my last phone, I replaced the battery after 3 years and I was amazed at how much faster it was. I didn’t realize throttling was such a big problem.

I might replace my current battery, but it’s such a pain, and it costs more than my phone is realistically worth.

WTF is up with that title. Jesus.

I use Wayland now but there are still apps I run in X mode. Notably mpv and Firefox, because I cannot for the life of me configure them sensibly in Wayland, and I don’t want to write arcane KWin scripts just to get widow sizing/positioning to stay the way I want them on launch. I tried; it was extremely frustrating and still not quite functional.

Perhaps there are other window managers that would make my life easier. I haven’t tried many, but in principle, there is no way for the widow manager to know the correct size and location of new windows for arbitrary applications, so I doubt it. I consider this a user-hostile design choice in Wayland and I pray it will change in the future.

In practice they’re cheap. I saw the Pixel 9 on sale for under $400 before the 9a was even released.

MSRP is an absolute joke, but most people either get it for much cheaper than that, or think they’re getting it for much cheaper through obfuscated costs with carrier deals.

Also, brand reputations tend to outlive reality by a decade or more, so people still think Pixels have great software and Samsung is bloated as hell. The reality is that Samsung and Google have met in the middle.

I can’t fucking wait for a non-Pixel GrapheneOS phone. So tired of Google’s shit.

Yeah, there is no consensus on quantum gravity. There are competing theories, none of which have any viable path to test.

Here’s the abstract from a paper from last year at https://arxiv.org/pdf/gr-qc/0601043 (PDF, unfortunately):

Freeman Dyson has questioned whether any conceivable experiment in the real universe can detect a single graviton. If not, is it meaningful to talk about gravitons as physical entities? We attempt to answer Dyson’s question and find it is possible concoct an idealized thought experiment capable of detecting one graviton; however, when anything remotely resembling realistic physics is taken into account, detection becomes impossible, indicating that Dyson’s conjecture is very likely true. We also point out several mistakes in the literature dealing with graviton detection and production.

Edit: That said, the paper does address this. They cover a variety of QG theories and try to address the fundamental requirements any theory must meet.

As we do not have a fully consistent theory of quantum gravity, several different axiomatic systems have been proposed to model quantum gravity Witten:1985cc ; Ziaeepour:2021ubo ; Faizal2024 ; bombelli1987spacetime ; Majid:2017bul ; DAriano:2016njq ; Arsiwalla:2021eao . In all these programs, it is assumed a candidate theory of quantum gravity is encoded as a computational formal system

ℱQ​G={ℒQ​G,ΣQ​G,ℛalg}.

It’s over my head, personally.

The majority of people will trail behind by 5-10 years, same as always. As long as a small minority at the cutting edge continue to use and develop better things, everyone will have access to them eventually.

They announced that they’re working with an OEM to support new non-pixel phones (perhaps even shipped with GOS).

The Pixel 9 series will be supported for another 6 years, and GOS support for the Pixel 10 is probably coming after Google releases QPR1 source. Hopefully there will be viable replacements by then.

Google is obviously going to keep making this more difficult but the rest of the world isn’t going to just sit still.

Other terms that made the shortlist of finalists for this year’s Word of the Year included “agnetic,”

Surely they mean “agentic”, right? Right???

I searched for “agnetic” to see if I was out of the loop and it’s kind of funny, kind of sad. I found a lot of what I guess is AI slop that took a typo and just ran with it. Like this one: https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/clash-intelligences-agnetic-ai-vs-agent-explained-robin-biwre

Agnetic AI is a newer conceptual framework that extends beyond the traditional agent-based model. The term “Agnetic” is derived from the word “magnetic,” signifying its dynamic, adaptive nature.

https://www.agnetic.ai/ also looks like slop, but it’s realllllly hard to distinguish between AI bullshit and traditional tech marketing bullshit.