Not for me, I've had an increase 🥲

Has some Lovecraft vibes 🥳

Haha, yeah time travel strays in to deus ex machina territory pretty easily. It can make for an interesting story if done well, but usually ends up feeling cheap and lowering the emotional stakes.

Interesting, I'm working my way through Voyager now, I'll keep this in mind when I run in to those episodes. It makes me think of Stargate Universe too, lots of time travel in that show. They seem to always give you the perspective of the successive version of the group and the "originals" get sloughed off pretty regularly.

I don't know man, those are some strange behaviors. Can't say I've experienced any of them. There does seem to be a common theme of slow and delayed responses, that is almost certainly a hardware issue from my experience, but that doesn't line up with the specs you mention.

Regarding the privilege issues, running a general user without superuser privileges is a standard practice for Linux. You can change your user to a superuser though, there are plenty of walkthroughs available to accomplish that. That will keep you from having to run sudo, doas or enter your password as often. Some things will always require a passcode though, as that's just what the best practices of the tech landscape indicate.

+1 for that Jeff Geerling video. Excellent tutorial.

This was posted three days later:

Samsung's Google messages rival isn't dead after all in fact it's just been upgraded

There may be a few others that handle RCS besides those two, but their ties may be just as unsavory as the first two.

That's pretty awesome that there are at least some laws about telecom provider privacy where you are! Here in the states they can basically do whatever they want with whatever you give them 😓

If you want RCS, you have to go with one of the corporate apps like Google Messages or Samsung Messages. It's sad and I hope the situation changes eventually because RCS is much better than SMS and more ubiquitous than signal.

Supported and justified by the stockholders isn't surprising. It's the fact that this column writer is so unabashed in their reasoning that surprised me. It's not often that you see regular, bottom level consumers enthusiastically using the same reasoning as a stock holder. Usually they come at it from more of a "they produce great products, they care about providing a great service" standpoint. However, someone who writes articles for a platform called "Apple Insider" is likely to have some level of stock in the company.

I've never stumbled across Apple Insider before, it's quite the apologist for the company. Here's some tone deaf quotes from the article that made me laugh:

"It's true that the buck stops at the CEO, but without Tim Cook, Apple would not have so many bucks."

I guess if you make a lot of money you get a pass for allowing misleading and anti-consumer marketing campaigns?

"If billions and trillions are hard numbers to imagine, here's another one. Apple could, if its valuation could be converted to cash without loss, give every person living in the continental USA a free iPhone 16e — and then 13 spare ones. Each."

I love how they chose to illustrate Apple's obscene level of wealth with how much it could benefit people if they ever distributed that wealth through altruistic giving 😂

Heres a summary of the predictions made, from never all the way up to within the year. It seems to me the closer you get to the dollar bill the sooner the projections become.

"Some experts predict it will never happen..."

"Some experts argue that human intelligence is more multifaceted than what the current definition of AGI describes." (That AGI is not possible.)

"Most agree that AGI will arrive before the end of the 21st century."

"Some researchers who’ve studied the emergence of machine intelligence think that the singularity could occur within decades."

Current surveys of AI researchers are predicting AGI around 2040"

"Entrepreneurs are even more bullish, predicting it around ~2030"

"The CEO of Anthropic, who thinks we’re right on the threshold—give it about 12 more months or so."

I feel your pain 😅🫠

Yeah, just to add another confirmation to the other comments, if you have a separate home partition you can reuse it with a new / partition and expect it to work fine. The only stuff that gets saved in your home folder is comfiguration files for your apps, along with whatever actual files you have stored. You can even swap distros (Ubuntu/Arch) and keep your home folder, though sometimes the config files and settings don't translate perfectly.

Storygraph looks super interesting! I'm going to check that out for sure.

The best horror is rooted in something that we see to some degree in actual life. This is good!

Its true! I think the underlying Linux bones help with that. The one thing that moved me away from Kobo is the notes export limitations. You have to install a mod to get the functionality, then you can manually export them to a txt file in the home directory of the device. Its good, but not as flexible as it could be.

It kind of blows me away when ereader producers don't have deeply integrated and functional notes management systems, its such a big part of the device! I suspect it may be linked to vendor lock in though, each company wants you to stay with their services and so make it difficult to extract your notes 😕

Nooks were some of the best you could get there in the early days! Having such a large hacking community made fun to tinker with them.

Seriously. It seems like the subconscious anxieties and fears of the writer's mind come through in statements like this and a few others. Whatever positives (real and imagined) there are about the situation, there is an underlying loss of personal autonomy that causes a sense of unease. The thing that's continuing to intrigue me now is: did the writer intend for that to come through, showing the losses a society of that nature would sustain as a commentary on those that promote it, or are they unaware that their words reveal that distress and anxiety? Idk, weird article.

I started out (in recent years, previously had an old B&N Nook Simpletouch) with a Libra H2O. It was a well-made device, Kobo is a good company.

Currently I use a Boox Page (7 inch) for reading and a Boox Go (10.3 ich) for studying and notating.

Downside for Boox is the Chinese firmware that's basically a black box. The upside is they are the most flexible of any e-reader regarding self-hosting your own library and syncing across custom or personal services. I've been happy with the devices overall.