I mean I don’t have the amount of time necessary to go into how dirty past presidents have been and I certainly don’t have the knowledge at my fingertips. But also, I think the stuff like Watergate and Monica Lewinski is barely a blip on the chart when you put Trump on it too. Which is not to say I condone the behavior of those presidents or seek to normalize their behavior. Just that from a numerical perspective it barely registers.

Like an order of magnitude worse?

• No sitting president before him has been a convicted felon.
• No sitting president before him has been involved in the sheer volume of sexual scandals from assault to cheating to being implicated in possible pedophilia.
• No sitting president before him has refused to return literally boxes and boxes of classified documents which he kept as trophies (or possibly as items for sale) while storing them in extremely inappropriate ways. (This is extremely different from Biden, btw, who promptly returned a few accidentally retained documents. Trump was playing shell games with them, repeatedly swearing he had returned them all while doing things like loading them on planes to move to other locations, etc.)
• No sitting president before him has attempted to overthrow the government when they lost an election.
• The level of bribery and corruption in his administration is off the charts.
• The number of lies he tells has always been off the charts. (“I’ve never heard of Project 2025!” while having given a speech to its members and now following its plans to dismantle the federal government.)
• His department heads have all been picked to dismantle the departments they’re in. (Project 2025 again)

And then of course there is the christofascism angle, which is extremely disturbing because he definitely plans to never leave power again. He’s currently trying hard to normalize use of military force against US citizens so he can seize control of the elections to make sure they go his way.

As far as I know, there still aren’t any non-WebKit engines for iOS, even though the possibility is theoretically there as of 17.4… (It may need to be EU-only? I’m not clear on that part.)

It is somewhat ironic they’re showing a Mac in that shot… did Office even run on them at that stage of the game.

I mean… it’s hilarious that people still use Chrome when it has been a known back actor for years and years. Firefox is an excellent option and the more people that use it, the more it encourages companies to keep supporting open web standards.

Likewise, if you set an iPhone to use Advanced Data Protection, it’s probably quite a bit more secure from intrusion than a similar Android phone. (And definitely more secure from subpoena.)

Thank you. Glad to know I am not the only one that got triggered, lol.

One thing I will say is here in the desert, we don’t actually want them either. Water is already an issue. Power costs are already an issue when you’re cooling your house all summer/heating it all winter. Data centers provide minimal jobs for the amount of resources they use in a community and the downsides have been discovered in a number of places around the country too (ranging from noise to increased costs to resource shortages). Keep your data centers off our cactii!

I literally choose all my books sight unseen from library website or online shop websites based solely on recommendations or prior author experiences. The cover art plays zero role in my decision to buy.

Hell yes! Thanks for that, made my day.

Only two days until the new album drops too, but who’s counting? 😹

That would be the dumbest thing he could possibly do to himself. Honestly I hope he is smarter than that because Putin would turn him upside down and shake him until every last nickel falls out of his pockets, and put it all into the war effort against the Ukraine.

Humorous rogue cyborgs aren’t super common, alas. The tongue-in-cheek humor of it reminds me of Stainless Steel Rat a bit, and occasionally Larry Niven’s stuff too. His Gil Hamilton character is pretty droll at times, and it comes through in some of his short stories about him. (For pure humor from Niven, try “The Flight of the Horse”.)

You might try Strata by Terry Pratchett, which is a bit in both camps? It’s a one-off, but a lot of fun. Can’t say it has anything at all to do with rogue cyborgs though.

I mean I’ve been using DuoLingo for like a decade (only paid the last 2 years) and it’s been very useful until now.

I’ll be looking for a new Spanish app when my subscription expires next year now, alas.

Honestly I have used Blue Sky and Mastodon and Mastodon feels a lot more elegant to me, personally.

What I don’t get is why anyone would ever choose commercial social media again given there are Activity Pub clones for practically everything now, where you aren’t the product. So many people learned nothing from the ongoing Twitter debacle and the zillion Facebook privacy scandals apparently.

It is always hilarious and strange to see the buy-in on these things. We have a single coder in his late 60s that has bought in hard to spicy autocorrect. Meanwhile, the youngest on our team (like 22) won’t touch it with a 10 ft pole.

The other issue is just the morality of it. Do I know people that got rich on Bitcoin? Yes. Do I feel like they’re participating in a pyramid scheme still? Also yes. And with spicy autocorrect, where they got their training data for any and all of these models is so freaking morally bankrupt, and they’re desperate to paper over that and make it “ok” for businesses to use it.

Had to click through to change my downvote to an upvote, lol.

Literally all we need is everyone to kick in a couple bucks a month and I think everything would be in great shape. I think the user base is like 65k+ users currently?

They need to get the fuck rid of that executive. Whoever has been running FF the last couple years has done a terrible job in picking directions for them to go, IMHO.

Yeah, I’m still in AZ, thus my question, haha.