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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 15th, 2023

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  • The ease of buying a quality laptop without having to worry about if it will run well with my OS.

    I’ve been using MacOS for about 8 years at work and I never really taken to it. It’s fine and I can do my work but I won’t use it if I hadn’t to (unless the only alternative was Windows). But one thing I really like about Macs is that you can buy one and you won’t have any headaches with battery life, software compatibility etc. You get decent hardware (let’s ignore the whole 8GB on an M3 = 16GB on other machine debacle) and know that it will work decently well with 3rd party software/hardware and if something breaks you can just bring into an Apple store.

    While there are dedicated Linux sellers (System76, Tuxedo Computeres, Starlabs), I’m hesitant to spend 2k on a computer just to find out that the build quality is subpar, the battery life sucks or that customer support will just ignore my requests (read some bad experiences on the Starlabs subreddit).





  • Firefox now supports a setting (in Preferences → Privacy & Security) to enable Global Privacy Control. With this opt-in feature, Firefox informs the websites that the user doesn’t want their data to be shared or sold.

    This sounds like Do Not Track revisited. The only difference that I can find (only skimmed the website) is, that there seems to be some legal support for this in the state of California.

    Now you can exercise your legal privacy rights in one step via Global Privacy Control (GPC), required under the California Consumer Protection Act (CCPA).

    I wonder:

    1. How does this differ from DNT?
    2. Does this this have any real chance to take off? From what I’ve heard, DNT has been rather counterproductive as it can be used to fingerprint users.



  • I’ve been vegan for 12 years and my position on this has changed somewhat over the years. Although, that’s mostly philosophical and doesn’t really affect my actions.

    I agree that our moral consideration should be based on the subjective experience of a being rather, instead of which biological category they belong to.

    This is why nowadays I believe that the consumption of an organism from the animal kingdom, that can be reasonably considered not an individual, is not a matter of moral good or bad. I think certain bivalves like scallops or oysters don’t have brains. Therefore it would be reasonable to assume they don’t have an individual experience that would be affected by killing/harvesting them.

    For me veganism is about respecting the desires of a non-human individual to not feel harm, not have their body exploited, their children taken away, and not have their life taken from them. It is about treating animals as individuals, not commodities. I don’t care about biological taxonomy.

    If that does not make me vegan, I don’t mind. I will still call myself vegan in everyday situation for two reasons:

    1. it is important to show representation, especially if you don’t “look like a vegan”. I’m just a (arguably) normal person who doesn’t want to exploit someone who doesn’t want to be exploited.
    2. my actions won’t dilute the definition of veganism in non-vegans’ eyes. What I mean is, that I don’t eat bivalves (salty goo sounds pretty gross) or wear animal products and therefore won’t be caught in a “gotcha” moment by non-vegans who may or may not care about why I think it’s okay to eat some animals but not others.

    So to (not) answer your question: at the end of the day it’s up to you if you want to call yourself a vegan or not. If you don’t fully align with the moral views that are held by most ethical vegans but still eat a vegan diet, maybe go with the term plant-based. If you think your views won’t really be subject of discussion or scrutiny in your everyday life and you mostly agree with a vegan worldview, call yourself vegan for the sake of simplicity and representation. If none of those answers feel right, don’t call yourself either and explain your dietary choices every time you eat in a social situation without using the words “vegan” or “plant-based” :D

    I hope that was somewhat helpful. Good luck!