Different people don’t like it for different reasons. Some people don’t like it because they think it has CIA financial backing (nope), and some people don’t like it because it requires your phone number, therefore it is not private (the privacy it provides is more than sufficient for anyone not actively being persecuted by a Five Eyes state), and some people don’t like it because it feels corporate (it’s a 501c3 nonprofit, and how corporate it feels is subjective).

I get distracted/overwhelmed fairly easily, so GNOME is a godsend. minimalistic top bar + on demand workspaces to throw my extra windows into = I can actually get stuff done.

Aquaman. the visual effects were ridiculous, the characters were one-dimensional, the soundtrack was…something, and the overall tone was that of a testosterone firehose to the face. i said the eight deadly words about halfway through, and i was thoroughly bored out of my mind despite action scene after action scene after action scene…the only reason why i didn’t just get up and leave was because i was watching with a group

if you’re looking for a nice ultraportable, System76 has you covered

i’m not informed much either, but here’s what i gather; it’s centralized around the proprietary Snap Store and you can’t run your own Snap repositories, Snap apps take ages to start up, and each Snap app is mounted as a separate partition (???). there’s a whole bunch of technical issues that go over my head too, and Snaps have seen so little adoption that Canonical basically had to twist the arms of flavor maintainers to drop Flatpak support and support Snap out of the box. it’s evidently so bad even Ubuntu’s official flavors wouldn’t support it until Canonical forced them to

it’s in the name: generative pre-trained transformer. the one thing ChatGPT and GPT-3/3.5/4 are truly good at is transforming data. it can restructure paragraphs to have a different flow, take class notes and make flashcards out of them (that’s how i use ChatGPT), or even take non-textual data and potentially present it in textual format if trained right

what?

shit just went from 0 to 100 real fucking quick

for real though, if you ask an LLM how to make a bomb, it’s not the LLM that’s the problem

Pirates of the Caribbean music intensifies

as others in this thread have mentioned, Linux Mint or Pop OS are the best for someone coming from Windows. both work really well out of the box. Linux Mint has a very Windows-like desktop, so it’s often recommended to people coming from Windows; but if you want a more unique experience Pop OS is the way to go

it redirects you to BreezeWiki, a no-bloat frontend for Fandom (example)

ugh yeah. especially the SEO war thing, the new website doesn’t even register on DuckDuckGo yet. at least there’s this extension called Indie Wiki Buddy which will hide Fandom results from search engines and redirect you to an independent wiki if you end up on Fandom anyway

answering your questions as best I can (I’m a straight male too) in order:

1. if he/him seems right to you, then your pronouns are he/him. if other pronouns seem right to you, then your pronouns are those pronouns. pronouns don’t have to match up with your gender or presentation, go with whatever you vibe with
2. when meeting new people, I give my name and pronouns. “hi, my name is salarua and my pronouns are he/him.” of course, it’s nice to give your pronouns when asked, but other than that it’s up to you
3. just including your pronouns in your profile is good. some people put them in their nicks, some in their bio or about me. if you have a Mastodon, Akkoma, Misskey, or Firefish account you can put your pronouns in your custom fields
4. you can try and figure out other people’s pronouns from how other people refer to them. many people will also give their pronouns if you introduce yourself with your pronouns. it’s not a faux pas to not know someone’s pronouns beforehand, although I admit I don’t know a non-awkward way to ask someone their pronouns
5. a good bet is to refer to people whose pronouns you don’t know as they/them. if you mispronoun someone by mistake, quietly correct yourself and continue with whatever you’re saying. “so after arriving at the office, he- sorry, they went to go see their supervisor about the presentation…” as long as it’s not done out of malice, people don’t mind being mispronouned if you acknowledge the slip-up and move on
6. I haven’t met anyone irl with neopronouns either. presumably people with neopronouns would go by them if they were among people they felt safe with. unfortunately most of the world isn’t safe :(

i don’t have one on hand, but it’s a physical letter sent through the mail which basically says “delete the copyrighted data we think you downloaded or we’re shutting off your internet”

i live in the US. seeding and torrenting in general is relatively safe here, although sometimes you’ll get a nastygram from your ISP because a copyright industry plant on one of the torrents told on you. the easiest way by far to prevent that is by getting a VPN. go with something paid (free ones do shady stuff) and with a no-logging policy. i use NordVPN because i know someone who pays for it and is letting me use it, but another great option is Mullvad

for every person who leeches on mobile data and can’t afford to seed, there’s someone who has a freakishly powerful rig that seeds like 17 different torrents 24 hours a day. if you can’t afford to seed, don’t worry about it, because people who can afford to seed often do. things balance out in the end

there’s a GNOME extension called Bedtime Mode that adds a quick setting to turn the screen grayscale: https://extensions.gnome.org/extension/4012/gnome-bedtime/

non-spoilery version: what do you do when you crawl out of your shelter? die, die again!

hi, anti-Meta person here: it’s not about how many users we have. it’s about Meta’s long track record of insufficient moderation and harvesting of personal data. thanks to their almost nonexistent moderation, they’ve facilitated genocides, let deadly disinformation spread unchecked, and contributed to the rise of fascism. and they harvest enough data from their platforms to create digital duplicates of us, and if they join the Fediverse, of course they’re going to harvest data from anyone federating with them too.

would you trust them to play nice in the Fediverse after all they’ve done?

Blindsight by Peter Watts. it’s a really unique take on first contact, but wow is it dark