Both I and my book feel personally attacked by this cartoon.

Anal Pilot

I’m middle aged.

Yeah that was my assumption because he looks middle-aged to me. Found out after I wrote that he’s like 35? How the fuck can you look that haggard when you’re a 30-something content creator raking in the money from your parents’ basement!

It’s the natural progression for a 20-something piece-of-shit gamer edgelord. When he hits middle age he pivots into being a miserable racist piece-of-shit bore.

They don’t need to. There’s always a core of alt-right loud mouths in every parish who try to force their political opinions down everyone else’s throats.

Sometimes it’s the parish priest and their hard-right lackeys. Sometimes it’s leaders in the Knights of Columbus council for the parish. Sometimes it’s just regular church-goers. But there always seems to be a little group of them regardless.

Most parishioners just nod and smile and then disregard those guys. But my point is that even when the church officially forbids political endorsements in a higher level, others do it on a local level.

I feel bad for all the sane, reasonable people in Texas. I know they are in the minority. But they are getting dragged down this black hole of misery and stupidity too. And through no fault of their own. It’s got to suck to see your vote for common sense and open-mindedness count for nothing year after year.

Texas, you really need to stop electing greedy, sociopathic assholes to public office. I know it’s difficult due to corruption, gerrymandering, and the unflinching stupidity of a small majority of the electorate. But this should be (yet another) wake-up call.

That’s a good point. And to add to it, I’ve tried using Briar as an emergency option if there’s no Internet. And there seems to be a massive flaw in that scenario: you need the Internet to authenticate yourself on the app. So if there’s no Internet it’s useless. I just tried switching off WiFi and 5G on my phone and yup, can’t log in, so can’t use it.

I don’t have any empirical evidence for you on this topic, but in my opinion yes, I think some people are - especially with oral language adaptation. And I think I’m one of them too.

I’ve tried learning French on and off for most of my life. Did it in school for several years, got a French tutor who helped me scrape by with a C in it, spent a few years with it on Duo Lingo (I know I know, that so is far from perfect), spent time watching French news. And after all that I’d say my French language skills aren’t even closer to a conversational level. I especially struggle with the oral side of the language, even though multiple teachers have told me I have a good jack for pronunciation.

I haven’t lived there, so maybe that would push my over the edge? But I don’t know. I think I’m in the same boat as you.

The language your are learning also factors in. I’ve also tried learning Spanish and have found that easier. Meanwhile, I tried learning Mandarin and was completely lost. And English is often described as being ready to learn at as basic level but difficult to master. It’s such a relatively unstructured language with so many weird exceptions.

But with all that said, don’t give up! It might just take longer for the oral part to lock in. And your written English is excellent.

The interesting thing for me is that Grok was originally pretty ‘woke’ itself. Then Musk lobotomized it and turned it into a Nazi.

100% agree about boycotting everything that toxic nepo-baby asshole touches. Tesla, Twitter, Space X, whatever.

I just went into my settings after reading this article (and getting a bit frustrated that it was a wall of text with no clear instructions right up front).

I did a search in settings for “gemini” and found the Gemini settings. There’s no clear ‘off’ switch. But there’s is an option to switch back to Google Assistant. So I did that. And not when I search for Gemini in settings it urges me to enable Gemini.

I’m taking that as a good sign that I’ve disabled it permanently. Thought I’d post this info in case it helps someone else. Or so if I’m incorrect somebody else can correct me.

This is a great idea, but it would be difficult to manage.

It reminds me of the instant messenger wars during the late 1990s/early 2000s.

AIM (AOL Instant Messenger) had a virtual monopoly on the industry, and so when Microsoft started breaking into it with MSN Messenger they cracked AIM’s protocol so their users could communicate with AIM users. This enraged AOL, and there was a wild cat-and-mouse updates battle for a few months. AOL would push an update to block Microsoft, then Microsoft would push an update to get around that. Sometimes there were multiple updates from both sides per day.

And then there was Trillian messenger just sneaking through the middle providing access to both, mostly unnoticed (at least for a while).

Anchor? I hardly knew her!

ETA: happy cake day.

Okay. But one of my points still stands that there are already a bunch of p2p Bluetooth-based messaging apps out there.

Oh great, yet another secure messaging app.

Getting people to move off Messenger or even WhatsApp is tricky enough already for to interview and resistance to change. But even when you can coax them to move, you then often end up in a debate about where to move to. Signal, Briar, Viber, whatever proprietary thing Apple is currently pushing, or the thousands of other options/apps. I guess we can just add this one to that long list.

He’s very creative when it comes to pissing his money down the drain, I’ll give him that.

I try to use local stores or other websites, and only use Amazon if I can’t find what I need there. But at least half the time I end up having to use Amazon because I can’t find what I need.

It’s probably a kind of vicious cycle: as Amazon eats further into profits of other companies they are more limited in what they can offer.

Firewall-free link.

Incoming second pardon from Trump for this guy, probably.