The portal is a genuinely fun idea. I'd love to see those all around!

But... people being people got to ruin all the fun. So... I don't suppose I'll be seeing one of these any time soon.

Blah.

Sucks, but makes sense.

I'm surprised they even attempted to use that domain. The instance still exists and will need to be routed through a new domain. Which, again sucks, because any reference links will be broken now... which... again... has me wondering why they even went with that domain in the first place. Albeit, it was a clever use of a top level. I wonder how many others are doing the same.

🤷🏽‍♂️

“Banishing me does absolutely nothing to solve this problem,” Noem told reporters Friday. “All it does is help those who are perpetuating horrible violence and crimes against the people of South Dakota.”

Is there any evidence to the claims that she's been making? This article didn't mention any details.

Doesn't say much good about a person's god if Donald Trump is their envoy. Of all the people god could send, they chose him... 😏

May all pussies--man, woman, and every gender--be fortunate enough to experience the grab of his glorious, tiny, and orange hand.

Amen.

Finally a sentence that makes some sense.

But, honestly, based on what DePape told police--that he was on "a suicide mission" and wanted to take Nancy Pelosi hostage, question her, and break her kneecaps if she lied--unless psychiatrists clear him in 30 yrs... he should remain in prison. There is no way society is safe with someone like that free.

It would be a huge undertaking, but a Fitness and Health tracker / aggregator that could replace Google Fit and the likes.

I really can't bear how Google, Apple, Samsung, and all these big companies are the primary holders of our most intimate information. I've put some measures in place to limit who gets what, but it would be a huge boon to be the sole maintainer of my own info.

The problem is that the various apps and devices which report data won't immediately support syncing with a FOSS upstart...

The app I use for grabbing my weight and BMI can only sync with a few other apps. The app I use for calorie and diet tracking can likewise only sync with a few apps. They happen to have Google fit in common, so I use that as an intermediary to transfer weight to the calorie/diet app. All my steps, exercise, and sleep stay in Zepp, separate from them all.

It sure would be nice to have one service/application to rule them all and a secure method of storing one's own personal information without having to give it to the tech companies. Sure, use one of the many cloud services but encrypt all the data so that they can't steal it. Yadda yadda.

One can dream.

I hope this translates to the voting polls.

Gaming. In the car. 😐

For goodness' sake, do something about it then. Stop repeating these same words over and over and over, year after year after year.

But Israel's not doing anything wrong, so why worry...

/s

HeliBoard with Swipe + FUTO have made replacing gboard possible for me. I feel like it's been a 90% replacement, a far greater degree than some of the decent keyboards currently available. I regularly use but swipe and speech to text in two languages. I'm really really happy and grateful for these tools. 💜

Just in case I'm asked, here's the basics steps to get it going:

• I downloaded the release from https://github.com/Helium314/HeliBoard and then installed. (Or set it up via Obtainium until its ready for F-Droid release)
• I downloaded the Swipe library linked on the HeliBoard Github page from here.
• Under HeliBoard settings -> advanced, I clicked "load gesture library" and selected the downloaded swipe library
• And for voice input, l downloaded Futo from the play store. FYI, it's free and offline, but not FOSS.

That's it.

Just setup the two apps with your specifics like the theme and etc. This is what mine looks like now:

I love ads. I love what Microsoft and the likes are doing.

Said no one ever

sighs

Yet something else to disable in Windows. I'm losing track of each thing at this point.

I would be really interested in seeing this broken down by nation. Are any countries doing this better than others. Can others learn from them?

Or... are we simply a complete failure as a species... destined to become [choose your post apocalyptic story]

The modern prison-communication industry emerged four decades ago, after the federal government broke up A.T. & T.’s Bell System. New phone companies competed for customers by slashing prices. But inside prisons and jails a different model developed: telecom companies persuaded local officials to sign exclusive service contracts in exchange for hefty commissions. The costs of these commissions were passed along to incarcerated “customers” and their families, who lacked consumer choice. Price gouging was the inevitable result. By the nineties, prison phone-call prices in some jurisdictions had soared to twenty dollars for fifteen minutes.

I'll never understand how and why prisons and anything related are allowed to be privatized.

People make mistakes and some are prison worthy. However, we want them to do their time, grow in the process, and ultimately return to society as better people. Instead, we throw people in prison who don't belong there, keep out privileged ones who do far worse and need prison, don't provide the needed help, and make prison so miserable that people can't actually grow into something better.

WTF. I jokingly wanted to be a king (dictator) as a teen because I figured it would be faster to fix things... starting with firing every politician (although at that age I said 'off with their heads'). It's such a horrible idea. It wouldn't work. But then that thought comes back in moments like this and I'm like, "just give me a few years to fix things and clean things up". Ugh. No wonder people eventually end up doing insane things. How long can we wait for reform?

Just another of the many reasons that RTO is essential!

/s 😐

“The policy that has never been far from my mind for the past six months is the nearly unqualified support for the government of Israel, which has enabled and empowered the killing and starvation of tens of thousands of innocent Palestinians,” Major Mann wrote in the post, which noted that he had emailed his comments to co-workers on April 16. “This unconditional support also encourages reckless escalation that risks wider war.”

It's no small thing for him to make this statement publicly. I hope that him doing so does more good than the negative repercussions this will inevitably have for him.

Also, I've not heard of the source so I thought I would share a couple more:

• https://www.nytimes.com/2024/05/13/us/army-officer-resigns-gaza-israel.html
• https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/article/2024/may/13/military-resignation-gaza-war

So glad to hear there was an arrest. Hoping for justice and that this person gets the much needed help they need.

Alternative source link for those interested: https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-69030468

This is horrific on so many levels. I can't imagine how much trauma this is all causing. 😭

I remember seeing this warning and then nothing coming out of. It seemed so vague and strange. The atrocities never end. 😖

I wonder what Washington shared with Moscow and how the Kremlin chose to act or not act on that information...

I was waiting for some news on this and I'm so grateful to hear that he's actually gonna be punished.

Absolutely nothing can make up for what he did, but I pray to the cosmos that this deters other fools.

It's very curious to me how the economic indicators can seem so positive while people are still feeling the pangs of increased prices across the board.

There have been various articles/studies shared recently which indicate corporations have been taken advantage of consumers. We've heard terms like "greed'flation" to describe it. This article then says Biden alluding to this "is suspicious to many economists."

Are economic indicators not able to capture "greedflation"? Is it a thing or not? Something I need to do more reading on I suppose.

UPDATE: example article / study

• Fortune: The biggest study of ‘greedflation’ yet looked at 1,300 corporations to find many of them were lying to you about inflation
• The referenced joint study by think tanks IPPR and Common Wealth found profiteering by some of the world’s biggest companies forced prices up significantly higher than costs during 2022.

There needs to be a way to call for help from unarmed specialists. 😖

Christianity is quite broad and this question will yield a different answer depending on the variant.

The example tract you shared looks like a Chick tract (or similar). That's a specific breed of American Evangelicalism. Unfortunately, the number of followers in this brand of theology is quite numerous in the United States.

Evangelicals are definitely proponents of education, but very specifically things that align with their theology. So education in dogma, apologetics, and their brand of theology is heavily pushed.

Unfortunately, education in the sciences (particularly biology) is actively fought against because their theology and the sciences conflict on a number of matters. So long as the science agrees with their theology, they're okay with people being educated in it. That which disagrees with their interpretation of scripture, is interpreted as lies from Satan polluting people's minds and turning humanity from God.

These Christians will always speak of how important education is, but it takes the form of indoctrination. The more they can solidify people in their beliefs, the better and more "truly" educated they are as a result. If you believe in the sciences of evolutionary biology, then you've been deceived and misled.

With that said though... it's important to remember that there are quite a number of Christians that are not adherents of this form of evangelicalism and who are strong proponents of the sciences.

Religion is about control. The more fundamental the religion is, the stronger that control needs to be. This isn't a Christian problem or even an evangelical problem. It's common with numerous religions and why so many devastating wars I've been rooted in religion. This problem is a religious problem.

Anti-science misinformation is something that affects my relationships with numerous people in my life.

Empathy and patience seem to be the only response that has any positive impact, but it simply isn't enough to combat the massive amount of indoctrination driving these beliefs.

Ugh. It's so frustrating and I feel helpless so often. And things just seem to get worse. 😭

This is good. Other western nations should now follow.

The Russian disinformation campaign favors Trump? Say it isn't so!

This is exactly what I was wondering. I was hoping I would be wrong, but damn...

A White House official shared more information Friday evening in a statement reported by multiple outlets.

"Earlier this month, the US government had information about a planned terrorist attack in Moscow — potentially targeting large gatherings, to include concerts — which prompted the State Department to issue a public advisory to Americans in Russia," said Adrienne Watson, spokesperson for the White House National Security Council.

"The US government also shared this information with Russian authorities in accordance with its longstanding 'duty to warn' policy," Watson said, referring to the US policy in the intelligence community to notify potential victims, regardless of whether or not they are US citizens, of certain credible impending threats

...

Putin addressed the warnings a couple weeks later, criticizing the warning three days ago as "provocative."

Per TASS, the Russian president said on March 19 the aim of "the recent provocative statements of a number of official Western structures about the possibility of terrorist attacks in Russia" was harming Russian society.

"All this resembles outright blackmail and the intention to intimidate and destabilize our society," Putin said, according to state media reporting on his remarks.

Future humanity, if you even exist, please have mercy on us when you look back at this age. 😮‍💨

I've been using LibreOffice for a number of years without issue. Literally takes care of all my word processing and spreadsheet needs. I don't miss MS Office at all, which I use daily at work.

I also just saw this. What a travesty.

Putin addressed the warnings a couple weeks later, criticizing the warning three days ago as "provocative."

Per TASS, the Russian president said on March 19 the aim of "the recent provocative statements of a number of official Western structures about the possibility of terrorist attacks in Russia" was harming Russian society.

"All this resembles outright blackmail and the intention to intimidate and destabilize our society," Putin said, according to state media reporting on his remarks.

Future humanity, if you even exist, please have mercy on us when you look back at this age. 😮‍💨

So my "prepper" neighbor is on to something...

I'll never understand sentencing.

A 21-year-old Florida man was sentenced Monday to three and a half years in prison for firebombing a Southern California Planned Parenthood clinic in 2022, federal prosecutors said.

A co-defendant, 24-year-old Chance Brannon, was sentenced last month to nine years in prison. Brannon, of San Juan Capistrano, California, was an active-duty Marine stationed at Camp Pendleton at the time of the bombing.

Another co-defendant, Tibet Ergul, has pleaded guilty to the charges against him. He is scheduled to be sentenced May 30.

Psychologically speaking, perhaps deterrence being a goal of punishment isn't all that effective. I don't know what it would take to persuade a person from such an act, but whatever that is... that's what the prison term needs to be.

I presume these people have radical thinking, so perhaps no amount of prison time, whatever it might, is enough. Especially if they believe they were serving their god in the process. Religion is a powerful driving force. Ugh.

These are the kinds of things that make me less inclined to show compassion to my fellow humans. And I don't like that.

Why can't we have that Gene Roddenberry Star Trek future now? 😭

I've no skin in the game related to this device or software. I simply don't care. However, in terms of an AI assistant, I am curious if there is anything on the market, including this ~APK~ device, that is worth using. For someone who is privacy centric, advert avoidant, and security focused... does (or even can) such an app/tool exist?

Yeah, this is most probably true.

Honestly though, I don't even know what most of the generic domains are that were created. It's still deeply ingrained in me that any serious website should be using .com, .net, or .org. But... the amount of domains that were purchased just for the purpose of resale at an astronomical value has made so many of those unreachable.

There are some dot-coms that I have wanted for years which have been sitting stagnantly for more than two decades. I'd love to buy them, but there's no way I'd pay the asking price. At least generic TLDs break that stalemate for a lot of folks.

This is not a logistics problem; it is a political problem. Rather than look to the US military to build a work-around, the US should insist on immediate humanitarian access using the roads and entry points that already exist.

Exactly. The pier is unnecessary. As an additional supplement, sure. But as the primary means to addresses the crisis... this is a poor solution.

If the plight of Gazan civilians mattered to the US government, then this is not the way. There's much more direct and timely solutions that are intentionally being bypassed.

Perhaps we use search engines for different purposes... 🤔

I don't use Google, but I definitely use my preferred search engine numerous times daily.

This is pretty wild and I was excited to show it to my daughter and send her a gif example. 💜

I've used other software for a long time and she's been using krita with her graphics tablet but I'm very tempted to make krita my primary now.

Development ceased.

Company computing assets are managed. One normally doesn't get to override IT policy without business justification.