Has some Lovecraft vibes 🥳

I don't know man, those are some strange behaviors. Can't say I've experienced any of them. There does seem to be a common theme of slow and delayed responses, that is almost certainly a hardware issue from my experience, but that doesn't line up with the specs you mention.

Regarding the privilege issues, running a general user without superuser privileges is a standard practice for Linux. You can change your user to a superuser though, there are plenty of walkthroughs available to accomplish that. That will keep you from having to run sudo, doas or enter your password as often. Some things will always require a passcode though, as that's just what the best practices of the tech landscape indicate.

+1 for that Jeff Geerling video. Excellent tutorial.

This was posted three days later:

Samsung's Google messages rival isn't dead after all in fact it's just been upgraded

There may be a few others that handle RCS besides those two, but their ties may be just as unsavory as the first two.

That's pretty awesome that there are at least some laws about telecom provider privacy where you are! Here in the states they can basically do whatever they want with whatever you give them 😓

If you want RCS, you have to go with one of the corporate apps like Google Messages or Samsung Messages. It's sad and I hope the situation changes eventually because RCS is much better than SMS and more ubiquitous than signal.

Supported and justified by the stockholders isn't surprising. It's the fact that this column writer is so unabashed in their reasoning that surprised me. It's not often that you see regular, bottom level consumers enthusiastically using the same reasoning as a stock holder. Usually they come at it from more of a "they produce great products, they care about providing a great service" standpoint. However, someone who writes articles for a platform called "Apple Insider" is likely to have some level of stock in the company.

I've never stumbled across Apple Insider before, it's quite the apologist for the company. Here's some tone deaf quotes from the article that made me laugh:

"It's true that the buck stops at the CEO, but without Tim Cook, Apple would not have so many bucks."

I guess if you make a lot of money you get a pass for allowing misleading and anti-consumer marketing campaigns?

"If billions and trillions are hard numbers to imagine, here's another one. Apple could, if its valuation could be converted to cash without loss, give every person living in the continental USA a free iPhone 16e — and then 13 spare ones. Each."

I love how they chose to illustrate Apple's obscene level of wealth with how much it could benefit people if they ever distributed that wealth through altruistic giving 😂

Heres a summary of the predictions made, from never all the way up to within the year. It seems to me the closer you get to the dollar bill the sooner the projections become.

"Some experts predict it will never happen..."

"Some experts argue that human intelligence is more multifaceted than what the current definition of AGI describes." (That AGI is not possible.)

"Most agree that AGI will arrive before the end of the 21st century."

"Some researchers who’ve studied the emergence of machine intelligence think that the singularity could occur within decades."

Current surveys of AI researchers are predicting AGI around 2040"

"Entrepreneurs are even more bullish, predicting it around ~2030"

"The CEO of Anthropic, who thinks we’re right on the threshold—give it about 12 more months or so."

I feel your pain 😅🫠

Yeah, just to add another confirmation to the other comments, if you have a separate home partition you can reuse it with a new / partition and expect it to work fine. The only stuff that gets saved in your home folder is comfiguration files for your apps, along with whatever actual files you have stored. You can even swap distros (Ubuntu/Arch) and keep your home folder, though sometimes the config files and settings don't translate perfectly.

The best horror is rooted in something that we see to some degree in actual life. This is good!

Seriously. It seems like the subconscious anxieties and fears of the writer's mind come through in statements like this and a few others. Whatever positives (real and imagined) there are about the situation, there is an underlying loss of personal autonomy that causes a sense of unease. The thing that's continuing to intrigue me now is: did the writer intend for that to come through, showing the losses a society of that nature would sustain as a commentary on those that promote it, or are they unaware that their words reveal that distress and anxiety? Idk, weird article.

"Once in awhile I get annoyed about the fact that I have no real privacy. No where I can go and not be registered. I know that, somewhere, everything I do, think and dream of is recorded. I just hope that nobody will use it against me."

The consensus seems to be that this is a propaganda piece (or at least heavily opinionated by the writer) but I just don't understand how they could write this with a positive frame of mind. The article is a strange mixture of perspectives that don't seem consistent. Bizarre.

FOSS is a two sided coin: it's awesome that anyone with an interest can continue a project when the original maintainers disperse, but man you have to watch your software carefully for the most actively maintained forks. Thats happened to me on a bunch of apps: Breezy Weather, Paperless-ngx, Cromite, Ironfox, Simple Calendar and on and on 😂. It takes time, but it's worth it.

Interesting, I hadn't noticed the OG app had been abandoned. Thanks for the correction!

Try these two apps out. They'll help you remove deeply integrated stuff. If you don't need the Google Play store you can outright firewall it from internet access.

1. Universal Android Debloater. It'll guide you through removing whatever extra stuff the manufacturer put on that you don't want. It's great.
2. Netguard. This will let you see all the apps and services that are making calls out, and what they are calling. Then you can simply block what you want and deny access to the internet for any proprietary app.

You're doing the lord's work 🫡

LineageOS if you want a certain piece of hardware that is supported by them and aren't too concerned with highly technical security. Lineage is also much more flexible through custom recoveries and rootable firmware.

GrapheneOS if you don't mind Pixel devices and are interested in security above all else.

Sure is. Here's the github. I ran it for awhile a year or so go. It was good.