Slight sarcasm - I’m also a Mint user, and it was like a recursive reference to this meme from forever ago. Maybe it was too specific and dated, but the point is that since Macs were so easy to use, the Windows people back in the 8.1 days treated Mac users like kindergartners as they paid for their $1,000 facebook machines (also a meme from that time).

All the “Yeah, I use Arch, BTW” people that love the struggle and the hobbyist tweaks of their distros seem to look down on Mint users because it doesn’t require a struggle to use Mint. I used to see it all the time when I first jumped over to Linux.

For the most part, it works well without needing too much tinkering by the user. It’s the Fisher Price My First Distro.

I tried it out with a 21.3 dualboot with Windows 11 and within 2 or 3 months I hadn’t gone back to Windows other than to push files over. Sure, there were a few “learning opportunities” with tweaks or weird driver issues that were because of the particular hardware I’m using, but they were manageable. At this point I’m running 22.1 only on this machine.

The nice part is that being Ubuntu-based, if I run into a problem, I can search for both the more widely-documented Ubuntu version of the issue, or look for a Mint-related version. Claude does a great job with small-to-medium troubleshooting rather than me dig through forums. It’s low-risk, low-work, high-reward.

This is not new, and not because WhatsApp is somehow “untrustworthy.” It’s been banned from most govt desktops for years.

It’s end-to-end encrypted, so it bypasses malware filters. A House staffer can easily be sent a malicious file and spread it around to others before anyone learns the file is malicious.

I also truly hate “family groups” where phones and accounts commonly associated with you get just pings on a topic to make you more malleable to the idea when you finally get the ads.

The mitochondria.

Domains cost like $1 if you’re flexible. Email hosting is what costs money.

Most people have absolutely zero idea how much data they put out there, what’s done with it, and why any rational person would be horrified if they knew the extent to which individuals were tracked. Simply put, short of showing them how their lives are made worse, they don’t care, and can’t be made to care.

For friends and family, you can do things like give them books or send articles explaining it slowly in parts. For everyone else, just ask them if they know how Google tracks what they do in Incognito windows and see what they say. If they say that Google can’t or doesn’t, they might as well say the Earth is flat. You can’t argue with that, even though it’s provably false.

Musk probably heard about “synthetic data” training, which is where you use machine learning to create thousands of things that are typical-enough to be good training data. Microsoft uses it to take documents users upload to Office365, train the ML model, and then use that ML output to train an LLM so they can technically say “no, your data wasn’t used to train an LLM.” Because it trained the thing that trained the LLM.

However, you can’t do that with LLM output and stuff like… History. WTF evidence and documents are the basis for the crap he wants to add? The hallucinations will just compound because who’s going to cross-check this other than Grok anyway?

Prepare for Grokipedia to only have one article about white genocide, then every other article links to “Did you mean White Genocide?”

Narrator: But they weren’t a sleeping giant. However, Gob’s Chicken Dance had, in fact, filled them with more resolve than even they had expected.

If you want to get weird, there’s an astrologer named Nick Dagan Best that wrote a book about the US and 80-ish year cycles that follow the 7th planet in our solar system.

It’s called “UranUSA”. I seriously think he might have just come up with the title and worked backwards.

🏳️‍🌈🏳️‍⚧️🏴‍☠️

Ah, the possibly Chinese-originated propaganda pushing for the Republic of Cascadia.

As a former resident, here’s a few respond why not.

First, there’s already a looooot of rednecks and racists in every single state you talked about. In large numbers in rural areas. Simply smothering them with the numbers doesn’t mean you simply can’t represent them unless you just want someone else’s dictatorship. They’re still going to end up electing people you don’t like, and the ratio won’t be all that far off from now.

Second, Cascadia can’t sustain themselves with water, power, or food. Where are you getting wheat from? How about ethanol? How about EV production? It’s a guaranteed huge importer of lots of staples. So the first day you’re stick trying to import from farther away at the same cost as no tariffs overland from 1000 miles away.

Just have some delicious drag queen tell them in a husky voice “Babydoll, you see that white triangle hiding in the back on the fancy Pride Flag? That’s for all you vanilla-ass straight motherfuckers. You already ON the pride flag. You’re part of this shit already! Welcome to the party, it’s already going hard, and it’s your turn to sing ;)”

Yeah, but that’s not the result the OP post expects, but instead “oh, you’re on duty now? Well, sure, OK I guess.”

What you’re suggesting of the opposite. Legit other agency LEOs show up for a double-tap arrest and the first group start shooting at them because they don’t expect them.

I think you meant to finish that the inter-agency is notoriously bad at communicating and informing each other. Yes, that’s true, but unless the OP situation plans to identify themselves as the FBI with fake badges, credentials, and possibly even paperwork that the subject’s lawyer can corroborate, it’s not going to go well.

Might make some good fiction. IRL would make for a lengthy prison term.

I dunno. Depends on the acceptability of calling it a “multi - generational household” because Boomers locked up to much wealth and now have to live with the consequences.

Second Art Nouveau. Art Deco is nice, but I think over played as a throwback.

Also a fan of a neoclassical Italianate style. Square columns, low flat roofs, towers and tall thin windows. It can vary, but when done in a clean and simple style, it’s very nice IMO.

On top of the fact that you need to have saved money to pay to live in a retirement home.

Are… Are there people that sort of really hope to just go from their patents’ basement to a retirement home?

I mean, that’s simply statistics. The dude votes on 100 bills and isn’t simply following the party line, a few will not be votes for stupidity or hate.