DupaCycki

Ah yes, let's take absolute control over online discourse from one private, for-profit organization and give it to another. That'll fix everything!

While Bluesky seems [mostly] fine right now, it's not a long term solution. We need public online spaces that aren't owned or governed by any single entity. Or more appropriately - we need to improve the ones we already have and do whatever we can to bring people here.

Also, Bluesky has terrible algorithms and gives almost no control over your main page. I kept seeing exclusively political content from one specific side in my country (including some very obvious bots). Pressing 'Show less like this' on a few dozen posts every day produced no results over a few weeks. This ultimately led me to delete my account, as it made no sense to browse a platform that is actively showing me only the things that I don't want to see.

It's quite easy to blame the common people, but I don't think it's that simple. The American Empire has been carefully constructed in a way that would not allow any real opposition to exist under any circumstances.

The Americans keep voting against their own interests. You may say it's because they're stupid or ignorant. While generally true, can you safely pin the blame on them? In a system that consistently undermines and sabotages the educational institutions, as well as gives the people little free time to educate themselves on their own - is it through their own fault that they're uneducated?

Furthermore, no matter which one of the two parties you vote for - you'll still be voting against your best interests. It's only a matter of choosing how much and in what specific ways you preffer to get taken advantage of and abused. All major news outlets are run by friends and families of the government, so they'll never host actual opposition, meaning it might as well not exist.

Americans constantly fight each other instead of working together to overthrow the authoritarian regime. Well, what else can they do? A silly post online may lead to termination of employment, which carries with itself serious risk of going homeless. Protesting may, and often is, answered with brute, sometimes lethal force. Can't work with a broken bone, so you get fired and go homeless. Or die from police brutality.

This is not a new, nor a simple issue. We're talking about systematic problems that have been festering over the last 200 years. There isn't one single party to blame, and it certainly isn't the average Americans - they are among the victims here.

One of the most cozy setups I've ever seen. Except whatever it is surrounding the cable in the top right. Kinda disgsuting looking.

Just because I'll hold my nose and do the necessary thing doesn't mean everyone else will.

The 'necessary thing' is voting for a fascist multi millionaire? He may be slightly better than the current guy, since the bar to pass is so low, but he's very far from an actually valid candidate.

I understand different people have different situations in which the 'necessary thing' may vary. However, he'll only solve a handful of current issues plaguing the USA, if even that. From whefe I'm standing (which arguably is quite far away as I'm a European) you'd achieve much more by protesting. Especially given that there may not be another election in your country. Though I'm also aware protests in the USA may come with serious risk of injury or loss of life.

OnlyOffice, not OpenOffice. This is a different suite entirely. Might be better for people coming from MS Office, since it looks practically identical. Also supports opening multiple files as tabs.

I don't know why anyone would ever subject themselves to the torture of using Vivaldi. It's made by developers of Opera - the most bloated, spyware-infested web browser on the planet. Sure, it may be slightly better, but we'll never know for sure, since it's closed source. Honestly this might be a downgrade, even compared to Chrome. Anything else here would be an improvement.

Other than that, I'd replace Bitwarden with KeePassDX and Bitwarden Auth with Aegis. There's no shortage of decent password managers and 2fa apps.

obsidian's cool but it's not keep-like at all. don't know what would be a good alternative off the top of my head but i bet there are tons.

I recommend Joplin. Doesn't have Obsidian's fancy UI or add-ons, but the core functionality is the same. Should be great for the vast majority of users.

your best bet is fdroid obviously but in terms of apps available it's lackluster af and the UI looks like android gingerbread or something.

They recently overhauled it and it looks mostly modern. Still not perfect, but definitely a lot better than it used to be. There are also third-party front ends. Can't really say anything about them as I haven't used any.

It's also the most productive economic system ever tried.

I think whether this is true highly depends on the definition of productivity and circumstances.

What definition of productivity are we applying here? Capitalism sure is great at inflating useless statistics. It also seems to be decent for actually valuable products and services. However, depending on what you take into account, it's not so clear that it's the superior system.

Furthermore, there have been several cases of socialist governments improving the quality of life at a rate never seen in capitalist countries. Almost completely eradicating illiteracy in less than a year (Cuba). Or vaccinating half the population in a few months (Burkina Faso). Of course, those governments are rare and don't last long thanks to the CIA.

Personally I'd say the most immediate solution - or more accurately, improvement - is to mix our current capitalist dystopia with as much socialist policies as possible. Many countries in the EU are doing thay and it seems to be working pretty well. Let's just copy and build on that, then worry about the next steps.

It's very likely that no amount of negative feedback will change anything. Why not waste some of their time anyway? Write to them, call them, spread the word. This is the only thing we can do. Even if it goes through regardless - at the very least we can make it as unpleasant as possible.

Two things especially worth noting from the article.

If you have a non-Google build of Android on your phone, none of this applies.

This means that at least GrapheneOS will be unaffected for now. Other ROMs without gapps will be unaffected only as long as you don't install gapps. Since Graphene has a sandbox for them, I'm assuming it'll be fine. That is, unless Google decides to lock the bootloader entirely.

In September 2026, Google plans to launch this feature in Brazil, Indonesia, Singapore, and Thailand. The next step is still hazy, but Google is targeting 2027 to expand the verification requirements globally.

So most users worldwide still have at least 1.5 years until it's implemented. Plenty of time to get a Pixel and install Graphene on it. Or to figure out some other plan.

Don't get me wrong - this is insane, unreasonable and horrible news for everyone. We should push back as hard as physically possible against it. However, at the very least we still have some time to figure things out before the policy rolls out.

This is the law in all EU member states. What the article is discussing is different. Technically, a deepfake of you is not a photograph of you, unless you can reliably prove that a photograph of you was used to create it. Of course, it had to be, but a court will never accept "that's how deepfakes work" as evidence.

The new Danish law is forbidding anyone from making anything that closely resembles you, meaning nobody can make a deepfake of you, regardless of whether or not it's proven that a real picture of you was used. Just like you cannot create anything that closely resembles any other copyright-protected content, regardless of whether or not you use any of the original creator's material in the process.

(...) it was all avoidable.

It really wasn't. Everything in American politics for long years has been leading to this point. It was always bound to happen, sooner or later. Sure, by choosing another president you could have potentially delayed it by a few years. But later it would have happened anyway. This is not a 'Trump issue'. This is a 'USA issue'.

I think Americans are the only ones who haven't seen this coming. And I don't mean that in a hostile way. Your education system has been sabotaged for decades, so it's no wonder the people are uninformed and ignorant to what's going on. The only ones to blame are the psychopathic politicians and billionaires who deliberately made this happen over the last 200 years.