So it’s not really FOSS at all, it’s just a loss-leader to draw you into the network, trap your data, and then enshittify and monetize as per standard practice.

The end result is exactly the same.

The difference is that you can install an iso on a computer without an internet connection. The normal iso contains copies of most or all relevant packages. Although maybe not all of the latest and most up to date ones, the bulk are enough to get you started. The net install, like the name suggests, requires an internet connection to download packages for anything except the most minimal, bare-bones configuration. The connection would hopefully be nearly as fast if not faster than the iso and be guaranteed to have the latest updates available which the iso may not. While such a fast connection is usually taken for granted nowadays, it is not always available in some situations and locations, it is not always convenient, and some hardware may have difficulty with the network stack that may be difficult to resolve before a full system is installed or may require specialized tools to configure or diagnose that are only available as packages.

In almost all cases, the netinst works great and is a more efficient and sensible way to install. However, if it doesn’t work well in your particular situation, the iso will be more reliable, with some downsides and redundancy that wastes disk space and time.

Things like windows updates and some large and complex software programs and systems often come with similar “web” and “offline” installers that make the same distinctions for the same reasons. The tradeoff is the same, as both options have valid use cases.

To be fair, in the case of something like a Linux ISO, you are only a tiny fraction of the target or you may not even need to be the target at all to become collateral damage. You only need to be worth $1 to the attacker if there’s 99,999 other people downloading it too, or if there’s one other guy who is worth $99,999 and you don’t need to be worth anything if the guy/organization they’re targeting is worth $10 million. Obviously there are other challenges that would be involved in attacking the torrent swarm like the fact that you’re not likely to have a sole seeder with corrupted checksums, and a naive implementation will almost certainly end up with a corrupted file instead of a working attack, but to someone with the resources and motivation to plan something like this it could get dangerous pretty quickly.

Supply chain attacks are increasingly becoming a serious risk, and we do need to start looking at upgrading security on things like the checksums we’re using to harden them against attackers, who are realizing that this can be a very effective and relatively cheap way to widely distribute malware.

Joke’s on Reddit, I’ve always been posting unhinged misinformation.

It is mostly a myth (and scare tactic invented by copyright trolls and encouraged by overzealous virus scanners) that pirated games are always riddled with viruses. They certainly can be, if you download them from untrustworthy sources, but if you’re familiar with the actual piracy scene, you have to understand that trust is and always will be a huge part of it, ways to build trust are built into the community, that’s why trust and reputation are valued higher than even the software itself. Those names embedded into the torrent names, the people and the release groups they come from, the sources where they’re distributed, have meaning to the community, and this is why. Nobody’s going to blow 20 years of reputation to try to sneak a virus into their keygen. All the virus scans that say “Virus detected! ALARM! ALARM!” on every keygen you download? If you look at the actual detection information about what it actually detected, and you dig deep enough through their obfuscated scary-severity-risks-wall-of-text, you’ll find that in almost all cases, it’s actually just a generic, non-specific detection of “tools associated with piracy or hacking” or something along those lines. They all have their own ways of spinning it, but in every case it’s literally detecting the fact that it’s a keygen, and saying “that’s scary! you won’t want pirated illegal software on your computer right?! Don’t worry, I, your noble antivirus program will helpfully delete it for you!”

It’s not as scary as you think, they just want you to think it is, because it helps drive people back to paying for their software. It’s classic FUD tactics and they’re all part of it. Antivirus companies are part of the same racket, they want you paying for their software too.

Keep the gray plastic. Remove black clip around the vertical wheel post in the gray plastic. Remove wheel and wheel post. Buy new wheel. Installl new wheel. It will be easier to find a new wheel once you have the old wheel out so you can take measurements. but it’s likely something pretty standard, off-the-shelf. Wheels are something that companies buy, they rarely build them themselves. They typically come as a castoring assembly with wheel, axle, spindle, and attachment post in a variety of common sizes and with a dizzying variety of actual wheels.

a) Forecasts are very resource-intensive, they are performed on a specific schedule using a computational forecast model. Updating the predictions would require inputting new data and running the model again, and by the time they do that, the next forecast will already be out.

b) Do they know it’s wrong? Where did you get the temperature? From an official weather station? If not, there is no reason to imagine that someone is noticing that this one particular model run was wrong in one particular spot across the whole country and trying to fix it in real time.

c) If you did get the current temperature from an official weather station, that IS your update for it. Real time data from official weather stations is always going to trump the forecast model. What would be the point of updating the forecast when the current measured data from the weather station is now available? That’s like driving down the highway and saying “I was predicting my speed would be close to 65mph, but due to the heavy traffic I’m seeing today, I’m going to re-estimate my speed to be 45mph” when you have a perfectly accurate speedometer right in front of you telling you exactly what speed you are going at all times. Forecasts are only useful for the future, and they can be wrong.

Almost like the context matters and the world isn’t entirely made up of black and white binary choices because we’re not robots or computers and discrete logic does not apply to human moral arguments.

They’re only lying as long as people can continue to over and over find their way around the obstacles they place in the way, and it gets harder all the time. They have more money and more resources and more organization than the hackers trying to defeat them, they’re winning the war of attrition. We may be able to make small breakthroughs here and there, but overall we continue to lose more and more territory, because the amount of effort is disproportionate to the goals. Most of what’s left of the custom ROM community has given up on the losing battle with manufacturers and providers and changed focus to the various freephones but even they have their own troubles and are fragmented and short-lived. Between carriers, manufacturers, and content providers the whole mobile ecosystem is designed to be impenetrable. It is intentionally a fortress full of deadly traps and open source supporters have no hope to breach it anytime soon.

That’s kind of like seeing a story where a car crashed into someone’s living room and saying “I don’t see the benefit of having houses” even though:

• This is very rare
• Not all sites have equal risk of this happening
• The alternatives you would likely propose have even bigger risks.

It’s possible but not likely or common. Glass is stronger than most people give it credit for. Most “hollywood” glass is actually panes of sugar. You could certainly arrange things so that the gun’s pressure wave has a good chance of stressing and breaking glass, but it would take special preparations and effort and the gun would probably have to be very close to the glass. It’s almost unheard of for it to happen normally unless you specifically shoot at the glass.

Someone like mythbusters could probably test this pretty effectively, but based on my experience around guns and glass, I suspect they’d come to the same conclusion.

A not directly related but still interesting video was done by the slowmo guys on youtube

It’s veeeeery not standard in Canada. I use it on my phone and most people who see it on the lockscreen treat me like I’m an alien, and it’s about a 50/50 mix of people who simply think 24 hour time is weird (but at least recognize it) vs. people who seem genuinely baffled by the digits they see appearing on my phone and don’t even seem to recognize it as a time at all.

Counter rant: This is why we built encryption and VPNs many years ago. This is a solved problem, but rather than solving it you’d rather just complain ineffectually about it. The solution, the product of years of work of technical people and privacy people, is sitting right there staring you in the face available for you to use as a free service, a paid service, or your own self-hosted service. Use a VPN, that’s what it’s for.

“GL iNet” has a dizzying array of products and some are designed for this (you can find them for sale on the usual scumbags). Surprisingly, for a niche brand you’ve likely never heard of the firmware is surprisingly robust and has a small but loyal community. Expensive, and you might not want to carry an extra piece of hardware to provide a bulletproof VPN connection, but worth it for the security IMO.

No good reason, just historical inertia and resistance to change. People stick to what they’re familiar with, either the imperial system or to common metric units. Making a “metric ton” similar in size to an “imperial ton” arguably helped make it easier for some people to transition to metric.

Megagram is a perfectly cromulent unit, just like “cromulent” is a perfectly cromulent word, but people still don’t use it very often. That’s just how language works. People use the words they prefer, and those words become common. Maybe if you start describing things in megagrams other people will also start doing it and it will become a common part of the language. Language is organic like that, there isn’t anyone making decisions on its behalf, although some people and organizations try.

I don’t think they know about metric prefixes, Pip.

Imagine if the marketing people discovered that they could advertise that it has 19 million uWh (in Doctor Evil voice). Don’t say it too loudly though, someone at Apple might hear.

If you can prove beyond any reasonable doubt that someone is ignorant of facts, and then sure you can call it obvious and good. But when nobody can agree what is reasonable, why is your perspective of good the one everyone must follow? It’s not always obvious. Don’t pretend it is. And things that are reasonable and obvious to you aren’t necessarily reasonable and obvious to others. You aren’t willing to embrace the diversity of human experience and opinion, so you won’t get the benefits of that diversity. Just because someone else has a different idea doesn’t make it wrong. If you think literally every idea that isn’t exactly the same as yours is wrong, then we’re wasting our time here anyway.

So again, why is your path the one we’re picking? Even if I do agree with it, I am not willing to agree to it blindly, I want to know why we’re supposed to follow your advice/instructions/demands. At gunpoint or otherwise. And that’s why I’ll never follow a totalitarian, because totalitarians never have to explain themselves, and generally won’t. I hope you brought enough bullets if that’s your plan.

Godot is looking much better to me today than it did yesterday.

Musk is the richest man on Earth, give or take a few billion here or there. He can keep it running as long as he wants. It’s nothing but a toy to him. The problem will start when he finally gets bored of it, because he has already broken it to the point that nobody else will want it. He has killed it, it’s just not dead yet as long as he keeps swinging it around and paying its bills. But one day he’ll stop doing that, maybe once he finds a new, shinier toy. We just don’t know when.

Call the local fire department non-emergency number and ask if they can schedule a visit to inspect your fire alarms and provide recommendations on the situation. The fire department is genuinely interested in your safety, because it’s also important for their safety so they don’t have to come rescue you. If anything is a fire hazard, the professionals can explain why and explain how to fix it. But they’ll probably say “WTF” because the landlord is most likely just being a fuckface, as landlords do. Assuming the latter, ask them if you get the “WTF” in writing so you can wave it in the landlord’s face when you tell them to fuck off and die.