I had to look up the panopticon reference, so I thought to share with others: ‘A proposed prison of supervision, so arranged that the inspector can see each of the prisoners at all times without being seen by them: proposed by Jeremy Bentam.’

One benefit of colocating the food bank with the grocery store is that shoppers could make direct contributions to the food bank. Instead of those questionable ‘donate $1 to such and such’ prompts at payment, one could purchase an extra can of food and discreetly drop it off after checkout. Seeing the beneficiaries in person is confidence the grocery store isn’t just making a money grab.

Since most of us have to buy groceries, it would also provide shoppers a convenient opportunity to practice compassion. Sometimes a bad day can be turned around by doing something good.

I like the ‘ground up’ approach they mention that doesn’t rely on insecure ‘adversaries’. I’ll check it out soon.

It’s true (and it feels a bit dusty), but it’s still meeting my needs. I hope it’ll get picked up again or perhaps another project will replace it.

I installed a custom launcher that’s close to the stock one on my Pixel 3 specifically to make it possible to remove the Google Search widget. Now I have a Firefox widget that points to DDG.

If any are interested, the launcher is Lawn Chair, and it can be installed via F-droid.

One cool thing is that the comments are self documenting. I read the program earlier and it’s quite clear what it does. Excellent accomplishment, dear colleague!

I’ve was doing the same until yesterday, then I found StreetComplete. Since then, it’s so much easier to enter addresses. So much easier to add addresses while out walking than to carry a notepad or memorize numbers.

I don’t blame him for not wanting to travel. Airplane safety is a real concern these days.

After using it since Lucid Lynx 10.04, I switched from Ubuntu to Mint last weekend. I’m lazy about distros these days, and I really didn’t want to switch, but Firefox instability was driving me nuts. The web browser must be reliable, IMO. It’s a fundamental requirement for a desktop OS, and this problem didn’t exist before snaps.

There are some good ideas in this comment, but I’d like to counter that the cautionary tales are an instigating factor in implementing safety for new tech. The wealthy few shouldn’t get to blindly and unilaterally decide the future of all through careless and unrestricted development of world-altering tech.

Me too. I’m glad the EU is out there thinking about these things.

Apple’s refusal to cooperate is both obviously profit motivated and infuriating. They’ve engineered this social gulf between iPhone and non-iPhone users. I often wonder about the collective social harm.

The low res photos and video are natural byproducts of squeezing modern media into an SMS message, but the ‘green’ bubbles take it to another level. The worst part is that the average iPhone user at best is apathetic. Meanwhile Cook suggested last year that we should just buy more iPhones as a solution.

I’m amazed it’s 2023 and we’ve still not universally adopted a protocol better than SMS. Thanks Apple

If we keep doubling, will I eventually be a person on the tracks? There are a finite number of people, so eventually I would be, right? So, passing the buck would be equivalent to handing my fate to a stranger.

OTOH, if there are an infinite number of people, then this thought experiment is creating people out of thin air. Do these imaginary people’s rhetorical lives even matter?

Either way, it seems better to kill 1 person at the start.

This is a positive take. No OS is perfect, but there are lots of reasons to give a Linux distro a whirl. Tech right now IMO has become disappointing, but Linux continues to be a shining beacon of fun and hope.

Did somebody say fire sale?

This is something that makes me sad. Stallman and Raymond were heros to me when I was starting out 20 years ago. I guess it goes to show that people are flawed no matter how talented.

This is a good method. I love technology, but tech companies have become increasingly icky. Trends over the last decade have finally soured me on Google. I just can’t justify using or buying their services.

Follow-up: The icing on the cake was a release or so ago when apt started queueing the snap package’s installation instead. Very clever, but also a confusing user experience. It took a few iterations before I understood the snap was getting installed instead of the deb.

Firefox is one of the worst snaps. It pops up an annoying notification everyday reminding you to restarted it. Then came the crashing. It got to a point where I couldn’t keep my browser running more than a few minutes at a time.

I wanted to like snaps, and I’m not overall negative on Ubuntu, but keeping the web browser functional is minimum requirement. The Firefox PPA is much more reliable.