Christopher Masto

I think you missed the point.

Why is that safer/better? That binary can do anything a shell script can, and it’s a lot harder to inspect.

How Flint is doing is irrelevant to what I said, the same as me picking on a polluted city in Canada doesn’t change the fact that Canada generally has safe drinking water.

The comment I responded to made it sound like US tap water is mostly not safe to drink. That’s demonstrably untrue. I’m not defending the horrors of industrial capitalism or condoning environmental destruction, I’m merely pointing out that the US does in fact have standards, regulation, and enforcement for drinking water quality. This does not mean it’s perfect, but it does mean that in general you can drink the water out of the tap, like I do every day.

I hate that we live in a world where only extreme viewpoints are allowed. Either the USA is the greatest country in the world or it’s a complete shithole, anything else is just shouted down. I still make the stupid mistake of caring about what’s real rather than what makes a good soundbite on social media.

“Drinking water quality in the United States is generally safe. In 2016, over 90 percent of the nation’s community water systems were in compliance with all published U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (US EPA) standards. Over 286 million Americans get their tap water from a community water system. Eight percent of the community water systems—large municipal water systems—provide water to 82 percent of the US population.”

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drinking_water_quality_in_the_United_States

I don’t know where you got that idea, but public tap water is federally regulated in the US (at least for now). Bottled water is popular because of marketing, not because tap water is unsafe.

There’s a phenomenon I’ve noticed over the past few years where people refuse to read anything longer than a handful of words. In fact, it’s often lobbied as an insult toward the writer: “not gonna read that, bro” has a similar connotation as “what have you got there, nerd, a math book?” combined with “I guess I triggered you so bad you had to provide supporting detail for your ideas, ha ha!”

I think there’s a self reinforcing loop where we’ve all moved to mobile devices where it’s tedious and annoying to type anything, so we’ve gotten more used to shorter and shorter messages, making anything longer look old fashioned and out of touch. People who grew up with phones now feel like it’s tedious and annoying to even read a full paragraph (or watch a non-short video), let alone expend the extra energy required to decode handwriting and figure out a scribbled word from context. It’s easier just to say “not gonna read ur wall”, and reinforce that it’s now shameful to write a comment as long as this one.

Just saw another one this morning.

Maybe Pac-Man. Wandering around a maze eating all day isn’t that different from my current life.

You might assume that, but in fact the ADA is one of the places where the US was ahead of the game in protecting people’s rights. It wasn’t always like it is now.

Leaded gasoline.

You have disabled Safe Browsing. That prevents files from being checked for malware, so all downloads are blocked by default (nothing to do with Firefox). As you noted, you can override the warning to download anyway, but it is an extra step to try to reduce the chance of someone accidentally running a malicious program.

That’s how it’s made. They melt cheese with emulsifying salts, squirt it into a plastic envelope, and it cools into the shape of the wrapper.

This will not be a popular thing to say in Lemmy, but I don’t think self hosting those things is going to reduce your headaches. I have worked in IT all my life, and I have lots of experience running services of all kinds, including my self-hosted home stuff. Nowadays, I am very mindful of the cost in time and hassle to DIY rather than let someone else handle it. When it comes to calendars, everything I see has an option to integrate with Google or Outlook, so I can’t imagine how sharing and syncing are going to be better if you move to some obscure open source thing. I fought that exact battle for an entire decade - you don’t want to get me started talking about CalDAV - and my life got so much easier when I gave up and moved my stuff to a standard provider.

This post is basically what the Lemmy community has become, in a nutshell. I thought there would be a mass exodus from Reddit but it seems like the only people who came here and stayed are far out on the fringe. Between this kind of stuff and “I refuse to own a car because the infotainment system is not open source!”, I find myself more and more gravitating back to Reddit for some normality… which is a hell of a thing to say.

This is how it should work. I don’t want to have to sign up on every different service. If people I want to follow choose to post stuff there that I want to read, I can do so from my Mastodon account.