twig

Right?! I know. It's so needlessly complicated. When I first learned about this my jaw legit dropped.

I'm not even necessarily proposing a registry but this is just fucking ridiculous.

A lot of Americans do actually support some gun control measures. A lot of Americans also don't actually know how insanely hard and effectively the NRA has organized and opposed any remotely reasonable gun control measure. They basically ensure that any hearing on the subject is flooded by their members to oppose it. They just go and many sane Americans don't.

• The ATF has no ability to have searchable records of firearm sales. To run a "trace" they need to use fucking microfilm or manually go through literal shipping containers full of receipts that are scarcely legible due to water damage. Article.

• Also, measure to apply for funding for the CDC to study the effect of gun control on gun violence: no, because fuck them.

• Measure to impose some reasonable restrictions on the ability to purchase firearms for, say, known domestic abusers: no, because we just don't fucking care.

I'm not American, but I actually support sane firearm ownership. I look at the lunacy over there and I am almost shocked. I really do think, from hearing about this as much as I do, that many Americans support sane measures. But the NRA is a huge problem. It prevents people from even being educated on this issue.

This is not a very good article.

It's full of very weird qualifiers: "not a programmer," "studied computer science," "tech writer." This person is not an average user, and they kind of do everything they can to make sure the reader knows that. Then, while trying to say Linux is for average users, the author suddenly is claiming to be just that.

Linux is easier to use now than when I started using it, a little over six years ago. But it does require at least a basic curiosity to learn.

I think that's a good baseline. Not placing unnecessary trust is definitely a priority. The idea is definitely to remove as much of the need as possible for trust.

You have good goals and they are attainable. I wish you luck.

Your logic doesn't escape me but in point of fact, when we're talking about GrapheneOS we're not talking about volunteering usage data to Google. GrapheneOS does a better job of protecting user privacy than any other mobile option I can think of.

The problem I have is treating security and privacy like they're opposing forces. They're not. You don't need to make security concessions to ensure privacy and that line of thinking doesn't make sense when you examine it.

Genuinely curious: what your privacy metrics (what does this actually mean to you) and what is an organization that you trust?

I'm sorry, but that's just not how security works. Most of the "security" features exist because of patching known vulnerabilities. What this means in real terms: vulnerabilities and how they work are published to the public. There are people who specifically write and sell malware to exploit these known vulnerabilities. This is happening all the time. If you have a permissive security model, you are opening all of your information up to compromise

You cannot reasonably expect privacy on a system that makes major concessions to security. Security is necessary for privacy. The two are not the same thing, but one is needed for the other.

But also... GrapheneOS is in fact a very privacy-friendly operating system. I would consider it the most privacy-friendly in fact.

I don't think it's ironic. Google benefits massively from their projects like AOSP or OpenTitan being open source, and they even benefit from projects like GOS doing some heavy lifting for them in developing bug fixes that get integrated upstream.

The fact that their mobile phones are relatively friendly to alternate operating systems is of pretty significant benefit to them.

Google is invested in security research, albeit usually for reasons that don't benefit users.

I find the criticisms of the founder pretty seriously overblown. My interactions with him have always been positive. He's on the spectrum and a lot of people engaged in pretty serious abuse toward him and the project he created... so I'll give him some slack.

I've used GrapheneOS for 5 years. It's good, the project has integrity, and there really isn't anything that meaningfully compares in meeting its goals. It's proactive in that they actually do meaningful security research and implement solutions. People who troll on the project are either straight up bad actors or just stupid.

Except .410 for some reason. I guess 67 gauge is starting to sound a bit crazy.

But yeah I know. I just think it's silly.

Bullets are a weird, dumb one. Yes, kind of. But also: .308, .303, .30-06, .50 BMG .30-30, .45-70, .38, .32, .44, .45, .50AE. Then nonsensically basically all "30 calibre" are the same diameter, which is exactly not quite .3 of an inch. Most of those are calibrated by the metric system (as many imperial measurements are today), but the terminology exists in the imperial system.

And then there's fuckin gauges for shotguns smh.

I don't really think it's fair to get mad at someone for prioritizing meeting their own needs. It is however entirely fair to be furious about societal structures that place increased financial value on industrialization and privatization over community cohesion.

Your teeth are bared in the wrong direction. We do in fact have a common enemy here.

My main problem with strict dietary rhetoric is that it doesn't acknowledge the benefit of people eating vegan (or whatever) sometimes. Like it's a good thing to get nutrition from diverse sources and there's carryover benefit to the planet when doing this.

I'm not a vegan, but I eat a lot of plant-based meals and when I eat meat, because I eat less of it, it's generally local and ethically-raised. Militant vegans will often turn people from making decisions like this, and I think that's a shame.

I was a vegan for years. And I was careful about trying to get my nutrients. But I needed to eat so much more and I was lowkey tired all the time. When I started eating some meat again I felt ashamed of myself for not living up to the rhetoric. But it's just silly to treat this as an all or nothing type thing. A person eating beans and rice one day and a small amount of beef in a stir fry the next is... not the same as a person eating fried chicken every day, and I don't appreciate when anyone implies it is.