Yes, making notes.

Notepad is too crude. LibreOffice is too heavyweight.

I’m surprised by the numbers of people here who don’t use it. It’s a quick editor for note taking (Notepad, ironically, isn’t suited to the task because you can’t format anything - so no bolding, bulleted lists, etc, outside of stuff that doesn’t word wrap properly.)

Starting Word (or LibreOffice) to do that is like boarding a train to go to the corner shop. While starting Notepad to do that is like intentionally crawling to the corner shop. Wordpad has always worked well as an in-between tool for that kind of thing.

And given Wordpad edits text files too, at one point being more useful for text files than Notepad because until 10 years or so ago the latter couldn’t edit anything over 64k, and “Replace” is a recent addition, maybe Notepad is the tool that should have been jettisoned.

I agree, pleading up to guilty is dumb. But I do have to question the wisdom of this law anyway: Do you not normally go to prison for manslaughter in Texas? According to https://www.findlaw.com/state/texas-law/texas-manslaughter-laws.html you can end up in prison for up to 20 years (though it can be as little as two, but I’d assume it’s not two in the case of drunk driving.) Intoxication manslaughter is also usually accompanied by a fine of up to $10,000.

Even two years imprisonment for a felony will result in the felon (1) selling up all their possessions to pay for lawyers, etc, and (2) losing their jobs and being unable to get jobs for years afterwards. Something that’ll be made worse if they’re on the hook for child support they’re unable to pay for and therefore will, I assume, be unable to get a driver’s license, in a state where driving is mandatory.

So, other than theater, what is this for? Making child support “someone else’s problem” so the state can avoid helping people in dire financial circumstances by pointing at someone else and saying “Well they should be paying for it.”?

I appreciate a lot of people are posting here agreeing with the bill because it sounds like something they should support. But it’s either not thought out, or the intentions behind it are rotten. Given it’s Texas, the latter seems probable.

Or just mark the resource as private and only serve it to the user who created it until they associate a post with it.

You would probably need a separate server to stage images like this, as your main image server probably shouldn’t have a login wall, which probably slightly complicates things but not badly.

Yes. Section 230 has no requirements that someone needs to form a non-profit or anything like that. It applies to anyone who has responsibility for a website that accepts user submitted content, or more widely anything on the Internet not created by yourself. whether a private individual or a giant corporation.

https://www.eff.org/issues/cda230 describes it in more detail, but to give you an example, even forwarding an email from someone else to a mailing list has some protection (https://www.eff.org/issues/cda230/cases/batzel-v-smith)

Anyone in the US considering running a public Lemmy or Mastodon instance should check what their obligations are under the DMCA and Section 230 and do them.

Section 230’s protections and limitations are documented here: https://www.eff.org/issues/bloggers/legal/liability/230 - note that the limitations are not unlimited but generally if you act in good faith you’ll be covered for almost all of the non-copyright related situations you’re concerned about.

The DMCA requires you take action to protect your forum, notably registering an agent (which can be you!) with the Copyright Office, and posting contact information on your website. https://borgheselegal.com/news/44-internet-law/85-reducing-company-website-liability-steps-to-verify-dmca-safe-harbor-compliance has information on how to remain DMCA compliant, but basically it means responding to take down notices in a timely manner. It’s bureaucracy you don’t want to do, but it’ll protect your website from Sony if someone uploads the whole of Morbius to it.

Remember when you’re panicking about evil people posting to your website that there’s a whole host of websites everyone knows about such as the various American *chans that have never, to the best of my knowledge, been the subject of a raid.

It isn’t much of a shock to me.

My spouse has just had a two week stay at a local hospital due to a difficult to diagnose issue that started as “pain in leg” and escalated to “can’t walk” in the space of a month. We have regular insurance, and the hospital bill after insurance so far is $4,000 but we know it’s going to probably triple or more by the end of the entire process. The yearly “Maximum out of pocket” on our plan is $14,000 but there are many ways in which the OOP can be exceeded by, say, a doctor being involved who isn’t in network, or a treatment the insurer doesn’t cover.

We are “lucky”, we have ways to cover the inevitable bill. If it had happened ten years ago, when my daughter was still an infant, when our finances were bleeding, my job was barely covering our debt payments, raised in part because of disorganization during the birth, etc, there’s no possible way we could cover the bill that’s coming.

I know people don’t like the ACA being criticized because it’s considered a well meaning attempt to fix the health care system, but here are the problems with it:

1. For most people, it had a net negative effect because of the skin-in-the-game mandate. This is a principle the ACA’s writers signed up to early on to try to get right wingers to support the bill by massively increasing copays and deductibles. Suddenly an ER visit was no longer $100-500, but $1,500 or more. Doctors visits are up from $10 to $50-100. Specialists from $25 now to $75-100. These increases aren’t inflation based, they’re intentional policy. For a software developer like me, I can afford them. For someone working two low income jobs to support their family, a real “hard working American”, it basically makes healthcare unaffordable and unreachable. And all because some swivel eyed ideologue thinks that when you’re lying unconscious bleeding out on the pavement in front of the car that hit you, you’ll save the system money by using your smartphone to call the lowest cost ambulance service in your area.

2. The ACA mandated a “maximum profit” as a percentage of premiums insurance companies are allowed to make, while coupling it with no effort to make insurance companies non-profits (ie not beholden to investors.) The result is that insurers have to intentionally negotiate higher healthcare prices with their providers! No, seriously! Because regular public companies like health insurers have to increase profits every year, and the only way to increase profits if you can’t increase margins or customer base is to increase your supplier costs so you can increase your own prices.

And the cynical part of me says they knew this but didn’t care. The two obsessions were with “pre-existing conditions” and “bankruptcies”, but these are both sides of the same coin. People were facing huge medical bills because their insurers didn’t cover them and bankruptcies were the result. And bankruptcies hurt… banks. And banks seemed to be what they cared about most of all in 2009-2012. They did nothing to stem the foreclosure crisis, for example. Maybe, ultimately, what the ACA was about was protecting banks, creating an environment not where bankruptcies wouldn’t happen, but where those bankruptcies would be about debts in the region of $14,000, not $1M. Something much easier for banks to handle.

That’s the cynical part of me. Part of me hopes that the majority of Democrats who voted for the ACA merely thought it was the best they could do. But those two flaws need to be fixed. Get a Public Option in so there’s at least one non-profit insurer, and abolish the high taxes on “cadillac” plans - the plans that, like pre-ACA plans, had token co-pays and reasonable deductibles.

That’s an orthogonal thing though. Downvotes and removals are generally triggered by different things, even if they intersect occasionally:

• “I think The Mandalorian is the best sci-fi western ever” is a reasonable thing to post in c/tv, c/scifi, c/westerns, etc.
• “I think The Mandalorian is the best sci-fi western ever” might be a reasonable thing in an open topic about comparing Firefly to other space westerns in c/firefly
• “I think The Mandalorian is the best sci-fi western ever” is clearly an off topic troll if posted as a top level reply to a question “Do you think Mal will ever find his true love” in c/firefly

In all three cases, it’s entirely possible the comment will get a lot of downvotes. But the fact it’s off-topic and, in context, intended to troll, that means the third case is the only one where you’d want it removed.

Indeed, it’s possible to envisage a highly upvoted comment that also ends up being removed because it’s off topic or an attempt to derail. Those are actually harder to remove, and I’ve seen (Reddit) moderators make the wrong call on them when they’re successful attempts to derail because they’re not always as obvious.

TBH it’s not that he opposed same sex marriage that bothers me. People make poor decisions. It’s:

1. He donated to the campaign AFTER it became clear that campaign was using the funds to put up ads claiming gays were a danger to children.

2. His response to people working under him who were upset and had legitimate concerns they wouldn’t be treated fairly was: “the donation does not in itself constitute evidence of animosity. Those asserting this are not providing a reasoned argument, rather they are labeling dissenters to cast them out of polite society.” He has never withdrawn this insult and made little attempt to deal with it before or after becoming Mozilla CEO.

I’m also pissed that the right wing has managed to lie about what happened to the point that if you go against the false narrative, that falsely claims Eich was fired from Mozilla for his hateful views, he was actually promoted to CEO and resigned after a lot of outside pressure made it clear he was harming Mozilla by keeping the role, then you tend to get flamed, downvoted, modded “Troll”, etc in most tech forums.

I’m inclined not to boycott products because I dislike the people who made them’s views, but that said I don’t particularly want to find I’m contributing to the monetization of something that goes to a homophobic asshole, especially at a time when LGBT people are under attack at a level I haven’t seen in 30 years. So I will not be using Brave for that reason, regardless of what I think about the product technologically.

I said, they haven’t stopped shitting on gays and black people.

This is getting to be a very frustrating conversation where each time I ask “OK why have trans people been added” everyone claims to be living in some alternate universe where the Republican party is now nice to black people and gay people and are claiming they’ve had to switch to trans people because blacks and gays are just too popular.

I’m glad for you that you live in this alternate universe where there you’re not seeing racist and homophobic (and sexist) motivated mass shootings in Orlando every few months. I love that in your alternate universe the Republicans are not trying to suppress the black vote and haven’t put up blockers to prevent, for example, constitutional amendments aimed at dealing with Jim Crow laws from being effective.

I’d love to fucking live there! Really I would!

Especially as in that world, there never was a “Don’t say Gay” law targeted primarily at Gay people that was so major that even a major corporation ended up on “our side” and spoke out against it for one time before going quiet because the Republicans were so unashamed of that law that they removed that corporation’s rights to manage infrastructure on its own property, even though that’d raise taxes for the rest of us.

I’m so glad you don’t live in that world!

But I do. Which is why I’ve asked the question multiple times now. It’s why, in the comment you responded to, I wrote:

They’re still, STILL, shitting on gays. The groomer crap? That was originally aimed at justifying an anti-LGBT bill (all LGBT, to the point it was described as “Don’t say Gay” by many) by a DeSantis spokeswoman, trans people were, at that point, just another target, not a primary target.

and

I appreciate the optimism here about how oh this is just because they can’t be crappy to lots of other groups, but they’re still being crappy to the other groups. Transpeople have not replaced gay and poor black people in the Conservative lexicon of “others” that should be blamed for society’s ills, they’ve joined them.

So obviously this has FUCK ALL to do with black and gay people being able to defend themselves, because if that was the reason, THEY’D HAVE STOPPED FUCKING OVER GAY AND BLACK PEOPLE.

On Earth One, they haven’t. Glad to hear that isn’t the case in your universe though and the other people responding to me.

I would say this is actually an ironically encouraging sign that we are lurching in a good direction. There’s always going to be some level of racism, misogyny, homophobia, etc., but those things are mainstream enough that you have to be really hard right to beat the drum for them.

And yet here we are and they do. Do you remember how the term “Groomer” appeared? It was the DeSantis administration justifying the “Don’t say Gay” bill. That was a bill that, sure, mentioned gender dysphoria in passing, but it was primarily aimed at gay people.

I don’t see any evidence at all the Republicans have become less racist or less homophobic. Racism seems no better, maybe worse, than it was in 2008, and as the mainstream Republican establishment has declined, the party seems to have given in to the homophobic grassroots.

None of which really explains though why they’ve gone from merely laughing at transpeople to turning them into villains, while continuing to demonize the groups they’ve always done. Perhaps, far from transpeople being the only ones left, they’ve realized they can get away with scapegoating more groups than they previously have done.

I would agree with this logic if it wasn’t for:

1. As I said, I’ve noticed that they didn’t care about this until recently. So this isn’t a “What marginalized group are we still allowed to be shitty too”, this is “Hey, let’s pick a group we never cared that much about and treat them the same way reasonable people treat pedophiles”. (This I’m spelling out in different words because it was supposed to be implied by my original question but nobody has addressed it)

2. They’re still, STILL, shitting on gays. The groomer crap? That was originally aimed at justifying an anti-LGBT bill (all LGBT, to the point it was described as “Don’t say Gay” by many) by a DeSantis spokeswoman, trans people were, at that point, just another target, not a primary target.

I appreciate the optimism here about how oh this is just because they can’t be crappy to lots of other groups, but they’re still being crappy to the other groups. Transpeople have not replaced gay and poor black people in the Conservative lexicon of “others” that should be blamed for society’s ills, they’ve joined them.

I still don’t understand why the trans thing has suddenly become a “problem.” I’ve known trans people for 30 years. And I knew they existed before that. How the hell did it suddenly go from “Man wear skirt ha ha ha funny” at worst (not that that was good, just that it wasn’t what we have now) to “Fad! Groomers! They should die!”

We seem to be lurching as a society to a direction I don’t think I can live in.

Also the installer and compatibility. For years I recommended Ubuntu over others because while the rest was six of one, half a dozen of the other, the installer was pretty much guaranteed to work on everything from the most standard White Box PC to the most finnicky Thinkpad.

Whereas virtually everything else I’d tried was hit or miss - worked with some hardware, had major problems on others. As an example I recall five years ago trying to get Fedora to run on an old Dell laptop, and I had to disable the built-in AMD graphics in favor of the Intel integrated in the BIOS otherwise it just wouldn’t display anything.

(Right now I don’t recommend Ubuntu, but it’s only because they went too far with the snap thing.)

People forget the importance of the installer and how it can mean whether you spend 15 minutes installing and have everything set up, or whether it takes hours to find the right set of hacks and BIOS settings, and even then you’re left with something where you’re playing with Wifi drivers for the next six months.

There are two problems here:

1. Most of the disposable toothbrushes don’t have the ability to replace the heads. Some of them do, as the GP mentioned, but most don’t in my experience.

2. The ability to replace the heads is not the same thing as actually being able to find the heads in the store that sold you the toothbrush.

3. The entire assembly costs typically something in the same ballpark as a head replacement anyway.

4. The entire assembly often costs less to replace on a regular basis than the heads for, say, the Sonicare - $24 for 3 heads at the time of writing, compare this to the $10 two pack of disposable brushes, $8 per unit (plus the cost of the rest of the system) for the “right” way, $5 per unit for the disposable route (all inclusive.)

Most of these disposable systems are cheap in every sense of the word (cost and build quality) and not really intended to be used for a long period of time.

From a consumer standpoint, they make a lot of sense. From an environmental standpoint, not so much. How did we get here? Well, Sonicare would probably argue they make a superior brush and therefore can charge more which may or may not be true. More likely the volumes involved combined with the “Upscale”/“Downscale” marketing associated with each brush makes it genuinely much, much, cheaper to create an all-in-one unit that’s only supposed to last a month compared to the alternatives.

Yeah, most supermarkets have them where they have regular toothbrushes. Usually aimed at kids. At least in the US:

Some examples:

https://www.amazon.com/Oral-B-Pulsar-Medium-Bristle-Toothbrush/dp/B003CP12QG/ https://www.amazon.com/Arm-Hammer-Patrol-Spinbrush-Toothbrush/dp/B07J9W7TP7 https://www.amazon.com/Spinbrush-Proclean-Battery-Powered-Toothbrush/dp/B001J4ID5K

I haven’t used their non-Thinkpad branded latops, but their Thinkpads are the best laptops you can get. They’ve had some periods where they weren’t great, but somehow even the crappiest Thinkpad over the last 15 years was better than the other major laptop makers. Reliability is always difficult to measure, but I’ve never thrown out a Thinkpad because it stopped working, and I’ve been buying them since 1999. My Lenovo Thinkpads go back to shortly after they took over from IBM, and I still have them all and they all work.

One important thing they haven’t done is sacrifice everything to fads or blindly copied Apple when it’s clear Apple’s decision was boneheaded: they didn’t give everything 1mm deep keyboards (you can type on their keyboards! Fancy that!), there were no “USB-C only, no regular USB or HDMI ports” Thinkpads.

Even budget Thinkpads are high quality machines. I wouldn’t recommend anything else at this point.

This is compounded by the fact that people don’t take care of their teeth so feedback from dentists is almost always poor

I love the way this conversation is usually “What type of toothbrush are you using again?” “Uh, the spinny one you get from the supermarket, it’s disposable so I have to buy one every month, but it seems OK”, “Ah no, what you need is the $250 Philips SuperScrubacare Plus, which has bristles on the end of the bristles, and on the end of those bristles are more bristles, and on the ends of those are little robots with tiny vacuum cleaners and flame throwers. Those really kill plaque. Also stop eating so much sugar.” “Ummm OK” “Anyway, we’re done. Here’s a cheap ass regular unpowered toothbrush. And a starlight mint.”

There are multiple reasons, but one thing I’ve read is that part of the strategy of taking down someone big is to take down the people who work for him first. The process results in more evidence being gathered, plea deals that result in yet more evidence, etc.

It’s almost identical to Twitter before Twitter adopted “The Algorithm” about 7 years ago and stopped showing people posts in a chronological order. There are some differences though, some annoying, and the latter is mostly being worked on:

Positives:

• Chronological view
• (Though this seems to upset people for some reason): Choice of server - including start your own if you’d prefer
• Up to 500 characters, or even more if your admin allows
• Very few Nazis, general anti-Nazi stance by most admins and servers that tolerate Nazis tend to end up being defedded (disconnected) from the core network though they can federate with one another.
• "TW"s, ways to ensure posts are collapsed by default unless you want to see the contents

Negatives:

• Search doesn’t really work. Plain text is generally unavailable, and you’re supposed to use hashtags. People are recognizing it doesn’t work though and are discussing how it should work. But no consensus yet.
• Quote tweets are not here yet
• TWs only collapse the text, not graphics, for some reason.
• Reading reply threads is broken - your server generally only sees a subset of replies and you have to visit the original post on its home server to see all the public replies.

The other thing to watch for is the community. While it’s way less, well, Nazi than Twitter’s, it’s also regularly compared to an HOA, people who post a lot get a lot of meta criticism about how they post, which is… ridiculous.

In general, despite the negatives, I like it, the only thing I miss are some Twitter accounts that were fun to follow. Otherwise it’s a better experience over all, but it does need some of the wrinkles ironed out. Many of the limitations I described in “Negatives” are there for well meaning reasons, but in practice I think they went too far.