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Joined 3 years ago
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Cake day: February 19th, 2021

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  • Let’s say that I’ve never had a Facebook account, but Facebook still has a lot of data it has collected about me from multiple sources, including other Facebook users, who might post photos that I am in, or share information about me in posts, neither of which i gave consent to anyone to share.

    Is it fair that my only option to protect my private information is to CREATE a Facebook account and pay them to STOP collecting and selling my private information?


  • Not seeing ads for GEICO on your car’s dashboard doesn’t mean that Toyota isn’t gathering as much data as they can about you via the platform they built and then selling that information to GEICO.

    As well as information about who you are, Toyota can also collect your “driving behavior.” This includes information such as your “acceleration and speed, steering, and braking functionality, and travel direction.” It may also gather your in-vehicle preferences, favorite locations saved on its systems, and images gathered by external cameras or sensors.

    Some models of Toyota can also scan your face for face recognition when you enter one of its vehicles.

    Source







  • Several things keep Americans from moving to Europe.

    First, immigration laws of the country one is moving to. If one is not able to get a passport from an EU or EEA county based on ancestry, you basically need to be sponsored for a work visa by a company in the country you want to move to, which can be quite difficult. And even then, you have to be employed in that country for long enough to qualify for permanent residency, then citizenship, which can take up to 7 or 8 years in some countries.

    If one is lucky enough to have parents or grandparents who emigrated to the US from a European country and can claim citizenship based on that, it’s a lot of work to get all of the paperwork together and verified and accepted by that government’s consulate (at least it is for Germany, but German bureaucracy is … special).

    Second, the US is one of the only countries in the world that double taxes its citizens. If someone was born in the United States, they will have to file taxes reporting income to the US government every single year until they die, and PAY taxes to the US government on any income over a certain amount every year until they die, regardless of the source of that income, and regardless of the fact that taxes on the same income need to be paid to the host country.

    While I have zero respect for the snivelling shitgibbon name Boris Johnson, he was born in New York and had to renounce his US citizenship to escape the IRS. You also have to PAY the US government $2350 (in cash) for the privilege of giving up your citizenship, which is also…unique.

    Sometimes there are tax treaties that can take most of the sting out of the double taxation issue (Norway’s is decent for US citizens), but it depends on the country.

    Finally, it just never occurs to many Americans that leaving is even a possibility.








  • Ooh, I know this one! Here’s what I did to get it working and set so it survives a reboot:

    1. In a terminal, run sudo arandr
    2. Set all of the monitors to 1080p
    3. Close arandr
    4. Go to Settings > Display
    5. Rearrange monitors in correct order if necessary
    6. Set the each monitor to the correct resolution and frequency, applying the settings after each update
    7. All monitors should now work, BUT they will not survive a reboot in Pop-OS 22, because the GDM3 login screen will NOT have this information, and will reset everything. So we must copy the pop-os monitors.xml file to the gdm3 config directory:

    sudo cp ~/.config/monitors.xml /var/lib/gdm3/.config/

    Note: You may need to do this as sudo -i

    1. Reboot, and all 3 monitors should be loaded in the correct positions, at the correct resolution at the login screen

  • I wonder how many fucking numbers and letters they will keep adding over the fucking years.

    Numbers and letters over the years:

    “You shall love your neighbor as yourself”

    Galations 5:14

    “Be genial, sweet and kind towards your companions.”

    Mino-ī-Kherad, II.7

    “For my people are foolish; they know me not; they are stupid children; they have no understanding. They are ‘wise’—in doing evil! But how to do good they know not.”

    Jeremiah 4:22


  • You may want to give it another shot. They’ve been working pretty hard to move away from config files - much more is done via the GUI these days to make things more user-friendly.

    The devs have also really been focusing on voice this year as well - it’s been really interesting to see what they come up with. A few releases back, they released an update that allows you to give voice commands to HA via a landline phone hooked up to a $30 VoIP box. There is also support now for Espressif’s new “S3-Box” devices, which have small screens, a speaker and a few microphones for under $50 - this does require messing with yaml files at this point, but I should be able to finally ditch my Echos soon!