• 2 Posts
  • 43 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: August 21st, 2023

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  • Oh yeah, I reckon there’s a good number of extensions for it too, probably something I should check out as well in the future.

    And yeah, it’s definitely a tradeoff of sorts. Denying a browser or search engine access to all personal information, including GPS, might lead to irrelevant results, so I imagine it’s a matter of giving as little information as possible for the maximum relevance in results. GPS is one of those compromises I’ll make as well, though only at the zip code level most of the time, since most apps/sites don’t need to know my precise location.

    While I do try and stick to my trusted sites as much as possible, the things I often want to find online are beyond the scope of the sites I have bookmarked. Though bookmarking more sites that I trust and opting to use them over a regular search seems like a good habit to get into



  • As cautious as I like to be, I think this seems like a reasonable response and approach. It benefits Ukraine, even if it’s marginal, and while Russia will argue it’s an attempt to meddle directly in their war (Putin will find a reason to whine anyways), most of the world will see it as Romania attempting to protect their own land.

    How could Putin even argue against this? By claiming Romania has no right to shoot down a Russian missile that’s already violated international airspace? The rest of the world will just laugh and ignore yet another meaningless complaint- just one of many.


  • I tend to like the “bangs” feature that DuckDuckGo offers when it’s set as my browser’s default. Basically by putting !+prefix it automatically redirects your search to a different website. !g will do Google, !b will do Bing, !yt will do YouTube, etc… And it’s quite extensive. Currently, DDG claims to have 13,564 bangs you can use, so if there’s some website with a search bar, chances are it can be banged from DDG.

    The search engine from my use over the last 4-6 years generally provides me with “good enough” search results and I enjoy the interface itself, as well as the sorting options when searching images. Every now and then, if i don’t get the results I want, I can just bang a different search engine (I’m just starting to realize the repercussions of using “bang” as a verb…).



  • I don’t see the Tokaimura nuclear accidents (which led to the aforementioned death of Hisashi Ouchi) as a reason to dismiss nuclear energy. Even if this is bait as @CADmonkey@lemmy.world mentioned, I want to make it clear that wasn’t my intention behind bringing up Ouchi’s death, and shouldn’t be twisted into a case against nuclear energy as a whole.

    The Tokaimura accident of 1999 was the result of improper safety, due to the facility failing to install the necessary alarms should criticality occur, and cost-cutting by having workers mix uranium in steel drums instead of proper vats that would control the rate at which it’s mixed (which would have prevented criticality). In essence, had the proper safety measures been followed, the incident would not have occurred. The same can be said for most nuclear disasters, especially the famous Chernobyl disaster.

    A compiled list of nuclear incidents (which also includes events aside from nuclear reactors) can be found here:

    It’s evident that nuclear incidents, especially those pertaining to reactors, are incredibly uncommon, and this is the result of strict safety protocols that cannot be shirked, as well as an extreme number of fail-safes in the event of a malfunction. The most recent major nuclear event- The Fukushima Disaster, required an earthquake, tsunami, compounded with human error- extraordinary circumstances that not only are extremely rare, but have been learned from too.

    If the reason to ban nuclear energy is due to a small handful of disasters like these, then logic dictates that this should be expanded to a myriad of products. How about pesticides, due to the Bhopal Disaster? How about getting rid of dams, due to the1975 Banqiao Dam Failure, that led to thousands of deaths?

    The truth of the matter is that much of the large scale infrastructure that we rely on, especially in industry and energy production, can fail on extremely rare occasions, and lead to tremendous loss of life. But through strict safety measures, training, and human ingenuity, the threat of disaster is minuscule.

    TL;DR: Singling out nuclear energy as a problem when the same concerns can be raised for any industry is hypocritical, and just the result of fear-mongering. It is safe.



  • I already hated Android 12 for overhauling the aesthetic for the worse: making volume sliders obscenely wide, making the notification shade just an over-enlarged mess, and the half-assed implementation of Material You. On my Pixel 3 that I used at the time, this change alone made me root a phone for the first time just to fix all of it.

    Two updates later and once again Google fucks up something that was perfectly fine before and turns me off from their operating system yet again. While I’m nowhere close to using an iPhone, I may just use GrapheneOS if I have to switch to a phone that comes with Android 14+ out of the box.



  • Correct me if I’m wrong, but from what I’m reading online, Proton doesn’t “market” or “advertise” discounted plans beyond what you’ll save by purchasing a longer plan for their VPN. They do have a page on coupons here: https://proton.me/support/coupons

    And based on what it says, as well as other tweets and reddit comments I’ve seen from their official accounts, they grant these coupons on a case by case basis. So forgive me for being skeptical, but I don’t believe it was false advertising, nor do I believe it was presented as a plan to begin with.

    Unless you have a screenshot that shows them blatantly telling you it was a plan, I think you probably misread what they said, and that it “suddenly a coupon and not a plan anymore” isn’t actually truthful. Though of course, you could very well be right, and I might just be skeptical for no reason