EDIT: since I don’t want the top reply not to mention this, fuck IT Crowd creator Graham Linehan for the incalculable damage he’s done to innocent trans people. He’s a worthless, disgusting bigot.

Honestly, I always found that episode… Weirdly progressive? Even maybe by accident? Consider the following:

• The trans woman April is legitimately physically attractive and with a distinctly feminine voice to match.
• She’s a legitimately very sweet, intelligent, and earnest person.
• She tells Douglas upfront in no uncertain terms that she’s trans (she phrases this as “I used to be a man”, but honestly, considering both 2008 and the fact it was used to setup a joke, I think this isn’t too transphobic? A trans person in 2008 might’ve even said this because there was less of a support network to understand that you always were a woman.)
• Douglas gets upset because he thinks he’s been tricked, but 1) he absolutely was not, and the episode makes this crystal clear that it’s because April made every effort and he’s just an absolute dumbass, and 2) Douglas has been portrayed in the show to this point as nothing but a juvenile, overdramatic, chauvanistic sack of shit, and we’re clearly not supposed to be rooting for him.
• She’s a fantastic girlfriend and becomes the love of his life. A big part of this is because she has a duality between traditional femininity and an interest in traditionally masculine activities, but I also don’t think this is terrible representation? I have a trans woman friend who carries herself in a traditionally feminine way but hasn’t dropped more traditionally masculine activities that she grew up enjoying.
• She throws the first hit at the end, but this is after Douglas dumps her on the spot after they’ve hit it off, had sex, and confessed their love for each other because he was too stupid to listen, he tells her to get lost, he basically calls her gross to her face by talking in a disgusted tone about “that operation you had”, and flat-out denies her existence as a woman.
• It’s made very evident that if Douglas weren’t transphobic, he could’ve lived the rest of his life with a woman who’s established to be literally perfect for him.

Toilet paper math becomes a lot easier with a bidet.

“You mess with Luigi, you mess with New York!”

“You mess with one of us, you mess with all of us!”

Just doing my part. 🫡

• Misattributed to Socrates. Mis/disinformation spreads quickly over the Internet, so it’s up to all of us not to be vectors for it.

• We have increasingly extensive bodies of scientific evidence indicating the harms of giving young kids the sort of near-unrestricted access to smart devices and social media that are common in society today.

• That one person said “something similar bad” but it wasn’t actually that bad in the past (or even that this is a pattern) doesn’t invalidate scientific evidence. If kids started smoking cigarettes en masse, you could pull up this exact same quote, and it would be just as strong an argument as it is here.

It makes complete sense if you work from the angle that Trump is a Russian plant working to destroy America from within.

This is a series where I make a meme out of every line of dialogue in The Room. It was running every day, but I got kind of burnt out on it for a bit and started having gaps of a day or two. I’m intending to get back to doing it daily now.

Many crowdfunded devices are delayed for years, many of which are never released. The global pandemic and chip shortage certainly did not help move things along any faster.

The Librem 5 Kickstarter was in 2017, and it wasn’t until c. 2023 that they were actually apparently able to start shipping phones at a reasonable rate. Not only that, but by the time that happened in 2023, the price had ballooned to a staggering $1300. Moreover, the problem isn’t just the delivery timeline: it’s that people would wait literal years for a refund, which is a joke. It was Purism’s responsibility to give a reasonable timeline for delivery of the phone, and they failed catastrophically over and over again as they kept delaying it (one could even imagine that each delay was deliberately shorter than what they needed to generate fewer refund requests). When people correctly identified this pattern and wanted their money back from the money pit, Purism left them high and dry.

Purism also funded/developed phosh and many other libraries which allow mobile Linux to be where it is today. Competitors are mainly hardware vendors and rely heavily on community support, many of which never provide any financial support or direct contributions toward FOSS development.

I’m well aware that Purism put money into software development. I’m even aware that PinePhone started shipping Phosh in 2021. However, it was Purism’s choice to start their own Debian-based PureOS instead of just helping develop PostmarketOS or another existing OS for less money (this existed by the time of their Kickstarter and certainly would’ve been on their radar over the next several years). It was Purism’s choice to start Phosh instead of just helping develop GNOME Shell which Phosh appears to be heavily based on. When you say financial support for FOSS, I want to qualify that this is them developing FOSS they started and continue to be the maintainers of, not them giving back to extant projects like GNOME Shell which they so clearly based Phosh on. And that they decided to do these things does not an $800 smartphone make given dogshit specs and given that it apparently still drops calls left and right (the most basal function a phone is supposed to be able to handle).

Purism certainly could have done a better job at proactively constructing a more clear and comprehensive refund policy, clarifying crowdfunding vs pre-order (and what is meant by “pre-order”), etc. Purism also could have done a better job being transparent and communicative about its refund queue.

As noted, though, I think this was deliberate. It took people literal years to get their refunds, and I’m betting this was because Purism had mismanaged funds so spectacularly that they couldn’t even refund people who had been left waiting for a product for years (keeping in mind that each year that goes by makes the specs they paid for more obsolete). So instead of just coming clean, they decided to rugpull their pre-orderers and change the wording of the refund policy as people were trying to get refunds. This isn’t just an “oopsie”; this is an illegal bait-and-switch in many countries. To be crystal clear, by the way: a crowdfund on the premise that you’ll receive a device and a pre-order on the premise that you’ll receive a device are functionally not different things; Purism was playing a semantics game to try to underhandedly stem the tide of refunds.

Despite the phone taking much longer to release than anticipated, it was eventually released. How is that a scam?

• The final product is a barely usable piece of shit.
• It took half a decade to really start releasing in earnest. At what point does something become not a scam for releasing too late? If I ask you to pay me money to write a book (on the condition that you’ll get a copy) and release it 25 years later (it’s an incoherent mess, but it is words on pages), having given you no reason to believe it would take nearly that long, have I scammed you?
• They’re shady as all hell and played that game with people seeking refunds, literally running the delay, deny, defend playbook to a ‘T’. Even if I desperately wanted a Librem 5, I wouldn’t buy one for fear nearly $1000 would vanish into a black hole.

This is not the common trend. Many software improvements have been developed since, and most users report much more than “a few hours” of battery life - especially with auto-suspend enabled.

We’re 8 years on from the Kickstarter. That battery life has allegedly become serviceable on an $800 commercial product isn’t something to be celebrated or even the bare minimum: that’s still a terrible look. Keep in mind the previous thread I linked about the battery life was from I think a couple years ago. Note, by the way, the comment in this mid-2023 thread reading: “I still have 0% of my refund for my Librem 5!!” Purism is absolutely shady as fuck. With 4500 mAh of charge and those booty cheeks specs, the Librem 5 should be running circles around modern smartphones in battery life, not hobbling behind them.

A higher resolution would consume more power, thus exacerbating your previous complaint.

And? My S23 Ultra has a 4K display and gets much better battery life (AMOLED helps a lot with that, but Purism uses a cheap piece of shit IPS display). It’s not my fault that Purism is too incompetent to have at least a 1080p display and a decent battery life at the same time. It’d be like having a car that gets 1 km/L and goes 30 km/h, and then when someone says it should go faster the response is “well but then the fuel efficiency would be worse.”

The Librem 5 uses removable WWAN and WLAN/BT modules, as well as a removable battery. Waterproofing would require a fully sealed system which would be much less user-serviceable.

I’m keenly aware. I am of course just pointing out that the Librem 5 lacks a major quality-of-life feature present on modern smartphones as a tradeoff for the modular design. What does concern me with that tradeoff however is that there’s not even an IP rating (e.g. even my wireless earbuds have a published rating of IP54), and so I genuinely have zero idea using this thing how waterproof I should expect it to be. I would be paranoid to even take out my $800 smartphone in the rain because I don’t know where the boundary is. This is one of the most baseline specs I expect to know about a smartphone, and yet instead of this, the specs page is spent touting: “Notification LED: Yes (RGB LED with PWM control per color)”.

Rockchip, Allwinner, and NXP chips have the best mainline Linux support for any FOSS-focused Linux device. 3 GB is the memory limit for this CPU, which is often used in commercial/industrial/automotive environments.

I am aware that it’s not just Purism saying “fuck it, use garbage”. Computing power is probably the place where I have the most sympathy for Purism, since, like, what are they supposed to do? Push RISC-V two decades into the future and start their own fab? This complaint is taken from a more hollistic point.

1. They’re charging $800 for this in 2025 when a $500 smartphone in 2014 could compete with it on performance.

2. These specs were announced in 2017 for $800 (maybe it was the A53 back then? Which wouldn’t be much different in price), and yet eight years later they’re still selling it for $800. Inflation tells me $800 in 2017 would be about $1000 today, so the price has deflated by about 20%, but that’s not even close to acceptable nearly a decade later with the same specs. I’m looking at an LG V20 64 GB (removable battery and microSD card slot in all their glory) on eBay, and I’m seeing $40 from its original price of $700. When I see the same specs eight years later, I expect a price drop of 50–80%, not 20% (let alone that they randomly decided to jack up the price to $1300 in 2023 only to roll that back).

3. Purism did still decide to create this product and went into it understanding the paucity of options. For having a noble stated goal of creating a privacy-oriented smartphone, it nonetheless is very poor for daily driving. (I remember watching one of their demos years back of using Firefox on the phone, and it was scrolling at like 4 frames/sec. It was excruciating to watch.) If Purism were a non-profit trying to advance the market solely out of altruism, “I did the best I could” would carry a lot more weight for me. Of course they’re not, though; they’re a “social benefit corporation”, or a for-profit company with the goals of a traditional non-profit (cooooool). They decided to launch this product, they did it for a profit motive, and they gathered over $1 million to do it, so “they did the best they could” only goes so far.

Purism also hires staff across the globe, and this abbreviation may differ within the author’s country.

To my understanding, no. Rather, this is a naive mixing of ‘M’ – the usual abbreviation for for ‘mega’ – and ‘px’ – the usual abbreviation for ‘pixels’. Which is a pathetic oversight for somebody trying to manufacture a smartphone.

It’s likely in your best interest to move away from Gmail, if not immediately then over some period of time (e.g. start new email signups with other address, gradually move over existing ones, etc.)

Nah, this was totally drawn by a human. I mean look at how the leftmost woman’s four-fingered right hand is in a superposition of every angle at the same time. An AI could never.

but it’s not helpful

Seems pretty helpful to me to direct software requests or bug reports to the place where software or bug reports are taken.

The Lemmy github page — like any github page — is indecipherable for anyone who’s neither geek nor nerd.

Huh? How’s it “indecipherable”? It has some code listed, then below that is a description of the project. If you just want to add a bug report or request a feature, you click on ‘Issues’, then you check to see if that feature request/bug report is already there yet, click ‘New issue’, select the kind that you want (“Bug Report”/“Feature request”/“? Question”). Then you fill it out in the template that they give you and click ‘Create’.

I’m neither geek nor nerd.

Okay, but it’s not “indecipherable for anyone who’s neither a geek nor nerd”; it’s actually extremely easy, and even if you don’t find it that way at first blush, you could just ask “Hey, I’m kind of having trouble with this; can anyone help?”

Is there a community about Lemmy software on Lemmy somewhere?

The reason it’s on GitHub is because that’s where the developers are.

Okay, but the watermark says tentaclenumber3 from lemmy.ca. Do you have an alt or something?

Same here with plant milk in coffee. It gives you a ton of really yummy variety. I’ve accidentally had dairy milk put in my coffee, and every time I recognize it by how noticeably worse the coffee tastes.

Another one for me was nutritional yeast on popcorn. I mixed it into my usual popcorn seasoning, and popcorn legitimately isn’t as good to me now without nooch.

Purism repeatedly delayed their phone for years, charged exorbitant amounts for it compared to their competitors, and then changed their refund policy to fuck over their customers who had been waiting practically forever at that point. The Librem 5 is a scam, and it has embarrassingly bad specs. We’re talking a few hours of battery life and constant dropped calls, a 720p IPS display, no waterproofing, and computing power (i.MX8M CPU, 3 GB of RAM, 32 GB of eMMC, 802.11n okay so the order page says 802.11ax but another page says 802.11n, and a 8/13 MP front/back camera (they apparently don’t know the abbreviation for megapixel is ‘MP’, not ‘Mpx’, which is kind of embarrassing)) comparable to a pre-2015 $500 smartphone sold in 2025 at a starting price of $800 (or $2000 for the USA edition).

EDIT: sorry, not citizen, but nonetheless a legal green card holder who’s been determined to be here legally.

Garcia has never been convicted of criminal charges in the US or El Salvador

Also, you can’t, you know, legally deport a US citizen to an El Salvadorian gulag even if they had committed a crime. Trump here is trying to shift the Overton window from a discussion of if they’re a US citizen to if they’ve committed a crime (they haven’t, of course), and it’s fucking disgusting.

At this point, the only criminal I think who deserves to be sent to a deep, dark hole never to return is Mr. 34 Felonies himself.

EDIT: sorry, not citizen, but nonetheless a legal green card holder who’s been determined to be here legally.

I can’t believe I’m actually about to complain about this – that the Trump administration is so profoundly shitty that they can make such a giant step for animal rights into something to be concerned over.

Each year, over 110 million animals are horrifically killed in the US alone for experimentation. It’s very obvious there are classes of product where animal testing requirements are bogus. Animal testing bans for cosmestics are present in the EU, India, and elsewhere, and it should be banned here too as it’s working out just fine there (although as this admin and this Congress strictly do not care about animal welfare, this won’t happen in the next four years).

Of course we’re talking about drugs here, not cosmetics, and a lack of experimentation can be seriously dangerous to human health. I don’t for a single second trust this admin to replace animal testing with robust requirements that ensure the same level of dilligence is still carried out (which we do know is possible). Given this entire administration has shown itself to be a naked grift, and given we know that anything not a grift is motivated strictly by far-right, whackjob ideology (and neither RFK Jr. nor Trump give a fuck about animal welfare ideologically), the express reason this is being done is to make drug testing requirements more lax to the financial benefit of big pharma companies and to the detriment of everyone else in the US.

Now you could say “but hang on, human safety doesn’t deserve to take precedent over the intentional, gruesome murder of millions of sentient animals; it’s still good even if it’s more dangerous to humans.” And I agree that it’s a complex dilemma. But here’s the thing: this admin presumably isn’t forever. There will come a time in the future where the public and the politicians are doing what they can to mop up Trump’s steaming diarrhea. At this point, it’s highly plausible that Trump’s loosening of requirements for drug testing will have real, measurable negative ramifications and that there will be a reactionary push therefore to bring back animal testing stronger than ever. If we want animal testing gone, we need to make sure robust alternatives are in place, or its removal today will be seen for the foreseeable future as a cautionary tale anytime someone proposes the well-reasoned, well-intentioned removal of animal testing requirements.

From your source:

I cited 1© because it’s the one that actually makes any sense with what they were saying. I did read the entire thing, and yes, saying they were using sense 3 would very obviously be a bad-faith interpretation of what they were saying; that’s why I pointed to 1©.

In terms of “sentience” or “consciousness” these also cannot be applied black and white to animals or plants

True to an extent. The line is fuzzy. Plants aren’t sentient; we’re not doing this. Plants don’t have a nervous sytem and aren’t conscious. It’s a bad-faith attempt at equivocation not accepted by science. If we’re talking about animals, sure there’s a fuzzy line somewhere, but that fuzziness keeps getting moved back year after year. What we can say with certainty though is that that line isn’t around what a typical omnivorous diet eats such as cows, pigs, birds, etc. and hasn’t been for a very long time. There’s increasingly robust evidence for fish’s abililty to feel pain. I draw the line at no animals because I don’t know exactly where in the animal kingdom that line really is and so don’t feel comfortable choosing (and I have no interest in eating sponges), but rational minds can disagree when we’re talking about bivalves, about echnioderms, etc. However, yes, we can easily apply things like consciousness to animals like pigs and have been able to for well over a decade now.

There is [are*] animals which show a quite complex consciousness and there is [are*] animals, where we couldn’t observe these (yet).

Correct. For example, humans have quite a complex consciousness among the consciousnesses we’ve found (maybe some advanced civilization out there totally dwarves us; who knows). Meanwhile, sponges likely aren’t conscious, and we have zero evidence for their consciousness. Again, though, the most common land animals farmed for food are sentient, and it’s increasingly evident that’s also true of fish.

At the same time we see more and more examples of plants showing what could be called “pain” or “social life”.

Nope. Sorry, just nope. There is a wide scientific consensus that plants do not feel pain, let alone are conscious. The pseudoscientific discourse around antiveganism has begun turning away from health now that vegan diets are healthful and demonstrably confer substantial health benefits compared to omnivorous ones and away from the environment because climate change is demonstrably very real and caused in large part by animal ag and now toward “plant pain” because it’s just enough to give scientifically illiterate laypeople another excuse to bury their heads in the sand.

OP could have just talked about “animals” instead of “beings”. Talking in terms of “beings” only muddies the water both between plants and animals but also animals and humans.

Humans are animals. Objectively. Objectively Homo sapiens are hominids, which are primates, which are mammals, which are chordates, which are animals. We are separated from the genus Pan by about 7–9 million years of evolution. This is like saying that talking about “vehicles” only muddies the water between cars and my 1987 Chevy Malibu. That you’re expressing notions of plant pain and delineating humans biologically from animals really tells me you don’t understand biology. They shouldn’t change their language just because you don’t understand basic taxonomy.

And the latter is highly problematic, which is why we must not be careless with these words.

Why is treating a basic biological fact as factual in a completely neutral way (which you’re already weirdly extrapolating that they’re comparing humans to other animals? when in reality they’re just saying that non-human animals can be sentient?) problematic or careless?

Some Fascists work to infiltrate movements such as veganism or animal rights precisely with the goal to devalue human life through weakening the perception of value of human life over animal life.

Give me even the slightest shred of evidence that ecofascism is a serious problem that’s so prevalent in veganism it warrants such a prominent mention here (let alone one at all) and that it’s caused by treating other beings (I am going to use that word and use it proudly) as sentient/conscious or absolutely piss off with this fucking gutter trash. What the fuck are you fucking talking about trying to distract from the obvious ethical good of veganism through rhetorical whiplash to this nonsensical “um, actually, what about ecofascism?” Would you bring this up in a discussion about solar panels? “Um, just be careful not to talk about global warming or the spooky ecofascists might show up.”

I don’t think this is the case for OP

NO SHIT.

or the majority of people in these movements

Okay?

but they need to be vigilant against it.

Vigilant against what? Basic scientific literacy? My dude, my guy, veganism is one of the most leftist movements you can imagine which has the express intent of reducing suffering and unjust hierarchies. We’re constantly vigilant against fascism and refuse to let it infiltrate our spaces. I can think of few places other than an ancom protest rally that are more resilient to infiltration from fascists. I’m genuinely disgusted that your arguments were so flimsy that you felt the need to compare calling sentient animals “beings” to fascism.

They said “being”, not “living being”, so I think it can be safely assumed they’re talking about conscious life here (see Merriam-Webster’s definition 1©). Like I think we both know that they’re not talking about plants, but in an age where being vegan (especially in the first world) is easier than it’s ever been by a wide margin, where the overwhelming majority of people in the first world wouldn’t have to eat sentient life if they didn’t want to and live perfectly healthy (or often healthier) lives, and where it’s only continuing to become easier, more popular, and more widely understood to be healthful and ethically more sound, it’s a lot easier to quip “haha whaddabout plants dum-dum??” than to confront what they’re very obviously saying about eating sentient animals.

The Boston Herald is tabloid trash.

Mark’s lines are so criminally underappreciated I swear to god. lmfao

This one’s top 10 for me.