They are regulated, but there’s a lot of breakdowns in the system. People passing background checks who shouldn’t, prior offenders passing background checks because local cops didn’t report them to the feds, etc. The DC Navy Yard shooter years back literally had fired a weapon into his neighbor’s apartment before and still passed a background check to buy the weapons he committed the shooting with. I also think if you’re a parent and you leave your weapon accessible by your children, and they go shoot up their school, you should be held at least partially liable. As somebody who is former military, the civilian population gets away with a hell of a lot with regards to firearms. No federally mandated training standards, concealed carry licenses are haphazard and go state by state, and not all states recognize other states’ permits, no federally mandated storage requirements, etc. When I was in the military, if I wanted to go target practice on base with my personal weapons I had to register them with the provost marshal on base, keep the weapons and ammo separate in locked boxes out of my reach while driving to the range, etc. And if one weapon went missing the entire base was locked down; gates closed and nobody in or out until it was located. Civilians get by with way too much.

I think a lot of our problem is loose or missing standards at the federal level, which leaves each individual state to kind of make things up as they go along and not communicate properly with feds when things go wrong.

1975 was 49 years ago, that’s basically half a century, 😋

I’m using CalyxOS and it’s pre-installed as a system app, so this seems like something that’s being built in at the AOSP level of development.

Edited my original comment for accuracy.

If I go to a buffet style restaurant like Golden Corral where there’s a long table full of precooked items, I’m gonna go up to that table and rummage around and fill my own plate, 😜

Thanks for clarifying. I hadn’t actually used that particular feature so I must have misunderstood the way it was worded in the app.

For most of my shopping, which takes place at our local Walmart (I live in the US), I actually really like using the self-checkout. Now when we make a big grocery run, having a person there makes things easier because they can scan and bag, I can unload things onto the belt and my wife can pull bags off the little turnstile thing and put them back in our cart, but most of the time I’m just running in to grab a handful of items so when I leave I can just walk up to the kiosk, scan my stuff, scan the QR code with the Walmart app on my phone and walk out the door. It’ll auto pay with the privacy card I attached to my Walmart account and give me a digital receipt to show if somebody wants to see it at the door. They even have a thing now where you can pay a monthly subscription for “Walmart+” where you can scan and pay for your items as you shop.

Governments should not depend on social media for vital communications, period.

Google may not be showing an “AI” tagged answer, but they’re using AI to automatically generate web pages with information collated from outside sources to keep you on Google instead of citing and directing you to the actual sources of the information they’re using.

Here’s an example. I’m on a laptop with a 1080p screen. I went to Google (which I basically never use, so it shouldn’t be biased for or against me) and did a search for “best game of 2023”. I got no actual results in the entire first screen. Instead, their AI or other machine learning algorithms collated information from other people and built a little chart for me right there on the search page and stuck some YouTube (also Google) links below that, so if you want to read an article you have to scroll down past all the Google generated fluff.

I performed the exact same search with DuckDuckGo, and here’s what I got.

And that’s not to mention all the “news” sites that have straight up fired their human writers and replaced them with AI whose sole job is to just generate word salads on the fly to keep people engaged and scrolling past ads, accuracy be damned.

I’m on my laptop so I thought I would elaborate on my first comment to give you things to watch out for if/when you update. I’ve been hosting mine with the zip file manually installed with my own Apache/PHP/MySQL/MariaDB setup for ages now without issue. It’s been rock solid except for, like I said, the occasional changes required to take advantage of new features such as adding new indices to the database or installing an additional php addon. Here’s the things that I noticed with updating to 28.

• The 3 dot/ellipses menu was missing in the web interface and was replaced with dedicated buttons for “Download”, “Add to Favorites” and “Delete”. Shift clicking was also broken. This meant that when I, for example, take a lot of photos for a holiday, I can’t use the web interface to select a large range of multiple files and then move them all from “InstantUpload” into a more permanent album. I either had to use the mobile app, or do them one at a time. The ellipses menu, along with the options to bulk “move/copy” have been added back since then with the *.1 update, but shift clicking in the web interface to select a range of files is still broken.
• The “Retention” app, which is listed as a “Featured” app doesn’t function any more. I used it to automatically delete backups of my Signal messenger, files in the “InstantUpload” folder that were over a year old, etc. You can enable it, but it doesn’t actually work and just throws errors in the log file, which is now reported in the “Overview” portion of the “Administration” page with a note of “X number of errors since somedate”, and prevents you getting the green checkmark. It’s probably safe to assume that other apps will also have issues because I had half a dozen get automatically disabled with the update.
• Occasionally when I use the web interface to move or copy a file, I’ll get an error message that the operation failed. Sometimes this is true, sometimes it’s not and the operation actually succeeded. If it ends up being true and the move did actually fail, doing it again results in a successful move.

It seems like they’ve made some substantial under-the-hood changes to the user interface that shouldn’t have been shipped to the “stable” channel. It’s not completely broken, it “is” usable, especially after they restored my bulk move/copy button, but I still can’t use the Retention app, at least last time I looked, so I’ve literally got daily cron scripts to check those folders for old files and delete them, then trigger an occ files:scan of the affected directories to keep the Nextcloud database in sync with the changes. This however, bypasses the built-in trash bin so I can’t recover the files in the event of an issue. I actually considered rolling back to 27 for a bit, but decided against it, so if I were you, I would stick with 27 for a while and keep an ear to the ground regarding any issues people are having that are or aren’t getting fixed in 28.

While the individuals have a responsibility to double check things, I think Google is a big part of this. They’re rolling “AI” into their search engine, so people are being fed made up, inaccurate bullshit by a search engine that they’ve trusted for decades.

I’ve hosted mine for years on my own bare metal Debian/Apache install and 28 is the first update that has been a major pain. I’ve had the occasional need to install a new package to enable a new feature, or needed to add new/missing indices to the database, but the web interface literally tells you how to do those things, so they’re not hard.

28 though broke several of the “featured” apps that I use regularly, like “Retention”. It also introduced some questionable UI changes that they had to fix with the recent .1 update. I’ll get occasional errors when trying to move or delete files in the web interface and everything. 28 really feels like beta software, even though we’re a point release in and I got it from the “stable” update channel.

I’ve been using DuckDuckGo for years now and it works surprisingly well for me. 9 times out of 10 I find exactly what I’m looking for in the first couple of results. Brave Search is another independent alternative you might look into.

AI generated garbage seems to be cluttering up places like Google.

They’re beginning to federate with Mastodon, though at least so far it’s only developers and employees at Meta. If it becomes an issue later though I’ll just block that whole domain from appearing in my feed.

I think a big part of it, here in the US, is besides all the post WW2 sentiment, a lot of folks here in the bible belt literally think they are God’s chosen people, and so whatever they do is right by God, no matter how terrible. I recently showed up for jury duty and was speaking to a lady there about her son who had joined the Marine Corps. and thought he might get deployed, and she said, I shit you not, “At least he’ll be fighting for God’s people”.

I’ve seen antisemitism. I’ve been in online communities that slowly devolved into rat caricatures and conspiracy theories about how Jews are out to destroy the world. So I know that modern antisemitism persists and is a thing to watch out for. But it’s not antisemitic to admit that Zionist Israel is butchering innocent people because they want to claim all of Palestine for themselves, and that the west is too weak willed to do anything about it for fear of being called antisemitic, or going against “God’s chosen people”. That’s not antisemitism, it’s an objective, observable fact.

We’re all paying attention, the problem is that those who vehemently support him just literally don’t care and will vote for him anyway. He wasn’t wrong when he made the comment that he could shoot somebody in the middle of the street and get away with it. He literally orchestrated and attempted coups and got people killed because he threw a temper tantrum and couldn’t stand the thought of not getting his way.

Signal set the industry standard for encryption and privacy, and it’s what I tend to point people towards. The one down-side is that it is still tied to your phone number, so solutions like Element/Matrix or XMPP with OMEMO might be a little better for some use cases. My wife, kids and I use Conversations(.)im for our intra-family chats and use Signal for talking to everybody else.

She straight up admitted that she was essentially a sock puppet CEO and would offer no friction to anything Musk wanted.

He’s impulsive and doesn’t know when to shut up. I got the distinct impression that, initially, he was absolutely not serious about buying Twitter. It was a joke/jest. BUT, because his antics affected their stock price he actually got forced into the purchase and now he’s desperately trying to figure out how to make the purchase worth what he actually paid, which is fine and all, except he seems to be leading by impulse, not by consensus or logic. He wakes up in the morning, has some random ass idea and implements it without any oversight. Even his new CEO straight up admitted that she is basically a straw man CEO who will offer no friction to anything Elon wants to do.

I hate phillips. It seems like their only purpose for existing is to strip out so that you can never remove them.

Personally, any time I have a project, I always opt for torx (star). The screwdriver bits for them are not tapered so they don’t push themselves back out of the screw-head (unlike phillips), so they tend to stay in place and grip much better. It’s a lot harder to screw up a torx screw or bit than a phillips one.