I looked up the Open Technology Fund on Wikipedia and it has no relation to the CIA. well, except that its parent agency (Radio Free Asia) is part of the US government like the CIA is. they don’t seem to work together at all, and they’re under the purview of two different branches of government

besides, as other commenters have said, they’re open source and they’ve been audited. anyone can build the client themselves (with any potential backdoors removed) and set up their own server. would the CIA allow for that?

nothing better than Signal

Signal was developed with financial backing by the CIA, so do with that information what you will.

source?

NPR News is probably what you’re looking for. sports and celebrity stuff is relegated to the Culture section, which is its own separate thing (although there are a couple of music stories that seem to have been misplaced). here is the RSS feed for the News section: https://feeds.npr.org/1001/rss.xml

to spite entropy

he absolutely carried Stargate Atlantis, it was weird to see him in Aquaman

Aquaman. the visual effects were ridiculous, the characters were one-dimensional, the soundtrack was…something, and the overall tone was that of a testosterone firehose to the face. i said the eight deadly words about halfway through, and i was thoroughly bored out of my mind despite action scene after action scene after action scene…the only reason why i didn’t just get up and leave was because i was watching with a group

they are so much more than that. Builder for example has a full tree view of your project, instant compiling (well, instant in the sense that the compile button is always accessible and you don’t have to leave the application to do it), live preview for markup languages, Git integration, unit tests, profiling, and several other things I can’t remember right now. so no, an IDE is an entirely different beast from a text editor

the ones I build. I have to admit the Switch is really fun, but at the end of the day it’s just another DRM machine. I’d rather have a rig sitting somewhere that I built to my exact specifications, that I can connect to from wherever, and that will run whatever I want

on the other hand, there could be an enemy of my enemy situation, because everyone in the Middle East hates Israel (and for good reason too: not only is Israel run by genocidal fucks, but they stole everyone’s land). it’s not impossible that Jordan, Egypt, and neighboring countries would gang up on Israel.

don’t forget the part after “open crypto app” where you find out your favorite coin crashed overnight and you now have 29 cents

I’m not gonna speculate on what you’re buying, but I’m afraid you’re gonna get involved with shady people no matter what if you’re using cryptocurrency. the entire industry is in the midst of a cascade failure thanks to Three Arrows Capital going toes up, and con artists and thieves are cashing in. cryptocurrency exchanges are using their own customers’ money for not-so-good purposes, stablecoins are rapidly losing their pegs, and it seems like a bridge gets cracked every other day. my advice? if you don’t want to deal with shadiness, you really shouldn’t use cryptocurrency at all.

Outer Wilds: Echoes of the Eye. i can handle horror just fine, but Echoes of the Eye is on entirely another level of horror than most everything else. i was only able to complete about a third of it before i got too psyched out to continue

if you try to upvote/downvote or comment on a post from a community you’re banned from, you’ll get a message informing you that you’re banned

I’m not too keen on Tomorrowland. it’s got a lot of great man theory messages in it, which isn’t surprising since it was written and directed by Brad Bird, a notorious Objectivist

if you’re looking for a nice ultraportable, System76 has you covered

i’m not informed much either, but here’s what i gather; it’s centralized around the proprietary Snap Store and you can’t run your own Snap repositories, Snap apps take ages to start up, and each Snap app is mounted as a separate partition (???). there’s a whole bunch of technical issues that go over my head too, and Snaps have seen so little adoption that Canonical basically had to twist the arms of flavor maintainers to drop Flatpak support and support Snap out of the box. it’s evidently so bad even Ubuntu’s official flavors wouldn’t support it until Canonical forced them to

it’s in the name: generative pre-trained transformer. the one thing ChatGPT and GPT-3/3.5/4 are truly good at is transforming data. it can restructure paragraphs to have a different flow, take class notes and make flashcards out of them (that’s how i use ChatGPT), or even take non-textual data and potentially present it in textual format if trained right

shit just went from 0 to 100 real fucking quick

for real though, if you ask an LLM how to make a bomb, it’s not the LLM that’s the problem

as others in this thread have mentioned, Linux Mint or Pop OS are the best for someone coming from Windows. both work really well out of the box. Linux Mint has a very Windows-like desktop, so it’s often recommended to people coming from Windows; but if you want a more unique experience Pop OS is the way to go