Sugarcoating pills is fairly common, especially for pills which are frequently ingested or target older demographics. It’s because sugar coatings are much gentler on the esophagus (i.e.: less likely to cause esophagitis, “pill burn”). Advil (i.e.: ibuprofen) is a cheap, well tolerated, and non habit-forming pain reliever – it’s about as safe as such a thing could possibly be, so hopefully that helps to explain why a sugar coating might be warranted given the aforementioned upsides (for the love of all that is holy; always read the directions on the label, it’s still quite possible that Advil is not safe for you specifically). FWIW: the bottles also have childproofing mechanisms built into the caps (… at least in U.S. markets. Not sure about elsewhere?)

Watch out I saw these guys about to show up at your inbox

No, but now that you mention it that would be a pretty plausible thing to have happen. Just grabbing hold of a random armchair analysis and then repeating it ad nauseum until it transforms into an irony-poisoned meme totem… you’ve really gotten my hopes up now!

I am of two minds:

1. He’s not wrong
2. It doesn’t matter at this point

It’s a mess, but honestly so are a lot of critical FOSS projects (e.g.: OpenSSH, GNUPG, sudo). Curmudgeons gonna curmudgeon. There was a point of no return and that was years ago – now that Wayland’s finally becoming useable despite itself it’s probably time to come to terms with the fact that better alternatives would have arisen had anyone thought they could truly manage it.

95% of the time he plays the straight-man and then the other 5% of the time he behaves like an unhinged lunatic. It’s the perfect recipe for cultivating an audience of viewers who love to torment him with his own words. After that it’s just one step further to put words he didn’t say into his mouth and see how he reacts to getting gaslit.

I make it sound like a cynical ploy but really this kind of thing is just intrinsically tied to Jerma’s online personality. Lightning in a bottle. If you ask me the most impressive part’s actually how he manages to stay in control of the situation and not get totally swallowed up by the increasingly bizzare behavior of his viewership.

No, I am not contradicting myself. Let me say it again with the ambiguity removed:

1. Cox Media isn’t an advertiser, they sell a dressed-up analytics service. Think spreadsheets (that’s literally the service they’re selling in this copy, a monthly report spreadsheet).
2. The “technology partner” selling this data to Cox is accessing it by bypassing the normal and correct operation of the device using malware.
3. What does not “exist” is a shadowy cabal of smartphone manufacturers scheming to hide listening devices in the pockets of their consumers.

I’m sure you still believe this is a load of apologia and frankly you can think what you want, but you should probably know that I’d already read about the Cox story when it first broke and specifically chose my words with that knowledge in mind.

Read the document:

The growing ability to access microphone data on devices like smartphones and tablets enables our technology partner to aggregate and analyze voice data during pre-purchase conversations.

Key word is “technology partner”. They’re buying voice transcripts ripped from someone else’s spyware and selling the service of scraping it for keywords and maybe somehow tying that back to an individual by cross-referencing the hit against data from traditional above-board ad platforms.

Google isn’t buying transcripts, Facebook isn’t buying transcripts. It’s Cox Media buying shady recordings stolen from spyware-compromised devices and then trying to whitewash it into something sellable with their (unverifiable) cross-analytics middleware.

Hmm… what’s the purpose of loading amdgpu at all if you’re using an NVIDIA card? Optimus?

we still have people that do not believe that the phones are always listening when seemingly any website or app you use gives you advertisements about what you were just talking about in the other room with the phone locked.

Oh come on. Don’t bring this into conspiracy territory. Yes, eavesdropping does happen, but it’s not something an uncompromised Android phone will do when locked. Even when it does happen in the case of spyware, the people doing it aren’t selling your transcriptions to advertisers.

People should still opt out of as many of GAPS’s spyware-like features as possible, as you suggest, but not because it’s a special anti-listening-device warding spell.

Your best bet is probably figuring out why the graphical session isn’t working and then going from there. Since you’re on NixOS odds are all the logs you need are right there in journald.

Worst case scenario: you might need to pin your system nixpkgs to ~January 2021 until the issue sorts itself out. You can still install newer userland packages if you separately manage them as a flake (this is a common and well-supported pattern in home-manager)

EDIT: found a discussion with good configuration.nix examples for pinning the system nixpkgs. Once you find a workable pin you could also try inching it up to get a better idea of what broke (January 2021 is a good starting point because it’s the last month before 5.11 released, a newer pin is very likely possible)

Still no free blowjobs!

“He who smelt it dealt it, and I am no blacksmith good sir”

I’d say that’s already becoming the case in a few places. Hyprland isn’t just “Wayland good”, it’s “You should use Wayland good”.

Yes, I know the devs behind it act like pissants. That’s bad and I’m sorry for liking their software. I use Emacs too and RMS was kind of an asshole. Hell, I use Lemmy even though one of the devs has slighted me on more than one occasion.

I burst into a short musical number, then put my coat on and peoplewatch at the park with a sandwich.

In-group signalling. One of the many microhabits you need to acquire in order to fit in with the local culture and nothing more. As usual, people make up reasons to justify why their cultural proclivities are objectively right but these are without exception completely post-hoc.

A self-portrait. If it turns out unrecognizable, just move the goalposts and tell the viewer that it’s a depiction of their mum.

More importantly: did you know the “monopoly man” does not in fact wear a monocle? We live in trying times.

I think it’s a little unfair to escalate my talking about a presumably invisible and flavorless level of contamination into somehow advocating for choking down soot-blasted cancer nachos.

For the record: that’s not what I meant and I think any reasonable person would not have interpeted it as such having read the context of the post. It’s a sealed bag of chips – they have functioning taste buds and eyeballs for Pete’s sake!

People have put worse things in their bodies. Some mildly contaminated chips won’t kill you and probably won’t even give you cancer.

Let’s be honest, though… a standard bag of chips is already kind of bad for you – maybe you should toss them out because you’re better off without them either way? It’s just a bag of chips at the end of the day.

The joke

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