GrapheneOS is super easy to install if you do the browser method. The explanation kn their site may look longish but it’s always longer to explain something than to do it. Feel free to DM me of you get confused, but you won’t.

Most Samsung won’t allow you to unlock the bootloader so the Lineage angle is probably moot. If it is one of the few supported Samsungs, it does offer more privacy by not coming with Play Services. Assuming your friend doesn’t just sign into Google anyway, or is willing to make the transition to apps that don’t need Play Services for notifications. Also Lineage does not allow you to relock the bootloader, which is a substantial security security risk of someone gets ahold of your phone, which isn’t unrealistic in today’s world with rising fascism. So really, if he is not going to commit, it may be better to just leave stock Android on there.

GrapheneOS is both the pro enthusiast choice and the “set it up for your friend” choice because they can have sandboxed Play Services, sign into Google, and use the Play Store, and they’re still significantly better off privacy AND security wise than even iPhone, and virtually no different for someone used to Android. Especially if they use a dedicated google Account just for the phone. Of course, it may not be relevant to you in this instance if you’re giving him a Samsung.

That’s a suspiciously specific promise to make.

I’ve seen her on TV shows and stuff so I know she’s a better actor than Holland. But still not what I’d call a generational talent or anything. The obsession is a bit odd.

I agree. That’s why religion and politics don’t mix. Someone truly spiritual is bad at playing politics, a politician can rarely be genuine. So then it just becomes a self sustaining system that doesn’t do or help anyone.

I agree.

Right now I’m just done for now attending anywhere and mostly with studying anything, aside from a few things like looking into Hinduism a bit, visiting with someone to a different sect of Christianity, stuff like that. I’d be pretty surprised if there was no intelligent design or greater purpose to the world. I do believe some form of spirituality is important to the human experience. I’m not married to any idea at the moment though.

Thank you, that’s more than anyone else said :) I haven’t lost her yet, but it’s just a matter of time. A few more years at most.

The oversimplified explanation: they are stupid/unwise/shallow. I couldn’t have said it better myself than your last sentence, that’s exactly the narrative purpose of the prequel Jedi order.

They have the correct words memorized, but they don’t understand what it actually means. Anakin is able to quote “unconditional love is encouraged, it is just attachment that is forbidden”. When he goes to Yoda after having nightmares of the future, he tells Anakin that he must learn to let go of the thing he is afraid to lose, since it is just a part of life. Is any of that wrong? Not particularly, but was Yoda unconditionally loving him? Or did he uncaringly spout dogma at him when he could clearly tell he was struggling. No questions of what it was about, no follow up, no kind words, no empathy, no nothing.

Then there’s the clouding of the Force. So, they could generally see the future before this point, and now they can’t. And they don’t think this is odd or concerning? They’re not on their toes enough to expect a trap or a plot twist? Mace floats the idea of telling the senate in episode 3, many years after it started. Just because they are the ones that presuppose they are always trying to do the right thing doesn’t mean that they will always have the answers, always be strong, or even not just fooling themselves into thinking they have an honest heart for the truth. Pretending otherwise led to the downfall of the free world.

Yoda can rattle off “fear leads to anger, anger leads to hate, hate leads to suffering” in Episode 1, but that’s exactly what happened to them. They feared losing to the Dark Side, feared losing their influence on the Republic, so they integrated further with the government, making both weaker (which always happens when you mix religion and government), which caused Anakin to doubt because they were so transparent, then completely abandon the ideology because he saw no place for himself in the world after making a single mistake.

I am all too familiar with the mindset as someone who was raised very Christian. Jesus himself even criticizes the practice of “tithing the mint and cumin, but ignoring thr weightier matters of the law: justice, mercy, and faithfulness.” Basically. the religious leaders of the time took the old law’s command to give a tithe (one tenth) of your income to God SO seriously that they’d dump out every slice on their spice rack into a table once a week, and carefully divide it into 10 equal pieces, and give a tenth to God. Yet they completely missed the point of religion, the concepts and real people that actually matter. Even for the small things, why did God want them to tithe their belongings? Not because he came down and grabbed it from the altar every night, but so it could go to people who needed it but couldn’t afford it. Yet the religious leaders neglected the orphans and widows in the community. The religious leaders wee “so good” by being “so dedicated” to thr tithing command, but guess whose job it was to distribute the tithes to the needy? Guess who actually kept it. They were too enthralled with the specifics (and their own additional dogma) that when God himself came, they killed him because they didn’t recognize his teachings as the same thing they “followed”. Whether you believe in the Bible or not, it is a universal truth about humanity, and unfortunately even so-called Christians have learned nothing from this.

Similar to Anakin, I left my local church of over a decade because my mom got cancer, and nobody said a thing about it to me. Nobody reached out after I left either. I called out one guy on it later, and he was basically like “yeah but she’ll go to heaven so no big deal right? I don’t know what you want me to say” Like yeah maybe, even if I fully believe that (which I’m not sure I do anymore) or in Buddhism where we all become a part of something greater, I still have emotions and it would sure be great if anyone cared enough to help me process them. If God gave us emotions, it was for a purpose, not to ignore them.

Yes but also no. Due to all the good Star Wars video games and the emphasis on dualism, we think of force powers as separate abilities unlocked on a skill tree, and you have to choose to use or not use them, or it’ll make your dark side points go up. That’s not really the case though. Everyone uses the Force for telekinesis. Force Choke is just telekinesis, except increasing the pressure specifically around the throat. Sure, you can kill someone and be “good” or Light Side, even specifically that way theoretically. But let’s be honest here: it was a way for Vader to torture or kill underlings that questioned him to assert his authority to aura farm. Not out of love, not out of any sense of “I need to do this to make the world better”. So it is a “dark side power” in practice, because of your intention.

There is some debate about how Palpatine’s master (have you ever heard the tragedy of Darth Plagueis the wise?) was able to extend life. But at least one popular books says that it was by literally sucking the life energy out of someone else to extend your own life, increasingly having to kill more to extend your life by increasingly shorter periods. The same book states that this is how Vader survived and why Padme mysteriously died “of a broken heart”. Palpatine killed her to save Vader, as well as a bonus for him to have full control over him by severing his last connection to his old life. So yes, defying the laws of the universe of life and death, and using life itself (the Force that is a part of us all and we are all part of it) to inflict suffering, pain, and death, just to extend your own life (“you” really just being the Force too that exists for a small period of time, think Buddhism) is definitely a corruption of the Force for evil purposes. But if you were able to do this to sacrifice your own life to save multiple others, or even to save one person who can serve a greater purpose, perhaps that wouldn’t be seen as the Dark Side.

Lucas himself kept it pretty simple. From interviews and the movies themselves, his narrative is that the dark side is a corruption and abuse of the force. Think like burning through natural resources, instead of using renewable energy. The Force is not a finite resource in that way exactly, but corrupting the Force can have wider effects psychologically and sociologically. This may seem overly simple at first, but I don’t think it is when you consider just how evil the Sith actually are.

But you know, death of the author and all that. The expanded universe saved Star Wars in my opinion, and gave it a lot of much needed depth. There was a lot of info about lessons Luke had to learn about accepting all parts of himself, and learning how fear, even of himself, leads to the dark side. He hesitated using powers like force lightning or mind manipulation because of how evil it seemed. But he learned that it isnt an act itself, but the intention behind it that matters, as well as the reasoning/wisdom behind it. Dominating another’s mind to aura farm or assert your authority is not the move, but a Jedi mind trick to save lives is acceptible,for example. This was expanded in more in the EU by those that walk a middle path, the Grey Jedi. Who were not all that different than Luke ended up being, though they were more fixated on the whole “duality of man” thing.

The Prequels reinforced this by highlighting how imperfect and ultimately impotent the Jedi order was at the time of Palpatine’s rise.

While I don’t believe the discourse online that Anakin killing all Jedi and Sith WAS the balancing of the Force, the Jedi Order DID need to be reworked. Just like how religion in real life isn’t perfect and needs reform kn a regular basis, but we do need people to tell us to be nice to other humans and form a certain kind of worldwide standard of social accountability, and religion is a useful form of that. We certainly DON’T need an equal, “balanced” amount of people whose religion is mass genocide and “might makes right” to the degree that they kill their teachers (often guardians that raised them) as a rite of passage. Also, Jedi=/=good the same way religion=/=good. The Light Side is good. The Jedi, and religion, attempts to achieve goodness, but does not always succeed. The Dark Side, whether Sith or Dark Jedi, is fundamentally a rejection of accountability, the concept of goodness, and respect for the natural order of the universe. This so-called binary, ironically, comes from the idea that anything not approved by the Jedi order’s dogma is the Dark Side.

This overly emphasized social pressure is a big reason Anakin fell. In his mind it was “well I did x so I’m not a Jedi anymore, so that means I have to embrace the complete opposite of everything I once stood for because I am now officially Bad™️”. And while Anakin is responsible for his own actions, the Jedi Order is not “good” either for setting him up to fail like this. He seems like (and is) an idiot who was easily fooled and manipulated. But like, Padme was the only one who fully accepted him for who who was, even after he admitted to thr Sand People massacre. She never even looked at him with fear or judgment. Palpatine was similar. And that’s a powerful thing.

But none of this means the Force decided “we need some more genocide and less people who care about trying to be good. Send in the chosen one.” That’s just dumb.

I’m not going to pretend there was any subtext to the sequels since there isn’t even a main text.

Source: used to be WAY too much of a Star Wars nerd.

EDIT:

In the scene you mentioned, Yoda warns him not to take his weapons, which Luke ignores. When Luke asks what is waiting for him, he tells Luke “what you bring with you”. Bringing weapons/violence to “win” at his training is missing the point of what Yoda was trying to teach him. Obviously violence IS sometimes necessary, some people are too far gone, and Yoda himself later tells him he’ll need to defeat his father. But the lesson is this: when your main tool is a hammer, everything looks like a nail. Luke learned the lesson, and by committing to the bit while staring death in the face, was able to save even Vader.

So you basically ARE calling me a narcissist by proxy, or a defender of narcissists at best.

Well, no more Mullvad for me. Thanks for pointing that out. There are several good alternatives.

I’ll keep it brief. I do find the controversies comparable, for the reasons previously stated. I will not continue to belabor the point as you do not agree. I find Brave’s mistakes to be easier to point out than the proverbial frog in boiling water, but not any less harmful. My goal is not to say everything Brave does is OK, but rather to push back in this concept that they do so many more worse things than similar products, which I do not believe to be true, as well as explain the context, which as much as they are still bad things that should in fact be criticized, are not AS bad as reading the headline sounds, and I can kinda see where they were coming from in some cases. And I’m more inclined to stick with them because they respond to criticism by fixing thr problem. I don’t expect that to change either, they’ve forced themselves aggressively into the position of catering to the core audience of privacy enthusiasts. I’m not telling you to accept it “at the expense of things you care about”. I’m telling you the problems no longer exist, so you don’t have to.

Worth noting that the CEO was the CEO of FIREFOX at the time of the LGBT controversy. He was forced out due to the backlash, so good on Mozilla, but I don’t believe for a second that Firefox employees didn’t know the type of person that he was, or that their corporate culture or values are particularly different than Brave’s. They’re just not arrogant enough to say it out loud. I could nitpick other things I don’t like about Firefox like their VPN, but at the end of the day my opinion is that they are both not great, but some of the better options available. I don’t play favorites just because it’s the thing I chose. It is entirely possible that either company could announce something tomorrow that would be unforgivable to me, and I would not be surprised by either one.

The only reason I point out of something is not “as bad” is because I don’t believe it is possible to stay completely away from supporting anyone controversial. Can’t do it with food production, can’t do it at work even though it makes me feel bad. Can’t do it with web browsers. If a 4th option besides Chromium, Gecko, or WebKit pops up overnight ran by the Jesus Christ of open source and privacy, I’d happily switch and we won’t have to keep having these conversations. But right now, this is what we’ve got: Brave, Firefox, and a few standout Firefox forks like Tor, LibreWolf, and Zen.

I wasn’t sure if you were referring to either or both interpretations for Mullvad, so I responded to both versions of what you could mean by that. Based in your last comment I have a feeling I didn’t hear something recent about them, as far as I know everyone still likes them.

I reread the narcissist thing and I’m really not sure what you mean then. Are you calling the Brave CEO a narcissist?

I do see a pattern, which is why I said I don’t fully trust them and why I noted they were controversial in my original comment. The way I see it is basically this: if you are a dyed in the wool tinfoil hat wearing privacy advocate, and actively part of the privacy community, you are probably a little bit crazy. Privacy should be default, but unfortunately we are in the wild west of information exploitation, that’s why you and I have to go out of our way to find private options. For a privacy focused dev, its them vs the world, and in a capitalist economy, you have to find a way to make your product make money, or it has to be a small enough project to not need much. GrapheneOS’s lead dev, for example, is a bit nuts. Do I trust he is competent and trying to do the thing he says he is trying to do, and do I trust putting his OS on my phone over Google? Definitely. Would I be friends with him? No. Brave I trust a little less, but I see them in a similar way: often trying to find a crackpot method to make money off their product so they can stick around.

I can’t say I’m a fan of their CEO. Then again, I can’t say I particularly like any CEO of any company, so I try to support open source projects with the Unix/Linux philosophy of doing one thing good, so I can support small projects that don’t need a CEO. Unfortunately maintaining a browser is not one of the things that can be done the Unix way. It is basically its own OS in some ways, a lot of work, even more so if it is your own engine like Firefox. For companies that I’m forced to choose between, their personal viewpoints are a concern, just not my biggest one, unless they’re like Satan themselves like Larry Ellison or Elon Musk. I’m forced to pay Microsoft for licenses and support at work, and that bothers my conscience more than using a free browser by a guy who didn’t support gay marriage in 2014 before it went through federally, like just about everyone I grew up with, most of whom have since gotten over themselves. Not saying it’s OK or right, just noting that was at least half of Americans back then.

I agree with your assessment that Firefox used to be the default good option and get steadily worse every day. They got have too big of a team so they’re trying to expand, but that goes against their core audience because we just don’t want extra “features”. They aren’t doubling down on what got them here: being a privacy focused browser. They’re trying to be Google, but can’t be because 1. Google exists, And Chromium is still is the best browser engine functionally, which most people care about most, and 2. It will alienate core audience even more. So their strategy is to go slow enough that hopefully we don’t notice or they don’t go bankrupt because they make most of their money from. Google being the default search engine.

Does this make Firefox a stupid option that I’d criticize people for using? No. It is still one of the best options we have, in a world where most of them are bad because a browser project has to have a certain amount of devs and money behind it to keep up with security and maintenance. And I recommended 2 Firefox forks to OP in my original comment. Firefox vs Brave is really just a predictable trending down of “Stop Firefox we don’t like this minor bad change!” “I’m gonna do it anyway” VS “Hey guys what about this?” “WTAF were you thinking Brave?” “Oh, sorry…”

What a strange comment. Can’t say I’ve ever been called a narcissist for recommending privacy browsers before.

Mullvad is pretty much the most trusted VPN provider. If you don’t want to pay for a VPN, don’t. I explicitly mentioned it is still a good privacy by default Firefox based browser without the bloat of Firefox.

Sure, let’s go through your list, why not.

2016: Brave announces a feature, then are laughed at because it’s a bad idea. They don’t do it. Ok then?

2018: for some reason they allow users to donate in someone else’s name that Brave is not affiliated with. They give them the money after $100 is reached, which is clearly stated. They don’t clearly state which is affiliated and who isnt, confusing the website owners into thinking someone impersonated them. They then label it after someone contacts them about this, and don’t use a dumb ass fundraising system like this again. At no point are they being misleading about where money is going, and this does not affect Brave users in any way.

2020: injecting affiliate links. According to Brave, this was a coding mistake, and it was fixed before they made any money from it. Even if I don’t believe them, from what I can tell, this is not like the Honey scandal where it stripped out other people’s affiliate links to steal their money, but rather only put an affiliate link into a clean link to make Brave money when there would have been no money involved. Not a privacy issue either from what I can tell. It’s an “if x then y” thing during the search process. There’s not someone sitting in Brave HQ reading everyone’s searches and pressing a button, nor is it recorded. Is it scummy and possibly illegal to get money from a company who is thinking someone advertised on their behalf but are effectively not gaining anything? Yeah, and if they did in fact do it on purpose, that is bad. But I can see their logic of it not hurting anyone. Sorta…and if I’m being honest I’m not going to cry for corpos that heavily push ads.

2020: ads on home screen. Like every browser, including Firefox. OK. I forgot this happened because I turned it off. Like I do for every browser, or at least every browser that allows you to do so. Except in Brave’s case, they will literally pay you to not turn it off.

2021: Brave makes a Tor plugin that they didn’t realize conflicts with their ad blocking in such a way that causes DNS leaks. They fixed it as soon as this was found out. Unlike the affiliate link thing, I don’t believe for a second that this would be intentional. Brave does not stand to benefit from this on any way, unless they are fully a fed psy-op.

2023: certainly the most worrying on the list that they’re even approaching this as a feature. However, Web Discovery Program is opt in. Your data is not being sold or used for Brave’s index unless you tell them to. I think their idea here was to build their own index based on consensually given data rather than solely scraping the internet without consent. However I’d really prefer they just didn’t be a part of data selling at all, obviously. Needless to say, this is a big problem with browsers in general. Firefox has stated that they don’t sell data, but they have definitely been in bed with Ai lately and their telemetry is opt out.

Now far be it from me to even approach being a corporate defender. I am. not here to suck Brave’s dick, I keep up to date with what Brave is doing because I don’t fully trust them. But then again, I don’t trust pretty much any browser creators more than I am forced to. I just think it’s really weird that Brave gets so much hate when it isn’t warranted when compared to what other browsers do.

Ungoogled Chromium, for example, removes some key security features from the Chromium project for absolutely no reason, and relies on a bizarre build system that lacks transparency, relying on third parties binaries instead of just, you know, building from source. Helium is a fork of Ungoogled Chromium, and doesn’t fix either of those issues. Vivaldi is closed source. Why are we even entertaining them being a privacy browser if we don’t know what code they’re running? They could be worse than Google for all we know. Firefox refuses to fix a security flaw on Android where they don’t sandbox by site, which has been known about for years. Every Android Firefox fork has the same issue. As good as it is on desktop, that’s why I ultimately moved away from Firefox, because I need to sync tabs from my PC to my phone.

I’d recommend Mullvad Browser. It has Tor’s anti-fingerprinting features without the Tor part. Designed to use with a VPN to get anonymity from sharing IP addresses. But even if you don’t do that it is still a stripped down private by default Firefox fork. I use it for general searches and some anonymous accounts, and Brave or Zen for signing into personal accounts. Brave is controversial but their controversies are at least understandable, quickly rectified, haven’t happened in a while, and are generally best in class on features. Zen is a little slower due to being based in Firefox and not Chrome, but not much, and is much more clean and customizable than Firefox.

If I’d already had a Lemmy account I’d probably have just stuck with that but yeah Piefed has more features. The combined comments from cross posts are really nice.

KDE is only boring if you allow it to be :) it is probably the most customizable DE

It was 3.5% at best at the beginning of the year. It is finally happening.

Depends on if you’re talking about actual woke, ironic woke, or Trump 2.0 era woke.

Actual woke is opening your proverbial third eye to see what’s really going on around you, making you based.

Ironic woke is jokingly calling someone/something woke that is clearly not woke, but think they are woke. In reality, the person being referenced is probably getting their opinions from the hive mind of public consensus like most people, but a different hive mind that makes them THINK they’re enlightened and woke.

Trump 2.0 era woke is “anything the most diabolical far right supporter doesn’t like or makes them slightly uncomfortable” which is just about everything.

Politically correct aligns closest to ironic woke because it relies on consensus on what is deemed “unprofessional” or “offensive”. It’s not inherently a bad thing though, generally it comes at least partially from a standpoint of wanting to express oneself in a constructive and respectful way, such as avoiding outdated terminology like “negro” or “retarded” which we should all do at this point despite them being the preferred politically correct term at one point. For this reason it ranks slightly higher on the morality scale than ironic woke, which is often motivated by acting morally superior and smug. But political correctness can go too far, and often leads to it being politically incorrect to criticize certain groups at all, which is not actual woke.

Being actually woke is aware of REALITY, even if it is controversial to bring up certain things, and therefore ranks the highest.

Trump 2.0 era woke is meaningless as a term, since Trump supporters have no sense of either reality or irony, and is thus impossible to rank.

Jimmy Johns: similar to Pei Wei & PF Chang’s, there is a fancier, more expensive version of the restaurant named James Jonathan.

Fiat: Fix It Again Tony 🤌🏻🤌🏻

Google: it used to be an in joke with my friends to say “giggle it” instead of google it. Now we don’t use google of course…

Best Buy: Worst Buy

Target: it is pronounced “tar-jay” because it is the fancy version of Walmart

711 was a part time job!

The what now?

Have you done a major version upgrade ever? That’s usually the only downside to stable distros, though Mint tends to manage them better than Debian and probably a few others I could think of.

Pacman is the PACkage MANager (lol get it?) for Arch based distros. It would be apt for you. Or, you know, just Mint’s graphical app store + update manager which I have never seen a reason to not use.

Not saying this is OP specifically or anything, but I have long suspected that some fellow humans just aren’t as…conscious/sapient as the rest of us. Like literal NPCs. It would explain a lot. No I’m not talking about anything race or eugenics related, not going there at ALL. Just sometimes I’ve met people and wondered “…did we grow up on the same planet?”

It is good. There is a certain narrative that isn’t exactly a part of the book but I think is perfectly logical to ascribe without feeling like a different thing, and I think it makes it better. That’s just about the only thing I could see someone not enjoying if they are a huge fan of the book. Well, I was not the biggest fan of Menelaus or Telemachus’ casting either but that’s a nitpick.