The irony of the autistic person using a metaphor, and someone else taking it too literally. You have to laugh!

I tried SailfishOS, gave it about 5 years but in the end a combination of bad hardware options and small user base (leading to small number of high quality apps) led me back to Android (grapheneOS).

And people who have no time install gentoo? Pull the other one :D

I started in 2012, and it wasn’t that difficult. I’d say I do about 30mins of maintenance every other month. It took me a while to work out the config originally, but I wrote a guide afterwards which was really popular for other people doing the same thing (it’s quite out of date now but the principles are the same).

Started out using a raspberry pi (which was also hosting a website at the time) but when I moved house to somewhere with a worse internet connection I migrated to a VPS, so there is a cost but it’s not enormous, maybe £20/month.

Don’t even bother if you can’t use a static IP, because all your email will be bounced if your PTR record for the IP (reverse DNS record) doesn’t match your domain name.

It got a bit more complicated when people started adding extra layers of spam protection like SPF, DKIM and DMARC, but those are mostly set and forget.

Overall, I’d say it’s worth it but only because I find it quite interesting/fun.

Google is unavoidable but I do my best to mitigate the worst parts of their privacy intrusions.

I have a pixel phone running grapheneOS with Google Services Framework installed but without Google Play or Gboard or any of that stuff. For me that’s a balance that works.

I host my own email server so no Gmail.

I also host my own Matrix server and avoid WhatsApp where possible (not Google but just as bad if not worse).

I use YouTube but via Newpipe or using Ublock origin on Firefox (not logged in obviously).

Chrome is genuinely worse than Firefox now that Google have made adblocking more difficult with manifest v3.

You just have to decide what the best tradeoff is between privacy and convenience.

More similar to Sunak calling the current General Election. It’s very unlikely they will win but they have to do something rather than let it get even worse!

The questions I had are:

• Do we use flash pasteurisation in the UK?
• How high is the residual risk for flash pasteurised milk?

Yes we do use flash pasteurisation in the UK.

https://www.dairycouncil.co.uk/who-we-are/ni-dairy/field-to-fridge/pasteurisation

Residual risk for flash pasteurised milk is high enough to be concerning, but the study didn’t follow exactly the same process as industry does during pasteurisation, and those extra steps may also help to kill the virus. So we probably need another study to add in those other steps and see if the virus survives or not.

Not ideal though.

Heating the milk to 72 degrees Celsius, or 181 degrees Fahrenheit, for 15 or 20 seconds — conditions that approximated flash pasteurization — greatly reduced levels of the virus in the milk, but it didn’t inactivate it completely.

Milk samples heated for 15 or 20 seconds were still able to infect incubated chicken eggs, a test the US Food and Drug Administration has called the gold-standard for determining whether viruses remain infectious in milk.

“But, we emphasize that the conditions used in our laboratory study are not identical to the large-scale industrial treatment of raw milk,” senior study author Dr. Yoshihiro Kawaoka, a virologist who specializes in the study of flu and Ebola, said in an email.

That’s a good reason not to panic over the study findings, said Lakdawala.

Lakdawala said that commercial flash pasteurization involves a preheating step, which wasn’t done here. It also involves homogenization, a process that emulsifies the fat globules in milk so the cream won’t separate. Both of those steps would probably make it harder for the virus to survive, but she adds that the results of this study suggest full process of commercial flash pasteurization should be done “with all the steps in place.”

I don’t know about your personal situation, and it may be different for whatever you are suffering with, however the part you quoted is true for a lot of cases.

Having just looked after my wife through a period of ~3 years really severe depression I’ve seen it first hand, it completely changed her personality and outlook and she was saying all kinds of stuff she’s quite embarrassed by now. She genuinely couldn’t think straight at all or see any way out, and in that moment if offered the choice to die she might have taken it (a fact she is quite scared by now, having mostly recovered).

Similar story with my brother, who has bipolar… when he’s manic he has an absolute inability to hold a train of thoughts together for longer than 30 seconds. When he’s depressed it’s absolutely awful. He’s now stable and enjoying his life.

I’m not arguing that this shouldn’t be an option for some very extreme chronic conditions, but it’s obviously complicated.

Thanks for the info! I’ll have to give Element another go and see if it’s more reliable for me nowadays.

Is the fix a client thing or is there an interaction with the server as well? I had really bad issues with message decryption on Element for Android last year (July 2023 based on the date I installed a different matrix client).

I’m self-hosting synapse on Debian Bullseye (from bullseye-backports).

I like to chat people up and get their number then disappoint them by sending a deluge of maymays

Like memes?

Mate, nobody is crushing on the American healthcare system

Was this in 'murica?

In know your comment isn’t serious but do you know how wasps pollinate figs?

It’s pretty cool, the fig is actually a load of flowers pointing in towards the middle of what we think of as the “fruit”. Each variety of fig has a specific species of female wasp that burrows in and then lays its eggs inside. The male larvae hatch first, fertilise the female larvae, burrow out and die. The females then hatch, use the burrows to exit and fly off to find a new fig. The female wasps fertilise the figs in this process. Some wasps end up trapped inside the fig and get partially dissolved by an enzyme…

Some commercial varieties have been bred to fertilise themselves but in the wild the figs don’t ripen without the wasps.

https://www.foodunfolded.com/article/figs-wasps-how-plant-and-pollinator-work-together

I’m cirious about what you dislike about Ubuntu?

Just paste it into the end of the file, save and close it, then run “source ~/.bashrc” in the terminal to force bash to read the new settings (or close the terminal and open it again).

Is Pop!_OS really that popular? I started using Linux about 10 years ago and it wasn’t around then, so I never tried it in my distro hopping days. I see it’s developed by System76 so I can see why you’d choose it on their hardware, but is there any point doing that on other hardware?

We can all agree on the last point