Being banned from communities doesn’t mean anything to me. I’m basically banned from my entire social network I had growing up because of atheism. Grounding one’s perspective loosely against the stereotypes of others is just a transferable form of measure. The way you perceive the prerogative of others is none of my business or relevant to the level of abstraction of this question. You’re grounding the context too much in meaning that is not a required aspect of the question.

Identifying ones comfort zone is healthy for self awareness. Everyone has a comfort zone. The legality and external judgements of others are irrelevant to the question. The scale given does ground the question to cultural norms in an attempt to build a more translatable reference, but externalization is not the intended spirit of the question, nor is this some request to share one’s kinks or reasoning. It is really a question of how one views their self awareness internally. In a way, this is a more accurate measure of an individual’s conservatism internally.

In abstract, everyone has an answer to this question. This is not intended to offend, or in any way judge anyone. Feel free to object or abstain, but I did not ask the question to judge you or guilt you in any way; quite the opposite really.

I’d say I’m a 7. My functional abstractionism extends into everything. Kindness, empathy, and the Hippocratic aphorism “do no harm” ultimately rule me, but cultural norms or conventions do not like race, experimentation, or an older partner.

I went to a 90% black k-12 advanced magnet school from 9th-12th grade in the Southeastern USA. I’m white. I never really got like an intense interest or anything. This level of stereotype culture is of limited interest to me personally. It was just my culture group for a time. I dated a black girl for awhile, and a Persian girl for awhile too. I even picked up a few lines of Farsi, although I don’t remember any of them now.

The culture is very different in the black American south. Probably the biggest takeaway I have is that poverty culture largely forms the flavor of any community, and communities without poverty have no flavor to them. The struggles are very real, but the solutions are never straight forward. Neglect and abuse causes irreparable harm and scaring as deep as a community and cultural level. Only persistent change and time can heal those wounds. No outsider has a right to minimize or belittle those traumatized by abuses and neglect.

I haven’t gotten a single date yet, but will keep you informed

https://apnews.com/article/missouri-execution-marcellus-williams-fd7279d8e885bac17658a66f6f72b5c7

Any human based legislative system is an equivalent horror in reality - (Marcellus Williams)

It is very much context dependant. People want to say it does not matter, and in our default context, it theoretically does not. There are certain contexts where use of outdated patriarchal norms of the past will garner a response. In a sense it must matter that it does not matter.

My mind is drawn to the old adage, “hate is not the opposite of love; indifference is. For to hate is to still care in common with those that love.”

If you use gender incorrectly here, or, in a broader context, act like an ass about gender you are likely to garner a reaction.

There was a post here in the last few weeks about someone on reddit that posted about a guy giving his partner an old iPod or some device like that as part of a birthday gift with other things, and getting eviscerated for the idea. Then after reversing the gender roles, under the same premise, the opposite reaction was the outcome. I don’t think we are the same demographic here, but I also imagine we might display a similar objective bias in honest and objective aggregate.

So does it matter here, IMO, we’d like to think it does not, but we are biased like any group. We are generally aware and appreciative of our diverse community members and tend to prefer gender neutrality when possible, like assuming they/them is generally good decorum and practiced here. When an anthropomorphic gender assignment is appropriate, the cool kids default female.

At least that is the lay of the land abstracted as I see it when one speaks the unspeakable.

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I have an HP laser printer from like 1992, before they turned to US=Privateers; rest-of-the-world=criminal pirates. HP died as a company when they spun off Agilent/Keysight as test equipment and continued the branding for contract manufactured consumer garbage. HP does not make anything. They market, place stickers on what others manufacture, and create ponzi scheme-like extortion scams, as the shriveled shell of a dying husk disconnected completely from their now long irrelevant past.

The Harkonnericans ignored the freemen in their seitches…

TBH: tl;dr (…but read ~1/4 and skimmed the rest.)

Emacs can likely do most, if not all, of what you’re looking for.

As far as distros, go with either Fedora Workstation or Silverblue. If you can run SB, try to avoid messing with the base system as much as possible, skip using the toolbox containers system and just use distrobox. With distrobox, you have almost all Linux distros available as containers, so you build on them. The only exception I know of is NIX. You can’t run NIX in distrobox. You probably could run the NIX package manager, but that involves this weird setup where a user owned directory exists in / root. Personally, this is just too weird for me to use it. I expect all user activity and configuration files to be confined to /home/$USER/

Fedora just works, but try and lag behind the release cycle a little bit. Like right now F40 is pretty solid, but there were some issues in the first month or so after F40 first came out. I have lagged in every release since ~F28 and never had issues. I switched to F40 within the first week or so and a few packages were wonky. Basically Python was super fresh and did some odd stuff with containers where it did not work without manually removing and replacing Python in each container. I think that was the only manual intervention issue I’ve had with Fedora. I have a 3080Ti laptop with the 16 GB GPU. The Anaconda system in Fedora builds the Nvidia kernel module automatically in the background each time the kernel is updated. It works flawlessly, even with secure boot enabled.

While it is outside of the scope of most people’s abilities, the bios is on a flash chip that can be removed, read, and disassembled. I’m no expert here by any stretch. That said, my usual check with software is to simply check for http in strings. Even with a binary like a bios ROM, I can pass it through the $ strings command to look for any addresses. No matter what kind of malicious nonsense the software is doing, it has very low value unless it can dial out.

My lack of a complete understanding in this area is why I use a whitelist firewall for most of my devices. It is also the ultimate ad and tracker blocker as I only visit the places I chose to access. I don’t conform to the lowest developer’s ethics and will simply stop using any site or service that fails to be direct and transparent.

The thing is, even most whitelist firewalls are inadequate. They only filter incoming packets. That is really an inadequate model in most cases now, especially with local large language models where it is impossible to verify their capabilities. My reason for all thus bla bla bla is to say, a whitelist on a trusted 3rd party device is a PITA but an effective low barrier way to prevent any bad actor from communicating with the questionable device. It still leaves you open to a potential situation where the device could be sending a packet stream to the outside world over something like UDP.

Otherwise, the main thing I would be concerned with, if it is a UEFI device, are the UEFI secure boot keys. Whomever holds these keys has a lower ring access than the operating system kernel. Anything happening in kernel or user space is effectively under their control.

Anyways, the main way to monitor and check the device is a trusted 3rd party router that blocks any unauthorized connections. This can be challenging to setup with something like OpenWRT. There is a forked OpenWRT device running a version that makes a lot of this easier called PC WRT. That can make a whitelist fw a little easier than sorting out NF Tables and scripting a whitelist firewall.

Went out with this girl I really liked but brought a friend too just to make it less one on one and more casual. I really liked her and thought it went well. When I drove my friend home, in conversation, he told me I could do better. It was such a stupid destructive thought. All three of us were into the arts. He was into videography, she was photography, and I was painting airbrushed graphics on motorcycles. I dated her for a little while again later and more seriously, but my life was more of a mess then and it didn’t work out. That was one of my biggest mistakes in life; not realizing my lack of emotional depth and letting other’s opinions hold sway or weight. I partition my emotions now. I’m not sure how I feel in the moment. My first reaction is likely worthless, so “I’ll have to get back to you later” - is my usual response. People who whine about how everyone is about to lose their job at work, or tell me how I should feel about others are like giant red flags telling me to avoid them as toxic. Really, in a way I do not lack emotional depth as much as that part of my inner voice speaks quietly and I need to take the time to listen to it carefully. That girl and life lesson are the same thing to me; an abstracted patch, forever holding that part of my personality. When that red flag flies in my head, she is the one waving it; holding me back; telling me to think it through.

This looks a lot like trolling. The community here certainly doesn’t seem to care for it.

We have a damn good business model here folks. All we need to do is sandbox the idiots so that they pay to see what they want to see and only they see it.

I would like to phone a friend Regis; Jean-Christophe Bonaparte.

I would go with hard science fiction futurism. You get to write your narrative future history of humanity and nothing about your choices are restricted to following the styles or decor consumerism.

For example, humanity has moved into thousands of 35 km × 9.1 km O’Neill cylinders with centrifugal spin gravity, mostly in cislunar space. We renamed the planet Wild Earth, and only a small scattering of indigenous humans choose to remain planetary caretakers. The age of scientific discovery has long past. Science is primarily an engineering corpus. Our primary technology is entirely biological, and in complete elemental cycles balance. All phenomenon of biological nature are accessible to us with a few genetic # inclue libraries and a few lines of code. We grow a banyan frame of a building and dial in our colors and patterns on living chitin walls, while more regal structures of ginkgo trees last nearly forever. Biocompute is a thing with the synthetic brayn. All is accessible with a complete understanding of biology.

Allowing your imagination to run freely in this space is therapeutic on a level that I find deeply satisfying, and dare I say hopeful. Getting others talking about this can create change. Futurism is anti dystopian. Many will try to call it utopianism, but I counter that they simply lack depth of imagination. The full spectrum and challenges of such a future creates a powerful lens for inspecting and critiquing the present. That is the best way I can imagine the experience of creating a space and the type of space that inspires positive conversations I want to share with others.