Aside: don’t buy into the myth that older cars need more maintenance or cost more to maintain. Its an excellent sales pitch to convince people to keep upgrading but it’s not always reality. Modern cars can easily cost more to repair and maintain than older cars because more technology = more that can break. Car manufacturers have, over time, crammed more and more proprietary parts into cars which they can then charge exorbitant amounts for and force you to use their mechanics rather than your local.

I have both an 25+ year old Toyota that’s still going strong and still only needs basic maintenance (parts are also easily available and cheap). I also have an ‘older’ Nissan Leaf EV that is very little maintenance and has nothing in it that reports back to Nissan. It’s got a nice balance of technology and most things we can maintain or repair ourselves if we want. Parts for this are also easily accessible and cheap.

I also highly recommend people learn more vehicle maintenance themselves (easier of older cars with less tech) so you can either do things yourself and/or you’ve got more knowledge yo protect yourself from mechanics and car dealers who try to scam you by repairing/replacing things that don’t need it.

I switched to GrapheneOS about a year ago. It was a conscious choice and I also wanted to use my phone as a phone. I installed the absolute minimal apps needed to function when out and about. I refuse to use things like Messenger and WhatsApp (I redirect friends and fam to Signal). I also experienced a decrease in phone usage which has been really nice. I feel like I’ve definitely kicked the doomscrolling habit as I don’t feel inclined to pick up my phone all the time and the only time I use Lemmy (Voyager app is the only social media app on my phone) is when I’m in a waiting room.

I really love the freedom that my phone is (mostly) just a phone and I’m not constantly online and constantly available. There’s just this weight lifted of not being constantly aware or hypervigilant about my phone.

If I ever couldn’t use Graphene anymore for whatever reason, I would just go back to using a dumb phone and prepare ahead more.

Is there a particular reason for Zulip vs something like Signal or Jitsi or Matrix? (Also asking for myself because I’ve been looking into Matrix again lately and this is the second time I’ve seen Zulip come up and in relation to VTTs lol)

I mean, capsicums (bell peppers) have more vitamin C per gram than oranges so…

Reminds me of a friend who had this whole long social media series using #notourcat and I always read it as No Tour Cat. I was like, damn, poor kitty doesn’t get to tour like the other kitties 😅

!blurrypicturesofcats@lemmy.world

Too bad that whenever I’ve tried it, its eaten my battery

This is lower light than the op

The thing that jumps out for me is the huge pupils. Cats only get that if its low light, they’re targeting something, or drugs. If they were targeting something then there is a massive mismatch between their posture and body language and their pupil dilation.

On the other hand, generative AI know that humans find large pupils on animals cute and is more likely to spit out an image of a cat with dilated pupils.

My money is on AI slop 🙁

Over the ditch here, New Zealand isn’t much better and like many countries only getting worse. The insane amount of personal information that essential companies (e.g. electricity, property managers, etc) is getting out of control and our digital privacy laws are still in the dark ages.

Its just less setup for me. My personal domain is shared with other people so I can’t set a domain level catch all. That and its less setup for me. I have no automated way of easily creating new emails (and my email settings would get very cluttered with hundreds of different emails). With a generic email address that I use with a +, its just one email and whatever comes after the + will go to that email. Then I have more options for what to do with those emails in mail clients. In my case, I have different mail filters to send them to different mailbox folders. But I can also tag them, auto delete, auto forward, etc. Whatever your mail client filters can handle.

A savvy spammer can do that anyway by brute forcing whatever is before the @ for any email address at all.

I’m less concerned about spammers (which are annoyingly inevitable after a while) and more concerned with data breaches. Thus if I can see where my leaked email address came from, I know who to blame and its also a lot easier yo change my account logins.

And yes, some sites annoyingly disallow them but in that case I can create another email address for those since they are few and far between.

I use a custom domain with a personal email address that I only use for communicating with actual human beings. e.g. myname@example.com Then I have a generic email address that I use with a + for different services e.g. email+hfu2sb5d@example.com or email+ebay@example.com I use Bitwarden as my password manager and that can automatically generate a + email using random characters but I sometimes use the latter + form if I want a human readable email. This way I can see exactly what website/service has been breeched/sold my data if I get spam emails.

Cries in kiwi due to decades of successive useless governments and entrenched car culture

I subbed to this community but the barrage of political posts makes me want to unsub. I came here for amusingly infuriating posts not a constant reminder of how fucked up politics are (I’m not even in the US)

https://www.registerguard.com/story/news/local/2025/11/11/flock-camera-locations-map-eugene-springfield/87202411007/

You’re very naive if you think only propaganda is controlled solely by right wingers lol

This is one of the things I don’t get about any of this shit - if we were talking about physical items, letters, a hard landline, physical art, written medical information, etc. this would require a warrant, court order or whatever. Why the fuck is digital anything viewed as a free-for-all by govts, AI techbros, data brokers et al. How do they not understand that just because something is ‘digital’ it doesn’t deserve the same protections as before?!

Unless you’re using GrapheneOS and then the answer is “Mostly but it depends”.

Ah, the privacy invasion is indeed the devil. I wish more folks cottoned on to Jitsi.

A Brave New World describes pretty well the self imposed glass prison the human race will end up with if the general apathy so pervasive now continues. Panem et circenses