I don’t know what you mean by that. No country or federation in the world is self sufficient. Everyone needs global trade.

I echo the criticism of the term ‘sideloading’, before it started to mean just installing software, I assumed it meant using a separate device or software on the side, like a PC with a debug interface or memory inspection tools, to inject custom code into a running system or software.

Similarly to preloading libraries into games or other software to replace functions in order to change or enhance the game or software. For instance used with script extenders or game mods. There it is ‘pre’ because the software is not running yet. ‘Side’ would be on running software.

But installing applications (the distribution doesn’t matter) is in no way side loading.

And I really hate that the press or whoever picked this term up from apple or google and ran with it without question.

And now, because that term is so strange and useless in that way, its definition keeps getting changed into whatever the industry needs in order to squeeze out more money and personal data, while taking away the freedom and rights of the owners.

Apart from questionable quality of the result, a big issue to me about LLMs is the way it substitutes human interaction with other humans. Which is one of the most fundamental way humans learn, innovate and express themselves.

No technological innovation replaced human interaction with a facsimile, that way before.

Sure, but we are talking about the US here.

Or are you all busy building tunnels and bunkers over there? Organise in your neighborhood and build local groups?

Pretty sure that if the media starts calling these guerrillas terrorists, anti-american, instigators of violence, Communists, Antifa, and so on, they will loose public support and without broad local support in the population, guerilla fighting will not work.

Afganistán and Vietnam fought guerilla against a foreign invasion. US would have to fight ‘guerilla’ against their neighbors and other Americans, against people like them… I don’t think this is comparable.

In an all out war, (which I doubt will happen) all these guns in the population don’t matter against drones, aircrafts, tanks and trained snipers or other soldiers. If the military and all other agencies decides to support Trump, all these weapons will be useless. The pentagon surely has plans for a civil uprising in their own country.

I don’t think the US has enough ordinary citizen that would actually risk their lives for democracy, to make a difference. Media and social media is controlled by the oligarchy, and even the progressives don’t seem to want to cut themselves loose of twitter, Facebook/Whatsapp, google, bluesky, discord and so on. Where would they even organize?

If it would run a open source firmware or be open source hardware, it would be nice. But they are using a non-OSI/non-FSF license, so it is not open source.

I would argue that it depends a lot on what kind of beginner you have. If you have someone that only uses basic desktop PC functions, like browser, email and maybe stuff like video, photos and documents. You can set it up once, and then have a system that updates itself reliably and has minimal maintenance overhead and isn’t easy to break.

In my experience that system is more robust and gets updated than a generic Debian system.

Of course there are downsides, and those include issues caused by apps running inside flatpak, like system themes are disrespected, opening files in one app, doesn’t respect the xdg-mime settings for the file type and open them in unexpected apps, printer does not work… But those are just bugs, and they need to get reported and fixed.

Well, good to know.

I was thinking more about the way of Android security models, and that it would make sense for GOS to restrict available storefronts to stay consistent with their way to implement them. But good to know that it will not automatically happen just by updating the google services.

And I would also think that people would likely complain if they where to implement it in a different way.

Well… The Android security model, as it is implemented in stock android and GOS, is about top down control, the full trust is given to the system vendors, not the end users. No rooting for instance. From this perspective not allowing installation of apps that cannot be blocked by the system vendor, fits well with that model.

TBH, I am not a fan of that security model. And this is my critique of GOS. It doesn’t allow the user full access to their device, so that they can check and control what each application is storing or sending to third-party servers. Instead it is on full security and allows apps to store and transfer information to which the user has no access to.

But the system vendor/developers would have that access, because they control the whole base system.

The focus of the Android security model and in turn of GOS is on security, at the cost of privacy or freedom.

TBH I would actually expect GrapheneOS not to disable these checks. GrapheneOS devs pride themselves to have the best implementation of the official Android security model, and enforcing signature checks is likely part of that…

They might add additional certificates I guess, to allow their own apps, and maybe a selected few others.

Probably all of them… I mostly play single player games, which I either mod, and/or edit memory/save games to skip grindy parts. I am there for the story, exploration and puzzles.

By the most different way I play, would be Beyond All Reason, where I mostly just spectate public matches, since I am pretty sure I would be stomped, and to get good at it, might be out of my abilities. But watching is fun.

Once it passes inspection, the F-Droid build service compiles and packages the app to make it ready for distribution. The package is then signed either with F-Droid’s cryptographic key, or, if the build is reproducible, enables distribution using the original developer’s private key. In this way, users can trust that any app distributed through F-Droid is the one that was built from the specified source code and has not been tampered with.

https://f-droid.org/en/2025/09/29/google-developer-registration-decree.html

The issue there AFAIK is that some app builds aren’t fully reproducible, because if they were the developer signature would still apply and be used. In the reproducible case the security of the build infra wouldn’t matter, because the same app would be produced the same regardless were they are build.

Without reproducible builds, you cannot really trust the software anyway, because the Dev could hook some hidden code only for the released binary app and sign that.

Na… The likelyhood of installing some bad or fake app from google play store is much higher than on fdroid.

The ‘availability’ is misleading. If they offer OpenVPN or Wireguard then they are available pretty much anywhere.

Using just plain Wireguard or OpenVPN configs would also be much better than installing random VPN provider apps.

Hmm… I am using git for maybe 15 years… Maybe I’m just too familiar with it… and have forgotten my initial struggles… To me using git comes natural… And I normally pay a lot of attention to every single commit, since I started working on patches for the Linux kernel. I often rebase and reorder commits many times, before pushing/merging them into a branch where continuity matters.

Sure, I sometimes messed up with git, but a git reset , checkout, rebase or filter-branch (In the extreme cases) normally fixes it, but real issues are very rare. And I use git a lot… But only the CLI, maybe people have issues with GUIs?

Isn’t it the exact opposite?

I learned that you can never make a mistake if you aren’t using git, or any other way for having access to old versions.

With git it is really easy to get back to an old version, or bisect commits to figure out what exact change was the mistake.

The only way I understand this joke is more about not wanting to be caught making a mistake, because that is pretty easy. In other methods figuring out who did the mistake might be impossible.

I think humanity is really slowly being replaced by LLMs.

Presentation and simple, but stupid and wrong ideas, are preferred over actually researching and understanding situations, isolating the underlying issues and working on ways to resolve or at least lessen them.

Just like LLMs, fewer and fewer people seems to care about a deeper understanding, and more about if the stream of words look ‘good’.

I did read that. And how much of it was distributed, it doesn’t say.