I assume they mean that this Lemmy is part of their fake persona, so maybe links to another social media account they use for this persona, or an email address, or the personal details they mention in their comments matches with their fake persona’s personal life and not their real personal life. But yeah seems like overkill if your threat model is only your employer, unless you’re employed by some military intelligence agency, in which case it’s probably not enough.

Yes, I do this plenty. I have some SIMs I continue to pay for in cash (pay as you go) so I keep having access to the phone number, and it’s not easily tieable to my identity (ie you’d figure out who it was probably through watching CCTV of me buying it which seems like quite a lot of effort, so good enough for people with lower threat models).

I don’t know where you are but in terms of selecting a service or phone, I would just walk into a local shop and see what they have on offer. I can’t imagine prices would vary that wildly between shops.

Edit: also no need to buy a whole new phone if you don’t have a state threat model and just want to make it harder to track you for eg data mining corpos. You can just swap out the sim in your normal phone to receive texts then put your regular sim back in afterwards. Or if you have a dual sim tray. You could also anonymously buy an esim so it doesn’t take up a physical sim slot.

Doesn’t impact me so fine with it.

You haven’t mentioned if there are any ethical concerns with this new meat; e.g. environmental cost of the production process, what kind of human labour is required to create it, who is providing that labour and under what conditions are they working.

Provided I had no ethical concerns with it, sure, but a lot of modern innovations tend to have these issues and I assume lab-grown meat would have these issues too.

Edit: Also, I’m opposed to animal captivity, so if there’s an ongoing need to collect samples from captive livestock then no, I wouldn’t. If it’s a “collect it once then it keeps reproducing from the lab samples forever” type of thing then sure.

I feel the opposite just because I rarely find clothes that fit me well in person, whereas online they can have a broader stock. The sizing is not necessarily an issue because I know what my size is, and I’m hesitant to buy from online stores without a size guide (though my guess is usually right). If it has a size guide I just measure myself to check it’s in line with their sizing.

Act to change it and be at peace mentally knowing that you have dedicated your life to the struggle and you have done all you can.

What makes you use bitmaps as a system font?

I like the aesthetic of bitmaps. Personal preference

Gohu Font Nerd is a nice small bitmap font I’m fond of. Only issue is the size for high DPI monitors, but the JetBrainsMono nerd font is a nice vector font that’s easy on the eyes (quite stereotypical/cliché, but that’s for a reason).

Considering “the Linux system” is literally anything you throw on top of the kernel called Linux, it can be a development environment or anything you want it to be.

I’d just like to interject for a moment…

configuring vim from blank state is an art itself and requires quite some time and dedication.

Not really sure where you got this from. It’s quite simple to me. The default vim config works completely fine for me if I’m eg in a VM and I don’t want to copy all my vimrc and plugins over, if it’s a machine I’ll be using more long-term then it’s quite quick to configure a few settings to be how I prefer them to be. Main changes I make to a default config is enabling line numbers (idk anyone who wouldn’t want line numbers tbh) and setting them to be relative, set scrolloff=9999, use 4 spaces for indent, enable line and column highlighting, set a theme, and a couple odd scripts, but again the default is perfectly usable and the tweaks in my vimrc are just to my personal taste.

Not all products have an organised boycott movement behind them. The number of large-scale organised boycotts is quite small and easy to participate in.

Sleep

If you hadn’t been diagnosed, would the behaviours the psychiatrist deemed “narcissistic” not exist in you? Behaviours don’t suddenly manifest upon diagnosis. Diagnoses are a way of pathologising and, ultimately, punishing differences, especially ones which are contrary to capitalist productivity. Diagnoses are definitely not objective assessments of dysfunction: see, for obvious examples, the hysteria diagnosis, the now nonexistent diagnosis of homosexuality/homophilia, or the entirely bullshit racist diagnosis of oppositional defiant disorder (diagnosed as ADHD in white boys, of course). Even taken at their most benign and apolitical, diagnoses are still human-made categorisations of observed behaviour. The vast majority of psychiatric diagnoses describe a set of commonly co-occuring symptoms, not a root cause or a particular structural anomaly in the brain; they aren’t any more of a natural discrete category than creating a category of white people with blonde hair and blue eyes, since those symptoms tend to co-occur.

I know and have some friends who are diagnosed with NPD. It doesn’t affect how I treat them. A diagnosis is just a piece of paper at the end of the day, and there’s no reason to treat someone differently based on whether or not they have a particular sheet of paper. I act according to people’s behaviour.

I had that happen once, but I found that it worked with duckduckgo’s email aliases forwarded to my own domain’s email.

Linux phones definitely are a thing, but depending on your threat model, they may not be enough. There isn’t a smartphone which is 100% open-source from all hardware, to firmware, to software. But there’s a variety of phones that are known to run Linux. The Google Pixel 3a is known for working very well with Ubuntu Touch. There’s also the PinePhone, Purism phones, and there will be others too that support “desktop Linux” (specified for pedantry, since Android is also a type of Linux I guess).

You also don’t need a smartphone. They do still sell “dumb mobile phones” that just do SMS and phone calls; I’ve bought some recently. You can get them for really cheap too, like in the range of 20 USD/EUR kind of price. I don’t think that particularly contributes to privacy since these phones are also proprietary and easily backdoored, but I suppose then it’s missing out on much of the spyware that smartphones have installed as software. If it’s location data you’re worried about, sticking it in a faraday cage should be good enough, but if you need to receive unexpected calls that won’t work. If you’re paranoid about the mic recording, while I think that would be an unlikely and unfeasible way of spying, you could also physically block that by putting the phone in something soundproof, but again you’d need some way to hear that the phone is ringing. For camera paranoia just tape over the camera.

You mean getting a privacy-respecting phone? You could get a Pixel with GrapheneOS as one of the most popular options. There are also a number of OSes and phone manufacturers competing in the privacy-concerned market you could look into. Note that privacy is not the same thing as security, and for security, GrapheneOS is the clear winner.

Use end-to-end encrypted email if the people you’re emailing are willing to set that up (not hard, but a lot of people have learned helplessness when it comes to tech), and/or you could host your own email. I don’t think there’s much point to looking for an email provider that “respects privacy” because that’s simply working on a pinkie promise that they don’t read your unencrypted emails. I suppose it’s better if they claim they don’t read your emails, than if they don’t make that claim at all, but beyond that I don’t think it matters with external email providers.

Honestly don’t remember why I signed up. I like it though. Kind of similar vibe to when I used Reddit except much better. It’s got some nice small-ish (but not too small) communities for FOSS stuff.

Not really “secretly” bad for you, but all the plastic in our lives. I wonder how we’ll ever replace it cause everything you buy at the supermarket (in developed countries) is wrapped in plastic.