This is a discussion about liberals in the US, not the liberal party of Canada, which is decidedly left of US politics as a whole.

This sounds like it’s a problem no matter what method of communication you use, unless you keep no address book and memorize everything.

Phone numbers cost money, which means they’re not easy to create in bulk, and therefore banning or blocking spam numbers is much easier than if it was open sign up.

Signal doesn’t use SMS anymore, and all messages are sent over encrypted Internet protocol. Any servers in between won’t see the phone number, it’s not needed to deliver the message, it’s using an IP address at that point and the entire message metadata is encrypted. Signal is the only one that can see the phone numbers, which they use to identify multiple clients as a single user and route messages accordingly.

If you don’t trust Signal to run an unmodified server without malicious modifications, then why would you trust their build of the APK?

To truly be safe from Signal’s influence you would need to audit the source code and build it yourself.

Personally I have no problem using Signal’s servers

Yeah, pretty sure I remember clicking skip on this as many as 5 years ago. Google Maps has asked to store your home address for as long as I can remember.

Thank god we were able to ditch flash player!

But DO rotate your passwords if you suspect they’ve been leaked. Or every 5-10 years probably couldn’t hurt either. The thing that has a much bigger effect is using unique passwords for every service. And if you have a password manager, resetting 1 password after a leak is trivial.

I don’t think that matters, since when bruteforcimg a passphrase it’s more like using whole words as the characters (or tokens) in the password. If there’s 7776 possible unique words, it doesn’t matter what characters are in the words at all. Just how many password combinations are used.

Side note, this is assuming words without character replacements. If you consider variations with A->@ or B->8 there ends up being significantly more possible unique “words”

What are the chances of everyone interested in this project already having a tablet? I don’t own any, and I certainly wouldn’t be going out to buy one just to test running Linux on it. I do have multiple old phones I could turn into development test devices however. Anything is better than nothing.

Normally the term for this is headless rendering, but I think in this case it’s more like head-only rendering 😆

In theory it makes it possible for other games to use the same items to make stuff in their games (I doubt this in practice)

I’ve heard this before, but there’s literally nothing preventing games from setting up some shared items on their own without NFTs. Nobody does it because companies want to keep their IP, and worrying about external items would be a nightmare to balance.

NFTs solve like 1% of the problem of sharing items. So much more goes into making them actually work. For example: NFT id 5551337 is owned by the player: now what? How do you figure out what 3d model to render? What actions can you perform? How does it integrate with other systems? All of that is going to have to be custom for every game involved on a per-item basis.

I understand what you mean. Water vapour (i.e. clouds, fog, the visible part of what comes from boiling water which any normal person would call steam) vs Gaseous water (i.e. most of the atmosphere, and the non-visible part of boiling water also called steam).

Vapes work by boiling PG/VG which starts as a liquid (i.e. the juice), and generates both vapourized and gaseous PG/VG. If it was water, any normal person would consider this steam. This isn’t a chemistry or physics class.

I don’t think there’s a need to so pedantic here. Water vapor is the visible part of steam, and for the purposes of this discussion, we’re talking about boiling liquids, so I don’t think there was any miscommunication by using the word “steam”

Our data suggest that the flavorings used in e-juices can trigger an inflammatory response in monocytes, mediated by ROS production, providing insights into potential pulmonary toxicity and tissue damage in e-cigarette users.

Well, I guess that’s a point against flavored vapes. I really wish there were more studies, because presumably not all flavorings would have the same effect. A comparison with unflavored e-juice would have been great.

That’s certainly a problem. It’s one of the big reasons I think THC vapes should be both legal and regulated. In the states were it is legal, there’s strict inventory tracking every step of the way.

Admittedly it’s a lot harder to get people on board with regulating drug-free vapes, but I think it would be a good idea to have guarantees about what you’re consuming just like food.

Well, I’m impressed they actually did test JUST the vape liquid, even though they’re still calling them e-cigs.

Quoting from the journal itself:

There were no significant differences in changes of BAL inflammatory cell counts or cytokines between baseline and follow-up, comparing the control and e-cig groups. However, in the intervention but not the control group, change in urinary PG as a marker of e-cig use and inhalation was significantly correlated with change in cell counts (cell concentrations, macrophages, and lymphocytes) and cytokines (IL8, IL13, and TNFα), although the absolute magnitude of changes was small. There were no significant changes in mRNA or miRNA gene expression. Although limited by study size and duration, this is the first experimental demonstration of an impact of e-cig use on inflammation in the human lung among never-smokers.

The way I read this, it seems like there’s a small correlation with inflammation, but there’s no measurable risk of developing lung cancer from it (they were doing cancer research after all). Personally for an adult, I feel like “inflammation” is kind of a nothingburger, just stop vaping for a while and you’ll be fine. But for kids developing habits, I can understand the concern.

If you’d like to point me at some studies go ahead. The only dangerous cases I’ve heard about were black market vapes that had other contaminants in them. It’s been very hard to find reliable studies because most I’ve seen are self-reported using the entirely generic term “vaping” without any qualifiers on the kind.

I’m getting a lot of downvotes, and maybe I’m wrong about what kinds of vapes kids are using? Obviously if they’re using nicotine vapes, that’s bad and chemically addictive.
But I don’t have a problem with kids vaping the drug-free, flavored juice. It can be habit forming, but so can fidget spinners. As long as it’s not actually dangerous then I don’t really care.

Banning fruity flavors sounds like it would inadvertently ban all of the drug-free vapes… Flavor-only vapes get you all the big clouds and cool-factor that’s a big drive for kids, with none of the Nicotine or weed. Just inhaling the vapor on its own can be fairly safe.