I like the picture, but it's not on topic here.
I decided to try to stop swearing in college, to see if it would improve my attitude - and to see if anyone would notice.
Both turned out to be true. People found me pleasant to work with and hang around. I recommend it, personally!
I had no idea it was even released.
NixOS for me. It's a package manager (a very nice, declarative one) that you can use on any Linux (or Mac), and there's also an entire distro based on it.
The article that changed your mind really shouldn't have. It's mostly full of hyperbole. Like this:
"PGP does a mediocre job of signing things, a relatively poor job of encrypting them with passwords, and a pretty bad job of encrypting them with public keys. PGP is not an especially good way to securely transfer a file. It’s a clunky way to sign packages. It’s not great at protecting backups. It’s a downright dangerous way to converse in secure messages."
Literally none of this is true - the author is presenting their particular opinions as general fact. I use AES through PGP, knowing that even future quantum computers can't break it.
I wish they'd cut out all the 90's references and pointless exaggerations, and stuck to facts. Then again, the facts-only version of this article probably wouldn't make a strong case against PGP.
(Also, one of the links in the article, with the dodgy-and-harmful link text "Full disk encryption isn’t great", includes advice to use PGP in it. Maybe the author should have read the references they were citing.)
As someone who routinely watches YT through Invidious and NewPipe, I haven't changed my habits.
The Electoral College.
The tech isn't there yet. There are so often distracting flaws around the hands/feet. The AI doesn't really know what a human is, its just endlessly re-combining existing material.
Windows has so much pushy behavior - trying to trick you into using Edge, turning on OneDrive and syncing files in the background (eating bandwidth in the process), locking you out of the machine while OS updates run.
When I switched to Linux Mint in 2015, the most surprising result was how much smoother and frictionless everything became.
I genuinely believe that the "average" user outlined above would be served well by Mint. Why would I not tell people to use it?
My lifehack: block every community with "memes" in its name. You'll see far fewer memes in general, and be less aggravated when one does show up!
I love Signal, and I have persuaded people to use it a lot. That said, it is definitely not the gold standard for privacy. It's a good-enough compromise between actual unbreakable encryption and trivial for anyone to use. It's always been valuable for that reason, and still is.
Don't worry about Molly - it uses a variation of the same code that Signal does, so they don't need "help" to get critical fixes that Signal receives. Use it if you like it!
The actual gold standard for privacy would be logging in through TOR and sending GPG-encrypted messages that way. And there's an app which does this, too - it's called Briar. (No phone number needed, either!) It's not as seamless to set up as Signal is, though.
The topic was asking for examples; got any?