Ask Me Anything

The grift goes nuclear. No surprise.

My understanding is that, in broad strokes... Aurora acts like a proxy or mirror that doesn't require you to sign in to get Google Play Store apps. It doesn't provide any other software besides what you specifically download from it, and it doesn't include any telemetry/tracking like normal Google Play Store would. microG is a reimplementation of Google Play services (the suite of proprietary background services that Google runs on normal Android phones). MicroG doesn't have the bloat and tracking and other closed source functionality, but rather acts as a stand-in that other apps can talk to (when they'd normally be talking to Google Play services). This has to be installed and configured and I would refer to the microG github or other documentation. GrapheneOS has its own sandboxed Google Play Services which is basically unmodified Google Play Services, crammed into its own sandbox with no special permissions, and a compatibility layer that retains some functionality while keeping it from being able to access app data with high level permissions like it would normally do on a vanilla Android phone.

And they all suck, my boss is still alive.

It's a loaded term that should be replaced with a more nimble definition. A dog whistle is the name for a loaded term that is used to tag a specific target with a large baggage of information, but in a way where only people who are part of the "in group" can understand the baggage of the word, hence "dog whistle", only heard by dogs. In the case of the word "degeneracy", it's a vague word that has been often used to attack, among other things, LGBTQ and their allies as well as non-religious people. The term is vague enough that the user can easily weasel their way out of criticism for its usage, but the target audience gets the message loud and clear: "[target] should be attacked for being [thing]." Another example of such a word would be "woke".

Come on up to Canada, we still got that garlic bomb. I can still taste the one from last week

Is it though? Its always far easier to be loud and obnoxious than do something constructive, even with the internet and LLMs, in fact those things are amplifiers which if anything make the attention imbalance even more drastic and unrepresentative of actual human behaviour. In the time it takes me to write this comment some troll can write a dozen hateful ones, or a bot can write a thousand. Doesn't mean humans are shitty in a 1000/1 ratio, just means shitty people can now be a thousand times louder.