You say that like anyone knows how Fahrenheit even works.

It took maybe 10 minutes or so for a 256 GB hard drive for me, if I remember correctly.

That was an SSD, though, so yeah, mileage would definitely vary on an HDD.

Hmm, what does that full format do? Write zeros over everything?

Personally, I would run shred on the root filesystem. It’s a tool specifically intended for properly deleting data (overwrites it with random data multiple times).

If we’re talking passwords, that’s a no. If we’re talking enough personal data that you could use it for spear phishing, identity theft or targetted malvertising, that’s a no.

Honestly, no matter how innocous the information you want is, I would be extremely suspicious why you’d want it. And I’m certainly not turning off my ad blocker either.

I guess, the real question is: Could we be using (simplistic) LLMs on a phone for predictive text?

There’s some LLMs that can be run offline and which maybe wouldn’t use enormous amounts of battery. But I don’t know how good the quality of those is…

You’re in the No Stupid Questions community. Think about rule 7 in particular.

And you wouldn’t have to reverse causality to travel backwards in time. You would just have to travel faster than the speed of light.

If you can travel faster than the speed of light then you can arrive at a destination before you left.

I know practically nothing about all the wormhole theories, because I just don’t consider them relevant, but from a logical standpoint, the above does not feel correct to me.

The thing is, you would arrive at your destination before the light would arrive there from where you started. So, you could take out your telescope and potentially watch your own launch.

But that doesn’t actually put you into the past. It just looks like it when looking into the direction you came from. Light from the other direction will look like you’ve fast-forwarded through time, because you now get more recent imagery.

I don’t have another explanation why someone might think, this might put you into the past…

Hmm, but why do you think these things haven’t occurred yet?

As far as I can tell, the speed of causality means things can have occurred in a certain location in the universe, but it takes time until the effects have permeated into the rest of the universe.

So, it’s like a shockwave from an explosion. The explosion happens, but it takes a few seconds until you feel the shockwave.
Well, with the difference that you can see an explosion before the shockwave. When we’re at the speed of causality, literally no evidence will have arrived in your position until it does.

So, one could go meta-philosophical with basically “If a tree falls in a forest and no one has heard it yet, did it actually already happen?”, but yeah, I don’t think that’s terribly useful here.

And well, if we treat it like a shockwave, let’s say you detonate some TNT and step through a wormhole to somewhere 20 km away. You would know that the shockwave will arrive soon, but does that matter? The shockwave will still just continue pushing on.

And I guess, crucially, it did already happen, so you can’t do the usual time travel paradox of preventing that it would happen.

That’s actually not as obvious as it might sound. The thing is, as far as we know, light seems to have no mass¹. No mass means no inertia. So, if it accelerates at all, it should immediately be at infinite speed. But for some reason, it actually doesn’t go faster than what we typically call the speed of light. And we assume, that’s the case, because that’s actually the speed of causality.

So, it’s reversed. It’s not that light is just the fastest thing and as a consequence of that, nothing can be transmitted faster. No, it’s actually that there appears to be a genuine universal speed limit and light would be going faster, if it could.

¹) Light is still affected by gravity, e.g. can’t escape from black holes. We do assume that gravity is just a ‘bend in spacetime’ because of that, meaning even any massless thing are affected by it, but yeah, we’re still struggling to understand what mass actually is then.

Well, I’m going to give the party-pooper response, even though science fiction and pop-science love to fantasize differently:

The past and the future are theoretical concepts. They don’t actually exist in the sense that you can ‘send’ something to them.
Obviously, you can write data to a hard drive and then read it out after a week has passed, but presumably that is not what you had in mind.

But that’s also the essence of the time travel that the theory of general relativity allows. You can travel forwards more slowly along the time axis by travelling more quickly on the space axis (close to the speed of light), which means you might just need to spend 5 perceived years to end up in the year 2200.
Similarly, you could take a hard drive onto this journey and it wouldn’t have fallen apart in that time.

Travelling back in time makes no sense in general relativity. You would need to reverse causality for that, which is on an entirely different level from merely slowing causality down.

General relativity would mathematically allow for the existence of wormholes, but that’s pushing the theory to extremes where it might simply not be applicable to reality anymore. We certainly have no actual evidence for wormholes.

So, what’s the yellow stuff for? To keep the bags from sticking together?

I generally only use non-commercial apps, so never really had any problem…

If those analytics do not process personal data, then you don’t.

At the very least, don’t use Google Analytics. To my knowledge, that’s currently illegal in the EU in general. See, for example: https://techcrunch.com/2023/07/03/google-analytics-sweden-gdpr-fines/

I’m not a lawyer, but I’d say that’s a case for implied consent.

Typical example is when you’re shopping and you hand the cashier the money that they’re asking for, then that counts as an agreement to a contract. You don’t have to explicitly say that you’d like to buy the wares for that price.

With the dark mode button, I’d expect the same. You’re very likely cool with them storing your preference, specifically for providing you with dark mode (not for tracking et al). So, pressing the button would presumably suffice as consent for that.

Interesting, I didn’t know that, but it doesn’t really change anything about my comment. Mozilla can offer APIs in addition to what Manifest v3 offers, allowing extensions that want to do these things to do them. It’s already the case today, for example, that uBlock Origin makes use of additional APIs for more effective ad blocking on Firefox.

Mozilla will want to be API-compatible, but there’s nothing inherent to the API that requires the arbitrary content-blocking limitation that Google put in. So, Mozilla will be API-compatible without adopting this shitty limitation.

No, because it gives suicidal folks a purpose. People don’t tend to kill themselves, only because things are hard. It’s much more vile when things are the slightest bit uncomfortable, but you don’t know why you should endure that. And when the world does actually fall apart, they can become politically active or help out in their local community.

recent versions of Firefox (with a few privacy add-ins) have become nearly unusable for me.

Due to performance issues? Mind that Linux is likely a good bit more usable on your hardware and you may very well not need to move away from Firefox after all.

“missing MSVCR120.dll” (part of Windows C++ Redistributable pkg)

Not sure, if you’re saying that you already found this out, but yeah, there is an installer from Microsoft for this Windows C++ Redistributable package.

bergerrealty.com & attheshore.com (web cam hosting sites)- “no compatible source was found for this media”

I’m on Linux and these work for me in Falkon. But it could be that your particular hardware + the Chrome browser engine that Falkon uses, results in no source being compatible (e.g. your graphics card only offers acceleration for the H.264 codec, which is what Firefox generally uses, not VP9, which is what Chrome/Falkon prefers). Then it would still not work after the switch, although again, Firefox would probably work…

legacy.com (obituary site) - various page loading and display issues. If I fully enable content permissions, I can get the home page displayed, but no links are functional.

Again, works for me. I didn’t have to do anything. I have the built-in ad block enabled, but no other customizations, as far as I remember (I only use Falkon as a backup browser).

facebook.com - Log-in successful. Home page displays, but is immediately followed by: “Qt Qtwebengineprocess has stopped working” here is the pertinent info from the Windows analysis pop-up:

Problem Event Name: APPCRASH; Application Name: QtWebEngineProcess.exe; Application Version: 5.12.1.0; Fault Module Name: Qt5WebEngineCore.dll; Exception Code: c0000005; Exception Offset: 00b75263

I don’t use Facebook, so can’t test this one. This could be due to using the 32-bit version, but it’s really difficult to say. Only real pointer I can give you is that “QtWebEngine” is a thin wrapper around the browser engine of Chrome (which is called “Blink”). It’s part of the Qt GUI framework that Falkon uses. So, likely not specific to Falkon.

If you’ve got a spare USB stick, I would recommend just preparing it as the Linux Mint installation medium. You’ll be able to boot off of that into a largely functional Linux Mint system, without actually installing it.

This will be slower than a proper installation, as it will read the data off of the USB stick rather than your hard drive, and lots of these “live” installation medias do not come with all the media codecs, so this will probably not be representative for your webcam sites.
I’m also not entirely sure, if you can just install Falkon into that live system.

But at the very least, you can give Firefox a look (it’s the default browser), see how that performs, and just play around with the system.

I’m mostly a fan, because I don’t feel like I have to have faith.

If my instance explodes, I’ll make an account on another instance. If the Lemmy devs collectively evaporate (and neither me nor others want to pick up the slack), then I can go to Mastodon or Kbin or whatever.

Individual rogue instances can be defederated. If e.g. Reddit truely disappears over night and Lemmy were to gain mass market appeal, then I can likely find a more isolated instance with a smaller community sharing my interests.