my_hat_stinks

Username and display name can be set independently, you should have a "Display name" field in settings. Their non-unique display name is "max" and their unique username is "@[email protected]". If you check their profile you should see both.

If you don't set a display name it will be the same as your username, if you set display name to the same as username (like I have) it'll show your username without the instance even to people on other instances.

I'm not sure I follow that analogy, if you get a ride to a hospital you don't expect it to lock off all other destinations. What happens in the hospital is irrelevant.

From reading the article, this is more like if you walk into a hotel and they burn down your house so you have no choice but to stay. I suppose in theory you could argue in very bad faith that this is a problem with the house since it's the house that burned, but in reality the problem is the fact they're the ones who started the fire.

Ads. Specifically, a popup served by the OS about chrome and switching to bing or edge or something like that. I didn't even use chrome, just having it installed was enough for them. Any ads baked into the OS is unacceptable, but that's just so far over the line that I find it insane anyone still uses Windows at all.

I contacted support to complain and their "solution" was to reinstall the OS, so I installed a better one instead.

No, it's the website's fault. You only need explicit consent if you're tracking users beyond what your service obviously requires to function, the problem is these sites are stalking you.

And if it's even slightly harder to decline than to accept they're likely not in compliance anyway so it's definitely not the EU's fault.

"w/" has been around forever, though it's a bit less common without the slash. Here's a random language forum post from 16 years ago commenting on how it's common which I found with a quick search, I'm far too lazy to put in more effort but I'm sure someone properly motivated could find older references or maybe even the full etymology.

Social security numbers being involved in a breach does not mean that the breach only affects Americans. Some records might not have an equivalent ID number associated with them at all, and some records could have similar ID numbers from other countries. They also list current address as part of the data leaked but the fact many people don't have a current address didn't seem to cause you any confusion. The original source lists "information about relatives", if that was in this title would you have assumed only people with living relatives were included?

"I didn't read the article" is a poor excuse when you're commenting on the believability of the article. What happened here is you saw an article, immediately assumed it was about the US, realised that doesn't make any sense, then dismissed the article without even bothering to check because the title doesn't fit the US exclusively. It's crazy to me that you wouldn't even consider the fact it's not an exclusively US-based leak.

I'm not really sure what you're asking since your post is a but unfocused, but if your problem is that you have too many addresses with different providers you could simply redirect mail from alternate addresses to whichever one you actually check. When I switched to proton I didn't delete my old gmail account, I simply imported my old emails and set up email forwarding (see here for Proton's migration instructions from Gmail). If you want to completely de-Google you don't need to do it all at once, just migrate accounts to your new addresses as needed.

If you want a separate account for your PC then this does of course require a separate account. There isn't really a solution there since your problem is also your requirement. You could set up separate folders or aliases for your PC and phone but that might not have the same level of separation you want.

I'd recommend switching away from Chrome-based browsers entirely anyway due to Google forcing through questionable standards by throwing their near-monopoly around, but using one Google service doesn't mean it's pointless to switch away from others. You don't need to do everything at once.

Okay, but I'm not sure how revelant that is. The article doesn't say only Americans were affected, it says the exact opposite.

[...] this data likely comes from both the U.S. and other countries around the world.

It's possible to factually accurate with heavy bias, but since that would require selective reporting to enforce a single worldview I wouldn't consider that "highly trustworthy".

Consider the following hypothetical headlines:
"Teen Killed by Islamic Group During Shooting"
"Terrorist Shooting at Mosque, 20 Dead"

Both are technically factually accurate ways to describe a hypothetical scenario where a teen shoots up a place of worship before being stopped by one of the victims, but they both paint very different pictures. Would you consider both sources "highly trustworthy"?

I'm on Mint with a nvidia card, I haven't really had to do any tweaks since I stopped trying to install games on an NTFS-formatted drive and nearly every game works perfectly out of the box. There's a lot of very loud voices complaining about nvidia/tinkering but it's definitely not universal; you won't necessarily need to put in a lot of effort to get games to work on Linux.

Sounds like snake oil. Their website says you need to sip water through their straw for 3 seconds two/three times, then repeat those 3 sips up to 2 more times so that puts the effectiveness at somewhere around that of pretty much any other free home remedy. The way those instructions are written seems like it's meant to intentionally obfuscate that fact too, it's incredibly unnatural to say "do this thing two to three times, up to three times".

This is the poster child for whataboutisn. You literally just argued that it's okay for cryptocurrencies to pollute and waste energy because it takes energy to make glass too.