Muehe

(not actually everything, but I get your hyperbole)

How is it hyperbole? All artificial neural networks have "hallucinations", no matter their size. What's your magic way of knowing when that happens?

there must be a bit more to it than that. AIM, Skype, and several others were viable options with existing userbases.

Once upon a time in a messenger landscape far far away there lived a king called XMPP. It had a lot of powerful children, WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger, Google+, and even Skype amongst them. And they all worked together in a big federation towards the commonwealth of all, freely sharing their metadata. But then some of the children grew greedy, jealously guarding their own gardens behind higher and higher walls, breaking down the federation. And thus the era of the warring messengers began. But prophecy foretells of a prince to unite all the disparate standards in one big Matrix again, completing yet another revolution of the XKCD 972 wheel of time.

For real though it was phone numbers. WhatsApp always worked based off of phone numbers, which is an identity confirmation method that was immediately familiar to most people at the time, even more so than email.

Oh you are right, I misread that. Thanks for pointing it out.

it’s definitely more pro-privacy than Brave or FireFox. I’ve never had to jump through a captcha to use Google in those browsers.

You have this backwards. Google showing you captchas is basically them saying they can't match your browser to any know (shadow) profile they have already stored. So they aren't sure you are a human and if so which one specifically. Getting harassed with a captcha is essentially like a badge of honour for your browsers privacy settings.

Firefox has no extensions so no Adblock.

That's because so far every browser on iOS had to use WebKit as it's HTML rendering engine, meaning that even if you installed another browser manually you were basically still using Safari under the hood. IIRC the new DMA rules include allowing other browser engines like Gecko, so Mozilla is probably already working on making addons available. I mean they are available on Android, so why wouldn't they make them available on iOS now that they finally can?

So WINE was just imagined into existence? Or maybe it was a wizard with a magic spell?

GP is simply wrong on this one. While it is an open source project with a lot of volunteer involvement, there are companies like CodeWeavers and Valve which directly or indirectly contribute to development. You can get support from CodeWeavers AFAIK, but that means paying them.

Why do people get so uppity when I simply ask questions? I never claimed that anyone owed me anything. I never asked for anything.

Well you did ask for something, which is replies to your questions. And your reaction to those replies, whether intended or not, comes off as "uppity" as well. Hence the downvotes and hostility (not to say that I support that from either side of the conversation).

I am unwilling to learn.

Then why are you wasting peoples time with asking questions?

I’ve wasted hundreds of hours trying to learn to use Linux for basic tasks after everyone assured me it was “so easy” and not gotten anywhere. I’m done trying to learn.

Running software on an OS it wasn't made for is anything but a basic task. Try running various Linux software on Windows and you will see. If you want to run software made for Windows easily the way to do that is using the version of Windows it was created for.

What people mean by "basic tasks" is usually browsing and office, and there is Linux-native software for that.

Someone posted Zorin OS elsewhere, which appears to be exactly that.

Not really. It has deeper integration of Wine into the system by default, but it is still a Linux OS running a compatibility layer for Windows software. This will not save you if you are unwilling to learn, there will still be various problems. Some software will simply not work, or only partially work, or require additional configuration to work.

In summary, if your definition of "basic tasks" is running arbitrary Windows software then doing it on Windows is the way to go.

At this point somebody should really create a /c/Aipocalypse community or something to collect stuff like this.

pandoc.org is probably what you are looking for, but you might have to create a custom reader/writer or find one on the internet.

Cryptography ⊋ Blockchain

A blockchain is cryptography, but not all cryptography is a blockchain.

Well I guess that depends very much on what you mean by being on life support. Like financially speaking? Oh yeah, they are more or less entirely dependent on Google. Regarding user numbers? Sure, Statcounter says 3.3% currently. Technologically speaking? Not really, quite the opposite actually. Besides Apples WebKit and Googles fork of it called Blink there is but one game in browser engine town, and its name is Gecko.

Now? Want?!

then kill them with a sharp pointy rock

In persistence hunting, at least the kind that humans practice, the prey mostly dies through indirect effects like exhaustion or heat stroke. You just keep tracking until you find a dead deer lying around basically, brought down simply by constantly having to flee your incessant pursuit again and again.