In my experience (as a Brit), people generally only refer to Americans as Yanks in a mildly pejorative way or if we’re taking the piss, otherwise it’s Americans.

British values on display here, it’s not even marginal (48% for Ukraine vs 20% for Trump’s America).

It’s not often I’m proud of my country these days, but this is one of those rare moments.

It’s not the same as the UK-Canada relationship either though, because the UK isn’t responsible for Canada’s defence and foreign policy.

Practice / testing new equipment?

I’m English, I assure you people here eat them all the time!

Are you sure they were invented in America? That seems very unlikely to be true so I googled it, wikipedia says recipes for muffins appeared as early as 1747 in English cookbooks…

Most English people don’t even know what an English Muffin is

Citation needed

Just in case it’s not obvious, they mean an English muffin, a kind of flat bread roll. In the UK that’s what they sell for breakfast at McDonald’s (sausage and egg, bacon and egg etc).

I’m pretty sure Ukraine doesn’t have enough ATACMS to completely change the situation. I’m confident they will find clever ways to make Russia hurt with them though, they always use the weapons they are given to good effect.

What’s sobe?

People are mostly talking about what a bunch of idiots they are though.

This lot look like they were cast by the daily mail, they couldn’t be more of a caricature. It is absolutely not effective communication.

On the one hand, this is embarrassing for Russia, but on the other hand the UK’s Trident nuclear deterrent failed a couple of times in a row over the last few years, so I’m not going to get too excited about it.

I like it like this, looks very cosy!

Agree to some extent, but the meaning would only become clear if they continue to listen instead of assuming they know what you’re about to say and zoning out.

I have some of both with my SO and I’m not sure what’s more annoying, being interrupted or explaining exactly what you mean and having none of it be absorbed.

The irony of the autistic person using a metaphor, and someone else taking it too literally. You have to laugh!

And people who have no time install gentoo? Pull the other one :D

I started in 2012, and it wasn’t that difficult. I’d say I do about 30mins of maintenance every other month. It took me a while to work out the config originally, but I wrote a guide afterwards which was really popular for other people doing the same thing (it’s quite out of date now but the principles are the same).

Started out using a raspberry pi (which was also hosting a website at the time) but when I moved house to somewhere with a worse internet connection I migrated to a VPS, so there is a cost but it’s not enormous, maybe £20/month.

Don’t even bother if you can’t use a static IP, because all your email will be bounced if your PTR record for the IP (reverse DNS record) doesn’t match your domain name.

It got a bit more complicated when people started adding extra layers of spam protection like SPF, DKIM and DMARC, but those are mostly set and forget.

Overall, I’d say it’s worth it but only because I find it quite interesting/fun.

Google is unavoidable but I do my best to mitigate the worst parts of their privacy intrusions.

I have a pixel phone running grapheneOS with Google Services Framework installed but without Google Play or Gboard or any of that stuff. For me that’s a balance that works.

I host my own email server so no Gmail.

I also host my own Matrix server and avoid WhatsApp where possible (not Google but just as bad if not worse).

I use YouTube but via Newpipe or using Ublock origin on Firefox (not logged in obviously).

Chrome is genuinely worse than Firefox now that Google have made adblocking more difficult with manifest v3.

You just have to decide what the best tradeoff is between privacy and convenience.