One of my favorites!

All 3 books in the first uplift series work fine as stand-alone stories. But book 1 (Sundiver) does kinda read like a prequel to the rest of the series. The inciting incident of Startide Rising is what sets everything else in motion for all subsequent books, and Sundiver takes place before that. But it does have a bunch of world building that is helpful context for the other books (and is still a fun story).

I recommend you read Startide Rising first, then circle back to Sundiver if you are enjoying the world and the author's style.

These people aren't actually your friends

When a topic has been covered by multiple national newspapers, it's just very silly to claim censorship.

such as, the lab leak hypothesis... once completely censored as "misinformation", but now a viable theory

It was never completely censored. Evidenced by the fact that you, me, and everyone else heard about it.

People got called names for promoting it without good evidence. People also got called names for pointing out that the evidence was super weak. Y'know, what passes for "debate" these days.

Stop lying

I didn't see any election fraud. Can you explain how the fraud worked?

Carjackers (especially young carjackers) kill cooperating victims on the regular around here. My car isn't worth a human life, but my car isn't what's being threatened in a carjacking.

Canada also has a holiday called "Thanksgiving", and it was last week

If you can go a few days without food and not die, that means you don't need to eat at all. Obviously.

Previous to the switch to snaps, Ubuntu was providing the latest version of Firefox built for each supported Ubuntu release. I'm sure this was more work, but the older system library version issue was not a blocker.

Edit: in fact, Mozilla still provides an apt repo with Firefox deb packages built for each supported Ubuntu release.

Smart card support is still completely broken. I kinda need that to use Linux for my work PC.

If you trust the judgment of the (admins of the) sites you are syncing with, this isn't a problem. If you don't trust that, don't sync with them.

For instance, if I wanted to run my own server, I would absolutely sync with lemmy.world's block list. I agree with their stated defederation policy, and have seen no evidence of the admins disregarding it.

Perhaps you are misunderstanding what this tool does?

If the single user on such an instance is so obnoxious as to be defederated from multiple larger instances, making them spend time and money to come back is a good thing.