I don’t listen to many podcasts, but those two are pretty great.
Router-level VPN is going to be more difficult to configure and cause more problems than just having it on all your devices. There are some games where online play just refuses to work if connecting through a VPN. Some mobile apps are the same. When a website blocks your currently selected server, and the usual solution is switching to another server, that’s going to be more difficult and more tedious when it’s configured at the router level. In addition, if you do something like using a self-hosted VPN in order to connect remotely to a media server on your home network, that becomes more difficult if your home router is on a different VPN.
If you’re trying to keep local devices in the building from phoning home and being tracked, a PiHole or router-level firewall might be a better solution. I think if you’re running a pfsense or opnsense router and are a dab hand with VLANs then maybe you could get what you’re looking for with router-level VPN, but it’s a huge hassle otherwise. Just put Mullvad on your computers and phones and call it a day.
At least their username is accurate!
Web ads are a security risk that even the FBI has acknowledged, so your friends should be aware that having uBlock Origin installed is nearly as important as having virus protection.
Regarding profiles, having two is generally recommended - your main profile with no Google services, and a secondary profile only for apps that absolutely require Google Play Services. Personally, I just dump everything in one profile and deny nearly every permission to anything Google, and on top of the sandboxing that’s enough of an improvement over stock Android that I don’t bother with two profiles.
They advertise E2EE as a feature
They can call it E2EE as much as they want, but it’s a lie. It’s encrypted in transit and at rest, at least on the user’s device, but unlike true E2EE, they can decrypt and view any conversation they want to.
I wouldn’t trust any phone with GrapheneOS preloaded unless it was directly sold by GrapheneOS themselves. Especially not from a site that phrases things in an almost uncanny way.
He did at the beginning, but he helped them get what they wanted in the end, and I think that counts for something.
“We’re thankful that the Biden administration played the long game on sick days and stuck with us for months after Congress imposed our updated national agreement,” Russo said. “Without making a big show of it, Joe Biden and members of his administration in the Transportation and Labor departments have been working continuously to get guaranteed paid sick days for all railroad workers.
“We know that many of our members weren’t happy with our original agreement,” Russo said, “but through it all, we had faith that our friends in the White House and Congress would keep up the pressure on our railroad employers to get us the sick day benefits we deserve. Until we negotiated these new individual agreements with these carriers, an IBEW member who called out sick was not compensated.”
Archives are ideal for identifying sneaky behavior like that. You never know when an admin might have the ability to delete or edit something without anyone noticing.
You don’t need to add the exe of whatever mod tool to Steam, use Steam Tinker Launch. It lets you add an exe to run instead of the game, concurrent with the game, or injected after the game is up, and it will run in the same prefix that Proton uses for that game. It also has tools for installing and using several mod managers, and generally a ton of good features for tinkering with the game.
The main issue I haven’t solved is getting something like the Nexus mods “open in manager” to work. My guess is I might have to install, run, and configure a web browser inside the prefix, but that sounds really annoying so I haven’t tried it.
Technically, any model trained on LAION-5B before December 2023 was trained on CSAM.
But yeah, I expect any porn model trained on a sufficient diversity of adult actors could be used to make convincing CP even without having it in the training data. AI image generation is basically the digital equivalent of a chainsaw - a tool for a particular messy job that can really hurt people if used incorrectly. You wouldn’t let a typical kid run around unattended with one, that’s for sure.
You can add swipe (glide?) typing into HeliBoard. From their github readme:
- Glide typing (only with closed source library ☹️)
- library not included in the app, as there is no compatible open source library available
- can be extracted from GApps packages (“swypelibs”), or downloaded here (click on the file and then “raw” or the tiny download button)
The only reason HeliBoard doesn’t include this themselves is presumably legal liability plus their dedication to the app not having any network permissions at all.
Someone is bound to start selling conversion kits for regular cars eventually - turn your 20 year old gas dinosaur into a zippy EV or hybrid, no spyware required. We can already do it with two-wheelers, and Edison Motors is well on their way to making kits to turn big trucks into hybrids.
To be fair, even in my family it’s not a full streaming replacement. We have Discovery+, Nebula, and (free) YouTube. Live TV from the Roku player is the main thing I want to replace through IPTV, either Jellyfin or maybe Kodi, but both the metadata and functionality of free sources is a crapshoot. If I could replace the Roku live TV use with some inexpensive paid IPTV source, then I could easily switch to any streaming box brand, like ONN or some other generic Android TV.
My setup is not recommended, honestly. Old gaming PC from about 14 years ago with a couple extra hard drives, thrown in the closet with stripped-down Windows 10 on an old SSD, desktop version of Jellyfin, and an external drive for backups. Not even running in a Docker container because the CMOS battery is dead and getting to it is way too much of a hassle on that particular motherboard, so virtualization defaults to off whenever it completely loses power. Which it unfortunately does on occasion like winter storms, or summer heat, or if the wind is blowing.
But hey, for the movies and shows we have on DVD/BD, as well as the music we’ve bought over the years, it does work for access from PCs and phones on the local network (Finamp + Jellyfin Media Player). I dabbled with IPTV for live TV replacement but found that only using totally free IPTV+metadata would take either much more work on no-virtualization Windows 10 than I’m willing to put up with, or have much more jank than my family is willing to put up with.
All the cybersecurity in the world won’t matter if a handful of manipulated idiots people shoot a bunch of unguarded and remotely located substation transformers.
As a fellow virgin, if you actually do want to not be a virgin, but see yourself as having “failed” then think deeply on what the reason is.
First of all, if you’ve “failed” then what did you actually try that failed? Do you constantly take steps to meet new people and find friends, male and female, whether in hobbies or online or anywhere? If not, why not? If you have, and therefore have lots of friends you speak with regularly, are you recruiting them to help you find a romantic partner? Meeting lots of people, making friends, and then asking those friends for help is a great way to accomplish almost anything. It’s much easier early in life, but it’s never impossible.
If you have taken steps to meet lots of people (and I mean a lot of people), but none of them or their single-and-looking friends wanted to date you, then did they give reasons? What is it about you that they don’t like? Are you taking care of yourself? Maintaining good personal hygiene? Dressing well? Do your peers find you unpleasant to be around? Are you simply boring? If you meet lots of people and all of them reject you, there’s likely something you’re not doing that you need to be doing. Work on yourself to be someone that people want to be around.
If any of what I’ve said here is relevant to you, even if it’s unpleasant to think about, it’s very important to be consciously aware of it so that you can accept that your current reality is one you’ve chosen, consciously or unconsciously… and that you can choose differently.
I’m one year younger than you, also virgin guy who would maybe like to have a partner, but through introspection and years of learning shit on the internet, I’m aware of the likely reasons I haven’t gotten one yet - I just don’t meet people, and when I do, even when we get along, I tend to fall out of touch immediately. I believe I likely have undiagnosed and unmedicated ADHD along with some steep but situational social anxiety, both of which I know have and will continue to keep me from forming and maintaining many social connections that I otherwise could have, which I could be leveraging to find people to date.
So, I recognize what my stumbling blocks are, and that if I decide I really do want to find love and get laid, I have to deal with those stumbling blocks. For me, that will involve speaking to a head doctor and learning more precisely how my brain works and what strategies I can use to overcome those blocks. It’s not about fixing me, it’s about being able to be more me. But until I do that, I accept that my current status of “virgin, but maybe wants to change that” is there because I have, in some way, chosen up to this point not to change it.
If you figure out what your stumbling blocks are, or even if you haven’t, tell a close and trustworthy friend or family member about where you’re at, where you want to be, and how you feel about it. They might have options, or be able to help you take whatever steps you need to be where you want to be. If you feel like you just can’t make yourself do the thing, get someone else to give you a kick in the ass.
It’s a little more tinkering than Windows, but definitely less than it’s ever been, and getting better all the time. I’ve found it to be basically exchanging one set of weird OS quirks for another. And hey, if you have any issues, the folks in the Universal Blue Discord are super friendly and helpful!
The biggest thing missing for me is good VR support at the OS level. Even with all the optimizations in Bazzite making regular games perform about equivalent to Windows, latency in VR is awful, and motion smoothing just plain isn’t supported in Linux yet, on any hardware. Those two pain points make the experience much worse than on Windows, I’d be motion sick in minutes if I tried to actually play something. Thankfully, normal gaming works just fine, and I don’t play VR as often as flat games, so I can just boot into Windows when I want to do that.
The second thing is the poor state of music players. I’m used to the very extensive feature set in MusicBee, and not a single native player hits all the boxes that MusicBee does. It can be run in Bottles, but not very well, and as a newbie, it took me a lot of extra tinkering to get things working even sort of right - file permissions, dotnet stuff, font libraries, etc. I still haven’t quite gotten file permissions working right, and font rendering is pretty bad (and custom font selection is broken entirely), but maybe I’ll figure some of that out eventually so I can stop booting into Windows whenever I want to make changes to my library.
Try KittyToy (itch.io).