kiryin

You'd think the "think of the children" gag has already more than served it's purpose in this world, but then stuff like this pops up...

Oh the irony of fate...

I can't recommend PIA anymore after the acquisition. It used to be my choice ever since using a VPN became a necessity, but these it's Mullvad for me. They're relatively transparent, allow me to pay anonymously in cash, and are based on a VPN protocol already included in my kernel.

A commenter below us put it rather nicely:

"Advertising is a huge business predicated entirely on manipulating people to make purchases they otherwise wouldn't, surgically exploiting weaknesses in our psyche."

I strongly believe that advertising by definition is unethical in all of it's forms and "block" ads to the best of my ability, in real life as well. I do not view ads that reach me by mail, and as for billboards and posters I see around town, I make a note to avoid the products they advertise. I know this doesn't make a difference but it's an ideological thing. If my actions could in theory cause a tiny little dent in a graph somewhere, I make a point to do it.

I agree with everything but the latex part. Something like HTML 3.2 is a better fit for hypertext documents. There's no need to re-invent anything, only remove the feature creep and cancerous bullshit.

That's easier said than done though, with everyone so invested in this modern game of "emperor's new clothes" that is the modern web.

For those who may not know, this is a front-end to LibGen. I like the search feature more and use it now and then, but for me the 5-downloads-per-24h limitation is usually quite limiting.

I dunno. I had my doubts for the longest time but recently I've started, little by little, placing my bets on Flatpak. Snap can go to hell, for reasons exhaustively discussed here and elsewhere, but Flatpak is reasonably solid, open and performant technology that fits the problem it's trying to solve. I wouldn't mind if it takes over the distribution of big, GUI desktop apps on linux.

A good refresher as to why a netflix subscription isn't worth my time or money. Gonna add these to my seedbox for that sweet sweet ratio though.

I've read about this so much, I wonder if B/W printers have anything similar? Is there a secret yellow cartridge somewhere in my printer that I don't know about?

I used to use scanners, until I bought a new Brother laser printer and discovered that the scanner feature requires a proprietary driver on the computer end. It's sad as Brother printers tend to work really well with linux, for printing at least.

Since then I've written an ImageMagick script that converts phone photographs of documents into reasonably convincing "scans."

It's pretty cool. When you think about it, the backslash is kind of a useless character, apart from windows paths and escapes I can't think of much use for it, both of which are rather arbitrary. As far as I know it has no real use in writing. I wouldn't be opposed to replacing it with something else and making room for something useful on the keyboard.

First off, do yourself a favor and avoid snap like plague. It's vendor lock-in and horrible.

I use flatpak precisely as you describe. It's for graphical desktop applications, "apps", basically stuff like Firefox, Libreoffice etc. Sandboxing is cool but I mostly do this because the flatpaks are always up to date with respect to upstream, instead of locked into a particular version like in the system repos. I also recently ran into a situation where a particular application wasn't feasibly packageable by the distribution because of unorthodox dependecy choices (and their own, rather strict rules related to packaging), yet they made a flatpak available.

I also like the fact that the applications and their files are isolated in their respective directories, which makes purging unused stuff easy, as opposed to traditionally packaged software pooping all over my home directory.

Running stuff from the command line is a pain, thus why, at least in my use, it's limited to graphical desktop stuff that I'd anyway run by clicking on an icon.

I wonder what likes and dislikes are even for. They don't generate income for channel owners afaik, nor do they affect the recommendation algorithm for users, also afaik. Only views "matter." Especially if the other half gets hidden now, they should just get rid of the whole thing. It doesn't seem to provide anyone with anything, except useless bandwagoning

This is the right way to go. Teach, don't block. You fuck up your relationship to your kids if you force them to keep secrets from you and constantly "fight" against you. Because trust me, that's how it'll end up.

What do you think should be done? What methods are there, besides harsh economic sanctions, to control entities which break regulations and detriment free society? Clearly something needs to happen, something with impact. Pray to the invisible hand?

This is inexcusably disgusting. Reminds me of the bullshit Amazon feeds their employees about unions.

I belong to the camp that believes in using the defaults when it comes to ciphers. I am not an expert in cryptography, nor do I like copypasting stuff I don't fully understand. The openssh guys know this stuff better than I do and I think that's fine.

The way to fix this, along with most issues I see in modern web search, is for search engines to penalize SEO swindling heavily instead of rewarding it. I dare say it's one of the most destructive and terrible aspects of ad tech.

I don't personally keep in touch with people so I can't really say how it's like, but I do know that it's popular around my neck of the woods. On par with whatsapp, it feels like.

I sincerely hope this does not work and they continue to carry the stigma they've rightfully earned.

A little bit off-topic perhaps but I have to take the opportunity to mention how much I love James Grime and his videos on numberphile. In my opinion, he has the most entertaining and compelling way of explaining and teaching the subject at hand, out of all the "hosts."

As a Japanese learner, this has been a massive disappointment in unicode for me, and a pain in my ass. It has sort of formed into a challenge for me, trying to get the characters to display consistently on all of my devices. Believe it or not, even with pango configured to always show the japanese variants, and fontconfig set to always prefer the JP font, some applications like Firefox find a way to mess it up.

Can't blame them much though, han unification is a huge mess and designed by someone who I can only posit to be entirely brainless. There aren't many characters that are affected, you aren't even saving any considerable amount of codepoints. It's just west-centricism and lack of knowledge on the subject.

I, for one, do not like this. Software that doesn't exist on your computer, but instead gets ephemerally downloaded from a server somewhere when you wish to use it, is about as anti-user-freedom as I can possibly imagine. I can ony hope this doesn't become the standard.

This has largely been my experience as well, also using Fedora but I doubt that matters much. I rarely have issues, in comparison to the endless stream of ACPI and other hurdles other people seem to be going through with their laptops. Also LVFS is a godsend, I wish every vendor ever participated. I get updates even for my thunderbolt dock.

The lack of analytics is a good thing. It's none of your business what I read, you already have it in your server logs that I've added your feed to my reader. I do not wish to feel like a tool and an asset of some company simply because I want to read an article.

A lot of sites have "solved" this nonissue by not including text in their feeds, instead only providing a link to the article on their site. A quick and easy way to make me unsubscribe immediately.

Yes, they amount to absolutely nothing in this context.

When you use Firefox, your bookmarks bar gets covered up while you're typing an URL. When using chrom(e|ium) or its plethora of derivatives, you're actively contributing to browser monoculture, sharing your browsing habits with a predatory corporation, and supporting anti-user changes such as the manifest v3 webextensions, which cripple content blockers and disempower you, us, the user.

If the choice is difficult for you, I really don't know what to say.

The criticism that people in these communities come up with is limited to button placement and pixel-to-pixel tab bar height, I wouldn't take any of it seriously. Especially in the current web browser climate, it's laughable. It's our moral obligation, as people with knowledge on the subject, to use Firefox.

I've expressed my distaste for the way Mozilla is managed again and again, and I hate the stupid stuff they do from the bottom of my heart, but there simply is no other choice.

People saying that the laws are only there to ruin your business are mainly non-Europeans who have at most read a shallow blog posts on the topic, also written by non-Europeans.

The EU laws and regulations are quite simple to follow, and I dare say that it's much more difficult for those large corporations you mentioned because they usually have much more responsibilities. Smaller companies with a smaller scope do not have to worry about rules which do not concern them and their business.

So, to answer your question, yes, this is exactly what I want personally. For-profit actors need to be scrutinized.

Is that somehow at odds with what I want? If I search for "can you trust the police," I want both sides of the story. I want information and opinions from varied sources in order to get a comprehensive picture of the topic, upon which I will base my own opinion. I do not want ready-made opinions to copy without thinking.