There are other search engines than google. I never even mentioned Google specifically in my responses, that was the top comment. I used the generic term. VPNs and anonymizing extensions also exist. “Appropriate forums” can and are infiltrated/monitored by fascist government agents all the time, so don’t pretend like it’s that much safer unless you’re also taking safety precautions.

Edit: I will add that your best bet is finding a local group initially and going analog from there. But again, those aren’t immune to fascist spies, so I’d recommend learning how civil rights groups of the past/present reduce(d) their risk against infiltration/spying.

It’s gotten worse, I won’t argue that. But basic stuff is still quite easy/straightforward to look up, and using search modifier tools is still incredibly useful in narrowing down results.

Man, it’s crazy how bad it’s gotten with people not knowing how to use search engines, let alone how to effectively use them. If it’s not on their social media platform of choice, it’s simply unattainable information.

Kitty ghillie suit

Damnit, I just finished watching Alien Romulus and that’s a dad joke worthy for the android in it.

I’m mostly agnostic to it almost all of it. For all I know, the ancient Egyptians were spot on.

I think some states are offering workarounds for that dilemma now, but I really do wish the US federal would just legalize it already. We have 24 states that have already legalized it, as well as 3 territories and D.C… Around 33 states have for medical purposes.

When 2/3 of a country has legalized something in some form, it should become the de facto law of the land at the federal level. Those other states can continue keeping it illegal if their citizens so choose, but the Federal government should be forced to at least decriminalize it if it’s something that isn’t directly harming people against their will.

Now hold on, maybe they’re onto something. The highest levels of drug dealers most likely aren’t accepting cash, they’re laundering their money through legitimate fronts. Small time dealers setting up some simple LLC or something for a relatively small fee and funneling money through that could actually shield you better from local law enforcement. I’m pretty sure Cashapp and their ilk offer business accounts nowadays, haven’t checked myself.

We used to do tape backups up until about 6 years ago, but our higher headquarters decided they wanted to go all in on Rubrik instead. I will say that it is a lot easier to maintain and conduct restores from, and we have all of our various sites’ Rubriks backing up to each other for redundancy. But you’re definitely right that tape is far cheaper per GiB of storage than anything else.

Definitely keep watching. Larry David is definitely not a magtard and the show is hilarious. Also, in the later seasons, she only makes brief appearances. Hell, the last season has an entire multi-episode arc calling out and making fun of Georgia’s voter suppression laws.

I had thought that 5+ years ago, Google, Apple, Meta, etc. all created “master” private keys that would allow them to unencrypt users’ data. At the time, the argument used was to combat CSA material/trafficking. I could be wrong, though. I’ll try looking it up later.

Edit:

I did a quick search while on break at work.

Apple claims they have no master key and do not allow governments direct access to their servers. They only provide data when legally required to;

https://www.apple.com/privacy/government-information-requests/

Google claims the same thing.

As for Meta, I could only find anecdotal Reddit posts that seem to somewhat contradict the E2EE claims from Meta, as an example:

https://www.reddit.com/r/privacy/comments/1g6tqg7/meta_ai_scanning_private_conversations/

https://www.reddit.com/r/facebook/comments/1al9dk9/messenger_has_access_to_the_endtoend_encrypted/

So it seems that Meta is likely scanning content before the encryption takes place. So they can still claim that messages are indeed E2EE, but that’s useless when their AI tools are still scanning the content beforehand.

There’s also this recent development:

https://www.medianama.com/2024/03/223-meta-end-to-end-encryption-europe-interoperability-2/

In spite of these processes, Meta has concerns. The blog post said, “Without ownership of both clients (endpoints) we cannot guarantee what a third-party provider does with sent or received messages” and thus cannot assure that messages are safely encrypted and protected. Further they said that with interoperability they would “lose connection level signals that are important for keeping users safe from spam and scams such as TCP fingerprints.”

Finally, Meta said that having a intermediary between third party provider and a Meta server could expose the “chat metadata to the proxy server, which increases the likelihood that this data could be accidentally or intentionally leaked.”

Tldr; I wouldn’t trust Meta’s E2EE.

Sometimes this one place gives me $20 of food before closing when I only intended to spend $5 so the upsell kinda hurts

But that upsell is strictly self-inflicted. If it’s before closing, I can almost guarantee the staff are just hooking you up because a large amount of that food is just going to go to waste since most restaurants require things to get thrown away (e.g. if it’s a deli, some of the meats may have hit their shelf life limit).

I’d just tip what you can comfortably afford and what you feel isn’t insulting (e.g. tipping someone like $0.50 on a $20+ order). I always follow the 15-20% rule, and possibly higher in some circumstances. But I don’t know, I haven’t worked food in 20 years, so maybe the manners/expectations have changed nowadays. Also depends where you live.

Not to mention a large chunk of the public won’t agree with the idea to begin with. Especially the top 20-30% of income earners.

Additionally, emergency/medical personnel not working would mean people are directly dying as a result of it, creating easy negative PR against the movement.

Asking 180+ million people to coordinate on anything is a farce, and for something like a general strike it is an absolute fantasy.

HDR in movies/TV shows that support it look phenomenal on a good monitor/TV, especially if you have OLED. Games, on the other hand, I have yet to see any that actually look improved with it.

Or the author included it because they also thought it was funny, haha

I was tired last night, toddler hasn’t let me sleep much.

I think I poorly conveyed that I do prefer Steam, and do think Epic’s launcher is lacking. My point is, getting into the gaming retail business has a crazy upfront cost, so if GOG closes shop (which isn’t so crazy to speculate: https://cdaction-pl.translate.goog/publicystyka/wielkie-zwolnienia-w-gog-u-pracownicy-naswietlaja-wewnetrzne-problemy-firmy-tylko-u-nas?_x_tr_sl=pl&_x_tr_tl=en&_x_tr_hl=en&_x_tr_pto=wapp&_x_tr_hist=true the original article was in Polish, thus the google translate link), that leaves only Epic competing with Steam. If epic eventually concludes they can’t pull enough marketshare to continue justifying the crazy money they’ve spent trying to attract users from Steam with all their sales, that’ll leave zero competition to Steam. I for one don’t condone monopolies.

Alternatively, studios could just start releasing physical media again, but we all know that’ll never happen…

Steam’s voice chat/partying functionality is garbage. Discord is widely used for a reason. Remote Play is hit or miss, but I’ve largely resorted to using Moonlight instead on my Steam Deck because it’s more reliable and stable. The guides on Steam vary wildly from game to game, just depends on the community support for it. It is nice when there’s good stuff available, as it is somewhat convenient (though I wished it saved my spot on the page, I constantly have to scroll to where I left off on guides whenever I do use them). Lutris and NonSteamLauncher makes running Epic on Linux a non-issue.

I get it, Epic is a lackluster launcher. No one’s arguing otherwise. But it’s hardly a huge barrier to playing games.

Not really. Games would’ve gone digital either way, it was the obvious path to go. Steam might’ve sped up that process by a few years, but pretending that without steam, digitalization of the games industry would’ve never happened is naive at best and dishonest at worst.

And yet consoles still have physical game copies available all these years later. Why is PC so much different?

And I’m not saying to be happy that Epic is competition, I’m saying that if GOG dies, you’ll only really have Steam and Epic. That sucks ass, but it’s still better than only having ONE option. And like I said, once Gabe is gone, I 100% believe Valve will go full on enshitification mode. I wouldn’t have to worry as much if I could still buy physical fucking copies of modern PC games.

As for Epic competing by creating better platform, I completely agree. Their launcher has made improvements, but it is still very bare bones and not great. I try to remember that tons of common sense software features we take for granted get patented. Hell, that’s why so many streaming services felt so much shittier than Netflix for so long. It’s not as straightforward as just emulating what Steam does but slightly better. That’s still no excuse though, and they still fall very short of offering the mostly comfortable user experience we’ve grown accustomed to. Steam didn’t start off where they’re at now, they’ve had 20 years with an entire company dedicated to developing it.

My main point is, we all love Steam and Valve because they’ve been a mostly ethical corporation so far as well as mostly improving the experience of PC gaming, especially with Linux (minus expediting and enabling 100% digitization so they could attain better profit margins on Half-Life 2 sales). But nothing lasts forever, and pure monopolies are bad. Fuck Epic for buying exclusive rights for third party games, but in this specific context, it is their game, so it is what it is.

Games not developed or published by Epic only become exclusive when the publishers and/or devs take their money. Why is no one mad at them? And of course Valve doesn’t have to do much of anything, they have had like a 10+ year headstart on cornering the PC marketplace. GOG has been completely awesome and more ethical than Valve and yet they’re barely scraping by. Gamers/consumers just love to fanboy the hell out of corporations these days. When Gabe is gone and Valve inevitably goes public and enshitifies, you’ll be glad there’s still some competition left. But it’ll suck because 90% of PC gamers have probably damn near 100% of their library locked into one platform. Remember, Steam is a huge reason why PC games went fully digital almost two decades ago.

Exclusivity has been a thing since the advent of videogames, this isn’t anything new. Epic is just a shitty company, so they’re an easy target to criticize. They funded the development and published the game, it’s their right to do with it as they please. They’re losing money by not bringing it to Steam, so their loss, really. But it’s not even close to the equivalent of console exclusives, as the barrier here is spending 5 minutes to just download their shitty launcher. It sucks, but this really isn’t that big of a deal, in my opinion.