A friend showed me their workflow for piracy and it’s really incredible just how easy it all is. Literally just download an OVPN config from whatever VPN provider you subscribe to, connect to the VPN and search in qbittorrent (and use the link in qbittorrent to download the necessary search plugins)

Like obviously this is a few decades of software refinement, legal battles plus a fair amount of large companies turning a blind eye to the obvious. So it’s shoulders of giants and all but it’s still kinda jarring

Good question! I can’t remember.

I think I read a Microsoft blog or something like a decade ago that said they shifted from a Hyper-V based solution to Linux to improve stability, but honestly it’s been so long I wouldn’t be shocked if I just saw it in a reddit comment on a related article that I didn’t yet have the technical knowhow to fully comprehend and took it as gospel.

At this point I think it’s most telling that even Azure runs on Linux. Microsoft’s twin flagship products somehow still only work well when Linux does the heavy lifting and works as the glue between

The true snowflakes are always looking for something inconsequential to have a meltdown over

Generally Republicans and Trumpists use “woke” to describe anything they don’t like that seems to slightly swing liberal rather than anything specific.

Originally “woke” was slang in the black community meaning to understand the risks of being black in the world and basically was an equivalent of saying “drive safely!” or a Midwestern “watch for deer!” in wishing one a friendly goodbye

Too big of a map ultimately becomes a deal breaker for me because it will inevitably have too much empty space and get too boring and time consuming to play through.

Smaller more refined maps are better than larger maps where the team can’t sufficiently justify every single corner and make sure every inch truly is fully designed and makes sense.

Sounds like you’ve read the books much more recently than I have because I simply can’t remember much of any of those details, just my takeaways from the books

I remember it being unclear if the professed feelings for her by Peta were genuine or also manufactured for the cameras, and while the ending implied Peta had genuine feelings for her by that point, he likely was also thrust into a position he didn’t necessarily want either

For the not all media played successfully, I found it was primarily down to transcode settings trying to hardware transcode file types my server can’t hardware transcode. It’s something worth playing with

AI at least provides a clear product that can be a helpful workforce multiplier, whereas Bitcoin provided an unprotected alternative to traditional markets with none of the safeguards nor legal precedents of traditional markets, so it’s only led to illegal activities piled upon illegal activities

To be fair, if I had an option to effectively invest in Google circa 2004 in 2024 I would toss some spare money at it, and that’s basically what OpenAI is offering at this moment. They’ve established themselves, shown strong leadership and established strong relationships with major companies. They’re a leader in a particular product segment and while they could falter and fail, there’s enough momentum that they’re more likely to be acquired than to actually fail, plus they’re swimming in extremely uncharted waters so there’s plenty of opportunities for them to both greatly improve ongoing operational efficiency and to create new products with new markets, much like where Google was in 2004

On the other hand some breakthrough in either hardware or software could make AI models significantly cheaper to run and/or train. The current cost in silicon is insane and just screams that there’s efficiencies to be found. As always, in a gold rush, sell pickaxes

Now yes, but it was briefly the basis for Firefox OS, which was almost early enough to the market to become a major player, but unfortunately too late and people were already attached to some apps they used regularly

Completely flabbergasted that we run internal services not indexable by google.

This is why it’s becoming the norm to have an Intranet with a links page to all of the internal and external webpages employees rely upon. Just make that the browser homepage with Kerberos authentication and the employees never need to know URLs or Google the internal/external service they’re trying to access

Fortunately Google messages filters all of it to spam and makes it very easy to toss whatever doesn’t get filtered into spam. Here’s mine from Wisconsin!

Personally I keep my installed apps to a minimum, heavily use Firefox on mobile with uBlock Origin, and heavily curate what’s allowed to send notifications and when, so my phone is quiet and not distracting but there when I want it/need it

If my grandmother makes it to the next election I might move her to an android phone for this reason alone. Her iPhone doesn’t block the spam at all, and even appears to not have a way to delete the messages

The nice thing about these thrift stores is they’re actual charities and if you are in a hard place they’ll often help you get the stuff you need for free rather than charging the $0.25 an item they might otherwise

I loved the wildlife zoo there when I visited Rochester on a whim a few years ago!

I love that I knew exactly what classic it would be just from the bash.org archive link