At least duckduckgo and Kagi search allow you to turn off AI. It’s a big part of why I’m using them almost exclusively now. I don’t want every web search I do destroying the planet to show me some unnecessary, untrustworthy and often irrelevant and unwanted AI garbage.

The alt-right propaganda being firehosed onto social media is particularly targeted at and effective against young men. All our information spaces are under direct and sustained attack by enemies foreign and domestic, and most of them have the goal of influencing or simply destabilizing our democracy. I don’t think this is really in question at this point, I think the only open debates are about exactly how much of these attacks can be attributed to what sources, but my belief is that any sort of adversary who’s been accused by anyone is probably legitimately involved at some level.

We also don’t seem to have any idea what we can do about it or we’re going to do about it other than accept that it’s happening and apparently continue to let it happen.

Not an option. They have to be connected to something, the grid has to be able to monitor and coordinate power plants of any kind remotely and for a solar power plant the inverters are where a lot of that logic happens. Obviously it’s not going to have a public IP accessible to the whole internet, it may not even be connecting across the public internet at all but at the very least there are data collection and monitoring networks woven throughout the entire country and there are all sorts of ways anyone with nation-state level resources, nevermind China who manufactures and supplies so much of the world’s technology, might gain access to them.

A few more honorable mentions that are not exact re-implementations with compatibility with the original datafiles, but more spiritual followups:

Total Annihilation - TA Spring > Spring Engine > Recoil Engine > Beyond All Reason https://github.com/beyond-all-reason (I think there are mods that make it “Basically TA”)

Escape Velocity/EV Nova - Endless Sky https://endless-sky.github.io/

Goldeneye 64 (multiplayer only) - Goldeneye Source https://forums.geshl2.com/index.php?topic=7823.0

Warlords II - LordsAWar! https://libregamewiki.org/LordsAWar!

XCOM 1 (UFO Defense) and XCOM 2: Terror From The Deep - OpenXCOM https://openxcom.org/

Master of Orion 1 - 1oom https://github.com/1oom-fork/1oom

Ultima 6 - Nuvie https://github.com/nuvie/nuvie (apparently now part of ScummVM)

I believe it, but I’m still debating whether something like Kagi is worth paying for. On principle, I strongly feel like it is, but in practice I’m still evaluating. So far, I’ve played with it a few times and I haven’t observed any notable improvements, but I’m trying to keep an open mind. First impression is that it’s definitely a little quicker and cleaner to get at the information I’m looking for. And taking a step back, I have to say it’s impressive that they can replicate a behemoth like Google’s accuracy already. On the other hand, I’ve felt like Google has gotten so crappy at search recently that maybe I’m simply not going to be satisfied with anyone simply “meeting” them and maybe what I want simply isn’t possible, in which case I’m just paying for disappointment.

I’ve moved to an “infrastructure as code” approach, not using any fancy tools in particular, primarily just bash shell scripts. Basically almost everything I setup or do gets documented via shell scripts, I write them as I go when I’m learning to install something new, and before I commit to something to new, I take extra care to make sure the scripts are idempotent so that when I want to do make any changes, all I need to do is add it to the appropriate script and re-run it.

The idempotent part takes some effort sometimes, but is not actually as hard as it seems, particularly if you don’t mind that it sometimes spends some wasted time doing things that have already been done, and occasionally spits out some harmless error messages because something is already done, but I also try to minimize that when I can. The consequences of doing too much by re-running are rarely serious. Yeah sometimes the scripts can break, but as long as they fail properly (set -euo pipefail) it’s usually pretty obvious how to fix it and it won’t leave too much of a mess.

Doing this has transformed my homelab from a mess of unknowable higgledy-piggledy spaghetti-services that was always teetering one small failure away from total collapse and frantic rebuilding, into something repeatable and reproducible that I can actually … wait for it … test. Just firing up a Linux ISO in a VM is all I need to test everything I’m doing in a perfect sandbox, and I can throw it away when I’m done with no regrets. Plus it makes rolling out new servers, and more importantly, decommissioning old ones, a breeze, you know exactly what’s on them and how it was set up, because it was all in your scripts. Combined with good data backups (which are also set up in the scripts) and restores (which I also test with scripts) it really takes the drama and stress out of migrations and even hardware failures.

Yeah there are probably easier ways to accomplish what I’m doing using some of the technologies like terraform, ansible and nix/flake that people have mentioned, and I’ve dabbled with those, but for me, the shell script approach strikes a nice balance of not just documenting but also learning the process myself so that I understand enough of what it’s doing to effectively debug it when something goes wrong, and it works on almost everything and in most cases requires no installation or setup. Bash is everywhere. I even have an infrastructure-as-code setup for my Steam Deck to install stuff and get it set up the way I want.

Tim Sweeney is an obnoxious hypocritical dickhead who has only gotten worse and stupider and more hostile over the years, he is constantly spouting anti-consumer and anti-common-sense nonsense while acting like he’s saving gamers and nurturing his egotistical martyr complex. He has gotten so bad that he has contradicted his own past self so many times that for awhile there was a literal subreddit “TimCriticizesTim” devoted to it. Also EGS itself is garbage resource-guzzling software that almost nobody actually wants on their computer, most of the people who do use it do it either because they’re forced to so they can play games exclusively available on it, or because Epic bribes them to by giving them free games constantly. It is nasty software that collects way more data than it needs to, spying on your files and possibly other stuff too, and they also lied about it (and as far as I know still do).

I think you underestimate how strong the masts of a sailing ship are. They are the main propulsion of the ship, they have to take the entire wind load (or in the case of a three-masted ship, depending on sail plan the mainmast might normally take about half the total wind load) and it takes a very significant wind load to haul a ship like that through the water at a dozen knots. The mast is a main structural member and is typically tied into the ship all the way down to the keel, as well as being heavily tensioned in every direction practically possible with rope stays. Granted this is done especially from the rear and sides more than the front, where they would not typically be expected to experience significant direct loads like an impact, but this is still a serious piece of heavily reinforced structure we’re talking about despite its thin appearance.

Also I can’t tell if they’re wood masts in this case, but if they are, those tend to explode into potentially deadly splinters when they’re broken like that. Sailing injuries used to be pretty horrific and dangerous.

Literally any old PC is likely fine. It may be slow, it may struggle or even fail with some of the very complex software (perhaps you will encounter timeouts, or you will spend so much time waiting for memory to swap in or out to disk that it won’t be worth using) but you can run Linux itself on a potato and if your machine isn’t powerful enough, maybe you can get a second one and run different stuff on each, or just scale down your expectations and don’t try to self-host LITERALLY everything just because you can. Certain services are very intense, others will run on a very small piece of a potato.

Look at how many Canadians Walmart employs! (Is a position I’ve heard several times).

The part nobody understands is that ownership is explicitly about control and profit-taking. Doing business is a two-way street, but in situations like these, there’s an awful lot more traffic going in one direction, and you can use your imagination to figure out which direction that traffic is going. Plantations employed lots of slaves too, gave them housing and food, but it didn’t mean they were generous charities. Yeah that’s an extreme example, but this is the point. An employer that comes here and pays hundreds of thousands of people within spitting distance of minimum wage – literally the bare minimum legally and economically possible, does not make them a good and genuine employer that has Canada or Canadians’ best interests at heart. They just want our money, while giving the least possible back.

Fuck 'em.

NSFW, NSFL and Porn are the three categories that would be most useful to configure independently. While there are always gray areas and situations where either/or might apply, I think there are generally pretty clean dividing lines between those three that will cover almost all content.

Trump’s mouthpiece can return to kissing Trump’s ass. We should ban him from our country like we banned their products from our shelves. Fuck off, oppressors, you have made it clear we are at war. Maybe only economic war right now, but you’ve lost every shred of trust and credibility you ever had. You want to be my enemy, mission accomplished, I will treat you like an enemy.

You’d be better off doing actual genealogy, which involves research, reaching out to family members, combing through dusty family heirlooms, following up on leads and stories, gaining access to historical documents and records, and more and more and more research. It’s not so much a conclusion you’ll come to as a process of discovery you’ll go through and a story you’ll piece together, potentially over a lifetime. If you’re lucky the pieces will be very solid and well supported, but more likely they’ll be hazy and questionable and quite possibly completely false. It will often lead you in directions you never would’ve suspected, and you may discover serious surprises, some of which you might wish you hadn’t discovered. But that’s the risk you take.

DNA can sometimes play a part in that process, but it’s no substitute for it, and it’s often way overblown in significance by the companies making money selling it to you. Especially it can help connect you with distant or not-so-distant relatives who may be able to fill in huge pieces of the family puzzle, or may be no help at all, but maybe it will not be about the answers you get as much as the friends you meet along the way. Trite but true.

It’s aggressively privacy-first in some ways. It doesn’t do any self-updating which could be considered phoning home, so you have to make sure you have a way to keep it updated, through a package manager or otherwise. There’s a separate update monitor if you want that, for Windows at least. I tend to dial back the anti-fingerprinting a bit because it just makes browsing frustrating to me. I understand the risk of fingerprinting, and it’s good that they do everything they can to avoid being fingerprinted, but it doesn’t strike the right balance for me. Particularly forcing light mode, I absolutely fucking loathe getting light blasted unexpected into my eyeballs, I always have. The biggest mistake technology ever made in my opinion was trying to pretend an actively illuminated screen was paper and make it blinding white.

I’ve so far resisted the urge to enable DRM. If something won’t show me stuff without DRM I’m willing to just say I don’t want to watch it.

And obviously as per the topic, I turn on sync, which is not on by default, but that’s easy and a sensible default. Honestly it’s mostly sensible defaults.

Librewolf, you can host your own sync server.

The only free speech that is allowed is the speech they agree with. You know, “free speech” (*some prison may apply).

And you can still only take off from a registered airport in most places, because silly laws. So you still have to drive to the airport. Oh also don’t forget they’re hilariously dangerous in a collision at basically any speed because they’re basically made out of paper compared to the rampaging 2 ton behemoths regularly speeding down our roads. So good luck getting to the airport safely!

And getting back on topic, it’ll also need a license plate for the roads, and a transponder in most airspace, so you can still be tracked whether you’re on the ground or in the air. Flying cars are great at combining the worst of both worlds!

v2 doesn’t realistically add anything important for functionality. sha256 is nice to have, but the chances of an actual attack on a sha1 chunk are still bafflingly remote. sha1 might be technically broken but in order to actually attack a sha1 torrent you need to generate a collision that is not only the same sha1 (which is still extremely rare and hard, only the fact that it’s proven possible at all makes it “broken”) but also within the same expected length of the torrent, otherwise any decent client should reject it for being too long, and they must reject it because otherwise they would be vulnerable to a denial-of-service attack from any bad actor who sends infinite length chunks and copyright trolls would be having a field day. I’m not a security expert but I write enough software to be fairly confident that I’m not wildly off base. In the event that somebody comes up with an actual realistic sha1 attack on bittorrent probably because of some weak/stupid client, and proves me wrong, attitudes might change quickly but I also suspect it will quickly be patched or vulnerable clients banned. If it’s pretty widespread I’m sure it will light a fire to migrate to sha256 but the actual risk remains, as far as I can tell, infinitesimal.

Until then, the v2 protocol doesn’t add anything except compatibility headaches for private trackers. I’m sure they’ll get to it eventually, but there’s no urgency and there’s not going to be unless there’s a viable attack to drive that urgency. Latest version for latest version’s sake comes with its own set of risks.

First past the post is stupid. The post itself is stupid. Get rid of the post, fix our democracy, don’t let a single vote change an election, and don’t have thousands of votes in this riding not matter regardless of which way the final decision goes.