Overspark

Thing is, every time a fascist party rises to power in the EU they fuck it up spectacularly and lose the next elections. So far Meloni in Italy is the only exception, the rest have been quite pathetic.

Agreed, hence the “very often” and not “always”. You are always trusting the VPN provider to not fuck you over, and there probably are a few who don’t.

Your post suggests you’re operating under the assumption that advertising itself is a valid activity. The example about a new small business seems totally legit.

But in reality most advertising money is spent by companies like Coca Cola, that we all already know. And they know that too, which means they know for a fact that continuing to spend money on advertising pays off.

This can only be true if advertising isn’t about awareness of your brand, but about directly influencing buying decision. In other words, it’s brainwashing.

A small business should get known through word of mouth, through endorsements in pillow-related media and communities (in this example). If their product is a good one and they get the right people talking about it, no advertising is needed to succeed as a business. Only line-must-go-up companies that are not content with what they can achieve with an honest way of doing business need advertising to sell even more crap.

IMHO it is entirely valid to reject all forms of advertising, and most of it should be outlawed. As a species we’re wasting a colossal amount of effort and energy on something that shouldn’t even be a thing.

5. It means you’re letting a different company (VPN provider instead of ISP) see everything you do. In countries with sane privacy laws (i.e. not the US) this is very often a net negative for your privacy, as your ISP will be bound by your country’s privacy laws and most VPN providers are foreign (and often based in the US).

Good blog. You touch on this point in the blog but IMHO it should be one of your main talking points.

Yeah this. Python was already popular with the early adopters, and it’s a fairly easy language to learn and use. After that it became a network effect thing: all the best tools were already written in Python so people continued to do so.

Why not switch to LibreOffice?

Proprietary code that won’t be known by a single product name like the client-side ones are. So it’s impossible to make a good comparison as a member of the general public, only their developers will know how they work and how effective they are. But you can look at anti-botting measures all MMO’s employ as a rough comparison, it’s almost the same thing.

The debate is that it’s far less effective than server-side anti-cheat, but that costs more money to operate so they’d rather inconvenience their users and invade their privacy in the process.

Yet another nail in the coffin of client-side anti-cheat. If you’re seriously affected by people using these kinds of cheats on their PCs (this one requires specialised hardware) then no amount of client-side anti-cheat is going to make a difference anyway.

That’s because this isn’t managing people, it’s bullying people, and proper spelling isn’t really required for bullying.

Podman explicitly supports firewalls and does not bypass them like docker does, no matter whether you’re using root mode or not. So IMHO that is the more professional solution.

That’s an optimistic take. As a long-time LCD owner I don’t expect this to ever work flawlessly.

Nope, same here. Edit: in The Netherlands.

dotfiles and system configuration are pretty different use-cases, usually when you do system-wide stuff you want to manage not just the configuration files but also what software is installed and a bunch of other things. Ansible or something else like it is definitely the right tool for the job. And Ansible isn’t so difficult to learn, you only need to know like 5% of what it can do to be very effective.

For dotfiles my personal preference is dotbot, but there are MANY many different tools that are all good and are just different ways to accomplish roughly the same thing.

What do you think you’re paying with when you’re using a “free” VPN?

Same here. Only time it stopped working is when my last subtitle provider stopped working, so then I put in a few new ones.

Oh, that would have been really useful a year ago! Thanks, I’ll keep it in my bag of tricks, it looks pretty neat.

Yeah I wouldn’t call Arch a server OS. I run Arch on my laptop, but Debian on my docker/file/self-hosting server. Best tool for the job etc. Never even been tempted by Unraid, the whole point of running Linux is that I control what goes where.

+1 for Podman. I switched from docker last year and I’m really happy I did. It’s not all sunshine and roses (can’t copy paste so much from the internet being the main issue, nobody gives examples for it), but the product itself is much better.

This particular example isn’t very good, just install multiple kernels (or compile one yourself) on your distro of choice and boot into the one you want with your bootloader of choice. Once set up you don’t even have to change any configs any more, just use an interactive menu on boot. So even easier than NixOS? There are plenty of valid use-cases for Nix, this isn’t one of them.