Discord for me. A bunch of my family and friends are avid gamers. Discord is the universal standard app they all use for general communication.

Not only do they use it for all their gaming related stuff, they have additional servers and channels for just chilling, chatting, off topic stuff, memes, politics, etc etc.

It’s the network effect. Even if there was an open source app that perfectly replicated all the functionality of Discord and was just as simple to install and run as Discord, most of them still wouldn’t switch to it, because all of their friends and family are still on Discord.

So they would have to have two completely separate apps with totally separate social groups to maintain, and nobody but hardcore advocates for FOSS and privacy are willing to do that.

Sure, I have Discord, Matrix, IRC, Signal, XMPP clients, and a Private Mumble server, all on my systems, but I’m hardcore about FOSS. None of my friends and family are willing to do that. It took all my energy to convince two of my most techie friends just to get Signal on their phones. And only One has been willing to install a Matrix client to chat just with me.

My spouse and I are foodies and both vegetarian. We’ve had several chefs put together some absolutely incredible vegan/vegetarian dishes.

One of the chefs told us that being a plant-based chef has recently become much more respected in the culinary world. He thought we were at the start of a plant-based revolution in the culinary world. Younger folks are reducing meat consumption more than any previous generation, and there are beginning to be a lot of dedicated vegetarian/vegan restaurants popping up in most medium to large cities.

They were really helpful in my transition into Vegetarianism. When I first became vegetarian, I pretty frequently craved meat, Impossible/Beyond meat alternatives were great for those times.

Pretty quickly the cravings lessened, after a few months I rarely craved meat at all.

Almost 5 years later, I crave something meaty maybe 3 times a year. Sometimes I want a heavy savory burger during the summer. Impossible meat patties are great for that.

They are also useful for entertaining family and friends who still eat meat. I’ve cooked vegetarian burgers, brats, breakfast sausages, etc. And most people give them pretty rave reviews. I even have had some family members say “I didn’t know you are eating meat again.” because the taste/smell was so close, they thought it was real meat I was cooking.

I can’t speak for lab meat, but it would be pretty cool if we were able to grow authentic meat from cell cultures that were acquired ethically, like painlessly from already dying/dead animals.

At this point, I can’t see myself ever going back to even totally ethically synthetic meats, I just don’t have a strong taste for it anymore. I prefer the health benifits I get from eating cleaner anyways.

I do wish they had a really good Impossible fish, I still often miss a hearty fish and chips with fresh tartar sauce and nice balsamic vinegar dip.

Lol at all the conservatives screeching about “socialism” and “communism” and how they will be the downfall of our country, then slurping up Trump nationalizing part of Intel 🤣

They don’t believe in anything, just brain dead simpleton cultists who would happily stick their tongue into a rat trap if Trump told them to do it.

Last week I kicked my neighbor’s door open, walked into the living room, and sat down on the floor with a bunch of bags of my stuff.

They got into a fight with me because they are saying I’m trespassing and a bunch of other crap. They are demanding that I leave their house after cleaning up my mess and taking my stuff back home.

I generously offered that I could stay permanently in the living room and they could keep the rest of the house, but they are refusing my peace deal! Don’t they realize that I could easily have taken over the whole downstairs, even the whole house? Besides, before their house was built, I used to walk through that empty lot all the time!

I can’t believe they want to keep fighting and making a worse mess of the living room, so illogical!

Never been happier to be 100% on Linux.

I can’t speak to any other countries, but in the states, Magic Earth has been great for me. Been using it for over two years now, several different regions of the USA. It’s not as good as Google Maps, but it’s plenty good enough for my needs.

Navigation and routing is solid, traffic data is acceptable, and the dashcam feature is awesome.

There’s quite a few places that you can host a simple site for free.

Plus, linode’s cheapest Nanode option is $5 bucks a month, you could spin up a very minimal LAMP stack on that.

Favorite heavyweight Type 1 hypervisor: XCP-ng. It’s open source, runs on a ton of enterprise and consumer-grade hardware, has always been rock stable for me, even when forgetting to update it for like 6 months, still ran everything like a champ.

I need to try ProxMox, has some cool features. XCP-ng is pretty intuitive though, UI makes sense and is cleaner than Proxmox. The integration in Proxmox with the Incus project is pretty cool though, especially being able to run VMs and containers and manage them together. I’ve been thinking of trying that and seeing how it goes.

For containers, I just install Debian and run Docker on there. Stable, simple, nothing fancy. If I need something more up to date, I typically use Ubuntu Server.

I used to do this myself, just with OpenVPN instead of Wire guard, worked fine, then I found overlay networks like Tailscale and it changed my life.

Just use an overlay network. Tailscale or Netbird are my personal recommendations, Netbird if you want 100% open source right out of the box, Tailscale if you don’t mind their default coordination server being closed source, (you can run the open source Headscale server if you want)

Overlay networks make all this sooooo much easier. Encrypted secure access to any and all of your internal network devices, with fine tuned access control depending on how you want it set up.

I will never portforward or manually set up a VPN tunnel again, overlay networks perfectly fit my use case and they are so much easier to get working.

They’re saying you’re exposing your goodies to the whole world when you start opening ports to the internet.

Steam Deck easily. Everything you said you’re worried about Valve possibly doing in the future goes double for Microsoft.

Steam Deck is a great platform for playing any games on, pirated included. I have my whole GBA ROM collection on my Deck and play them through RetroArch, works perfectly.

I only mentioned it because it’s what I’ve been using for a while and it’s been a good experience so far. Cheap, runs well on Linux, and is one of the few that still allows you to port forward.

There are several good ones to pick from, defs would stay away from Nord because of their advertising practices, but Mullvad is solid. I think they removed port forwarding though.

Don’t subject your family to nasty letters in their mail from your ISP. You won’t go to jail, but you might risk your internet service getting canceled, which won’t be a fun conversation with your parents.

If you’re 18 and healthy, go donate plasma at a local clinic. In the USA depending on where you are, you can make $40-$80 per week, sometimes even more if they have a big shortage. Takes about 90 minutes a session, and you just chill with a needle in your arm and browse on your phone, super easy.

Proton VPN’s most expensive plan is $108 for 2 years, you can afford that. Go to your friends or neighbors and offer to do some yard work for cash. Mow their lawn, shovel bark, dig up dead shrubs, whatever. That’s the main way I made money when I was in my teens. People will pay 20-30 bucks an hour in most places for that kind of work, so a few hours of that in a week or two and you’ve got your $108 for Proton VPN, or whatever other VPN you want to use.

Sell some crap on eBay, FB marketplace, Craig’s List, etc. Old clothes, computer parts, consoles, weights, people will buy anything. You’d be surprised how fast I’ve gotten rid of junk buy posting it online for 10 bucks.

Did you mean to say, preposition instead of proposition?

I’ll check it out. Even if it doesn’t work conceptually, it’s still cool to think about alternatives to the Capitalist markets and currencies that are dominant.

I’ve got plenty of human touch, I’m touching myself right now!

~50x

My policy is double my download, minimum. But I almost always hit much higher than that, my average is probably between 5-10x

All my torrents are public sites, and I only torrent pretty common stuff, so I don’t feel too bad about killing a torrent after a week or two. I figure 5-10x average on easy-to-find, mid quality media is plenty in the karmic sense lol.

As far as I am concerned, always give better than you get, even if that’s 1.01 but try to aim higher.

Of course, if you’re seeding a rare or otherwise hard to find piece of media, then you should keep it alive for longer. I am in the process of upgrading my torrent machine, and once that happens, I will be able to hold far more active torrents, and my average ratios will be significantly improved.

Happy sailing!

Remember, it’s all or something, not all or nothing.

For me, I look at each major category of things in my life a few times a year and ask myself how I can improve the ethics of my participation.

So for food, I have been vegetarian for years now, which is good, but lately I have been trying to cut out most processed foods. I also have started shopping more and more local, getting as much of my food as I can from local co-ops, individual sellers, and small local grocery chains.

For software, I’m FOSS everything as much as I can be. 100% Linux on my computers and servers, and I have replaced almost all my programs with FOSS alternatives. Even my phone doesn’t run stock Android.

For work, try to find places to work that roughly align with good principles. For instance, try to get a job at a credit union vs a traditional bank, or try to find an employee-owned establishment vs a traditional top-down corporation.

If you have to work for a corpo, try to pick one that has a good reputation with unions and workers, like Costco, vs Starbucks or Walmart.

Capitalism is a machine that grinds us all down, so don’t feel guilty about not being perfect. But do the best you can to reject it, little steps at a time. Always be improving, bit by bit.

RustDesk, it’s by far the best remote desktop software I’ve used on any platform.

Tons of great features, open source, self-hostable, easy to install and configure, works on all major platforms including mobile. Cross platform works like a charm.