evujumenuk

You seem to have settled on an opinion and accompanying emotional response already. If so, why are you still using Python if your prior experience isn’t a good fit for it? Not everything is made for everybody, maybe Python just isn’t for you.

Your complaints mostly revolve around syntax. I’m sure there’s a dynamically typed, sequential language with curly braces — y’know, “standard” — out there for you. You could even convince a Scheme reader to accept something like that instead of brackets everywhere 🤷

I think installing spyware on someone’s device is two or three steps more drastic a measure than a simple search, which is about the extent of what a court order can authorize police to do right now. It feels conceptually close to tampering with evidence present at a (possible) crime scene. To add to this, spyware is not the same thing as installing a physical listening device in someone’s home. It requires far-reaching permissions on a system, and can influence lots of other software on the same system. You’d have to have an extreme level of confidence that this won’t lead to accidental or intentional planting of incriminating material. And, in my opinion that sort of load-bearing trust is not really something law enforcement has earned in the general case.

Where in Settings would this be? Cellular?

If you only ever use this mail domain to send messages to or receive messages from people who don’t know your name and address, why not. Any old infoleak would otherwise indelibly associate that domain with that personal info.

Eh, did War of the Lions not happen? Doesn’t that imply some missing content in this remaster?

If your idea of a federated Twitter is a bunch of mini-Twitters that sometimes exchange indirect replies or something, then the Fediverse fulfills that purpose completely. Mission accomplished, we can all go home now.

If your idea is that the replies to every post look the same to any user, anywhere, at any time, even the thing Mastodon merged half a year ago that supposedly fetches all replies if you remember to navigate to the topmost post, and wait up to 15 minutes for your view of the thread to coalesce, falls short.

And this is why hosting Mastodon is cheap, it fundamentally cannot provide the functionality BlueSky offers. Of course, you might think that such functionality is not desirable anyway, and that’s entirely fair. But if you’re looking for the immediacy that centralized Twitter gave users, I don’t see a way for Fedi to ever provide that, whereas there is a path to BlueSky decentralization. It’s a fact that your UX is diminished if all of your followers and followeds are not on the same instance.

But in the end, I think there is space for both.

Eh.

Username checks out.

I don’t know, since I didn’t have to specifically buy anything to get that throughput. So, in my case, it cost me nothing.

It was just an ISP-provided router and an older Mac Studio. I didn’t check but there’s a good chance the wireless link actually supports even higher bandwidth; at the time, I was bottlenecked by the 1 Gbps connection to my ISP.

USB-A, FireWire and that video output converged to Thunderbolt, which also means I can connect several displays to e.g. a 2021 MacBook Pro. The separate headphones and microphone jacks got merged as well. After the whole Touch Bar brouhaha, the card reader and HDMI also made their return.

So the one connector we did lose is Ethernet. Which, to be fair, is a bummer indeed. Luckily, we can easily push 1 Gbps over Wi-Fi nowadays.

Were you not looking for advice? To me it read like you didn’t want to just vent, but everybody makes mistakes I guess?

Income tax doesn’t do anything to the 1%. You have unrealized gains, and borrow against your assets? You owe zero tax.

A wealth tax, or income tax on yet unrealized gains, would be better. Of course, that comes with its own set of issues. But, I don’t think they are insurmountable.

Can I ask where the material difference is to a game that requires a Day 1 patch download to work? With a Game Key Card, that patch is simply very large. You can still sell the game, just like a standard cartridge. And the Switch cartridges never had infinite shelf life to begin with, so they’re not suitable for archival either.

That’s a good question, since it doesn’t have a trivial answer. Zelda is basically three or four different types of games in a trench coat tunic.

There’s the open world adventure that the original Zelda established, which is probably best represented by BotW.

There’s the 2D tile-based action puzzler, the quintessential of which is probably LttP.

There’s the 3D “interconnected small rooms”, which got its start with OoT and was so successful that to this day players are arguing that the newest two games are not really Zelda even though they stick to the original concept much more closely.

Finally, there’s Adventure of Link.

I finished BotW 100%, and am currently nearing 100% completion with TotK. Here’s what I would do if I were you.

Get the BotW demo. It’s free, and it contains the entire first portion of the game, the Great Plateau.

Play that, and when you’re finished, read the story synopsis on Wikipedia or wherever. Then acquire and play through TotK.

The Great Plateau gives you about 80% or 90% of what’s great about BotW in a tight, controlled package. If you’ve played Metal Gear Solid V, this is basically Ground Zeroes.

TotK is so amped up over BotW that there’s no “tutorial inside area” that showcases the mechanics of the full game, it’d basically be a carbon copy of the entire thing.

In terms of gameplay, this should give you something pretty close to the full experience.

Edit time! Looks like the BotW store demo was not actually generally available, let alone “free”. Since you’re only hurting for time, not money, you could still get the cartridge version of BotW and sell it after completing the Great Plateau. The rest of my reply should still apply.

That’s pretty interesting. Do you happen to have any introductory material to that topic?

I mean, it might even have applications outside of running a techno-communist nation state. For example, for designing economic simulation game mechanics.

Utilization of models begets training of more models.

Kinda like CSAM.

It kind of has to be, if you’re trying to be persistent about the whole thing. It’s easy to feel overwhelmed and burn out over all of the different threats we’re trying to defend against. I don’t see how you can keep at it for months or years if you feel no joy over it. But maybe being deathly, relentlessly afraid of the dangers around us is enough after all.

If you don’t even like doing this stuff, wouldn’t it be better to focus on measures that require little upkeep? This is what my example suggestion was getting at, something that’s as close to set-and-forget as possible, while getting you 90% of the way there. (Depending on your threat model, sure. If yours says that the sky is falling if Tim Apple gets your iCloud data, it certainly doesn’t apply.)

I’d sure hope so! Many of the things that privacy nuts like us do are not efficient uses of one’s time.

They might require constant vigilance. They might need recurring work for continued effectiveness. They might necessitate exposure to intrusive negative emotions (“what is Google doing this week?!”).

If you’re not having fun, focus on measures that you implement once and then never have to think about again.

For example, I wouldn’t recommend GrapheneOS to a journalist in an authoritarian regime. It might be “more secure”, but they have a job to do and can’t keep dicking around with obscure pointer authentication settings or whatnot. They should just get a current iPhone, enable Lockdown Mode if its tradeoffs are acceptable to them, and continue doing their best job, which isn’t “phone administration”.

LARPing as Jason Bourne, or prepping for the Rokobasiliskocalypse, is a hobby. It’s okay, I do it too. However, it’s not approachable or understandable to people who don’t share that hobby, or are not as alarmed at the general state of things as we are.

I used to run unbound on my laptop just so I could configure stuff like forwarding zones with more precision than what a stub resolver normally gives you.

It can also be your validating DNSSEC resolver, which also satisfied that sort of morbid curiosity in me.

In the age of DoT and DoH, with endpoints hardcoded in browser binaries, that sort of thing has a lot less punch than it used to. Even back then Go binaries would start ignoring your nsswitch.conf…

As long as everyone is having fun, I see no problem.

If you’re not having fun switching mail providers, researching Gecko forks, or being a part-time sysadmin for your Fairphone, you should probably stop doing those things.