Not a VPN, but you may also want to look into I2P.

https://i2pd.website/

https://proprivacy.com/privacy-service/guides/i2p-guide

https://youtube.com/watch?v=FNp0TRDG0BQ

Basically, a p2p protocol for the entire internet.

Its considerably more complicated to set up than most modern VPNs, where nowaday’s its usually as simple as install an app with a GUI, verify some settings and you’re good to go, and i2p is also quite slow…

… but its totally free, and you can torrent over it, and as far as I know, if you’ve set it up properly, it is basically undetectable by ISPs, due to how it uses ‘garlic’ routing: basically, a whole bunch of users net requests are encrypted, anonymized, and then smashed into a big packet… so an ISP would have to untangle all of that for every packet, and afaik, none of them have figured out how.

I2P would obviously be horrible for watching streaming content though, snail speed.

Did… did people not know this?

I mean, I guess this is a study of how widespread it is, but this shouldn’t be news to anyone.

Apps have been doing this for about a decade, either more precisely determining your location when GPS location is on, by checking it against known stationary wifi and bluetooth things that come into range, or even just guessing your location with GPS off via the same thing.

Most people just blindly give every app every permission it asks for, just like most people don’t read ToS.

You can either deny unnecessary permissions for each app, or just have wifi/location/bluetooth off if you’re not actually using them, and/or keep reseting your ‘advertising id’… or just run in airplane mode as a kind of ‘do not disturb’ mode.

Of course… if apps are actually circumventing those above methods of mitigation, permissions management etc, … well then they are malware.

Apparently 19% of the apps use methods that are so explicit that they probably violate the Google Play Store’s TOS, but 86% of them use methods that are basically allowed.

EDIT: Err, 86 - 19 = 67% use ‘allowed’ methods, a total of 86% use any method from their closed source, built in SDKs.

All malware imo, hooray for closed source proprietary software (the sdks built into the apps are closed source), you can totally trust them lol.

=P

If you go back far enough, you’d be coding the ENIAC via punchcards.

… Or maybe today you could write code on paper and have an AI augmented OCR system try to run it?

I mean, the entirety of Steam’s code could maybe be described as an obfuscated version of

while(true){ print(money); }

Mhm.

Innovate, Dominate, Stagnate, Enshittify.

Classic tech company lifecycle.

They learned it from Microsoft.

Ah ok, I appreciate the clarification =D

Autism strikes again lol.

Hrm. Well… right.

Is … the nickel acrually sentient at all?

Or is Cosmo just needlessly gendering non gendered things?

Like, if you can ask the nickel, then yes, do that…

But if the nickel is in fact… just a nickel…

???

Philippa, or some approximately close spelling of that, is a fairly common feminine form of Phillip in many languages, and it used to be in English as well, but largely fell out of fashion in particularly in present day American English.

Goes all the way back to Greek, then Latin, then the Romance languages, etc.

My favorite dumb joke of all time is from Fairly OddParents:

Cosmo: The good news is I named my nickel Phillip!

King Gripullon: What’s the bad news?

Cosmo: It’s a girl nickel!

… Cosmo is so fucking stupid lol.

https://www.zeldaspeedruns.com/oot/tech/bottle-duplication

Need more bottles.

Break game to acquire more bottles.

I don’t follow the OoT speedrunning community much, but I am fairly sure that it is possible to overwrite … almost all usable items in your inventory with bottles, though some methods to do this basically make the game unstable.

If there isn’t already such a category, I think there should be an Oops! All Bottles! category, lol.

I remember being able to pull off at least one of these methods back in 1999 or 2000, on an N64… at least one of these methods was circulating on GameFAQs.

IIRC, you can actually deflect certain range attacks, like Ganondorf’s energy ball things… by precisely timing an empty bottle swing.

The two major third party kernel level anti cheat have publically stated they have supported some level of their anti-cheat working on linux since 2021.

Easy Anti Cheat:

https://www.gamingonlinux.com/2021/09/epic-games-announce-full-easy-anti-cheat-for-linux-including-wine-a-proton/

BattlEye:

https://www.gamingonlinux.com/2021/11/supporting-linux-proton-and-the-steam-deck-with-battleye-is-just-an-email-away/

All the devs/management has to do is actually use/enable this feature that is part of what they’re already paying for.

They’re paying to liscense/use the AC in designed for windows games, these ACs have supported linux via Proton and WINE for almost 4 years now, the game devs just don’t enable this compatability.

As you can see from the articles, with EAC and BattlEye… the process truly seems to be as simple a sending an email or checking a few boxes in a dev toolkit, and EAC/BattlEye does all the hard work, the game devs just need to do some testing and submit logs/error reports, and EAC/BattlEye iron out the rest.

…

Many proprietary or less broadly used anti cheat solutions also work on linux.

Valve Anti Cheat

nProtect Game Guard

PunkBuster

TreyArch Anti Cheat

EQU8

FairFight

… all of these AC systems have at least one, usually multiple, very to moderately prominent games which use them, and are fully supported on linux.

…

There is a ton of prevalent misinformation amongst gamers and devs and management as well, that common anti cheat systems are impossible to support on linux.

This is completely false.

What is happening is game developers either don’t care, or don’t bother to put in a modicum of effort to make their games work with third party systems with features they are already paying for, that do exist, that already support linux… or they are to incompetent to figure out how to make their games fully compatible with said AC SDKs they are already paying for / using / developed in house.

How many times have game developers in the last 5 years released a giant, buggy, unfinished mess?

How many times do we have to learn that making games that are far, far too client side authoritative actually need to have a whole lot of stuff be sandboxed, sanitized, and more server authoritative?

https://areweanticheatyet.com/

Scroll through this and you’ll find examples of almost every major different AC system working on linux in some games, and not working in some other games.

But most people act like its just completely impossible, across the board.

It obviously isn’t.

Many game devs or PR people or AC devs will publically state things that roughly equate to ‘it isn’t possible for our AC system and X game to work together on linux.’

This is again, obviously false, for almost every kind of AC system that exists, there exist fairly popular games that have gotten that AC system fully working.

…

Beyond that, people will say things like ‘all linux users are hackers’ or something to that effect.

Again, this is obviously false.

A cursory look at websites that sell hacks for various games will show you they are all targeted at windows users.

These are actually substantially less likely to work on linux, as Proton and WINE and other translation layers are probably not going to be able to emulate the insane hacky exploits that work on a baremetal windows system.

…

Oh, right. Last point: Many of the most popular sites and communities that sell hacks to windows users … well they defeat kernel level anti cheat systems.

So we arrive at a situation where game devs and gamers blame linux users for cheats linux users can’t use, and because of this, they clamor for and build increasingly invasive AC … that doesn’t even work to stop windows cheaters, but it does make legit linux users unable to play.

… The point of a complex system is what it does, not what it claims to do.

Hey now, when you test in production…

… you gotta aim for the stars.

I played through HL Alyx on a baremetal PopOS! system and Valve Index, with no need to compile a kernel from source … in 2022.

I’ve been gaming soley on linux since 2020 or 2021.

Yeah, its definitely ready now, most straggler games are basically massively overproduced and massively MTX exploitative team based shooters using kernel level anti cheat that are designed for children with mom’s credit card.

I mean… probably yes, but in the case of much of the Torah, the mythical characters and stories first appear textually in Sumerian cuneiform.

The Sumerian culture and written language (cuneiform) was located basically in modern Iraq, near the Tigris and Euphrates. The written language and stories can be dated to about 3000 BC, the actual culture itself, even further.

Then you can trace the evolution of the mythic/legendary characters and stories into the Ugartitic texts, located in Ugarit, modern day Syria, dated to about 1200 BC, with the Ugaritic written language itself being an evolution of Sumerian cuneiform.

The Torah itself, in early Hebrew, wasn’t actually written and compiled as such untill roughly 400 BC, despite the tradtitional insistance it is many hundreds of of years older, and is largely based off of the Ugaritic texts.

If you look at the actual archaelogical and linguistic history of peoples, languages, texts and stories, its quite clear that the ultimate origin of many of the characters and stories in the Torah is Sumeria. Those stories then migrated and mutated as they spread from Sumeria to Canaan, where the Hebrews and Israel/Judah later arose.

I’d say a ‘reality check’ is not always negative.

Say you’re very, very self conscious in public, always nervous about how others percieve you.

But then, one day, a friend pulls you aside and ‘reality checks’ you with:

“Look, in 90% of situations you’ll ever be in, if you can follow a few basic dress and behavioral rules, you’ll be fine. Barring situations where the whole idea is you making a good first impression… most people, most of the time, in most situations… really don’t care that much.”

Things like that are arguably ‘positive’ reality checks.

The reason why ‘reality check’ is often connotated negatively is because most of the time, cognitive dissonance develops as a way of excusing or justifying harmful or irresponsible behavior or inaction, all things that mean you are living in a mild to serious delusion which can no longer be maintained, and will require a lot more effort to grapple with.

But it can be the case that reality is in someway better than it is perceived by someone who is overly critical or peasimistic in some way.

In some sense, the initial realization that you’ve been incorrect about something is negative in that you may be embarassed about being wrong in the past, but if it actually means a more realistic outlook going forward, which is actually less troublesome, easier to exist with/in, then I’d say thats overall a ‘positive’ reality check.

Another hypocritical dichotomy is:

Central planning does not and cannot work as efficiently as the free market!

Meanwhile, Amazon and Walmart are literally centrally planned economic production/purchase/distribution systems for nearly every kind of good imaginable, which both benefit massively from government subsidies, but they don’t count because… they’re corporations, and they don’t have perfect monopolies.

… Even though in almost every example given of a ‘centrally planned economy’, the state also did not have a perfect monopoly.

translation party!

Throw Japanese into English into Japanese into English ad nauseum, untill an ‘equilibrium’ statement is reached.

… Which was quite often nowhere near the original statement, in either language… but at least the translation algorithm agreed with itself.