Its what literally changed my life. I was really socialy awkward, spend most of my lide behind a computer, and when I managed to go out to parties in a subculture scene parties I loved, I couldnt talk to anyone, had a few beers awkwardly in a corner and went home.
Then I met someone who introduced me to MDMA. That happened almost 8 years ago, and now I am an organizer of 2/3 of the same scene regular parties in our city, Im helping and DJing on a festival that happens here, and am living my best life in that regard. All thanks to that one best friend who got me something that made me talk to, and get to actually know people in the scene in the extent that I always wanted, and get comfortable enough that I no longer need to be high to interact with anyone. Since now they are friends and regulars, and not random people I wanted to talk to, but was afraid of approaching.
But, it wasn’t as easy as it sounds. I was always trying to be responsible and cautious, and In did get bordeline to addiction in the process, which I was fortunately able to recognize early and put a stop to it by getting help in a adictiology nonprofit. It was never bad, more like a precaution. And I caught it in the best possible moment. I’ll never forget my first group session, where literally everyone else said “I’m 35+, I used to take stuff at parties for fun when I was 25, and then I ended for 10 years in meth…”.
Everyone had similar story. And I went “Well, I’m 25, and I take stuff on parties for fun…”. And that was a really strong lesson, where I realized I’m stopping a really huge problem at exactly the right time.
So, it might help. It is definitely fun, but it is so hard to not end up badly. You will need a lot of luck, especially if you are exploring it on your own. I still take things on parties, but with personal experience about the dangers it has. And getting that, is something that no one can give you, unless you see it for yourself. And for most of the people, that comes too late. I was lucky, you probably won’t be. But in conclusion - drugs are amazing, and have changed my life. Its a shame that personal experience will probably vary.
I wonder, is it possible to create a license that would allow you to simply ban people who are being a dick about something from using it? Sure, it may turn away some people, since there’s always a risk of abuse, but it’s your work and as far as I know, you are the one who sets the terms.
If I’m not mistaken, most of the FOSS licenses (or maybe even laws?) guarantee you that you would be able to use the software even if the project later decides to change to proprietary license. But I assume you can simply specify in a licence “Everyone can use it, expect X.Y.Z”.
Would that be legal? Sure, it would probably be pretty hard to enforce, but in some cases it could make for a pretty satisfactory (and petty, of course) C&D letters, for people that really deserve it. You insult the devs of a software your company depends on, demanding something while being a dick about it? Well, fuck you, no library for you and your company.
But a paid licence will affect users that are all right abd for whom you’re doing it.
I understand that using something with a risk of loosong access because you’ve upset the developer is something that will turn away a lot of people, but then again, I’d say that “don’t be a dick” is a pretty reasonable requirement. The only issue I see that it’s a pretty vague definiton, but maybe just limiting it to profanities and insult towards the contributors is something more concrete, which would be easy to fulfill and also enforce.
I do feel kind of simillarly betrayed. Watch Dogs were my forst point of reference into what hacker subcultures look like, and it has shaped a large part of my life - next month i’s going to be 5 years I’ve worked as a Red Teamer in a cybersec company. I’m also mostly a poser, and the aesthetics simply makes it way more fun - making art that’s tied into what you do is great, assuming you dont take it too seriously, of course. Not that I do it, but the way Watch Dogs portraied it, it was fun.
Is it neccessary? Of course not. Is it a shame there aren’t many hackerspaces with cool street art, and hacktivists making over the top manifests ajd cool streetart around our town? A little bit.
It helps a lot. Because then, a Linux support won’t be such an afterthought, and you wouldn’t have to deal with stuff like popular games adding anti-cheat that bans Linux users.
Right now, some game developers aren’t even willing to enable EAC Linux support, which is like a one checkbox they need to enable for it to work.
If you don’t use Discord for voice much, Matrix has a pretty solid bridges you can use.
Hosting your own Matrix server is suprisingly way easier than I though - got a VM on hertzner for like 5$ a month, and there is an Ansible script that takes care of the setup for you. It’s also one of those rare cases where someone made an Ansible script that actually works, instead of you getting stuck in dependency-hell (seriously, fuck npm. Not a single docker or ansible tool that has used it ever worked for me out of the box. Python can get simillarly annoying).
They have a pretty easy to follow guide, and the whole setup took me like 20 minutes. I only edited a few options in config.yml (mostly to add Messenger and Discord bridge), and ran the ansible, and it worked at first try.
So I could at least ditch both messenger and discord apps from my PC and phone, without having to convince anyone to quit their poison - with only issue being that you can’t use Discord voice. And that the messenger bridge is still unreliable sometimes, but those are still minor inconviniences in comparison to my deep-seated hate for Meta.
Of course - Meta still gets my chat data and content, same as Discord. But at least they don’t get anything else from my phone or PC.
you need to do it not only for every Discord server you want to use on matrix, but every channel as well. It’s a huge chore. And ofc it doesn’t work with Discord DMs.
This wasn’t my experience at all - all I had to do was message the Matrix bot with servers I want to join (I’m not a mod on any of them), and it bridged all channels in that server. Also, Discord DMs are working fine.
I’m using the mautrix bridge, which doesn’t use a bot or anything like that, but uses your Discord session instead.
Why, though? I have helpful answers in many threads, giving support about arcane issues people have been dealing with. I don’t want this content to be monetized further.
Few recommendations from the top of my head, from skimming the post.
I’d recommend checking out QubesOS (www.qubes-os.org), especially since it seems you switch between ToR and already use Silverblue, which is AFAIK similar, but why not go all the way in?
Also for VPN - I’ve switched Proton for Mullvad VPN, because I really like the idea they are going for - if you pair Mullvad browser, that is designed to have the same fingerprint for all users, with a VPN that’s from the same company, you can kind of expect that most of the Mullvad VPN users will also be users of Mullvad Browser. Which means you will not be one of the few Proton VPN users with Mullvad fingerprint, but will have the same fingerprint as most of other users of Mullvad VPN. This will make it harder to fingerprint you based on your browser. One word of warning, though - don’t install extensions to Mullvad. If you do, you break the “same fingerprint” premise, and the more extensions you install, the more identifiable you are. Mullvad should be used without any extensions.
Another thing I see is music streaming - I think that in general I’d recommend just getting a cheap laptop/NAS and run your own Jellyfin, and slowly start building your own music collection. You can also run Matrix server as a bonus, and bridge all your communication (including Signal, even though that may not help that much) - but it does help if you need to use some kind of service, i.e Messenger, for group or work related purposes.
My approach to music was to cancel my subscription, and then use the money I save to spend on albums on Bandcamp, so I still support the artists I want. I make sure to do that every month. Since there’s just wast amount of music to get, I use Headphones with an account on redacted.ch to fill my library, but I still make sure to buy albums I like even if I already have them downloaded. The added bonus is that you actually don’t loose any of your music, if the artist decides to pull it off the streaming service, which has aready happened to me several time.
If you want hosting your own LLM, take a look at refact.ai. But note that it’s not really cheap, I’ve recently upgraded my computer and decided to use my NVIDIA 1060 to run refact, and it still didn’t work well - 8Gb of GPU memory is borderline usable, and I couldn’t do the finetuning.
Browser: Mullvad with Mullvad VPN, LibreWolf for stuff that breaks. Brave if I really have no other choice.
Phone: Pixel with Graphene, main profile is Google-less, second profile with Sandboxed GServices for apps that don’t work without it but I need them, downloaded through fresh gmail profile. Third profile linked to my old gmail with credit card for the two apps I bought and sometimes need to use.
Mail: I use Protonmail, with my own domain that sounds vaguely corporate. I have a catch-all address, and generate random name.surename@mycorpdomain.com addresses for each service.
File storage: I have a NAS, that I use for most file sharing I need.
Music: Jellyfin server with Headphones and redacted.ch account, and I also make sure to support artists every month by spending what would be my Spotify subscription price on Bandcamp albums
Desktop: I run Nobara, too lazy to run QubesOS - plus I game a lot, so it would be infeasible. I mostly try to get stuff on GoG and back it up on my own NAS. I have a ZeroTier network set up for streaming through Sunshine/Moonlight when I need to game from a laptop.
VPN: I use Mullvad paid for with Monero, because it plays nicely with the Mullvad Browser fingerprint.
Home automation: I have a few basic stuff made for Home Assistant that is running on RockPI I have at home, everything local and without any cloud, mostly through ESP32s.
Messaging: This is the one I hate the most - most of the groups I’m working with or volunteering for use Messenger, so I have a Matrix server hosted that bridges it and Discord. It’s not ideal, but better than having anything Meta on my phone.
Payments: This one is the one I’m struggling with the most. I pay by card almost everywhere, because cash is so much effort. I’ve tried looking into crypto or prepaid cards, but it’s really hard to find anything without KYC in Europe, so I’ve given up. I’m looking for advice regarding this, but I’m afraid that aside from switching to cash I’m out of luck.
Passwords: I just use Bitwarden with YubiKey setup, same as using YubiKey for every important MFA I can. I have two backup keys stored at home, so I don’t need to use other recovery methods that would render it useless.
That’s seriously impressive. I wonder, what is your threat profile for all of these? It seems to me like some of the things you do have a drastic impact on user experience, while also not providing that much of a benefit unless you have some really sensitive data.
Hey I’m sure you all know how sketchy club cards are for collecting your data. But I do begrudge paying slightly higher prices just for valuing my privacy. I was wondering if there was any way to sign up to these things whilst limiting the data they have access to. Would it be enough to sign up with fake details and never use...
If I have more items with club price that would make a larger difference, I just quickly register a new one-use account with disposable email and random address in the app, and delete it afterwards
I don’t think surface would make for a good work laptop, but I have amazing experience so far with using it for the ocassional traveling, or just as a carry-on.
I just Parsec into my desktop at home, and can comfortably work without having to deal with performance, and Surface is amazing for that.
I also really like the pen support, so I can make notes or draw bascially anywhere.
And I also use it for DJing, where it works pretty well and is compact enough to not be a bother carrying it around.
I’ve just had to switch back to X11 from Wayland on Nobara, because I couldn’t get Sunshine to work no matter what I tried, my windows were occasionally flickering black, and my taskbar kept freezing. So I guess I’ll wait a little bit more.
Ooh, you are right, I can actually file bug reports or try to fix it myself now that I switched to FOSS from Windows. Tbh that didn’t really occur to me, since I was switching only like a month ago. I’ll look into it, so far I suspect that it’s actually covered by one of those troubleshooting cases mentioned in their FAQ, and I’m not really confident enough to start recompiling libraries with additional flags. Especially since I’m on Nobara and don’t want to break anything, AFAIK that OS is pretty customised from the start and figuring out what I can safely touch isn’t something I have the guts for yet.
Exactly! The game is pretty great case study on how to combine different genres together and make them work, while also being a prime example of how really important theming is.
I haven’t actually played their previous game, Craftopia, but it looks like that both the “using animals in bases” and “catching animals into spheres” was there too, to the point where Palworlds are getting really close to just being mostly a reskin.
But that illustrates really well how much does different theming works wonders for game feel. The mechanic while in Craftopia, with normal animals, wasn’t really much of note. But just by simply reskinning them to a colorful monster collecting game, instead of regular animals, the game feel entirely different, the mechanic is way much more fun to interact with, and it completely changes the game.
Sure, they did build some changes on top of how it worked in Craftopia, and switched the game around to be mostly build around it, but a lot of the elements remain the same, only in a different skin.
And that’s a really good case study in game and themic design, and I really love it.
For that, I really like what they have done, and the game has been so far really fun, even while being only EA. Sure, they still have a long way to go, but I’m really interrested in what direction will they take the game, and I’m really glad they choose the mix of genres they did, and that they mixed and matched elements from other games in a clever fashion, where nothing feels like it was just slapped into the game just because it’s popular. It’s taking the best ideas from other games, and uses them to a great effect together.
I also don’t mind them choosing the traditional Pokemon visual style, because it’s just the best fit for this kind of game. There is a reason why almost every Souls-like game looks like Dark Souls, because the atmosphere just fits into the mood and gameplay the genre is going for. The same can be said about monster collection games.
However, I’m a little bit worried about some red flags raised about the studio - namely that their history with supporting and finishing EA projects is a little bit wonky (although, it can be explained by them coming up with Palworlds concept, and liking it so much that they just immediately switched over to obviously way, way better concept for a game), and also the fact that one of the developers was tweeting about how AI can be used to circumvent copyright by just letting it generate designs similar to other existing products, while making an example on Pokemon. That’s not really a good look, when you’re working on a game that is also a monster collecting game and you don’t want to be accused of stealing design without making it yourself. And that, especially combined with the fact that Palwords is mostly just a re-skin of Craftopia that has been polished a little bit, may be a red flag that indicates that this may have indeed be just a quick attempt at low-effort cash-grab, where they threw Pokemons to AI to change them a little bit without taking any effort at designing original monsters.
But none of that is a concrete proof, and I still believe and hope that instead of a cheap cash-grab, they really do love the game idea and are excited to work and iterate on it, and will not abandon the game for next project once the hype dies down. Time will tell, but I really hope that it’s the latter.
It’d say that exactly what most of the haters are not getting. This is not supposed to be a Pokemon game. It’s a survival crafting and basebuilding game, that uses Pokemon for a great effect and neatly integrates some of the aspects of Pokemon games to fit into the genre.
I’d recommend Tyranny. Its a CRPG, where you play as an envoy of basically villains that are sweeping through the world, conquering almost everything. Most of the choices are pretty difficult, because from what I remember its usually “bad or different bad”, without it being clear what’s going to be worse. Because you’re an envoy for a dictator with the power to literally wipe an entire continent with a single sentence, you can’t just go " fuck this, I’m gonna ignore the orders and do good", and balancing the long term and short term consequences makes every decision pretty difficult.
For example, if you get an order to “capture this fortress within few days or I’ll wipe the entire island”, any small war-crime now may be the long term good option, if it helps you capture it in time, and helping the soldier asking you to help find his wife nearby may be lost time you can’t be sure you can afford.
I don’t have any issues with diversity and inclusivity, and support it however I can.
But I don’t really see the problem with this mod? It’s a honest question, I’ve just read the article, and the Nexus mod answer doesn’t make much sense to me. I mean there are literally mods that change every character in Skyrim to females, how is that different? (I didn’t log in to see the if the mod is active, but I’m sure there’s a lot of “we change this character to female” mods for any game).
And more importantly, why not let anyone do whatever they want with their game, and enjoy it however they want? Or was it similar to the Starfield pronouns mod, where the creator went on a hateful rant in the mod description, and acted like a total dick, spewing their bullshit intorelant propaganda? Then, the removal would be understandable. Otherwise, it’s just counter-productive and only serves to even more divide people and turn them against eachother, and feels like an unnecessary witch-hunt and a PR stunt.
But please correct me if I’m wrong or missing something, there’s probably some context that I don’t have.
I totally agree with your second sentence, that it makes the game more believable and (at least for me), and BG3 is such an amazing game thanks to their character cast.
However, why would it be dumb to make such a mod? Sure, it’s not something I’d use, but it’s actually a pretty cool technological feat, given the voices and everything, and it allows you to finetune the game to more fit your preference or fantasy. RPGs are supposed to be about living through your fantasies, and having fun. It’s a single player game, why shouldn’t people tailor it to their own specific needs and wants?
Of course, if they are being a dick about it, and spewing their bullshit propaganda in the mod description, the I’m all for just banning it.
It’s just a PR stunt by Nexus mods. And I really hate companies doing PR stunts like these, because you can be sure that they are insincere and most of the time only exploit the diversity and inclusivity as a part of their marketing campaign. It’s just like companies waving rainbow flags on their logo for Pride, while donating millions of dollars to anit-gay politicans. .
I was just surprised why did people find the mod that much offensive. I wasn’t aware that the authors intent wasn’t to just change one character into different gender, but to effectively purge all diversity from the game, including the racial one.
That changes my point of view, because then it makes absolute sense why you wouldn’t allow someone like that on your platform. That was the context I was missing. But if I took the mod at face value, without the rest of the anti-diversity modpack this mod was made for, I still don’t see an issue with wanting to change one characters gender for your own playthough, or a reason why to remove such mod from your platform, especially compared to all other “change this character to female” mods that Nexusmods is full of. But given the context, Nexusmods are in the right here, of not wanting to support someone with so blatant propaganda.
You are right, I wasn’t aware of the context - the authors goal to just eradicate diversity from the game, and that makes it perfectly ok of not wanting to have someone like that on your platform. But taking the mod at a face value, I didn’t see what’s the fuss about, now I get it.
Yeah, I wasn’t aware of the context of the author working on other mods like that, that are purging every diverse character from the game. I totally agree that then it shouldn’t be there, I was just taking the mod at a face value and comparing it to other gender-changing mods, which still were there. Given the author’s intent and rhetorics, he shouldn’t be given a platform to speak.
I agree, Nexus isn’t oblidged to host your files. I wasn’t aware of the authors other mods and goal to purge diversity from the game - which makes it absolutely OK to not want him on your platform, and I agree with removing it.
But when I took the mod at a face value, without this context, I really don’t see any problem with it, especially compared to all other gender changing mods on Nexus. Which made their reason not to include it seem like pandering because someone took an issue with it. Now I know that was not the case, and that there was malicious and pretty awfull intent and message behind the mod. But without that, I still think the mod would be OK, and taking it down would be unfair, just because some vocal people took issue with it - which is how the situation looked like from the article. But that’s not the case, and I was mistaken, so it’s solved.
I just hope bitcoin will finally die. It’s literally just wasting absurd amount of energy, only to allow scammers to scam billions of dollars from victims, and regular people to steal from eachother by investing into it. I mean, if the only use of bitcoin by now is for speculation and investment, then it means that any dollar you made, you literally stole from someone else who will be left with useless bitcoin once it’s all over. There’s no value, and with the ledger getting bigger and bigger, and bitcoin more expensive to mine, it will eventually be worthless. And we all know it, so anyone who makes thousands of dollars, there’s someone who probably financially ruined himself by making a wrong and stupid investment at the wrong time.
You are right I shouldn’t have equaled bitcoin with the rest of the crypto ecosystem. While most crypto is utter scam, it’s true that there have been some slight advances here and there, and there are coins that may be actually useful for some cases, mostly Monero and I suppose Ethereum. I’d still say that crypto has done more harm than good in the world, and I say that as someone who’s really focused at privacy, care about it a lot and have invested significant amount of time and effort into staying as private as possible.
But it’s great that Ethereum managed to solve most of the issues with Bitcoin - unless I’m mistaken, it’s not really used for investment speculation, and if it managed to keep the energy requirements low, that’s good. But last time I remember researching about blockchain (it was few months, so feel free to correct me), isn’t it running into serious issues with ledger size, that makes it infeasible for long-term (decades) of use, without sacrificing some of it’s guarantees? Which is one of the main issues with blockchain tech in general, that I don’t think has been solved so far.
After several of my favorite songs disappeared from Spotify, I’ve adopted a different approach to music.
If I see on on a band show merch stand, I buy a cassette. It’s more of a novelty item and a way to slightly support the band. While I do have a portable tape player, I only rarely take it out. I switched from LPs to tapes because of the costs and huge effort associated with playing or storing them (that is, if you do it right are are not OK with fucking up your LPs), but tapes are cool and don’t have that many storage or playing problems.
Other than that, I’ve stopped paying for any kind of streaming services, and save the 10$ per month to just buy one or two (new or old) albums from my favourite artists on Bandcamp, that I’ve spend the last month listening to the most. The albums I buy I add to my NAS library, which usually replaces stolen copies of said albums that I’ve previously got from Redacted.
This allows me to keep a pretty expansive library, by just stealing what I need, but with a promise that I’ll eventually buy the album (using the money I saved on streaming services), if it’s something that I’ve listened to extensively. I’m also not at mercy of streaming services, that can take away my music whenever they decide to.
So far I’ve been doing this for a few years, and even increased my budget for just buying albums if I can’t immediately find them on Redacted.
This finally explains it. I was about to write something similar as the comment you are replying to, because it did felt like a totally unnecessary PR stunt of another corporation that only exploits the issue for publicity, and I really hate that.
But if the mod description was as bad as you say, then removing it was the right move.
I don't get how people can become depressed, when we live in the century of Fentanyl, easy access to alcohol and amusement arcades.
GameStop Set to Jump as Keith Gill Post Shows $116 Million Bet (www.bloomberg.com)
Without paywall: archive.ph/1Ff97
I'm giving up — on open source - Blog (nutjs.dev)
Sustainable open source will stay a dream
Aesthetics rule (pawb.social)
Linux continues to be above 4% on the desktop (www.gamingonlinux.com)
Discord to start showing ads in the coming week after resisting for almost a decade (www.neowin.net)
I don’t think people on this sub use it, but it’s great news for us. The worse it gets the likelier people move on.
Reddit started blocking VPN users on old.reddit.com (lemm.ee)
At this point, I’m not even going to bother trying to go on there anymore.
Improve Your Privacy Setup
Hello, Lemmy!...
supermarket club cards
Hey I’m sure you all know how sketchy club cards are for collecting your data. But I do begrudge paying slightly higher prices just for valuing my privacy. I was wondering if there was any way to sign up to these things whilst limiting the data they have access to. Would it be enough to sign up with fake details and never use...
Surface Laptop 3 running Kubuntu, such an improvement over what it was "designed" for. (lemmy.world)
My move to wayland: it's finally ready (www.edu4rdshl.dev)
Let’s talk about #Linux on the desktop, #Gnome and the state of #Wayland in 2024.
Palworld Devs Says They Have Received Death Threats Amid Pokémon 'Rip-Off' Claims (www.ign.com)
Games that force you to make hard choices
Hey all!...
Mod That Makes ‘Baldur’s Gate 3’ Less Gay Gets Nuked After Players Revolt (www.vice.com)
Each Bitcoin transaction uses 4,200 gallons of water — enough to fill a swimming pool — and could potentially cause freshwater shortages (www.tomshardware.com)
Spotify made £56m profit, but has decided not to pay smaller artists like me. We need you to make some noise | Damon Krukowski (www.theguardian.com)
Nexus Mods Fine With Bigots Leaving Over Removed Starfield ‘Pronoun’ Mod (kotaku.com)
I'm looking for games with unique or experimental game design
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