Someone is bound to start selling conversion kits for regular cars eventually - turn your 20 year old gas dinosaur into a zippy EV or hybrid, no spyware required. We can already do it with two-wheelers, and Edison Motors is well on their way to making kits to turn big trucks into hybrids.
To be fair, even in my family it’s not a full streaming replacement. We have Discovery+, Nebula, and (free) YouTube. Live TV from the Roku player is the main thing I want to replace through IPTV, either Jellyfin or maybe Kodi, but both the metadata and functionality of free sources is a crapshoot. If I could replace the Roku live TV use with some inexpensive paid IPTV source, then I could easily switch to any streaming box brand, like ONN or some other generic Android TV.
My setup is not recommended, honestly. Old gaming PC from about 14 years ago with a couple extra hard drives, thrown in the closet with stripped-down Windows 10 on an old SSD, desktop version of Jellyfin, and an external drive for backups. Not even running in a Docker container because the CMOS battery is dead and getting to it is way too much of a hassle on that particular motherboard, so virtualization defaults to off whenever it completely loses power. Which it unfortunately does on occasion like winter storms, or summer heat, or if the wind is blowing.
But hey, for the movies and shows we have on DVD/BD, as well as the music we’ve bought over the years, it does work for access from PCs and phones on the local network (Finamp + Jellyfin Media Player). I dabbled with IPTV for live TV replacement but found that only using totally free IPTV+metadata would take either much more work on no-virtualization Windows 10 than I’m willing to put up with, or have much more jank than my family is willing to put up with.
All the cybersecurity in the world won’t matter if a handful of manipulated idiots people shoot a bunch of unguarded and remotely located substation transformers.
If “nearly every app” that people already use suddenly has a big warning on it, people will quickly decide the warnings are meaningless and start ignoring them, like Prop 65 warnings. Congratulations, we’ve moved the needle backwards.
You have to meet people where they’re at. I finally switched to Linux when MS introduced a feature I wanted no part in (Recall AI), but I would have given up within a day or two if the transition hadn’t been basically seamless. I was able to pick up right where I left off, using all the same apps I did on Windows except MusicBee RIP, but now I’m in a better position than before, on an open-source OS instead of closed-source. Now there’s a little less friction between me and better, freer software.
When I look at Firefox in Discover, it only shows the list of permissions the flatpak will be given out of the box, with no warning of it being “potentially unsafe.” This certainly does seem like the better way to handle it.
Also, the warning on the Flathub website is clickable - it expands into the full permissions list. Why it defaults to “no information except maybe dangerous” is beyond me.
As a fellow virgin, if you actually do want to not be a virgin, but see yourself as having “failed” then think deeply on what the reason is.
First of all, if you’ve “failed” then what did you actually try that failed? Do you constantly take steps to meet new people and find friends, male and female, whether in hobbies or online or anywhere? If not, why not? If you have, and therefore have lots of friends you speak with regularly, are you recruiting them to help you find a romantic partner? Meeting lots of people, making friends, and then asking those friends for help is a great way to accomplish almost anything. It’s much easier early in life, but it’s never impossible.
If you have taken steps to meet lots of people (and I mean a lot of people), but none of them or their single-and-looking friends wanted to date you, then did they give reasons? What is it about you that they don’t like? Are you taking care of yourself? Maintaining good personal hygiene? Dressing well? Do your peers find you unpleasant to be around? Are you simply boring? If you meet lots of people and all of them reject you, there’s likely something you’re not doing that you need to be doing. Work on yourself to be someone that people want to be around.
If any of what I’ve said here is relevant to you, even if it’s unpleasant to think about, it’s very important to be consciously aware of it so that you can accept that your current reality is one you’ve chosen, consciously or unconsciously… and that you can choose differently.
I’m one year younger than you, also virgin guy who would maybe like to have a partner, but through introspection and years of learning shit on the internet, I’m aware of the likely reasons I haven’t gotten one yet - I just don’t meet people, and when I do, even when we get along, I tend to fall out of touch immediately. I believe I likely have undiagnosed and unmedicated ADHD along with some steep but situational social anxiety, both of which I know have and will continue to keep me from forming and maintaining many social connections that I otherwise could have, which I could be leveraging to find people to date.
So, I recognize what my stumbling blocks are, and that if I decide I really do want to find love and get laid, I have to deal with those stumbling blocks. For me, that will involve speaking to a head doctor and learning more precisely how my brain works and what strategies I can use to overcome those blocks. It’s not about fixing me, it’s about being able to be more me. But until I do that, I accept that my current status of “virgin, but maybe wants to change that” is there because I have, in some way, chosen up to this point not to change it.
If you figure out what your stumbling blocks are, or even if you haven’t, tell a close and trustworthy friend or family member about where you’re at, where you want to be, and how you feel about it. They might have options, or be able to help you take whatever steps you need to be where you want to be. If you feel like you just can’t make yourself do the thing, get someone else to give you a kick in the ass.
Odysee takes a lot of curation to even be usable. You can block whole channels easily and they won’t show up for you anywhere, but once you’ve blocked all the RWB you’re left with mostly tech, gaming, and reactions. And this is despite Odysee/LBRY having been around for years.
This is the one of the few real things that make VPNs a security tool - security from thugs using a MITM attack on your phone. This is also a reason to avoid SMS messaging and port your number to a VoIP service instead of a direct cellular number, as VoIP traffic would be routed over the encrypted VPN tunnel with everything else instead of through the traditional cell network which is vulnerable to these attacks.
If government agents want to know what you’re saying and doing without your consent, you should leave them no choice but to get a warrant and do some actual work.
I’d get premium if they weren’t so insistent on bundling in bullshit I don’t want or care about to justify the high price. I put up with enough of that from cable TV. I’ll pay when there’s an ad-free tier that doesn’t do anything else and is a reasonable price for “the service that’s free with ads, but without ads”. If there was a per-device premium tier that I could throw on my Roku, and all my family members could have premium when they stream from there, I’d pay for that. I’d pay for family tier if it didn’t have the dumb single-household rule which screws over truckers and those who travel for a living.
Google has options they could take to convince consumers to pay to not see ads, but there’s no creativity left there, no effort to court the market or adapt the service and prices to what potential customers need and are willing to pay. And it’s because they believe they are the market, and want to keep it that way.
The InterPlanetary File System (IPFS) is a protocol, hypermedia, and file sharing peer-to-peer network for storing and sharing data in a distributed file system. It allows users to host and receive content in a manner similar to BitTorrent.
It’s not gone, they didn’t even take down all of the Nintendo games, they took down specific games (reddit link), albeit a lot of them, but there’s still lots of stuff left.
Not at all - you could just be a US citizen coming back from a brief trip across the border.
A few congress critters have been trying to get bills passed to curtail this overreach for almost a decade, but unless I missed the news, none of them have succeeded.
That’s wonderful, I’m so glad you enjoyed yourself! And I’m glad I was able to help :)
Remember that a dance party is a party - most people are there to have fun. I think the main thing to avoid, if you can manage it, is being so caught up inside your own head that you aren’t looking at the people around you. Keep your back straight, your head high, your eyes off the floor. Basically, avoid the posture of a shrinking violet and you’ll feel less like one. Even if you don’t feel confident, maintaining a pose that looks confident will keep some of your fear away, and it will passively invite others to interact with you, which boosts your confidence a little more with each person you talk to.
Even if you spend the entire party standing around and watching other people dance, as long as you are actually watching the event, and mentally present for what’s going on, you will gain something from the experience. Just remember that standing around and not talking to anyone is as much a choice as going up to someone and asking for a dance. Neither choice is wrong, but you have to live with what happens - or doesn’t - based on what you choose.
All that said, you can do this! We believe in you!
Atomic means the core OS packages are in an immutable container such that none of its individual components can be updated separately; instead the entire container is replaced with a newer version when the system is updated. This makes it much less likely for something to break during normal use, and easier to rollback updates if something does happen to break. The ideal use case is a containerized environment where each app you use is installed in its own container, like Docker, or is otherwise self-contained such as flatpak installers, and doesn’t rely on any of the system’s packages.
his “solution” is some kind it proprietary video player that just plays Youtube videos.
It’s not proprietary, it’s source-available, and it plays a lot more than YouTube videos - in addition to YT, I use it to watch Nebula, Twitch, Odysee, and even Peertube on rare occasions. There are other plugins (that I don’t use) for BiliBili, Rumble, Patreon, Kick, and Soundcloud, and the way its plugin system works, there’s potential for many other paid subscription-based streaming services to be viewable through Grayjay. That is its real strength. If a creator uploads to a bunch of platforms, users can follow them on the platform they prefer, and get all their updates from one feed in one app, with added functionality that the official apps or sites simply might not have.
This is FUTO’s way of trying to make web video platforms more competitive, by creating an app that can interface with content from all of them and has all the popular features even if the sites themselves don’t. Grayjay has playlists, likes, dislikes, background playback, picture-in-picture, local history, the ability to block certain creators from the home feed, and the ability to hide individual videos from your feed. Furthermore, creators get a lot of ways they can monetize their content in Grayjay, like putting their merch store under the description of their videos, donation buttons, links to their Patreon or other subscription services, or general promotions, that would appear under all of their videos. Like… there are a lot of features here that really improve the experience with otherwise lackluster competitors. This tilts the market a tiny bit away from the established dominant players, and every new Grayjay user tilts it a little bit more.
Finally, it’s worth emphasizing that this is not Louis Rossmann’s personal pet project. His promotion of Grayjay, while it does align with his personal values, is paid work for a literal tech billionaire, Eron Wolf, who created and runs the FUTO organization. Neither of them need you to “take Louis Rossmann seriously.” They only want you to consider if the apps the company makes suit your needs and values.
I don’t know if this has changed, but last time I used Ungoogled Chromium, I recall the UI still referred to Google and/or its services in many areas, even if the underlying code’s removal made those areas nonfunctional. Google’s name is also still right in the browser title, like free advertising every time I look at it, and that bothers me as well.
The ELI5 for Fedora’s atomic desktops is that if Windows had an Atomic Desktop version, Program Files and most of the Windows folder would be read only, and each program you installed yourself would go into its own folder in your user directory. That’s the basic idea. It’s harder to screw up an Atomic system as long as you stick to containerized app formats like flatpak/appimage whenever possible. It makes it easier for everyone to diagnose problems, and easier for users to roll back if an update has problems. Even if you were to install it right now, you could use one simple command to “roll back” to any image from the last three months.
The benefit of Bazzite is you have all of the above, plus a lot of gaming-related stuff preinstalled which, if you were to install them yourself in a normal Fedora environment, you’d likely have to spend a lot of time just learning how they’re supposed to be configured, how they interact, which versions have problems, and how to troubleshoot problems when an update to one app breaks a prerequisite for something else; eventually you end up in config hell instead of actually using your computer. With Bazzite, the image maintainers are the ones in config hell - they work out the kinks, app versioning, communicate with upstream to fix issues, all that, so your system should be in the most functional state that a Linux system can be, so you only have to think about using your apps.
tl;dr