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Joined 9 months ago
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Cake day: February 11th, 2024

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  • Pick one that has a wireguard config generator, so you don’t need to use any client software besides the normal linux wg client.

    I’d also look for one that accepts anonymous payment methods. Even if you don’t intend to go to the trouble to use that yourself, it’s probably a good sign if it’s available. Mullvad is pretty safe and served me well until they stopped doing port forwarding. Proton, windscribe, azire, and airvpn were the ones that seemed most recommended when I went to look for a new one a few months ago.


  • It was rc6 that finally fixed the amdgpu bug that’s been annoying me for the past two months after I switched to a newer kernel than my distro came with in order to make some stupid ML stuff work. Probably it was the change described as “fix the runtime resume failure issue” I suppose. Whatever the problem was, it’s gone now. If your graphical session sometimes fails to come back after the monitors were powered off for a while, 6.8 may be the kernel for you.

    That’s the problem with going out of your way to get a newer kernel. It has some new features but also some new bug and before you know it you’re spending Sunday nights compiling the latest rc builds straight from Linus.


  • Well, she’s not wrong that we need more influential people fighting back against this latest push in the global coordinated effort to put an end to communications privacy. It’s really quite alarming how little attention it seems to get most of the time. Civil society seemed much more robust when it fought off similar attacks in the 1990s. I do hope that the “VC community” isn’t our only hope.

    But of course Signal can’t interoperate with another messaging platform, without them raising their privacy bar significantly

    Signal is supposed to be free software. You could probably manage to interoperate at least with other operators of actual Signal-Server instances, if you wanted to.







  • It’s not that easy being free Having to wonder if you picked the right instance When I think it could be nicer being Zucked or Musked or Spez’d - or something much more profitable like that.

    It’s not easy being free. It seems you vibe with so many other federated things. And people tend to pass you over 'cause you’re not standing out like influencers in the feeds - or big brands in the web.

    But free’s the color of fedi. And free can be cool and friendly-like. And free can be big like an ocean, or dank like a meme, or round like a blobcat.

    When free is all there is to be It could make you wonder why, but why wonder why? Wonder, I am federated and it’ll do fine, it’s pretty good most of the time!

    And I think it’s what I want to be.









  • Price discrimination just means charging different prices to different customers based on what you think you know about them. Its benign form would be a market vendor asking higher prices of individual people who look like they can afford it, and then really fleecing the tourists who look like they’ll fall for it. In that form it looks perfectly wholesome compared to what the big corporations get up to today: Supermarkets selling smaller package sizes in poor areas at lower sticker price but higher unit price, airlines asking different ticket prices depending what they know about your web browsing history, et cetera. I do not rate it a good thing overall. Even if we take it for granted that international borders are a thing, and services can’t be intermediated or subjected to arbitrage, the rich man in a luxury condo in Brazil paying less for some thing than the minimum-wage worker in New York does not strike me as reflecting any kind of justice.

    But this is the Internet. International borders are not supposed to be a thing here, and still aren’t for the most part despite the best efforts of the most repressive governments to change that. The cost of shipping data from one side of the world to the other is effectively zero. The system where it’s broadly true that different parts of the world have vastly different purchasing power is an injustice, it’s not something we should be attempting to replicate in cyberspace. I can route my network packets so that they appear to be coming from any region I choose, and so can anyone who can afford Netflix in any country. It’s not a freedom I want to give up so that big streaming services can extract maximum revenue from each national market separately.