Poor man’s TOR :).

It’s not completely inconceivable that ISPs using CG-NAT could keep logs that would allow these users to be deanonymized, but it’s an extra step and they might not have enough information between the Reddit and ISP logs to do it. But… they’d have to be talking to the ISPs anyway, and the ISPs will probably cooperate?

There’s surprisingly few standalone email clients for normal people on desktop platforms as far as I know.

There is potentially a world in which you want to see ads because ads themselves do technically provide a service. You do want to know about things you care about and would want to buy… you just don’t want it obnoxiously shoved into your face all of the time in psychologically manipulative ways.

I mean, I wouldn’t exactly call a company with 1000 employees “small”. It’s not the behemoth that something like Google is, but like… that’s a good chunk of people.

That’s fair, but IRC also tends to leak information about users to everybody. They’re maybe bad in slightly different ways, but frankly if you care about privacy that much you probably shouldn’t use either, at least not with additional protections.

How has fame changed you?

Or maybe… How is discord any worse of a privacy nightmare than IRC? I love me some IRC, but it ain’t exactly a bastion of secrecy.

Doom multiplayer is kind of arena shooter, I’ll agree. Something like Quake 3 or Unreal Tournament fits the term much better to me. Genres are pretty arbitrary, though.

I don’t think an arena shooter necessarily has to be multiplayer (but they’re mostly only fun when they are)… but it heavily implies that the maps are… arenas. Smaller areas that you backtrack through constantly with no “end”. Matches probably end by a condition like a timer or kill count or something. That said, I think we use “arena shooter” to distinguish games like Quake 3 from CoD (with some differences like weapons being on the map and players spawning with the same barebones kit)… but arguably CoD isn’t that far removed from something like Quake 3 (which I know is heresy and they play very differently, but the fundamentals aren’t so different).

Okay I know what you mean, but… Technically you could even consider text to be polygons. Or anything on your display could be considered to be made of single pixel polygons.

Like, you could argue that a sprite based game doesn’t have any polygons because it’s just blitting sprites onto the screen, but a sprite is kinda just a textured rectangle, which is a polygon. Rendering a sprite isn’t all that different than rasterizing a more general polygon either, it’s sort of just a special case where the math is really easy. I’m just being a pedant, though. I blame math class.

I don’t know what you’re considering to be a boomer game, though. Maybe you just mean hoop and stick doesn’t have polygons.

I mean… I wouldn’t really say Doom or Duke Nukem or whatever were arena shooters, though? Something like Quake 3 certainly is, but I feel like anything that vaguely has a map that you progress through instead of having a round of a fixed length / kill count in a smaller space doesn’t scream “arena shooter” to me.

I get that people aren’t a fan of Google, and I’m not either, but this is a reasonable option that would be better than what the vast majority of people are doing now…

Probably, but my exposure to Wayland has just been people complaining about how much X11 sucks and then proceeding to have more problems than everybody else.

I don’t really have much of an opinion about Wayland but it’s still funny to me whenever somebody using Wayland shits on X11 and then tries to share their screen on Zoom or something. If Wayland ends up being great I’ll be happy, but for now X11 just kind of works, so I don’t understand why people are so eager to switch? This isn’t to say I don’t understand the desire to build something better and more secure than X11, I’m just not sure what the end user gets out of Wayland right now. I don’t have VRR monitors and stuff, though, so maybe I’m not running into problems I would be if I wanted fancier features. Plus, I use xmonad and some other stuff right now that won’t work on Wayland, so I don’t have much incentive to try it. Hopefully everything gets Wayland updates eventually.

Oh good, you wrote basically the exact response I was going to give!

The only other thing I would mention is… if you don’t know what a command is, you can and should look it up! You can use the internet, but you can also try “man sudo” or “info sudo” and do a bit of reading. It might not make sense at first, but you’ll start building up a vocabulary really quickly.

I can totally understand why the terminal seems confusing and scary right now, but it’s actually awesome for this kind of stuff because you can just copy and paste commands to do pretty much anything to your computer. Using a GUI often means having a bunch of screenshots that you have to follow manually to do something that a single command can do. Once you’re used to the terminal for these kinds of things GUIs can seem barbaric. Of course it seems scary before you know much about it because it seems like the fucking matrix, and you should only run commands from sources you trust (because they can do anything)… But it’s worth giving a chance, I think.

For this particular instance… often you can just download an application on Linux from a website and run it, but this is almost never the preferred way of doing things. Usually you install applications from your package manager, which is kind of like an App Store (but free), and the advantage of this is that 1) you don’t have to hunt down sketchy executables on the internet, you have a vetted source of safe packages from your distribution, and 2) you can easily update all of your packages. Having a one stop shop for all of your applications (or at least most) is really great, but it can be a little annoying when something you want isn’t in the official repos (like this), though it’s usually a fairly rare occurrence.

The abysmal adoption of DNSSEC is just embarrassing, and I haven’t heard any good arguments for why we shouldn’t do it. There’s one blog post that gets passed around as justification for not adopting DNSSEC, but it doesn’t really go into any technical detail and is mostly just the author saying “I’m scared of governments and TLDs”… which is maybe fair, but you still have to trust them for regular CA certs and everything, so why not make thr base secure?

Honestly, I might care slightly more about DNSSEC than IPv6 adoption… IPv4 exhaustion and NATing everywhere sucks, but the fact that you can’t trust DNS is like… insane.

DNS setups can get fairly complicated with enterprise VPNs and stuff, but the main thing is probably just that DNS is built entirely around caching, so when something does go wrong or you’re trying to update something it’s easy for there to be a stale value somewhere. It’s also really fundamental, so when it breaks it can break anything.

Overall, though, DNS isn’t terribly complex. It’s mostly just a key-value store with some caching. Running your own nameservers is pretty cool and will give you a much better understanding of how it all fits together and scales.

Yeah, I can agree with that. I definitely feel like Joel is quite a lot angrier and scarier than Din, which is a pretty big difference. Joel is also far more reluctant and tries very hard not to be overly caring or become attached to Ellie, which is quite different than how Din acts overall. So, fair enough, I think I feel the same way :). But they are weirdly similar rolls at a surface level at least! I don’t think I’ve seen much of Pedro’s other rolls, but I really liked them as Joel (and Bella as Ellie), felt like they had really good chemistry and it was cool to watch their relationship develop on screen. I didn’t really like The Mandalorian all that much, everything felt a bit… stiff? None of the characters really seemed to stick around that long and it felt kind of like just watching a bunch of different short films. I think that was kind of what they were going for originally, but it felt a bit weird and disjointed with how short the seasons were, and when they started introducing more continuity it just felt like there wasn’t enough of a foundation to really support that to me. Still, it’s a really technically impressive show and they definitely picked some really hard problems to solve. Just having your main character always wear a mask and the other main character being a weird alien baby makes it a lot harder to convey emotion and stuff, so it’s impressive how well they handled all of that!

Arguably their characters in The Last of Us and The Mandalorian are relatively similar, at least I thought so, but I have only seen two seasons of The Mandalorian.