Not everyone is US based, but ofc it’s an understandable assumption since it’s a very populous and well Internet-connected country (plus we’re discussing in English).

To save one’s behind when torrenting (pirating is a bit generic), a VPN is a great tool, but falling into the privacy/security and legal nightmare of a cheap service installing malware (or getting their proprietary app hacked) and/or stealing residential connections is a big risk (like with those services where a huge budget is spent on predatory marketing on youtube); paradoxically having that unrestricted VPN app installed might mean that a lot more people are torrenting with your residential connection. This point is not a deal breaker, just a “beware”, do your homework and isolate that connection within your OS or even better within your network.

Other counterpoint: within a country where they haven’t started to really crack down on it, you are protected by the impossibility of fining / suing / arresting millions of people at once. More people sign up for VPNs and torrent from outside the country, the more their connationals will also need protection.

Sorry for the wall of text…

Totally agree, you’re preaching to the choir here (I’m amused at this being the first time I’m receiving downvotes but I’m glad it’s because I might have sounded like a slop AI apologist)

Those few people I know that find chatgpt at the same time incredible and very useful, are using the official app from their iphone, just to give you an idea. If they knew how to search the web 20 years ago they forgot it. And the web has worsened a lot in the meantime as you said. One of them was complaining to me a few months ago how it was considering incresing his subscription level or something, and that he needed it to get ahead at work, while I was trying to explain to him that at best it’s regurgitated stuff, no smarts are there, and I don’t think down the line he’s gonna really save time (what’s very sad is that he wants to use it to help him write medical research papers)

Ahah I’m totally with you, I just personally know people that love it because they have never learned how to use a search engine. And these generalist generative AIs are trained on gobbled up internet basically, while also generating so many dangerous mistakes, I’ve read enough horror stories.

I’m in science and I’m not interested in ChatGPT, wouldn’t trust it with a pancake recipe. Even if it was useful to me I wouldn’t trust the vendor lock-in or enshittification that’s gonna come after I get dependent on aa tool in the cloud.

A local LLM on cheap or widely available hardware with reproducible input / output? Then I’m interested.

In this and other use cases I call it a pretty effective search engine, instead of scrolling through stackexchange after clicking between google ads, you get the cleaned up example code you needed. Not a Chat with any intelligence though.

Privacy Browser with JS off (by default) can read the article and navigate, only minor eye-sore are the buttons at the top of the site which are on a transparent background and stay on top of the text as I scroll down

Use keepa.com and learn how they take us for absolute fools. Their new trick to circumvent the recent law in Europe that forces them to show the average price from the previous 30days, is to have a “tickbox coupon” on many items (only visible from the item page) that takes out a discount, and obviously is not counted in the average “list” price. Magically all those tickbox discounts disappear on black friday.

For those who want to know more about Piracy Shield and have a laugh at its ridiculousness (and danger), I enjoyed Max Stucchi presentation at https://ripe89.ripe.net/archives/video/1496/

“Blocking and Censoring the Italian Internet for Football Reasons”

I recently added a used mini pc to my lab and it has a Ryzen 3550H, 16GB ram and 512GB nvme; it cost less than 100€ total, hits almost 8000 passmark. Just to give you an idea of what you can get on the used market, I wouldn’t buy a new Celeron pc myself.

“App uses a third party service for currency exchange rates” (source: f-droid app or the metadata repo)

Nothing to do with it being a launcher

Do they though? To most of my peers email=gmail

I do agree that it’s a good way to explain federation, anybody willing to be openminded will get the concept very quickly (I mean the importance of federation, like for email, not simply the fact that it’s a thing / old tech but whatever who cares).

But will many be exposed to those posts or articles explaining the fediverse while staying inside of the walled gardens? I hope so, personally I’m not going there anymore myself :)

I think they mean Settings > Instance > scroll down to Proxy ; Disable Piped Proxy.

Sadly I moved to Newpipe because I was using Libretube for the Piped integration and increased privacy…but Piped doesnt seem viable these days without selfhosting it

That’s what cheese glue sticks are for!

I noticed recently that Gramophone has a Dates tab, a list of years in increasing order that groups Songs together. So not albums exactly, but pretty cool nonetheless, it grabs a random cover for each year.

1337x is my favorite. Look for efficient encodes like HEVC or AV1 for a better quality/size ratio (and ideally AAC or opus for audio). It’s usually in the torrent name as well as the resolution, source, etc.

Oh you’re right, under Tabs! Thanks

I so wish we could get actual wheat grains at the supermarket, possibly bio. Instead whole cereals are mostly sold as animal feed (so with fewer safety standards). It’s bs. Same goes for soy beans! They give 'em out to farmers for a lot less than a 1€/kg as animal feed, but I have to order them online? While every corner shop has tofu, soy milk, etc… come on 😅

Idk what their source was but I think you should look for cheapest “possible” to do a fair comparison (cause obviously a certain shop can have super expensive wings). Near me lowest for wings will be 3-5€/kg, canned tuna starts from 8/kg when on discount, but also has like 30% of seed or olive oil in it (so actual tuna cost to the consumer is more like 12€/kg minimum) Chicken is definitely cheaper everywhere IME.

BTW I’m talking raw chicken wings…everything pre-cooked costs more

I remember seeing a youtube vid from someone who had analyzed all products from one supermarket (after scraping their website), cheapest protein ended up being flour 😄

After all people can survive on bread, on average if I remember correctly we need just 11-13% of the calories to be protein according to WHO (or less if we are eating with a caloric surplus)… protein needs are vastly exaggerated thanks to health gurus and humans’ unhealthy love of meat.

Btw flour and bread are not all the same, especially refined has very little fiber and a little less protein (protein content is used also to determine quality of wheat)

Hi, you can set browser.tabs.hoverPreview.enabled to False in about:config

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