Glad they clarified. To me the “selling data being defined broadly” argument made sense in the context of Google paying them to be included as a search provider. Because there is an argument that Google paying Firefox, and then the user entering a search and that being sent to Google’s servers could be legally seen as Mozilla selling data to Google.

When I first got a Bluesky account, back when it was invite-only a whole bunch of the Physicists and Astronomers I used to follow on Twitter were already there. If anything it seemed like scientists were early adopters.

Fire your CEO.

Out of a canon, through some flaming rings, and into an empty bucket of water. If I have to watch a clown-show, at least make it entertaining.

There is a plan going around over on TikTok that everyone should delete their Meta accounts on the 19th (when the TikTok ban goes into effect). We’ll see how many actually do it, but so far it’s fascinating to watch.

There have been recent leaks that indicate Valve is working on something going by the codename “Fremont” that is basically just that. Also some 3D models of a new Steam controller that’s much more like A SteamDeck without the screen were included in a recent update.

We’ll see though, Valve does have a bit of a problem staying focused on what they were working on when they come back from their holiday break, and sometimes things get cancelled because they lose interest over the break.

It’s just all tied up in AI and crypto right now. Because everyone wants to get in on the next get-rich-quick scheme. Coked-up investors don’t have the patience to stick it out and wait for a return, they’ve moved on to shiny new toys (that have very little chance of real growth or market viability) and are gutting and cutting the games industry to pay for it.

While I personally agree with your sentiment, and much prefer arch to debian for my own systems, there is one way where debian can be more stable. When projects release software with bugs I usually have to deal with those on Arch, even if someone else has already submitted the bug reports upstream and they are already being worked on. There are often periods of a couple of weeks where something is broken - usually nothing big enough to be more than a minor annoyance that I can work around. Admittedly, I could just stop doing updates when everything seems to be working, to stay in a more stable state, but debian is a bit more broadly and thoroughly tested. Although the downside is that when upstream bugs do slip through into debian, they tend to stay there longer than they do on arch. That said, most of those bugs wouldn’t get fixed as fast upstream if not for rolling distro users testing things and finding bugs before buggy releases get to non-rolling “stable” distros.

I still use DDG as my “daily driver” (I know there are better options for privacy and avoiding big tech, but I haven’t yet found anything independent that is good enough for me to switch to full time yet). I bookmarked Stract a while back, and it proved useful a few months back when Microsoft had an outage that took down Bing and by extension, Duck Duck Go. I do like Stract, their index seems to be enough larger than MoJeek (another independent search with their own index) that it gives me better results.

Stract might not be as open as I’d like, but it’s nice to have as an option, and I’m never going to complain about having more search providers with independent indexes.

I’ve been using Syncthing-Fork (on F-Droid) for the extra features it has. I wonder if that developer will be able to continue.

Yeah, 2019 had a reboot with David Harbor as Hellboy.

So more like Judas and Goliath then?

Yeah, Ringleader’s Evergaol was rough, took me over 30 tries. I was a bit under-leveled when I first found it and after getting my ass handed to me for 10 or so attempts I decided to mark it and return later, went back after leveling up a bit and died another 15 times or so. Came back a 3rd time after defeating Mohg on my 4th attempt and finally cleared the evergaol after about 8 more attempts.

I had a nicer Acer monitor that I replaced with a similar Samsung model about a year ago. I still kinda miss the Acer. Both were 32" curved LCD and 1440p. The Acer had a much more uniform curve to it, and the Samsung has a bunch of firmware issues that sometimes can only be worked around by unplugging it and power cycling it that way. The only reason I “upgraded” was the Samsung had better support for PS5 and scaling 4K inputs down to the native 1440p without artifacts.

No way that’s the real reason, the real reason is taxes. So many California millionaires move to Texas for the low tax, only to realize once they’re there that it’s a shitty state with a barely-functioning power grid. Unfortunately it never seems to click for most of them that the low taxes is a big part of why they don’t have a competent state government.

Yeah, I know a lot of the smaller, independent search engines are lacking, but the people using the “udm=14” trick to remove Google’s AI results now, as if that won’t be removed as soon as Google needs to show investors the AI is more profitable.

To add to this, Scarlett Johansson took on Disney and they settled. And Disney is like the final boss of litigious companies (either them or Nintendo). If she has the same legal team for this, and they think she has a case against OpenAI, this could open the door for OpenAI to get rightfully clobbered for their tech-bro ignoring of copyright laws.

Just to add a bit of clarification, the image wasn’t just a headshot, yes that’s the part that was originally scanned and used, but it’s a cropped in section of the centerfold, a 3-page fold-out image in the magazine. If I remember the story correctly, they needed a large image to scan, and several people brought in images to scan in, and one guy brought a Playboy.

I remember seeing an interview with the model, who at the time of the interview was in her 70s or 80s, she apparently wasn’t enthusiastic about having become a common test image. But since she had technically consented to be in Playboy (which was only a magazine at the time), there wasn’t anything she could do to stop it. I think in this case it’s probably best to stop using her image specifically, as it does kinda get into a weird messy situation of consent, and how her consent to be in a magazine morphed through technology into something more “permanent” than she originally realized. There are plenty of other models who would absolutely be down for that, and given enough time, knowing how nerds are, there will be other test images of women. But I think it’s probably for the best that this one gets retired from this use.

And yes, there are people who have tried to use this instance as a “there shouldn’t be images of attractive/implied nude women a standard test images, because it can cause body image issues for women who go into that field.” Which on one hand, I can see where they’re coming from, but also people take pictures of people, and some people do look better than most of us, having more diverse test images would be a good thing, because we don’t all look like that. But some do, and they’re probably going to get more pictures taken of them than the rest if us.

Not sure exactly how good this would work for your use case of all traffic, but I use autossh and ssh reverse tunneling to forward a few local ports/services from my local machine to my VPS, where I can then proxy those ports in nginx or apache on the VPS. It might take a bit of extra configuration to go this route, but it’s been reliable for years for me. Wireguard is probably the “newer, right way” to do what I’m doing, but personally I find using ssh tunnels a bit simpler to wrap my head around and manage.

Technically wireguard would have a touch less latency, but most of the latency will be due to the round trip distance between you and your VPS and the difference in protocols is comparatively negligible.

Maybe I’ll try and give it another go soon to see if things have improved for what I need since I last tried. I do have a couple aging servers that will probably need upgraded soon anyway, and I’m sure my python scripts that I’ve used in the past to help automate server migration will need updated anyway since I last used them.