Bitlocker.

I’ll decrypt it one day…

Piggybacking onto this, MenuLibre also works and the “hide from menus” setting does exactly that if a GUI is preferable. I used it to hide a bunch of VSTs a while back.

Forking is indeed the way forward when Mozilla loses its way a little more. For myself, I switched to Librewolf about 6 months ago, along with replacing Thunderbird with Betterbird after using it since the Phoenix days.

I cannot remember what prompted the move to Librewolf, it may have been the AI stuff they were pushing at the time, or possibly the update that forced the tabs into my titlebar without having to go into about:config to fix it. Or the fact that Firefox was constantly pushing me to sign up for an account. There were quite a few gripes that added up over time lol

Betterbird restored some removed things I liked pre-supernova as well as a native systray icon under Linux and that was enough motivation to make the switch.

It is time for a new browser to enter the market. Either Ladybird or something built with Servo seems likely.

I’ve got some bad news for you. Mozilla bought an ad company.

Have you looked at Duplicati? I use it and find it dead simple and reliable (I did a full recovery from a total data loss last year).

Ooh damn. Mandrake was my first distro, I remember being sooo excited when the CDs came in the mail. It was I think 4 discs?

The experience was absolutely not good lol. At the time I only had one computer (some eMachines something or other) and a 56k line that only went to 14400 or 2600 baud depending on the weather. My NIC wasn’t supported and after some banging my head on the desk I ended up going back to windows 98se after a few days because it was the family computer I messed up and caught sooo much flak for wiping.

Returned some years later when it was called Mandriva and had a better experience with a custom built AMD machine. The eMachines machine by then was still around as a network file server running a flavour of BSD that served media to my OG xbox played through XBMC (now Kodi).

Great post OP and thanks for the trip down memory lane!

I admit that I am a bit biased. During the 8-10 years I tanked my startup by going all-in on Microsoft Store apps because I absolutely loved my Windows Phones and was convinced that they were the future, especially when Continuum was announced (and it actually worked!).

The disenchantment started when Microsoft forced developers to rewrite their apps for Windows 10 after already having forced the mobile devs to do it from 7 to 8. The hatred ramped up when they killed support for the Lumia 950XL 6 months after launch. I freaking loved that phone.

It pissed me off so much that I went to Apple lmao talk about cutting off my nose to spite my face.

You forgot Vista before 7. The list didn’t “break down” because Vista was the steaming pile of shit in between.

8 sucked, 8.1 was good at least in my opinion. 10 was when I fucked off to Linux land permanently after using it on and off for 15 years and have never been happier.

I’m a fan of hellpotting them.

Over-explaining is my biggest issue. I’m entirely self taught and the trash quality of certain softwares with non-descriptive variable and function names sort of steered me towards clearly naming things (sometimes verbosely). That has the unfortunate side effect of repetition when documenting and it comes across as sarcastic or condescending when proofreading.

Its far easier to have a machine do it than to second-guess every sentence.

You mentioned a llamafile, is that offline? I’m using GPT-4 at the moment because my partner has a subscription. If so, I maaaay have to check it out ^^

I use it to generate code documentation because I’m incapable of documenting things without sounding like a condescending ass. Paste in a function, tell it to produce docstrings and doctests, then edit the hell out of it to sound more human and use actual data in the tests.

Its also great for readmes. I have a template that I follow for that and only work on one section at a time.

Betterbird is the solution. It just works and the system tray icon is a welcome addition. No more needing to use Birdtray for that.

Yikes and a big hell no! Reject, uninstall, and review bomb that fucker into oblivion.

I am aware of that. I could also just use Lutris since I use it to install the games themselves anyway. My point is, if the company that wants my money goes out of their way to not produce a Linux build of their launcher in the age of Electron, I’m going to get it elsewhere and launch it as a non-Steam game. Its the same number of steps. Still a service problem.

It seems that I misunderstood your original comment. You’re right in that piracy isnt the same as stealing physical goods.

My original comment was a jab at the corpos and using their terminology to highlight how utterly absurd their line of thinking is. I should have worded it better and used “imaginary profits” instead.

My mistake!

Sorry to say, you’ve mistakenly made one hell of a generalisation on that last sentence. Other than that one stinky turd, the rest is spot-on.

The truth is that if somebody was going to pirate software, then they were never going to buy it in the first place and it’s greedy and mentally ill to think otherwise…

I’ve been on the piracy scene since 2001 and was a moderator for one of the largest dreamcast piracy forums once upon a time. The core members of that forum are still together on Discord and we all buy things wherever possible. Gabe Newell is correct in that piracy is a service problem.

Steam cut my games piracy down to zero for the longest time (501 games, 414 DLC) because it was more convenient and had frequent sales. Other companies that decided to pull away from Steam and conspire with publishers regarding timed exclusives on a platform that doesn’t want me as a customer (Epic). As a result, anything that is an Epic exclusive is pirated indiscriminately and seeded for several weeks. I don’t even play any of them. Download, seed for a week, delete, rinse and repeat on the next exclusive. The same goes for anything with Denuvo DRM.

GOG has DRM free games, there’s a site where they are all available for download, and I’ve discovered quite a few gems that way. Those gems got purchased on Steam because GOG also doesn’t want me as a customer, even though I had decent library and bought several games at launch on there. I’m refusing to use a third party launcher to install games from there because once again, its a service problem.

Netflix cut my video piracy to zero between 2011 and 2020. When I moved across the world, I brought only my clothes, laptop, and storage drives. Everything I wanted to watch was available on Netflix or YouTube. Once Netflix started losing shows like Futurama, Parks & Rec, and even Sons of Anarchy, I went straight back to piracy and haven’t looked back. Netflix only continued to get my money because my partner insisted on doing things legally. By the time she had enough in October 2023, we were paying for Netflix, Amazon, Disney, Ziggo, YouTube, Curiosity Stream, and HBO. At the moment, only Curiosity remains.

Adding up the 3 “services” we consume content from the most (not including the ones we watch one show here and there on) added up to €497 per year. My piracy costs €472 per year not including electricity, which is used anyway since the server also hosts a boat load of microservices like NextCloud which replaces yet another subscription storage. It’s costing me €72 to rent a seedbox, and €400 at the upper-end for a large NAS drive one time per year.

It’s a service problem and I don’t think those who refuse to contribute to the broken service problem are mentally ill. The “managers” in charge are.

I’m expecting to hike my rate of piracy in 2024 as I continue to take a bigger bite out of overall corporate profits.

Buying a proprietary 3D printer with internet connectivity. What could possibly go wrong?

Going by the linked forum post, Anycubic has been aware of it for two months. Any competent FOSS project would have nipped that in the bud on the same day it was discovered. Incredible.

I don’t need to, you’ve already told on yourself.

Day old account, crying about Wayland

Please share more of your valuable opinions!