Markup pro tip: to have multiple separate lines appear as a single large block quote, insert the quote signifier (>) into the blank newlines between them as well.

so this

is one giant

block quote

despite the newlines.

I have been using the same web browser, in terms of ideology, codebase and heritage, since the release of NCSA Mosaic.

That was 32 years ago. And holy f**ck, that dates me.

Sure, I dabbled around with others. There was the original Opera, back when Netscape cratered and the only other real option was IE. Opera’s tab behaviours made me install Tab Mix Plus for FF, and I still find that extension to be the second-most critically important extension FF has, right after UBlock Origin.

And lately I took a shine to Vivaldi, but I have been weaning myself off of it once I realized that the Manifest v2 shutdown was unavoidable for it as well.

And the only reason why I even have Chromium is as a sandbox for any Google services I access and as a “naked” web browser for those websites who implement malware and spyware in the name of “website security”. Which, of course, also means a majority of websites that are “protected” by CloudFlare’s incredibly hostile anti-user practices.

And of course, I also run forks, such as Librewolf and others, also with the appropriate anti-malware and anti-spyware add-ins. It can be useful having multiple web browsers up at once.

But my main will always be Firefox.

This broken english is printed with impeccable quality.

That’s probably the funniest bit about this whole thing. Absolutely impeccable workmanship, but horrendous English. If only they spent a touch more money for decent translator.

Legit impressed with the sharpness of that text at that size. That’s definitely not from any fly-by-night back-alley Indian factory using sweatshop labour.

I love how the Streisand Effect works. They just made this app the hottest thing out there.

Allowing men’s issues to even be addressed risks giving legitimacy to the fact that these issues even exist. And if they exist, men can no longer be that evil monolith that exists only to be torn down and used as the cause for whatever is wrong with the world.

After all, the zero-sum game must be properly reinforced with an appropriate evil that cannot be allowed to have any weaknesses or redeeming attributes.

Every single member of ICE needs to be arrested and put on trial as a traitor and a terrorist.

• According to the church, babies are without sin. If they die at birth, they go straight to heaven.
• Abortion was illegal at the time.
• Contraception was not widely available at the time, heavily discouraged by the church, and was still very primitive and hit-and-miss.
• There were far more unwed mothers having babies than couples who couldn’t have children, but wanted them.

1+1=2.

“Papers, please” - just like Soviet Russia and the other Soviet-bloc countries.

Hey nice, journalism with a backbone!

If only more news orgs in America could import that.

But then, it would probably be blocked by TACO tariffs.

deleted by creator

Imagine if a carmaker sold a premium vehicle with a polished metal and glass exterior that you had to protect under a vinyl wrap to keep it from rusting and chipping under normal use… they’d be a laughing stock!

tesla cybertruck wanders into chat, spots comment, slinks quietly back out with a red face

I would likely go case-less if it wasn’t for my dry hands, and the occasional need to have my phone sit on my leg (while I am driving) so I can go hands-free with it.

My problem is that any phone without a case (and about 99.999% of cases out there) has the phone being as slippery as an enraged hagfish. It literally leaps out of my hands with most operations, which is why I need a case – to grip it effectively.

And now with my iPhone 15 pro max, I have been in a desperate search for any case which is sticky enough. As in: with the phone in the case, place it face-up on your open palm without gripping it and tilt your palm 30-45°. If it slides off, the case is too slippery. I’ve had sticky cases before, but it seems that everyone suddenly stopped making them some time after the iPhone X.

A mirror of Anna’s Archive.

Information is meant to be free.

…And it’s bound to be stupidly expensive.

Wish I could afford 20 of them, but not without winning the Powerball.

but you’d already be hard pressed to read the data off a deck of punch cards or reel of magnetic tape

Even something like a 3¼″ floppy is getting hard to find a drive for, because not many USB drives were made, and non-USB drives need a motherboard with floppy compatibility. Which would be more than a decade old by this point.

And I self-host precisely because of the money I save using surplussed hardware. I have a symmetrical 1Gb SOHO fibre connection from my ISP, so I can host whatever the hell I want, I just need to stand it up. And a beefy older system with oodles of RAM is perfect for spinning up VMs of various platforms for various tasks. This saves me craploads of money over even a single VM on cloud platforms like Vultr. Plus, even if I were to support a “heavy” service sufficiently in demand to warrant its own iron, it still costs me less than a year’s worth of hosting to obtain a decent platform for that service to run on all by it’s lonesome.

My only cloud costs end up being those services which are distributed for redundancy and geographical distance, such as DNS and caching CDNs.

the key is to simply seed all of your content for as long as you have it in your collection.

Tell that to TheGeeks. If you aren’t actively uploading - not just sitting there sharing, but actively sending data to anyone else - you’ll eventually be warned, then banned.

Back when I was trying to use their site, they had only one system: strict 1 ratio on a time limit. If you couldn’t maintain a 1+ ratio, and achieve it within a very limited amount of time, it didn’t matter what you grabbed or how long you shared back out, you got banned. At the time they had no other way to get ratio other than sharing back out - no freeleech, nothing. Which meant if you were wanting any content more than 2-3 HOURS old, you were looking at a ratio shortfall because there was no way to make up that ratio you were losing by downloading that content. There were simply too few peers after you to overcome the masses of seeders ahead of you satisfying peers.

It was absolutely brutal, which is why I now refuse to deal with any sites with that rule (1+ ratio with time limit) even if they have other ways (freeleech, etc.) to mitigate it. Like, f**k those sites. I’ve been seeding some torrents for close to 15 years, I have no problem letting shit remain resident in my client. So sites like MyAnonamouse it’s going to have to remain.

If you are talking about sites that have a strict, non-negotiable seeding ratio requirement, it is impossible. Your only real long-term option is to write a script that will grab everything that gets uploaded on a 30-second cadence, and then aggressively super-seed that content back out. And this is regardless of what it is - this script runs 24/7, doing about 2,880 hits on the website a day for new content. Still, even with the script it will be difficult to have your overall ratio exceed more than about 1.5-2, and you may still get banned for individual seeds that never exceed 1 because no-one is very interested in them.

I have tried to use sites that have strict ratio minimums, and long-term success is impossible without an edge like the script I mentioned. It’s why I now work with sites - like myanonamouse - that have minimum seeding times for everything you grab, regardless if anyone else needs it. They tend to be far less stressful and user-hostile.

We have high technology because we don’t have anything else to leverage.

I suspect a world with strong magic is liable to leverage that to the exclusion of technology.

A now-ended iseki story on Reddit’s HFY subreddit called “Wait, is this just GATE?” Asks the question of what would happen if a universe of only technology and no magic (ours) made contact with a universe of pretty much only magic and almost no technology beyond that found in the Middle Ages. It contains some tropes (used mainly as comedic relief or irony) and plenty of references to current magical-universe plot elements from games and novels, but is a surprisingly fresh and compelling examination of the cross-universe idea.