I’ve taken an interest in Hyphanet recently too. It’s kind of like an ancient precursor to IPFS (large distributed filesystem + encryption and some anonymity built in). Not many users as far as I know, but I like the idea of it; being extremely censorship resistant (but has all the downsides that entails).

Gotta watch out for tracking identifiers in the URLs too.

It’s definitely possible. I’ve heard the film industry does do this with theatrical releases so they can determine what theater a copy came from (and determine the seat it was recorded from by the angle). I don’t really share images/video anonymously though, so don’t think about it much. When I rarely do, I try to check for and strip metadata.

I’ve done this in the past with Raspbian and the official Steam client, and set up Steam to launch in Big Picture mode, and used an X-Box controller to control it. Problem was my PC was old, so games would peg my CPU and give me bad latency due to poor encoding performance on the PC side.

I think it’s like SecondLife or Metaverse for kids. I saw a short video about it, where kids were being exploited for labor. E.g. some of the kids had managers, forcing them to crunch creating and promoting content for Robux, or whatever it’s called. Also saw an interview with the CEO, where he said he’d be open to adding adult content to the game (which is sus considering the problems the game is having with predators). I’ve also noticed the game is rated for teenagers on the Play Store, but I’m pretty sure it’s targeted toward younger kids.

Peertube, but requires taking care of monetization/donations themselves, and possibly needing to run their own instance(?). Discovery sucks (I think Peertube may be anti-algo similar to Mastodon) so they’ll have to take care of promoting themselves as well.

I think Nebula is a creator-owned platform, so very hard to get into. I’ve also seen that their privacy policy is not good.

All the crazy colors and styles originally happened to sell “self expression” because the culture was becoming more anti consumption. Advertisements for most things used to be more matter-of-fact, then they started focussing on manipulating emotions to sell more shit. I guess now the culture is more pro-consumption and status-obsessed, so conformity is what sells now.

You can buy cheap Chinese walkie-talkies that can transmit on ham bands. Yagi antennas are directional antennas that can be used for triangulation.

The fantasy tech didn’t really bother me, but the pacing of the show was too slow for me.

Not enough room in the GPU machine for all the HDDs I needed.

Also who got millions of photos at home?

People working on biological datasets.

If the corporate VPNs keep logs and allow government access, they will be allowed. That’s how it works in some (authoritarian) countries.

I believe China does statistical analysis to do stuff like detecting and blocking VPNs, suspicious looking ssh traffic, etc from home Internet connections not going to an approved business. It’s my understanding it’s very hard to get around the GFW at the moment, and pretty complex stuff is needed to mask VPN traffic to make it look normal (Project X, Xray, Reality, etc).

Rsync, syncthing, backups, mp3s, photos, json files; idk, a lot of tasks involve large amounts of small files. I personally ran into this problem training models on millions of photos. My GPUs would only get up to 25% utilization with mirrored HDDs, so I had to switch to SSDs.

Edit: the difference is also significant when compiling large projects or just using git. I imagine some game servers need a lot of random accesses too.

HDDs have horrible random access times, so if you need to process or just copy a lot of small files, say photos, there’s a significant penalty.

IDK, it seems almost transparent to me those in control of the US are doing a racketeering-like thing to solicit bribes, and doing whatever whoever bribes them the most wants. They aren’t thinking on a national level, just personal; and would burn the US or any other country to the ground to gain more power and wealth.

All the open hardware and software and ecosystem was pretty cool. It was cool you could just buy hats, or whatever they’re called, to add functionality, rather than designing a custom PCB and spending hundreds of dollars to get a few boards made and populated. I’m not a fan of their software stack or their choice of uC’s, but they did make it easy to just kind of plug stuff together in hardware and software.

Alibaba has released Qwen models under Apache licenses (and they are some of the best models that can reasonably be ran locally). Some argue that models aren’t really open source unless the training code and datasets are made available though.

I tend to prefer creators who do the donation model (e.g. Patreon). The advertisement and sponsorship models create bad incentives. The donation model can too, but it’s preferable, IMO.

Yeah, I have a node that’s just a RAK Wisblock kit just hooked up to a USB power adapter and taped together. Works great. Looks like the ESP based boards are a bit cheaper, and should be fine if you don’t need to run off battery (they use considerably more current).

I think ublock origin hides that for me (might need to enable cookie notices lists if it doesn’t).