None of us is here by choice

I have researched the existing options, and it seems like one must trade so much convenience for privacy that I would be in favor of Signal, even though it certainly has problems. If only I had the power to convince the people I mostly chat with to switch too.

I wish for this nighttime to last for a lifetime

It is so funny to see people call Telegram a private and secure messenger; ironically, for many users, it kind of is given what the alternatives known to them are.

Winter is weird cause going outside sucks when it is cold but also once I am outside, I have the motivation to move and get things done quickly but also once I get home, I am spent and basically hibernating.

I want to see the core plot of Melancholia revisited but in a less philosophical and more hard sci-fi sense. Particularly, the tidal effects on the atmosphere, the oceans, and the Earth itself would make for a somewhat unconventional but spectacular catastrophe.

Everyone wants to believe. It the Second Coming, or the AGI singularity, or the Revolution, or the destruction of the Earth and death of everyting. Something that will solve the problems. I am getting the impression that there is some kind of fundamental bug in human firmware responsible for that.

that holly jolly

Pretty sure I've seen this person on Cohost, and her entire blog was just nudes

Presumably to add to the confusion since people still roultinely call X Twitter

On second thought, this isn't even a matter of privacy. After all, the marketplace has all the information about the customers' purchase history and spending habits no matter what, and from what I got, there is no indication that any other data was taken into account. So what is it then...

I've also seen this done with clipped idols with the added benefit of being able to get launched in just about any direction, but pretty sure that got patched at some point.

I found out that by stacking guttermen, killing them all, and then ground-slamming their clipped corpses, you can launch V1 at such speed that you will start to see some floating point jitter before he starts to fall back down. So, naturally, I tried to test it with a couple hundred guttermen...

Ultrakill screenshot: the camera pointing downwards into the grass, the Marksman revolver selected. Cheats enabled: Spawning arm, No weapon cooldown, Enemies ignore player

It ultradied :/

Inchresting.

Makes me wonder,

1. If better online privacy would make it more difficult to instantiate these practices

2. What other companies (online marketplaces, ticket sellers) do this exact thing, and not just in the US but everywhere

Update: you can fool this nonsense by pointing the camera at the face on the screen. Takes some patience but it works. Just use some old dude from stock photos or an actor's photo or smth like that.

Also, just noticed that YouTube now lets you manually set your country but that, obviously, doesn't change anything

Screenshot of YouTube age verification page that is supposed to be taking a selfie but instead there is just a loading animation

Nvm, this stupid selfie page doesn't even work.

Using a selfie: Select “Take a selfie” on the verification screen. Your device’s camera will scan your facial features. A specialized algorithm analyzes your facial structure to estimate your age. The system is not trying to identify who you are; this is not facial recognition. Instead, it’s looking for general markers of age, such as the distance between features, bone structure, and skin texture. As Google says, your device controls this process, and the selfie itself is not uploaded to Google’s servers. However, only an estimated age, e.g., “over 18”, is sent back to complete the verification. As a result, your face biometric data never leaves your phone, which reduces the risk of it being stored or breached.

Yep, just as I expected. Although, I wonder if showing this thing a picture on the screen will fool it. Gonna try it rn

YouTube video by The Collector "Age Verification" is an Actual (AI) Scam

Oh, and that fake-ass system refuses to verify your age until you provide every single way of verification available EVEN IF YOU ARE MONETIZED.

Even if you have already provided your ID and your credit card and they have already been confirmed by humans.

This is a scam.

youtu.be/THRiTBHZwDI

The latter is especially bullshit because I am neither in the US nor using a US server.

They seem to have changed the 'verification' methods to make it slightly harder to pass an AI-generated old dude as a selfie, so not sure what I can do here.

YouTube video by Layna This Game Was BANNED on Steam... So I Had To Try It

PSA:

1. Videos about Horses the Banned Game get age-restricted

2. Now I know why YouTube obsessively (and since a few days ago, successfully) tries to guess the users' actual location bc VPNs no longer work to bypass verification.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=8G1O...

If you know someone doing diy, no you don’t

Here's the shark. Looks a bit less ridiculous, I must admit.

The image from www.georgiaaquarium.org/animal/tasse...

GOOSEFISH

This picture has been making the rounds again, and is being misidentified again.

This is a GOOSEFISH.

This is NOT a tasselled wobbegong shark.

It’s a great pic. I get why people are very excited about it. But it’s as easy to give it the right name as the wrong one.

fullfact.org/online/tasse...

...therefore the computer is a perfect tool to make decisions for which a human would, ideally speaking, face criminal charges.

there isn't really a "right" way to engage with retro tech but being able to divorce yourself from nostalgia and not blindly treating that nostalgia as a universal, shared experience are important skills to have. this is one of those cases; a *lot* of people at the time hated what w98 represented

I had to google what 'protected belief' stands for in the lingo and was disappointed but not surprised.

Note: For more on the implementation details of the Vec<T> type, see “The Rustonomicon”.

I think I am being indoctrinated

Also, it may not be the smartest idea to use an ancient HDD that makes suspicious squeaking and crackling noises when working for backups, but then again, that is the one thing that by definition, duplicates data that exists elsewhere, so it is probably the one possible use case for such device.

Speaking of backups,

what folders do you people back up besides /home?

I've seen suggestions to back up

/etc,
/root,
/var,
/usr/local/bin,
/usr/local/sbin,
/var, and
/opt,

but some of that seems only relevant for sysadmins and servers, not PC users.