Crypto is doing kind-of ok. But what about other blockchain apps and startups, or blockchain integrations into every tech imaginable? There were so many popping up, just like there are with AI now. Business models and use-cases that are based solely on the hype of the tech in question, without any consideration about whether it’s actually a good fit for the tech. That is the point, and what it has common with AI and other “buzzwords”.

That you should never use the same password for more than one site, especially some random Chinese eshop. I don’t get why people refuse to use password managers, ffs…

I’m not sure about other countries, but here in Czech we actually have a mandatory subscription, that’s absolutely bullshit.

So far, the law is that if you own any TV or radio, you have to pay monthly fee for public service broadcasters (national Czech TV). It’s bullshit, the channels are full of ads anyway, and the shows they run and create is insultingly bad. Sure, it is important to have public service broadcasters that are not dependent on the state (because state-owned TV is reeaallly bad idea), but FFS can they just reduce costs and stick to news, instead of doing another stupid series, and stop forcing us to pay for something I don’t care about or use?

You could just not pay the fee, if you state you don’t have a TV capable of receiving it (which I don’t). But now, they are changing the law that everyone who has any kind of internet-capable device has to pay the monthly fee, while also rising prices to something like 6 EUR per month. Fuck that and fuck them.

I never managed to get gamescope working on my Nobara. Any docs I should look into?

Ever since I played watchdogs and shadowrun, I wanted to work in cybersecurity, especially as a Red Teamer, which is literally Shadowrun - you run complex ops that have to break in, and steal stuff from largre banks without anyone but the management knowing about the test, with almost nothing being off-limits, as long as it doesn’t cause some kind of damage.

Five years later, I do work as a Red Team Lead. Hpwever, our company was just scrambling to start doing RT since thats the buzzword now, and while we did have amazing pentesters, unfortunately pentesting and Red Teaming requires vastly different skills. Ypu never need to avoid EDRs, write malware with obscure low-level winapi, or even know what kind of IoC ajd detections will a command you run create, when you are doing a pentest.

But since no one knew better, and I love learning and researching new stuff, while also having Red Teaming romabticized, my interrest in it eventually led to me getting a Lead position for the barely scrambling team.

Mind you, I was barely out of being a junipr, with only three years of part time pentesting experience. It was NOT a good idea.

I quickly found out that RT is waaay harder and requires the best of the best from cybersec and maleare development. We didnt have that. Also, turns out that I love to learn now stuff and take on a challenge, but being a Lead also means you are drowning in paperwork and discussions with client, while also everyone from the team doesn’t know what to do and turns to me about what should we do. Which I didn’t know, and barely managed to keep learning it on my own. Our conpany didnt want to give us much time for learning outside of delivery, I was only working parttime, and I was slowly realizing that we don’t have almost any of the skills we need.

We were doing kind of a good job, most of our engagement turned out pretty well, but it was atrocious.

Turns out, I’m not good at managing and planning projects, or leading people. I’m better just as a line member.

My favorite windows update was when I was attending an onsite coding competition hosted my Microsoft. We were all in this large meeting hall that looked like a theater, and we spent first 10 minutes or so at the start of the competition just looking at Windows update, with the Microsoft rep apologizing to us, because his pc decided to do the “Forced update restart you cant postpone any more” literally two minutes into the presentation

I suppose it’s written in a way to sound way worse and alarming than it actually is, due to the upcoming elections. It sounds almost unreal, i mean “EU secret plan to ban any kind of encryption or privacy” can’t be reallistically happening, right?

I know about Chatcontrol, so I wouldn’t be surprised, but this article sounds pretty overblown, to the point of sounding more like a wild conspiracy theory. Does anyone have more resources or info about this, that don’t read like an election ad?

I’m not trying to dismiss or disrespect the author, and I trust that it was written with best intentions, but it’s a really worrying topic about which I’d like to get more information about.

However, thanks for bringing it up, I contacted our local Pirate party about the topic, because they don’t have anything related to crime prevention vs. privacy in their programe. I suppose that I know what the answer would be, but getting a confirmation before I vote for them would definitely be nice.

I’d like to mention one exception, because it took me ages to properly debug.

If your endpoint is serving mirrors for APT, don’t redirect to HTTPS.

APT packages are signed and validated, so there is no need to use TLS. Lot of docker images (such as Kali) do not have root certificates by default, so they can’t use the TLS, because cert validation fails. You also can’t install the certificates, because they install through APT. If your local mirror redirects to https by default, it will break it for people who choose the mirror, which IIRC happens automatically based on what’s closest to you. I think this issue is still there for Czech Kali package mirror, and it took me so long to figure out (because it’s also not an issue for most of the users, since they have different mirrors), so I like mentioning this when talking http/s. It’s an edge case, but one that I find interresting - mostly because it would never occur to me that this can be an issue, when setting up a mirror.

But that was more than a year ago, it may be better now.

Btw, choco (and maybe even winget?) already has a gsudo tool, which implements sudo. It is super handy, and having a native version is definitely better, but before its available, I recommend gsudo.

Depends, assuming a fresh install, can you even create account on win11 without internet access? Last i checked, it wont let you start with local account and requires MS account.

Some kernel anticheats work too, I had no issues playing Helldivers and Hell Let Loose, both of which use EAC. Developers have to enable Linux support, which AFAIK is just one checkbox, so you still get games that don’t allow it (like EVE Vanguard), but most of them are OK.

League and Valorant is a different story, those don’t work.

We’ve had to work in Pharo for our OOP uni course, and it was one of the worse experiences I’ve had in school. Mind you, it was something like 7 years ago, so the language may very well be a lot better now, but the whole “your IDE is the code” felt cubersome, it was buggy and crashed randomly, and in general I spent more time fighting with the IDE than doing something useful.

It was a bad time, but also a great learning experience. Being forced to work in something that IMO sucks is an useful skill, but I never want to see that language again :D

Another one came to my mind - ROBLOX_OOF.mp3 by hbomberguy.

It’s really a wild ride. As traditional with his videos, it starts with a pretty innocent investigation into one of sounds popular on the internet, and then gets into a mindboggling rabbit hole about Tommy Tallarico, the guy behind Video Games Live, and how he accidentally discovered what an insane text-book example of pathological lier he is. It’s funny, and really absurd - I’d recommend it to everyone, because it’s really interesting insight into how bad can it get with pathological liers. It’s a roller coaster, and a really fascinating one. And I also learned that Guiness World Record is a scam and literally only an advertisement business, which I never realised before.

It’s a shame, I really liked Video Games Live, the live recordings of it’s shows are great. Assuming you skip the ego-trip monologues he interupts the concert with.

Down the Rabbit Hole for EVE Online is absolutely amazing. I’ve played the game here and there for quite a long time, and it’s one of my favourite experiences, that is however really hard to put into words.

That game is weird. I still can’t explain why it’s one of the best games I’ve played, but I always keep returning to it and love consuming content about it from time to time. And this document is amazing in explaining how extremely unique and cool the game is in it’s metagame and the stories it generates. The game has it’s problems, but I still think it’s one of the most unique lifestyles in gaming, that nothing ever comes close to. It’s the only MMORPG that’s actually literally roleplay, that basically forces you to roleplay without you even realizing it. Sure, you may not speak in character, but the fleet doctrines, logistics, corp organization, propaganda, corp-politics and everything around it people do - that’s literally roleplaying.

Another one would be B-Movie: Lust & Sound in West-Berlin 1979-1989. This document is really really hard for me to watch, because it’s a subculture that was always really important to me, to the point where I help with event promotions and DJ at local 80s goth/synthpop events and it’s my main hobby. But, since I’m now in my 20s, I’ve missed it. The way internet transformed music subcultures is terrible, especially so the alternative ones, but music consumption in general - sure, it’s really amazing to have every almbum ever in the palm of your hand, but there’s just so many that I don’t know any. If I talk to anyone who started with music with the one MC tape, and each new relleas was something hard to get that you actually treassured, I really envy their relationship with music. And that’s something that’s almost impossible to build in this day and age.

The fact that I’ll never get to experience the scene as it was in the 80s is one of the saddest things for me, and this documentary shows it in really genuine and amazing way.

And then there’s The Social Dillema, about the dangers of social networks. A word of warning from people who worked at large social network companies and left because the way they exploit users got too much for them, and now they are trying to spread the word. I really recommend this for everyone, it’s eye openning and really terrifying. It was one of the first impulses that got me heavy into privacy, and it everyone should see it at least once.

But… They said that privacy is the most important thing for them 0_0 https://about.meta.com/actions/protecting-privacy-and-security/

I’m starting to think that “good code” is simply a myth. They’ve drilled a lot of “best practices” into me during my masters, yet no matter how mich you try, you will eventually end up with something overengineered, or a new feature or a bug that’s really difficult to squeeze into whatever you’ve chosen.

But, ok, that doesn’t proove anything, maybe I’m just a vad programmer.

What made me sceptical however isn’t that I never managed to do it right in any of my projects, but the last two years of experience working on porting games, some of them well-known and larger games, to consoles.

I’ve already seen several codebases, each one with different take on how to make the core game architecture, and each one inevitably had some horrible issues that turned up during bugfixing. Making changes was hard, it was either overengineersled and almost impenetrable, or we had to resort tonugly hacks since there simply wasn’t a way how to do it properly without rewriting a huge chunk.

Right now, my whole prpgramming knowledge about game aechitecture is a list of “this desn’t work in the long run”, and if I were to start a new project, I’d be really at loss about what the fuck should i choose. It’s a hopeless battle, every aproach I’ve seen or tried still ran into problems.

And I think this may be authors problem - ot’s really easy to see that something doesn’t work. " I’d have done it diferently" or “There has to be a better way” is something that you notice very quickly. But I’m certain that watever would he propose, it’d just lead to a different set of problems. And I suspect that’s what may ve happening with his leads not letting him stick his nose into stuff. They have probably seen that before, at it rarely helps.

I had the same issue with gamedev industry, but thankfully Ive very quickly realized that’s how work works, and you usually have a choice - either earn a good living being a code monkey, or find a job in a small company that has passion, but they won’t be able to afford paying you well, or do it in your free time as a hobby. Capitalism and passion doesn’t work together.

So I went to work part-time in cybersecurity, where the money is enough to reasonably sustain me, and use the free time to work on games in my free time. Recently, Ive picked up an amazing second part time job in a small local indie studio that is exactly the kind of environment I was looking for, with passion behind their projects - but they simply can’t afford to pay a competitive wage. But I’m not there for the money, so Ibdon’t mind and am happy to help them. Since there are no investors whose pocket you fill, but the company is owned by a bunch of my friends, I have no issue with being underpaid.

But it’s important to realize this as soon as possible, before trying to make a living with something you’re passionate about will burn you out. A job has one purpose - earn you a living. Companies will exploit every single penny they can out of you, so fuck them, don’t give them anything more than a bare minimum, and keep your energy for your own projects.

And be carefull with trying to earn a living on your own - because whatever you do, no matter how passionate are you, if it’s your only income and your life depends on it, you will eventually have to make compromises to get by. It’s better to keep money separate from whatever you like doing, and just keep your passion pure.

EDIT: Oh, I forgot to mention one important thing - I’m fortunate to not have children, share living costs with a partner, and live in a city with good public transport, so no need for a car, and free healthcare. I suppose that makes it a lot more easier to get by with just a part time.

First thing I did after I got Kagi was to set lower priority for Reddit results. My search experience has been way better ever since.

Max Schrems, the Austrian activist lawyer whose 13-year legal crusade against Meta is what gradually removed those options

I wonder, does anyone know how would one go about acomplishing something like this? One of major websites here in Czech, and a major search engine, has started doing exactly the same thing - pay or agree. And I really don’t like that. Are there organizations you can contact, or do you have to have the resources to just sue them?

What’s really unhinged is the amount of resources invested into gaslighting Meta does. https://about.fb.com/news/2024/01/investing-in-privacy/

They even have a “Chief Privacy Officer”. They have brainwashed entire departments into believing that Meta actually cares about privacy, it’s so terrifying. I wonder if people working there realize that, or they have simply fell for the gaslighting.