At least to me, Overwolf is the third or fourth iteration, following acquisitions, buyouts, restructurings, etc. The original FTB launcher worked perfectly fine. It’s mostly just obnoxious now and I make sure not to have it running in the background. No direct rent-seeking behavior just yet, I don’t have an account on there and it’s not a problem.

Right now I have it on my computer just use it to update packs that are only available there and then yoink them straight into MultiMC.

AFAIK it is owned by Curse and I guess those guys make most of their money from those godawful wikis and their ads.

I thought I’d check this before posting it, and it turns out it’s the other way around. Overwolf bought Curse. Worse, Overwolf is a company based out of Tal Abib… that’s two discoveries in one day. I was looking into getting a CaribouMini until I learned where that comes from. Less than two hundred kilometers away from me as the missile crow flies (and sadly, has flown). Great. Fucking great.

The shitty thing is that a lot of cool pack creators only publish through Overwolf, so I don’t want to delete it just yet, but I don’t like this at all. At best a minor security risk, at worst I don’t even want to know. I just thought it was just some shitty ad company’s Curse buyout as a billboard for more ads. For all the issues I might have with Nexus Mods, I don’t think they’re quite this bad. Concerning that this is the de facto standard repository of MC mods.

Did all my urgent housework on Friday evening. Got up at 8:30 AM. No sleeping in today, I have a game I want to play, and I’m going to spend a leisurely day that I’ve dedicated to it.

It’s now 8 PM. My computer is still off. I don’t even know what I did all day.

I think I should have been more clear, this is exactly what I’m asking about. I’m somewhat surprised by the reaction this post got, this seems like a very normal thing to want to host.

Doesn’t help that some people here are replying as if I was asking to locally host the “trick” that is feeding a chatbot text and asking it whether it’s machine-generated. Ideally the software I think I’m looking for would be something that has a bank of LLM models and can kind of do some sort of statistical magic to see how likely a block of tokens is to be generated by them. Would probably need to have quantized models just to make it run at a reasonable speed. So it would, for example, feed the first x tokens in, take stock of how the probability table looks for the next token, compare it to the actual next token in the block, and so on.

Maybe this is already a thing and I just don’t know the jargon for it. I’m pretty sure I’m more informed about how these transformer algorithms work than the average user of them, but only just.

Oh that’s a good point. I have only ever encountered these on Lemmy or similar places where you are clearly clicking a link that starts with “xn——————“ and then seeing how it ties together on my phone’s browser.

Maybe we shouldn’t be using these. I did find myself looking at domains with emojis in them, weirdly enough for someone who doesn’t use or really like them. But the fact that this extends to basically any Unicode character is an absolute security black hole.

Unless the standard is extended to have more guardrails/to make it impossible to resolve domains with the most egregious fake characters. Or better, to make characters interchangeable the same way domains aren’t case-sensitive.

The learning curve for understanding the actual web and its protocols looks more and more insurmountable to me every day lol

Good thing I gave this thread a quick scroll before joking about feeling represented properly here as a non queer person by the boring plain beige one.

Welcome to today’s 10,000. Today’s episode is about Punycode. It’s basically a standardized way of putting unusual characters in a domain name.

The way the link is shown in your interface/client, it’s giving you the encoded version that looks nonsensical. But if you click on it, the link in your browser’s address bar will more likely render properly.

I’ve seen this done with URLs that contain emojis, this one contains katakana (?) characters.

This might be the best way to go about it. Wireguard has an iOS client and it should be easy to set up. I’ve done this for dumber devices, should be okay.

Or frankly, some others here are mentioning that logging in to one service doesn’t automatically log you into all of them. So maybe I’d be giving my family member more flexibility by not limiting them to a small number of servers as defined in the configs, since each one needs a file and picking among them is annoying if there’s an issue.

That said, going from 5 euro a month for Mullvad to 5 + 10 to add Proton does add up, and to be honest, a second free Proton address and a second Mullvad subscription (and investing in a more local solution instead of getting tied down to Proton Drive) might be better for me.

But I haven’t made any decisions just yet. The 500GB of storage might just end up swaying me.

I feel like the dialogue in the last panel is unnecessary.

I’m sorry I didn’t namedrop enough purveyors of tendies after the first bit to keep your attention all the way to the end of my post. I can do all the privacy stuff in the world but if that gets me thrown into a cell for suspicion of espionage, because of how uncommon (ie suspicious) it has become to not sell your soul to the worst companies on earth, then how has that helped me.

The commercial internet exists and we have to know how to interface with it, and to be able to do so on our own terms. Most Fedi instances are hosted on commercial rack space, does this make both of us hypocrites for not exclusively hosting our own micro-instances with blanket IP bans on every hyperscaler?

If you use VPNs then you are still playing pretend.

This tells me all I need to know. What even compels you people to write like this, there’s no way you don’t know better.

I kind of get what they mean. Sure the physical infrastructure is pretty decentralized, and sure we’re not as dependent on overbuilt East Coast data centers outside the US. But digital infrastructure still revolves around the US, and most large hardware vendors are joined by the hip to US IP law and stuff like that.

As for me, even if I do believe that the modern financial system doesn’t reflect reality, “the money is fake” and all that, I know that an AI bubble meltdown will fuck my country over just because of how sensitive we are to anything the US does. We had the gold reserves and our own bubble to cushion us in 2008, now I don’t know what might happen.

There’s a saying around here that translates to (and “it” here is understood to be some sort of catastrophe): “If it gets pregnant in China, it gives birth in Lebanon”. Basically a grotesque, nihilistic interpretation of the butterfly effect. “Any disaster that brews elsewhere is about to occur here.” Although writing it out in English makes it look like some sort of Western immigration brainrot slogan.

I’ll definitely reach out. Just knowing the culture of HAM radio though, I feel like it’s a coin toss whether they’ll be happy to give advice to a godless miniaturized-digital-Aliexpress-SDR seeker such as myself.

Et tu, Phoenix Jones?

It’s a weird situation. I think there is an amateur radio club, although last I checked their website it was last updated a few years ago.

I just looked. Latest update is from 2018, it’s about a licensing exam. I guess I could get certified, but it’s anyone’s guess if they’re still holding exams. Every single ministry is broke at the moment, so non-essential services like amateur radio licensing doesn’t seem like something they’d be doing. But I can call them directly and see.

Sorry if this seems condescending or patronizing to point out, but getting a license isn’t a solution if one person in charge gets a bad impression of you or what you’re doing. Maybe where you are, showing an officer a license can make a big difference. I can theoretically get full licensing and pull every possible string to get explicit permission from the Ministry to do anything within reason. But one army official can look at a LoRa deployment or an antenna they’ve never seen before and call me in for questioning. It looks like espionage. My computers are encrypted and I network exclusively through VPNs. Not a good look for someone who claims to have nothing to hide, eh? That’s what I was going for towards the end of my post.

I should look into it, but given the security situation at this moment I’d be poking a bear. Not a sleeping bear, a scarred, paranoid one.

I really do think there’s a very definite before and after. At one point he seemed to figure out exactly the cadence and wording that young men especially wanted out of a wisdom-giving father figure. I think he got a lot of mileage out of whining about that one Canadian law proposal at a time when transgendery things were (for better or for worse) less understood by most people. So even if you were sympathetic to them, there was a chance that what he was describing would raise your eyebrow. Didn’t matter that the narrative he was peddling was pretty much fiction.

And then COVID broke his brain, and he was suddenly terrible at hiding his power level. I think selling increasingly political books titled “All you need to do to live (part 4, final, this is the last one I promise)” and “All you need to do to live (part 5, okay no this one is the last one)” also tired another part of his audience.

Right now most of the people who looked up to him at the time, even those who both are (and acknowledge) that they are right wing, think he’s lost the plot.

It’s not a great reassurance that those who let go of him may still have probably been swayed net-rightward by his stuff. But his spiral and widespread perception as a laughing stock, and as a clear example of lack of moral integrity on the right, that’s also a factor. His red crying mug in his messy room is a meme on its own now. This is what he really is: a pompous, pontificating, fragile prick who can’t even use the good parts of his advice for his own sake. Even if it’s as simple as touching grass and cleaning up your shit.

At one point in my life, during his rise, I had a vaguely positive view of him, and I even bought his book. I viewed myself squarely as an open minded liberal person, and thought of him as relatively moderate. I come from an extremely conservative (in some ways) part of the world, so no alarm bells rang. But with continued learning and meeting new people I was able to rebuild a much more robust and morally sound view of the world and how it works. I recognized how caustic a lot of my beliefs that he influenced me actually are. One of the few things I miss from the old site is /r/ExLobster, it was so enlightening to see how many others went through the same process I did with this guy. It also took off the edge from the embarrassment I felt about falling into this in the first place. I was just vulnerable to his shit at that point in my life and there’s no shame in picking yourself up and moving forward. Then COVID happened, and while he put himself in a coma and wrecked his brain, my country had a multidimensional meltdown, and I did charitable work and mutual aid work and came out the other side with a radically new and solid foundation for my beliefs.

But you know what was the tipping point for me? It’s a very silly little thing I saw, I don’t recall particularly when. I intentionally avoided his subreddit because I thought I was an enlightened centrist who was above those weird right wingers who dominated that community. But I opened it on a whim once. And someone was asking about “Jordan-Peterson ideology compatible Anime”. Not sure what the exact words were. But there you go. Sometimes you need to see a word salad like that to see how ridiculous the company you’re keeping actually is.

I think he’s a fascinating case study of the grift economy. I genuinely think that if he was truly the conservalib old-soul psychology professor with an interest in the way Christian theology and vague folktale cosmology influence modern worldviews and narratives, he would definitely be someone I’d pay attention to. At least for his areas of expertise.

But we know now that he was always mad as a hatter, that he was trying to get famous a decade before he actually did, and that his actual beliefs don’t deserve an iota of public recognition. That the ways he couched them are the sum total of what he was bringing to the table.

The mythological Jordan Peterson isn’t necessarily a bad guy, the original character, as played in like 2016. The actual one is a pathetic, and now failed cult of personality grifter, an enabler of great evil.

I hope he feels a fraction of the pain he has caused before he kicks it.

Fucking DEI programs and their checks notes combined arms warfare and counterinsurgency strategies!

(Even using this verbiage straight faced without a ton of asterisks gives the US the benefit of the doubt lol)

Thing is, even with how bafflingly evil Google is, the one corporate service I could see myself paying for is the YouTube subscription. I use the phone app a lot, it would make sense for me.

The problem is that they’re notoriously ban-happy with paying VPN users, due to some of them using their exit countries to pay less for a service. Thing is, if I tried to pay for premium from a country I’d exit from, I’d be paying more compared to where I am. I’m perfectly content overpaying slightly for a few things online with this situation, I don’t buy much, I’m fine. I also don’t know where the line is. If I pay for my account with a card from my IRL location, using the pricing for said location, will I get my account suspended after I jump back on the VPN? It’s not like they’ll publicly announce a clear breakdown of what is and isn’t okay.

Google knowing I use a public VPN on Google services is not an issue for me. I don’t do anything sketchy, I really just want an uncensored internet out of the eye of my ISP.

It’s the most popular sporting event on the planet in a country with 300 million people, this is nothing like the Club World Cup that was held this year. The lack of tourists might not be a problem, save for maybe atmosphere.

This chart, with the huge ticket prices, is why the US was chosen.

Interested in knowing what they posted. I feel like I was the only Lebanese regular on Lemmy/Piefed, or at least the only vocal one, until a few months ago.

I don’t know what either of you are talking about. This is the logical conclusion of Reagan and the continued hyper-Hollywoodization of what America is in the public consciousness, both in the US and where the rest of us live.

I read American literature. I watch American movies. I listen to American music. I wear blue jeans, I prepare <US City Name>-Chicken, and I speak with a simulated American affect (better than I speak my own language). And I live in a country that (frankly) has suffered a lot more than it has gained from America (and its rabid lapdog for the most part). And yet intellectually, my instinctive understanding of the US is not a graveyard of natives, it’s not a modern prison slave society, it’s not the largest private army in the world, it’s not what’s funded the ongoing terrorism, mass murder, and annexation of my own country (not the biggest crime in the spree but this is evil too), it’s not a christofascist corporate-captured company-town-continent with nothing but a paper-thin porous veneer of progressive values and freedom. It’s a nebulously positive place that every piece of media I have ever seen has urged me to move to. The American Dream has been seeped into my brain since the day I was taught the letter A in nursery. A nice fantasy sure. But pure fiction. All circus, no bread.

This situation is not an indictment of “how far it’s gotten”. This is precisely the world your country has created for itself.

I don’t want to come off as unnecessarily cynical, I have a genuine curiosity and fascination with the American experiment. Some part of me still wants it to work, some part of me still feels compelled by it, by the prospect of being a part of it. But like…. Guys. Come on. Take a good look in the mirror.

I remember seeing this or something like it before. I know it’s good for the cow, but still, freaky to see.