When I wanted my current server to be available for more experimental loads I decided I needed a new machine and at that time all hdds had gone up in price, but a package of ds225+ with 2x16TB had not yet been price increased so I got the NAS “for free”.
I would’ve repurposed an old gaming machine otherwise.
Worth looking for those kind of “deals” where someone has forgotten to increase a bundle price.

If you want a privacy focused VPN then Mullvad is great.
If you want one for torrents then it’s no good.

I find it harder to believe someone can rate any of these monsters as sexually attractive:

But with those it would be very easy to let then rate a whole bunch of monsters where only one of the variables differ - such as penis size.

Section 9 - The Engineering Mindset was an interesting part of the article.

edit: Published online by Cambridge University Press: 01 August 2009
This is an ooold paper

The proportion of engineers who declare themselves to be on the right of the political spectrum is greater than in any other disciplinary group: 57.6 % of them are either conservative or strongly conservative, as compared to 51.1 % of economists, 42.5 % of doctors and 33.5 % of scientists, 21.4 % of those in the humanities, and 18.6 % of the social scientists, the least right-wing of all disciplinary groups.
[…]
The Carnegie survey reveals an even more surprising fact, hitherto unnoticed, that strengthens the suspicion that the engineers’ mindset may play a part in their proneness not only to radicalise to the right of the political spectrum, but do so with a religious slant: engineers turn out to be by far the most religious group of all academics – 66.5 %, followed again by 61.7 % in economics, 49.9 % in sciences, 48.8 % of social scientists, 46.3 % of doctors and 44.1 % of lawyers.
[…]
One could question whether this mindset is unique to academic engineers. The answer is likely to be negative: similar results are found on the political and religious opinions of students, both for “un-socialised” beginners in the first four semesters and more advanced ones.
[…]
Still, one could further object, the phenomenon could be uniquely American. Some old evidence suggests that at least the right-wing bias occurs in the Middle East: a 1948 survey of 3,890 Cairo University students recorded the highest sympathies for fascist ideology among engineering students (Botman Reference Botman1984, p. 70). A survey of Canadian professors also found that engineers are the least liberal of all (Nakhaie and Brym Reference Nakhaie and Brym1999).

Unfortunately, non-US data that would allow us to combine political and religious attitudes are of much lesser quality.
[…]
The results from 2,816 cases in 16 mostly Western countries show that engineers were not more religious than other graduates and only insignificantly to the right of them. However, the combination of the two characteristics occurred far more often among engineers than the null hypothesis of non-correlation would predict – the only professional category in which this happened. Whereas based on individual scores on religiousness and right-wing attitudes we expected 9.4 % of engineers to share both attributes, 13.9 %, actually did (significant at 0.05).

I mean they have added a chatbot to their website and I’m sure they have replaced overseas first line support in many products with chatbots as well to encourage their customers to give up on getting support (and ensure that the customers that prevails and get sent to a human coworker are sufficiently pissed off).

“They ruthlessly cut costs, R&D, and employee benefits and then replace existing employees with overseas contractors. Innovation and growth take a back seat to sheer profitability.”

This is the operating manual that explains why IgniteTech’s much-publicized AI purge feels more like a familiar private-equity play.
[…]
IgniteTech is owned by ESW. For anyone who’s watched the ESW orbit, that vagueness is not accidental. ESW’s playbook, summarized in a long explanatory dossier that has circulated inside the industry, is blunt: buy distressed software, strip costs, move work to an hourly contractor model through a unit like Crossover (which has been described in Forbes as a “global software sweatshop”), and squeeze recurring revenue out of an existing customer base rather than invest in new products.

• https://aimmediahouse.com/market-industry/ignitetech-didnt-fire-80-for-ai-it-fired-them-for-profits

Meanwhile I’m hoping for the technology to get more efficient and require less compute to achieve worthwhile results.
I’d rather have a small specialised local language model that knows everything about a small field, f.e. vegetarian cooking recipes or maintenance and repair of <specific car model>, but nothing about anything else.
I’m just not comfortable with giving all my data to a generalised large language model running on someone else’s computer.

Most of the old settings are at least easily reached if you can remember their names such as ncpa.cpl for the settings you mention but when you write “control printers” you get sent into the new Settings view now. Instead you gotta go to the control panel and change view from category to small or large icons to finally right click Devices and Printers and choose “open in a new window” to get there. If you left click it you get sent to the new Settings view.

Ah, I always associate my .txts with notepad++ - notepad.exe is only started from Win+R as a temporary clipboard.

Have they removed the option to disable the alias and bring back the old notepad.exe?

Interesting, it seems that while IronFox has the protections activated by default (and with some changes) you can also activate most of them on Firefox.
https://github.com/ironfox-oss/IronFox/blob/dev/docs/Features.md#fingerprinting

Ironfox Devs themselves say that the only browser that can truly protect you against fingerprinting is the Tor Browser.
https://github.com/ironfox-oss/IronFox/blob/dev/docs/Limitations.md

Do you feel IronFox breaks many sites for you?

I definitely understand your view and personally don’t see a way to disrupt the market either. I just hope someone else finds a way.

Ah - there’s your problem. VC companies simply don’t do that.

They most certainly do and then either cash in by selling to the next more risk adverse VC or sells it at a loss if they believe the company failed to disrupt the market.

When is the next VC driven company that focuses more on growth than profit coming? I feel Netflix and all the other streaming services are ripe to be overtaken in the same way Netflix overtook tv channel packaging.

Yeah, my morning brain was trying to say that when it is used as a tool by someone that can validate the output and act upon it then it’s often good. When it is used by someone who can’t, or won’t, validate the output and simply uses it as the finished product then it usually isn’t any good.

Regarding your friend learning to use the terminal I’d still recommend validating the output before using it. If it’s asking genAI about flags for ls then sure no big deal, but if a genAI ends up switching around sda and sdb in your dd command resulting in a wiped drive you only got yourself to blame for not checking the manual.

I find that an extremely simplified way of finding out whether the use of an LLM is good or not is whether the output from it is used as a finished product or not. Here the human uses it to identify possible errors and then verify the LLM output before acting and the use of AI isn’t mentioned at all for the corrections.

The only danger I see is that errors the LLM didn’t find will continue to go undiscovered, but they probably would be undiscovered without the use of the LLM too.

For wifi what you can do to break free from the proprietary black box “mesh” networks is to build it youself using openwrt. I’d only recommend it if you find learning networking fun, not a chore, as it takes some fiddling.
https://openwrt.org/docs/guide-user/network/wifi/roaming

Having a pfsense between your LAN and the ISP means the ISP won’t know as much about your LAN devices, they are usually the true admin of the ISP router and can see what it sees.

I imagine you’ve run factory reset on the switches you bought second hand, should be enough.

Bonus: If you want to break ip cameras free check out https://thingino.com/ and https://frigate.video/

I played around with https://coveryourtracks.eff.org/ and realized that I’m quite unique whether I allow js or not. Many trackers get blocked by the absence of js though so that would hamper them somewhat.
My Sony phone with 21:9 screen ensures I’m uncommon compared to most.

My goal isn’t to be untrackable but to block the ads they try to shove in your face as step 2.

Particularly owners of custom domains, do you find your custom domain is allowed more often than not or do you run into the same problem?

I’ve never had my own custom domain be blocked for signing up at a service personally.

Not sure what you’re quoting but in Sweden the Mobile BankID is used as a digital ID on company sites and apps too, so even with a physical bank security device that gives you access to your bank website you’re still locked out of a lot of services in Sweden.