networking aldalire • 4 weeks ago • 100%

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.dbzer0.com/post/26553762 > How can I use my VPNs port forwarding feature while also disabling global routing by adding “route-nopull” in the OpenVPN config? Using hide.me vpn > > I found a relevant post, but the links to the anwsers don't work anymore: https://forum.netgate.com/topic/127557/openvpn-client-port-forwarding-route-nopull-issue

Piracy: ꜱᴀɪʟ ᴛʜᴇ ʜɪɢʜ ꜱᴇᴀꜱ aldalire • 4 weeks ago • 88%

How can I use my VPNs port forwarding feature while also disabling global routing by adding “route-nopull” in the OpenVPN config? Using hide.me vpn I found a relevant post, but the links to the anwsers don't work anymore: https://forum.netgate.com/topic/127557/openvpn-client-port-forwarding-route-nopull-issue

Piracy: ꜱᴀɪʟ ᴛʜᴇ ʜɪɢʜ ꜱᴇᴀꜱ aldalire • 4 weeks ago • 87%

(i’m also gonna ambush my friends about Signal on sunday and coerce them to download it to get rid of the green bubbles)

Piracy: ꜱᴀɪʟ ᴛʜᴇ ʜɪɢʜ ꜱᴇᴀꜱ aldalire • 1 month ago • 100%

How do you use BiglyBT to discover I2P torrents from different trackers? I tend to just go to postman.i2p and discover torrents there, but I want a way to discover torrents using BiglyBT and I2P. I know that BiglyBT has DHT capabilities, does that work over the I2P network to discover torrents (Perhaps through Swarm Discovery?) Any seasoned captains out there?

Piracy: ꜱᴀɪʟ ᴛʜᴇ ʜɪɢʜ ꜱᴇᴀꜱ aldalire • 1 month ago • 96%

I was looking for ways to bypass the Chegg blur. I came across this reddit thread (https://archive.is/Z4r5c#selection-2584.0-2584.1) and one of the comments read: "There used to be a website (probably 5 years ago) that’d scrape answers when you post the link. I can’t remember the name though, but hopefully someone else here is privy to it (if it still exists)." The comment underneath was removed by reddit, but I can't help but think that the link removed by reddit might be this website. Fuck reddit btw, glad we're in this ship now. Anyone here know which site they mentioned?

Monero aldalire • 1 month ago • 81%

Crap, i forgot about last week. Time for another Skepticism Sunday! ### Stay on topic: - This thread is only for comments discussing the uncertainties, shortcomings, and concerns some may have about **Monero.** - NOT the positive aspects of it. - Discussion can relate to the *technology* itself or its *economics*. - Talk about community and price is not wanted, but some discussion about it maybe allowed if it relates well. - Be as respectful and nice as possible. This discussion has potential to be more emotionally charged as it may bring up issues that are extremely upsetting: many people are not only financially but emotionally invested in the ideas and tools around Monero. --- ### How it works: 1. Post your concerns about Monero in reply to this thread. 2. If you can address these concerns, or add further details to them -- *reply to that comment.* This will make it easily **sort-able.** 3. Upvote the comments that are the *most valid criticisms* of it that *have few or no real honest* solutions/answers to them. 4. The comment that mentions the biggest problems of Monero *should have the most karma.* --- > The first principle is that you must not fool yourself — and you are the easiest person to fool. - [Richard Feynman](https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Richard_Feynman)

Monero aldalire • 2 months ago • 82%

I’m taking on the mantle this week. ### Stay on topic: - This thread is only for comments discussing the uncertainties, shortcomings, and concerns some may have about **Monero.** - NOT the positive aspects of it. - Discussion can relate to the *technology* itself or its *economics*. - Talk about community and price is not wanted, but some discussion about it maybe allowed if it relates well. - Be as respectful and nice as possible. This discussion has potential to be more emotionally charged as it may bring up issues that are extremely upsetting: many people are not only financially but emotionally invested in the ideas and tools around Monero. --- ### How it works: 1. Post your concerns about Monero in reply to this thread. 2. If you can address these concerns, or add further details to them -- *reply to that comment.* This will make it easily **sort-able.** 3. Upvote the comments that are the *most valid criticisms* of it that *have few or no real honest* solutions/answers to them. 4. The comment that mentions the biggest problems of Monero *should have the most karma.* --- > The first principle is that you must not fool yourself — and you are the easiest person to fool. - [Richard Feynman](https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Richard_Feynman)

Monero aldalire • 2 months ago • 73%

With localmonero shutting down, what would be the challenges of creating a federated version of localmonero? Traders and buyers can have accounts at different servers but still be able to trade each other and see each others' listings. The pros i can see are: It would be harder to stop without a single point of failure, and brave server maintainers can host their services in different jurisdictions to prevent legal troubles. And it would be very difficult to prosecute server admins, as they aren't the creator but merely hosting a site.

Monero aldalire • 3 months ago • 30%

drive.proton.me

No shade at the person Michael Fitzgerald (or Stoic.xmr). He's probably a good person But clearly a better quality book with the same name can be written by a person that understands that the average paragraph contains at least three or four sentences. I can write one. I've never written a book before, but fuck it. What topics would you like to be included in a book titled "Monero Standard"?

Monero aldalire • 3 months ago • 93%

The monero community is building a lot of infrastructure to build a circular economy, and there is a lot of recent developments in that regard, such as xmrbazaar which is a sort of ebay and the sellers accepts monero. This is great. However, how can we penetrate markets outside of the monero economy? I fear that Monero still has the "dangerous hacker crypto which funds terrorism and north korea" reputation, and although while not true, could severely pause monero adoption and hurt us as a community as a whole. We as a community value privacy, but i feel like we need to work together as a community to forge an alternative to the mainstream narrative about privacy coins. I'm thinking something revolutionarily positive, at least in the USA, such as making a charity that gives directly to homeless people, or setting up a decentralized network of people that work together to distribute life saving drugs for cheap (because drug prices are really fricking high here). Privacy coins tend to attract privacy minded people, and privacy minded people won't even touch twitter with a 10 foot pole because of all the injected ads and the tracking, and i respect that. But, one of these days we gotta do something big to break the mainstream narrative. I personally am locked in, I have a girlfriend and two pets and a full time job, but for those that have less to lose and more time and resources to spare for the cause, i say let's fking do it. Anything, man. Let's change society with this thing.

Monero aldalire • 3 months ago • 75%

I've been contemplating about Monero's place in society. If Bitcoin is (debatable) "Digital Gold" then Monero is a non-custodial Digital Offshore Bank Account. There has never been a point in history when there's been a means to hide your wealth perfectly. The possiblities are endless (i've also drank too much coffee this morning). It is a way to break free from the chains of debt. Struggling to pay off your medical debt? Hide all your money in Monero, tell the banks to screw themselves, declare bankruptcy, and rebuild your credit score after the dust settles. Too much student loan debt and afraid they'll come after your money after you default? Hide your money in Monero and tell those vultures in Sally Mae to fuck off. (I skipped a couple steps and important details here and there) Credit card debt? Chapter 7 their asses and they can't touch your money when it's protected by ring signatures lmao get fucked. Of course, you still have to protect your assets such as your house. I haven't tried these strategies out yet, as I still haven't been forced to the brink with my finances. But when the time comes, instead of waiting for the government to implement more robust social safety nets, Monero can protect the wealth I have rightfully earned through my labor. Personally, my father is getting crushed by credit card debt. I think he's paid more interest than the principal amount to those lowlife banker scumbags. Fortunately he's able to survive, but he could be in a better place. Any other scenarios where people can adopt an adversarial strategy against the system? More ways out for people suffering as an economic debt slave? I would like to see a "guide" for this too, a way to more perfectly say fuck you to debt collectors.

Piracy: ꜱᴀɪʟ ᴛʜᴇ ʜɪɢʜ ꜱᴇᴀꜱ aldalire • 3 months ago • 99%

Let's just all stop and appreciate that libgen is a thing in the internet. It has saved me so much money with very overpriced math textbooks during college when my family was low-income. It contains virtually all the books, and even obscure ones. It provides low barriers to entry for knowledge for people wanting to advance their career, and perfect for finding epubs for books to send to my kindle. (I buy physical copies of books, it's just convenient to have a kindle instead of volumes of lord of the rings while travelling) Overall, this is what the internet promised. Fast, easy, universal access to information. It sucks that governments are trying to take it down, and do what governments do best which is to restrict the flow of information and restrict freedom. 10/10, libgen is the best thing in the internet. Long live libgen

Monero aldalire • 3 months ago • 60%

I’m posting this on the Monero sub because ya’ll are chill, the BTC community are occasionally peppered with nuts My friend who’s a Bitcoin maxi has took all his savings and put it in bitcoin, i believe 10k USD more or less. He’s very (almost religiously) certain that bitcoin will skyrocket. I talk, debate and question his beliefs for weeks now, trying to take a nonjudgmental stance (although sometimes i falter), and there are three pieces of “evidence” that he believes Bitcoin will eventually 100k or even 1M 1. The bitcoin standard by Saifadean Ammous, a watered down textbook on Austrian economics that I’ve been reading recently actually. 2. The “Power Law”, basically a regression analysis on Bitcoin’s historic price and adoption, mainly esposed by this dude https://x.com/Giovann35084111 (here’s a youtube vid https://invidious.fdn.fr/watch?v=NxAkZ2tHQko) 3. The “Energy Hypothesis” of bitcoin, he thinks that bitcoin will allow society to capture excess energy generation and make it profitable through mining bitcoin I’ve reviewed these and think it’s flimsy at best. It is under my belief that a store of value can only be feasible when either it is a medium of exchange or if it is backed by something (like fiat paper money, for example) that allows it to be an efficient medium of exchange, none of which applied to bitcoin right now. I even try to suggest him books like Roger Ver’s Hijacking Bitcoin (that I converted from epub to pdf just for him) and he wouldn’t read it because “Ver’s a scammer and got fooled by BCH”. Although I really just think it’s heavy confirmation bias, Ver is indisputably a knowledgeable source for bitcoin (he was an early adopter, he’s “Bitcoin Jesus” for god’s sake, and has a lot of knowledge of the economics behind bitcoin given that he’s a businessman who’s built his businesses on top of bitcoin). Hijacking Bitcoin is an excellent book btw go check out the pdf I posted it a while ago on this sub I’m just looking for advice on how to proceed. It was fun debating and dunking on him but at this point i’m just worried that the bitcoin bubble will burst and he’d lose his savings. It’s one of those occasions where I kinda don’t want to be right in the debate

Piracy: ꜱᴀɪʟ ᴛʜᴇ ʜɪɢʜ ꜱᴇᴀꜱ aldalire • 3 months ago • 100%

github.com

I remember 5 years ago Musescore allowed free downloads of sheet music with an account. Now, I'm trying to get back in to playing the piano, and I was surprised that they're requiring you to pay, so fuck em Pretty easy to do with Tampermonkey. They also show you how to set it up on iOS, which is pretty convenient for nabbing sheet music in my iPad

Monero aldalire • 3 months ago • 85%

Unless you enjoy holding paper monero, and letting centralized exchanges get away with fractional reserves, always withdraw your crypto!

Monero aldalire • 3 months ago • 63%

I’m tryna buy more monero bro just dip it just a tad. Just a touch.

www.scientificamerican.com

Any reading recommendations to plunge further into this new rabbit hole? 🤔

Monero aldalire • 3 months ago • 83%

I stumbled across this short and well-written blog https://petertodd.org/2022/surprisingly-tail-emission-is-not-inflationary from this very unhinged reddit argument: https://old.reddit.com/r/Monero/comments/16wuha9/what_would_you_list_as_some_risk_factors_or/k2zwkar/ I took a physics course and I immediately recognized the differential equation listed in the blog post. The differential equation (and therefore its solution) looks exactly the same as the velocity of an object in freefall where there's drag that's proportional to the objects speed (I.E. basically it's terminal velocity. You can't accelerate forever under freefall in an atmosphere). In physics, you can feel this yourself. When you're a passenger in a slow moving car, putting your hand out of the window you'll notice some slight force. But when you're in the freeway, putting your hand out is like arm wrestling the air. The drag is proportional to the velocity The blog post argues that the circulating supply of Monero is asymptotically constant (more specifically, the ratio of the rate of increase of the Monero supply divided by the rate of Monero being lost from the Monero supply) Now there's a LOT of assumptions hidden under the differential equation. A diff eq only really makes sense in predicting something when the assumptions are checked. There are two assumptions: 1. The rate at which Monero increases is constant 2. The rate at which Monero is lost (from lost wallets, boating accidents, savings accounts) is proportional to the amount of Monero in the system. 1 seems solid: it's 0.6 per block. Assumption 2 however is a bit confusing? I expect the amount of Monero being lost from the money supply proportional to the adoption of Monero. Monero adoption can be loosely proportional to the amount of Monero in the supply, given that Monero adoption is linear over time, but that is a big assumption. I have, however, found an explanation for the tail emission of Monero that I found to be more compelling. Overall, let's say, worst case scenario, that nobody loses and nobody saves their Monero, and that monero whill increase a fixed amount per year with no decrease in the money supply. For the sake of simplicity, let's say there's 100 Monero in supply, and every year 10 Monero gets added into the supply. Then, 100 -> 110: 10% increase In the second year, it goes from 110 to 120, which amounts to a: 110 -> 120: 9.1% increase 120 -> 130: 8% increase Notice that every year, the rate at which your Monero inflates decreases asymptotically. After the 20th year, there's 300 Monero in supply, and on the 21nd year that's a 5% increase, so on and so forth. So, the rate of inflation goes to zero. That doesn't mean that Monero has an asymptotically fixed supply, it just means that eventually there'd be enough Monero floating around where adding 0.6 per block wouldn't make a huge dent to the money supply and purely serves to incentivize mining without the exorbitant transaction fees seen in Bitcoin. I'm no economist, I studied Math. But I studied enough Math to know when a diff eq doesn't really hold up in an argument. In reality, coins DO get lost, and at what rate who knows? (especially in an obfuscated blockchain only God knows) Overall, my take is that people are really hyperfixating on the fact that Monero has a constant inflation of its money supply, but the real problem economically is unpredictable and large changes in money supply over short periods of time (IE gov't bailing out banks, printing money during a famine, etc) What you think??

Piracy: ꜱᴀɪʟ ᴛʜᴇ ʜɪɢʜ ꜱᴇᴀꜱ aldalire • 3 months ago • 94%

Found this cool vid on twitter https://x.com/KevOnStage/status/1798744950236131379 Wanted to download it. However big tech doesn't want its users to be in control of their own data and does not show the option of downloading the video from their site. Big tech can suck my dick. https://video.twimg.com/amplify_video/1798744879654371329/vid/avc1/576x1024/Fq7Vs_JLyX7wQqln.mp4?tag=14 Paste Shitter links here: https://cobalt.tools/ Edit: also try out yt-dlp https://github.com/yt-dlp/yt-dlp

Monero aldalire • 3 months ago • 83%

Posting this mainly because I hate how shit reddit has become and it's a good thing we're migrating here. Some good information is stuck there, however. The original question: Can anyone explain "shares"¿ ..how does pool operator know that I really tried to mine the coin Answer, from reddit user _nak: Sure. I'll make sure to prime you on the basics and then it'll fall into place. We need to be aware what a block is: A block is a list of transactions paired with a hash. That hash is calculated based on the byte value of those transactions, plus some additional "stuff" the miner throws in there. One of the reason there is additional "stuff" in there, is because a hashing function will always generate the same output for the same input, so if there were only one transaction and you couldn't put additional stuff, you could only generate one hash and there would be no mining going on. Now what that stuff is, is largely dependent on the miner. Everyone throws random garbage together with the transaction data into their hashing function and looks at the so called quality of the resulting hash. This quality needs to be above the so called difficulty. If your hash is high enough in quality, you broadcast it to the network and every node validates it, then puts those transactions, the stuff and the hash together as the new block. That's the basics right there. Now we'll look at stuff. If you're mining on a pool, then that stuff is only partially controlled by you. In fact, even the transactions that get put into your attempt of making a block is dictated to you by the pool. That's the so called block template. A pool sends you the template, containing a bunch of transactions and part of the stuff, you then add the rest of the stuff to your liking and run your hashing function. Now you will almost never find a hash of high enough quality so that you can make the next block, but all your hashes can still be verified in the sense that anyone can look at your chosen transactions, your stuff and your hash and validate that the latter is a result of hashing the former. So you can prove that you did work. That's where the name comes from, by the way, Proof of Work. We'll call low-quality hashes "block attempts" for convenience. Obviously if you would send all of your block attempts to the pool and they could then validate it and know that you did hash it, but the issue is that validating it means repeating the hashing, so they would have to do all your work again - useless. The good thing is just that we can look at the quality of your block attempt and estimate how many hashes you had to try to get a block attempt of this specific quality. Quick example: If I tell you to roll a die until you get a 6, I know that it will take you, on average, roughly six attempts to do so. So if you show me the result of your latest roll and it's a 6, I can reasonably assume that you rolled that die six times. That means that you only need to show a pool a couple of hashes for the pool to know how many hashes you calculated in total. What hashes you show to the pool depends on the custom difficulty. On some pools it's 100k, on others it's "vardiff" and adjusts with your hash rate, but the idea is that the pool only needs to repeat a tiny fraction of your work to validate all of it. So, a share is a block attempt with high enough quality to satisfy what you and the pool agreed on, but it's not high quality enough to become a block - most of the time; and if it is, the payout goes into the pool's wallet, because they gave you the template, remember?, and named themself the recipient in it. So the pool gets the funds and the pool knows how many hashes everyone contributed and pays everyone accordingly. Or runs of with the funds because nobody can force them to pay you. If you want me to explain p2pool shares and how that avoids pool operators from running off with your money, but still make sure that no miner can run off with a block they found, let me know. It's similar in terminology, but works quite differently. I just don't want to add another four paragraphs to this looooong comment without the need for it. Edit: p2pool explanation The most important difference is that p2pool is not in control of the block template. That means that the miner has full control over what transactions to include and what stuff to throw in the mix, so the "pool operator" is not getting the block reward send to his wallet. Now, with full control over the block template, how does p2pool make sure that all miners don't just pretend to be mining on p2pool, sending the failed block attempts to the pool and broadcasting their successfully found blocks to the network? Because in order for their failed block attempts to count for p2pool and be put into the PPLNS window, their block attempt needs to include every single miner that currently has a share in the window. And since you can't change a block attempt after it has been hashed, and the recipients of the reward must be included in the transactions before it's hashed, p2pool and everyone on it can immediately see if you tried to scam them and will decline any block that either doesn't list everyone in the PPLNS window or where the hash doesn't match the block. Now, why does that work, exactly? Because of how the so called coinbase transaction works. (Note that it's a technical term and not related to the exchange). The coinbase transaction is a special transaction included in every block that comes with no sender and the miner can write his own address as the recipient. That's how XMR is generated, that's where the reward comes from. A solo miner would put his own address, a pool miner would be forced through the template to put the pool operator's address and on p2pool? XMR allows multiple recipients per transaction, and that includes the coinbase transaction, so a p2pool miner writes everyone with a share in the window into the coinbase transaction before hashing. So, once the block is hashed, everyone gets paid by the blockchain itself, nobody can run away with the funds. And as to shares, they're similar to any other pool, except that it's publicly being kept track of, instead of being stored privately by the pool operator, and that keeping track happens with the side chains: p2pool, p2pool mini or an side chain set up by anyone who wants to. Now, the PPLNS share window of 2160 shares is nothing but the latest 2160 blocks on the side chain and that's how everyone knows whom to include. And the p2pool side chains behave just like other blockchains, distributed ledger, difficulty increases as network hash rate increases and vice versa, the only real difference is that the side chain itself cannot generate XMR (only the main chain can) and that transactions included in a side chain block neither move funds, nor are they removed from the global transaction pool*, because only transactions that make it into a main chain block are actually being carried out by the main network. Honestly, it's so simple and elegant I can't get over it. When I learned about all this, I kept going "oh, of COURSE", because it just makes so much sense. *transaction pool being the technical term for where your transactions go before they are mined into a block. It's part of the protocol and just unfortunately also called "pool", just as mining pools are.

Monero aldalire • 4 months ago • 79%

I first got introduced to Monero by Mental Outlaw's videos by around late 2022. I actually first mined monero before having owned any (which is a weird flex but ok) and I must say the lack of overpowered ASICS encouraged me greatly to try to start mining. I would hate mining bitcoin on my old laptops because it's futile against machines literally built and engineered to optimize mining. I knew I'd have a fair shot at making some pennies mining monero. And my only real competition are botnets. In the end I got around 50 cents worth of monero through mining! Although, I would love to figure out a way to make mining more profitable. Has anyone figured out a way for beginners to optimize hash rate for XMR? I have also heard about merge-mining. As far as using and obtaining monero, I bought Monero through Kraken. Don't use the regular kraken site, because they'll charge you higher (i believe it's like 2%) fees. Go instead to, pro.kraken.com. The interface looks a lot more complicated. Figure it out and make a market order, you'll get significantly lower fees (at around 0.5%). Or maybe even better, make a limit order, set the price you want to buy monero at like 2-3 dollars cheaper, and take advantage of monero's volatility RNG :) Monero was bullish for the past couple days, though, so i was like fuck it i'll make a market order i don't care gimme my freedom cash. Also, it takes 1-2 days to withdraw your monero from kraken. Also, USE A NON-CUSTODIAL ACCOUNT AND WITHDRAW YOUR XMR WHEN IT IS AVAILABLE IMMEDIATELY. privacy wise, i think multiple small withdrawals gives you plausible deniability that you were just transacting with monero, and not holding it all, for tax reasons. Besides, you SHOULD only ever transact with monero from your non-custodial wallet (aka, from your wallet app) to ensure you are getting the privacy benefits of monero. Transacting with monero from Kraken is stupid, since they can just associate the transaction address you gave them (if your bakery advertises "pay at <address1>" then if kraken sees a <address1> transaction they know you're paying the crypto bakery). So, get your freedom cash earlier rather than later \^_\^. Also, make a new receive address and sending your kraken monero through that (As an alternative to the adage buy low, sell high,) Buy monero when monero is low, transact with monero when monero is high. Seriously. I bought so much cool shit with this currency. Lemme list them to you. 1. Anonymous ukraine phone number through [https://stealths.net/ ](https://stealths.net) which you access through a proton mail account which they provide provide for you (change the passwords on those things) 2. Amazon delivery from [https://monezon.com](https://monezon.com) 3. Domain name from [https://njal.la/ ](https://njal.la/) 4. Monero hoodie from [based.win](based.win) [still haven't received it] I've also became an executor from Monezon. It's kinda fun to handle people's amazon orders and you get some non-kyc monero. Overall, 10/10 community. Love this vision of a more free internet, and, eventually, free world.

196 aldalire • 4 months ago • 100%

Best item in Starbucks! Completely free and 100% organic and natural! Nothing else is worth getting in my opinion.

chapotraphouse aldalire • 4 months ago • 100%

Guess we should just give up guys.

196 aldalire • 4 months ago • 97%

Please donate moneys to the communist cause for giving me more squid pizzas XMR: 87QzevaAWiUUiwgpCSJ1hFe1j9NbdZhZuBToCsabwLfsYk8s1TU3Fja4XdWwYFgnaEUVoe8Xmfr4Q4VF3L6XqcQ2TcTDfJL

Piracy: ꜱᴀɪʟ ᴛʜᴇ ʜɪɢʜ ꜱᴇᴀꜱ aldalire • 5 months ago • 98%

My gf and I have had discussions about teaching morals to kids. In that vein, I asked myself, would I teach piracy to my kids? Yes, it’s technically illegal and carries inherent risks. But so does teenage sex carry the risks of teenage pregnancy, and so we have an obligation to children to teach them how to practice safe sex. So, is it necessary to teach them how to stay safe in the sea? How to install adblockers, how to detect fake download sites that give you computer aids? Show them how to use a VPN and choosing the right one (a true pirate must always choose a VPN with port forwarding capabilities, so you can still seed) I feel like this is all valuable info we all learned as pirates the hard way, and valuable information to pass on to our kids. I definitely want my kids to know about libgen. Want a book you want to read about? Wanna learn about dinosaurs from a college level textbook for whatever reason? Just go to libgen, son! And I attribute most of my computer literacy and education to piracy, trying to install cracks to various games, trying to make games work, and modding the fuck out of skyrim as a young teenager. That, and also jailbreaking android phones. All the interesting things i’ve ever done with computers was probably against some BS terms of service. So, is piracy something you would actively teach your kids? Sit them down and teach them how to install a Fallout 3 FitGirl repack? Or is this something you’d want them to figure out themselves?

Piracy: ꜱᴀɪʟ ᴛʜᴇ ʜɪɢʜ ꜱᴇᴀꜱ aldalire • 5 months ago • 90%

I realize that, after all this time, I have never payed for my all-time favorite games I grew up playing (Fallout 3 & Skyrim). I can pay for it, but I really do not want to pay the money to the Bethesda’s marketing team, CEO, and whoever bullshit middle man who wants a cut of that. I want to give directly to the team that made the damn game, the artists, the sound designers, the voice actors, the programmers. If there was a way to do that, i’d be more happily inclined to spend my money on a decade year old game. Just thinking

Privacy aldalire • 6 months ago • 91%

Apparently Apple can end-to-end encrypt your iCloud, but it’s opt in because they still want to profit off your data >_< To enable this, go to Settings -> iCloud -> Advanced Data Protection You need to have all the devices under your apple account to be fully updated, and you’ll need to remember a 28-key passphrase for recovery I hate how big tech treats privacy as an afterthought. This should have been the default. But oh well. Spread the world people.

Piracy: ꜱᴀɪʟ ᴛʜᴇ ʜɪɢʜ ꜱᴇᴀꜱ aldalire • 6 months ago • 94%

Hello Pirates. Let me tell you a tale of a bounty I am proud of partaking. I have installed Risk of Rain Returns on a fresh Arch Linux distro, Wayland (i also needed XWayland) , KDE plasma 6, and GPU-accelerated. Moreover, I have used another laptop i have at my disposal to become a 24/7 i2p router, which is able to capture the warez that were necessary to perform this bounty. This bounty can be obtained without the use of a vpn, since the game can be downloaded from the i2p postman site. Because it was an exe file, I had to take certain steps to allow it to execute on my system. I installed lutris, as well as the [arch linux dependencies](https://github.com/lutris/docs/blob/master/WineDependencies.md) that it required, and launched the installation executable through lutris This journey was not without its challenges and setbacks. One such challenge I had to face to secure this bounty was to install the [xorg-xwayland-explicit-sync ](https://aur.archlinux.org/packages/xorg-xwayland-explicit-sync-git) patch. The nvidia drivers 550 is weird when playing games through XWayland, because it would render frames out of order. Applying this patch, as well as using [envycontrol](https://github.com/bayasdev/envycontrol) to switch to nvidia mode (i am on a dual-gpu laptop) worked in fixing this issue overall, I am happy with this bounty. I actually feel morally regretful when pirating games, more so than pirating movies, because of just how much sweat and tears developers had to put in to making it happen. But I am broke, and I have bought Risk of Rain and its DLC in the past, so in the moral calculus of piracy I think I've balanced it out. I am quite broke right now, however, so games are outside of my price point and I'd rather have something to eat. I love i2p. There's so many cool warez in there, and I believe it's the future of piracy. It allows us to decouple ourselves from VPN providers, because who knows how long until they turn against us.

Gentoo Linux aldalire • 6 months ago • 100%

Hello :) I just finished my first arch install I wanted to set my sights on something more challenging. So, I booted a live image with QEMU Virtmanager to try out gentoo, and after reading the wiki I thought to myself “man i should have started with gentoo” The arch wiki is good in its own right, but as a beginner i felt really confused and overwhelmed. I felt like I had to google terms just to catch up. The gentoo wiki, however, is really good at explaining concepts and the overview of the technology. When the Arch wiki just says “use mkfs.ext4 /dev/sda2” or something the gentoo wiki actually explains what sda, sdb, etc and ext4 means. I sort of learned it the hard way with arch, but i learn and understand lot more from the gentoo wiki. I love that it explains partition tables, filesystems, heck it even explains what is an IP in the networking section. Making a gentoo system and reading the wiki is basically an interactive computer science course lmao So, thank you gentoo wiki :)

Privacy aldalire • 6 months ago • 89%

I believe that the only two privacy extensions you really need to meet 90% of your privacy goals are uBlock origin + NoScript [uBlock origin](https://ublockorigin.com/) is effective because it stops the injection of ads which might contain and inject code. [NoScript](https://noscript.net/) forces you to look at which scripts you really need for the website to function. Say you visit a trusted site, like your lemmy instance, then you can enable running of javascript by default the next time you visit the site. You'll be surprised how functional some sites are even without javascript. I did not like the idea of browsers having Javascript: it's remote code execution and if there's anything malicious in there and your browser is not patched against it you're fucked. This way yeah it'll be annoying when you first visit a site but it remembers your settings for the next time you visit.

Privacy aldalire • 6 months ago • 73%

When I was configuring my searxng I noticed a search engine that piqued my interest. Link: [yep.com](https://yep.com/about/) From their about page: >Here's how it works. >We offer an unbiased, private search experience that rewards and compensates the makers behind the content. To do this, we use a 90/10 revenue share business model where we pay 90% of advertising revenue directly to these makers. >Simply put, when you use Yep, you’re directly putting money in the pockets of your favorite content creators.

Piracy: ꜱᴀɪʟ ᴛʜᴇ ʜɪɢʜ ꜱᴇᴀꜱ aldalire • 6 months ago • 81%

Hello sailors, I have been job hunting for a while and I have felt a great disadvantage in my job search due to my lack of access to high-quality LLMs. Writing cover letters is honestly so bullshit. GPT-3 is honestly quite bad nowadays, but as a true pirate at heart I couldn't quite get myself to cough up the coin for OpenAI's GPT4 out of principle. I hate them for putting their cutting edge technology behind a paywall, making it inaccessible for their own gain. I feel like this is not what the internet was supposed to be. So today, call me the great emancipator cuz i'm teaching u how to get that shi for free baby Requirements: Docker It's all gonna be based off of this github repo: [gpt4free](https://github.com/xtekky/gpt4free/) Installing through docker (there's also a way to install with Python PIP if that's more convenient for you. The docker worked for me though) 1. `docker pull hlohaus789/g4f` 2. `docker run -p 8080:8080 -p 1337:1337 -p 7900:7900 --shm-size="2g" -v ${PWD}/hardir:/app/hardir hlohaus789/g4f:latest` 3. Open up the webui in your browser at localhost:8080 4. In the "Provider" dropdown in the bottom look for "Liaobots" 5. Choose "gpt-4-plus" under the "Models" dropdown ??? Profit  The cool thing about gpt4free is that there's a lot of providers and a lot of models to choose from! So if gpt-4-plus from Liaobot doesn't work for you you can switch to something else easily. Do note that some models require you to provide an authentication token or be logged in. Most of them work right out of the box tho. *this post was not made with any use of an llm I promise ;)  ^^list of gpt4 providers

Piracy: ꜱᴀɪʟ ᴛʜᴇ ʜɪɢʜ ꜱᴇᴀꜱ aldalire • 6 months ago • 85%

Hello mateys, There's a lot of discussion recently about the ethics of piracy. A lot of good points have been made out of a handful bad ones. The most compelling one is of course the data preservation one, that piracy is the only way to mass preserve digital media in a medium that is prone to error. However, sometimes discussions about the ethical justification to privacy often lead to rationalizing. Pirating, as others have exclaimed, is at best morally grey, and there are some cases, namely pirating works of small creators, where it is actively harmful and wrong. I would like to share my perspective on it. I studied some game theory in college and that course made me look at the world in a different way. I believe piracy is a perfect example of a game theory concept known as the prisoner's dilemma and evolutionary game theory, if you all haven't heard about it. My essay is less of a justification of piracy, but more of an explanation of why piracy happens and grounding it in theory. As a background for this concept, here's a scenario. Let's say you're a criminal faced with two options: snitch or stay silent. There is also another criminal, your accomplice, who is also in jail and faced with the same option. Depending on your response and your accomplice's response there are different payouts: I stay silent and accomplice stays silent: 2 years of jail for both of us I stay silent and accomplice snitches: 5 years of jail for me, 1 year of jail for the accomplice I snitch and accomplice stays silent: 1 year of jail for me, 5 years of jail for my accomplice We botch snitch on each other: 3 years of jail time for both of us **Most of you probably know where this is going, but bear with me because i'm gonna go further**. The quick analysis of the situation is that there is a best-case scenario, which is both of us staying silent. But this best-case scenario can only happen with the result of cooperation. This is because if one of us flips, the other will have to serves longer sentence. The best case scenario can only happen if we both agree before the game that we will stay silent so we can guarantee the outcome, or else we will serve the longer sentence if the other betrays us. So, what if we play this game without cooperating beforehand? Well, looking at my options: if i stay silent, i can either get 2 years or 5 years of jail time if i snitch, i can get either 1 year or 3 years of jail time when faced with both these options, which **strategy** will you choose? of course, I do not want to got to jail for 5 years. Snitching definitely looks mad appealing to me when looking at it from this perspective. That's why, in game theory, snitching is what's called a **nash equilibrium**. Staying silent is not a nash equilibrium, because if the other snitches then I get a resulting jailtime which is worse off than if i just stayed silent. Note that this does not mean that everybody **should** snitch. It's just that, given the choices handed to us, snitching is the one that will result in the least bad jail sentences. As with life, there may be other factors at play, such as the fact that if I snitch, the gang boss might kill me when I get out, which will definitely affect my decisions whether I should snitch or stay silent. Okay. So how does this relate to piracy? What if we now play this game at a **massive** scale. Each and every one of us is faced with two options: pirate or buy. Currently, the majority of people actually buy software and media! But wait. If buying is analogous to staying silent, and pirating is analogous to snitching, why aren't we at Nash equilibrium? why isn't everyone pirating software? My sweet summer child, I present to you the concept of **law**. The purpose of the law is precisely to coordinate people so we don't fall into our shitty Nash equilibriums and ruin everything, and it does it precisely by attaching a more negative result to snitching (pirating). That's why we have stoplights (seriously, we talk about stoplights a lot in my game theory class) and why (mostly) everyone follows stoplight laws. (before you say tRagEdY oF tHE cOMmONs!!!! the guy Garrett Hardin who coined the term was a hardline eugenicist and his intellectual contributions is a shitstain in academia so shut the fuck up.) (for people that are curious, this is the realm of **Evolutionary game theory**. It studies the scenarios where each individual pair off in a population and play a game, and studies stable populations and stable strategies under this model. Ironically, i learned this from Game Theory, Alive by Anna R. Karlin and Yuval Peres. which i got from libgen XD) So, as we have it, we have a majority of people buying software, with a minority of pirates who are getting that software or media for free. **We aren't at nash equilibrium!!** More technically, piracy is stable strategy under the parameters of the system. We pirates know that buying all the software we interact with will just make us poorer and sad in the end, and we'll be stuck with all the DRM. But on the other hand, it's untenable if everyone just pirates everything all the time! We pirates profit so long as the majority of people keep buying software. This puts us, pirates, at a very precarious position. It is dangerous when the population of pirates to increase, because this will cause things and create domino effects which will put us at nash equilibrium due to more regulation of piracy and a crackdown of piracy, leaving us worse off and needing to adapt to these changes. My advice:the most stable strategy right now is buying software whenever you can spare the coin and if you think the value of the software to you matches its price, but pirating if it's convenient or unaffordable. Too long, didn't read: piracy is a stable strategy under the current parameters of the system. If everybody pirates it fucks everything up. So, be as sneaky as you can. Also, read up on your evolutionary game theory you pleb

chapotraphouse aldalire • 6 months ago • 100%

Seriously. There’s so many floating around. It feels like there’s a cycle of Random programmer thinks xyz language sucks -> she/he makes a slightly different, slightly faster, slightly more secure version -> by luck this gains mass adoption-> random programmer thinks new xyz language sucks I propose when the revolution comes and the last guillotine falls we decide a general-purpose programming language that coders should stick to. I vote Lisp or any of the dialects (scheme, clojure, racket), but i also feel something about the Julia language for scientific research. Maybe we can decriminalize using C. Absolutely ban and hunt down the use of any of the hipster languages teenagers are into these days. Nim? Zig? Crystal?? I am absolutely losing my damn mind. It compiles to bytecode people. Make up ur damn minds. To jail with all of u

Lisp Community aldalire • 6 months ago • 100%

Hello! I've been obsessing about the lisp language recently. I've been in the periphery with learning about Haskell and functional programming. I have actually kind of avoided learning lisp because of its "ugly" syntax at face-value, despite being raised by Emacs as my first (true) editor. I woke up one day and decided enough was enough, i'm gonna learn lisp and gain a deeper understanding of Emacs and also programming. And dear god was it so worth it. Just today I coded this function for Eratosthenes' sieve, and I had so much fun coding it! I like to go through Project Euler's archived problems when starting off with a new language because it really forces me to interact with the code rather than passively reading a programming book (I'm reading Land of Lisp, it's so unhinged I love it) ```lisp (defun range (start end) (if (< start end) (cons start (range (1+ start) end)))) ;; Checks if d is a factor of n (defun factorofp (d n) (zerop (rem n d))) ;; Sieve in lisp?? (defun sieve (n) (let ((primes (range 2 n)) (curprime 2)) (maplist (lambda (tail) (delete-if (lambda (n) (factorofp curprime n)) (cdr tail)) (setf curprime (cadr tail))) primes) primes)) CL-USER> (sieve 1000) (2 3 5 7 11 13 17 19 23 29 31 37 41 43 47 53 59 61 67 71 73 79 83 89 97 101 103 107 109 113 127 131 137 139 149 151 157 163 167 173 179 181 191 193 197 199 211 223 227 229 233 239 241 251 257 263 269 271 277 281 283 293 307 311 313 317 331 337 347 349 353 359 367 373 379 383 389 397 401 409 419 421 431 433 439 443 449 457 461 463 467 479 487 491 499 503 509 521 523 541 547 557 563 569 571 577 587 593 599 601 607 613 617 619 631 641 643 647 653 659 661 673 677 683 691 701 709 719 727 733 739 743 751 757 761 769 773 787 797 809 811 821 823 827 829 839 853 857 859 863 877 881 883 887 907 911 919 929 937 941 947 953 967 971 977 983 991 997) ``` I love lisp because it is at its core a functional programming language, but (as i do in my sieve function with the outermost lambda) i can specify localized points where I define, use, and mutate state. It gives me the best of both worlds, functional and imperative. Lisp has made me kinda like coding again. Every function feels like writing poetry, especially with the indentations. People say our parentheses are ugly but they're wrong and they're the ugly ones.