I’ve just had to switch back to X11 from Wayland on Nobara, because I couldn’t get Sunshine to work no matter what I tried, my windows were occasionally flickering black, and my taskbar kept freezing. So I guess I’ll wait a little bit more.
I haven’t really looked into it too much, but… Aren’t they actually right in this case?
Sure, reading “we can’t protect your privacy because you’re using privacy-centric extension…” feels like bullshit, but from how I understand it based on the screenshot, the issue is that you have blocked the cookie permissions pop-up, whose main reason is to give you an option to opt-out of any tracking cookies, thus protecting your privacy. While also being required by law.
However, this depends on how exactly is the law formulated. How does it deals with a case where you don’t accept, nor decline any cookies, and just ignore it? Are they not allowed to save any cookie until you accept it and specify what exactly can they save? Or should they not let you use the site until you accept it?
I vaguely remember that it used to be enough to just have a OK-able warning that this site is using cookies, but then it changed to include a choice to opt-out. Which could indicate that unless you opt-out, which they are required to give you a chance to, they can use whatever tracking cookies they want. And if that is the case, this message is actually correct.
I’m actually glad for it. It made me switch to Linux, discover Mullvad Browser and their VPN combo, get a GrapheneOS phone, find an amazing Freetube YT desktop client, and dabble with Home Assistant and PIHole. Plus I migrated to Protonmail and Kagi as my search, and Lemmy instead of reddit is also an amazing change, the discussions I’ve seen so far feel better and more in depth, and I’m enjoying my time here so far. The lack of endless content is also great, to help with implementing Digital Minimalism.
So, while I hate any large corporation and their greed with more and more passion, it has lead me to a nice privacy journey, for which I’m glad.
Being a programmer, I was always just as baffled about religion, mysticism, and various esoteric stuff, because it just didn’t make logical sense, and it was hard to take people who are into it seriously.
tldr:Was sceptical, gave it a try just for fun and to see what’s the fuss, found out it’s net-positive as long as you don’t take it too seriously, let it define your whole personality, or use it as an excuse to be a dick. It’s basicaly just like playing solo TTRPGs, and it feels great once you get rid of your jugement.
Then, during high-school, I’ve stumbled upon the Psychonaut Field Manual, which is a nicely written guide about chaos magic. And I read into it, because the presentation seemed fun, and most importantly - it was the first book where the introduction and first few pages convinced me, that it makes sense and could, in a limited fashion, actually work.
What convinced me was looking at mysticism as something akin to “hacking your own mind” - by using symbols, rituals, meditation and whatnot, you convince your unconscious mind to push you slightly more towards doing what you need. And that sounded like something interesting, especially since I just finished reading the Art of Game Design, which had a few great chapters focused on the subconscious and how to work with it when being creative. Of course I still don’t believe that you can affect any external factor of your life through it, but now something like “I do a ritual to finish this exam”, and my subconscious may just give me a little nudge to study more, since that’s what it’s convinced we really want.
So I went into the rabbit hole of modern mysticism, and eventually discovered more about the whole movement of Chaos Magic, with authors like Phil Hine. And their reasoning has won me over - their main point is that all mysticism is the same - learning symbols and doing rituals, so you can convince your subconsciousness. And the flavor or dogma you attach to it doesn’t matter, so just do whatever you want. Want to do Wicca? Suit yourself. Christianity and angels? If it works for you. Invoke Spongebob with pentagram out of pizza, or go with Lovecraftian Old Gods? Why not, the only important thing is that you do really believe in it, because otherwise you probably won’t convince your subconscious.
And that’s why they work with something I find really interresting - they call it paradigm shifts, where you hop around various systems, dogmas and religions, immersing yourself into their rabbit hole and honestly giving it a try, to see if that’s what works for you. And that sounded like fun, letting go of the prejudice about religion or esoteric bullshit, and just trying it out for myself, log what results I have, and have fun learning about it.
There’s another point that won me over for chaos magic - one of their core principles is, that every mysticism was so full of themself and took it too seriously, that they’ve forgotten how to have fun. And having fun while doing it is important.
And so I throughout next few years went into the rabbit hole of Wicca, Golden Dawn, Enochian, and probably bunch more I don’t really remember, just trying to take it seriously and see for myself how does it work for me. The hardest part was getting rid of feeling absolutely stupid when you sit in your room with candles, incense, and memorize various bullshit, but it was still pretty fun.
To get to the point - Wicca is one of the only systems I’ve tried that is also a Religion, and works with deities. And I’ve enjoyed this system more than the others, which were more focused on occultism and abstract concepts, because it basically meant you got an imaginary friend. The small daily rituals, that are celebrating nature while also being appreciated by said imaginary friend were fun little games, that made my day pretty much universally better, just like it turned a simple walk through nature as something wonderful - because I started paying more attention to what is around me.
As long as you don’t take it too seriously, don’t let it control your life, don’t talk about it with others that are not interrested, or use it as an excuse to be a dick to anyone, and just enjoy adding a little bit of magic and fantasy into your daily life, I don’t think there’s anything wrong with that. It’s a net-positive change, and not too different than just playing a game of TTRPGs.
I’ve since forgotten about it and don’t really do anything in regards to religion or mysticism, but I still fondly remember the few years I’ve tried, and it has definitely changed my point of view on a lot of things in life. I’d recommend to everyone here to give it a try and see for yourself - you don’t have to tell anyone, it’s a fun rabbit hole to explore (if that’s something you find interresting), and most importantly - you can decide it’s not for you and forget about it at any moment.
I’ve recently switched to Nobara, and has been unsure whether to go with Wayland or X11. Mostly because I’ve read that Wayland has issues on NVIDIA GPUs and will perform slower, so I went with X11 (On KDE). Is that still the case nowadays, or can I just use Wayland?
I don’t think surface would make for a good work laptop, but I have amazing experience so far with using it for the ocassional traveling, or just as a carry-on.
I just Parsec into my desktop at home, and can comfortably work without having to deal with performance, and Surface is amazing for that.
I also really like the pen support, so I can make notes or draw bascially anywhere.
And I also use it for DJing, where it works pretty well and is compact enough to not be a bother carrying it around.
Ooh, you are right, I can actually file bug reports or try to fix it myself now that I switched to FOSS from Windows. Tbh that didn’t really occur to me, since I was switching only like a month ago. I’ll look into it, so far I suspect that it’s actually covered by one of those troubleshooting cases mentioned in their FAQ, and I’m not really confident enough to start recompiling libraries with additional flags. Especially since I’m on Nobara and don’t want to break anything, AFAIK that OS is pretty customised from the start and figuring out what I can safely touch isn’t something I have the guts for yet.
I was using LibreWolf before, but I really like the idea of bundling VPN + Browser, and also the way they handle payments - not only is Mullvad VPN kind of cheap, I can just pay with crypto and don’t need any account (kind of - you just generate username that also serves as an password, without any other contact information required).
But what I like the most about it is the idea of making a browser with the goal of having the same fingerprint between users (as much as possible), and offering it with a VPN - becuase that means that most of other users of the VPN will probably also have the same fingerprint from the browser, so you will blend in with them. I wasn’t really sold on the idea of VPN before that and didn’t use one, but this was what convinced me.
But tbh I haven’t done much research into the company, or into the effectivness of their implementation. I’m kind of betting on their cooperation with Tor Browser, which should have most of this stuff already figured out. But it’s possible that other browsers are just better at it, I never checked.
I do however still use LibreWolf for the occasional site that breaks with Mullvad, but it’s not something that happens too often.
I use(d) the VPN alongside it and found the add-on “hints” regarding the correct DNS settings more frustrating than helpful, too.
Hmm, I don’t think I’ve ever noticed anything about DNS. I think I’ve actually never click on the browser vpn extension, though :D Is it the encrypted DNS hint?
EDIT: Found this, apparently it’s doing pretty well privacytests.org
I’ve been having a pretty good experience with Mullvad, however I don’t hear many people talking about it. I wonder why is that, IIRC it’s being developed with Tor Foundation, and is basically a Tor browser for clear web, and that sounds perfect. So far, I didn’t run into any issues, so is there a catch, or are they just not well enough known yet? Or, maybe people are turned away by their optional VPN?
Yes and no. For ads to make any kind of revenue, you first need an user-base. And if the first thing you do is riddle them with ads, it will probably really hurt the sales.
So, the first generation of smart glasses should be pretty OK as far as ads go. Of course, they will gradually introduce them, but that will hopefully take several years before we get to that point.
And inevitably some FOSS/privacy focused alternative will show up, just like you have with GrapheneOS, PinePhone and similar. Or, assuming they will let developers side-load their apps without going through proprietary store (which may be unlikely, given the current trend of locking everything down - on the other hand, there is a pretty large market of developers who wouldn’t touch anything Apple-level of closed and someone will definitely want to cash in on it), you will eventually get OCR ad-blocks for billboards outside. I bet that would be one of the first apps developed once possible.
Unfortunately, NVIDIA. I was buying a new PC half a year ago, and only started even considering to make the switch to Linux few months after that, so I am at a pretty unlucky point where I just had recently spent a lot of money for new-gen PC, but without knowing that I should really go for AMD.
I will make the switch to AMD as soon as it’s justifiable, but I’m too lazy to deal with second-hand resale and it’s hard to justify a new GPU when I still have the current gen, but from wrong manufacturer.
Thank you! My main issue is that while I’m familiar with all those algorithms, its usually pretty simple to find how do they work and how to use them for very basic stuff, but its almost impossible to research into actual best practices in how and when to use them, once you are working on moderately complex problem, especially stuff like formations, squad cooperation and more complex behavior (where I.e behavior trees start to have issues once you realize you have tons of interrupt events at almost every node, defeating the point of behavior trees - which can happen if you’re using them wrong, but no one usually talks about it at that level).
And I’m also dealing with issue that isn’t really mentioned too much, and that is scale. Things like GOAP would probably be infeasible to scale at hundreds of units on the screen, which require and entirely different and way less talked-about algorithms.
I’ve eventually found what I needed, but I did have to resort to reading through various papers published on the subject, because just googling “efficient squad based AI behavior algorithm” will unfortunately not get you far.
But its possible that I’m just being too harsh, and that the search results were always the same level of depth - only my experience has grown over the years, and such basic solutions are no longer sufficient for my projects, and it makes sense that no-one really has a reason to write blog posts of such depth - you just publish papers and give talks about it.
Aside from the AI related keywords. I’m still salty about what the buzzword did to my search results.
While I did see Kagi recommended on Lemmy, I’ve made the switch because of a recommendation by my colleague at work (now that I thing about it, that would funnily probably be the case even if I was actually working for Kagi :D), and it has been a nice experience so far. Plus, we’ve just been talking about it today at the office, so I was in the mood of sharing :D But I haven’t done any actual search comparisons, so it may just be placebo. I’d probably say it’s caused by a lot people trying to be more privacy-centric here, and mostly deeply against large corporations, so the software recommendations tend to just turn into an echo-chamber.
As for the second point, yeah, I guess you are right, Brave Browser being one of the finest examples of it. But it’s a good reminder that I should do some research about the company and who’s behind it, just to avoid the same situation as with Brave, thanks for that.