I can't recommend PIA anymore after the acquisition. It used to be my choice ever since using a VPN became a necessity, but these it's Mullvad for me. They're relatively transparent, allow me to pay anonymously in cash, and are based on a VPN protocol already included in my kernel.
"Advertising is a huge business predicated entirely on manipulating people to make purchases they otherwise wouldn't, surgically exploiting weaknesses in our psyche."
I strongly believe that advertising by definition is unethical in all of it's forms and "block" ads to the best of my ability, in real life as well. I do not view ads that reach me by mail, and as for billboards and posters I see around town, I make a note to avoid the products they advertise. I know this doesn't make a difference but it's an ideological thing. If my actions could in theory cause a tiny little dent in a graph somewhere, I make a point to do it.
I agree with everything but the latex part. Something like HTML 3.2 is a better fit for hypertext documents. There's no need to re-invent anything, only remove the feature creep and cancerous bullshit.
That's easier said than done though, with everyone so invested in this modern game of "emperor's new clothes" that is the modern web.
For those who may not know, this is a front-end to LibGen. I like the search feature more and use it now and then, but for me the 5-downloads-per-24h limitation is usually quite limiting.
I dunno. I had my doubts for the longest time but recently I've started, little by little, placing my bets on Flatpak. Snap can go to hell, for reasons exhaustively discussed here and elsewhere, but Flatpak is reasonably solid, open and performant technology that fits the problem it's trying to solve. I wouldn't mind if it takes over the distribution of big, GUI desktop apps on linux.
I've read about this so much, I wonder if B/W printers have anything similar? Is there a secret yellow cartridge somewhere in my printer that I don't know about?
I used to use scanners, until I bought a new Brother laser printer and discovered that the scanner feature requires a proprietary driver on the computer end. It's sad as Brother printers tend to work really well with linux, for printing at least.
Since then I've written an ImageMagick script that converts phone photographs of documents into reasonably convincing "scans."
It's pretty cool. When you think about it, the backslash is kind of a useless character, apart from windows paths and escapes I can't think of much use for it, both of which are rather arbitrary. As far as I know it has no real use in writing. I wouldn't be opposed to replacing it with something else and making room for something useful on the keyboard.
First off, do yourself a favor and avoid snap like plague. It's vendor lock-in and horrible.
I use flatpak precisely as you describe. It's for graphical desktop applications, "apps", basically stuff like Firefox, Libreoffice etc. Sandboxing is cool but I mostly do this because the flatpaks are always up to date with respect to upstream, instead of locked into a particular version like in the system repos. I also recently ran into a situation where a particular application wasn't feasibly packageable by the distribution because of unorthodox dependecy choices (and their own, rather strict rules related to packaging), yet they made a flatpak available.
I also like the fact that the applications and their files are isolated in their respective directories, which makes purging unused stuff easy, as opposed to traditionally packaged software pooping all over my home directory.
Running stuff from the command line is a pain, thus why, at least in my use, it's limited to graphical desktop stuff that I'd anyway run by clicking on an icon.
I wonder what likes and dislikes are even for. They don't generate income for channel owners afaik, nor do they affect the recommendation algorithm for users, also afaik. Only views "matter." Especially if the other half gets hidden now, they should just get rid of the whole thing. It doesn't seem to provide anyone with anything, except useless bandwagoning
This is the right way to go. Teach, don't block. You fuck up your relationship to your kids if you force them to keep secrets from you and constantly "fight" against you. Because trust me, that's how it'll end up.
What do you think should be done? What methods are there, besides harsh economic sanctions, to control entities which break regulations and detriment free society? Clearly something needs to happen, something with impact. Pray to the invisible hand?
I belong to the camp that believes in using the defaults when it comes to ciphers. I am not an expert in cryptography, nor do I like copypasting stuff I don't fully understand. The openssh guys know this stuff better than I do and I think that's fine.
The way to fix this, along with most issues I see in modern web search, is for search engines to penalize SEO swindling heavily instead of rewarding it. I dare say it's one of the most destructive and terrible aspects of ad tech.
I don't personally keep in touch with people so I can't really say how it's like, but I do know that it's popular around my neck of the woods. On par with whatsapp, it feels like.