Spyke

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What was a profound moment that a video game caused you to experience, and why?

Disco Elysium was full of such moments for me. Here's one:

You spend a lot of time in the game basically talking to yourself and your inner voices, and one of these voices is volition. If you put enough points into it, it'll chime in when you're having an identity crisis or struggling to keep yourself together and it'll try to cheer you up and keep you going. At the end of Day 1 in the game you, an amnesiac cop, stand on a balcony in an impoverished district reflecting on the day's events and trying to make sense of the reality you've woken up into with barely any of your memories intact. If you pass a volition check, it'll say the following line:

"No. This is somewhere to be. This is all you have, but it's still something. Streets and sodium lights. The sky, the world. You're still alive."

This line in combination with the somewhat retro Euro setting, the faint lighting, and the sombre-yet-somewhat-upbeat music was very powerful. The image it painted was quite relatable for me. I just sat there for a minute staring at the scene and soaking it all in. Even though this is a predominantly text-based game with barely any cinematics/animations, I felt a level of immersion I had rarely, if ever, experienced before.

Oh, look at that. Someone actually made a volition compilation. 😀 This video will give you a better idea of what I'm describing: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ENSAbyGlij0 Minor spoilers alert!

memes

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Cute

Please put a NSFW tag on this. I was on the train and when I saw this I had to start furiously masturbating. Everyone else gave me strange looks and were saying things like “what the fuck” and “call the police”. I dropped my phone and everyone around me saw this image. Now there is a whole train of men masturbating together at this one image. This is all your fault, you could have prevented this if you had just tagged this post NSFW.

general

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Lemmy.world active users is tapering off while other servers are gaining serious traction.

I created an account on lemmy.world before I'd understood how the Fediverse works. Later on I went and searched for a smaller instance that's better aligned with my interests and whose moderation I was happy with, and I abandoned lemmy.world (Edit: Bad choice of words here. I still subscribe to communities on lemmy.world; I just stopped using the account I had created there). It had served its purpose well as a landing zone for a Fledditor like me.

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Gfycat.com shuts down on September 1 and all Gifs will be taken down

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Adding to what you said about interest rates: We're at the end of a long period of cheap borrowing (very low interest rates) during which overvalued assets were used as collateral to secure loans for investments. These propped-up assets are beginning to drop to their true (intrinsic) values. In other words, speculation and irresponsible practices were propping up a house of cards that's starting to collapse, and now investors are scrambling to cash in or cut losses wherever they can. So they're deciding that time has run out for online platforms that promised to grow but still haven't hit their numbers/monetization goals.

tl;dr: Infinite money glitch got patched (because it was wreaking all sorts of financial havoc) and now investors need to end life-support for risky/unprofitable investments.

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Microsoft to Force Web Links Shared in Teams to Open with Microsoft Edge

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Edge is so invasive now that people have developed tools to remove it, for example https://github.com/ChrisTitusTech/winutil. And you still have to run them after any update that ends up reinstalling Edge! It's like removing malware, but it's even worse because this gets reinstalled by updates from the same legitimate authority that provides your security updates. This recently got me so mad that I decided to quit the games that don't run on Linux and replace Windows with Linux on my gaming PC.

It's a shame I can't avoid Microsoft at work as well.

piracy

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Empress forgot to take her meds again

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Some had hilarious protections where the game would screw the player if detected

I will never forget that one day one of my high school friends called me after I'd hooked him up with a pirated version of Crysis and yelled into the phone: "WHY IS MY GUN FIRING CHICKENS?! I CAN'T KILL ANYTHING!"

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Lemmy.world active users is tapering off while other servers are gaining serious traction.

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Sure thing.

I just went through the instances listed on https://join-lemmy.org/instances and visited each one that caught my eye and I'd just glance over the welcome message, rules, and check to see if they have a website or a Matrix Space where you can talk with the admins, get support or just chat. Eventually I found one that's hosted in my country, is better aligned with my interests (browse the list of local communities!), has no moderation rules that I disagree with, and is being maintained by folks who are passionate about FOSS and whom I wouldn't mind supporting in maintaining the instance (financially or otherwise). Most instances will have one community where people can ask for help or discuss anything related to the instance itself, like the state of the server and updates, whether or not the instance should defederate from some other instance, etc... For example, ours is https://discuss.tchncs.de/c/tchncs and lemmy.world's is https://discuss.tchncs.de/c/[email protected]. Be sure to take a look at those "home" communities as well.

If it's a smaller instance, it would also be a good idea to check the state of funding. Are they getting enough donations to maintain the server already? If not, would you be willing to help them out? Then just create an account and test the stability of the server for a week or so. This may sound like quite a bit of effort, and it is, but it's worth it in my opinion. I love that I've stumbled upon this community https://tchncs.de/ and I've already switched to using their servers for a bunch of other stuff I'm using (Matrix, for example).

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YSK Iranian developers have created an open-source censorship bypass solution that works on desktop and mobile.

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They do block Wireguard. They use DPI (Deep Packet Inspection) at the national level (it's as expensive as it sounds). They filter and monitor all traffic. Once you have something as invasive as DPI in place, Wireguard becomes rather easy to detect, because it doesn't hide the fact that you're establishing a tunnel (its purpose is just to obscure the data being tunneled).

According to the specification, a specific sequence of bytes (Handshake Initiation packet) is sent by the "client" to negotiate a connection, and a Handshake Response is sent back by the "server". The handshake packets used to negotiate a connection are basically a recognizable signature of the Wireguard protocol, so if you are able to analyze all outgoing and incoming packets (which DPI enables you to do), you can monitor for these signature packets and block the connection attempt.

There are variants of the Wireguard protocol that can circumvent this method of censorship (Amnezia Wireguard is one example), but they only work as long as they stay under the radar and don't see mass adoption. Their own "signatures" would also just get blocked in that case.

Ultimately, bypassing this level of censorship just isn't something Wireguard was created for. Wireguard assumes you are only concerned with obscuring your traffic, not hiding the fact that you're using a VPN. There are better tools for this job, like this: https://www.v2fly.org/en_US/

Edit: Better link with the language set to English

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Separate Docker stacks using gluetun networking

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Uhh, I think you might be confused. Let me explain a bit more:

  1. Services and Containers aren't the same thing. The distinction usually doesn't matter in typical self-hosting scenarios, but in this case it does.

In short: Services are what you define in a compose file; Containers are what you spin up based on those service definitions.

  1. network_mode is a service attribute and it can be defined for each service separately.
  2. network_mode: "service:{name}" requires the service being referenced to be part of the same stack. This is probably what you were thinking of when you wrote this reply.
  3. network_mode: "container:{name}" can freely reference any preexisting container. This helps you achieve what you want. You can define your gluetun container independently, along with any services you might want to be part of the same stack, and give it a unique identifier using container_name: myIndependentGluetun. After spinning it up, run your Qbittorrent container or whatever service you want to route through the gluetun container after adding network_mode: "container:myIndependentGluetun".

You could also route it manually. That's a more advanced solution, but it's more convenient than the network_mode approach. More on this here: https://discuss.tchncs.de/post/19039498

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What ebook reader to buy that works with selfhosted ebook library?

I run Koreader on a Kobo Libra 2. I just connect to my OPDS catalogue on my Calibre-Web instance. It's not exactly a sync setup; it just gives me access to my library whenever I need to download something, and that covers my needs. There are several other sync options; check out Koreader's features here: https://github.com/koreader/koreader/wiki

If you like it and decide you want to it, go through the list of supported devices and see what sort of sync capabilities are available for them (support for Kobo devices seems to be the best/have the most options).