I was reading some joking comments about asking fast food customer service bots to reverse linked lists and I was struck by the realization that I didn’t quite remember how that would be done. Data structures were never my strong suit but I landed on something like going through the whole list and filing the pointers in a stack.

I was actually half decent at writing something in a programming language I barely understood back in university, but these days I prod a pandas dataframe twice a year or set up an abomination for one-off data scraping once a year and that’s about it. Maybe I do half of a Zachtronics game.

There’s two sides of this for me:

1. The actual writing of code and the theory has become very rusty (not a pun). I’d ideally like to fully re-learn a lot of the software fundamentals. I did a lot of RTL and embedded stuff in university and I never really got deep into writing that much “traditional” code. Mostly lower level stuff and others would write the high level stuff.
2. I’m actually not very familiar with actual tools people use to build stuff. I’m somewhat familiar with Conda and NodeJS, my understanding of the microcontroller ecosystem is still pretty reasonable, but I’m not very familiar with what people actually build software with. I get that the meta now is electron and web apps but that doesn’t really appeal to me. Everything I’ve ever built has been versioned by saving backups of source folders so even though I understand Git I haven’t really used it for my own work. Student projects were simple enough and abstracted the right way that we just used loose files. Stuff like that

I’m probably not pursuing a career pivot into software development but the idea of having personal projects has never faded away. I know it’s far fetched but the early 2010s dream of making a few little apps or games and quitting corporate still appeals to me. Even before the slop era there was far too much fodder to stand out, but hey, I still like making things, I’m not going into it with the expectation of it changing my life.

As LLMs eat up more and more of beginners’ foundational knowledge I don’t quite know exactly how to feel. I think asking for a regex filter in natural language is neat, it’s also something I can immediately verify without messing up my work. But I hesitate to offload much brain power into that kind of tool. I intuitively understand it would probably be very helpful to explain basics, or to offer an explanation for an error the compiler is being obtuse about, but I don’t know. I see this stuff totally melt people’s brains around me. Competent professionals just throwing away their judgment and experience. Even if my use case is what it’s better at doing, I have reservations. I do worry about the future of online documentation of little weird issues if nobody is asking the dumb questions in an open forum.

I guess the trivial solution is just “come up with a project and learn as you go” which is how I’ve done this before, and I’m assuming most of you have too. But I lose all momentum most of the time pretty fast, and a lot of it comes down to frustration with not having the time to debug like I did as a student, not knowing what the obvious libraries are, just plain blanking on when to use a pointer and when to use an address. My brain still thinks in (bad) C++ so I’ll look at my bad python and think huh this looks nothing like the documentation. Ideally I’d like to be decent or at least confident with both, and be decent at winging it in another language when needed.

Not looking for explicit recommendations as much as just seeing what you guys think. If the world economy crashes and I’m out of a job, doing a few projects on my own time might be good for me. Especially at a time when computing feels like it’s being wrestled out of our hands, and when most people are treating computers as magic black boxes again. I swear the interns are somehow worse at navigating an OS than my grandma.

In the short term I should just try to beat The Farmer Was Replaced, but after that I’m all ears

I’m safe for now but I feel like this time is worse than the last few times we have had to deal with this shit. A lot of my family has fled from their homes, but everyone is staying with relatives, which is good. I personally have more urgent commitments and (no way around it) less money than in the 2024 war, so I haven’t been able to help at the shelters, and I feel a little guilty about it.

I honestly feel very hopeless. I feel like Lebanon will be amputated, and finally forced to kiss the ring of the butcher who did it. Many of my friends have left over the past decade, and I am scared about the war making it harder for me to move afterwards, as countries will look at us less like skilled migrants and more like refugees they don’t want. I’m just so fucking tired of this.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.dbzer0.com/post/64538524

So this is a bit of a weird one. I have a tech background, which gives me some more authority, but I'm working in a non-tech field at the moment. They're taking this event pretty seriously, they're flying me out from Beirut to one of their Gulf offices, so I would hope that they would make the trip worth it and not only listen for AI boosting.

I'm one of the few people on my team who doesn't use these tools every day. The only benefit I've ever gotten was as an alternative thesaurus when the search engine results don't give me exactly what I want, and as a supercharged content aware fill on my personal laptop when I'm dicking around editing images. I use a low memory local model from 2022. This is all I need or want. I also understand the tech on a much more fundamental level thanks to my background. Not to give out too much information, but we built simulated pseudo tensor cores on an FPGA in university. I'm not a machine learning engineer, but I understand what this thing is better than anyone else in that meeting will - and certainly anyone with AI in their job title.

I have to temper the fuck out of my tone and frustration to make sure I can get messaging across. I also need to be careful not to come off as panicking about AI "stealing" my job. I have a completely different career path than all those business people, so I don't know if that's something on their mind. I also, you know, work from another country. I'm the cheap offshore labor.

I'm obviously not going to word all of the below this way is my point. I have to pick my battles as well, because most of the people with serious authority haven't had a real job in years and think their magic workplan generator and semi-reliable banana bread ratio calculator is the future of work, humanity, and consciousness.

Within my organization, I've seen people with years of knowledge and experience throw it out of the window because of the magic text box in their pocket. I've seen people with very passable English push their work through a slop extruder to "make the wording more natural" - when it makes it look more generic. I've also had experiences where someone in the chain of custody of my hard work did this to something I've made, making the information within it more generic, diluting my effort.

Company policy has banned external chatbots because Microslop Copilot is "more secure". I used to use GPTZero as a detection tool, just to put in particularly egregious paragraphs and send a screenshot to whoever "wrote" it, to be like "Hey, this reads really bad and I expected actual tailored analysis here. Please write this yourself, if it's not this long, it's okay." Slop makes our hard work look cheap! But GPTZero offers an LLM service, I think it offers a "de-roboticization" service, it has fucking GPT in the name, so it's blocked now.

However, despite the ban, I'm still getting ChatGPT links sent to my Whatsapp from superiors asking me if I "checked this" or "if we're covering all of this", with the most generic ass information in there. The corpus of the web is largely Western and this shit just does not apply here. You know it doesn't apply here. If we were having a face to face conversation and I suggested this stuff you'd be shocked, boss man. What the fuck.

I hear people in meetings and in the offices when I fly in openly talk about "ChatGPT being "better"" and using it on their phone. I'm not fighting for Copilot's market share here, I want these people to use their brains!

So many little things as well. Feedback on my work comes back more vague now, like someone brute forcing a prompt instead of actually, you know, being a part of the process of doing work. People who need time to write English or are not confident with their English are not gradually improving their language skills. Some interns and juniors don't learn anything, and are outright awful at looking up obscure information the old fashioned way.

Over the last few months, I've helped push some work friends off paying for ChatGPT, after relentlessly bombarding them with "You already know this", "This sounds off, you worded it better to me over lunch", "This contradicts our call with those guys, don't you remember the argument you made?", that kind of thing. I find it funny that the antidote to this shit is to be 1% more conscious about your work.

I can also probably score a lot of brownie points by overemphasizing my mini pc / raspi homelab situation and using it to do "AI", kind of reassuring them that I am not insulting their digital false idol.

Thing is, with war tensions (usually it's them asking about my safety, ha), this meeting has been pushed forward, but they seem adamant on having it.

---

I would prefer not to enter job specifics for obvious reasons, but I do want to emphasize that the work we do can have direct positive impact on people's lives and has done so already. Part of what keeps me sane in the corporate machine is the fact that I've somehow found myself in a position to nudge typically unfeeling processes into marginally improving the material conditions of normal people.

---

Oh but you're a dbzer0 user, that's a pro-AI instance!

Yes and no. The admin is upfront about this being a facet of technology they are interested in, in the technical sense. I am as well. Their focus is on mass proliferation of this stuff with user control. I can't say I share their views on this tech era to the tee, but this does not give me the heebie jeebies the way mainstream machine learning worship does. Also they seem to be horrified at the social phenomenon that is modern "AI", so... It's not that big of a deal. I don't hate the tech when it's in a whitepaper or running in a university server semantically indexing its digital library. I hate it when it kills the web and the brains of the people around me.

AI worship and AI financing is also a bit different in the Middle East, but this is not the place for me to complain about that. Let's just say there's layers. Let's just say a lot of shit keeps me up at night.

So this is a bit of a weird one. I have a tech background, which gives me some more authority, but I'm working in a non-tech field at the moment. They're taking this event pretty seriously, they're flying me out from Beirut to one of their Gulf offices, so I would hope that they would make the trip worth it and not only listen for AI boosting.

I'm one of the few people on my team who doesn't use these tools every day. The only benefit I've ever gotten was as an alternative thesaurus when the search engine results don't give me exactly what I want, and as a supercharged content aware fill on my personal laptop when I'm dicking around editing images. I use a low memory local model from 2022. This is all I need or want. I also understand the tech on a much more fundamental level thanks to my background. Not to give out too much information, but we built simulated pseudo tensor cores on an FPGA in university. I'm not a machine learning engineer, but I understand what this thing is better than anyone else in that meeting will - and certainly anyone with AI in their job title.

I have to temper the fuck out of my tone and frustration to make sure I can get messaging across. I also need to be careful not to come off as panicking about AI "stealing" my job. I have a completely different career path than all those business people, so I don't know if that's something on their mind. I also, you know, work from another country. I'm the cheap offshore labor.

I'm obviously not going to word all of the below this way is my point. I have to pick my battles as well, because most of the people with serious authority haven't had a real job in years and think their magic workplan generator and semi-reliable banana bread ratio calculator is the future of work, humanity, and consciousness.

Within my organization, I've seen people with years of knowledge and experience throw it out of the window because of the magic text box in their pocket. I've seen people with very passable English push their work through a slop extruder to "make the wording more natural" - when it makes it look more generic. I've also had experiences where someone in the chain of custody of my hard work did this to something I've made, making the information within it more generic, diluting my effort.

Company policy has banned external chatbots because Microslop Copilot is "more secure". I used to use GPTZero as a detection tool, just to put in particularly egregious paragraphs and send a screenshot to whoever "wrote" it, to be like "Hey, this reads really bad and I expected actual tailored analysis here. Please write this yourself, if it's not this long, it's okay." Slop makes our hard work look cheap! But GPTZero offers an LLM service, I think it offers a "de-roboticization" service, it has fucking GPT in the name, so it's blocked now.

However, despite the ban, I'm still getting ChatGPT links sent to my Whatsapp from superiors asking me if I "checked this" or "if we're covering all of this", with the most generic ass information in there. The corpus of the web is largely Western and this shit just does not apply here. You know it doesn't apply here. If we were having a face to face conversation and I suggested this stuff you'd be shocked, boss man. What the fuck.

I hear people in meetings and in the offices when I fly in openly talk about "ChatGPT being "better"" and using it on their phone. I'm not fighting for Copilot's market share here, I want these people to use their brains!

So many little things as well. Feedback on my work comes back more vague now, like someone brute forcing a prompt instead of actually, you know, being a part of the process of doing work. People who need time to write English or are not confident with their English are not gradually improving their language skills. Some interns and juniors don't learn anything, and are outright awful at looking up obscure information the old fashioned way.

Over the last few months, I've helped push some work friends off paying for ChatGPT, after relentlessly bombarding them with "You already know this", "This sounds off, you worded it better to me over lunch", "This contradicts our call with those guys, don't you remember the argument you made?", that kind of thing. I find it funny that the antidote to this shit is to be 1% more conscious about your work.

I can also probably score a lot of brownie points by overemphasizing my mini pc / raspi homelab situation and using it to do "AI", kind of reassuring them that I am not insulting their digital false idol.

Thing is, with war tensions (usually it's them asking about my safety, ha), this meeting has been pushed forward, but they seem adamant on having it.

---

I would prefer not to enter job specifics for obvious reasons, but I do want to emphasize that the work we do can have direct positive impact on people's lives and has done so already. Part of what keeps me sane in the corporate machine is the fact that I've somehow found myself in a position to nudge typically unfeeling processes into marginally improving the material conditions of normal people.

---

Oh but you're a dbzer0 user, that's a pro-AI instance!

Yes and no. The admin is upfront about this being a facet of technology they are interested in, in the technical sense. I am as well. Their focus is on mass proliferation of this stuff with user control. I can't say I share their views on this tech era to the tee, but this does not give me the heebie jeebies the way mainstream machine learning worship does. Also they seem to be horrified at the social phenomenon that is modern "AI", so... It's not that big of a deal. I don't hate the tech when it's in a whitepaper or running in a university server semantically indexing its digital library. I hate it when it kills the web and the brains of the people around me.

AI worship and AI financing is also a bit different in the Middle East, but this is not the place for me to complain about that. Let's just say there's layers. Let's just say a lot of shit keeps me up at night.

Trying very hard to hold back a torrent of rants about the state of tech. I’m clinging onto an older model of something at a time when they don’t make a good new alternative, you can figure out where the problem is.

---

So far I’ve changed the switches (the mechanical things inside the mouse that click), the outer shell, the scroll wheel, and the teflon pads at the bottom.

Am quite pleased with how it doesn’t feel like it’s falling apart anymore.

It’s sad that the switches and rubber shell especially feel like they were intentionally built to age very poorly. This was not a cheap mouse, and switches that don’t break in two years are like 2$ more than the ones they used. The rubber coating on the outside peeled and crumbled until I finally replaced the whole outer shell with a solid single piece. And the scroll wheel was beginning to rust.

Overall some of the replacement parts don’t feel quite as rigid. The older rubber part, while crumbling from the outside in, was glued to a sturdier-feeling plastic frame than the replacement, which is just a little creaky.

But hey. I love fixing my stuff and using what I want, marketers and their poor record of product discontinuation be damned. I probably wouldn’t have bought a new one. But I don’t like that I can’t if I needed to. I don’t like that everything is built to be disposable when things as simple as a scroll wheel that doesn’t rust, a shell not made of crumbly rubber, or switches that don’t break after two years have all been the default for 40 years before the current tech dark age.

Basically what the title says. I know online providers like GPTzero exist, but when dealing with sensitive documents, I would prefer to keep it in-house. A lot of people like to talk big about open source models for generating stuff, but the detection side is not as discussed I feel.

I wonder if this kind of local capability can be stitched into a browser plugin. Hell, doesn’t even need to be a locally hosted service on my home network. Local app on-machine should be fine. But being able to host it as a service to use from other machines would be interesting.

I’m currently not able to give it a proper search but the first glance results are either for people trying to evade these detectors or people trying to locally host language models.

I have been using Proton only as a burner email service, but I've been intrigued about signing up for the paid version to get a few more of those with less restrictions.

I currently use a different VPN provider for my personal devices, and that's been fine. But I'm sharing some of my device slots with someone else.

Suppose I get a Proton subscription - would I be able to share device slots with someone without granting them access to the drive/emails etc? Obviously I can tell them "Hey I logged you in, don't mess with the settings or it will stop working", and I have full trust that they won't mess around with the settings.

It's cheaper for me to double up on my existing VPN subscription, but hey, I'm all about exploring options. I'm not thrilled about the recent political comments made by people in charge at Proton but I haven't seen enough red flags just yet.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.dbzer0.com/post/55365151

I have found myself in a mental hole of tech-nihilism. Maybe even on the road to tech-fatalism. Long, rambly, Sunday night post, heads up. But I think I touch on the risk posed by even using privacy tools, something which I don't think I see discussed here because of where most of you live (Global North, where you have the right to tell a policeman to get a warrant for the most part). This is kind of about two things at once, they're related though.

---

Different events bubble this feeling to the surface but it's always there in the background. When I (and you) defected from Reddit cold turkey after they decided to cut off the API, I had this feeling. When I started having to use a VPN permanently, I got it again. And when I had to "move" my exit country because the UK started verifying identities online, I got it again. Can you guess how I felt this week, following Microsoft's bullshit about making it even harder to set up their OS without signing in? Or when I tried to use my trusty YouTube downloading scripts, only for them to seemingly require I feed them login cookies now? Or this whole Google Play dev verification thing? I don't even use Android!

I'm sure this is the case for most of you, but being anonymous online feels like more of a challenge and more of a necessity now. I don't want YouTube to log 900 music playlists under my account. I don't want to log into every Windows mini PC I set up for family. I know most of you obviously do not, and Lemmy being Lemmy there's this culture of saying well fuck the corporate internet altogether. Can't rip from YouTube? Fuck YouTube! Don't want to give M$ your blood type to set up a printer server NUC? Image Debian on it. etcetera etcetera. I know. I use Lemmy, I avoid Google search, I most definitely avoid most big tech products when I can. Don't need em.

But like... The corporate internet is still there. I quit Reddit, even though it was my online home for over a decade. But YouTube? That's a completely different beast. This just is where the videos are. I can host Pixelfed for my family and friends but I can't host video, much less expect everyone to. Most people aren't very computer savvy and YouTube is just where most people will post videos.

And since I use their service quite a bit, I did look into actually paying for their service. The folks you watch get a little kickback, and you no longer get ads on your TV and phone. I can stomach paying, even the uBlock Origin and piracy advocate that I am, just because I use it so much. But I use a VPN. And their FAQ explicitly has a page for this: you can't connect from outside of where you're paying, if you're paying. But it doesn't clarify whether it uses the country of your payment details, your IP, your location in Google Maps, or the country your account's settings are set to. In my case, those are four separate countries lmao

These are little complaints, but I don't think this is some "first-world" problem nothingburger. I suspect the UK identity verification scheme, or something similar, will start becoming more common around the world, regardless of how many data breaches happen. And not because some stuck up politicians are scared that a teenager could see a woman's penis online, oh no, I totally think the true purpose is to tag "unwanted" ideologies and prevent their spread. Wouldn't want anyone to type in ultra evil extremist words like "Palestinians have human rights" without consequences now would we. The fact that everyone is using their spin euphemism, "age verification", instead of what it is, "identity verification", gives them too much credit, even when being critical about it.

There is some irony in calling this a first world problem, because I live very decisively in the third world. Lebanon. Our internet speeds are shit, but for the most part, the internet here is pretty unrestricted. Combine this with most people's service coming via legal gray area local """ISPs"""" with haphazard IP ranges and messy CGNAT, and you have a plausibly anonymous and relatively uncensored connection. Beautiful, besides the 2Mb (yes, lowercase) speed.

But. But.

I was looking into setting up a meshtastic/LoRa/whatever network, that would link up my home with a few relatives who live nearby, as sort of an emergency backup. You probably only see bad news from where I live, I promise good things do happen here, but an emergency comms network in case something happens and services go down seems like common sense to me. Especially since these services go down when there isn't an emergency. But setting one of these up would definitely get me on a list here. I'd probably get an unpleasant "interrogation" for setting up a parallel communications network. Best case scenario I get asked to take it down and to keep my nose clean kiddo. Worst case, I'm accused of espionage and thrown in a cell because it's hard to explain what this stuff is to people who don't care about understanding it. I do not live in a place with consistent rule of law, or even the thin veil of it. Staying out of trouble is paramount.

Further, along the same topic. I remember seeing an article about some countries in the EU raising an eyebrow about GrapheneOS, where police are associating its use with drug dealers. Perhaps I would need such an OS in the future, as someone who is not a drug dealer but who hates what is going on with commercial tech. And so I started thinking about what using it would look like. The same concerns with my local police are there, but there is a worse one: I have been flying internationally into countries with much more strict security than Beirut's sticky, comfy little airport. I've been to Abu Dhabi in the past 24 months, what happens when I land in that airport with a "drug dealer phone"? I doubt Lemmy would even be allowed there if they knew what it was. I wonder what kind of shady deals Reddit had to crack to get approved, with how that place's culture and content was.

I wonder about this a lot. The VPN I use in Lebanon isn't blocked in the countries I visit for work, so I've felt relatively at ease so far. But I feel these tendrils of surveillance and data collection, of deanonymization. And it kind of terrifies me. I have to stand in the pleb physical stamping line in these techy airports, but I see people just walking through the electronic gates with nothing but an iris scan. It's weird. I can make a burner YouTube account to yoink cookies and download videos, but I shouldn't have to. I can log into a Microsoft account on a machine I'll be logging into their email from every day and connecting to their Minecraft auth servers from twice a year, but... this is not right at all. We all know what's downstream from tying your files to your identity.

I don't know. The rise of tech-induced willful ignorance and authoritarian regimes is scaring me. The fact that people's pensions are tied to AI companies that facilitate the terrorization and mass murder of innocents in the south of my country (and unquestionable genocide south of the border) fucking terrifies me. And it should, even if I wasn't a working-age Lebanese man. Even if I wasn't in those fucking databases.

I'm going to hold myself back from ranting about the fact that tech has come to almost exclusively mean predatory products and bullshit slop extruders to most people. About the cruel summary execution of our dream of cyberspace that we glimpsed on the early web. About how infuriatingly, nonchalantly shit almost every young person is at solving tech problems now. There is an immense, crushing powerlessness. I almost wish I didn't care about tech, about privacy, that I could give Glaxo-McUberzon my mother's maiden bone marrow and carry on with my day.

Almost.

I am 100% on the way to becoming a forest hermit with the way tech is going. And I'm a tech guy. I'm the tech guy to most people in my life. And boy howdy is a life of making coffee, chopping firewood, and screaming into the valley between commits to projects-that-go-nowhere looking real, real good right about now.

---

I should probably cross-post this to Tech Takes. But I don't think I'll be putting it on my personal blog. Doesn't feel right.

I have found myself in a mental hole of tech-nihilism. Maybe even on the road to tech-fatalism. Long, rambly, Sunday night post, heads up. But I think I touch on the risk posed by even using privacy tools, something which I don't think I see discussed here because of where most of you live (Global North, where you have the right to tell a policeman to get a warrant for the most part). This is kind of about two things at once, they're related though.

---

Different events bubble this feeling to the surface but it's always there in the background. When I (and you) defected from Reddit cold turkey after they decided to cut off the API, I had this feeling. When I started having to use a VPN permanently, I got it again. And when I had to "move" my exit country because the UK started verifying identities online, I got it again. Can you guess how I felt this week, following Microsoft's bullshit about making it even harder to set up their OS without signing in? Or when I tried to use my trusty YouTube downloading scripts, only for them to seemingly require I feed them login cookies now? Or this whole Google Play dev verification thing? I don't even use Android!

I'm sure this is the case for most of you, but being anonymous online feels like more of a challenge and more of a necessity now. I don't want YouTube to log 900 music playlists under my account. I don't want to log into every Windows mini PC I set up for family. I know most of you obviously do not, and Lemmy being Lemmy there's this culture of saying well fuck the corporate internet altogether. Can't rip from YouTube? Fuck YouTube! Don't want to give M$ your blood type to set up a printer server NUC? Image Debian on it. etcetera etcetera. I know. I use Lemmy, I avoid Google search, I most definitely avoid most big tech products when I can. Don't need em.

But like... The corporate internet is still there. I quit Reddit, even though it was my online home for over a decade. But YouTube? That's a completely different beast. This just is where the videos are. I can host Pixelfed for my family and friends but I can't host video, much less expect everyone to. Most people aren't very computer savvy and YouTube is just where most people will post videos.

And since I use their service quite a bit, I did look into actually paying for their service. The folks you watch get a little kickback, and you no longer get ads on your TV and phone. I can stomach paying, even the uBlock Origin and piracy advocate that I am, just because I use it so much. But I use a VPN. And their FAQ explicitly has a page for this: you can't connect from outside of where you're paying, if you're paying. But it doesn't clarify whether it uses the country of your payment details, your IP, your location in Google Maps, or the country your account's settings are set to. In my case, those are four separate countries lmao

These are little complaints, but I don't think this is some "first-world" problem nothingburger. I suspect the UK identity verification scheme, or something similar, will start becoming more common around the world, regardless of how many data breaches happen. And not because some stuck up politicians are scared that a teenager could see a woman's penis online, oh no, I totally think the true purpose is to tag "unwanted" ideologies and prevent their spread. Wouldn't want anyone to type in ultra evil extremist words like "Palestinians have human rights" without consequences now would we. The fact that everyone is using their spin euphemism, "age verification", instead of what it is, "identity verification", gives them too much credit, even when being critical about it.

There is some irony in calling this a first world problem, because I live very decisively in the third world. Lebanon. Our internet speeds are shit, but for the most part, the internet here is pretty unrestricted. Combine this with most people's service coming via legal gray area local """ISPs"""" with haphazard IP ranges and messy CGNAT, and you have a plausibly anonymous and relatively uncensored connection. Beautiful, besides the 2Mb (yes, lowercase) speed.

But. But.

I was looking into setting up a meshtastic/LoRa/whatever network, that would link up my home with a few relatives who live nearby, as sort of an emergency backup. You probably only see bad news from where I live, I promise good things do happen here, but an emergency comms network in case something happens and services go down seems like common sense to me. Especially since these services go down when there isn't an emergency. But setting one of these up would definitely get me on a list here. I'd probably get an unpleasant "interrogation" for setting up a parallel communications network. Best case scenario I get asked to take it down and to keep my nose clean kiddo. Worst case, I'm accused of espionage and thrown in a cell because it's hard to explain what this stuff is to people who don't care about understanding it. I do not live in a place with consistent rule of law, or even the thin veil of it. Staying out of trouble is paramount.

Further, along the same topic. I remember seeing an article about some countries in the EU raising an eyebrow about GrapheneOS, where police are associating its use with drug dealers. Perhaps I would need such an OS in the future, as someone who is not a drug dealer but who hates what is going on with commercial tech. And so I started thinking about what using it would look like. The same concerns with my local police are there, but there is a worse one: I have been flying internationally into countries with much more strict security than Beirut's sticky, comfy little airport. I've been to Abu Dhabi in the past 24 months, what happens when I land in that airport with a "drug dealer phone"? I doubt Lemmy would even be allowed there if they knew what it was. I wonder what kind of shady deals Reddit had to crack to get approved, with how that place's culture and content was.

I wonder about this a lot. The VPN I use in Lebanon isn't blocked in the countries I visit for work, so I've felt relatively at ease so far. But I feel these tendrils of surveillance and data collection, of deanonymization. And it kind of terrifies me. I have to stand in the pleb physical stamping line in these techy airports, but I see people just walking through the electronic gates with nothing but an iris scan. It's weird. I can make a burner YouTube account to yoink cookies and download videos, but I shouldn't have to. I can log into a Microsoft account on a machine I'll be logging into their email from every day and connecting to their Minecraft auth servers from twice a year, but... this is not right at all. We all know what's downstream from tying your files to your identity.

I don't know. The rise of tech-induced willful ignorance and authoritarian regimes is scaring me. The fact that people's pensions are tied to AI companies that facilitate the terrorization and mass murder of innocents in the south of my country (and unquestionable genocide south of the border) fucking terrifies me. And it should, even if I wasn't a working-age Lebanese man. Even if I wasn't in those fucking databases.

I'm going to hold myself back from ranting about the fact that tech has come to almost exclusively mean predatory products and bullshit slop extruders to most people. About the cruel summary execution of our dream of cyberspace that we glimpsed on the early web. About how infuriatingly, nonchalantly shit almost every young person is at solving tech problems now. There is an immense, crushing powerlessness. I almost wish I didn't care about tech, about privacy, that I could give Glaxo-McUberzon my mother's maiden bone marrow and carry on with my day.

Almost.

I am 100% on the way to becoming a forest hermit with the way tech is going. And I'm a tech guy. I'm the tech guy to most people in my life. And boy howdy is a life of making coffee, chopping firewood, and screaming into the valley between commits to projects-that-go-nowhere looking real, real good right about now.

---

I should probably cross-post this to Tech Takes. But I don't think I'll be putting it on my personal blog. Doesn't feel right.

I’ve recently “moved” countries! And by that I of course mean the country I exit from online. I’m trying to keep a perma-VPN situation going.

YouTube loaded for me on my computer, where I’m logged in, even through uBlock Origin. But no luck on their locked down phone app, where I’m also logged in. Very weird. Shuffled servers a bit and still nothing. And I’m not talking about sports content which is always super locked down.

Anyone else facing this problem? Has this been the norm for a while in some exit countries? Is this just one of those wait for it to tide over situations that works itself out in the end?

Weirdly it loads shorts just fine.

I wonder at what point it would end up being better to just rent a VPS and wireguard into that.

In case your answer is “Just use Peertube!” my reply is Inshallah I will

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.dbzer0.com/post/54512198

There's a newer post as well that follows up on that first one from June. I'm not super technically versed in things like CPU scheduling but I really like that they shared these posts.

I haven't played DSP in about a year but these guys have definitely caught lighting in a bottle with this concept. If you've played this game, you know how crazy that feeling of finally being able to lift off and just... have the full expanse of outer space open in front of you is.

I’ll probably solder it back on in the weekend, or ask a phone repair shop to do it if I’m feeling extra lazy, it’s okay.

Maybe I should have known knocking it this way for years without making sure the cable isn’t wrenching the port at an angle would have some consequences. I have a backup, it’s fine. Not a great start to the workday, but whatever.

I built it myself a few years back out of Aliexpress parts and couldn’t be happier with it.

::: spoiler Tap for spoiler I’m posting this here instead of a dedicated keyboard com because this is about the inconvenience, not the hardware. I’m also wary of how consumeristic hardware discussions can be, especially purchasing-driven “hobbies” like keyboards. I don’t want to post my keyboard. I don’t want to discuss builds. I don’t want to help goad more people into buying things they don’t need.

It’s a little heartbreaking how keyboard discussions went from DIY-focused folks, who really went out of their way to salvage the various cool vintage solutions that different manufacturers used for the simple mechanical problem of making a nice button to press, to… what it is now. I do like that more artists are designing keycap sets, making cool designs that people interact with every day, but yeesh. The buying culture. :::

Hotly awaited update: It turns out those tiny pads were ripped out, will have to go to the repair shop regardless. Fingers crossed. If it’s not repairable, I could just order a replacement PCB. Not ideal but oh well

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.dbzer0.com/post/49033194

Sorry if this is not the high brow discussion this com is for.

I travel a lot between different countries in the Middle East which have restrictive laws, and I live in one that is slowly becoming more competent technologically. I have to stay for an extended time in different places, so I’ve been connecting through always-on VPN out of the same place and it’s been working fine for now. But Digital ID laws are quickly going to close things off from me.

My risks that I’m trying to avoid are as follows:

::: spoiler Collapsed this part, it's not as important

Locally, I want to make sure my IPs aren’t connected to public accounts. I don’t say anything online that can put me in jail for the most part, but I don’t trust that this will always be the case. I also would appreciate being a bit separated from the local internet. Elsewhere, I also don’t want my traffic to be monitored or my accounts to be tied back to my personal identity. For example, I don’t want to land in Dubai and to have my Steam account permanently affected by having “Spec Ops the Line” (banned game there) in my account (silly thing to worry about, but this is one tiny example out of many small issues that pile up). Plus, a lot of the internet is not accessible from these places, and I don’t like that, regardless of whether or not I want to peruse inaccessible internet stuff from there.

This has come with some serious downsides (online services are more expensive in Europe, where I have historically exited from), but it was/is worth the cost for me. Ironic that many VPN users seem to be trying to connect in the opposite direction than me (out of rich countries rather than in). :::

I’ve just been permanently using a single reputable VPN and single exit city for all of my traffic for the past while. Digital ID laws in the UK and EU will make this increasingly infeasible and I will probably have to exit out of somewhere new like Switzerland. I don’t know if those servers might be more trouble due to increased abuse for example.

Just want to know how others are dealing with this. Is just stomaching the wave of verifications after logging into all my emails from a new country the only price to pay? Is the world going to shit and should I rethink “just” using a VPN? Is it VPS time now that more and more things are being blocked from VPN access? Do I give up on the internet a decade ahead of schedule and chop wood in the woods until Israel’s AI mistakes my shack for a children’s hospital and drops heavy munitions on me?

I’m really hesitant to start using two sets of devices, some for insecure local traffic and some for encrypted traffic. I don’t think carrying like four laptops through airport security would keep eyes off of me.

While most of the technical solutions suggested by the replies in my original thread are probably good for different use cases, I'm just chasing the original high of the anonymous internet of my childhood, I just want to blanket route all my traffic through one place and not have to think much about it. Too naive? I'm sure. But I have no big threat to worry about in my scenario, at least now. This is just basic I-want-to-network-out-of-view-of-ISPs.

My main exit nodes have been in the UK, since that was a good compromise between the US's wild west privacy/surveillance and not being blocked by US stuff that wasn't GDPR compliant. I know the UK was never the bastion of internet freedom, but it was a practical option. Especially getting English-as-default for everything, which is something I missed. When the internet went hyper-mainstream in the 2010s, I was no longer getting a standardized English internet like everyone else, I got a localized badly-Arabic-translated version that assumed I want the strictest filtering on everything. Moving over to always-on VPN has made me feel like I got something back. Especially now that ISPs around me are no longer as careless as they once were.

Now the UK is introducing digital ID, and services have started to comply. I'm not a regular Reddit user, but I still would like to access the site without sending them a selfie (or my ID, of course). Nexus mods is enforcing this now as well, and while I haven't used it in ages, it's still a big public repository of stuff I'd want to go through at some point. Digital ID really goes against everything I believe about the internet, this concept of me being on the same anonymous playing field is directly under attack from laws like this, and it is fueling a lot of tech doomerism thinking inside of me. The last thing I want is for an any account of mine, regardless of how infrequently I use it, to be permanently blocked for lack of ID. I know we love our piracy here, but I am a Steam user as well, and with the amount of money I've put into their service (and how much I use it), I would have no choice there. But that's the only one, I think.

Someone in the thread suggested Singapore, I was thinking Ireland or Switzerland, as good exit node countries. Ireland has only two Mullvad servers (which is a problem). Switzerland I'd think would be very popular with scammers. And Singapore would, if nothing else, make my terrible ping even worse.

There's also the fact that a lot of things are now getting blocked more often from VPN servers and it is pretty annoying. Random Imgur links and so on.

I know this is more of a meandering rant than a pointed question, but I just want to hear some of your thoughts on this.

Sorry if this is not the high brow discussion this com is for.

I travel a lot between different countries in the Middle East which have restrictive laws, and I live in one that is slowly becoming more competent technologically. I have to stay for an extended time in different places, so I’ve been connecting through always-on VPN out of the same place and it’s been working fine for now. But Digital ID laws are quickly going to close things off from me.

My risks that I’m trying to avoid are as follows: Locally, I want to make sure my IPs aren’t connected to public accounts. I don’t say anything online that can put me in jail for the most part, but I don’t trust that this will always be the case. I also would appreciate being a bit separated from the local internet. Elsewhere, I also don’t want my traffic to be monitored or my accounts to be tied back to my personal identity. For example, I don’t want to land in Dubai and to have my Steam account permanently affected by having “Spec Ops the Line” (banned game there) in my account (silly thing to worry about, but this is one tiny example out of many small issues that pile up). Plus, a lot of the internet is not accessible from these places, and I don’t like that, regardless of whether or not I want to peruse inaccessible internet stuff from there.

This has come with some serious downsides (online services are more expensive in Europe, where I have historically exited from), but it was/is worth the cost for me. Ironic that many VPN users seem to be trying to connect in the opposite direction than me (out of rich countries rather than in).

I’ve just been permanently using a single reputable VPN and single exit city for all of my traffic for the past while. Digital ID laws in the UK and EU will make this increasingly infeasible and I will probably have to exit out of somewhere new like Switzerland. I don’t know if those servers might be more trouble due to increased abuse for example.

Just want to know how others are dealing with this. Is just stomaching the wave of verifications after logging into all my emails from a new country the only price to pay? Is the world going to shit and should I rethink “just” using a VPN? Is it VPS time now that more and more things are being blocked from VPN access? Do I give up on the internet a decade ahead of schedule and chop wood in the woods until Israel’s AI mistakes my shack for a children’s hospital and drops heavy munitions on me?

I’m really hesitant to start using two sets of devices, some for insecure local traffic and some for encrypted traffic. I don’t think carrying like four laptops through airport security would keep eyes off of me.

Right into my veins please

I legitimately punch “Celtic fans Palestine” into Google images to make myself feel better every so often. Of course they know what’s happening, everyone knows what’s happening, but they use their visibility for the greater good. Even if they get in trouble over it every time.

Edit: here’s a few more

Randomly remembered this song at work today, and it knocked the wind out of my sails after giving it a listen during a break.

I can't say the every line of translation is exactly how I would convey this song into English, but it's the official translation and has the artist's blessing.

For the first time in two decades of my tumultuous relationship with the coldhearted mistress that is Microsoft Windows, I am glad that it turned itself on. It didn't update itself. It didn't even bluescreen for no reason and update itself in its confusion.

The torrent finished downloading about an hour before I got home, and by the time I noticed it finished, the elusive seeder was long gone. I feel oddly at ease. I feel oddly... responsible. For propagating knowledge to future seekers.

Is this dull enough for here?

Have this terrible photoshop bodge job as an offering of my goodwill.

It would be funny if this ends up being an unremarkable movie.

The image has stuck in my mind for what must be two decades now. Is this familiar to anyone? And should I even bother watching it? We all know of movies that peak at the moment you notice the poster, so...

This is a bit of a lower effort post, heads up.

I've always tried to be a bit less pessimistic about trends and platforms that are irrelevant to me. For a few years now I've been a bit apologetic when friends in group chats described TikTok as some kind of digital disease, for example, when they share some kind of egregious screenshot. I didn't use it, I didn't plan on using it, but I wasn't going to fault people for using internet platforms that they clicked with. I remember similar arguments about platforms like Pinterest, DeviantArt, or Tumblr in the past. Like they weren't for me but I got what they were going for there. They served a purpose, and they had a certain culture that was usually catalyzed by the platform's features.

My patience has been wearing thin, and the catalyst for it has been the nonstop torrent of what is affectionately being referred to as "AI slop" by the kids online. Every element of personality and personal escapism that seemed so foundational to the idea of cyberspace (remember the word cyberspace?!) is being mined and then worn down to dust in the pursuit of a nonsensical internet whose only interesting concepts seem to flourish in spite of the current trend.

I remember when things started transitioning from text and images to more usable video. Being in a part of the world with exceptionally bad internet, the video revolution was kind of a step back: video just took forever to load. But video was also more personal, and amateurishness was harder to cover up in a video than in a blog post. There were so many weird accents out there, regardless of English proficiency, that gave every clip of someone's voice a sense of place.

I only write this to contrast with the absolute hatred I have for AI-generated voice overs for slop content. I absolutely abhor the grating, EQed-for-loudness, syntactically perfect AI voiceovers I hear from people around me scrolling through short form video. This is a fucking waiting room, put some earphones in or do literally anything else. That type of voiceover really really gets under my skin. Robotic TTS was bad enough, but there is a "yuck factor" for me when a robotic voice feigns emotion or personality. It makes me think worse of whatever's being narrated. I cannot stress how much cheaper the average piece of internet "content" feels now that everything is gated behind multiple machine learning black boxes.

---

My internet upbringing came about a bit earlier than people my age. We still had dialup until around 2008 where I am, so until that point the internet escapades I was able to go on were quite limited. The bandwidth was extortionately expensive, and it was hard to check much out since we were still quite reliant on the landline for actual calls. It was only when the DSL came about in a few years (which we are still on... thanks third world!) that I was able to properly "surf". (I'd quite taken to the term used in French media for internet users - "Internautes" - basically like astronaut but for the online world... It carries a fragment of this sense of wonder I am chasing now. Cooler than "users" who "surf").

I loved the early web. 2010 or thereabouts was hardly the golden age of the web, of course. Web 2.0 was well underway and I was really exploring the recently-vacated ruins of an age in decline. But I loved what I saw. I would Google something that I wanted to know about - let's say, Windows keyboard shortcuts after a typing error and a subsequent eureka moment - and I'd click on what seems the most interesting. While I'd now look for something like a Microsoft help page, Reddit post, or a Github-hosted text file for such a query, I clicked on articles (I think the main one was from Lifehacker?) and naturally, blogs and personal pages. I remember discovering what gifs are and for the first month or so after that discovery I exclusively thought they were used for MSN emotes. "Dragonball Z emoticons animated gif" was probably my most searched query in like 2010.

I was never a blogosphere guy but I loved old hacked-together HTML personal sites. Sure most people were using Blogger or Wordpress (at least most people I could reach incidentally through tangential searches). I still return to Skytopia every few years, and sometimes write something in its now-desecrated guestbook. I'd found it while just looking for "3D fractals" online.

I have a few scattered memories that I look back upon fondly. I got really into origami and then papercraft models, for a duration of time that I can't quite remember. I very vividly remember stumbling upon a link to this model in a list of papercraft links, one cold winter. It was in an unremarkable HTML table list, that contained other, less impressive models. I still used that PDF's password as a sort of catch-all, basic zero-security password for years after finding this model, despite never putting in the effort to actually build it.

I'm rambling (I am full of too much alcohol and cheese as I'm still on vacation) but the point of this post is that I don't feel this way about the internet at all anymore. I don't feel like sitting in front of the computer and "experiencing the digital world" is giving me any escapism or inspiration, and it hasn't in a very long time. This is even worse, considering how much more time I spend now on an internet-connected anything now. Back when I was feeling the most connected to a bunch of cool scattered nerds online, I was spending a few hours at most every month in front of a web browser. Now it's multiple hours a day, split about evenly between business and pleasure. At least, pleasure in intent. The experience itself has been less than pleasing.

One step afterward was the early app age on iOS. It might sound very bizarre for the older and/or more privacy minded, but early app platforms were mostly populated by curious early adopters. Right before microtransactions and subscriptions absolutely blew up, these online communities were a small microcosm of the wider internet that skewed a little younger, and it is a strange thing to feel nostalgic about. My point is that there was some magic left in there. The main platform I have in mind is a defunct little proto-Discord (all groups were publicly listed with various privacy configurations) called Groupie, that was full of a very odd cast of characters. Of which I was one.

I don't know what I'm trying to say here. My post reads like old man yells at cloud, only the Cloud is a meaningless term and I'm by no definition an old man. I just miss the internet being magical. I'm sure there are parallels to people missing curated print media, missing having more options for quality (arguable) live television, missing the zeitgeist being transmitted through radio. I can't deny that there has to be a nigh-opaque layer of rose tint making this era of the internet seem like it's more than it was. But it meant something, dammit. The uncensored, fully customizable and unapologetically crusty looking personal pages carried a promise of some kind of techno-utopia that never happened.

---

A few months ago as I was looking back through the documentation for IndieWeb, this personal blog was linked. I got a tiny hit of that internet euphoria, in a weird way. Nothing about how this person seems to post their location appealed to me, as someone in a tiny country the size of a shoebox. But most of the early internet involved stuff I wouldn't do, so - experiencing things I dislike about modern social media but in the milieu of a personal website was a nice compromise.

What really got me was everyone's favorite article I Will Fucking Piledrive You If You Mention AI Again. It is a generational piece of writing that I will treasure like the other Fediverse darling, Cory Doctorow's Tiktok's Enshittification. Alongside the Reddit exodus of 2023, these really made me feel like I could be doing more to interact with the side of the internet that is still trying to be more personal.

I have a bit of internet doomerism left inside me, even knowing about initiatives like IndieWeb. I'm fully aware that the early aughts web aesthetic and culture explicitly arose from the disconnect between people and the limited tools the average person was willing to wrap their head around. It's very different to now, an era where I find myself disgusted by people formatting videos that will only circulate among friends in a closed group chat in the same way that an Instagram video would be formatted, practically looking like an advertisement in terms of pacing... Like the main goal of being online is "content". We all have our own rant about the word "content", so I won't rehash mine right now - especially after writing this whole rant post.

I just hate how everything is converging into the very thing we complain about AI slop outputting. Garbage out requires garbage in and I can't help but feel like we are increasingly encouraged to create, gargle, and consume garbage, from even before this current era of machine-generated slop.

I wish I had a positive note to end this on. I don't want my writing to be whiny screams into the void. But at least it's my own writing - and unfortunately, the bar is just getting that much lower. I feel like I need to apologize for insufficient editing.

---

I originally posted this to my personal blog. I try to post better stuff on there than this, but hey - if I only posted posts that were perfect, I'd post nothing.

The issue is that I think there are Steam bundles that can’t be gifted, such as the Valve pack and that kind of thing. That also makes something like Civ 6 less likely, just because of the DLC bundles. I can also use Fanatical or Humble but frankly the region thing might be an issue.

This guy has played every console-available game under the sun before around 2020. So I’m focusing more on what he’s not likely to have played. He’s more of a soulslike/fighting game guy and I’m more of a simulation and eurojank enjoyer, so the recommendations don’t always carry across.

That said, I’ve been thinking newer games like Animal Well that are sure to be received well, but it’d suck if he already played it on something else. Would be a funny inclusion as well, a 35 megabyte 2D platformer for his new gaming desktop.

Any suggestions?