Huh, this person doesn’t like starbucks

They must be autistic

Peak .world behavior right there

Convenience? The fuck are you talking about?? Have you never heard of soluble coffee? I carry a jar of soluble coffee in my backpack when I go to uni. They have those instant water boiling taps on every floor in my faculty building, I can make myself a mug just like that. Is it good? No. But certainly better than starbucks.

But whatever, I’m not going to argue with someone who’s trying to convince me that the thing I do almost every day with no issues is actually impossible.

It has always striked me as a rich people thing

Fastfoods marketing themselves as luxury brand is a relatively recent trend. A decade or so ago starbacks, mcd’s, etc. really were “cheap, fast, tasty”. Fast food used to be a convenience for when you were on road trips and couldn’t make your own food.

All these different fastfood brands built up such a large reputation around themselves that they practically became a part of our collective conscious. At some point they realised that instead of selling food, they could sell their brand. And that’s when it stopped being cheap, stopped being tasty, and generally became a “rich people” thing.

So I used to think that people hated on starbucks because “hurr durr real men only drink black coffee” and starbucks had extremely sugary and milky drinks that had barely any actual coffee in it. “No problem” I thought, “I like sugary drinks!”. So I went to a starbucks at the shopping mall close to where I live and ordered something and it was literally just a glass of ice cubes with like three sips’ worth of milk and syrup squirted into it. It genuinely felt like the barista forgot one of the ingredients or something. I thought it was a fluke but when I was at that mall at a different time I got a different iced coffee and it was the same stuff: glass full of ice cubes with a squirtling of syrup and milk. What even is the point!?

You know this is the good shit because when it first came out a few years back google was running a huge disinformation campaign against it. You’d search for “adnauseum” in google and the first result would be an article from some weird advertising company calling is “insecure” and “malware” without any actual argumentation behind those claims, while no other search engine returned that article (I lost the screenshots, so yall are just gonna have to take my word for it). They also delisted it from the chrome store for not discernible reason. They were afraid.

But nowadays I’m willing to bet that they figured out how to detect adnauseum’s fake clicks and filtering it out. Stuff like that needs a talented development team to keep it up to date.

Yeah this is the way. Debian stable has outdated packages, debian testing has broken packages. Ubuntu is difficult for beginners because of snap. Linux mint is the perfect just-works debian-based beginner distro. Same for DE: Gnome is hard to use, KDE is bloated and unstable, and XFCE is too minimalist/diy/quirky for beginner users (you need to add a panel applet in order for the volume keys to work? Huh??). Cinnamon is the perfect middle ground between resource usage and features.

Make sure during installation that you create a 4 GB swap partition too

Or at least as large as your RAM if you want to be able to hibernate.

How well do the signal and whatsapp bridges work? Have you used them yourself? I tried setting up a discord bridge years ago and it was terrible. Is it better now?

hmm havent heard of this one yet. Looks promising, gonna try it later. Thanks!

For people seeking an interface similar to signal, I suggest Session. It’s a fork of signal that onion-routes the messages (they have their own onion routing network, not TOR). There are no user IDs stored anywhere, you message people through their public keys. From the user experience side of the coin, it’s a little on the slow side tho.

Whatsapp to messengers is what internet explorer was to browsers lol. Slow, bloated, unfree, universally hated, but still somehow universally used

There are many things you can complain about when it comes to signal, but overall it’s a huge improvement from unencrypted messengers like discord and definitely a step leap in the right direction

What does privacy badger do that isn’t covered by UO? Is it worth it to install privacy badger if I already use a browser like librewolf that nukes all data every time it’s restarted?

if they finally decide to turn full evil.

Yeah this is the brave experience. Free and open source product that behaves as advertised… from a company that acts like they’re perpetually on the brink of fucking you over. Really hope this doesn’t happen, brave’s approach to antifingerprinting is actually quite interesting and completely different to what we see in the firefox-based hardened browsers.

Yes this is so confusing to me. There was a blast of attention about it when it was launched that lasted like a week max and then everyone completely forgot about it. I thought it was a short-run experiment that got shut down. What reason is there to use threads? Are there any actual humans who still use it? I’ve never visited it but something tells me that it’s just like reddit with at most 100 real users and the rest is just bots replying to bots.

I tried using it with a friend, and it completely nuked my phone’s battery, while my friend’s phone silently killed it (likely for using too much battery). I understand that truly privacy-respecting messengers will always use slightly more power than apps that use the google notification thing, but simplex is just a complete power hog beyond any reasonable limit. Hopefully they fix it at some point, it seems like a pretty solid messenger otherwise, and their approach to privacy and anonymity is unparalleled, at least in theory.

Yes in casual conversation I always say “DDoS” regardless of whether or not it’s distributed because “DoS” makes people think of the operating system.

1. Invent some incredibly specific but entirely false fact (e.g. the kingdom of bolivia was once ruled by King Aron the Benevolent before he was brutally murdered by his cousin-in-law over a dispute about the colonies)
2. Embed said fact in invisible font among material you own the copyright to
3. Let AI bots suck it up as training data
4. Ask random AI bots about King Aron the Benevolent of Bolivia and sue the companies since you now have proof that they violated your copyright

I mean this probably wouldn’t work from a legal standpoint, but whatever. It’s nice to image.

This reminds me of that one time a guy figured out how to make “gzip bombs” that bricked automated vuln scanners.

What desktop environment? KDE, right? Just make sure you aren’t using the encFS backend for your vaults, it’s insecure https://defuse.ca/audits/encfs.htm

I don’t use KDE, so they may have already dropped support for encfs, idk. Just wanted to leave a warning for you/anyone else

I think you used to be able to “bootstrap” a proton account with a mail.ru account (which needs no prior email or phone), but I don’t think that works any more

Hi, I recently set up my own email server

• It’s a huge pain in the ass getting things like DMARC and DKIM and whatever to work. Without those, most providers won’t even deliver your messages. But luckily, there are websites that help you check and fix your configuration
• Even once you do get these things set up correctly, most providers will send your outgoing messages straight to the recipient’s spam folder
• That being said, I believe most providers will mark you as “not spam” if the other person initiates the conversation. So this could be a non-problem if you’re making an email for your business and putting it on business cards or something.
• Mullvad (VPN provider) self-hosts their support email, and they seem to be doing fine.

Hope that helps