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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: July 5th, 2023

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  • It is for most scenarios in my life. And in many peoples’ lives I will wager.

    For the people that are abroad I’d have to pay to call/text them each time, and I can’t even send them pictures/videos in a convenient way (no, convincing everyone to use signal just to talk to me is not happening)

    And when my family/friends share photos/videos of important events in their lives that I care about I’d just have to accept I’ll be the only one missing out and be that awkward guy at family gatherings that’s all out of the loop.

    And when my family is organizing events I would be the only one left out and have to convince someone to text/call me because I don’t want to be in the chat, being an inconvenience to everyone and also losing much of my input.

    And I’m not even gonna mention how most workplaces and business expect you to be on WhatsApp.

    And what would I get in return for being off WhatsApp? Nothing, that’s what. I’d just be seen as the weirdo that never wants to interact with anyone online.

    Do I like meta? No. But avoiding everything they touch is not worth being a nuisance to everyone else around me. I’ve just learned to suck it up like most people do. It’s not ideal but it’s absolutely unrealistic to expect most people to get off whatsapp/messenger when everyone has been on it for like a decade now. It’s unfortunate but it is what it is.



  • Nothing about the US system is particularly geared to prevent double voting.

    I get that you don’t have a federal register (something you should really fix tbh) but requiring manual registration when you could, oh idk, simply register people when they are born and then later automatically provide them a unique ID they can vote with? (I’m not even talking a government ID for the purposes of identifying yourself to law enforcement and stuff, I’m talking even just a voter ID for the sake of voting only)

    Then have part of the number in that ID identify the state you’re from if you want to prevent crossing borders to double vote (kinda like how credit card numbers have that info on them).

    It’s what they do here anyway, I’ve had an ID since I was like 4, and it’s with that document that I and everyone else votes.

    Though I know the US is probably too anti-democratic for this and none of the parties in power want to change jack.




  • Yes. In most European countries even small parties can get seats. In my country there are 8 parties in parliament, for example, and 2 of them didn’t use to be there 2 election cycles ago (they were too small/new 8 years ago but eventually grew in popularity and got enough votes for representation).

    Of course if they only have 1 or 2 members in parliament they typcily tend to form coalitions with other like-minded parties so they can get more voting power.




  • It’s not really Twitch’s fault. Twitch doesn’t care about sexual content, they’re a company they don’t have morals. They’d be more than happy to rake in those dollars. The problem are advertisers and payment processors who have very strict views/policies on stuff like this and Twitch has to kowtow to them if they want to be in business.

    So many sites have this happen to them, where they allow or even encourage sexual expression and then a payment processor comes in and says “yeah if you don’t cut out that we’re dropping you” and then it’s over.


  • First, when you get into these arguments, always start from the viewpoint that these people do not see any worth in their data. Their convenience is worth way more than any privacy breach. That’s why your goal is usually to convince them that privacy breaches can be a huge innconvenience for them, use their selfishness to advocate for their self-interest.

    Quick example, what defines something that needs to be hidden changes constantly with different governments and regulatory bodies. There’s no telling if your current data won’t be illegal or something in the future, causing you problems. That’s why it’s important to have protections for your data to begin with so a future government can’t just unilaterally decide to trample all over your rights.

    Basically, see what they care about and try advocating from that viewpoint, not your personal viewpoint. There’s a good chance you’ll have a line of argument.

    I find that I have more success convincing people if I put their self-interest first and foremost instead of trying to explain some grand ideology. People want something tangible, not a hazy ideal. It’s only when something affects them that they may change their views.





  • The sites are purposefully obtuse to not draw attention.

    A debrid service generally has 2 purposes: caching files and unlocking premium file hosting sites for cheap.

    The latter is self-explanatory and not relevant for this thread (basically imagine unlocking premium for sites like mega and rapidgator but only paying 1 site for all of it).

    The former is what’s important. When you give a site like real debrid a torrent/magnet link, it will download the files in that torrent and cache them so that anyone who later wants to access that same torrent, instead of having to rely on seeders, can just download it directly from the debrid website.

    What are the torrent sources?

    It doesn’t have any, users are the ones who manually (or automatically with their API) provide the site with torrents, which the site then caches for anyone who later wants them.

    Also, what about seeding ratios?

    There aren’t any. Most debrid sites only leech and don’t seed, that’s why even among piracy communities they can be controversial.

    And then another comment points out that streamio is meant to work directly with torrents, which leaves me confused as far as how all the pieces fit together.

    Stremio doesn’t do anything on its own, the add-ons built for stremio are what do the work.

    There is an add-on called torrentio which can pull torrents from several popular trackers and show them in stremio, where you can pick one and start streaming (or, more specifically, the stremio app downloads the torrent sequentially, which allows you to watch it while it’s still downloading). That’s what we’re using here.

    This add-on can additionally be configured with your real debrid account’s API key so that when you select a torrent in stremio, instead of stremio downloading the torrent normally from the available seeders, it instead pulls the cached file from real-debrid, dramatically increasing download speed and more or less eliminating buffering altogether (since real debrid can provide the file at much faster speeds). Using real debrid also solves the issue of torrents with no/few seeds, since the file is always cached regardless and can be provided at fast speeds always.

    Hope this helped.


  • The alternative is on desktop always get your smartphone, open some app type a token or on the phone to switch to multiple apps to get your credentials. Not fun imho.

    There are desktop apps for OTP, you don’t need a phone. And since you only need to setup an OTP secret once, doing it for your phone and pc isn’t that big of a deal.

    I have my OTP secrets in 3 places, 2 yubikeys and my phone’s authenticator app, with the former meant for my PC.

    For me, the key benefit of 2Fa is getting more security against leaked, stolen, phished passwords, and that still holds up.

    If your vault doesn’t have 2FA too this doesn’t hold up though. Means you’re trusting a single service that can get hacked with all your secrets. Sure, your other accounts are more protected against leaks and stuff, but if your password vault isn’t, you didn’t really change much, just pointed the hackers to one single place.

    Yes I know hacking a password vault isn’t some walk in the park and rarely happens, but the point is any leaks from it would be 10 times more catastrophic for you if all your OTP secrets are also stored in it. I’ll spare myself from that nightmare with the small inconvenience that is a separate, offline OTP app.


  • This isn’t really a good idea because then you’re putting all your eggs in one basket. The whole point of 2FA is that the second factor is in a separate location so if your first factor (password) gets compromised the second one (OTP code) still protects your account. If both factors are in one place you’re back to a single point of failure instead of 2, losing a key benefit of 2FA.

    If you’re gonna do this, at the very least have 2FA with a security key on your bitwarden vault.





  • Yes, there is a rhyme and reason, but because that requires actually delving into linguistics studying (plus etymology for all those edge cases that got carried over from Latin and other languages), most people don’t get too deep into it apart from shallow rules (eg: if word starts/ends in X then it’s male/female).

    Not even natives of gendered languages usually bother learning the nitty gritty rules, they just pick it up as they go, that’s how all of us learn our languages.

    On a practical level, it’s also much easier to teach a 6 year old in elementary that something is male/female just because, and to remember that, than to go into each and every individual case (morphology, syntax, semantics, etc.), which themselves typically have edge cases due to history and whatnot. Especially because that child will naturally pick it up as they absorb the language around them so it really doesn’t matter much.

    And then there’s just those cases where we actually don’t know because the etymology got lost. Yeah, that’s fun.

    In school I was never taught why something is male/female yet I can always distinguish them naturally in my. day to day because that’s how I’ve always lived. That’s just one of the amazing things of human language.

    If you ask a native of a gendered language why they think X word should be male instead of female they’ll probably just tell you it sounds wrong otherwise, and that’s literally the end of it for most of us. We don’t think about it, we just intuitively know it sounds right or wrong. I’m sure that’s frustrating to hear for a foreigner trying to learn, but you can’t teach what you don’t know. In the end, other than very broad rules, the best way typically is to just start memorizing it one by one.

    Also, “ends in A” is definitely rhyme or reason in Portuguese, that’s actually a rule. Although to be more specific it’s a tonic A, but even that has an exception if it’s a nasal Ã, but I didn’t want to get into phonology too, I just wanted to give a simple example.