Squiddlioni

It’s the only piece of consumer software I’ve ever used that I straight-up thought should be illegal after I tried it. If you’re a parent, and you’re wondering if you should let your child explore Roblox: DON’T. Ban any videos that mention Roblox from their apps, do not install the game, and do not ever give that company a single cent. The entire structure is designed to torment children and yank on their psychological levers until they beg their parents to buy them in-game currency to turn their low-low into a high-high for a couple of minutes, then restart the cycle.

There are VIP areas that you have to have a subscription (pay) to go into, and devs are incentivized to add them by kickbacks, so they show up in just about every game. In competitive games where you chase other players to catch them, if you don’t have VIP the other players can literally just go through a wall you can’t pass to get away. Then they can get boosts in the VIP area to get an unfair advantage.

There’s the “revenge” buttons, where if someone in a competitive game wins against you, it gives you a button you can click to to punish the other player in various ways. Naturally, it costs real money.

Obstacle courses start out decent, but once you’re far enough in that the sunk cost fallacy is in effect, it ramps the difficulty up massively and frustrates you over and over. And each time you respawn it makes you walk past the item you can buy that will make this frustrating part disappear and get you back to the nice dopamine hits like you had earlier in the map.

And of course, every game tries to make people who buy the pay-to-win items as visible as possible, and make it look as spectacular as possible. It’s masterful psychological manipulation, and while the games with these exploitative systems are made by devs external to Roblox itself, the economy and reward systems that shaped those games is defined by Roblox. It’s actually worse that you have external devs, because it insulates Roblox from the responsibility for these exploitative mechanics, while Roblox acts as the bank you use to buy currency for the games. Roblox only cares about money, and they don’t care how many abusive things their games have to do to kids to get it.

I’m about as far from a pearl-clutcher as you can get while still being a responsible parent, but even before considering that the social features are repeatedly being used to groom children, Roblox simply should not be allowed to exist. Play Goat Simulator 3 with your kid instead. Or Minecraft. Or Terraria. A Lego game. Bayonetta. I don’t care–anything but Roblox.

It’s essentially a guarantee that certain tools and system APIs will be available, accept certain arguments, and accept/return data formatted in a specific way. It’s important for general purpose software and portability. Basically, if you want your software to run on anything and everything, you target POSIX. Except Windows, obviously, but pretty much everything else is POSIX compatible, or close enough that you’re probably fine.

An example: I write medical applications that are distributed to many hospitals, so well outside of my direct control. One program in particular is run on Windows, Linux, or AIX. I have to write separate handling for Windows obviously, but all I need to do to support both Linux and AIX is stick to POSIX APIs and test on Linux. Which is great, because I don’t have access to an AIX system. I still have to do final testing on AIX, but with one minor exception in the last five years, it all just works.

They’ve been on an every-other-year-in-September-ish release cadence since the 3 came out in 2019, so it’s been expected for a while that 2025/09 would be the release of the Fairphone 6. Glad to hear they’re on track for that since I’ve been holding off on replacing my phone in anticipation of the 6.

For a while I had Willem Dafoe’s “Haaaark! Hark, Triton” speech from The Lighthouse as my wake-up alarm. After a couple glorious weeks of startling awake to the curses of a crazed lighthouse keeper, my partner used the marital veto and I changed it back to the default gentle jingle. Haven’t messed with it since.

That’s Dyson Sphere Program. You can fly to different star systems and collect various resources to grow your factories, build a solar collector swarm, and eventually Dyson spheres to harvest energy from stars. If you’re into factory games, I highly recommend it.

You’re sort of right. It’s a condition associated with the rapid-growth breeds raised in commercial farms, and has become more prevalent over time. It’s called woody breast.

It’s me, I do it. But only when I need something to do to stay awake in hour five of today’s meetings to address the “quick turnaround” patch that I finished coding three weeks ago, but now they want a label to change and no one on the six teams that have somehow become involved seems to know who owns the package that the field the label represents belongs to, but they’re absolutely certain we need to programmatically retrieve the text in case the package owner changes it at some point, and someone remembers that the original developer wrote code to get the label text 16 years ago, but it was removed from the program two years before the project started using source control, and they have an old installer around here somewhere that we can decompile or trace with Wireshark to get the right RPC name (sharing their screen while they have a rummage for it, natch), and someone else volunteers that they might know how to get a version of the server application from around that time since the client and server versions have to match, but it’s technically the intellectual property of a different subcontractor who was just a guy in Alaska who passed away five years ago, but they’re sure they can convince his estate to burn it to a disk and mail it to me if they can just find the contact information…

That all makes sense. You described yourself as a non-techie, so I misunderstood and thought you had assumed that all emails had to go through their portal.

You’re correct that Tuta doesn’t support PGP or S/MIME, which I didn’t realize. I assumed that any email service that has the word “privacy” on their website would support both. I don’t use personal email for sensitive communications, so I’m not in the habit of using PGP or S/MIME, but still… come on.

Their reasoning seems a bit silly. They say they don’t support PGP because it doesn’t encrypt the subject line, and it doesn’t support post-quantum algorithms or forward secrecy. That’s, at most, a warning line in the GUI, not something you just don’t implement.

They say they don’t implement S/MIME because of EFail, a seven year old vulnerability. They can’t confirm that all external services have a mitigation in place for it. But again, just put a warning on the UI. Could even build a list of external providers that mitigate it and only show the warning if the user is sending to a system not on the list.

There are a lot of places on Tuta’s website where they say they’re working on features but don’t specify a timeline, and a quick scan through their github issues finds some conversations where they indicate developer resources are low and they’re focused on post quantum encryption first, but they said that for years. Seems they didn’t implement basic features because they wanted the one big QC feature. They stated in 2020 that they intend to support PGP and Autocrypt, but they removed those from their roadmap. They’re not a current priority.

“Once our PQ-encryption is in place we can consider how to best interop with others keeping benefits of perfect secrecy and post-quantum encryption.” So it looks like they’re letting Perfect be the enemy of Good.

Yep, I can totally see the walled garden aspect. If you want PGP, Autocrypt, or S/MIME, find another provider until Tuta gets around to implementing them. A lot of their communications read as though they don’t have enough development staff to chew what they’re biting off.

ETA: I don’t see any scaling option in their desktop app, but you can launch it with GDK_DPI_SCALE=1.25 (or some other number) to embiggen it.

From your description it sounds like the feature you might be thinking of as walled-garden-ing is end-to-end encrypted (e2ee) emails, which they call “confidential”. The idea is that you can encrypt a message and send it to someone. The message they receive is actually just a link to a publicly-accessible page that Tuta hosts. You give the other person a password that they can enter on that page to read the email you sent and respond to it. If your recipient is also using Tuta, though, when you send an encrypted email it just shows up in their inbox like a regular email.

This is the standard way to handle secure emails, and it’s actually a limitation of the email protocol. The way you would send an encrypted message to someone on another email server is to encrypt the email with your recipient’s public key. Then the message goes to their email inbox like a regular email and they can use their private key to decrypt it (which is what Tuta does if you’re sending an encrypted email to another Tuta user–they already have the recipient’s public key). Email servers don’t have a standard way to send each other public keys for accounts, so if you want to encrypt an email you either have to get the recipient’s public key yourself and tell your email software to encrypt the message with it, or have your provider send a password protected link.

I actually just switched to Tuta. You can still get and receive normal unencrypted emails. The encryption is optional and not enabled by default. I don’t have strong feelings one way or the other yet on the service as a whole. They just added the ability to import emails exported from another service, which is usually something email providers do pretty early on. Currently it’s only available at the $8/month tier, but it’s speculated that they’ll roll it out to the $3/month tier once it’s stable. That’ll be a non-starter for a lot of people. The client UI is simple but functional. It was easy to set up my domain so I don’t have to go into each account and update my email address. Yeah, no complaints so far, but also nothing that blows me away. There’s a free tier if you wanted to just poke around.

He said unnecessarily political things in a tweet which don’t match the experiences of many people, at the exact worst moment possible. Then he doubled down on his statement with an official company account, which he later edited after there was backlash. The original comment. He’s promised to post from a personal account in the future. In that same post he stated that “while the X post was not intended to be a political statement, I can understand how it can be interpreted as such, and therefore should not have been made”.

In further discussions he described his political leanings as “probably closest to European center-left parties. But again, that’s a massive generalization/simplification. Where that puts me on the American spectrum, I have no idea”. That’s not really part of the drama, but can be taken to imply that despite working with US legislators in the past and touting this work in his responses, he may not have fully understood the current political climate or party dynamics if he doesn’t know which US party he more closely identifies with. Another interpretation could be that he knows full well and doesn’t want to say either way because making a statement of partisan support is what put him in the hot water in the first place.

I linked original sources so you can do your own reading and come to your own conclusions. Personally I bounce between believing that he stepped in something he didn’t mean to and he genuinely doesn’t support either party, and thinking that he’s too clever a man to not understand, especially since he has directly worked with US legislators on privacy issues and he doubled down in the comments after the general response was critical of his original tweet.

Yes, I canceled my Ultimate account. Andy can believe whatever he wants in private, but publicly stepping outside of non-partisan policy advocacy at this exact moment in time was a red flag, doubly so because he espoused his personal politics through an official business account in his response to the Reddit thread.

Email/calendar went to Tuta, AirVPN for VPN, BitWarden for passwords. Everything is encouragingly smooth so far.

Fair warning: Tuta’s email import is very new and only available on the more expensive tier at the moment (not sure if that’s permanent). I didn’t have any problems, but there were some issues a few weeks ago.

I do think people are over-reacting to Andy’s words and assigning him political views he didn’t express. He didn’t endorse Trump or the Republican party at large, and definitely didn’t “go full MAGA” or express Nazi sympathies. His statements about Democrats I partially agree with and partially disagree. His remarks about the priorities and actions of Republicans, though, were pure tailpipe-huffing fantasy. Being able to say these absurd things in public–under an official business account no less–shows poor judgement and implies he might believe other absurd things he isn’t willing to say publicly.

Another factor in my decision: Proton’s privacy policy specifies they can modify the policy at any time with no notification to users, and deems continued use of the services as agreement to the updated terms. The updated terms they didn’t notify you about.

That being said, no service provider is perfect. I don’t think Proton stores enough data to really be a concern if they turned over everything they have. But this whole thing is based on trust. Even with their clients being open-source software, you’re trusting that they always serve the same browser scripts that they published. You trust that the password you provide at key generation or login isn’t ever passed back to their servers. You trust that they don’t keep unencrypted copies of your emails, files, or VPN activity. You trust that they aren’t going to modify their privacy policy and quietly undo protections you thought you had.

The way Andy responded was enough to question my trust in the company with him at the helm. I didn’t leave as a heavy rebuke, just as a “do better”. There are plenty of other companies which provide equivalent services. That’s the risk companies take when a major part of their market is ideological people: if you chafe their ideology they’re more likely to put the effort into leaving.

It shows an 18+ tag for me too, and the image is blurred. I assume it’s because of our host software. I’m on kbin.melroy.org (Mbin), and the original commenter is on moist.catsweat.com (also Mbin).

I nixed the Zojirushi because of the PTFE coating, but I love having a non-stick rice cooker. Ended up getting a GreenPan induction rice cooker with an insert that has a ceramic coating to make it nonstick, and I love it.

Almost 20 years ago I convinced my high school library to let me install Debian on one of the computer groups. I found the “eject” command, and wrote a script that just invoked it with an argument to close the tray. I named that script “inject”. Being high schoolers, my friends and I made scripts to “eject” and “inject”, along with various beeps, and named the scripts suggestive and tawdry things. We all had a good giggle setting the systems off on their little routines and walking away.

It’s hex numbers that map to ASCII characters: 72 r 75 u 6c l 65 e

Or, in the modern nomenclature, “systemd and friends”

I did this exact thing when contemplating getting a mini pc. I got an external drive and turned my Deck into a Kodi box. It’s been great, though it had trouble pushing 4K60, so I have it set up to output 1080. If you’re setting up something like Kodi it’s worth mentioning that the Deck uses KDE, so you can set window rules to always open the application fullscreen.

Looks like Patricia Tallman, maybe? Lyta from Babylon 5.

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Alright, you’ve convinced me that you’re either a disingenuous troll or a genuine fool. Either way, I think this conversation isn’t going to be productive. Have a good one.