Leon

This is what Mullvad says on their payment page.

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Do not use the same token more than once. Do not send coins, checks, or money orders. Do not send parcels or boxes. Do not seal the envelope with excessive amounts of tape. Do not use registered mail. Do not send large amounts of cash. Expect post to take at least two weeks before it arrives in our PO box. We check our PO box and credit accounts every day of the working week. Please be patient if your account has not been credited. We deal with payments as quickly as we can.

I guess they aren’t saying that they won’t accept registered mail, just that it will take longer to process.

In what manner? Capabilities, or belonging to an evil corporation that happily steals data and works to undermine democracy?

You’re free to disagree, but all the tools say otherwise. Hell even the widely lauded Claude Code is just that, we know for sure since the source leaked.

Of course, that’s how all of these agents work. At best they’re a bunch of prompts tied together with scripts to perform actions. At worst they’re just interacting directly with software without any scripts or sandboxing.

There is no AI.

That looks like Tim Apple.

I don’t think anyone hunts cows for sustenance these days, and it’s not like the majority of people needs to eat cows for sustenance. Society has just collectively decided that certain animals should suffer for our gain and that said suffering is okay. For me, that just causes too much cognitive dissonance.

Though, I realise that abstaining is easy for me on account of never having eaten meat in the first place; I’ve nothing to give up. I also don’t particularly enjoy people preaching that someone should or shouldn’t eat one way or another, because I grew up with that shit being preached at me and it made me want to pull certain people’s eyes out.

I think it’s healthy to examine societal biases and traditions, because there are plenty of things we do just because it’s always been done one way or another, and breaking habits is tough, particularly on a societal scale. If someone comes to the conclusion that they’re actually perfectly fine with eating meat and all of the impacts that has sits well with them, far be it for anyone to tell them otherwise.

I’m not sure if you’re being funny and I’m not getting it. Macromedia were the original developers of various web products. Flash and Dreamweaver for example. They were acquired by Adobe and it was renamed to Adobe Flash.

They’re talking about the same Flash you are.

Flash itself was junk. People made some fantastic things with it, though.

They exist, but most of the scams you get on Grindr in my experience are like “WANT SEX?! Check out my profile on BugDickDudesSite dot C🫦U🫦M No credit card required!!”

I mean hardly, but neither has any of Bethesda’s own games. The New Vegas team did what they could with the broken tools that Bethesda makes, and they managed to craft a fantastic narrative, something Bethesda will never come close to delivering.

Yes, but nobody cares about Spotify. […] But I can use my own cd collection instead if I want to or play my own music or none at all. Nobody cares.

I really wish this was the case, but a lot of people feel like they’re stuck with Spotify, and buying music to own is increasingly difficult. You and I, and people like us who maintain our own collections are outliers.

I recognise however that Spotify isn’t an essential service in the sense that say, a word processor is. I’m also not saying that Spotify, Skype or Klarna are good services by any means. Skype doesn’t really exist anymore so fuck them, but Spotify and Klarna are terrible corporations.

What I’m saying is that there are services outside of the U.S., as well as popular software that isn’t developed in the U.S., though many of these might just exist to cater to needs that U.S. software doesn’t fill. For example, we have a software suite that’s ubiquitous in government and public institutions here called Platina developed by Formpipe.

I wouldn’t say that the ubiquity of American services is because their services are higher quality or in general better than other offerings. I think a lot of it has to do with the absolutely bananas funding of the U.S. tech sector, as well as the anti-competitive practises the tech giants have been engaging in for decades at this point. Word became the de-facto standard not because it was the better software, but because Windows was the de-facto standard.

Had as much time and money been poured into FOSS alternatives, they’d be at the forefront now. We might see this happen now with a lot of European governments attempting to move over to a FOSS software stack to minimise their reliance on proprietary, particularly U.S., technologies.

I’d further argue that a lot of the U.S. tech sector is actually backed up and powered by FOSS software that doesn’t necessarily have an inherent “location” to it. Any sort of big media platform that serves video or audio (Netflix, HBO, Amazon, Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, Spotify, etc.) will be using ffmpeg to do the heavy work for them. Most of the web runs on Linux servers, and the ecosystem that comes with. None of the tech giants would even function if not for the smaller software projects developed and maintained in large by private individuals.

This is something you don’t see every day.

I have no strong feelings about php, but I love your enthusiasm.

Eh, there are plenty of success stories with companies that aren’t American. Spotify for example is Swedish, as is Skype, and if you count fintech, Klarna. Skype was acquired by Microsoft.

That is the way with a lot of tech; something was created and then bought up by a bigger tech company, either because they wanted to expand their offerings, or snuff out competition.

They usually have a dragon nearby so I think you’re on the right path!

You need a dragon.

I recommend Netbird over Tailscale. It has more features, is fully FOSS, and you can self-host it.

That depends on how willing you are to take Google at face value.

Aww, but I wanted to see their penis.

Ahah! I love everything about this. The hairdo, the shirt, the pockets sticking out of the shorts, the Batman logo moustache. What a stud.

That’s bizarre. Since it’s 20 of them and they’re all pinktoes my first thought was that she’s a breeder. However, it feels really strange that a breeder would just forget about 20 babies on a train? I can’t quite fathom how this sort of thing could happen.

No, they’re not.