I loved The Talos Principle! I haven’t played the remake, I didn’t realise they added new stuff I thought it was just updated graphics which didn’t interest me.

The Talos Principle 2 was great, the puzzles were fantastic, some of the new concepts totally broke my brain for ages and had me trying the dumbest stuff because I was fully lost lol but it was so fun! I recommended the DLC too, I loved the Hexahedron in the Isle of the Blessed and I hope they do more puzzles like that in the future.

I just wish the world was smaller and there was less emphasis on the story, when it comes to puzzle games I just want to get to the puzzles asap I don’t want to run back and forth across the world just to sit through cut scenes. I do kind of get why it was so big for the bonus stuff outside the main puzzles and also

which was pretty funny.

I’ve been playing Balatro for what feels like the last 84 years and I constantly rage quit and say I’m done with the game when I know my run is over then stare out the window for a minute and start the game again, its painfully addictive.

I’ve also been playing Angry Birds on the 3DS its so fun. I haven’t played it since it first came out on mobile 15 years ago, I didn’t realise how old it was! I’ve needed games like this for the past few weeks with life being so busy, they’re so easy to pick up and then just pause whenever I need to.

Huh I thought the right were blaming gamers for taking benefits from single mothers, the elderly and disabled.

"No one has talked about cutting one benefit in Medicaid to anyone who’s duly owed—what we’ve talked about is returning work requirements, so, for example, you don’t have able-bodied young men on a program that’s designed for single mothers and the elderly and disabled. They’re draining resources from people,” said House Speaker Mike Johnson last week.

“So if you clean that up and shore it up, you save a lot of money, and you return the dignity of work to young men who need to be out working instead of playing videogames all day.”

https://www.pcgamer.com/games/young-men-are-playing-videogames-all-day-instead-of-getting-jobs-because-they-can-mooch-off-of-free-healthcare-claims-congressman/

Get back to work gamers https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JQLMo2A1ous

Men aren’t finding their home in the political right because of their love of videogames, they’re being manipulated by companies like Cambridge Analytica and losers that complain about not having sex on their weirdo podcasts

The website uses google services while promoting a phone that advertises avoiding google services… And it seems to be completely broken for me on any android browser I use. Also his main website seems to use the Microsoft store logo for his store logo lol

720 display?, it doesn’t say it has a removable battery? and can somehow promise years of software updates when they rely on third party custom ROMs for their software…

Also I don’t know of any android phones that block replacing the battery?

The website says 6GB RAM and the indiegogo page says 8GB RAM

The hardware seems meh and the software is based on FOSS ROMs that support a wide variety of devices that actually exist. Ubuntu touch is advertised as Coming Soon™

The BraX3 phone offers the most privacy-friendly location service through the Lunar Network

Please anyone who can find the Lunar Network website, link it because right now to me it seems they’re using a now defunct minecraft server for location services

I’ve got scammy vibes from this guy for years, even when I was new to privacy I never felt like he was reliable. Did he dub himself “the internet privacy guy” lol

Overall, I think the phone will probably come out at some point, it’ll be kinda sucky from a hardware perspective for anyone who is used to mid range phones and the software could be fine or it could be buggy AF but I don’t think it’ll be anything special or offer anything unique enough from a privacy perspective to bother with.

I don’t think he can guarantee software updates as he has no control over the ROMs he relies on and I would not expect any sort of support for bugs etc. I don’t think he is knowledgeable enough to trust not to have privacy/security issues with the phone, especially when his whole shtick is “privacy”

It sucks that headphone jacks and sd cards are so hard to find in phones today but I’d prefer to use a dongle and external storage or self host and have a better refurbished phone running LineageOS or any other degoogled ROM than trust this guy.

I use https://github.com/ckb-next/ckb-next You can check if your device is supported https://github.com/ckb-next/ckb-next/wiki/Supported-Hardware here

Select your device -> select the button -> binding -> keyboard -> Miscellaneous -> Page Up or Page Down -> Apply

Lol I spent a week going back and forth with Revolut support in august. I could sign into the app but it would always ask me for a “selfie” verification and every time support would say its a super dark selfie.

Eventually I decided to try a stock ROM and it just worked and I realised what was happening so I transferred all of my money out and deleted my account.

Most local banks here are terrible at making apps, some even require a separate device that looks like a calculator to use online banking, so hopefully they wont follow suit anytime soon

Thank you! I’ve been hesitant to install a whole bunch of extensions but vitals and astra monitor look great, I’m going to try them out this week and see which I prefer.

I’ve been avoiding flathub, it just doesn’t seem like my cup of tea but I may have to reconsider and take a proper look at it because it sounds better than a browser extension ngl

I was just so surprised that a terminal that supports tabs doesn’t have generic tab switching, at least I know I’m not crazy now for not enjoying Gnome terminal lol

I promise the giant cursor is a useful feature even though so many people have thought it was a weird bug lol I constantly do it when I’m trying to figure out how to word an email and on the very rare occasion where I can’t find my cursor it has actually been helful!

I’m pretty biased since I have been using KDE for a few years and only switched to Gnome this week to properly try it out so maybe I’ll change my mind but I doubt I will.

IMO KDE has better theming and is more uniform across a wider variety of apps. It has support for community themes out of the box and it feels like the components are modular so you can have a different colour title bar compared to the app window etc

• Dolphin > Nautilus
• Kate > Gedit
• Konsole > Terminal

These are the 3 main default apps I use on both DEs. Dolphin has way more customisability and looks better but Nautilus has a fantastic multi-file rename with the option for find and replace built in.

For me, Kate is like the vlc of documents. It will open anything and everything whereas I’ve had a couple of “could not open” errors from gedit this week. I also prefer Kate to Vscode.

Konsole by default switches tabs with ctrl tab but Terminal doesn’t and thats basically my only issue with it.

Gnome seems to still require you to install a browser extension to use Shell Extensions.

KDE widgets are fantastic, I love having system monitors in a hidden panel at the top of my screen so I can really easily check system resource usage. I haven’t found anything similar on Gnome yet.

KDE Connect is such a brilliant app, it wouldn’t launch for me on Gnome but there is GSConnect for Gnome but its a 3rd party app

By default on KDE, if you shake your mouse the cursor gets bigger and there doesn’t seem to be a size limit which is so fun to do lol

Going from Plasma 5 to 6 was a nightmare for me but its probably because I was using EndeavourOS so the updates were sooner and more frequent.

Overall I think Gnome looks and feels a bit outdated and clunky and KDE looks and feels more modern with better integration across apps but that might just be QT vs GTK

I do plan on continuing to use Gnome for at least another 2 months to give it a fair try but I will almost always recommended KDE because I prefer the look and feel

2 accounts consistently reporting the same IP, location and user habits etc being linked is more absurd than nobody ever noticing excessive uploaded data from their phones? It is very easy to monitor the amount of uploaded and downloaded data on a device, lots of people would have noticed by now. The amount of storage, bandwidth and processing power that would be required to monitor the audio from hundreds of millions of android users globally 24/7 would make this the dumbest business decision ever when there are so many easier and efficient ways to track users.

Ah damn, its an issue on console too, that sucks. I wonder why there are so many recommendations when its so broken. I can’t believe its on gamepass and PS5 when it can so easily be broken in less than 5 minutes

I finished Silent Hill 2 too, the Mannequins made me jump so many times. They always seemed to appear when I least expected them to. The game created such a tense and scary atmosphere the whole way through but the prison area was by far the spookiest and of course I didn’t understand the hanging part and kept getting punished for it lol.

I also played The Last of Us Part 1 it was no where near as scary but the story was so good, I even cried a bit. I’d love more games that focused on keeping quiet, I dont think I’ve played anything with that sort of mechanic before. I really hope they port part 2 to pc soon.

I tried to play Alien Isolation but I kept getting game breaking bugs and when I finally managed to get about an hour in, there were still no aliens?? Just more bugs so I’ve given up on it and maybe I’ll try see if there are any fixes and stuff when I have more time since so many people recommend it.

American Arcadia

Quantum Break

Hellblade

God of War series

Sniper Elite series

Talos Principle

I found out recently that Portal has some free mods, I’ve just started reloaded and its pretty good so far.

• Portal Reloaded
• Portal Stories Mel
• Thinking with Time Machine

https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/security/genetics-firm-23andme-says-user-data-stolen-in-credential-stuffing-attack/

The information that has been exposed from this incident includes full names, usernames, profile photos, sex, date of birth, genetic ancestry results, and geographical location.

The threat actor accessed a small number of 23andMe accounts and then scraped the data of their DNA Relative matches, which shows how opting into a feature can have unexpected privacy consequences.

• Usernames Profile Photos DoB

They can be linked to other online accounts. This allows for phishing, potentially scamming or getting additonal information on them which can lead to more sophisticated/personalised scams. Older, less tech savvy users are better targets for scammers.

• Username Sex DoB Genetic Ancestry Location data

Data aggregators can sell this info to Health Insurance Companies or any other system who can then discriminate based on genes sex age or location

• All of this information

Can contribute to people committing fraud with their information if they collect enough information from different sources.

• DNA relatives

Having enough information about a user to use it to target their now known relatives in personalised scams.

The people that did this probably didn’t know what information they were going to get, maybe they were hoping for payment info, and settled for trying to just sell what they got.

Any information, no matter how useless it might seem, is better than no information and enough useless information in the wrong hands can be very valuable.

Theres countless data breaches every year and people will collect it all and link different accounts from different breaches until they have enough information. Most people use the same email address for every website and a lot of people reuse the same passwords, which is how this data leak occurred. Knowing that these users reuse the same email/password combination here means theres a very good chance they’ve reused it elsewhere.

You can check out what data breeches have occured and if your email or password has been posted in any of these dumps here https://haveibeenpwned.com/

Once the information is out there, its out there for good and what might seem trivial now to you could be valuable tomorrow to someone else

Yeah, sometimes there just isn’t another option. I have a 60GiB Win11 VM for things I use every few months for a couple of minutes at a time

I’d recommend https://www.qemu.org/ for virtualisation

https://virt-manager.org/ for a gui to manage VMs, you can easily add or remove cores, memory, internet, directories etc really easily.

https://github.com/winfsp/winfsp lets you add a directory from your host to the VM to easily share files

https://github.com/virtio-win/virtio-win-guest-tools-installer makes the cursor seamlessly move between the VM and host instead of pressing ctrl alt g to escape.

Win11 23H2 still allows for offline set up. Just press shift f10 when you’re at the internet set up and type

oobe/bypassnro

The VM will reboot and give you the option to select I don’t have internet so you can just use a local account

https://github.com/Raphire/Win11Debloat/ for getting rid of the unwanted bloatware

Theres also an easy way to activate windows for free, I don’t think I can link it here but its on github and MAS-sive amount of people have starred it.

I started The Witcher 3 for the second time. I tried it a year ago and I kept getting absolutely wrecked by the ghost thing in thr very first crypt so I gave up but this time I killed it straight away so who knows what I was doing wrong last time! Also, probably a bit controversial but I refuse to learn how to play Gwent, I don’t have the time or patients to learn a card game inside an already massive game

I also started and finished American Arcadia this weekend and I absolutely loved it. I’m trying to play shorter games that I wouldn’t usually play in between The Witcher 3 since its long. AA is probably one of the best games I’ve played. The story is fantastic and the gameplay is pretty basic, which suits me. It doesn’t take itself too seriously and has some fun twists at the end.

I’ve also been playing Supraland, its a pretty fun, chill game. The areas aren’t very difficult and the upgrade system is fun. I love the funny dialogues from the NPCs and again its a fun game that doesn’t take itself seriously and I find myself smiling while playing it

Over and over and over and over the gaming community has been screwed over by Publishers so I’ll stop grave dancing when Corpos stop being so horrible

• Requiring a third party account to play a game months after it was released and after selling it to customers who can’t legitimately make an account because you don’t feel like their country can make you enough profit. Helldivers 2

• Attempting to take away peoples digital “purchases” of media because you can’t be bothered to pay licencing. Sony

• Changing the definition of “purchase” an established word in English and not defining your new definition until page 22 of a EULA that you know nobody is going to read. Sony, and everyone else

• Shutting down a server and rendering a game with a whole single player aspect completely useless and not telling consumers this at the time of purchase. The Crew (https://www.stopkillinggames.com/)

• Selling a terribly incomplete game filled with glitches for the price of a full game. Cyberpunk 2077 and so many others.

• Selling Pre-Purchases to let people play the game early but really its just another way to get people to pay to be Guinea pigs in your buggy game. That new Star Wars game and so many others.

• Adding so many stupid “micro transactions” to games to milk players as much as possible for useless skins and camos etc. Diablo 4 and so many more.

• Adding a “Season Pass”??? I don’t even understand what this is??? Buy a full priced game and then buy a subscription to that game??? But still not have access to all of the content and then be shown a magic glove that costs €500, why is this not part of the subscription or is it??? I hope it is. New COD and probably others

• “Making” a game and selling it to people but really its just a scam where they got “volunteers” to work on the game for free. Then shutting the game down instantly. That zombie game with Will Smith.

• Something, something Overwatch 2 is a totally brand new game.

• Shutting down third party mods for an unsupported and dangerous game just after the sale for that game is over. Fine, they didn’t own all of the assets used but they did fix the issue where people could infect your system with malware. COD

• Increasing the prices of all of your subscriptions and making those subscriptions worse by offering less while your parent company is posting ~$20 Billion profits in the most recent quarter, yes quarter, thats like 3 months…

Btw all of these examples have happened within the last 4 years. Its pretty sad that I can list these off the top of my head. I only play single player games and I only got back into gaming a couple of years ago after ~10 years of not really playing anything

If your phone has a password on it then its data is going to be encrypted until you unlock the phone.

You can temporarily boot a twrp recovery image. It will let you put in your password and decrypt your storage.

You should be able to transfer the files to your PC with a cable then

Even if your coutry reaches 100% and you haven’t signed, please still do incase some signatures are invalid

TIP – It is better to collect more signatures than required. Sometimes the national authorities might not be able to validate all the statements of support you provide.

https://citizens-initiative.europa.eu/how-it-works_en

For me the issue here is, why put so much time and energy into basically rebranding an LLM. I’ve seen LLMs running on RPi and android phones. Why not write a blog post showing how to run LLMs locally with existing tools for the best privacy instead and put more focus on their existing services. It just seems like they’re jumping on the AI bandwagon and charging a premium for an already freely available LLM.

I see some benefits of AI like quality tts when using OSM and stt when transcribing/translating audio but other things like Googles AI answers and Microsofts Copilot leave me scratching my head wondering why consumer would want this

Am I out of touch?

a writing assistant was one of the most requested features in our recent survey

Apparently, I am. People actually want this

For Proton Mail, 59% of respondents want an easier way to send end-to-end encrypted emails to non-Proton users, while 29% want a writing assistant for proofreading, grammar, and composing emails.

Nothing I hate more than not giving a link to the repo

Scribe relies on open source code and models, and is itself open source and therefore available for independent security and privacy audits

Not on their support page specifically for it either

Had to got to Reddit and look at their comments to find out they’re using Mistral

https://reddit.com/comments/1e68sof/comment/ldsbs24

We built Scribe in r/ProtonMail using the open-source model Mistral AI to empower anyone in need of email productivity to use a privacy-respecting alternative to r/ChatGPT or r/GeminiAI that:
 ❌ doesn’t log or save prompts
 ⛔️ doesn’t use your data for training
 🔎 open-source code that anyone can inspect
 🖥️ can be run locally, so your data never leaves your device
 
See the official announcement here: https://proton.me/blog/proton-scribe-writing-assistant

https://huggingface.co/mistralai/Mistral-7B-v0.1/discussions/8

Hello, thanks for your interest and kind words! Unfortunately we’re unable to share details about the training and the datasets (extracted from the open Web) due to the highly competitive nature of the field. We appreciate your understanding!

I’ve run into issues where a game will work with a specific version of wine but then not work with a newer version but then other games that don’t work with the older version, work with the new one.

Theres also potentially issues of dependencies for one game breaking another game. Separate prefixes just make it easier to troubleshoot a game not working since you can just install/uninstall whatever dependencies that it might need without worrying about messing up other games.

Its also just easier to delete the entire prefix when you realise you’ve installed too many useless dlls and you’ve finally found the one thing you do need to make the game work lol

I also like to archive games I like since companies can just decide to remove their games from existence whenever they want. So I just add the separate prefix that has any extra dlls or tweaks to the archive so that the game should still work in 3 years without having to try and download dependencies that may not be as easy to find in the future

But if you don’t have issues I don’t think its a big deal and if you do have issues with a game, you can just make a separate one for that anyway.