Yes, it’s great if you like immersive horror style games with great atmosphere. And with beautiful graphics.

There’s also the very valid situation of a game you previously liked becoming noticeably worse after some update or addon, which might cause a previous recommendation and engagement to flip.

Don’t see an issue here. The advantages of the Steam Machine is that it requires no assembly, looks nice and is optimized for standing in a living room. If you build it DIY you’ll as usual have lower costs, more performance, but higher assembly time and probably also less good looks. People who value performance or price over the rest will do it DIY, otherwise they’ll take the pre-built option.

I was a bit disappointed with desktop Linux during the late 90s and early 00s because many applications within the typical ecosystem weren’t great or mature yet (I still shudder when thinking about the amount of time I spent trying to get audio to work nicely across OSS, alsa, artsd, esound, … this was before pulseaudio or pipewire, obviously), and then I temporarily switched back to Windows as a primary OS just because of gaming compatibility. But since the mid-10s or so, Linux grew to become very capable for at least casual gaming as well. So there was no need for Windows anymore and I just wiped it off of every device, leaving Linux as the only OS. This was also during a time where Windows 8, 8.1, 10 and later 11 showed up and this really showed to me that Windows was doomed to die a long-winded death. The last decent version of Windows was 7.

It was funny (and untrue) when desktop Linux was constantly at ~1% market share. But now with desktop Linux slowly but constantly rising, it’s actually true!

They probably reached their goal. It was never about efficiency. That was just the PR spin to sell it to the public. It was about getting rid of pesky regulatory bodies which stood in the way of making more money. Especially those who hindered Musk’s companies.

The USA is currently experiencing the end phase of capitalism: massive corruption turning into open corruption with an economic oligarch class fusing with the government, massive income gaps and problems for regular citizens, class and culture wars plus reappearance of fascism to keep the population busy with culture wars among themselves instead of uniting against the exploiters, and so on. But it just started in USA. It’s already swapping over to other western democratic countries as well.

You becoming a neo-nazi by constantly being served right-wing propaganda on company-controlled social media channels is better for their business than if you were a neutral, critical thinker. It’s why Twitter was worth the 40 billion for Musk. Not because he expects it to ever repay itself. But because he can produce more loyalists by influencing what the algorithm shows and hides for you. Nazis are great for them because they’re busy fighting against other parts of the population while giving the wealthy class a free pass to do what they want. Which is more money, more influence, more exploitation.

Overexplaining it might scare away non-technical users. Just compare it to well-known social media but say it 's independent and more like e-mail in the sense that everyone can choose a different server with different rules but they all talk to each other. No one company controls everything. And that the algorithms aren’t secret or manipulative. Basically, just tell them the main advantages in an easy to understand way.

What this also means: you cannot have any private conversations with windows users anymore. They all have to be considered fully backdoored. Even if the agent runs locally, you don’t know what it all sends back to MS servers.

For people who have any slice of privacy consciousness left, this is the death of Windows. The difference between this and using a desktop directly from MS’ cloud is negligible - MS can get access to potentially everything that’s visible or readable on your desktop.

Stands for “fear, uncertainty and doubt”. It’s actually a very relevant term. In a lot of contexts. It’s when people influence you to either fear, have uncertainty about, or doubt something. Sometimes this happens without any intent, for example if you’re unsure about some new situation or thing, you tend to first view it more negatively because you have some fear or doubts about it (which might not be warranted). But sometimes, it can have malicious intent (e.g. right-wing extremists spreading FUD about human subgroups they don’t like. Usually the first step before more aggressive behavior happens).

It’s mildly interesting that this claim originated during a time (~ late 70s and 80s) when such claims also originated about rock and metal music. Both D&D and those were somewhat new (or at least newly popular) during that time.

In a way it was the analog equivalent of modern FUD and misinformation spreading on social media. Maybe even disinformation, but probably just misinformation and FUD.

On many websites, the cookies are created no matter what you choose. It’s a dark pattern to get you to accept all, yes, but In the end it’s often meaningless.

Use a decent browser like librewolf which isolates cookies so only the site that created them can access them and clears all cookies on exit - this protects you from bad effects of cookies so you can just accept all. However, you’re still susceptible to other methods of tracking (like IP address or browser fingerprint based tracking) unless you use Tor Browser or something similar.

How to Wagon your Dragon

Incredible community project. Massive scale. Looking forward to this much more than to TES 6. Also doubt that Bethesda is even capable of creating a top-tier game these days.

Not just themed Chrome but with Microsoft’s anti-features (data gathering) and unwanted integrations added on top. Or instead of Google’s. Not sure. Anyway, if you don’t want to freely give away even more of your browsing data to either Microsoft or Google you shouldn’t use any of those.

If you want a Chromium-based browser for the desktop, try Brave but be wary that you need to change lots of settings to make it behave well (but it’s still the least bad Chromium-based browser, when not counting Vanadium for GrapheneOS/Android).

If not, try Librewolf, which already behaves well out of the box and reigns among the top Firefox-based desktop browsers.

After you’ve already established security, you can add obscurity (without compromising security) on top for an even bigger gain in security overall. But you can’t do obscurity in place of security.

I read somewhere (and it seems very plausible, though I’m not sure whether it’s scientifically accurate) that the subjective feeling that time runs so fast is something you automatically get with increasing age, and it has to do with what’s still exciting or new for you in life and what is not. With increasing age and life experience, you get the feeling that anything is still exciting or new less often over time. You’ve kind of seen it all, that’s why days seem much more similar to each other than when you were still a kid (when almost every experience you’ve made was still a fresh one), that’s why each day is less memorable, that’s why it seems like time is flying by like crazy.

GrapheneOS is the best mobile OS. Even though the Graphene team has weird habits of communication which might be off-putting for some, the OS technically still is the most secure AND most private mobile OS distribution you can have on any phone. It’s literally at the top, according to many technical and data protection experts. It’s so good that Cellebrite can’t crack it even with physical access, and some police in some country (I think it was Portugal) will assume you’re a criminal for using it, because it’s so secure and private and they can’t stand the thought of someone fully utilizing their personal rights. Plus, it has great documentation and is easy to install. Despite it being so secure and private by default, it still allows you to shoot yourself in the foot by installing the sandboxed Google services and so on, if you really want to. So it can also be used like an off-the-shelf Android, just with some additional hardening and extra protections on top which you benefit from, but the benefit will be much smaller of course when you install and use spyware apps.

Generally, a Samsung phone isn’t great for privacy. Consider getting a Pixel and put GrapheneOS on it. Much better Android baseline. More secure as well.

Any connection to Samsung’s servers is likely non-essential, but do check that OS updates work.

Google Play Services is Google’s main surveillance stack on every commercial Android distribution. It transmits a lot of unique device info to Google, every 20 minutes or so. The minimum data being transmitted is:

Phone #
SIM #
IMEI (world-wide unique device ID)
S/N of your device
WIFI MAC address
Android ID
Mail Address of your logged in Google account
IP address

However, this app might be required for Google Play to function. And also for some other apps. So check those dependency issues. In general, you should prefer using open source apps or any apps which don’t have such stupid dependencies. Some apps merely complain when you don’t have the Play Services app running (by displaying a popup) but still work.

There’s also the issue with Google’s DRM called “Play Integrity”. Some apps use Google’s Play Integrity API to “verify” that the device is an “officially sanctioned Android” and then act like any other Android is “unsafe” and then refuse to work. If you encounter this, be sure to complain to the app developers about this.

If you need the Google Play store but want to block network access for the Play Services app (which you should do), you should probably use the third-party Aurora store app.

About the Ironfox connections: not sure, but the “firefox-settings” hosts from Mozilla sound related to the Firefox Sync feature which syncs your settings/bookmarks/… with Mozilla. If that’s the case it’s also non-essential and can be blocked.

Used to prefer GOG over Steam. GOG did nothing for Linux gamers though, they didn’t even release their Galaxy client for Linux. Will prefer GOG over Steam again when this changes (they said recently they want to change this, but only after Valve has already invested a lot into making Linux gaming a real thing with almost zero friction). That’s also basically the best thing that Valve has done - they really did help to make Linux gaming a reality, and Linux gaming is an important step towards toppling Windows’ dominance. They deserve a lot of credit for that. But there are also plenty of other things that you can criticize about Steam.

If you’re on Windows though, you should definitely always prefer GOG over Steam because it’s DRM-free (you buy it, you own it). Of course, there are many more games only available on Steam, so it might not be possible all the time, but at least you should prioritize your choices.

We also have plenty of other monopoly problems, one of the biggest is YouTube.

Some good or at least decent stealth action games, some are open world, some not:

• Far Cry: most of these can be played in that way
• The modern Tomb Raider games (since 2013 or so)
• The Sniper Elite series
• Tom Clancy’s Ghost Recon series
• The Hitman series
• Dishonored + Dishonored 2 + all addons/DLCs
• Deus Ex Human Revolution & Mankind Divided (also the very first Deus Ex if you can tolerate its “graphical fidelity” nowadays)
• Deathloop, but it’s worse than Dishonored and much less “serious” than the other games on this list