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InitialsDiceBearhttps://github.com/dicebear/dicebearhttps://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/„Initials” (https://github.com/dicebear/dicebear) by „DiceBear”, licensed under „CC0 1.0” (https://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/)AR
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  • Why on earth do you think anyone would rent out a house, or pay for all the ancillaries - furnishings, repairs, insurance, legal etc. if they didn't get a return on their investment, time and effort? Do you also accuse Marriott of being parasites for renting rooms? Or Hertz for renting cars? They do these things because they spent a lot of money to provide something of value that people can utilize for a period of time but they still expect to make money.

    Renting is a business. It's as "parasitic" as any other business were a person pays for something with money and receives something in return. If you are not prepared to rent then don't. There are other options to having a roof over your head. Buying a house would be one option but there are others.

  • No, I'm making a comment about the word "securely" in the post I responded to. i.e. "Secure" means different things for different people.

    I like to use Tor on occasion for the reason stated but I'm sure as hell not booting up an OS to do it for my use case. That would be inconvenient especially as I'm using Tor to subvert a stupid netnanny, and not endangering myself or putting myself in legal peril. So using Tor this way is plenty secure - I can hold a secure conversation with a website of my choosing without netnanny interfering.

    Other use cases may vary and your need for "secure". Maybe you absolutely value your privacy above all else, or are up to something you don't want others to know about. In which case do, go and use Tails or whatever.

  • Depends on the country. Apparently most people in Germany rent because that's just the way things are over there. I would say in the UK that generally people only rent if they're living somewhere on a relatively short term basis. Otherwise they might either buy their own property or apply for social housing depending on their income level.

  • Who rents for 20 years and then acts all surprised that they don't own the house? If your end goal is to own a house, start by buying a house. If you can afford to rent and pay off someone else's mortgage then you can certainly afford to pay off your own mortgage.

  • So apparently buying a house, furnishing it, maintaining it, complying with various codes and regulations, and making the house available for someone to live in for a period of time for a sum of money is "parasitic". Not sure why, or why the same logic wouldn't apply to anything of value someone makes available to others for a fee.

  • It’s better to use Whonix or Tails if you want to use TOR browser securely. If I ever had to use Windows again it would not be for anything private.

    I'm certain there are people who use Tor in a way that it would make sense to use a secure OS.

    But I use Tor to get around stupid public wifis and suchlike that have content blockers. I'm not scared that the police are going to beat the shit out of me so I just use Windows or Android.

  • Steam Deck is the main reason for this and reasonable WINE emulation of DirectX & other APIs.

    I bet the experience outside of Steam Deck depends a lot on the dist, the graphics drivers & card and someone's personal knowledge & willingness to screw around making everything work. Drivers are the biggest issue by far - open source drivers tend to be more limited, while binary drivers tend to be quite fragile, e.g. breaking after a kernel update & requiring reinstallation.

  • The fanbois have obviously found this story and voting down the people saying how obvious the grift was/is.

    I wonder how many other space sim genre games that conspicuously did not hand out the begging bowl, or squander all their money and were actually delivered have happened in the time that Star Citizen hasn't. Being generous the best that can be said is the project is just badly mismanaged. At worst, and more realistically, much of that money just got siphoned away to fund lifestyles. Maybe the devs know they can run this grift for as long as their people stupid enough to keep funding them, knowing they'll never have to actually deliver on their promises.

  • Only if you remembered to put water in it and happen to want hot water at exactly the same time. Besides, a normal kettle boils in a minute so it is hardly difficult to just flick the switch on the kettle on when needed. Certainly less effort than fiddling with some app.

  • LIDL is selling a bunch of "smart" crap this week including a "smart" kettle. According to the blurb "Can be linked to the Lidl Smart Home System using your WiFi connection". And I'm thinking yeah and what possible reason ever would I have for needing that? And the same is true for most smart products.

  • I only use Android so I don't know. Check the menu and see if you have add-ons and you can install uBlock Origin. Edit - it looks like thanks to Apple being Apple, Firefox on iPhone is a wrapper around webkit and doesn't support add-ons. Maybe you could still make a launcher though I don't know.

  • This won't help in the above case so it's a little off topic. But I got rid of Twitter on my phone and still use Twitter on my phone - Basically you just open twitter.com in Firefox, and go to the menu and click "Install". Now you get a launcher icon to an "app" but it's just the website hosted by the browser.

    Instantly saves 150Mb, stops it doing evil shit and because it's hosted in Firefox I get to block all the ads.

    I would advise doing this with any app which has a desktop / mobile version and see what happens - Facebook, Reddit, LinkedIn etc. Some social media sites will nag you to install the app but some won't or will be functional in spite of it.

  • I think FreeCAD should feature freeze and redo it's entire GUI to make what's there more usable. Take a look at OnShape or Fusion 360 and do something similar. Hide infrequently used buttons, put labels on commonly used buttons, make everything more context sensitive, task-centric, forgiving and user friendly.

  • Unfortunately there aren't a whole lot of good options. They're either commercial and therefore potentially cost $$$ (or are time limited or otherwise restricted), or they're free and kind of suck in one way or another.

    Of the commercial offerings I like OnShape. I think Fusion 360 is fine too. They're WAY more powerful than anyone needs for just designing 3D parts but they're still powerful, well designed tools. I think if your needs are simple and you don't care a great deal about complex shapes then Tinkercad is great too.

    Of the opensource, FreeCAD is the closest to OnShape / Fusion 360. It's a parametric modeller like they are but the user interface that throws every button in your face at once and doesn't bother to sort them very well or provide context. It's not an intuitive or forgiving tool and really needs a usability makeover to make it as simple as the commercial equivalents. I've never had much success with it because of this.

    Blender is pretty popular for modelling. It's not really CAD so it's likely more useful for modelling free form / artistic stuff. The UI is pretty complex but it is extremely powerful.

    OpenSCAD is pretty neat if you want to create something by essentially programming a shape and rendering it. It works well for certain kinds of geometric designs that are better expressed in code. e.g. maybe you have to punch 100 holes in a spiral pattern on the side of a box or something.

  • Powershell is horrible all right. What annoys me is they alias ls, dir and other common commands onto commands which don't act or behave in the same way at all. I just run bash or command prompt rather than deal with the bs of powershell.

  • Unless the CEO walks and takes his yes-men with him, I don't see Unity recovering from this self-inflicted shitshow in the near term. I bet it has motivated a lot of devs to look at the viability of using Godot instead and being free of future shakedowns.

  • tar was originally was for tape archiving so it's just a stream of headers and files which end up directed to a file or a device. It's not well ordered, just whatever file happens to be found next is the next in the stream. When you compress the tar this stream it's just piped through gzip or bzip2 on its way.

    The tradeoff for compressing this way is if you want to list the contents of the tar then you essentially have to decompress and stream through the whole thing to see what's in it unlike a .zip or .7z where there would be a separate index at the end which can be read far more easily.