Torrenting requires at least one side (either seed or leech) to have an open port. If you don't have an open port, you'll be able to torrent but will only be able to leech from seeds that have their ports open. So it will potentially limit your torrenting speed and/or completion. For instance, what if there are 10 seeds, but none have open ports? You'll sit there being able to see 10 seeds, but your client won't ever actually connect to them. So you'll be stuck with a torrent that looks like it could finish but never will because you can't connect to the available seeds.

Of course, if you're only torrenting popular content with thousands of seeds, you'll probably be fine. The chances of some of them having an open port are pretty good. But for smaller torrents with only a few seeds, you may find yourself stalled even when seeds are available.

Private trackers don't really do much to improve P2P security, nor will they stop you from getting angry letters from your ISP. If you, a relative Joe Nobody, can get an invite to a private tracker... You really think a multi-billion dollar industry can't get an invite too? They have entire teams of people whose entire job is getting accounts on private trackers and then quietly reporting back to copyright owners while they act like good little users.

Use private trackers for day one uploads, better upload quality, curated content, more reliable seeds, an established request system, etc... But don't use them for security. Because the P2P part works exactly the same as a public tracker, which means anyone connected to the swarm can see your IP. Use a VPN if you're torrenting.

Yup, there are a lot of old forum posts that basically boil down to:

Lost user (0 comments/1 posts): Hey, I’m having a weird error and haven’t been able to find anything about it. Sorry if this is a newbie question, but I’ve already tried searching for it and have come up empty-handed:
{Detailed error description}
{Detailed instructions to recreate error}
{Debug level logs showing the error}

Forum mod (1,234,567 comments/65,535 posts): {Insert any/all of the following: RTFM/This could be fixed with a simple command (without posting what the command is)/It works on my machine/Just run sudo rm -rf --no-preserve-root / and go back to Windows, Skill issue, Duplicate post (without linking to the post that has an answer), etc…} Closing this post.

And Docker. There are a number of ways of packaging complete self-contained images with all of their dependencies included. In the olden days, managing dependencies on a stack of services was basically a full time job, especially when you had multiple services that all needed different versions of the same dependency.

Of course, the downside is that it potentially leads to bloat when you have multiple containers running. If you have three different images that are packaged with the same dependency version, you’re effectively running that dependency three times. Compared to simply running it once, and having all three services access it.

It’s really just a trade-off between convenience and efficiency, and most modern hardware is probably capable of handling a little bit of container bloat. Containers effectively take the modern AAA game dev approach of “we don’t need to make it ultra efficient or worry too much about compressing file sizes, because modern hardware will be able to handle it even if it’s inefficient. If users can’t boot it, we can just tell them to use better hardware.”

For the curious, it’s because some kids were singing “LMNOP” and thinking “elemenopee” was all one letter.

Yeah, every “real” job I’ve had was due to contacts I made while freelancing or working other jobs. The sad reality is that it’s not what you know, it’s who you know. Most of the people in my industry who struggle to find (and keep) work are because they have a bad reputation, or they’re an asshole and nobody wants to work with them. Being kind and personable (and showing up sober in an industry where that isn’t taken for granted) will do a lot more for your career than any job site will.

She’s also one of the single greatest Easter eggs in modern gaming history. Red/blue strobe warning

It is still unfortunately the go-to landing spot for basically any “I’m having an obscure tech issue and only one person posted about this specific error code six years ago” type of search.

Welcome to A/B rollouts.

The idea is that instead of making a sweeping change for every single user, you roll a feature/system/UI update, etc out to a small number of users, to see how effective it is. It gives you time to see how those users react to it, how they interact with it, how it impacts their broader site usage, etc… And then once they have had time to gather some feedback and work out the bugs, they push it out to the rest of the users.

Most big tech companies use A/B rollouts nowadays. YouTube, Meta, Reddit, TikTok, etc all give users access to different updates at different times. Because it allows them to gauge how their users are actually interacting with the updates before they accidentally tank their entire system with a bad update.

For new features, it can also give the company time to properly scale their backend systems to accommodate a new feature. For instance, when Tiktok rolled out images in comments, they likely had to do some work on the backend to ensure their systems could handle the added load of suddenly downloading a bunch of images any time a user opened a comment section. By phasing the rollout in multiple steps, they didn’t have to upgrade all of their systems up front before making the feature available to some/most users.

Using this post as an example, imagine if there was a bug that didn’t allow users to log in after they got this prompt. Or didn’t allow logged in users to access the site, because it kept redirecting them back to this page. Or it allowed users to continue browsing without a login, as long as they were in Dark Mode. Or any number of other potential weird issues that could arise. The A-users are essentially pushed into beta testing the new feature, before the B-users get the update. In this case, you’re simply a B-user who hasn’t been scheduled to get the update yet.

My only guess is because they want to force AI scrapers to pay for access. And most scrapers probably work best on old.reddit because they keep changing new Reddit’s layout. As a programmer, if you’re going to code something to access a site, (and you don’t want to constantly have to rework it every time they make a small UI update) you’re going to use the version that never changes. So by forcing them to log in, it makes tracking the individual users (and thus, identifying potential unauthorized scraper accounts) easier.

It’s an old Reddit story. Some sort of “what quirk does your family have, that you didn’t realize was weird” /r/AskReddit thread.

A dude’s entire family took shits so massive and solid that they had a butter knife that was designated as the poop knife. If they took a shit too big to fit down the drain, they would use the poop knife to dice it up before flushing. Apparently this was a fairly common occurrence, to the point that they just had it hanging on the laundry room wall for anyone to use in any of the bathrooms in the house.

And then he went to a house party, and had to take a shit. So he dropped a football in the host’s toilet, walked out of the bathroom, and casually asked where their poop knife was. Cue a literal record scratch moment, where the music was paused and the entire party turned to go “where is the what?” It was in that moment that the dude realized that normal people don’t have poop knives.