I'm sure the most common reaction to this is "Wait, he wasn't already?"

Not really? The upside of buying Nintendo games (1st party specifically) and consoles is that they keep their resell value really well. So, if I wanted to, I could sell my Switch 2 right now and get a lot (if not all) of that $400 back, especially since the price for a new one has gone up due to the memory shortage. Same idea for the (1st party) games: I could get a lot of that money that I paid for it on the 2nd hand market. Also, the console was $450 at launch, not $400.

Interesting website, thanks for sharing.

Whoops I responded to the wrong comment. This was meant for the reply mentioning IVPN.

Interesting, I'll have to look into that.

I'm considering them despite the UI issues and the fact that they don't have a Firefox extension. I just don't know if I want a service that doesn't have the latter. For context, I'm particular about the extension because I want to able to whitelist specific websites from the VPN. Currently, ProtonVPN's app doesn't offer that (and I'm not sure any other VPN offers that either) so I have to enable split tunneling to disable VPN for Firefox, then install the extension to use the VPN in Firefox, except for websites I've whitelisted.

They seem legit except they discontinued port forwarding and they're out of my price range.

Cats and dogs living together, MASS HYSTERIA!

It's funny that the easiest way to break infrastructure around the world is not to be a world class hacker, but to ask computers to simply subtract a second from their clocks.

I was recently banned for the first time ever from a subreddit, and it was on a sub about reddit alternatives. The funny thing is, the thing that got me banned was something I already said earlier in the same sub. I was saying that all reddit alternatives suffer from the inertia problem: that even the most popular alternatives are basically ghost towns compared to reddit.

The first time I posted that idea, I actually got some upvotes. I can only guess that someone reported me the second time I said it and the ban followed. The mod who banned me accused me of actually trying to trick people to stay on reddit. I wasn't. I was on the sub hoping to see a reddit alternative gain real traction like bluesky did as a twitter alternative, but also was realistic about the current state of reddit alternatives. The second funny thing is, this ban was the incentive to actually start using piefed more seriously and wean myself off reddit.

So while this is a "reddit sucks because mods are up their own ass" story, I actually thank that mod for banning me because now I'm actually using this account more lol.

I had a hunch going into the article and I was right.

I could have had some pity for those devs who are supporting the open source ethos being flooded with AI grifters spamming bug reports for the money. However that pity instantly goes right out the window given that they're working for one of the biggest companies pushing AI and why tech hardware is becoming more and more out of reach for the average Joe.

This reminds me of that episode on Last Week Tonight about lethal injection. Lethal injection isn't about a "humane" way to kill someone. It's more about providing comfort to people who support the death penalty but don't want to think about the morbid details about killing people. I wonder how many people would stop supporting the death penalty if they were forced to witness an execution live, especially if it's lethal injection. If the horror of witnessing a botched lethal injection doesn't at least give people pause about the whole idea of execution, then I don't know what will.