So I just heard, less than a week before release, that Wicked (2024) is the latest film in the current maddening trend to lie (by omission) to audiences by not including the "part one" in the title.

Sure, that information is available online, but not everyone will see that, and that's clearly what their intention is. Get butts in seats, then hit them with a cliffhanger so they have to buy a second ticket. Or possibly to save budget on the second movie (which is likely to have more climactic action scenes) if the first is a flop.

When I was discussing Wicked with some friends recently, someone said they heard it was pulling this two-parter stunt so we looked it up, and sure enough it was! We were all genuinely shocked. For Dune and It, yeah those are big novels, but surely a 3 hour play adapted to a nearly 3 hour movie wouldn't need to be 2 parts? The musical buff in the group was especially surprised. For that musical buff, the deception and the padding out to two movies made them a lot less motivated to see it. The Google AI summary also goofed and said it wasn't 2 parts, citing a source that said it was two parts, which caused a lot of laughs, but that's another issue.

I'm not against movies being multiple parts, it's a much better solution than cutting a lot of content or making a bloated movie. My issue is the deception, it always rubs me the wrong way. The newest Mission Impossible went ahead and included "part one" in the name so it was clear. It helps to temper your expectations when you don't expect all the plot lines to be resolved by the time the credits roll. Compare this to the newest Spider-Verse movie, where several of my friends went in with no indication that this one would have a cliffhanger and very little would be resolved. It's a very bad feeling and can sour a theater going experience for some people.

Movie fans of Tildes, what do you think? Are you also annoyed with this trend? Or does it not bother you?

Solution

I added 20.43.161.105 duckduckgo.com to my hosts file and everything is working fine now.
I also changed DNS servers away from my ISPs, thanks to all the recommendations in this thread.

cat /etc/resolve.conf
nameserver 1.1.1.1
nameserver 1.0.0.1

That seems to be working

> nslookup duckduckgo.com
Server:		1.1.1.1
Address:	1.1.1.1#53

Non-authoritative answer:
Name:	duckduckgo.com
Address: 202.39.62.156
Name:	duckduckgo.com
Address: 2001:b000:1a0:3505:202:39:62:15d

except (note that non-autoratative IP address which belongs to my ISP) ...

> ping -4 duckduckgo.com 
PING duckduckgo.com (202.39.62.156) 56(84) bytes of data.

My ISPs address again. More...

traceroute to duckduckgo.com (202.39.62.156), 30 hops max, 60 byte packets
 1  * * *
 2  * * *
 3  * * *
...
30 * * * *

Why do ping and traceroute not use the new DNS server's I've configured (after re-booting too_)
The only thing to work is to add

20.43.161.105 duckduckgo.com

to my hosts file and now everything seems to be working as expected, though I have doubts now that changing the DNS configuration has done any good.

I know ISPs cache things like youtube to reduce costs so I'm wondering if 202.39.62.156 handled caching of duckduckgo, and they pointed their nameservers there and that box is broken.

Thanks for everyone's input and patience (lol are you still reading???)

Original Question

I've used Duck Duck Go as my main search engine for many, many years.
I have several search engines installed in Firefox including 2 for duck duck go. One for the /lite version and one for the full version.

[See update at bottom]

In recent days neither of these work. I would type my query into the search engine, press enter as I have done for years.

All I see is a blank page.

The latest development is that when I try and enter ANY search to either of those engines I get a GOOGLE 404 not found page.

    
    traceroute duckduckgo.com                                                                                                             ─╯
    traceroute to duckduckgo.com (216.239.38.120), 30 hops max, 60 byte packets
     1  * * *
     2  * * *
     3  The usual internal routing of my ISP
     4  ""          ""            ""
     5  ""          ""            ""
     6  ""          ""            ""
     7  ""          ""            ""
     8  * * *
     9  any-in-2678.1e100.net (216.239.38.120)  4.089 ms  4.077 ms  4.181 ms
    
    ping duckduckgo.com                                                                                                                   ─╯
    PING duckduckgo.com (2001:4860:4802:32::78) 56 data bytes
    64 bytes from any-in-2001-4860-4802-32--78.1e100.net (2001:4860:4802:32::78): icmp_seq=1 ttl=117 time=10.1 ms
    64 bytes from any-in-2001-4860-4802-32--78.1e100.net (2001:4860:4802:32::78): icmp_seq=2 ttl=117 time=8.52 ms
    64 bytes from any-in-2001-4860-4802-32--78.1e100.net (2001:4860:4802:32::78): icmp_seq=3 ttl=117 time=6.87 ms
    64 bytes from any-in-2001-4860-4802-32--78.1e100.net (2001:4860:4802:32::78): icmp_seq=4 ttl=117 time=8.83 ms
    
    --- duckduckgo.com ping statistics ---
    4 packets transmitted, 4 received, 0% packet loss, time 3005ms
    rtt min/avg/max/mdev = 6.873/8.584/10.118/1.155 ms

cat /etc/resolv.conf
> MY ISPs name servers
> MY ISPs name servers

Sure enough I cannot find any pages on the site 2001-4860-4802-32--78.1e100.net which is obviously belongs to google.

This is very very strange.

Could someone verify if they can use DDG or whether they see the same as me?
Does anyone have any idea what's happening?

UPDATE
I can connect to and use DuckDuckGo using a browser VPN. This appears to be a mess made by my ISP.
I'd still like suggestion to overcome the problem though.

I've been mulling over this for some time. I'm what you'd call a politically or ideologically motivated person, as it contains topics close to my heart and I'm trying to do my best about them. However, I mostly don't personally follow "the news". I still hear or read things due to my friends and family, or because of places I browse like Tildes. But even here, I filter out most news topics.

Part of this is due to the health problems I have, as they leave little mental energy to spend on stuff, and I'd much rather spend that energy to build something rather than get demoralized. So, what I do instead is to check out specific topics I care more about, and possibly academic articles.

With this being said, I've been observing people around me and how they interact with the news. I'm trying to assess how much following the news regularly impact their political activity. I mean contributing to some sort of political goal. Based on my observations, I'm not convinced that regular consumption of news, in the form of visiting a news website (or several), is what is presented to be.

So, I decided to flex my ideological analysis muscles a little. Here's a rough sketch of my thoughts on the ideology of being a news outlet, whether it's a giant corporation or a single person.

I think there are two levels to the ideology of being a news outlet.

1) The News System

A) How to Market Yourself

1. You are the most important source of knowledge about the topic you choose. This most often includes a city, country, continent, a political concept like "the west", or the world in general.
2. You are the objective source of knowledge on this topic.
3. Consuming news regularly is the responsibility of every citizen. Thus, they should buy your products or visit your website. Doing otherwise is shirking one's duty, and it's morally reprehensible. It's equal to being ignorant.

With this level, you establish yourself as the epistemological source of news about the topic, and you attach moral feelings of duty, guilt, shame, etc. to consuming your product. However, it's also a wider ideology. You don't only sell your news, you sell the news. That means you're also marketing the idea of news to people. This is how you establish the moral case, that is vital to selling your product. It's also important for prestige, which shouldn't be underestimated. There is not only an economic motivation but also a social motivation to selling the idea of news, presenting yourself as a bringer of truths.

B) How to Keep Them in the Loop

1. Humans are problem-fixers, because ignoring problems would mean they or their loved ones could suffer from them in the future. So, they are emotionally motivated to seek and try to fix problems. So, if you present them a problem, they will pay attention to it.
2. Cities, countries, continents, etc. are vast. There are always problems, no matter how big or small. You can always report on them.
3. If you face with the criticism of getting too small on scale, you can say you are just putting a human face on a widespread problem.

By utilizing the points above, you can ensure that you are always selling your product. You also ensure that you are feeling like you are contributing to the world, by "bringing the news to people". This way, you ensure both your financial success and your moral standing, your sense of meaning.

2) The Problems

The problem with the system created by the approach above is several-fold, and it doesn't depend on the factuality of the news being reported.

1. This system ensures there is always bad-news to be reported every single day, possibly even every single waking hour.
2. The constant source of bad-news demoralizes people, and quite possibly affects their mental health. A cursory look at Google Scholar with the keywords "doomscrolling mental health" is enough to show that this is suspected by the psychological literature too.
3. This stream of bad-news alters a person's perception of city, country, world.

For example, if you look at the subreddit for a city, quite often you'll see it filled with news of crimes and such, with people in the comments lamenting or raging about it. But the daily life in such cities is very rarely one of being riddled with crime.

Another example is USA citizens' perception of crime. "The violent crime rate fell 49% between 1993 and 2022, with large decreases in the rates of robbery (-74%), aggravated assault (-39%) and murder/nonnegligent manslaughter (-34%)." However, more and more people in USA think crime is getting worse. I suspect the news-cycle bears a big portion of the blame.

To drive the point home, I suspect this constant stream of bad-news might be feeding into conservatism, as "a meta-analysis (88 samples, 12 countries, 22,818 cases) confirms that several psychological variables predict political conservatism: death anxiety (weighted mean r = .50); system instability (.47); dogmatism–intolerance of ambiguity (.34); openness to experience (–.32); uncertainty tolerance (–.27); needs for order, structure, and closure (.26); integrative complexity (–.20); fear of threat and loss (.18); and self-esteem (–.09). The core ideology of conservatism stresses resistance to change and justification of inequality and is motivated by needs that vary situationally and dispositionally to manage uncertainty and threat."

So, there is enough reason to suspect that constant stream of bad-news, which should elevate people's feelings of uncertainty and threat, should be feeding into conservatism.

3) Solution?

This is an open-ended topic, and I'm not claiming to have solved a very complex topic in a few hundred words. However, one thing that I found to work is limiting and choosing what I consume. By the ways I mentioned, I limit what I see and I try to focus more on topics I care more about.

There is support from the literature too, that suggests partial news avoidance can benefit mental health and well-being (more on the topic can be found on Google Scholar with "news avoidance mental health").

Obviously, following news isn't a black or white situation, and for moderation there is no single size that fits all. But I think it would be better to keep in mind that news outlets benefit both financially and socially from establishing their regular consumption as a moral principle. Honestly, I think constructing a good understanding of ideology and history is more important than that, as it provides a more solid base to judge things from, but that's another day's topic.

I am going to be living in France for the next year. I want to keep my US mobile phone number, and I would like it to be somewhat usable while I am out of the country, but I can't find an affordable way do set this up. I am hoping someone here has some more insight for me.

I am going to be buying a French mobile phone plan (most likely through Orange) that will cover my data usage, along with a local number for calls and texts. I already have either whatsapp or imessage set up for calls and texts to/from my family in the US. Ideally, I would like to have my US number on a second sim on my phone. I wouldn't need any roaming data for that sim, just calls and texts, and my actual usage will be very small.

Here are the solutions I have explored:

1. Porting my number to Google Voice. This is probably the best solution, but I would like to avoid google if at all possible. This costs only $20 with no monthly fees. This would require me to use a separate app for this number. If possible, I would like to be able to use the iPhone system apps for calls and texts.

2. Some MVNO with international roaming. So far the best I have seen is Ting mobile. It costs $0.30 per minute calls and $0.12 per outgoing text. This pricing would be perfect for my extremely low usage. However it requires a $10/month pay as you go plan which is more than I want to pay.

3. IoT sims (although I am almost positive this won't work). These appear to be sms and data only, so for my usage they would be sms only. Telnyx is the service I found that actually supports esim (my phone has only esim). I am having trouble with the console, but I am trying to get an esim on my iphone. If this can work, it would be only $2/month plus usage, which would be perfect.

Are there any other possible solutions that I should look into?

So I continued to wet the bed way past 7 and I have no idea why.

different family members chalked it up to different reason:

1. I am lazy
2. I am a very deep sleeper
3. I have a very anxious personality
4. bladder issues

Amongst other things.

One thing I can see being a cause was that I was not raised in a peaceful household. It was a very violent household. not in the sense of physical violence like broken arms and such, more as in lots of yelling and screaming and things like that. My family really didn't know how to communicate well.

But I was not the only child raised in my household and I was the only one who wet the bed.

Anyways, different thing were tried, things to supposedly "fix" my bladder. shaming, etc. Growing up, my family had to always wake me up at around 4 or 5 am and take me to the bathroom, otherwise there was a good chance I'd wet the bed.

I personally was getting worried that it was a problem I'd have forever and it'd be an impediment to my social life (as in no sleepovers and etc (not that I had had friends at that age anyways)).

But I did start to notice that once I got into high school, it started happening less and less. Still did happen, but just wasn't as common. Then, I remember the last time it happened was when I was either in grade 10 or 11 but I am pretty sure grade 10.

Then that was it.

It just stopped on its own.

Weird thing is, I changed nothing about myself.

I'd still classify myself as lazy and a very deep sleeper and I still have an incredibly anxious personality.

The only thing that changed is that when I am asleep, and as my bladder is filling up, something in my bladder (or my brain) instead of just releasing, would instead block the urine until I wake up in pain and go to the bathroom. The change really caught my attention when I woke up with a really full bladder like 2-3 years ago and I remembered how a little over 10 years ago (I am in my 30s), no way my body would've reacted to it by holding it in involuntarily until I woke up.

I tried doing a bit of googling to figure out what parts of the body are involved in the process of holding in one's pee overnight to try and see what are the possible reasons for the change to occur so late in me to no avail.

I am forever curious what happened in my body to make that change happen so late but not sure I will ever know.

I'm very sorry, but this is going to be rant. One that may seem to come up almost daily, but I still feel the need to vent.

Every day I feel like I'm jumping through hoops to keep a little bit of privacy and autonomy, without ever winning. DuckDuckGo is my search engine, use a paid mail provider, I try to stay away from anything Google and Meta, use only Signal, ad blocking everywhere, hosting most services locally, etc. It seems, however, to make no difference in the long run. The user-profile-building just seems to enter the home faster than I can mitigate it. Kids install some new app or new hardware ends up listening in, privacy infringement is there.

The reason I'm starting this post now is because I switched ISP and TV provider recently, but it has been on my mind for a long time. Finding one that isn't owned by one of huge 3 parent companies, is almost impossible here. After a year of deciding, I finally figured it was time to throw in the towel and just pick the least bad option. Yesterday was the day of switching and it has been such a frustrating process.

The provided router doesn't allow me to turn off its WLAN. I live in a city, so the airwaves are already crowded enough as it is. No need to keep that antenna on, but screw me, that's not possible. Opened up the device to just remove the card, but everything is soldered on the board and disconnecting the antennas didn't do shit.
It's possible to buy a modem/router myself, but it'll need to follow their requirements and will set me back $200. It would be okay if the rest of the service was great, but here comes the TV part!

The device they use for TV is apparently Android TV. I assumed it would be IPTV with this subscription, but Android TV isn't that. Booting the device makes it immediately clear they are here to harvest data. It makes me so unhappy that a service I'm paying for, is also making money on the side by collecting data. To get a quick idea of what's being done, I routed the box through wireshark to sniff DNS traffic. It's riddled with domains used for data collection and ads. That combined with the features this box wants me to agree to (location, using the mic, access local network, sign into PlayStore, make a profile including real life information) does not make me trust this device. So I've decided to not play and will be sending it back.

People around me are pretty conscious about what they do online, but compared to them I'm highly paranoid. Wherever I look, there are privacy issues. It seems impossible to escape from. How are other people dealing with this?

UPDATE: I don't know if anybody is really interested, but I thought I would update anyway. I decided to listen to my gut and I cancelled the subscription. It feels like the best decision I've made in a long time. It's nice to feel like I'm still a little bit in charge, even though I know that's also just a false sense of autonomy. Suck it, Google! You're not the boss of me :-)

Fellow PC builders, here's a fun one for you.

I took some "old" and no-longer-used PC parts and built my sister-in-law a gaming PC for her and her stepdaughter to use. It was a Christmas gift so the stepdaughter could play the Sims.

She has called me three times to tell me it's completely frozen - like hard locked, dead freeze, screen is displaying the last frame it was on but you can't interact with the PC in any way until you reset it with the power button.

She let it sit for an hour before she gave up. Two times this happened while stepdaughter was playing the Sims 4 and once it happened while my brother-in-law was watching YouTube videos.

Obviously, I went through the usual things you'd think in this situation and I had her bring the PC over so I could do some digging. Fully expecting to find a hardware issue, I tried the following:

1. I ran the Sims while also watching multiple YouTube videos in the background. Couldn't replicate the issue after about two hours.

2. I obviously checked the temperatures while gaming and YouTubing, checked the usual performance metrics and everything was great.

3. Ran OTTC stress tests - all of them. Under heavy loads, this thing was doing fine. Even at 100% utilization, the memory, graphics card, and cpu were fine. Did a power test too, fine. Did a "combined" stress test and all was fine.

4. Ran mem86, no issues with the memory, no bad sectors or errors.

5. Played Skyrim on ultra for several hours. This was a really fun way to troubleshoot.

6. Checked the event log from the day she had freezes. I can see where the event happened because leading up to the unexpected "power off" event, there were a ton of events related to various processes timing out. Seems like it was unable to connect with services and run certain background processes while it was frozen? I didn't see anything that really stood out to me as being a possible cause except...

7. in the event viewer, there were a few events related to Microsoft family safety. I set this up at the request of SIL so stepdaughter wouldn't get into anything she shouldn't. In the Event Viewer, it seems like maybe it wasn't verifying something correctly or didn't have permissions it needed? Upon Googling, I found some other folks with this error but I couldn't find anything about whether it caused freezing or not. Seems like one of the many events that just gives a warning but doesn't have any effect. One guy who had this issue had his computer freeze but disabling the family safety entirely did nothing. People in the comments thought it probably wasn't related. I also found another event that Google wasn't very helpful with. Might have been related to sound card but my sound card drivers are up to date and again, I have not been able to replicate the issue even when gaming and watching videos, so I don't know if it's related.

8. I ran the Windows System Files Checker and found no issues related to my Windows install.

I can't figure out why this would be happening only at her house. She says it froze after one hour of use every time. This brings me to the title of this post. My SIL moved into a really old house with sketchy wiring. My FIL told her the wiring is so bad that she needs to get it fixed immediately or risk a fire, so she's working on that. This house has a butler stairway, asbestos, and plaster/lathe walls if that tells you what we're dealing with here. This is the ONLY thing I can think of that would possibly be different between the two setups and maybe explain the freezing, but it just seems so unlikely to me that this is the cause.

Help?

This is a recurring topic for the Three Cheers for Tildes mobile app, which is currently in alpha testing.

I'll summarize the previous month's updates at the start of each topic, so people can read the updates and then hit Ignore if they don't care about more frequent updates and user feedback.

Recently:

Three Cheers version 1.0 is out for Android! (Mar 25, 2024)

• Submit topics!
• Added donation option in Settings
• Share links from other apps to create a Tildes submission
• Edit topic text
• Delete topics
• Require minimum Android 7.1.1
• Fixed refreshing feed after login/logout

Android v1.0.2 (Apr 13, 2024): Validate submission tags, fix submit UI bugs, fix comment UI bugs with horizontal rules.
Android v1.0.1 (Apr 1, 2024): Fixed crashes on home feed

iOS v0.11.3 (Mar 28, 2024): Fixed UI bugs and crashes on large iPhones (Pro Max series), particularly when using the in-app WebView browser.

iOS v0.11.2 (Mar 8, 2024): Fixed crashes in Inbox under the Comments tab.

Android and iOS v0.11.0 (Mar 3, 2024)

• Added sort options for topics
• Tap username on comment, and topic OP, to view profile
• View markdown of topic OP
• Fixed minor UI bugs
• (Android) Fixed wrong profile showing via bottom tab, after logging into a different account

Last month's topic: March 2024

Where to get it

Android version on Google Play Store: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.talklittle.android.tildes

iOS version on TestFlight: https://testflight.apple.com/join/mpVk1qIy

This is a recurring topic for the Three Cheers for Tildes mobile app, which is currently in alpha testing.

I'll summarize the previous month's updates at the start of each topic, so people can read the updates and then hit Ignore if they don't care about more frequent updates and user feedback.

Recently:

Three Cheers version 1.0 is out for Android! (Mar 25, 2024)

• Submit topics!
• Added donation option in Settings
• Share links from other apps to create a Tildes submission
• Edit topic text
• Delete topics
• Require minimum Android 7.1.1
• Fixed refreshing feed after login/logout

iOS v0.11.3 (Mar 28, 2024): Fixed UI bugs and crashes on large iPhones (Pro Max series), particularly when using the in-app WebView browser.

iOS v0.11.2 (Mar 8, 2024): Fixed crashes in Inbox under the Comments tab.

Android and iOS v0.11.0 (Mar 3, 2024)

• Added sort options for topics
• Tap username on comment, and topic OP, to view profile
• View markdown of topic OP
• Fixed minor UI bugs
• (Android) Fixed wrong profile showing via bottom tab, after logging into a different account

Android and iOS v0.10.0 (Feb 15, 2024)

• View and send private messages
• Added button to send private message from a user's profile
• Added "Tap to refresh" when a feed is empty
• Show posted time in topic OP
• Renamed bottom tab to Inbox (instead of Notifications)
• (Android) Removed animation when using bottom tabs
• (Android) Fixed crash when replying from a user's profile
• (iOS) Fixed crash toggling Details in topic OP
• (iOS) Fixed layout bugs with markdown tables
• (iOS) Fixed UI bugs when replying in a user's profile
• (iOS) Fixed minor UI bugs and crashes

Last month's topic: February 2024

Where to get it

Android version on Google Play Store: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.talklittle.android.tildes

iOS version on TestFlight: https://testflight.apple.com/join/mpVk1qIy

Hey folks

I've got a couple of months to put together an overview for tools that a company could use as part of television production and I'm hoping for your input.

It goes without saying that everyone in the tech world is pushing ai heavily. Having been in IT for almost 3 decades I know what to watch, look at, out for, etc. AI is still very much regurgitation of its input but the input is vast. What I have right now is some bare bones of what I want to throw around for insight and discussion for what would help people in TV production tool wise.

For those that do not know how TV production works it's a simple idea: you generate a huge raft of ideas for shows, absolute basic outline of what the show would be about and put that in to a paper. You then sit around in your research/Dev dept and pitch to each other and the ones that people go "yeah, that could make a good show" get some extra meat added. Those ideas get pitched to dept heads who then take the best ones to channel/broadcasters execs and see if any get hooked at all. If they do, they get given some development funding to put together a taster/pilot/video version with the funding they have. This means shot on camera, run through an edit for cutting, audio, graphics, etc, still in its infancy and development state. This video and a bigger padded Treatment (documented idea with its bones, flesh and now make-up added) goes back to the broadcaster and you wait for feedback. If you get lucky you get a greenlight and order for X amount of shows and then you have a production. The production is taking the idea to it's full potential, shooting it, audio and music, graphics, the works and that's what you see on TV.

I'm after working out what tools AI offers today that would help them with this process. Right now, ChatGPT v4 will generate some great treatment ideas for shows, except I would imagine these shows already exist or have been tried to channel/broadcaster before? AI is regurgitation and not thoughtful to its own ideas and imagination. I suppose with great prompts it could generate great output.

Okay, that's the process and I'm rambling. Right now I have a short list of LLMs such as ChatGPT and Bard types that will help with the idea stage for researchers. I could use some decent links for prompters to help the research know how to ask AI for what they want out of it.

When it comes to generative AI for graphics I only have experience with txt2img using the likes of DALLE and Midjourney, along with some inpainting for changing images with lies, I mean, graphics (insert plane on fire, etc).

Does anyone have any other ideas and tools which would help production or useful things I can look at and research myself to see how they could be helpful? Auto audio generation? Graphic building that takes less time? Think of those great show intros for the likes of Game of Thrones, can that be done using AI yet or are we no where near that level for AI? Even basic video edits, where are we for AI help? Can we feed it some clips and have it autostitch based on an input document? If so, what tools should I be looking at and researching?

I'm asking here before I plop search terms in Google and Bing and then get swamped with whichever has paid the most or played the SEO game to be top of the pages. Asking for real human input is definitely better than asking AI which may actually be the whole point of my talk when it happens.

Thanks for listening and any help/pointers/sites you can give.

UPDATE:
I went off and did some research. Enjoy these if you want. I had issues linking so if a mod wants to go ahead and do that, feel free:

Pre-Production:

Treatment idea generation

Generating a great idea is usually through using knowledge and research, but these days you can literally ask an AI engine to come up with a show idea. Here I will list some good AIs that use a very large language model (LLM) to come up with ideas:

ChatGPT4 from OpenAI

ChatGPT is the best known AI out there, but essentially it's the AI that everyone uses. What's different is the data that is fed to it. ChatGPT from OpenAI has a lot of knowledge, however, it's generally backdated information and not up to the minute.

You.com

Built on ChatGPT4 AI. Data fed in more up to date as it's based around a search engine. Due to the plethora of sources being fed to the You.com Chat bot, you may find some more interesting results and ideas.

Bing.com - Chat

Directly leverages the latest version of ChatGPT4 from OpenAI but uses additional media from Microsoft sources. Responses are more natural due to the Turing Natural Language.

Copy.ai

A fun LLM designed for advertising agencies and the alike. The difference here is you can upload a back-catalogue of your own data for it to analyse to take on your brand voice, mix up your ideas and generally become one of the family.

Prompting

Just from picking one of the four AIs listed above, you can straight out ask for a basic show idea. All of them came back with interesting ideas from the prompt of "Generate me a great show idea for a television production treatment. The show should be a documentary for daytime viewing."

Prompting is the hardest part of any AI interaction, the results can wildly vary depending on what and how you ask. Due to this, there's a new type of website to help with prompting:

https://promptperfect.jina.ai/prompts

Using the line from above about generating a great show idea, promptperfect injects a lot more information into the prompt before running: "Please create a compelling show idea for a daytime documentary television production. The show should be engaging and informative, catering to a broad daytime audience. It should focus on a specific topic or theme that is both educational and entertaining. The documentary should be well-researched and provide in-depth information on the chosen topic, presenting it in a visually appealing and accessible manner. The show should aim to captivate viewers and leave them with a better understanding and appreciation of the subject matter. Additionally, please provide a brief outline of the structure and format of the documentary, including the number of episodes, approximate runtime, and any unique features or storytelling techniques that will make the show stand out." The quality of the Treatment created will be far superior to the initial request.

https://webutility.io/

An interesting take on generation of prompting. It breaks down the prompts to dropdown boxes with key words such as create, design, analyse along with the focus type. This forces the ai to create some more complex and well thought out documentation for a treatment idea with explanation of how it got to where it did.

AIs to help with show production

Location finding/scouting

With the latest AI image searching features, you can now upload an image and get a "related" search. Using this technology, you could, for example, look for English Country Gardens that you would like to film out of. Uploading this image would give you a list of locations, similar places and website associated with the image:

On each of the following sites, in the search bar, click the Image Icon to upload the image:

https://www.bing.com/images/
https://images.google.com/

Scheduling (not specifically AI)

Scheduling shoots should be simple. We've seen all the fun from an Excel spreadsheet that's laid out like a calendar, through to the most complex diary entries in a shared Google calendar. We already have the tools for this in Microsoft Office:

Microsoft Bookings: This is a great tool for scheduling a diary of a single person or a whole team. It allows to have a Web Page where people can book in time for appointments, whether virtual or in person. Perfect for a researcher trying to book interviews with a host. The AI lies in the ability to cross search a calendar and pick associated times available.

Microsoft Planner: A tool for project and time management. Breakdown the show in to buckets (categories) and assign out tasks to people and teams, due by dates or exact dates, etc. You can even keep all of the documents in the plan.

Microsoft Shifts: Team management for your production using Shifts. This allows you to schedule team members in Teams, allowing them to clock in and out, as well as specifying when they need to be available.

The three tools all work with the Outlook Calendars so each person knows what their plans are well in advance.

Post-Production

This is the one most people are interested in for AI at this time. The tools used for image generation, manipulation, etc. The market is currently being flooded with tools and not all of them are equal, but here's a few ones to watch and use.

Auto-Clipping & Social Platform

OpusClip, using the power of OpenAI, can take a long video and create 10 viral clips from it at the click of a button. The AI behind it analyses the video, looks for compelling sections and highlights, then seamlessly rearranges in to short videos. This tool will be great for generating short promotional videos of long form shows, documentaries, etc.

Descript is a great tool that can take a video, give you a transcription, then you can edit the transcript, where it then edits the video to match. You can remove words, create studio quality audio from a standard mic, remove common error words such as um, and er, etc. One of the bigger cool things it can do is voice mimic using AI. You read it a line and then you can type out a whole transcript and it'll narrate it in your voice and allow export.

AI Generative

Moving on to the more scary AI platforms, we have completely generative AI. This is where AI generates absolutely everything including the "avatar" of the human speaking. It's getting so real, you could probably make a documentary using nothing buy AI voice for narration and even have an interview with the AI Avatar.

Video Generation

Synthesia has 120+ voices, over 140 AI Avatars and an editing tool that is extremely easy to use. Mostly aimed at Sales, Training and Marketing Teams, but could easily be used to create development tasters and cuts by mixing in the AI with real video. An example video here.

AI Studios from DeepBrain is another tool, similar to Synthesia. The avatars are based on real humans being recorded but then converted in to AI models. Again, lots of models, full text to video.

Spline AI is a 3D modelling engine that will generate models from text prompts. It's still in Alpha stages but specifying something like "A cube", "rounded corners", "floating", "spinning slowly" will generate exactly that. This tool is aimed at animators but is likely where CGI effects will head.

Still Image Generation

Txt-2-img is amazing and growing at an ever rapid pace. With the wealth of images out there to learn from, the styles, etc, it's no wonder it's doing great. However, it's far from perfect, even now. You'll often find that it adds limbs or fingers to models, shadows completely wrong, crazy styles that are not what you asked for, and that's just the start of the issues with it. However, when it gets it right, it's amazing.

DALL·E3 from OpenAI is the current leader in image generation. If you need to whiz up a picture of a steam train, crossing a suspension bridge at sunset with a woodland in the background, this is the tool of choice.

Bing Image Creator is probably the second biggest right now and has very good accuracy of text to image due to the absolutely huge database of images with high detail being fed to it by Microsoft. It's also free.

I'm not going to list too many more as a lot of them stray off in to fantasy land, being trained on Anime, comics, however, DeepAI definitely deserves a mention. These are the folks behind a lot of the viral videos where you can scan your face and and speak a few lines, then it adds you to a section of a movie as a "Deep Fake". You can have it chat, generate images and even AI edit images with txt-2-img.

Video Edit Tools

The biggest AI enhancers right now are tools that help in the Edit at a professional level.

Topaz Video AI is one of the leading tools in Post production. Upscale footage from SD to 8K and HD to 16K. Full denoise, sharpening, 16x slow down with AI interpolation including building new frames. Corrects people and faces. AI Stabilized video to stop bounce and tracking issues. This is a complete Post Swiss-army knife.

Adobe After Effects which everyone knows. The Adobe AI, called Sensei, is under constant development. Easy animations of text and logos via text to video, rotoscoping video objects to remove the background of a person and replace, or removal of all objects in a scene using AI generative filling is all extremely easy.

Adode Premiere deserves a mention, but again, this down to Sensei. The current AI tools coming in to the suite are things such as Auto Rough Cut using the transcript to generate the video, full auto transcription with subtitle creation for multiple languages. Auto Colour will fix most colour issues using AI to save time in grading. AI Morph Cut adds visual continuity to cut transitions, remix for music matching with visuals, and Auto Ducking – popping dialogue over background audio to make sure you can hear voices correctly.

ColourLab AI is a new kind of grading tool where you no longer need to spend time with an artist grading every scene. The tool is a plugin to Davinci or Premiere and will do cool things such as film grain matching or stock emulation, which allows you to match any scenes together to look exactly the same. Take a video of a pigeon flying over a statue in London, and have it grade using a still frame from The Martian to get those awesome colours automatically, for the whole scene.

Audio/Narrator/Voice Over

The final piece is the new voiceover AI generation. No longer do we need voice over artists. In fact, Hollywood thinks the same and fired the whole staff of Snow White and replaced the Dwarfs with CGI and AI voices.

Altered Studio can change any persons voice, in any way you wish. Record your voice for narration and then adjust it to be male, female, Elvern, whatever. It also does full transcription and allows for VO with text-to-speech using AI voices.

A quick shout out to a member of Tildes who wants to remain anonymous for some of the cool links that they sent over - much appreciated.

I'm open to hearing from folks who have used iOS longer than me. How is the iOS dialer so terrible when it's supposed to be the primary usage of a phone, calling people?

1. Why can't I type the letters of a name in my contacts list, eg "5-2-6" for "JAM" and have all the "James" show up? Android has had that since forever because it's not rocket science.
2. Why can't I type to correct a digit in the middle of the number dialed? Or correct a number I've pasted in?
3. Seriously, is there no way to replace the dialer with something better? And if there is and I just missed it, what are your recommendations?
4. Same question for the god-awful contacts list. I use Google Contacts, have 3 google accounts in which the contacts are… and the syncing seems piss-poor.

Ok, this turned out to be more of a rant than I anticipated. I've gotten to like iOS quite a bit, especially because the android ecosystem has become a very "worst of both worlds" option. But man the dialer's shit. Someone please tell me I'm missing something obvious.

Whizy Kim

The Rejuvenation Olympics, an online leaderboard launched by tech millionaire Bryan Johnson earlier this year, takes the rivalry of the rich to the next level. The game? “Reversing” your age

Link to the article

Participants compete not on physical abilities but on how quickly and by how much they can slow their “biological age.”

Competitors do this mostly by adjusting their diets (like which macronutrients and supplements they consume), being physically active, and retesting their “age” regularly. They’re not actually reverting to a more youthful version of themselves — that’s not biologically possible. Rather, these competitors are racing to see who can age the slowest; as the Rejuvenation Olympics website quips, “You win by never crossing the finish line.”

The point isn’t merely being healthy. It’s laser-precision optimization of his health.

Johnson, for example, never eats pizza or drinks alcohol. It’s simply not a part of his algorithm. “I was just a slave to myself and my passions and my emotions and my next desire,” he said in an interview with Vice Motherboard. That doesn’t mean he never stumbles, but when he does, he calls it an “infraction,” as though he has committed a minor crime.

Leaderboard

Johnson tops the Rejuvenation Olympics leaderboard; he created the game along with Oliver Zolman — who leads Johnson’s team of 30-plus doctors and other health experts — and TruDiagnostic, an epigenetics lab based in Kentucky that provides the biological age test kits that participants in the Olympics must submit. The cheaper version costs $229. The more expensive one, at $499, provides more data on your results, including how habits like smoking or drinking alcohol have impacted a person’s aging speed.

Ultramarathon

It’s a contest that participants hope never ends — the most ultra of ultramarathons. The most dedicated members in the longevity community are, in essence, spending their lives obsessing over living. Says Lustgarten: “I plan on doing this for at least the next 70-plus years.”

I recently got a Loona, one of those "smart" robot pets. My kid isn't great with real pets yet so we're trying to ease into things, sort of like exposure therapy. But we're having major problems with it. This post is part first impressions and part asking if anyone else has experienced this and maybe has figured out solutions.

Now, my kid loves it, a lot. So it's not a complete flop, thankfully. But wow is it ever the opposite of smart. Kind of like how Google, Alexa, etc have "command phrases" to let them know you're wanting to talk to them, Loona has "hello Loona". But it only triggers listening mode like 20% of the time. Doesn't seem to matter if you talk slowly and enunciate or if you talk normal, it's just really bad at listening.

Even once you have it listening to you, it only recognizes your commands maybe half the time. The booklet it came with seems to say it sends audio to Amazon for voice to command translation, so I'm assuming it's bad at listening to commands because:

1. The microphone is mediocre and isn't picking up all the words correctly.
2. Amazon's public voice to command service isn't great for general use.
3. A little of both.

On the one hand, I get if you're looking to leverage existing technology and not reinvent the wheel. On the other hand, if it can't even detect "hello loona" locally, then everything it hears would go to Amazon. That terrifies me, given their privacy track record. It's also just plain frustrating to try getting it to play a game or go to sleep when it's constantly ignoring you.

Beyond that, it almost feels like the camera is for gimmicks rather than a functional component. It's constantly running into things like walls, chair legs, human legs... It's always running into you when you try to interact with it and it frequently moves violently; fast and without regard for its surroundings. I assume it makes no attempt to map out even just its immediate surroundings because of how it always runs into the same stuff over and over again.

And one feature I was looking forward to is that the robot is supposed to be capable of getting itself back to its charging dock, and yet not once has it ever attempted to do so. Not when it's low battery and not when we tell it to. But it also, for no great reason, assumes that it should just wake up when it finishes charging, so if you start charging it in the evening and forget to manually turn it off, the thing starts yelling and ramming into stuff in the middle of the night; it's insanity.

Anyway, I would not recommend it from personal experience. But if you have one or know someone that does, and you aren't having these issues, please share your wisdom with me.

Apologies for the vague title, but the topic itself is really open, and I was having trouble cutting down on its scope.

Here’s some background: Recently, I’ve been going through several transitions in life: moving and switching jobs somehow were not the most stressful among them. During this period I’ve been trying to keep all of the various tasks, events, reminders, alarms, etc. organized for myself. This process of organizing my time has been extremely overwhelming for me. I’ve been trying to take it one step at a time, only adding tasks as they come up. This still has lead to my problem of figuring out whether or not an event should be added to my calendar, or a task added to my todo list, or even an alarm added to my phone. If I add everything, then it becomes tough to see what is important, and if I don’t then I risk not remembering one of them.

My question is kind of two fold: what tools do you use to keep track of your day/tasks/events, and what philosophy do you have regarding adding or omitting items?

For me right now, I am using google calendar to keep track of major events and birthdays, and for everything else I use a physical notepad. In my calendar, I have birthdays and any event that has a time set in stone. This lets me see whether or not I am actually free when I’m invited to things or asked if I can help someone out.

For everything else, I use my notepad and attempt to keep track of anything that could be considered a task. At the end of each day I try to organize my list of tasks based on how immediately they need to be completed or how important they are to complete.

My system has two pitfalls: occasionally I over extend myself, because an event (stored on my calendar) will coincide with a day where many of my tasks (stored in my notepad) are due. For example, I had a day where I worked in the office (9 hours plus commute), had another event (4 hours plus commute), 1 task that took me two hours, 3 different tasks (each one ending up taking over an hour), and several other tasks that I didn’t even get to before falling asleep.

What tools/systems/philosophies do you use? And semi-related, how does one keep from falling into the trap of spending more time planning than actually living?

I have fond memories of trying to solve HTML/text-based riddles on sites like WeffRiddles when I was growing up in the mid-late 2000s. The premise of the site is usually pretty simple: the landing page represents "level 1", and you had to find the correct URL to get to level 2, 3, and so on. The "puzzle/riddle" aspect usually involves inspecting the underlying HTML and looking through clues given in the source code, then using those clues to piece together the URL for the next stage.

It was always fun hanging out on forums and sharing clues about how to solve the level that everyone was stuck on. Also, being a kid back then, frankly I felt like a Hackerman™️ whenever I'd have to inspect the page source, paste it into Windows Notepad, then set font size to 1pt because I thought there was an ASCII art pattern hidden in the HTML. Good times.

Sometimes I get the urge to play these things again, but besides WeffRiddles which I know by name, I don't really know what this type of game is called. The closest "modern" example I can think of is /dev/esc, which is more like an online escape room than a long-form riddle site.

Does this ring a bell for you? Any other fun ones that you remember playing? And what the hell do I type into Google to find more of these?

Hi all, first post so hope I do it right.

I just read the Tasker post and thought I'd post a question/request here about it.

On my old Samsung S21 I wrote a simple Tasker script that detected a change in volume on one of the sliders, eg Media, and then adjusted the others, IE System, Notification and Call, to match with a little check, ie %VOLM neq %VOLR.

It worked fine in my Samsung but goes all over the place on my new Pixel!

Has anyone else seen this or can post something that works on Pixels? Or maybe my scripts need some work!

The trigger is variable set, IE VOLM, and the actions are to set the other 3 volumes to VOLM if they are not already set to that. And I have 4 of those, one for each variable.

And advice appreciated!

Intro

This will be something of a long and theoretical post, but I'm interested in others' opinions on this - and a quick google search of Robert Nozick and Fediverse turned up literally nothing, so I'm thinking that this is a new connection. The recent news about Beehaw defederating from other instances, and the wider discussions about how federation might or might not work reminded me of Robert Nozick's Anarchy, State, and Utopia (1974), which I imagine anyone who's formally studied philosophy will have come across. The main point of this book is to make the case for the libertarian minimal state, with the overall thesis in the preface being:

Our main conclusions about the state are that a minimal state, limited to the narrow functions of protection against force, theft, fraud, enforcement of contracts, and so on, is justified; that any more extensive state will violate persons' rights not to be forced to do certain things, and is unjustified; and that the minimal state is inspiring as well as right. (p. ix)

The book, while influential and important, is I think deeply flawed, and there's some general agreement about this in the philosophy departments I've been involved with. (Same with many of Nozick’s general opinions.) Unfortunately, the parts of the book that tend to be taught are the first two, and in particular the Wilt Chamberlain argument (pp. 160-2) in which he argues that unequal distribution of wealth and goods is fine as long as the unequal distributions were caused by a history of mutual freely consenting exchanges.

I say 'unfortunately' because– while the first two sections and the Chamberlain argument are definitely important and influential– Part III, Utopia, is the strongest. I'm not a libertarian, but it's a novel, well-structured, and interesting argument for the minimal state, based in part on possible-world semantics, and I think it looks a lot like what the Fediverse is going for, which is why I'm interested in the crossover.

The Possible-World Model

Nozick begins by defining Utopia and identifying its main issues:

The totality of conditions we would wish to impose on societies which are (preeminently) to qualify as utopias, taken jointly, are inconsistent... The best of all possible worlds for me will not be that for you. The world, of all those I can imagine, which I would most prefer to live in, will not be precisely the one you would choose. Utopia, though, must be, in some restricted sense, the best for all of us; the best world imaginable, for each of us. In what sense can this be? (pp. 297-8)

He then sets up this perhaps rather convoluted idea, based on the concept of imagining possible worlds. The core idea is this: that in any possible world you can imagine, it must include that all other rational agents in that world will also be able to imagine other possible worlds, and that (if they prefer) they can then move to those possible worlds.

The question then moves to: is it possible for this to be stable? Because Nozick is interested in whether utopia as traditionally explored by utopian theorists and authors (and note that to an extent he’s subtextually talking to socialist utopians throughout) is possible, the key question is whether worlds will keep being created over and over, with people moving over and over, or whether there'll ever be a world where everyone in that world chooses to stay. And stable worlds must then:

[satisfy] one very desirable description... namely, none of the inhabitants of the world can imagine an alternative world they would rather live in, which (they believe) would continue to exist if all of its rational inhabitants had the same rights of imagining and emigrating. (p. 299, his emphasis)

This is, given that people are able to move to worlds they imagine (which Nozick calls 'associations' - as opposed to 'east-berlins' in which inhabitants are unable to move to other worlds).

He puts this also in set theory terms (quoted just below), and then points out an equivalency of members of S choosing to form an association of their own, vs. members of S refusing entry to those members of A who are not also members of S.

if A is a set of persons in a stable association then there is no proper subset S of A [note from me: 'proper subset' means it's a part of the whole but not equal to it. So {1, 3} is a proper subset of {1, 3, 5}, but {1, 3, 5}, although a subset of itself, is not a proper subset of itself] such that each member of S is better off in an association consisting only of members of S, than he is in A. For, if there were such a subset S, its members would secede from A, establishing their own association. (p. 300)

There is then a fairly lengthy section expanding on this, caveating it, and also doing some more in-depth logic/set theory, which I'll skip over as it's not as relevant (and this is already getting long). It's pages 301-6 if anyone's interested in reading, though. Page 307 onwards is where Nozick begins analysing how this model laid out above could be seen in the real world.

The Real World

Obviously, the above possible-worlds model is very idealised, and there are several limitations in the real world. Nozick lays out the following four:

1. In the model, we can imagine infinite possible people to associate with (although we cannot have an infinite number of people in an association); in the real world there are firstly not infinite people and secondly we can't create them. So even if I can imagine the perfect association for me, it might not exist; same with a community I might want to join.
2. In the model, the only ways associations interfere with each other is by drawing away its members - in the real world, communities impinge on each other in all kinds of ways.
3. Information costs - it takes effort to find out about other communities in the real world; in the model it's instantaneous and easy.
4. In the real world, some communities don't let their members know about, or move to, other communities.

It’s worth noting here that Nozick was writing in 1974, before the advent of the internet (and to a lesser extent, globalisation in general), so point 3 is less of an issue here. Particularly regarding moving and travel costs, which are vastly, vastly, reduced online. In fact, I think these issues are all reduced on the internet, which is relevant when it comes to the potential for implementation. I say more about this at the end of this post, and it’s one of the main things I’m interested in hearing opinions about.

Nozick, now, is interested in the implementation (or influence) of the possible-world model in the real world, and his key point ends up being this:

The idea that there is one best composite answer to all of these questions, one best society for everyone to live in, seems to me to be an incredible one. (And the idea that, if there is one, we now know enough to describe it is even more incredible.) (p. 311, his emphasis)

The ‘questions’ he refers to are questions of values, of activities, of interests. Security or adventure? Luxury or austerity? Private property? Religion? The fact, Nozick thinks, that utopian authors attempt to imagine a utopian society demonstrates a blindness to the heterogeneity of human nature. Which is demonstrated by the fact that they all have their own visions of utopia, and the fact that the inhabitants of their visions all lead different lives.

The conclusion Nozick draws is that there is no sense in having one type of community in a utopia - rather, that “Utopia is a framework for utopias” (p. 312, my emphasis because it’s the most important point here). We should be aiming for a kind of “meta-utopia”, and this is where the real-world limitations flagged above come into play. The meta-utopia is necessary precisely because of these real-world limitations. What does this look like?

[T]he environment in which utopian experiments may be tried out; the environment in which people are free to do their own thing; the environment which must, to a great extent, be realized first if more particular utopian visions are to be realised stably. (p.312)

Nozick thinks this conclusion can arise from a few forms of arguments. One is, that people are different, and so thinking there’s any ‘best’ world for everyone is foolish. That’s what’s happening when he states that there’s no composite answer to the questions of how best to live/structure society. But what if there is a society that’s the best society for everyone? Nozick reckons that that still leads to this meta-utopia. His reasoning for this involves what he calls “design devices” and “filter devices”.

Design devices basically attempt to structure an ideal society from the ground up, with a bunch of people discussing what the best society is, constructing a model for this society, and then implementing it.

Nozick basically thinks that this is a non-starter. I think this analogy puts his ideas well:

It is helpful to imagine cavemen sitting together to think up what, for all time, will be the best possible society and then setting out to institute it. Do none of the reasons that make you smile at this apply to us? (pp. 313-4)

EDIT: I want to note that I mean that this analogy puts his ideas well. I share the scepticism of design devices, while simultaneously thinking that many societies denoted as 'primitive' tap into important and valuable aspects of human communities which 'modern' societies dismiss.

The complexity of the human condition is also a large part of his reasoning here why design devices don’t work. So, the alternative is filter devices, which “involve a process which eliminates (filters out) many from a large set of alternatives” (p. 314). This is desirable for a few reasons:

1. It requires less knowledge than design devices. Filtering processes don’t need to know precisely what an end-product looks like; they can just have some ideas about what they don’t want and begin with that.
2. The filtering process naturally improves with time. When you have a filter for new candidates, then those candidates are, on average, of better quality (however that’s defined in this particular community), so the filtering process now has better material to work with.
3. New material creates novel ideas, which would not be accessible with a design process (Nozick doesn’t outright state this, but I think it’s clear that he thinks it).

Moreover, one single filtering process will be insufficient. Nozick describes it thus:

[P]eople try out living in various communities, and they leave or slightly modify the ones they don’t like… Some communities will be abandoned, others will struggle along, others will split, others will flourish, gain members, and be duplicated elsewhere. Each community must win and hold the voluntary adherence of its members. No pattern is imposed on everyone, and the result will be one pattern if and only if everyone voluntarily chooses to live in accordance with that pattern of community. (p. 316, his emphasis)

Some advantages he lists to this: given that the filtering process is largely constituted by people leaving communities they don’t like, this will cause communities which people want to live in; mechanical processes are limited “given our inability to formulate explicitly principles which adequately handle, in advance, all of the complex, multifarious situations which arise” (p. 317) - this one is very, very similar to many recent discussions I’ve seen about moderation and the ‘don’t be an arsehole’ clause.

So what does all this lead to? Basically, that the utopian framework should be one that is informational. Whichever framework provides the best means for finding out about various communities, is the one that should be adopted– first, because that is what best facilitates the filtering process, and second, because it best mitigates the real-world issues laid out at the beginning of this section.

Conclusion

Ok, so, that’s the bulk of what I wanted to put down. The rest of Utopia focuses very much on the physical world - it’s well worth a read. (NB I’m using ‘physical world’ rather than ‘real world’ or ‘actual world’ (which Nozick uses) because the internet is part of the real world. As opposed to the ideal world, which one example of is the possible-worlds model laid out above.)

I was initially going to offer my own thoughts about how this connects to the Fediverse and the internet in general, but just the sharing of Nozick’s framework has gotten long enough that I think I’ll leave it there. Part of my motivation for sharing this is that, although I’m very much not a libertarian, this is imo one of the strongest defences of the minimal state; in addition to this, I’m much more sympathetic for a kind of meta-libertarianism when it comes to spaces like the internet, especially if they function to facilitate filtering processes.

That said, I still have worries about the way this can be, and is, implemented. There’s been a lot of discussion on Beehaw defederating from lemmy.world and sh.itjust.works, and although I personally don’t see a problem with it, I can understand why people are annoyed. I wonder if this is a consequence of people thinking they’re existing in the meta-utopia, when in fact they’re existing in an instance of it. I also don’t want to label the Fediverse as the meta-utopia, although I do get the sense that that’s what they’re aiming to become.

Nozick has a relevant section on the Beehaw thing, actually, and I’m just going to quote it because I’ve just about reached my energy limit for explaining/elucidating philosophy lol. Feel free to skip it, it’s a side-note to this post and not a main point.

A person will swallow the imperfections of a package P (which may be a protective arrangement, a consumer good, a community) that is desirable on the whole rather than purchase a different package (a completely different package, or P with some changes), when no more desirable attainable different package is worth to him its greater costs over P, including the costs of inducing enough others to participate in making the alternative package. One assumes that the cost calculation for nations is such as to permit internal opting out. But this is not the whole story for two reasons. First, it may be feasible in individual communities also to arrange internal opting out at little administrative cost… yet this needn’t always be done. Second, nations differ from other packages in that the individual himself isn’t to bear the administrative costs of opting out of some otherwise compulsory provision. The other people must pay for finely designing their compulsory arrangements so that they don’t apply to those who wish to opt out. (p. 321-2)

Another reason why I’m interested in opening up this discussion, is that I’ve experienced almost no discussion on this section of Nozick’s work in my experience of academic philosophy. The other two sections– and particularly Wilt Chamberlain– are talked to death, but Utopia has relatively little engagement. On one hand, I get this - a large part of philosophical education is understanding the history of ideas, and Utopia is comparatively uninfluential. You need to know Wilt Chamberlain if you’re entering academic philosophy; you don’t need to know all this. On the other hand, it’s a shame, because I think it’s the strongest part of Nozick’s work.

I also think that it’s somewhat more relevant to the internet than it is to the physical world. Not because of the legitimacy of its ideals, but purely because of the relative ease of implementation. The four issues mentioned above are really reduced in online spaces.

1. We still don’t have infinite people, but the variety of people we can interact with is potentially wider. Potentially. The issues with lack of– or exodus of– minorities, which I’ve seen discussions about on Tildes while searching past posts, is an important one here. I’m not necessarily referring specifically to Tildes here - I’m too new to the site to really have a good sense of the community. But just like in the real-world, I can’t conjure up people and create my own version of Tildes which includes all the people here currently and also all the other people I’d like to see.
2. Communities on the internet obviously interfere with each other, just like physical-world communities. This isn’t that reduced, perhaps only in terms of stakes. Physical-world community interference can cause wars, financial boycotts, etc. Maybe doxxing or the like is analogous? Regardless, it’s reduced although not eliminated in severity, as far as I can see.
3. The difference in information costs should be immediately obvious. It’s much easier for someone to try out Tildes, than it is for someone to try out France.
4. Relatedly, internet communities don’t have the same power as physical communities to limit information, although there are definitely still issues here, especially with an increasingly-corporatised internet. On the other hand, the internet itself does work in breaking down these barriers in the physical world, at least in terms of information (not in ease of moving countries). At least, there’s usually no real financial costs to hopping platforms.

Guess I’m leaving it here? Maybe all I’ve accomplished is sharing some cool philosophy– at least, I think it’s cool.

The page numbers all reference Anarchy, State, and Utopia - I don’t know if I’m allowed to link PDFs here, but suffice to say it’s the first one that shows up.

This Stanford Encyclopaedia of Philosophy page also includes some useful context, and a bit of discussion on the Utopia section - although, again, relatively brief. Nevertheless a great source.

I'm a pretty conscientious person and I like to research stuff before I buy it - I'm not obsessive about getting The Best Whatever In Class, but like anyone I'm interested in a good deal for a product that suits my needs.

Between the prevalence of review-stuffing bots, Google's results getting worse, and reviewers themselves sometimes having questionable financial backing, I'm finding it harder and harder to find reliable information. So the gold standard is personal recommendations from real people!

I checked and it's been a while since we've had a general recommendations thread on Tildes so I thought it might be nice to start up another one with the influx of new folks!

Possible points of discussion:

1. Are you looking to buy something and hoping to hear from people about what's good and what's bad? Post the type of thing you're looking for in a top-level comment and others can chime in!

2. Is there a product you enjoy or that has improved your life, fills a niche or special requirement really well, or stands out to you as being a big improvement over its competitors? Is there a particular company you had a great experience with? Share with others who might also benefit!

3. Is there a product you tried, HATED, and want to warn people about? Something that's all hype, no substance? I think that also fits here.

4. Are there any reviewers or sites you trust in particular?

Toward the end of August, I signed up for a trial of Kagi -- a privacy-focused search engine.

You get 50 free searches, and then, if you want to continue, you can convert to a paid account at $10 a month.

I mentioned here that I wasn't planning on converting to paid, as $10/month felt very steep and I didn't think I could make it my default search on my iOS phone, but @pallas's comment here ultimately made me want to give it a try.

Thus, I dropped the $10 bucks to turn the free trial into a paid one-month trial.

I'm very glad that I did.

The free trial itself was actually not very convincing to me. Knowing that I had limited searches and not wanting to run through them more than I needed, my searches were in the single digits each day. I was very judicious about what I searched and how I typed it. Furthermore, I kicked myself if I instinctively typed something like "imdb everything everywhere all at once" into Firefox's search bar instead of going to imdb.com and then typing in the movie title, as that meant I'd wasted 2% of my allotment on what wasn't technically a search but more of an internet navigation optimization.

On the searches I did I felt like I got good results, but I wasn't sure if that was because of the quality of the service or if it was because I'd simply thought more about what I was actually typing in. Also, the trial made me way too aware that I was searching with limited queries to really make me feel at ease about actually using the service.

Now that I've paid for a month, however, I've just used it as a stand-in for how I used to use DuckDuckGo -- "wikipedia steam deck"-style searches and all.

Kagi doesn't track your search contents, but they do track your number of searches. I have completed roughly 400 searches this month, which Kagi says costs roughly $5.00 out of the $10.00 that I paid them. I don't know nearly enough about any of this to know whether this is an accurate accounting of actual costs or overstating things, but I will say that the $10 price that I initially felt was steep has looked a lot more worth spending after a month on the service.

Kagi generally finds what I'm looking for within the first link. If it's not the top link, it's in the top 3. Furthermore, it seems to dredge up less junk. With DuckDuckGo, I loved that I wasn't being tracked for the purposes of advertising, but it felt like DDG had no problem serving me pages that were built specifically for that purpose. I'd often look up product reviews and get re-routed to sites that appeared to be nothing more than machine-generated lists of recommendations with Amazon affiliate links. I've had to deal with less of these while on Kagi. Some of them still come up, but they're either further down the rankings or they're put into their own "Listicles" section.

Where Kagi really shines though, is local searches. Pretty much the only time I would bang through to Google from DDG was for local stuff. I don't know if it's my location in particular, but DDG is not great about giving me things that are specific to my area, often preferring to give me a smattering of things that are from similarly named locales from elsewhere around the world. Kagi, on the other hand, gives me the kind of local results I get from Google.

Most local searches of that type tend to come from my phone, and this also helped me understand that better search on a phone matters WAY more than better search on desktop. The smaller screen and limited view means that it's significantly more important for the top result to be the one I want on my phone than it is on desktop. As such, Kagi is winning me over because it's made mobile searching frictionless -- something I couldn't say for DDG. That aspect alone is probably going to be what keeps me on the service. I'm planning on paying for at least another month, though after that I might go back to DDG for a month to see how I feel in comparison.

I mentioned earlier that I didn't think I could make it a default search on iOS. I mistakenly thought Apple had that locked down? Turns out it's actually possible through an app. Also, Kagi apparently has an entire browser for macOS/iOS. I tried it out and it works quite nicely, though AdGuard+Safari seemed to do a bit better ad-blocking than the stuff they'd built into Orion, so I've stayed on Safari.

There's actually a whole lot of cool looking power-user stuff on offer from Kagi (you can individually prioritize and de-prioritize specific domains across your searches, for example), but I'm not the kind of user that needs significant search depth, so I can't really speak to anything other than the standard search experience.

What I can say is that I've been very happy with that experience so far.

Also, it should hopefully go without saying, but this post isn't sponsored in any way nor was I requested to post it by Kagi. This is me choosing to give my own experiences with the service because I thought people here might be interested.

I'm posting this outside of the language learning thread because I worry those not currently learning languages are skipping it altogether :) In this post, I want to share general advice and takeaways about language learning, so this is for everybody, not just current learners!

Today, I've hit I think a big milestone: I am now comfortable calling myself "conversational" in Russian. This comes on the heels of a 30 minutes, all-Russian, naturally-flowing conversation with my coach who was very impressed, and a couple days after having participated in a total of 4+ hours of conversations that included a native speaker who doesn't actually speak English (training wheels are off, now!).

The goal I set myself mid-may to reach in 1 year, has been reached in 3 months. My Duolingo streak is on 87 days (or 89? I don't know if it counts the two streak freezes that were used), but I picked up DL a week after I started.

During this time, I journaled my progress here on Tildes (1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7 - really, I hope Tildes isn't getting sick of my spam!), and rekindled my love for learning languages. I think it's time for a recap: What worked, what helped the most, etc.

Summary

I didn't follow one specific technique or guide. Everything from the beginning has been improvised, based on experience from previous languages, and gut feel.

I talked about my methods in-depth in the journaling posts, but here's the bird's eye view of it:

1. Learn the script first, and how it's pronounced (I had already done that years ago, kinda)
2. Rigorously followed a single, complete-beginner crash course to get me started. In my case, a 9-hour, 30 episodes youtube series called Russian Made Easy, at an average of 45 min/day.
3. Started using Drops to start accumulating vocabulary; this replaced Flashcards for me.
4. After a little while, started the Duolingo course (but I don't use Duolingo the way most people do - See the old journals for details) and kept up with the streak since.
5. Started listening to spoken material on YouTube, as much as possible, even before I could understand what was being said.
6. Force myself to interact with the language by switching away from English in a variety of devices and apps
7. Watch loads of short videos on various bits and pieces about grammar, etymology, word lists and misc advice
8. Started writing in Russian on IM apps (at first using Google Translate, then without) with natives. Ask for feedback on it all.
9. Regularly try to speak, to whomever would have a conversation with me.
10. Regularly introspect: appreciate my progress, share it, and think about what I need to work on

Deep dive

Motivation

I wrote about how important motivation is. People start learning a language and then abandon it after a few weeks like a gym membership purchased on January 2nd. Having a motivator that goes beyond "this sounds cool" is really important, because all this is a lot of effort and your brain won't see the point of making all that effort if you don't have a proper need to go through it all.

I found that motivation is not a constant, either. It is something which has to be maintained. Sharing this experience with you all has been immensely useful in that process. And having native speakers in your life who can really appreciate your progress and encourage you is excellent.

Variety

The most useful part of my "method" is definitely the variety of the language diet. It seems to me that following only a set of single-source courses will just leave you with huge gaping holes as soon as you leave its bubble. It'd be like learning to read by only reading the same 100 words, over and over, until you become very quick at reading specifically those words. And then you're done and you come across the word "exhaustion" and you're like, what the fuck do I do with this?

So yes, a variety of activities that will cover all types of input (reading, listening) and outputs (speaking, writing and thinking). And with the varied diet, one should also be careful not to burn themselves out by doing too much. I ensured that a lot of what I was "doing" was passive: Switching my phone's language, leaving audio in the background, asking others to speak to me in the language and translating if I need, etc. My active learning was only being done when I felt like it. This circles us back to the motivation aspect: If that's rock solid, then you will want to keep studying/reading/learning, and you'll do more.

Regularity

So yes, quantity and regularity are also important, and keeping the language in your brain every single day is, I believe, critical to help it develop. The languages I do not think about on a regular basis don't develop. Despite speaking Greek my whole life, only interacting with that language once every couple weeks at most has kept it from evolving beyond a pretty basic level, and now I'm convinced my Russian is better than my Greek. Oof, this puts shame on my supposed bilingual heritage.

Finding comfort

I think it's easy to get frustrated at a language you're not yet good at, because you're so used to how you normally do things, that communicating is SO FRUSTRATING when you don't have your whole toolkit.

Speaking in the target language, with people who know your primary language(s), can also highlight that frustration because the barrier feels "artificial". For me, I have not particularly enjoyed speaking to non-natives, and that hasn't motivated me much. However, speaking to natives has been much easier because it's really nice to think "Hey, you've been making all these efforts to speak in a language I understand, let me do the effort this time".

And well, finding a way to be comfortable speaking is critical. Olly Richards mentions that, if you start speaking too early and in an unsafe space, you can scare yourself into a "bad experience" and regress because of that. I can definitely see that, and I personally was careful to challenge myself without trying to push too hard.

Over time, you can get very good at getting a sense of how difficult a certain activity or material is for you. You have three grades: Things you are comfortable with (level+0), things that are challenging and teach you (level+1), and things that are straight up too difficult for you (level+2).Input-based method proponents often advise staying at +1, without really defining what that means, but it's true you kinda know it when you see it. For example, watching Let's Plays in Russian is still my_level+2 for me, but I see them slowly edging towards +1, and that type of material is super effective because, any time you see the progress happening, your motivation is massively improved.

Mistakes

Developing on comfort: You have to be comfortable making mistakes. This is what really scares everybody, and it was definitely the case for me as well.. I was (and still am) ashamed of my bad grammar especially, and if I don't know how to say something properly, I hesitate to say it at all. But you gotta push through that. There's a balance to strike as always, and you still need to be ok with

How I use Google Translate

I've been doing something which has helped a lot, and in hindsight it's obvious to me why, so I want to share this and popularize this technique.

I started writing to native speakers on IM very, very early (people often use and recommend Tandem for this). Because I didn't have a good enough control over the language yet, what I would do was: Write in Google Translate what I want to say. But without writing long, complex sentences; instead, I would write things I felt I wanted to be able to say. So instead of "Hey, I'm super hungry right now, do you wanna meet me and grab a bite on the way?", I would write "Hey, I am a bit hungry. Can we go eat together?".

I would take the translation, understand it, and usually I would write it again on the keyboard rather than copy-paste (this helps with memorization). Sometimes I would use voice input, because cyrillic keyboard hard.

Then, over time, as I got better at output, I would think about what I want to say directly in Russian and write that into Google Translate to check it (and sometimes do a little back-and-forth dance to see if it suggests alternate forms).

So, yeah, this has been extremely helpful because it's given me a way of using the language as a tool from pretty early on. It's great because Google Translate really is going to adapt to your level, so if you want to be at "level+1", you just have to figure out what that looks like for you in your native language.

Conclusion

Wow, what a journey. Of course it's not over, but I've actually hit my goal... with nine months to spare! That's enough time to make, like, a whole baby.
I want to keep improving, not stagnate, so I'm now going to keep using the language and I think wait that full year before I really start learning a new one. (Ukrainian was next on my list, but I'm shocked at how much I now understand of it, it's much closer to Russian than I thought; so I'm still undecided).

I have loved sharing this experience with you, Tildes, and I really, really hope I motivated some of y'all in your own language learning journeys. If these threads have helped you in any way, please do share it with me here or by DM, I want to know!

So I've seen some posts here and elsewhere about people making a home NAS setup, using it as a media server with jellyfin/plex/.arr to set up media + keep files/passwords/photos, and then managing it remotely. That sounds incredibly cool.

I also did some cursory searching that one way to do things without messing with port-forwarding is to look into Tailscale to network remotely.

I want to try this for my parents and I, especially since I will be training abroad for several years while they will be based in Asia.

The obvious problem is I don't have any experience with the process or even networking in general. I also do not know how to code in any capacity. I am in a decidedly non-tech field of work.

I've been googling but want to know if this a feasible idea at my skill level? Is this work for hobbyists or those in the professional field of computing? Am I going to potentially shoot myself security-wise if i try this? Should experiment with something smaller-scale first?

Preliminary "Research":

1. Watched Practical Networking on youtube to see what I was getting into (understood... lets say 45% of what he was talking about)
2. Plan to get a synology NAS with minimum 4 drive bays (Supposedly this is easiest for beginners?)
3. Connect to network via tailscale
4. Get a vpn
5. Install docker
6. Install apps
7. Connect it to PCs and smart tv at my parent's home in Asia
8. ???
9. Maintain it from Europe?

Any advice on how to start or any guides to recommend? (most of what I've found is 2021 or earlier so I am unsure if a lot's changed since then)

The following is an observation that may be obvious to some, but which I didn't fully realize the extent of until recently.

Everything has a lifetime. If you grok this, you are able to reason about everything a lot more efficiently. At work, in life, everywhere. I initially started thinking about this in the realm of software engineering, but this is a universally-applicable observation.

In code, it's useful to think about operational lifetimes: How long will each operation take? How long should it take? When should it time out? We often call these "TTL" or "time to live". If you request some data from https://example.com/data.json, and it does not answer within the designated TTL (of your choice), you proceed to a failsafe.

Not employing TTLs is often the root cause of issues in fault-sensitive designs. Connections piling up, stuck UIs on spotty connections, etc.

Then there is the concept of "data lifetime". That is often controlled not by time but by size, for example how many items can be present in a bucket, or how large overall the bucket can be, or both. You may have seen this in your various trash folders on desktop, email clients etc: "Delete items after x days", "Limit bin size to 1 GiB".
Once again, not putting a lifetime in place is the root cause of many issues such as memory leaks, UIs becoming less and less responsive over time, unusable software that doesn't test for edge cases ("what do you mean you have 1200 tabs open in Chrome?"), and so on.

Setting the lifetime on something is a type of contract. By determining an "edge", you are now able to test "edge cases". By saying "You can have up to 1 million items in this folder", you're also saying you have (or at least should have) tested the edge cases of 1 million items, and what happens when you hit the limit.

You see this in the physical world as well, you may recognize the concept as a tolerance, or a limit. "This elevator has been certified for up to 10 people, or 1000kg". It doesn't mean it won't work beyond that, but there is a contract of undefined behaviour when you exceed the limits.

What happens when you don't have limits?
Well, this article from the other day is an excellent example. The autobahn famously doesn't have speed limits. What did they expect?

What happens when you don't have lifetimes? Well, remember how Google is shutting down free legacy GSuite? They promised "free for life" accounts and had to back down after realizing the accumulated maintenance burden incurred by not putting a real lifetime on that promise.
Or the slightly famous $250,000 Unlimited Flight Pass.

I'll give you the example that changed the way I see the world: My first company's CEO told me the (unverified) story of how, in 2015, when Verizon was doing due diligence on AOL before acquiring it, the value of AOL was significantly reduced because of its "free minutes trial CDs" with no expiry date on them. Because of the lack of an expiry date on them, all those trial CDs would have to be honored, and thus were "debt". You couldn't wait them out. The acquisition price was thus much lower.

I apply this principle religiously in life, and try to understand the lifetime of everything I deal with. Especially things I purchase. You do it as well, maybe not consciously, but when you buy a phone and think "I want a phone that will last me at least 3 years", "at least 5 years", etc. You are giving the phone a lifetime, which allows you to divide its cost by the number of years you will keep it and think "by having a phone, I have to support a recurring cost of x dollars per year".

The recently-discussed article "Everything must be paid for twice (HN discussion)" touches upon the subject, though not as elegantly as I'd like it to. Indeed, thinking about lifetimes should force you to think about the "end of life" scenario, which touches upon questions of recycling for example. Efficient systems will handle end-of-life scenarios by reusing/recycling as much as possible, which allows for cost reduction. The reason you don't have to constantly purchase new hard drives is because you're allowed to delete things you no longer need, reusing existing space. But the hard drive itself has a lifetime, which is determined both by its usage (it won't last forever) as well as how useful it is (as storage becomes cheaper, storage requirements increase, following Braess's paradox, which means that 1GB hard drive that was once "more than you could ever need" is now utterly useless.

I invite you to think about these concepts everywhere, and see how relevant they are. Are you upset your latest appliance already broke down? Thinking of purchasing extended warranty on the next one? Wondering what you should buy in bulk? Are subscriptions better or worse than versioned software licenses? How long do you want to keep those photos around? Why did the restaurant across the street change ownership three times in the last two years? Do you think the Simpsons have had too many seasons? When are you gonna take down that christmas tree?

Keyword Research and SEO are entire industries today. There are tools like ahrefs and semrush that promise to give you "trending" topic keywords for a sum of monthly subscription money.

However, you can discard all their claims using a similar logic that you use to discard the claims of Astrologers, Voodooists, Stock Experts who "recommend" stocks, etc:

1. If an Astrologer knows the future of everyone, wouldn't they profit massively from it themselves using the information rather than telling the trick to everyone else (just for a pittance)?
2. If a Stock Expert knew that a stock's price will go up (and how much), won't they invest thousands and make millions themselves instead of giving those "tips" to "subscribers" and again, earn only a pittance?
3. If SEO and Search Marketing companies knew exactly which keywords can rank your blog or site in the Google Search Engine, won't they write articles on those topics/keywords themselves and profit massively with the page views instead of revealing that secret to you for merely a few cents!

Rounds one and two of the Tildes Writing Club have been smashing, if small-scale, successes. In the interest of luring out a few lurkers with a timely provocation, I want to establish this month's theme by fiat.

What do you have to say about madness? Your contribution can resemble a clinician's assessment, a confession, a polemic, an absinthe specter, the cry of the cuckoo, the diagnosis offered by Major Clipton (but hopefully of greater length), or a 1980s ska band. That is, whether you take the word to be romantic, offensive, biographical, inspirational, or risible, take it as inspiration for your writing this month.

Just follow these easy guidelines:

Your submission can be prose or poetry of any reasonable length. Less than 7,000 words, surely.

Watch for the April 23 submissions thread to appear. Reply to it with a link to your work, which may be housed anywhere you like, including on Tildes. Prioritize venues that are not known to be aggressively anti-privacy (e.g., Google Docs). You may provide questions for readers.

You must provide feedback on 3 submissions if you are posting a submission. Only one needs to be a substantial critique. If you see a post without feedback, consider giving it preference in the order of your responses. No one likes to be left hanging.

You don't have to follow the theme. Your detective fiction about beaver glands is welcome, too.
Feel free to post questions or comments.

Hey all! I got the idea for this from looking at the thread asking the users what they want to see more of on Tildes. While I unfortunately don't feel I have much to contribute in the way of ~arts, ~books, or ~humanities, I do have a love of ~music! (And an electric drum-kit, that I hooked up to my laptop yesterday)

I remember there being a thread about music collaboration a while back, and while it looks like nothing came of it then, I figured the time was ripe for another try! My idea is this: People record themselves playing any instrument they want (or know how), and post that recording as a top level comment. Others in the thread download the format (midi, wav, whatever) and add their own instrument into the mix, posting as a reply to the top level comment. Think of it like crowdsourcing a song, I suppose.

To start us off, have a link to a google drive folder of mine which has a couple drum beats (3 wav, and 1 midi). Import those, riff off em, and post what you got! I'll see if I can do the same if anyone else has audio they'd like to share.

If this thread goes well, maybe we could make it a recurring topic!

Lay it on the line in our March club posting! This time, let's submit short stories, chapters, essays.

@eve suggests that the optional theme be "liminality/liminal spaces. It could be about them, the creation of one, a dissection, the destruction of one, or just take place there. Anything and everything liminal."

Liminal is a sort of between. The definition is: relating to a transitional or initial stage of a process. occupying a position at, or on both sides of, a boundary or threshold.

You can also look into liminal spaces. These can be real places (like a train station that's simply a point people transfer to other trains to) or even the emotional betweens; coming to realizations or on a precipice of something. Like, summer vacation could be a liminal space even!

If you're not into borders and transitional spaces, or if you've been incubating a polemic all pandemic long, you are still encouraged to share your writing! You may draw inspiration from any theme (fictional or real).

Just follow these easy guidelines:

1. Produce a short story, essay, or chapter of a longer work. Your submission should not exceed 7,000 words. Let's aim for pieces 350-3500 words.

2. Watch for the March 14 submissions thread to appear... on March 14! Reply to it with a link to your work, which may be housed anywhere you like, including on Tildes. Prioritize venues that are not known to be aggressively anti-privacy (e.g., Google Docs). You may provide questions for readers in hidden expandable text, if you like.

3. You must provide feedback on 3 submissions if you are posting a submission. Only one needs to be a substantial critique. Our first outing was a trial run, and the offerings were extremely short. I anticipate proportionally longer responses to come easily this time. If you see a post without feedback, consider giving it preference in the order of your responses. No one likes to be left hanging.

Feel free to post questions in this topic. We had a stimulating and moderately edgy trial run. I'm excited for the longer prose to come!

Edit:

This was resolved by @tomf (cf. this comment).

Google’s account authentication appears to broken for me for some reason.

I have several devices and several Google accounts accumulated over the years.

Accounts:

1. Work Google account (this was set up by IT staff at the company where I work as they are a paying enterprise Google services customer)
2. Undergraduate University account (this was set up when I attended undergrad, where the University is a paying Google services customer)
3. Graduate University account (this was set up when I attended for grad school, where the University is a paying Google services customer)
4. Personal Google account (this was set up a long time ago, it’s just a non-paid, consumer Google account)

Under iOS and iPad OS, Google apparently asks you to download the official Google app in order to sign in and “trust” devices, so that they can send you prompts to acknowledge when you sign in on other devices. There is also the Google Authenticator app that lets you do traditional 2FA.

Further background, I got an iPhone 12 Pro circa October 2020. I gave my old iPhone handset to my dad (after signing out of everything and resetting it according to Apple’s instructions). Ever since, I’ve been having issues with logging into my Google accounts from the new iPhone, my iPad, and my Mac (provided by work). I’m actually afraid to log out of my work Google account on my work Mac, because I’m afraid I won’t be able to log in again, and that would prevent me from being able to get work done.

For example, let me walk through the steps I would normally take to log in to my Undergraduate University Google account on my iPad:

1. Open the Google app
2. Tap user icon in top right corner
3. From the modal menu, tap the downward chevron (circled in red)
4. Tap “Add another account” (circled in red)
5. Tap “Continue” on the confirmation widget when prompted
6. Enter the Gmail address for the account in the provided “Email or phone” input box and tap “Next”
7. At this point, I wait for the progress indicator (the blue bar with the red arrow pointing to it) to indefinitely traverse from left to right over and over again and I cannot progress further.

Virtually the same steps can be reproduced from my iPhone by going to accounts.google.com from any browser (I’ve tried Safari and Chrome).

The same sort of authentication redirect from accounts.google.com happens when trying to add my associated Gmail accounts to my iOS devices from the Settings > Mail > Accounts > Add Account, and similarly stalls at the same point.

I’ve tried logging out of my accounts from my personal Mac where I can still log in from google.com, and also tried going into the security settings for the accounts and disabling, then re-enabling 2FA (I can receive the text message with the code to associate my iPhone as a second factor authenticator, so Google knows my phone number).

Google’s support documents don’t provide any guidance on this situation where the accounts.google.com authentication hangs, and there seems to be no way to contact a human being at Google to provide technical support. I’ve searched their help portal/forums, and found nothing similar to my issue. They point me down a tree that ends here, which is not useful to me.

If Google’s services don’t work for you, it seems to be your problem, not theirs. I get that I’m not paying for their services, so it is totally unreasonable for me to expect any sort of technical support from Google. But, at the same time, it seems very strange that I am alone in my use case of simply trying to log into my accounts that have worked for years in the past without issue.

Anyone have advice on next steps?

I'm attempting to provision two mirror staging and production environments for a future SaaS application that we're close to launching as a company, and I'd like to get some feedback on the provisioning script I've created that takes a default VPS from our hosting provider, DigitalOcean, and readies it for being a secure hosting environment for our application instance (which runs inside Docker, and persists data to an unrelated managed database).

I'm sticking with a simple infrastructure architecture at the moment: A single VPS which runs both nginx and the application instance inside a containerised docker service as mentioned earlier. There's no load balancers or server duplication at this point. @Emerald_Knight very kindly provided me in the Tildes Discord with some overall guidance about what to aim for when configuring a server (limit damage as best as possible, limit access when an attack occurs)—so I've tried to be thoughtful and integrate that paradigm where possible (disabling root login, etc).

I’m not a DevOps or sysadmin-oriented person by trade—I stick to programming most of the time—but this role falls to me as the technical person in this business; so the last few days has been a lot of reading and readying. I’ll run through the provisioning flow step by step. Oh, and for reference, Ubuntu 20.04 LTS.

First step is self-explanatory.

#!/bin/sh

# Name of the user to create and grant privileges to.
USERNAME_OF_ACCOUNT=

sudo apt-get -qq update
sudo apt install -qq --yes nginx
sudo systemctl restart nginx

Next, create my sudo user, add them to the groups needed, require a password change on first login, then copy across any provided authorised keys from the root user which you can configure to be seeded to the VPS in the DigitalOcean management console.

useradd --create-home --shell "/bin/bash" --groups sudo,www-data "${USERNAME_OF_ACCOUNT}"
passwd --delete $USERNAME_OF_ACCOUNT
chage --lastday 0 $USERNAME_OF_ACCOUNT

HOME_DIR="$(eval echo ~${USERNAME_OF_ACCOUNT})"
mkdir --parents "${HOME_DIR}/.ssh"
cp /root/.ssh/authorized_keys "${HOME_DIR}/.ssh"

chmod 700 ~/.ssh
chmod 600 ~/.ssh/authorized_keys
chown --recursive "${USERNAME_OF_ACCOUNT}":"${USERNAME_OF_ACCOUNT}" "${HOME_DIR}/.ssh"

sudo chmod 775 -R /var/www
sudo chown -R $USERNAME_OF_ACCOUNT /var/www
rm -rf /var/www/html

Installation of docker, and run it as a service, ensure the created user is added to the docker group.

sudo apt-get install -qq --yes \
    apt-transport-https \
    ca-certificates \
    curl \
    gnupg-agent \
    software-properties-common

curl -fsSL https://download.docker.com/linux/ubuntu/gpg | sudo apt-key add -
sudo apt-key fingerprint 0EBFCD88

sudo add-apt-repository --yes \
   "deb [arch=amd64] https://download.docker.com/linux/ubuntu \
   $(lsb_release -cs) \
   stable"

sudo apt-get -qq update
sudo apt install -qq --yes docker-ce docker-ce-cli containerd.io

# Only add a group if it does not exist
sudo getent group docker || sudo groupadd docker
sudo usermod -aG docker $USERNAME_OF_ACCOUNT

# Enable docker
sudo systemctl enable docker

sudo curl -L "https://github.com/docker/compose/releases/download/1.27.4/docker-compose-$(uname -s)-$(uname -m)" -o /usr/local/bin/docker-compose
sudo chmod +x /usr/local/bin/docker-compose
sudo ln -s /usr/local/bin/docker-compose /usr/bin/docker-compose
docker-compose --version

Disable root logins and any form of password-based authentication by altering sshd_config.

sed -i '/^PermitRootLogin/s/yes/no/' /etc/ssh/sshd_config
sed -i '/^PasswordAuthentication/s/yes/no/' /etc/ssh/sshd_config
sed -i '/^ChallengeResponseAuthentication/s/yes/no/' /etc/ssh/sshd_config

Configure the firewall and fail2ban.

sudo ufw default deny incoming
sudo ufw default allow outgoing
sudo ufw allow ssh
sudo ufw allow http
sudo ufw allow https
sudo ufw reload
sudo ufw --force enable && sudo ufw status verbose

sudo apt-get -qq install --yes fail2ban
sudo systemctl enable fail2ban
sudo systemctl start fail2ban

Swapfiles.

sudo fallocate -l 1G /swapfile && ls -lh /swapfile
sudo chmod 0600 /swapfile && ls -lh /swapfile
sudo mkswap /swapfile
sudo swapon /swapfile && sudo swapon --show
echo '/swapfile none swap sw 0 0' | sudo tee -a /etc/fstab

Unattended updates, and restart the ssh daemon.

sudo apt install -qq unattended-upgrades
sudo systemctl restart ssh

Some questions

You can assume these questions are cost-benefit focused, i.e. is it worth my time to investigate this, versus something else that may have better gains given my limited time.

1. Obviously, any critiques of the above provisioning process are appreciated—both on the micro level of criticising particular lines, or zooming out and saying “well why don’t you do this instead…”. I can’t know what I don’t know.

2. Is it worth investigating tools such as ss or lynis (https://github.com/CISOfy/lynis) to perform server auditing? I don’t have to meet any compliance requirements at this point.

3. Do I get any meaningful increase in security by implementing 2FA on login here using google authenticator? As far as I can see, as long as I'm using best practices to actually ssh into our boxes, then the likeliest risk profile for unwanted access probably isn’t via the authentication mechanism I use personally to access my servers.

4. Am I missing anything here? Beyond the provisioning script itself, I adhere to best practices around storing and generating passwords and ssh keys.

Some notes and comments

1. Eventually I'll use the hosting provider's API to spin up and spin down VPS's on the fly via a custom management application, which gives me an opportunity to programmatically execute the provisioning script above and run some over pre- and post-provisioning things, like deployment of the application and so forth.

2. Usage alerts and monitoring is configured within DigitalOcean's console, and alerts are sent to our business' Slack for me to action as needed. Currently, I’m settling on the following alerts:
   1. Server CPU utilisation greater than 80% for 5 minutes.
   2. Server memory usage greater than 80% for 5 minutes.
   3. I’m also looking at setting up daily fail2ban status alerts if needed.

The final results would look something like this.

Ours here wouldn't be tailored to obscure music like that though, just the best albums of the year with no other qualifications. There hasn't been one on reddit since 2017, you can find the 2011-2017 sets in the archive. The first one was just me putting up 15 albums. I believe the highest number we ever hit was 287 albums. It's heartening when the artists show up to thank you for shining a light on their little corner of the music world, too. A good list is good press for Tildes, it'll make the rounds.

Frankly, the people who were instrumental in those roundups are here on Tildes now, so hitting past 300 isn't outside the realm of possibility, not that we need to get that extreme (it's just fun). There are several new type two listeners here too, so potentially we've already got more music lovers and more help here than we've had doing the previous set. General input from tens of thousands of people like you see on reddit isn't as important to this process as the hardcore music lovers, we'd get like 3 solid recs out of 1000 comments, and small/forgotten /r/letstalkmusic always kicked everyone else's ass when it came to album picks.

These things can be rather a lot of work, which is why they are hard to do. It's not the playlists that eat up the time, though - it's collecting all of the albums and getting enough ears on them to give them the stamp of approval for the final list. The way to make that easier is to get started on it early and spread the work out over several months. That way come November you're looking for late releases and overlooked gems rather than panicking and trying to do it all in a single week. Been there, that's the worst.

The way we'd do it before, we'd run roundup threads on reddit periodically (in several different subs) then sift the comments for album recommendations, listen to them to see if they passed muster. That's hardly necessary on Tildes, especially with the long-lived threads here that bump with activity and never truly lock. We also used a google docs spreadsheet so we could tally everyone's votes up, but that was a major pain in the ass I'd like to skip. Tildes' own votes should be more than enough, and exemplary tags can highlight the must-listen set that goes at the top.

I think the best way to do it is put up a collection thread that everyone who is interested can then bookmark or ignore, and then drop albums in the comments between now and mid-November. No, not in this thread, I'll post a thread for it during the first week of October. We just let that roll and keep dumping new albums into it, listening, and leaving comments there. Come late November I can whip that into a set of playlists in a weekend, that's the easy part.

I enjoy doing this because it's been my experience that most music publications would rather argue about what numerical order the same 50 albums should be in than round up all of the best and let the listeners decide for themselves. They also have an incentive to pimp bands that are industry darlings or that they are being paid to boost in the recommendations. We don't.

So, are you folks interested in getting the ball rolling on this in October? Leave a comment if you are interested in contributing (even if it's just a single album) so we can get a sense of how many people are down for this before we get started. If there isn't enough interest we can try again next year. I'd also like to invite the folks who have done this before to share their experiences, you know who you are. ;)

Admittedly keep education flowing is some corporate language. The only people who care about education are left-wing politicians and the actual teachers, neither of which matter now.

Anyway, my state government is broadcasting classes with 3 subjects from around 2PM to 4-4:20PM. The last subject of the day (3:30PM until the end) is only broadcast on the app they made and their YouTube channel unfortunately. All the classes are uploaded onto YouTube for posterity.

The app they made is mainly a chat, later limited to 15 messages as an attempt to stop copy-pasting from flooding the few meaningful/serious answers (it is a live chat with 20k people in it simultaneously so good riddance), to little avail IIRC. (IIRC because I watch by TV because my battery is limited and the screen is too small to actually copy to a textbook)

The quality is kinda mediocre but nothing bad enough usually. One time it was a 4:3 480p clip with interlacing, which is based until you start caring.

They are also sending us "handouts" (apostilas, PT-BR to English) and the normal state tests every bimester.

As for the teachers, they have sent us pretty much the full student workload via Google PDFs on WhatsApp, which is the opposite of private, but privacy is hardly possible when you're Brazilian and likely don't even have an up-to-date (defined as less than 5 years old ^LMAO ) PC. They haven't done any zoom/meet chats to teach us stuff however, since that's kind of the purpose of the TV/YouTube broadcast.

This is gonna be kinda of a personal mess.

My background is in film. In Bahia, Brazil.

I understand this is a very personal question with numerous factors to take in, some on which I'll absolutely not be able to convey.

I'm not looking for any definitive life advice because I know that's impossible. I just wanna hear perspectives from some smart people that might help me understand my situation. I've recently been through a (kind of a) life and death situation. I'd be dead or with severe neurological trauma without a helmet.

This made me rethink a lot of stuff about my goals and my life in general. I feel I can confide on Tildes, you people are usually caring and smart and awesome. I'm also a bit emotional, so please be gentle. Spending 24 hours on a hospital bed contemplating death and incapacitation kind does that too with you.

I won't change many details because fuck it, I don't thank there are a lot of people in the world wanting to dox me. And Google already knows everything about me anyway.

I have two very serious psychiatric diagnostics that impart my life in serious ways: bipolar disorder (type II, thankfully) and ADHD. I'm also suspected to be on the autism spectrum but I don't have the means to achieve this diagnostic. It would be useful anyway. These conditions seriously impact my ability to sustain a job for long periods and I have a hard time working with teams bigger than three (sometimes not even than).

I live for free in my mother's conformable apartment, while I she actually spends most of the time on another continent. It's a pretty good deal. But I wanted to be independent.

About two years ago I decided that work in film (my original major) would never provide me the financial independence I needed. Working in film means traveling a lot, infrequent hours, absurd exploration (its common to sleep 4 hours a day), and rampant drug use. I love film and do have a talent for it, but the environment is simply not conducive to my mental health.

Of course, now I realize that computer science may also not be conducive to mental health issues at all. The thing is, really like. When I'm lisping, the real illogical world becames more bearable, and I feel in a wonderland of logic, reason, and calming predictabilidade. This doesn't happen as much with other languages such as Python. I also suck at it. So much that's not even funny. I'm addicted to Linux, Emacs, and the command line, but that's kinda it. I became a Vim/Emacs semi specialist. I don't see myself ever doing anything complex. It this my mind, really!

I've been trying to program for almost 3 years and, beside my super awesome machine, I have nothing to show for myself. I try focusing on using things like Java or Python but I always get sidetracked trying to do some cool shit on Emacs.

Sometimes I wonder if I should just assume that I won't be able to concentrate on anything else and just learn Emacs Lisp for real. It's frowned upon by a lot of people, but Emacs is a wonderful learning environment and at least I would be doing something. Maybe an interesting package that some people would like to use.

Right now my choice seems to be between failing to study things that make me miserable (like OOP), but have clear professional possibilities, or focusing on something I actually like that might make a better programmer in the future.

An important detail: I'm 38 years old and unemployed. My region is not very economically active in that area but I'm afraid to leave it because then I would lose my support network. And the mere notion of being with other people on a daily bases causes me panic attacks.

And, as a reminder, studying programming with bipolar disorder ADHD is hard as fuck. My ADHD is so severe that I constantly forget what I'm doing withing seconds. That's probably why I like Lisp, which is more regular than other languages and I can get things more easily from context.

On the other hand, I'm super charming (and not at all modest hahaha) and interesting at parties because my scattered interests make it possible to contribute meaningfully (and sometimes witty) to pretty much any conversation. My success with women is indirectly proportional to may financial troubles.

Anyway, I know I said this was not about advice, but I kinda lied: what's your advice? Should I keep trying on something I'm not really talented at just because I like it (and it may bring financial rewards in the future).

Or should I just give up and, try my hand at some shorts and even a novel? (I'm currently on a severe writer's block though, but I do have some talent for it).

Maybe I could work from home, be some kind of sysadmin (in which case, what would be the quickest and cheapest way to do so?). I absolutely don't wanna create huge complex products, but managing thinks remotely would be awesome.

I also love philosophy and logic, and, if became suddenly rich, that's what I'd do for the rest of my life. Oh, well.

I've had a Nexus 6P for the past 3 years. It's been a good run, and I've swapped the battery out once before (1 year ago) but it's time for a replacement. At this point, it's not charging properly, and turning off randomly.

What phones are you all using? Any you'd feel good about recommending? I'd be interested to hear thoughts on current smartphones, as it's not something I've looked into for a while.

Some things I liked about the Nexus 6P:

• Camera (12.3MP) was really good back when I first got it and still holds up (just shuts down when I take photos now)
• Larger form factor (not a dealbreaker though)
• Android
• Convenience of having photos uploaded to Google Photos automatically
• Battery life (in its prime) was actually decent

I'm in EU, and ideally I don't really want to spend more than 300 euros.
Thanks all, keen to hear people's thoughts...

Appreciate any kind of response/advice.

In a pursuit of a more privacy-oriented mobile computing I've installed LineageOS ROM on my phone and decided to try living without Google Play Services, which usually provide aGPS (cell tower geopositioning), push notifications and lots of other frameworks like Google Maps that apps use as libraries.

My phone has 4 primary uses:

• Communicator - mostly Telegram, WhatsApp and Slack. Email of-course.
• Navigator - GPS and Maps are an irreplaceable tool if you're living in a modern metropolis
• Internet browser - obviously
• Music Player - music on the go

So let's see how you're supposed to tackle each of the uses, while using as much FOSS as possible.

0. System functionality - both push notifications and aGPS can be solved by microG - fake Google Play Services library. Not sure how it implements push, but aGPS is checked against Mozilla's geolocation database.
1. Communications - Telegram is available on F-Droid (OSS app store), but everything else is not. The solution here is to use Aurora (Play Store front-end to rip APKs) and install them manually. Push notifications might be broken even with microG (WhatsApp is missing notifications for me, sometimes). AOSP email is fine, K9-mail is ugly but works somewhat better.
2. Maps and navigation: OpenStreetMap is the obvious choice here and OsmAnd delivers the frontend. It has enough metadata for businesses to get you around, but compared to Google Maps it's can be sometimes lacking and/or out-of-date. Navigation itself is decent, but it's missing timetables for public transportation compared to GMaps, which can be a problem, especially if trains are cancelled or delayed. Overall it's very usable, almost feature complete, but I've found myself falling back to Google Maps in my browser when it comes to using public transport.
3. Internet browser - Firefox, with uBlock Origin installed (yes, it works on Android) it's really good.
4. Music Player - there are tons of music players available on F-Droid, you can pick whichever suits your needs. Here I actually stepped away from the FOSS and bought myself a PowerAMP license on developer's website. One of the rare moments where paid Android software is available outside of Play Store.

Now that the primary use cases are solved, let's try some other useful apps:

• E-banking? Broken without Google Play, app refuses to even start properly.
• Bike sharing? Taxi app? Public transport app? Broken without Google Maps libraries for the obvious reason. You might or might not be able to use the browser version, depending on the app.
• Reddit Relay/any app that requires the license? Okay you've ripped the APK with Aurora, but you can't buy the license to remove the ads.
• Ebook reader? Nothing good on F-Droid, have to rip something off Aurora.

Basically you have to be prepared to use your mobile browser a lot. And for some of the sites, do it in a "desktop mode" with tiny text, since the mobile version will just nag you to download the app, that might be broken.

The takeaway is simple - you give up A LOT of convenience just to cut off Google analytics (which you still might get with apps like Slack). It's certainly usable, don't get me wrong, but I still feel kind of stupid fumbling with OsmAnd when I'm out with my friends and trying to look something up. I'll probably end up going back to the stock ROM, or just installing the Google Apps. For me it was an experiment and I think I've got a general feel on how much information and use I'm actually getting out of GApps.

So Tildes, have you tried degoogling your phone? How did it go? Are you still using it?

Times are tough and isolation is getting to everybody, we've been playing some easy jackbox games with my friends on Google Hangouts, when the idea came to me: Why not start a DnD campaign? I've never ever played one, just watched some Youtube (Geek and Sundry, Mathew Colville), and definitely never though about hosting one until now.

After looking around, there are a lot of cool resources for running one, Roll20 seems to be the most popular and praised for ease of use. Rules are very well written into it and all the tools needed to deal with the mechanics are in. So technology-wise I think we're set.

Now I have a lot of questions on how to get an adventure running. Do I just get an official DnD guide book, do I just rip off the White Orchard level from Witcher 3 to start off or do I come up with some generic fantasy land? I'd like to run a small adventure in one night, just to get a taste of it and maybe branch it off later if everyone is up for it.

For characters I think it would be easier for me to come up with 8-10 pre-generated ones for a group of 4-5 people (with specific people in mind) to tailor it a little bit for my group, but still present some variety, while smoothing the learning curve and lowering the barrier to entry. Feels like a decent idea.

I'm still not sure where to start with this expansive world and I'd love to hear for seasoned DMs an players here on Tildes. How did you start your first game, what was the setting? How do I gently introduce players to mechanics? How do I deal with unpredictable situations?

And most importantly, how do I make sure everyone is having fun?

Hi Tilderinos!

As the title says, I have used Android almost my entire life. Many parts of the internet (especially reddit) really look down on Apple for many reasons (may of them valid). Starting about 3 weeks ago, I started to wonder if the grass really was greener on the other side. I would like to share my experience.

My first smart device was an iPod tough 4th generation. Back then, iOS was really bad. Notifications took over the screen. If you didn't want to deal with a notification right then, you had to dismiss it permanently. Multitasking did not exist (until a few updates later) Android was miles better then. Switching was the obvious choice. Flash forward to now, through many different android devices. I had a Samsung Galaxy S10e, Galaxy Watch LTE, and Galaxy Buds. I had the best ecosystem of devices that Android has to offer (Tizen vs WearOS is arguable, but I have not used WearOS).

I wanted to get back into mountain biking, and I wanted to bring only my buds and watch. This should be an obvious use case for an LTE watch and bluetooth earbuds. Unfortunately, transferring music to the watch is a difficult prospect. You must have the files downloaded onto your phone, but I use Spotify or Google Play Music. Spotify does have a Tizen app, but it is pretty terrible. Also, I wanted to have audiobooks and podcasts downloaded to listen to. I could not find any apps for audiobooks or podcasts for my Galaxy Watch. All my google-fu got me to the answer: Just transfer the files and play them in the watch music app. This was a pretty bad solution for a few reasons. First, listening times did not sync with the phone. Second, I don't think that the watch music app would save the timestamp when you closed it. Finally, the Galaxy Watch has 4gb storage, and only leaves around 2gb usable. Game of Thrones book 5 weighs in at about 1.3gb. If I wanted my book and even a single episode from most of my podcasts, that would not be enough storage.

Because of this experience, I started looking into the Apple Watch. My grandfather gave me his old iPhone 6s+ and I got an Apple Watch series 3 LTE for a great deal on craigslist. I thought the phone would be a downgrade from an s10e. In a few ways it is, such as the screen, battery life, and camera. But for everything else about this phone, it is just as good as my s10e, which is 4 years newer. I still have my s10e, and I keep it charged. There are very few times where I want to use my s10e over my 6s+. This was not what I was expecting when I switched. I expected to use the 6s+ to see if I could handle a new iPhone, just so I could use an Apple Watch. Since then, I borrowed my dad's old MacBook Pro mid 2012 non-retina, to see if I liked OS X. I am currently typing this in that MacBook. I also bought the AirPods Pro.

Almost every single interaction between these devices is quick, intuitive, and seamless. OS X is way better than windows. Parallels makes running windows software a dream. When I bought parallels, I was able to pay with my watch through Apple Pay. I have not heard of any software doing anything like that with google/samsung pay and windows. Overcast is able to automatically sync podcasts and playback times to the watch, and easily switch which device is playing. Audible is a bit more clunky (and I am still looking for an alternative for books), but it is possible to get books on the watch, and the playback time syncs without issue. The AirPods Pro seamlessly switch between the phone and watch. They are already paired with the MBP through iCloud, although they do not seamlessly switch. I think this is because the bluetooth chip in the computer is too old. CarPlay is miles better than android auto. Siri is just as good for most thing as google assistant, and is more consistent.

This is a pretty long post already, but the bottom line is every single apple device I am trying out is better than the corresponding android/windows device that is 2-4 years newer. After many years of shunning apple, I am back on the apple bandwagon. I am currently planning on replacing all of my devices with something from apple (except my gaming desktop, unfortunately). I would like to hear about your experiences with switching to or from either ecosystem.

(Mods: I wasn't sure if this should be in ~talk or ~tech. Please move it if necessary)

Update 12/03/2020: this is not a telemetry, but a kill switch from Colombian carrier - confirmed by HMD. Kill switch will be removed from most devices soon. I updated an article and posted it here.

Original article below:

I have recently purchased Nokia 6.2 and wanted to check if it sends any data somewhere, considering what happened with previous models

First, I noticed approx. daily connection to dapi.hmdglobal.net
This is a Google Cloud that could belong to a company behind Nokia - HMD Global.
But the Privacy policy in my phone only speaks of "activation" process, not of daily diagnostics data.
So I used developer tools to remove the following packages (warning: this may break your device, I am not responsible for any consequences)

    com.hmdglobal.enterprise.api
    com.qualcomm.qti.qms.service.telemetry
    com.qualcomm.qti.qmmi
    com.qualcomm.qti.qdma

Before removing them, I used APK Extractor to save APK files just in case it breaks my phone and I may be able to attempt reinstall. This part comes into play later.
The first was my blind guess about what exactly connects to dapi.hmdglobal.net
The next 3 I found mentioned in various forums for other devices as "safe to remove", however, I have not seen any telemetry sent to Qualcomm or anywhere else, except what I mention next.

After removing these packages, I noticed that there are some remaining unknown connections my device attempts several times per day.
They are all done in same order, one right after the other:

    www.pppefa.com
    www.ppmxfa.com
    www.forcis.claro.com.co

After some investigation, I found that the first two domains point to some Microsoft Cloud servers rented in US.
The last one most probably belongs to Colombian telecom company, and this is where it becomes interesting.
After many hours of fruitless removing of different apps in my attempt so stop it, I suddenly remembered something.
When I used APK Extractor previously, there was an empty first line with some generic icon where an app icon should have been.
I went there again and indeed, this is a hidden system app, that you can not see in the list of all apps in Settings, normally. But it turns out, you can see it in Data usage (after it successfully sends some data using your mobile connection).
The name of the app is deliberately left empty to hide it, but if you click it in Data usage, you can see that this app is co.sitic.pp , which can receive SMS, can make calls, and has access to internet.
As with all Android apps, you can reverse read the name to guess what it is.
Turns out, http://sitic.com.co is a Colombian company, who "are leaders in innovation and create mobile and WEB applications for new products and services." (credit goes to Google Translate)

screenshot of the app with permissions

In other words, this app is a 3rd party telemetry, hidden from user, not mentioned in the Privacy policy, that has access to SMS.
This looks very bad and I really hope this is a malware injected by factory and not something knowingly distributed by Nokia, HMD Global, the EU company.

After removing the co.sitic.pp app, requests to Microsoft Cloud and Columbia stopped.
I was later pointed to a German forum, where (I believe) it was first found in a Nokia 7.2 device.
So, we have it confirmed in 2 devices in 2 different countries.

On German forum they contacted Nokia (I assume support) but got tired exchanging emails for weeks without any result.
On 02/03/2020 I have requested an official reply from Nokia and HMD Global via press.services@nokia.com and press@hmdglobal.com and waiting for reply.
Since I am not a journalist, I may never get one.

TLDR: 3rd party telemetry is found in Nokia 6.2 and 7.2 devices, is hidden from user, has access to SMS, and sends data to Microsoft Cloud in US and a server in Columbia.
It is probably supplied by SITIC S.A.S., a Colombian company, and looks more like a malware than a telemetry.

I'm trying to clean up my internet presence and move away from at least Facebook and Google. I've come a long way with deleting my Facebook and it's now basically an empty shell for messaging. I've installed Signal and will start the grooming process with my friends and family now. If you have some solid arguments for the change regular ol' folks can understand please share them with me because as we all know "privacy" just isn't enough.

Next phase is the big one...Google or basically G-mail.

1. Is there any way to get an complete overview of where you've used your e-mail for a service online?

2. What e-mail would you recommend?
2a. I'm OK with paying a bit for overall quality, security and equally important UX!
2b. I don't use any other relevant Google products like Drive etc. It's just regular e-mail and sign in credentials for other services I basically need

3. I use a Mac, iPhone and iCloud. Is iCloud a problem? IF this needs to change it HAS to be an "easy" switch and not like setting up a server for myself. Because it won't happen and I'm not skilled enough.

I would very much appreciate your input :)

EDIT: Thank you all for your thorough comments!

Hello everyone, it's 00:16 my time and I'm finally fucking done making all the data pretty for you after about 4 hours of coding to parse all those juicy CSV files cause guess what, the excel files that JotForms gave me WHERE FUCKING GḀ͒ͬ̓ͦͅRͤ͊̔́B̴̼̫̟͍̅̆A̩̽ͮ̂̏͡G̸̭̜̑͑̃Ȇ͈͙͈̠̖̋́̌ͭ͂ͧ^{help me}

Anyway :) Let's give y'all a brief rundown of the current Tilde demographics, and some highlights, CAUSE NOW I HAVE ALL YOUR DATA AND THUS INFINITE POWER TO MAKE JOKES^{did I mention I've been doing for half the day and I'm really hungry? AND TIRED?} Honestly you owe me this moment of insanity considering I'M RUNNING ON GREEN LEAF JUICE AND HOW MUCH DATA I WADED THROUGH AHHHH-.

Also, most of these will be pictures because honestly I can't be asked to not pretty paste these figures into markdown tables or I'll legitimate go insane. Anyway, this post has plenty of sass, don't take this shit too seriously please, gracias.

The 2019 Census

Anyway.

This year we got 249 responses in total, which really annoys me cause 250 is way prettier to look at at. However, one was completely empty and the other two are... Fishy. More on that later.

Personal details

Age

When it comes to age, Tildes is heavily skewed towards people in their 20s to 30s, 45% of the responses came from people between 20 and 30. Overall, late 20s to and early 30s dominate the demographics. (before anyone screams at me about the proper use of graphs, don't worry I also took Statistics at uni, but the histogram in Excel refused to work and honestly go make your own census) There is also some statistical noise, which I'm not sure how it happened. Most likely someone typed too quickly.

Our youngest user is 11! And either very intelligent, cause they also speak 9 languages, or a fraud. If you're not a fraud, I apologize and wish you luck on your future path in life, which will surely be extremely successful, if you really speak that many languages at such an age.^{Hint, this was one of the fishy responses}

Our oldest user is 70! I really don't know what to say, cause that's a pretty high number for an internet user. How was uhh... The cold war?^{Holy fuck I should stop I need to eat}

Geographical... Stuff

Overall, the Tildes demographic hasn't changed much. US and Canada still lead by quite a lot, but we have acquired quite the little diverse userbase.

All I can do is salute my fellow other Austrian user. Can you say Oachkatzalschwoaf though? THAT'S THE SIGN OF A REAL AUSTRIAN.^{NONE OF THIS STARTING WORLD WARS SHIT}

Language

Predictably, a large number of people does not speak a second language besides English, however, due to geographical diversity, a large number of languages is represented, most of them from Europe, which is Tildes' second largest userbase.

Gender & Sexuality

Tildes is heavily male-dominated, probably due to its IT-focused population and the fact that most of us came from Reddit.

Of the 248 responses, 17 people hit marked that they were trans, pretty much all of them MTF (which is apparently the majority of trans people, Wikipedia tells me.) 3 preferred not to say and everyone else is cis.

Now, let's get to the sexy stuff. And by that I mean the point where the numbers rub together in fantastic ways.

The majority of Tildes is really fucking straight, though we have some fun sexualities represented, my personal favourite Still figuring that out. You do you mate, you'll get there eventually. Also, whoever wrote down O-Sexual also wrote X-Treme Wiccan as their religion, and at this point in I'm too afraid to google what any of that is. Clearly, we need more straight people, after all, we're in the 20s.^{Before anyone yells at me, THIS WAS A FUCKING JOKE} For now I've defined that person as Fish numero dos.

Religion

So, here's a doozy. To that one person (probably part of the 9% of <20 year olds), WHO DECIDED TO WRITE THE WONDERFUL ANSWER atheism and angosticism are not religions, can you PLEASE read the question properly next time. FUCK.^{Honestly that is such a 14 y/o thing to write, by the Ǵ͙͔͔̻͖̜́ͅO̶̱̘͡D͓̞͉̲͓̥S̢̲͙̙̟̯̙͓̱͟}

Anyway, religion is probably the thing with the most diverse answers, honestly. There are words in there I have never read in my life before. Like what is Apatheist.1? Is there some sort of ranking? Does it work with natural numbers only? Is there a Apatheist.3,51? It can't be a typo, people take religions way too seriously for that.

Politics

I averaged out the scores of everyone who answered the political questions and got the following answers (remember, these are based on the 8values quiz):

Economy - 7,02
Diplomacy - 6,9
State - 3,8
Society - 7,48

Only economy is really surprising here, though I'd also have expected diplomacy to be a little lower as well. Maybe the leftist skew ia bit of an illusion?

Work, education and really everything else these sections were a terrible idea

When it comes to education, Tildes is pretty university focused. Almost half people replying have a bachelor's, a good bunch are working or have aquired their master's. Also one (maybe soon-to-be) MD and a few PhDs. The Craftsmen and tradeship people barely balance us out, we need some more COMMON FOLK IN HERE.

IT people, rejoice! WE STILL REIGN SUPREME^{Everyone else will remember that} All jokes aside, shoutout to the stay-at-home dad, proud of ya'. And to the disabled person, I hope life goes as well as it can for you. That goes for the longterm-unemployed person as well. Someday, you'll manage mate, someday.

And to the person who said their job is a waste of time in exchange of money... Mate, you need someone to talk? I'm here. We're all here.

Surprise section about technical shit and Tildes

OS usage is as expected, due to Tildes' heavy skew into IT and the fact that Apple doesn't nearly dominate as much in other countries as in the US, it's to be expected.

Due to said IT dominance Linux has almost caught up with the leader, Windows. Though my personal favourite is Anything cool that comes into existence, like can we make a Linux fork that is called literally that? You'd be the perfect match.

When it comes to Tildes specifically, y'all need to chill out. Most people who answered the census visit Tildes multiple times a day, like the content here doesn't even move that quickly? WHAT ARE YOU ALL DOING? IS THERE SOME SECRET CULT I SHOULD KNOW ABOUT?_{If it's a LSD cult I'm totes in lads.}

As expected, most people who answered the survey have an account, and most likely due to the heavy IT skew most people are visiting from their PC. But I have also seen some people requesting a mobile app in the free form questions, so maybe that would go up if a native app were to be created.

The freeform questions

Well, in all honesty, not much has changed. Most people like the dedicated community, site design, in-depth discussions (though that was sometimes a point on both sides), etc. and dislike the heavy domination of IT topics and US/Europe news & politics. Also, multiple people simply said @Deimos when asked what they like most about Tildes. Get a room, y'all. Though it's well deserved, I think we can all agree on that.

Complete list of positive feedback: https://pastebin.com/KYCYLWP1

Complete list of negative feedback: https://pastebin.com/Eng6jjay

Complete list of ideas for change: https://pastebin.com/eery3mCt

Why am I posting these? Cause in all honesty, freeform feedback like this is hard to analyze and summarize, so I'd rather just post it all so everyone can form their opinion. Also, I'm tired.

Special mentions

Someone was nice enough to add the mention in parantheses that I should add them to the bisexual list instead if no one else marked pansexual. Well lucky you, exactly one other person marked it! You two can go find yourselves a room with lots of sexy pans in it now and have some fun.^{This is how it works, right?} Or just, slide into each other's DMs or something and talk about your love for pans. ( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°)

I also appreciate the one person who entered their religion in the languages section on accident. That's fact now, you speak Raised Catholic, now spiritual/atheist now, no shh, no talking back, that's your language now.

To that one person that said that Tildes is too serious, this one's for you.

And cheers to Deimos, without whom I couldn't be so silly on this overly serious but fantastic platform.

Anyway, Grzmot out, I need sleep. I'll come back in 8 hours or so to regret the shit I just wrote down at 2 AM. Please don't ban me.

Here's the official blog post: https://www.blog.google/products/stadia/lineup-games-coming-to-stadia/

But since they decided to list the games in the incredibly convenient format of... three slideshows, I'll re-type the important info here and save you that trouble.

Launch titles:

• Assassin's Creed Odyssey
• Destiny 2: The Collection
• GYLT
• Just Dance 2020
• Kine
• Mortal Kombat 11
• Red Dead Redemption 2
• Rise of the Tomb Raider
• Samurai Shodown
• Shadow of the Tomb Raider: Definitive Edition
• Thumper
• Tomb Raider: Definitive Edition

Planned releases in the rest of 2019:

• Attack on Titan 2: Final Battle
• Borderlands 3
• Darksiders Genesis
• Dragon Ball Xenoverse 2
• Farming Simulator 19
• Final Fantasy XV
• Football Manager 2020
• Ghost Recon Breakpoint
• Grid
• Metro Exodus
• NBA 2K20
• Rage 2
• Trials Rising
• Wolfenstein: Youngblood

I've been using Linux for the past 5 to 10 years. I'm not a developer, but a mid-to-advanced user. I don't really know bash (or any programming language for that matter), but I got a folder with 100 bash scripts I wrote myself. I compile my own Emacs (which I configured from scratch and contains more than 200 crudes functions of my own), Neovim (also configured from scratch) and other programs such as suckless terminal. I'm an i3wm user and currently use MX-Linux. I'm very good at Googling and pattern recognition.

I got a brand new AMD desktop with a Ryzen processor (no dedicated graphics, wifi works fine with a USB adapter). Should I try Gentoo, or maybe I should study more (maybe with something like Linux Journey)in order to get a better experience?

Reasons to install Gentoo:

1. Learning experience
2. A completely customized desktop experience
3. Never having to reinstall my operating system again
4. Masochism
5. Putting my powerful processor to work
6. It seems cool (and less painful than LFS)
7. Some hypothetical performance gain

Introduction

I wanna say that I made several corrections, additions, and improvements just because I love you guys way more than I love the people at Reddit

• Please note that I'm merely a dedicated Linux user, I'm speaking from that point of view. I'm not a developer and not a programmer. These are just my opinions of 10+ years using Linux

• These are just some commentaries from a dude who happen to love the concept of STABILITY in general (autism represent) and would like to discuss how it works when it comes to Linux distributions. This is all based on my use-cases and on what I think is common sense. I have no knowledge of how open-source projects really work, and make no claims regarding how they should work.

• Only distributions that claim to be stable are under my scope. So Arch and Debian Unstable are clearly out the scope, but Slackware, CentOS, Debian Buster, and MX-Linux are clearly under the scope.

• All considerations are void if the malfunctioning is SOLELY a product of hardware, extremely rare conditions or your own lack of knowledge.

• Except when otherwise noted, non-compliance means the distribution is deemed not stable.

1 Deal Breakers

After a correct installation by the user on hardware that is expressly supported by the developers, a stable distribution should, in the period of 1 year (counted from the first boot):

1. Remains bootable, manageable and fully accessible.
2. Work with almost no maintenance or intervention (updates excluded)
3. Present no decrease in performance
4. Freeze at most once every two weeks
5. Have no package issue that cannot be solved by a simple command from its own package manager

2 Major Issues

Because of the complex nature of major issues, I'm not going to establish any criteria about them. Both stable and unstable distributions have critical problems that cannot have a fixed time-frame.

3 Minor Issues/Bugs/Annoyances/etc

Small issues are the ones that do not impede the usage of the machine, but provoke significant annoyances:

Examples:

1. Window switching is not working properly
2. The mouse stops working for 3 seconds every 15 minutes
3. For some reason, the letter "c" is sending "h" on the terminal
4. My configurations are not saved after reboot
5. My configurations are not being saved at all
6. I must change video output manually every time I switch monitors
7. I must change audio output manually every time I switch monitors
8. Some essential configuration is ridiculously hard to find
9. Configurations have no undo button
10. Configurations have no reset button
11. A certain package cannot be installed
12. A certain dependence cannot be installed (dependency hell)
13. There's a ridiculously accessible keyboard shortcut that makes your keyboard change layouts all the fucking time

3.1 Places for Research

Such minor issues must be solved within 30 days, as long as the user does their part and seek some of the following resources:

1. Google
2. Official websites
3. Official forums
4. Official warnings, newsletters, etc
5. Semi-official communities
6. FAQs
7. Manuals
8. Github Issues
9. Gitlab Issues
10. Other Venues to post issues

If the minor issue is not solved in 45+ days, the distribution will be deemed not stable, regardless of the behavior of the user.

4. Conclusion

It is my opinion that, if any of the major and minor requirements are not fulfilled according to their particular rules, the distribution in question should not be deemed not Stable.

I have interactive firewalls like OpenSnitch running on most of my desktop OS's. I like to see what is going on with my machines' network connections to learn about networking, infosec, and to have have some peace of mind.

Example workflow:

1. Get a firewall notification of a new incoming connection to some process running on my machine
2. If no DNS entry exists and only the IP address is provided, then I google the IP
3. I find something like https://ipinfo.io/74.125.20.189
4. I make a decision as to whether allow/deny based on the ownership info which I found in step 3.

Aside from trusting the particular site presenting the ownership info, how reliable is this information regarding IP ownership?

For example, if an IP came back as "Google" could it really be a GCP instance running a command and control server?

Another example, I know that large corps own big blocks of IPv4, but they must lease these IP's out to whomever, right? I imagine there is some wild-west market for these with little accountability?

Are either of these scenarios realistic? If so, is my entire workflow for "do I trust this IP" pointless?

I received this email yesterday but haven't seen any blog posts or press releases about it yet:

Hello Administrator,

Since our Beta Program announcement last year, we’ve been testing an enterprise-ready version of Google Voice. Over the next seven days, Google Voice will become available as a core G Suite service for all eligible* G Suite customers (additional fees apply to this new, managed version of Google Voice). This email will help you understand the transition details but you can also refer to the Voice webpage for more information.

What's changing:

• Managed Google Voice is available in 3 tiers and will become a core G Suite service for your domain after subscribing to a service tier.
• Managed Voice accounts will be covered under your existing G Suite agreement and additional Google Voice service specific terms.
• Support for managed Voice accounts will be the same as other G Suite core services.

What's not changing:

• The Google Voice service will remain “on” by default.
• If users in your domain signed up for Voice prior to this launch, they will be able to maintain their legacy unmanaged Voice subscriptions without additional cost, and will remain subject to the Google Voice consumer terms of service. You can add a Voice subscription and upgrade these users to managed Voice users in your Admin console.
• Hangouts Meet (also a core G Suite service) is integrated with Google Voice, allowing meeting participants to dial in or be added by phone.

What do I need to do?

• If you did not participate in the Google Voice Beta Program and would like to use Google Voice for your organization, follow these steps to add a Voice subscription.

We're here to help

If you have additional questions or need technical assistance, please contact Google support. When you call or submit your support case, reference issue number ----------.

Sincerely,

The G Suite Team

* Google Voice is not yet available for G Suite for Government customers. Google Voice is available for purchase in select countries.

It looks like Google Voice is going to be sticking around for awhile. You can even use Polycom desk phones with it if you get the $20 tier.

There is something about new ideas which can potentially change how we live that I love. They do not necessarily have to be good ideas. Take for example Google Stadia, it itself might completely fall apart in 3 years, but competition will start to build and Microsoft might have an amazing service instead. On the other hand, the creation of social media, communication around the world is easier than ever, I don't need to spend absurd amounts of money on international calls. Another example is new jobs, Youtuber is a legit job. Being an Instagram Model is a legit way of earning money because people are looking at the clothes you wear. Of course this has resulted in new problems that we need to tackle, but that is ok too, we have to take it one step at a time. A few examples, are arguably because of social media, fake news is spreading, outrage culture is building, people are doing stupid shit to become viral, and this disconnect with the people around us.

I am not saying disruptive ideas are clearly good or bad, I just find them fascinating.

For my particular use case I share my home PC with my spouse and since I'm the more tech-savvy of the two I'll need to occasionally remote in and help out with some random task. They know enough that the issue will usually be too complex to simply guide over the phone, so remote control it is.

I'm also trying to improve my personal efforts toward privacy and security. To that end I want to avoid closed-source services such as TeamViewer where a breach on their end could compromise my system.

The following is the current state of what I'm now using as I think others may benefit from this as well:

Setup

Web

I use a simple web form as my first authentication. It's just a username and password, but it does require a web host that supports server side code such as PHP. In my case I just created a blank page with nothing other than the form and when successful the page generates a 6 digit PIN and saves it to a text file in a private folder (so no one can simply navigate to it and get the PIN).

I went the text file route because my current hosting plan only allows 1 database and I didn't want to add yet another random table just for this 1 value.

Router

To connect to my home PC I needed to forward a port from my router. I'm going to use VNC as it lets me see what is currently shown on the monitor and work with someone already there so I forward port 5900 as VNC's default port. You can customize this if you want. Some routers allow you to SSH into their system and make changes that way so a step more secure would be to leave the port forward disabled and only enable it once a successful login from the web form is disabled. In my case I'll just leave the port forwarded all the time.

IP Address

To connect to my computer I need to know it's external IP address and for this I use FreeDNS from Afraid.org. My router has dynamic DNS support for them already included so it was easy to plug in my details to generate a URL which will always point to my home PC (well, as long as my router properly sends them my latest IP address). If your router doesn't support the dynamic DNS you choose many also allow either a download or the settings you would need to script your own to keep your IP address up to date with their service.

Signal

Signal is an end-to-end encrypted messenger which supports text, media, phone and video calls. There's also a nifty command line option on Github called Signal-cli which I'm using to provide my second form of authentication. I just downloaded the package, moved to my $PATH (in my case /usr/local/bin) and set it up as described on their README. In my case I have both a normal cell phone number and another number provided by Google Voice. I already use my normal cell phone number with Signal so for this project I used Signal-cli to register a new account using my Google Voice number.

VNC

My home PC runs Ubuntu 18.04 so I'm using x11vnc as my VNC server. Since I'm leaving my port forwarded all the time I most certainly do NOT want to leave VNC also running. That's too large a security risk for me. Instead I've written a short bash script that first checks the web form using curl and https (so it's encrypted) with its own login information to check if any PIN numbers have been saved. If a PIN is found the web server sends that back and then deletes the PIN text file. Meanwhile the bash script uses the PIN to start a VNC session with that PIN as the password and also sends my normal cell the PIN via Signal-cli so that I can login.

I have this script set to run every minute so I'm not waiting long after web login and I also have the x11vnc session set to timeout after a minute so I can quickly connect again should I mess something up. It's also important that x11vnc is set to auto exit after closing the session so that it's not left up for an attacker to attempt to abuse.

System Flow

Once everything is setup and working this is what it's like for me to connect to my home PC:

1. Browse to my web form and login
2. Close web form and wait for Signal message
3. Launch VNC client
4. Connect via dynamic DNS address (saved to VNC client)
5. Enter PIN code
6. Close VNC when done

Code

Here's some snippets to help get you started

PHP for Web Form Processing

<?php
// Variables
$username = 'your_username';
$password = 'your_password_super_long_and_unique';
$filename = 'path_to_private_folder/vnc/pin.txt';

// Process the login form
if($action == 'Login'){
	$file = fopen($filename,'w');
	$passwd = rand(100000,999999);
	fwrite($file,$passwd);
	fclose($file);
	exit('Success');
}

// Process the bash script
if($action == 'bash'){
	if(file_exists($filename)){
		$file = fopen($filename,'r');
		$passwd = fread($file,filesize($filename));
		fclose($filename);
		unlink($filename);
		exit($passwd);
	} else {
		exit('No_PIN');
	}
}
?>

Bash for x11vnc and Signal-cli

# See if x11vnc access has been requested
status=$(curl -s -d "u=your_username&p=your_password_super_long_and_unique&a=bash" https://vnc_web_form.com)

# Exit if nothing has been requested
if [ "$status" = "No_PIN" ]; then
  # No PIN so exit; log the event if you want
  exit 0
fi

# Strip non-numeric characters
num="${status//[!0-9]/}"

# See if they still match (prevent error messages from triggering stuff)
if [ $status != $num ]; then
  # They don't match so probably not a PIN - exit; log it if you want
  exit 1
fi

# Validate pin number
num=$((num + 0))
if [ $num -lt 100000 ]; then
  # PIN wasn't 6 digits so something weird is going on - exit; log it if you want
  exit 1
fi
if [ $num -gt 999999 ]; then
  # Same as before
  exit 1
fi

# Everything is good; start up x11vnc
# Log event if you want

# Get the current IP address - while dynamic DNS is in place this serves as a backup
ip=$(dig +short +timeout=5 myip.opendns.com @resolver1.opendns.com)

# Send IP and password via Signal
# Note that phone number includes country code
# My bash is running as root so I run the command as my local user where I had registered Signal-cli
su -c "signal-cli -u +google_voice_number send -m '$num for $ip' +normal_cell_number" s3rvant

# Status was requested and variable is now the password
# this provides a 1 minute window to connect with 1-time password to control main display
# again run as local user
su -c "x11vnc -timeout 60 -display :0 -passwd $num" s3rvant

Final Thoughts

There are more secure ways to handle this. Some routers support VPN for the connect along with device certificates which are much stronger than a 6 digit PIN code. Dynamically opening and closing the router port as part of the bash script would also be a nice touch. For me this is enough security and is plenty convenient enough to quickly offer tech support (or nab some bash code for articles like this) on the fly.

I'm pretty happy with how Signal-cli has worked out and plan to use it again with my next project (home automation). I'll be sure to post again once I get that ball rolling.