Good insight. Men should always strive to be so good that it's intimidating. That's being respectable.

Lesser men can't be respectable, so they can only be scary.

And of course women should be able to tell the difference, respect a good man, and stay away from the scary ones.

But you can flip that round. A good woman should be strong and graceful, and men should respect that. A weak woman will wield sex as a weapon, and men should know to stay away.

Thank you!

To be honest I don't even know what the documents were (only heard about this in the UK through the usual propaganda slop factories). But as a thought exercise, let's say he did have the documents at his place. What's your take on that? and does the recent revelation change your opinion? I'm just curious to know because of the way you asked the question in response to the news.

Ah that's interesting. I've been generally ok, but what I did do was I installed regular old Ubuntu (BTRFS by the way, ZFS also too much hassle), then I installed the KDE full (meta package) on top, and just reconfigured to start with SDDM display manager and launch into KDE. So effectively Kubuntu but starting from an Ubuntu base. And then sometimes I'll randomly decide to switch back to Gnome for a bit and sometimes I prefer KDE. But the great thing is that I have everything available and any possible dependencies. Weirdly that's been super solid, although during one upgrade it made me uninstall KDE but not during the next upgrade. But yeah, I like it, and then whenever I try out other distros I just seem to be cursed entirely (Fedora for some reason is utterly cursed for me, just bizarre problems straight out of the gate on VMs or bare metal), or I end up spending months messing about with something and then saying what's the point in this even existing.

On the ZFS point, if you read what people say on the internet, ZFS is soooo much better than BTRFS and it's clearly the only sensible choice. But in reality it's just so much hassle, so many bugs, and you've got to worry about your RAM and your exact settings for it and all this nonsense. And these are the people with the gall to say that BTRFS is unreliable, despite the fact that you can have a 12 bay Synology NAS with BTRFS and pull the power cord out all day long with no corruption whatsoever, and then with ZFS it's make sure you do this and make sure you change that.

So at this point I'm very jaded on what anyone in the usual forums says about Linux, and I'm down to saying Ubuntu because as much as I like to tinker, I have so much else to be doing with my time, and it's so annoying with especially Arch based things to have them break things and then expect you to read release notes before you press the update button. I also went down the non-systemd distro rabbit hole, and again what a waste of time. Hours trying to do basic things and stuff just not working.

Also be really wary of using LLMs to help you with tinkering. I find they just leave out vital details, and if you go back and question them they say 'oh yeah, you're absolutely right, i did leave out xyz really important info, let me do that again for you', meanwhile you've already bricked your system.

By the way on the packaging front have you tried messing around in Distrobox? It's a really nice really easy way to install any app from any distro on any distro. Super quick and easy, export apps to your desktop so you can run them as if it's native, but they're running in little VM style containers of the target distro, but still with access to your user's home folder etc. So if you need a version of an app which is only available on another distro, you can use Distrobox to install just that app and have multiple versions and manage them all side by side. Totally negates the need for distro hopping. Of course this assumes that the stable base is working well enough for you, which to be fair it sounds like for you it isn't.

But for me all I'm worried about with the distro is a stable base, good drivers and default settings to save me time, and the kernel version, and timely security updates. Then everything else can be Distrobox or whatever other package formats.

I will say I don't think most people need that tech to bypass firewalls and censorship though, or at least not Mullvad's primary user base. So it's not really a threat to them. Whereas Obscura is going to be targeting a slightly different customer base, and yet they're still effectively funneling customers to Mullvad, so I'm sure this is a win for both companies. Obscura gets access to a lot more infrastructure than they could offer and they can just focus on their tech, Mullvad gets lots of new customers effectively through Obscura.

Also, I'm not sure at all on the details of Obscura or how it works or who's behind it or anything (the website seems to be down anyway so maybe they can't handle the traffic of this sudden spike in interest). So take this with a massive pinch of salt, but Mullvad's primary customer base are people who want the best level of privacy from their VPN provider, they allow anonymous sign ups with no account details, pay in lots of different ways etc. And a potential problem with using a service like Obscura which goes through two different services (Obscura and then Mullvad) is that you're increasing your exposure to different parties, so maybe you're increasing your exposure to correlation attacks which could de-anonymise you for example, or maybe to supply chain attacks.

That's why I was saying they're probably different audiences, because it seems like Obscura's main benefit is this tech to bypass firewalls by obfuscating traffic. But that's not really Mullvad's use case. And if you want better obfuscation with Mullvad then you've got their DAITA system anyway which makes every packet the same size/timing to avoid traffic analysis.

Out of interest what problems have you run into? I've had Ubuntu 23.10, then updated to 24.04, then updated to 24.10 and it's been rock solid even with lots of messing about.

By the way if you're looking at Debian then you might want to look at Spiral Linux. It's not a separate distro, it's just a configuration for Debian but still uses all standard repos etc. But basically it's just Debian with BTRFS encrypted, Snapper (snapshots) with grub integration, backports and flatpaks enabled by default etc etc. It's just exactly what you might want to do if you were setting up a Debian desktop, but all done for you, and without the risk of anything happening to the distro or it's maintainer because they're not actually separate.

On the broader point I really wouldn't recommend Arch or Nix, just soooo much messing about for no real world benefit that I can see. Even if you like to tinker, after several months all I can say is save your sanity and don't let it eat away at your time.

So other than that maybe look at Fedora, maybe OpenSuse, or even OpenMandriva?

Pics didn't upload properly

I'm just outside Valencia now and you can really see the destructive force of the floods even far away from the worst affected areas. There's also an impression that a lot of emergency work was done at the very start, and now things have really slowed down whilst people are waiting for resources and money to be allocated to start rebuilding. It's still a lovely area to visit though as the people are really nice.

Also very strange walking through the now completely drive river beds (best place to walk the dogs) and seeing how high the water must have been!

Spend and replace

Damn makes me realise how out of touch I am. Ihafd never even heard of the words Bellingcat, Navalny, or Pegasus workshop.

But for sure I can see the logic in what you're saying, especially because i have heard of hrf which sort of proves the point.

Also wasn't Epstein's whole thing compromising people? I don't know much about it. But for the two to be similar wouldn't there have to be a similar situation with blackmail etc?

How so?

nostr:npub1kqrddzzl6xng2wn0n0eyyjnf6smwmtp8m5atetzjw7vqyngwrphs4ye5xu nostr:npub1z9hy7a0n8zxnhgrcew2nnkr4sx6sum07exve99pqq30leujye3usgd858n

Hey, please could you tell me what's the song at the end of episode 57 (What is A Day)? I love the podcast by the way, most sane and rational Bitcoin podcast around without any hyperbole or influencer speak. Keep up the amazing work.

Hey just to say I think the part of your site where you have the track listing has been down for a while, is this the right URL?

https://tracklisting.mxtthxw.art/inpc/

Keep up the amazing work. You've basically become my music guru/guide by the way, and I thought I knew about a lot of cool music before! 😅

I'm torn from what i've seen. I like the aesthetic, and some of the systems look very clever and even fun, but it doesn't look like it has the charm or simple addictive loop of civ4.

That game just felt so cozy starting in the stone age, and the mechanicsmight not be balanced but it's so fun.

I'll definitely give 7 a good chance though as i basically didn't play 6 at all.

#memes #memestr

Shouldn't you look like a cross between your daughter and your mom?

Now I'm confused.

I totally agree, and I know it's frustrating when you feel like most people don't understand / don't want to understand. But on the bright side, I think you'll find that most people are just pragmatic and will use whatever the best tool is that's put in front of them. So I do think most people would use Monero for day to day transactions that they want to be private, and it's short term enough that they're not worried about losing purchasing power in the meantime.

I don't agree with your house example though, because really there's no way to 'own' a house anonymously, so there's sort of no point in buying it anonymously either. Surely?

Also about using Bitcoin privately, I think coin joining and mixing etc are becoming easier all the time. And I think if there's a push for that sort of thing (or other privacy preserving techniques) to just become the norm in wallets then it will all be mixed together enough to stop really mattering anyway. Unless you're trying to preserve anonymity for a very specific opsec reason, but that's different.

I'm confused, can you summarise what the content of the message was? I have no idea who David Icke is or any of these people, clicking on the link only gives the text in the OP, not any of the actual content.

And specifically, what's the truth that someone apparently cannot handle?

I like it, but then the question is, how can we make sure that clever ideas are attributed to their original creator and not someone who just reposted to a much larger audience and ran away with all the zaps?

I disagree, I've only just recently tried LLMs and honestly for me as a small business owner, the only two that are really incredible and a real game changer are Claude and to a lesser extent GPT.

All the others are such junk and such a waste of time that if I'd only tried those I would've said that the entire AI/LLM thing is a complete gimmick, complete waste of time. But Claude and GPT are so good that they're actually useful to me.

I'd been putting off rewriting my website text for ages, with Claude, bang it's done. It's not as good as I would do it, but that doesn't matter because the website just needs to be online as a business card. And frankly it doesn't matter how good I would've theoretically done it if I hadn't actually gotten round to it in years.

Using it for things like that has increased my output massively, and it's not in any way harmed my core business. Quite the opposite, it gives me time to focus on my core business and what I should be doing.

And even going a step further, Claude and GPT are actually good enough to build into products to enhance my core business, whereas the others are all so laughably bad (looking at you Copilot and Amazon Q) that they should just delete them from the internet.

I think every man will agree that this is the most relatable meme in the world

#memes #memestr