Had never heard of Silence thanks for that. Gonna check it out.

I miss when Signal still handled SMS. It was so effing convenient.

I’m in testing and almost ever fucking week I’m trying to QA a release cycle while they’re pushing three last minute features and fucking with the backend, meaning all the frontend stuff I’ve already tested needs done again.

Yep.

You’re absolutely right on all counts. And that’s why I quit (without waiting around to be laid off which frankly the severance package would’ve been nice). I got hired into the first (private) company I applied to, I’m thriving, and I don’t miss that stink of wall street/silicon valley money at all.

I’m not speaking in absolutes here obviously. But it’s pretty well established that a very small fraction of people who take drugs (prescription or otherwise) become what we term addicts. There are lots of affluent addicts and alcoholics (I know plenty personally) but just because they have access to medical and mental health care doesn’t mean every one of them will go there.

You don’t see a lot of upper middle class people end up on the streets with heavy addictions because they can usually get into rehab, get help processing whatever it is keeping them down, and move on with their lives. Lots of poorer people can do so as well (the poverty and “success” porn content out there is easy to find) but for every one of those success stories there are thousands who never make it. I don’t think it’s hard to parse that poorer people have less culturally acceptable means of getting help (if they don’t outright end up in prison for simple possession to begin with, which I’m guessing those peers you’re referring to seldom have to worry about).

The thing a lot of people get backwards (fuck the war on drugs actually) is that hardcore addiction is virtually always predated by some type of undiagnosed and untreated mental health issue. To say that another way, mental health issues are not caused by taking drugs. When someone is very unwell and often poor (i.e. low or no access to medical and mental health professionals) they often find a way to self-treat the affliction(s) with street drugs. Those same underlying causes for a more affluent person will be dealt with alongside medical supervision (and often with the same class of drugs) without falling into the trap of addiction (because supervised, and supported).

Nothing cool about being a drug user by choice, nor an addict trying to cope. It’s just reality.

I don’t have any personal experiences with any of these crew finder sites but I know lots of people who’ve used them. The catamaran designer I *apprenticed under met his wife through one. She had no prior sailing experience but was willing to learn, and he needed crew to do a Caribbean crossing, and that’s how the story began for them like 25+ years ago. They still sail together all over the world.

The other advice is good too. Just walk the docks and ask around. People love talking about their boats.

Between this community and the actual Onion I get pretty much the gist of current events, yeah. If some topic or other piques my interest from here, I’ll chase it down. The Onion and its opposite tend to give me enough of the context I need to figure out what’s important enough to pursue vs the vast majority of quasi-satire hitting “normal” news cycles over a given week.

It’s like a hyper-curated way to get my news, as if handpicked for me by a space clown. And I like it that way.

Windscribe is based out of Toronto.

Fuckin Boeing at it again.

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Amazing book. Haven’t thought of it in ages!

4. If every psycho and their dog knew there was a parachute onboard for them it would happen often that some drunk asshole decided today was they day they’re gonna jump from a commercial flight

You might like Commento which is FOSS. You can self-host it (or fire it onto a free or low cost cloud host), and fun. It’s more like a Lemmy/reddit format (comment up/down votes can be enabled) than masto but maybe you’ll enjoy it.

Users can comment anonymously or you can enable basic verification steps. Decent moderation for if spam bots find you. Etc.

ETA I used to host my instance on Heroku’s free tier and it was more than enough for what little traffic was coming to my site.

I use syncthing for personal and work, and it’s great. Having said that I’ve found it struggles with versioning i.e. editing a document from multiple devices.

Look into something like Standard Notes for cross platform markdown editing. It’s e2e encrypted, works great, the dev is very responsive. Ymmv but I really like it, have it on every device I own and use it daily.

I’ve also just used a private git repo for editing docs from multiple devices. Once you get it set up it’s effortless, and most ide’s are extremely fun to use as text editors.

The other comments almost got it right. If you had your torrent client bound to Mullvad and then opened your Tor Browser… your torrent client would be running over the VPN tunnel (Mullvad) while your Tor Browser would be sending all its traffic over your vanilla ISP and through… the Tor network (unless you also bind it to Mullvad). You’d effectively be “split tunnelling” your traffic, which is actually a good use-case for Tor anyhow.

There’s a lot of debate about whether it’s fine to run a VPN tunnel (OS-wide) before you fire up your Tor Browser… effectively you’d be pushing your Tor traffic through the tunnel to the VPN’s entry/exit nodes before it got to/left the Tor network. Some say it’s a security risk (if you don’t trust the VPN provider, for instance. Which is valid if you’re using some of the scummier providers). You need to do some research and understand the implications of doing that, before just mashing buttons.

You can also fire up the Tor network system-wide if you’re crafty and then create an encrypted VPN tunnel to go over that, so all of your VPN traffic would be travelling over and through Tor nodes before it reached the entry/exit nodes of your VPN. It can work both ways. There are cases for both options, if you know what you’re doing… which is a huge caveat.

Overall though, no. Please don’t torrent over Tor. As you say, it’s not necessary and eats bandwidth from an already slow network protocol. A VPN is more than sufficient for that purpose. If you wanna get more secure than that, make sure you’re running an encrypted DNS solution (or resolve your DNS locally if you know how to do that) and profit. Then your ISP can’t see shit. They’ll still probably traffic-shape and throttle you, simply because they can tell it’s going out over an encrypted tunnel of some kind… but they’ll never be able to see what specifically you’re up to.

Honestly when I told people where I worked, half of them heard Spotify in their mind and rarely bothered to correct them 😂

Welp… how long-winded do you want me to get on this one? You could look up literally hundreds of examples in mainstream news about how Shopify came up as a lean scrappy underdog circa 2012 alongside many of the second wave of budding platforms. In those days they were just a snowboard company who hated the pre-rolled ecomm solutions (especially Amazon) and came up with their own way.

Turns out a few other people liked their way as well… so they pivoted to SaaS and took off running. Their mantra at that time (and they still pull it out on the regular now… for laughs) was “Arming the rebels” (against Amazon…)

They built their SaaS platform on world-class customer/merchant support. Built things users asked for. Hired talented people who were inspired by the environment of doing good in the world… etc etc. They believed in what they were doing… i.e. “Make Commerce Better.”

Around the time I joined (2021) they got absolutely fucking hammered by new clients/merchants over lockdown. They were primed for “easy dropshipping” this and “low-cost barrier to entry” that for tens of millions of broke people sitting at home for lockdowns across 18+ months, looking for (pre-rolled) ways to earn an income. Their own marketing to small and emergin businesses (easy money over here!) ended up fucking them in the end.

They did an over-hiring wave like any other tech compan at the time. Very shortly after their email and chat support queues were overrun (weeks-long wait times) they reduces phone support hours for normal merchants before killing them completely shortly thereafter (workers can only field one call at a time, vs 3 chats and multiple emails per hour)… Obv they kept phones open for Plus merchants (enterprise, of course). That’s Enshittification - Stage 1. They built their business, name, and reputation helping the little guy (the “rebels”)… and now they were pulling up the ladder behind them to help the Plus/enterprize clients get and remain profitable, instead.

I could keep going. If you look far enough into it they started aggressively courting Enterprize clients last year after their shares tanked, and after they laid off 30% of staff… and while they do that they need to pull finances and resources further away from their “rebels” to keep the Nikes and the Chapters of the world happy. Established mega-corps don’t love it if you’re giving “the little guy” stellar support while you give them (Nike) the same level. They want “better”, at all times.

They’ve been at multi-billion dollar valuation for years prior to Covid. It was the pressure through lockdowns and out the other side tha pressured them to keep growing profitability, sent them over the edge of enshittification. They’ve clearly taken a lot of advice from Wall Street and Silicon Valley about how to stay on the money train (from same)… during tough financial times. They’re already pulling top-notch support from their enterprize clients, and third-party app devs (ask me how I know that). The next (obvious) phase is to claw back those margins that keep enterprize clients happy, once they have enough of them locked in that a few leaving won’t hurt them. That’s phase 3, if you haven’t been keeping track.

Do you need more of a primer, or did I answer your question?

See my other comment 😂