Cracks are usually released separately from the uncracked game files. Repackers take those cracks and package them with the correct version of the game, compress the files and add an installer. Then they upload them to the more mainstream public trackers.

Repacks have several benefits. They tend to be easier to setup and usually more reliable. They download faster and use less data because they are compressed. They are also sometimes packaged with extras like soundtracks, mods, etc.

Fitgirl repacks are known to be more compressed, so the files are a little smaller but take a fair amount longer to install.

I think the fact that reddit has never paid moderators in the past shows that they fear setting such a precedent. IAmA has always been a big draw for users and celebrities, yet they never put an employee in charge of it.

Once they start paying one set of moderators, other mods might start to expect something in return for their labor. This especially won't look good to investors who might otherwise like the business model of paying nobody for moderation.

Crackers mostly post the cracks to IRC sites, cs.rin.ru, and private torrent sites. Repackers are the main way releases make it to the mainstream torrent sites.

Repacking isn't that complicated anymore, it's more about reputation. There was a time when games were big and internet speed was slow so saving every MB of size was important. Repackers would reencode video files and find other ways of dramatically reducing the file size. Nowadays they don't do a lot of that, but repackers are still important for casual pirates who just want to easily play pirated games and not worry about malware.

I wouldn't say I am ashamed, but I cannot believe I liked Insane Clown Posse and thought it was legitimately good music.

We're also in a big vehicles arms race. I'm always telling people about how big vehicles cause more kids to get run over, more pedestrians to die, more damage in accidents, etc. The most common response from giant vehicle owners is that it makes them feel safer in an accident.

In 10 years they'll probably all be driving tanks with stadium lights mounted on top.

I have many of my services open to the internet, but behind authelia w/2fa and a reverse proxy. I haven't had a security issue yet, been running this way for a few years.

I think it's pretty safe as long as you keep them up to date. I run backups weekly and do updates at least once a month.

Using geoip restrictions will also help a lot because you can block most of the scanner bots by denying connections from outside your geographic region. These bots detect what services are open to the internet and then add them to databases like shodan. If a security flaw is found in one of those services, hackers will search those databases for servers with those services running and try to exploit them. If you aren't in those databases they can't easily find you before you are able to patch.

Exactly. Federation means no single instance needs to serve millions of users. If one gets too big and becomes too commercialized, you can move to a different one that shares your values. If large instances cost more per user as they scale up, we just need more instances.

I also think people are vastly overestimating the cost to serve users on Lemmy/kbin. Last time I calculated it, lemmy.world costs were around €0.01/mo per monthly active user. That can be maintained with 1% users donating €1 a month.

A lot of this self censoring is algorithm voodoo. Nobody knows what makes these platforms mark your videos as age restricted, so people do silly stuff like say, "unalive". I've seen many videos where people use the word kill that aren't age restricted.

I was a binge drinker. I would buy a big bottle of whiskey and drink until I fell asleep, then wake up and start drinking until it was gone. Then I'd be sober for a while and eventually binge again.

I had a sort of similar gradual experience with quitting. I was enjoying it less and less, mostly just getting depressed and feeling sick from the constant changes in body chemistry. I went from being blackout drunk 2 days a week to 2 days every other week, and then every month or so. At one point I realized I had been sober for 50 days and decided I needed to be done with it forever.

Now I'm at 200 days and almost never think about drinking. I have basically zero desire to drink, all I can think about is how bad it made me feel.

I don't go to bars or really socialize in person at all. I would recommend trying to find other ways to socialize that don't involve bars, but I have known sober people who can happily hang out with people who drink.

I had a physics class that required Mathmatica and a stupid expensive textbook. The professor said the college forced him to use those because the college gets a kickback for it. Luckily he was awesome and told everyone that we could buy the much cheaper older version of the book and pirate the software.

If when you run a fingernail over it, if your nail catches in the scratch, the scratch is very likely too deep to fix with paint correction(like buffing/polishing).

A proper fix will require prep, painting and blending, which you shouldn't try to do yourself. You could buy a touch up stick that matches your paint to cover the scratch. It won't look perfect and won't last forever without clear coat on top, but it will prevent rust.

Before you decide how you'll deal with this, you can bring it to a body shop for an estimate, most shops will do that for free. Most shops can give you an estimate from photos emailed or submitted to their websites.

I was one of the people who thought meta joining the fediverse could be good, but that convinced me that we need to keep them out.

Thanks for posting that

For most purchases, people really only have vanishingly few choices of companies to buy from. A truly free market might work, but the profit motives that have corrupted our political, legal and regulatory systems has made most markets into oligopolies. These companies work together to manipulate prices, without ever directly communicating in a way that can be punished.

For a free market to really drive prices down there needs to be real competition. When eggs went up in price, they allegedly did so because of avian flu. But that flu only affected a small amount of the production. Cal-Maine, the largest egg producer in the country, lost no egg production at all. Yet they increased their prices massively. If the market was working as you say it does, Cal-Maine would have kept their prices low to capture more market share. Instead they saw that other producer might have to raise prices and preemptively raised their prices.

I've mostly been wanting to play Rocket League, but I've been super stressed and for whatever reason playing against real people stresses me more. I think it's because I can't just pause the game whenever I feel like it.

So I've been mostly playing against ML bots with RLBotGui. As a gold/plat level player, it's actually a great way to practice.

I've also been playing through all of the Adventures of Lolo games(1-3 US and Japan, GB Lolo, eggerland series, plus all of the many rom hacks) on my Anbernic handheld. It's my favorite puzzle game of all time.

I recently watched, "Russia 1985–1999: TraumaZone" and greatly enjoyed it.

It's about what it was like to live in the Soviet Union at the end of communism and then the end of democracy. The story is entirely told with footage from the time.

I'd like to also recommend my two favorite documentaries about labor unions, Harlan County, USA and American Dream.

That's a really good deal for a car right now, even a car like the versa that sells new for under 20k. I got hit by a pickup this morning and am likely going to need to buy a new car in a hurry. I would take that deal in a second.

I usually prefer to buy a new econobox vs spending more on a used SUV or whatever. Unfortunately there really aren't many cheap econoboxes left. Even the cheapest cars are only available in higher trim levels, bringing them well over $20k.

Anyone have any cheap new car suggestions?

You can play them in any order, but I'd recommend playing the English games before the Japanese market games because the Japan games have more difficult levels.

No Mitsubishi dealer near me, unfortunately. The mirage was the first car I considered. I don't mind getting a car from somewhere far away, but I'd have nowhere to get warranty service unless I drove 3 hours each time.

I had a Versa as a rental a few years ago, I think it's too basic for me for the new price.

I appreciate your suggestions. I'm going today to check out a Toyota Carolla.

Rsync everything besides media to a Storj free account. I also rsync my most important data(docker compose files,config files, home assistant, a few small databases) to Google drive.

I'm not convinced statistics can be used like this on big questions where we know so little. Just because we believe the universe to be massively large and ever expanding doesn't satisfy the basic premise that underlies the assumption that there is so much stuff that some of the stuff must be alive. I don't think we know enough about the universe to make the assumption that because it is so big, it must be infinitely variable.

But what do I know, I'm just some idiot on the internet.

I've had issues that I've been able to work around.

I have previously had the error, "settings could not be applied", which I worked around by uninstalling my YouTube updates, installing the recommended version and clearing revanced manager data. I now get an error about not being able to load the original APK. I work around this by deleting the two apks in /data/abd/vanced before patching.

I'm rooted and have to repatch on each reboot. Not complaining, just want to share my experience in case it helps others.

I love revanced, and feel so thankful for it. I can't afford YT premium, without revanced I would miss out on so much great content.

I think SSO is less important than having everything behind the reverse proxy. The importance of the proxy is that if there is a security hole in the web server component of your service, it cannot be exploited without a second flaw in the proxy. It's an additional layer of abstraction and security that doesn't add a ton of overhead.

An attacker would have to find an exploit in nginx, which is used by most of the big tech companies, so it is well secured compared to the services many of us selfhost.

Another advantage of using SWAG is being able to use fail2ban and geoip restrictions. Any ports open to the ipv4 internet get scanned by security services and malicious actors many times each day. It's nice to be able to have nginx refuse connections from any of them that repeatedly fail to login, or that come from outside your geographic region.

If you're going to try Authelia and a reverse proxy, I recommend using SWAG. It's a docker container that includes Authelia, nginx, fail2ban, geoip restrictions, and has premade config files for most of the selfhosted software that people run. The config files are especially useful since they include comments that describe the settings you need to change within the services you run, like changing the external domain in Emby for example.

https://docs.linuxserver.io/images/docker-swag

Not OP, but I have this handheld and it's pretty great. I think its the 2nd best retro handheld in a package similar to the OG Gameboy, but is much easier/cheaper to find than the miyoo mini. There are a few little things I dislike about it, mostly relating to the software. GarlicOS improves it but still has a few weird quirks.

Billionaires buy media platforms to influence the public, not to make money. The audience Musk can influence is the same audience that watched Tucker. If he is the one paying Tucker, he gets to influence what Tucker says, just like when he was at Fox News.

It makes perfect sense.

My favorite new album in years is Codefendants - This is Crime Wave : https://youtube.com/playlist?list=OLAK5uy_maX9ORPggXh_sTT7I7Lw2IUEpEzdfgJgo

It's a new project from Fat Mike of NOFX, Ceschi, and Sam King of Get Dead.

I run everything in docker on Ubuntu 22.04 with the exception of Plex, which runs on bare metal on the same server. The server is a 16 core threadripper 1950, with 2 quadro gpu's, m2000 and a p400, 128gb ram, mirrored ssd for system, platter HDD for media, CoralTPU pcie.

I also run Home Assistant on a separate Lenovo MiniPC(forget which model), I did this so I can take down the server for various reasons without losing smart home stuff. Helps with the Partner Acceptance Factor.

In no particular order the server runs:

Calibre-web - Library management

Sonarr - TV series downloads

Radarr - Movie Downloads

Lidarr - Music Downloads

QbittorentVPN - Torrents over vpn, guarantees no leaks

Jackett - tracker management and proxying

Podgrab - downloads podcasts

Frigate - NVR, camera recording with object detection

DoubleTake - Facial recognition middleware, works between frigate/homeassistant and Compreface/Deepstack

Octoprint - 3d printer spooler

Tautulli - Plex statistics

Portainer - Docker Management

Ombi - Media request app, users can request shows/movies and they can be automatically added to sonarr/radarr

MeTube - Webui for youtube-dl/dlp, useful for downloading Youtube videos for offline and ad free use

Spot-dl - parses spotify playlists and downloads them from youtube