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