Omaha resident. I don’t drive through Nebraska from end to end. I just live here.

As a BBS era kid, I know you’re not trying to simulate the whole thing right now in the comments section. I’d say: you would have done fine, in any era. People talk, they share methods, and you would’ve picked up whatever you needed.

I think it’s just a common sort of nightmare, worrying about being unprepared, dealing with the consequences of lack of preparation.

I recommend the first few minutes of Jason Scott’s The BBS Documentary, for an overview of how people communicated in the pre-internet days. Especially if you imagine yourself a telegraph operator chatting with neighboring stations in the 19th century or something.

Market share. Basic permissions model.

I’m probably doing some kind of “this solution worked for me, so it should work for everyone!” thing, but it does seem that our understanding of autism has improved in recent years. Even if all you can see is some variant of mild autism (autism spectrum disorder) a professional might see other related things. Like in my case, where my problems were being amplified by constant anxiety … they might find something chemical they can treat, or something that counseling can train you to mitigate or moderate.

I wish you the best.

I’m genuinely scared I could do damage if I explain this badly. I’ll try my best. And bear in mind, mild autism, I communicate things strangely sometimes.

In a general sense, diagnoses are predictive statements, not just labels for communicating about a condition. There’s often sets of related behaviors and common kinds of advice or treatment. Think of it as peer reviewed science, instead of an algorithm, saying “struggling with this? You might also be struggling with this and that, and here’s how we can help with all of those.”

Also, diagnoses unlock access to medication. In my case I’ve also struggled with generalized anxiety disorder. Anxiety meds are having a profound and positive effect on my life. I do so much stupid shit when my brain is constantly making small worries into thought-destroying anxiety and fear. I was really resistant to the idea, thinking medication just avoids problems instead of letting you learn how to deal with them. I was very wrong.

And since I’m in the US where health insurance is a profit making industry, I had to go the route of counseling (“yeah I’m recommending you get tested”), then testing, and then with a diagnosis in hand, psychiatrist for possible medication. (It can take a long time to get meds dialed in. I was lucky, the first thing he prescribed worked great and we’ve just been slowly ramping the dosage, starting at half the usual starting dose in January and going up slowly every month.)

I don’t know if this was persuasive but I hope it at least made sense.

This is going to sound like an insult or snappy comment, but I genuinely mean this as something that might be helpful because I relate to this and think it’s affected me my whole life.

I think you’re describing mild autism. I got my own diagnosis a few months ago, at age 47, and I wish I had known so much sooner. Some of the things you describe were part of what the psychologist who diagnosed me talked to me about.

I was assuming a long delay between event capture and event logging, when brainstorming use cases.

Yes you will make it easier for kiwifarms to create an ALPR network if you GPL it. Also social change activists, news stations, “news” stations, nosy neighbors, overseas companies interested in obtaining intelligence on US citizens, people who hate racing on public roads, neighborhood watch, people who want to make ALPR bans functionally impossible by making them indistinguishable from dashcams, people who want to make rich people sweat by tracking their movements.

If you don’t GPL it, you’ll demonstrate that a small team can create an ALPR system, so, they might think, why not give it a try?

I would say it’s important not to conflate privacy with secrecy. If you have a domain with your name on it (e.g. my mspencer.net) but create email aliases for every situation, sites won’t be automatically correlating your addresses with each other. How do they know which addresses are yours and which aren’t? More importantly, if you self host, emails are encrypted in flight and live on your own hardware at rest, so nobody external to any conversation will be snooping on message contents.

I’m sure legally it has no effect, but I have postfix configured to refuse emails with “updated terms” and “updated our terms” in the body. If I still haven’t been notified that a site’s terms have been updated to allow some new horribleness, they can’t claim they made me aware, huh? I guess they’ll just have to send me paper mail if it’s so important to them.

(You could do that too, if you self host postfix / dovecot / roundcube / opendkim and use greylist and RBLs for anti-spam. It’s been effortless for me, after an admittedly grueling initial setup process taking several days to learn and fail with.)

I love this, and I’m definitely going to use it when describing enshittification to relatives. Kudos, genuinely.

I’m a professional C# developer, and I switched to iPhone in 2020. Mostly I wanted a more controlled, curated App Store for increased confidence in a safe execution environment. I’ll pay the $100/yr for a developer account if I really need to build and run my own code.

The lack of ad block options bugs me. I also don’t use iCloud.

I have doubts about whether this question is asking or proselytizing.

This makes me sad, that we can’t engage in civil discussion about this. Why did you assume and not ask questions? Be curious, not judgmental.

To me it’s a question of laws. The laws of the U.S. at least somewhat constrain the people of my own country, and can prevent them from working against their own citizens. Like me.

Please be kind when replying.

As a US citizen, I prefer services that US consumer protections could apply to. (While we still have them, ahem.) I know that Chinese laws will not protect me from things a Chinese business does in China.

(What’s with the rude replies? Did I fail to notice what instance I’m on or something?)

Don’t worry, you aren’t missing much. That paragraph was kind of goofy anyway.

Think of a Seedbox as a cloud service provider with convenience features focused on enabling piracy, by keeping the hardware in a jurisdiction that doesn’t care what you pirate and giving you one-click easy installation methods for apps that make piracy simple. But without going so far as “Thank you for your payment, download these specific media files here.”

You debatably have to be a techie. But by techie standards it’s very easy to use.

If you really hate piracy, I suppose you could pay for one for a month, get the identity of who you paid, and use one of the apps to host a shell script that listens on one of the few public ports you have access to, that answers every incoming connection with “this is a seed box operated by ABC, with cards payments accepted by LMNOP Inc in Athens, Greece.”

But the most common usage is running packaged software they let you run (like BT clients you can remote-control, sickchill, radarr, sonarr, Plex, etc.) or remote desktops or shells. Usually implemented as docker containers.

I’m genuinely worried it’s yet another deliberate denial of service against our ability to detect evil. I work extra hard to only pay attention to what is actually done that seems like it could stick.

Mostly I trust that good people in positions of trust (e.g. ACLU or EFF) will call out when there’s an opportunity for mass mobilization to make a real difference.

They would enforce the rules of their payment card network. Once they’re aware of a violation they take action. If they become aware of a series of violations they take further action to ensure the merchant complies in the future.

Apologies, I did the American thing. Checks, which get turned into X9.100 files, which are just digital versions of bags of bundles of checks, with check images that were TIFF images in CCITT T.6 encoding.

I don’t know if you’re being serious, but I can confirm from my time at as a developer at a banking software company, we didn’t use a hard RT OS even for like Mosler or Hitachi high speed check sorters. Just fast C++ code. (On Windows XP still, when I left in 2016)

(Work load is basically: batch of checks is loaded into an input hopper, along with check sized pieces of paper which are headers and footers, machine rapidly scans MICR lines and they go flying towards output pockets, and our code has something like 20 ms to receive the MICR data and pass back a sorting decision.)

I feel like objecting to the “General advice about email is don’t” thing but I don’t know if I understand the objections well enough to refute them. I self host email for mspencer.net (meaning all requests including DNS are served from hardware in my living space) and I have literally zero spam and can’t remember the last time I had to intervene on my mail server.

On one hand: My emails are received without issue by major providers (outlook, gmail, etc) and I get nearly zero spam. (Two spam senders were using legitimate email services, I reported them, and got human-seeming replies from administrators saying they would take care of it.) And I get amusing pflogsumm (summarizes postfix logs) emails daily showing like 5 emails delivered, 45 rejected, with all of the things that were tried but didn’t work.

On the other: most of the spam prevention comes from greylist, making all new senders retry after a few minutes (because generally a legit MTA will retry while a spammer will not) and that delays most emails by a few minutes. And it was a bear to set up. I used a like 18 step walkthrough on linuxbabe dot com I think, but added some difficulty by storing some use and alias databases on OpenLDAP / slapd instead of in flat files.

But hey, unlimited mail aliases, and I’m thinking of configuring things so emails bounce if they seem to contain just a notification that terms and conditions are updated somewhere. I don’t know, cause some chaos I guess.

And I have no idea if my situation is persuasive for anyone because I don’t know what the general advice means. And I worry it’ll have the unfortunate side effect of making self hosting type nerds like me start forgetting how to run their own email, causing control of email to become more centralized. And I strongly dislike that.