I agree. We need to be careful about what news/media we consume, and I think we can do this without being uninformed. I have several family members (on opposite ends of the political spectrum) who are having significant mental health problems in part because they are not considering what they are consuming (especially online). It’s dramatically impacting their health and families. It can happen to all sorts of people, whether they’re getting overwhelmed with anxiety on the state of things or getting sucked into an angry political group.

You can stay informed without clicking on/listening to/watching everything that sparks your fear, anxiety or rage. Curate your news sources, pay attention to their motivations, and listen to your own emotional reaction. It takes a little work but is well worth it when you can be a kind, functioning, and informed neighbor to everyone around you.

I’m going to go against the grain a bit here - while there were some nuggets of truth, there was also a lot of insufferable behavior from someone who’s job it was to teach technology to people who don’t know technology. This person recounted so many great teaching moments in such a dismissive way, it just made me sad.

I absolutely get how frustrating it can be to work in customer-facing technical roles, and to get dismissed for it. But if one of my customers was smart enough to embed a YouTube video in a PowerPoint slide, they’re smart enough to understand when I say “it looks like PowerPoint is trying to load it from YouTube every time you hit play, but YouTube is blocked on our network. Let’s think through some other options”. Not only that, it’s critical information the next time they want to present a video, and it’s information they can share with others around them too.

I tried gaming on Linux on a whim a few months ago and was blown away. Every Steam game I wanted to play worked as expected. Things have changed dramatically over the last few years.

It’s not for everyone and there are still some anti-cheat systems that reject Linux, but it’s worth trying if you prefer Linux.

You’re right! Edited.

Friendly plug for Pop!_OS, a great Ubuntu-like distro with flatpacks

I love that the absolute high point of someone’s career was finding a really old poo

Happy to see you mention Hunt: Showdown. That game recently broke a new record for most concurrent players, and the current wildcard “event” with the new boss and varying rain is fantastic.

I’m very sorry to hear that, and I’m sorry that today is one of the bad days. Sending you support, and I hope that a better day is around the corner.

This guy screws

To add to the good information that’s already been posted - upvotes/downvotes are public, which has surprised some people. Disgruntled people can easily see that you downvoted their post, or what other things you upvoted/downvoted.

Liftoff is the only one I’ve found that lets you hide read posts like the website does, which is the most important feature for me.

I’m only part-way through, but I think it’s the best-made game I’ve ever played. The world is like nothing else.

There’s no doubt we’ve seen an increase in convincing bot posts across social media. It would be interesting to apply some LLM detection methods to Reddit to see growth of bot posts over time: https://medium.com/@rxtang/the-science-of-detecting-llm-generated-texts-e816a14c18d

This is an important point - it’s the difference between emphasizing critical thinking skills vs falling into conspiracy theories, or being privacy-conscious vs being paranoid.

I think starting critical thinking with empathy is incredibly important. E.g. “What’s motivating this person to write this?” Are they trying to get clicks, are they trying to move the needle on an issue, are they meeting their word count quota for the day? Are they just lonely or isolated or scared and lashing out because they can’t find affirmation? Or even, are they paid by a foreign state to post controversial things and stir up dissent in another country because it helps their country economically?

There are many possible motivations, but it’s not going to be a big global conspiracy dedicated to manipulating you personally. Understanding a person’s starting point and motivation helps you critically think through their points and decide what you agree or disagree with.

Thanks, I agree with you and have a similar approach. I’m mostly interested in learning best practices, I don’t bother hosting juicy targets like Bitwarden. If an attacker really wants to put in the work to get the scanned manual for my 2009 Black & Decker toaster oven I probably can’t stop them.

Question from someone learning security - if no firewall ports are opened and UPnP is off, does running these sorts of services on your LAN substantially increase your attack surface? I imagined risks were minimal outside of running a compromised application.