If you aren’t specifically thinking of something that you remember and just want some sort of story that has all these elements, I think that you might want to look into LLM generation of stories.

It might be that it’s taking into account how recently you used the thing or something.

As long as any infrastructure used to hint to the indexing engine that its index is dirty to avoid fully-rescanning the filesystem occasionally is available to non-Apple software, I assume that you could just use a different software package for this.

kagis

I haven’t used any of these, and can’t recommend them, but it looks like Mac developers have built alternatives:

https://www.makeuseof.com/tag/spotlight-alternatives-mac-search/

I mostly use plocate on my Linux machine if I want to do a search across filenames on the filesystem as a whole.

Setting aside Trump, I have no idea why people who can apparently be mostly reasonable about, say, cars subscribe to utterly batshit insane views about diet and health and buy into all kinds of snake oil.

I’m not saying that there’s no magical thinking with cars — “my magical fuel additive” or whatever — but I have seen more utterly insane stuff regarding what someone should eat or how to treat medical conditions than in most other areas.

It’s also not new. You can go back, and find people promoting all kinds of snake oil when it comes to health. Some of my favorites are the utterly crazy stuff that came out when public awareness of radiation was new, and it was being billed as a magic cure for everything.

I get that not everyone is a doctor or a dietician. But you’d think that any time you see someone promoting something as a fix for a wide, unrelated range of conditions, that it should be enough to raise red flags for someone, layman or no.

You might want to list the platform you want to use it on. I’m assuming that you’re wanting to access this on a smartphone of some sort?

This will increase your privacy by protecting you from ISP web traffic analysis. It does this by generating fake DNS and HTTP request.

If you’re the kind of attacker in a position to be doing traffic analysis in the first place, I suspect that there are a number of ways to filter this sort of thing out. And it’s fundamentally only generating a small amount of noise. I suspect that most people who would be worried about traffic analysis are less worried about someone monitoring their traffic knowing that it’s really 20% of their traffic going to particular-domain.com instead of just 2% of their traffic, and more that they don’t know it to be known that they’re talking to particular-domain.com at all.

For DNS, I think that most users are likely better-off either using a VPN to a VPN provider that they’re comfortable with, DNS-over-HTTP, or DNSSEC.

HTTPS itself will protect a lot of information, though not the IP address being connected to (which is a significant amount of information, especially with the move to IPv6), analysis of the encrypted data being requested (which I’m sure could be fingerprinted to some degree for specific sites to get some limited idea of what a user is doing even inside an encrypted tunnel). A VPN is probably the best bet to deal with an ISP that might be monitoring traffic.

There are also apparently some attempts at addressing the fact that TLS’s SNI exposes domain names in clear text to someone monitoring a connection — so someone may not know exactly what you’re sending, but knowing the domain you’re connecting to may itself be an issue.

In a quick test, whatever attempts to mitigate this have actually been deployed, SNI still seems to expose the domain in plaintext for the random sites that I tried.

$ sudo tcpdump -w packets.pcap port https  

<browses to a few test websites in Chromium, since I’m typing this in Firefox, then kills off tcpdump process>

$ tshark -r packets.pcap -2 -R ssl.handshake.extensions_server_name  

I see microsoft.com, google.com, olio.cafe (my current home instance), and cloudflare.net have plaintext SNI entries show up. My guess is that if they aren’t deploying something to avoid exposure of their domain name, most sites probably aren’t either.

In general, if you’re worried about your ISP snooping on your traffic, my suggestion is that the easiest fix is probably to choose a VPN provider that you do trust and pass your traffic through that VPN. The VPN provider will know who you’re talking to, but you aren’t constrained by geography in VPN provider choice, unlike ISP choice. If you aren’t willing to spend anything on this, maybe something like Tor, I2P, or, if you can avoid the regular Web entirely for whatever your use case is, even Hyphanet.

Well, I think that the fundamental problem is that most people here are here because they do want to use the Threadiverse as an alternative to Reddit and find it to be the best alternative.

Of the alternatives that I know of (and don’t personally think are as desirable), on checking, all seem to have a Web-based front-end. You might have a PWA, what amounts to an “app” that’s basically the web browser running on mobile and appearing to be a separate app.

There are some vaguely-similar systems, but they tend to not be a “collection of forums” systems, things like Twitter, Bluesky, and so forth.

I guess you could try using Usenet, though last I checked — and that was some time back — there wasn’t a lot of discussion happening any more on Usenet. A lot of the people still using it are using it to basically get commercial access to “binaries” newsgroups, to pirate stuff. A big part of the reason that the Usenet discussion crowd mostly moved to Reddit-like sites was because they dealt with spam better. You can get free (registration required) Usenet access from eternal-september.org and commercial Usenet service from someone like supernews.com. I don’t know what the state of things there is. I’m sure that someone out there has a Usenet client for Android.

kagis

It looks like the pickings are pretty slim, but they’re out there. Here’s someone’s list from 2023:

https://xdaforums.com/t/a-list-of-android-usenet-newsreaders-how-to-search-reference-nntp-dejanews-google-web-archives-for-comp-mobile-android-newsgroup-topics-in-one-tap.4634973/

Note that there are some limitations compared to something like Reddit or the Threadiverse. You can’t edit a Usenet post once sent and normally can’t delete them either (there is something called cancel messages, but I have never used them and IIRC some servers won’t honor them anyway). Unless things have changed since last I looked, there was no standard support for something like Markdown across clients.

If you’re willing to use Usenet with a native client on a desktop machine, rather than Android, your choices become rather better. And there are clients with very good “offline” support — you can basically download a lot of content and make posts, and have them only be sent next time you have an Internet connection, which the Threadiverse and Reddit don’t really have support for. That doesn’t matter as much for most people today, where omnipresent Internet access is far more common than it was when people were using Usenet for discussion quite a bit, but it’s possible that it could be a benefit for you. You don’t benefit from a lot of the filtering and moderation that other users do, but clients do tend to have powerful tools for you to locally filter out content that you don’t want to see.

There are things like Matrix, IRC, and Discord, but they aren’t really a direct analog to what Reddit and the Threadiverse are — they’re really aimed at more real-time, interactive chats. I don’t find that I like discussion with them nearly as much, because people tend to write shorter material with less thought put into them. But they do serve certain niches, and you might like them.

Mulvad apparently uses Wireguard. Is there an Android Wireguard client that supports multiple VPNs and toggling each independently?

“If countries see that central bank money can disappear if European politicians see fit, they might decide to withdraw their reserves from the eurozone,” he added.

I mean, the assets were frozen. I imagine that if someone is planning to invade Ukraine a second time around, the freezing alone is probably sufficient to make them not want to store assets there while doing so.

If GRUB is having problems too, not just Linux, I’d be inclined to blame hardware of some sort. Do you have another stick of NVMe that you can swap in, see if that makes the issue magically go away? Maybe run off a USB drive, see what happens?

Maybe less likely, but that processor is a 14th gen Intel desktop processor, one of the models affected by the voltage degradation problems. I burned up both a 13th gen and 14th gen processor myself. Looked like a variety of random errors, often related to memory, eventually not even managing to get through boot unless I disabled all but one of my cores. Might look into that. I assume that there’s a potentially-affected serial number range list somewhere.

And you can run memtest86 to bang on the memory and CPU, see if anything comes up. If it runs into errors, then it probably isn’t the NVMe at fault.

I expect that that means that Israel isn’t too worried about incoming ballistic missiles from Iran at this point, or they’d probably be hanging onto it.

People have done a good job of mentioning the free open-source games that I’d call notable already.

I don’t play most mobile games, because most are commercial, and I’m not willing to get a Google account and associate it with my phone. I think that Google has enough information about me.

However, there are a number of commercial games that exist for both the PC and for Android, stuff like Bloons TD 6. Unless you have a PC, I’d probably take a glance there, since if a game is good-enough, unless it’s deeply tied to a touch interface, I’d expect it to have a PC port.

goes to find a list of Steam games with mobile ports

https://store.steampowered.com/curator/44803552-Mobile-Ports/

Some games on there that I know and think are good — though I haven’t played the mobile versions, and can’t speak as to port quality:

• Stardew Valley. I’m not a huge fan of this type of game — lots of drudge tasks — but I think that it was well-made, and lots of people like it.

• Balatro. Already mentioned here.

• Hades. Action roguelite. Might want a controller for this; I don’t know how well this would translate to a touch interface.

• Terraria. I don’t know how well this would work without a mouse.

• Bloons TD 6. I already mentioned this.

• Subnautica. Dunno how well this translates to not having a mouse, and the game is 3D-heavy, so I dunno what tradeoffs someone is gonna make to get it running on a phone, but it’s pretty neat.

• Vampire Survivors. I’d guess that this is probably playable with a touch interface, though probably best with a controller.

• Slay the Spire.

• Dead Cells. This might want a controller.

• Papers, Please

• Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas. I would definitely want a controller for this.

• Spiritfarer. Didn’t really click with me, but popular, and if you’re looking for an adventure game…

• Little Inferno. Older puzzle game that I enjoyed, and I don’t usually do puzzle games.

I’d also mention:

Cataclysm: Dark Days Ahead (if you want Android; there isn’t a current iOS version) is a good free and open-source game on the PC with an extremely steep learning curve. It is a very deep open-world roguelike. However, it is seriously tied to a keyboard interface. I have played the Android version, and while I think that the porter did do a better job than I expected making it playable on Android, it’s clearly not optimized for a touch interface, and it is very CPU-hungry, so can run slower than the original does on PC.

Shattered Pixel Dungeon

!pixeldungeon@lemmy.world

The dev maintains a presence on the Threadiverse.

This, of course, does not factor in the problem of scalpers and the hugely increased fees charged on the secondary market.

Well, if tickets for a given band are being scalped, then it’s a good sign that they’re probably initially selling below market rate.

Clothes make the man. Naked people have little or no influence in society.

— Mark Twain

Mali’s leadership tried to sell the French exit as an anti-colonial victory, but it was anything but. As one empire left, another quickly moved in. Russian mercenaries replaced French soldiers, announcing to the world Mali’s intention to move into Russia’s orbit.

Americans watched with worry, and eventually started to use the “counterterrorism” angle to try and befriend a regime they loudly condemned and sanctioned just a few years ago.

For the Malian people, the country’s transfer to team Russia brought no real positives. Sure, the humiliation of France at the heart of Francophone Africa was rejoiced over by some, but the Russians brought with them nothing but more aggression, corruption and chaos.

As the Russians enjoy their newfound influence, Americans appear to be looking for a way back in. They are now courting the regime under the guise of addressing “terror” but clearly with the sole intent of weakening the Russian hand.

Europe and America’s support for many “friendly” dictators across Africa, such as Uganda’s Museveni, and Washington’s ongoing attempts to befriend Mali’s junta despite its insults to democracy, clearly show Africans have no true ally in this proxy war being waged on their lands.

Well, dude, if Africans are going to permit themselves to be led by dictators, I doubt that you’re going to find that there’s going to be an absolute wall built against dealing with them. The US most-likely isn’t going to come in, forcibly eject your leadership, and impose elections, and I suspect that there are people in Mali who wouldn’t like it if they did.

You’ll probably get more support for a democratic government, but there’s going to be a limit as to how much by way of national interest that will be sacrificed for that, true enough.

As to wanting agency — Africans have agency. If the population of Mali collectively told the leadership of Mali that they weren’t going to be running Mali, said leadership wouldn’t be running Mali.

IIRC, it’s been Spain that’s been the strongest proponent of disallowing end-to-end encryption.

I’m guessing that this is because Spain has some substantial separatist movements and wants the federal government to be able to monitor them.

kagis

https://edri.org/our-work/chat-control-what-is-actually-going-on/

While certain pro-digital-surveillance countries like Hungary, Ireland, Spain and Denmark have unwaveringly supported the mass scanning and encryption-breaking measures, many other countries have been rightly alarmed.

They don’t have specifics there on a state-by-state basis.

https://www.wired.com/story/europe-break-encryption-leaked-document-csa-law/

Of the 20 EU countries represented in the document leaked to WIRED, the majority said they are in favor of some form of scanning of encrypted messages, with Spain’s position emerging as the most extreme. “Ideally, in our view, it would be desirable to legislatively prevent EU-based service providers from implementing end-to-end encryption,” Spanish representatives said in the document.

I’m pretty sure that Wired is referencing the leaked documents that I’m thinking of.

Note that there is a !letstalkaboutgames@feddit.uk.

EDIT: Ah, you posted there.

No problem. And just to make it clear, if you haven’t done so before, if you find a community you like on lemmyverse.net, you’ll want to copy the text with the leading exclamation mark, which you can do by clicking on that text on lemmyverse.net — say, for example, !foodporn@lemmy.world — and then paste it into the community search on whatever client or Web UI you use. That’ll make your home instance connect to the instance where the community lives and learn about it, if it hasn’t already. Your home instance is sh.itjust.works, which is decently-sized, so it’s not as much an issue for you — for many communities, some user on sh.itjust.works will have already done this and subscribed to the community — but for users on smaller instances, it’s more important.

Eh. It sounds like the thing is likely going out of business, and people are just batting around ideas to try to bring it back. Probably good odds that it won’t happen.

Craigslea community kindergarten, a local childcare centre in Chermside West in Brisbane’s north, made national headlines this week after a series of emails to parents. The centre has been in turmoil for weeks and was closed after a mass exodus of staff before the school holidays.

On Sunday, the management committee sent parents a 1,000-word email claiming the centre was “insolvent”, owing more than $40,314 to the tax office and employees. It proposed to “wind up” the centre, which has been placed into voluntary administration.

The next day, in a second email the management committee proposed to charge $2,200 for a scrapbook of artwork produced by their children and photographs of them to help pay off the debt.

I think that if I were Google, Meta, and Vodafone, I’d go build an app to measure a phone’s lifetime playing video and then promote that as a benchmark. Things that are the path of least resistance to measure tend to get measured more than those that are a pain to measure.