I don’t think that’s actually true. I think it’s more just AI propaganda. Most of the so-called “advances” that I’ve seen advertised seem to be far less than they seem when you dig deeper, often relying heavily on previous, human reverse-engineering efforts or simply being injection points built into wrappers for the actual binary game code. It’s just suddenly cool and polished looking because AI padded it out with a bunch of fragile and flaky filler code whose only purpose is to make it look finished and beautiful at first glance when it actually isn’t. The typical AI gameplan, in other words.

ShatteredPrism.

So, it’s a measurement of Gen Z’s heritable environment?

It’s pretty relevant, actually. It’s nice when you have choice. Not every ISP in my country is a big-name corporate shitbag (despite the best efforts and constant lobbying of said big-name corporate shitbags), and they are allowed equal-ish access to the last mile communication networks at (arbitrarily inflated) wholesale prices. It’s still worth the price, though. We even have some internet co-ops running their own fiber. And if they don’t care about piracy, and you trust them to stay that way, then what’s the trouble? Yes it is hard to gauge who to trust, but that’s the game we have to play.

Google has this really deep-rooted problem where they keep accidentally, through no fault or intention of their own, making things people actually like. It’s very upsetting and from all other indications they are doing everything they can to prevent it from ever happening again, and yet it keeps happening. Nobody can explain why. All they can do is immediately cancel the problematic products and services the moment they realize people actually like them.

Hook it up to the TV and use it for big screen web/media/gaming/retro-emulation. Steam and/or Sunshine/Moonlight can be used for low-latency streaming to play games from another PC (in either direction). You can use controllers and keyboard/mouse through either streaming method or bluetooth/wireless. Also handy for occasionally streaming things that don’t have smart-TV-apps, or for services where the only functional apps are service-locked, shitty and/or “Freemium” (most IPTV apps for example). Set it up for Wake-On-LAN (or Wake-On-WiLAN if it supports it). Lots of things you can do with a PC in the living room.

I’m not saying this is impossible, it certainly is possible, and clearing or disabling the TPM is always a good idea on used PC hardware or even new hardware. And I’m not saying I know if that’s what actually happened here. But I have to put on my “press F to doubt” hat, and point out that realistically it always seems to turn out that like 95% of the time when someone claims they were “banned for cheating and this is the reason why” no matter how dramatic the story, it turns out they were actually cheating, because the kind of people who compulsively cheat at games are the same kind of people who compulsively cheat their way through life by twisting reality into these wild narratives that sometimes they actually even believe themselves. Riot giving a bunch of detailed information about how their anti-cheat detected this guy seems implausible, and meaningless since they won’t unban him anyway. They have nothing to gain from allegedly explaining all that, and if they’re unwilling to unban the person they might as well assume it’s still the actual cheater they’re talking to, and why bother telling them anything at all?

This all sounds like a load of baloney to me. Plausible, believable baloney, but still baloney.

My solution to Adobe is: Gimp, Inkscape, Krita, Kdenlive, etc.

Fuck Adobe malware forever. It’s a bait and switch, and I’m never going to be taking the bait.

I have never trusted them, I always considered many of Signal’s decisions highly questionable, and I think they are either pressured into them by the US government, cooperating in what they think are limited and carefully-implemented ways while claiming and perhaps even believing they are fighting the good fight, or maybe they are just a psyop honeypot to begin with. I cannot trust them, and if they truly wanted me to, they would not do so many things that require me to trust them.

This is good thinking, and you may still want something like this anyway, as there’s always room for additional documentation, but let me propose an alternative that takes this good way of thinking a step further:

Infrastructure-as-code means my code is my documentation. How’s it configured? Look at the code. What’s it doing? Look at the code. Don’t understand why it’s doing that? Use more descriptive names for things and write more self-explanatory code. Is the code out of date with the current state? Stop implementing things manually and make the code run automatically instead so it’s never out of date anymore.

I have complete confidence in my setup and life is easy now. Except when the IAC breaks. But that’s rarely a panic situation, just mildly frustrating.

I wonder how this compares to Stoat. I found this comparison of many different options but I’m not sure how up to date it is

AI is stupid, but to be truly outstanding at stupidity, you have to be human.

rsync, SyncThing, or Nextcloud. I use all three, often on the same machine at the same time, for various purposes.

rsync is great for scheduled syncs (but intentionally not TOO frequent – where blowing away one copy would almost instantly blow away the other copy could be a concern.) and outstanding for one-off syncs. With the right command line options it can even create a rough approximation of snapshots with copy-on-write rolling incremental backups. I believe this is the original documentation for that particular trick although it has spawned many genuine backup tools which operate very similarly using rsync under the hood, like rsnapshot.

SyncThing is great for large, intensive datasets that you want to keep perfectly synchronized across multiple computers at the same time. One example is my saved games, so without relying on Steam “cloud saves” or anything, I can just save my game and hop from gaming on one computer onto my laptop and pick up right where I left off.

Nextcloud is what I use for keeping separate copies of all my documents, photos from my phone, etc. It’s easier than SyncThing to setup and manage in my opinion, it’s simple and reliable and reasonably user-friendly in most use-cases, and seems to be more compatible with a lot of software due to its similar design to something like Dropbox. It isn’t ideal for handling huge numbers of files or very large folders in my personal opinion, but it does work if you want to try it.

VMProtect is technically not a “virus” it is a heuristic detection saying that the program is implemented in a highly suspicious way that makes it impossible to confidently determine what it actually does, and thus it could contain a virus (and viruses often use exactly this technique to hide themselves) since there is no reason for a legitimate program to do it. That said, a crack is also not a legitimate program, and sometimes to avoid the defenses of the cracked program it has to do things to obscure what it’s doing too, and sometimes that results in a false positive heuristic detection like this.

That said, we really have no way of knowing which of the two situations this is, and neither do you, and neither does AppDoze.com really. I would personally not be willing to trust it, and if I had to run it, would do so on a dedicated and isolated machine with limited access and nothing of value on it, permanently, even if it seemed fine. Any program which needs to be cracked in such a serious way is software that I am highly inclined to find an alternative for if possible. It’s not worth the potential risk and headache to me.

The temperature is too hot for me. That’s because I get suspicious of games that are mega-viral and seemingly come out of nowhere to have everybody talking about them all at once. I figure it’s often either a fad, a masterfully executed guerilla marketing campaign, or genuinely outstanding, or some combination of these things. Of course, sometimes it is just genuinely outstanding, and if that’s the case I’ll probably pick it up eventually. But there’s no rush, so regardless of which it is, I’m a patient gamer and I’m perfectly willing to wait and let the dust settle so I can get a better perspective, and very often I find these kind of games fade pretty quickly and are forgotten and in the clear light of day I’ll often realize they’re not really the kind of game I like anyway. And if they’re the kind of genuinely outstanding instant classic they seem to be at first, they’ll still be around once I’m ready for them, and potentially on sale. So, overall this strategy of suspicion-by-default and wait for more data has served me well.

There are plenty of games I’ll impulse-buy, but it’s never the popular ones, it’s the ones that have a dozen reviews. I’m always suspicious of popularity. I do not believe in the wisdom of crowds, at least for my own entertainment preferences. I have very specific interests and preferences, and frankly I know them when I see them, and this probably isn’t it.

And here I am just using my flipper zero to turn my fan on and off since the remote that came with it sucks.