Well fuck me. I mean I don’t think that’s an immediate issue for me but that does suck.

EDIT: Although if we’re being honest, has PIA been found doing anything shady in the 7 years since they were acquired?

Do people not recommend PIA anymore? I’ve used it for a long time and never had issues. Supports port forwarding. Audits have shown they don’t store activity logs, and they even run RAM-only servers.

EDIT: Just looked at AirVPN. It’s nice they don’t request any identifying info on signup.

I agree the transport layer is good and having anonymity in a different layer works. I think my main gripes with it today are:

1. Anonymity is paid for and trust-based. It’d be awesome if something like I2P started working well enough that anyone could have anonymity for free without needing to trust a company or worry about poor performance.
2. Private trackers. While I understand the logic behind this form of community (incentivize seeding and make bans meaningful), I think it’s possible to solve those problems with a public tracker. I have ideas on how this could work if anyone is interested.

I haven’t tried SoulSeek. What does it do better than Bittorrent?

Public trackers never seem to have as good of releases or swarm health, except for the most popular content.

So just browse piracy sites with Tor. Bittorrent clients might struggle to access blocked trackers, but the DHT can’t really be censored IIUC.

EDIT: It might even be possible to configure Bittorrent clients to use Tor specifically for communication with trackers (but not for the bulk P2P chunk transfers).

EDIT2: Not sure why I’m getting downvoted. Maybe the next person to downvote could reply and explain why.

They could also force ISPs to ban VPN IPs that don’t comply with their piracy blocking rules, regardless of whether they’re in the US.

I think your initial criticism is too easy to refute. If someone wants to criticize me for using LLMs because they’re bad for the environment or because they’re built on stolen IP, sure we can have that more nuanced discussion.

But telling me that I’m “cheating and I didn’t use my own cognitive utilities” – you have no idea how I use LLMs. You’re just assuming that I’m putting zero critical thought into the code I’m submitting. I review every line of code I submit, regardless of whether it was generated by LLM, written by hand, or a combination of both. And it is a laborious task; but my labor is more focused on decision making and designing tests than typing and fighting a compiler.

I haven’t measured my productivity in any meaningful way, so I won’t try to argue that LLMs are strictly more productive. That’s a separate discussion. All I can say is that I prefer the workflow where I can describe my thoughts in natural language and then review generated code more than writing the code myself.

OK what game am I playing, and who wrote the rules that say I cheated?

What you described is not vibe coding. Vibe coding is when you don’t read the code.